Aquarelle Gastebuch, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925

This month we’ve chosen works that were all published or released in a specific year: 1925. And what a year. In fact the variety of works is quite a surprise.

Here’s what we’ll be looking at.

• The Great Gatsby (novel) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Trial (novel) – Franz Kafka
• Mrs Dalloway (novel) – Virginia Woolf
• The Couterfeiters (novel) – André Gide
• Battleship Potemkin (movie) – Sergei Eisenstein
• Symphony No. 6 (music) – Carl Nielsen

For this month’s Culture Club we’re focusing on the writer Laurence Sterne:

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne (novel)
• A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy – Laurence Sterne (novel)

I’m late posting this so I’m half way through the book as I write. The truth is I’m hating it, for a variety of reasons. But I always want to make my best effort to appreciate the works we look at, so I’ll wait until I’ve finished it before passing final judgement.

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

Well, it’s been a long time since I updated the Culture Club blog. There’s been a big gap between meetings, but the Culture Club is still going, have no fear.

This time we’ve decided on a Mexican theme for the works we’re looking at. Why? No reason, it just seemed to fall into place when we were bouncing around a few ideas.

Here’s the list of works we’ll be reading, listening to and discussing in the next couple of months:

• Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry (novel)
• The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene (novel)
• The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz (essays)
• Mornings in Mexico – DH Lawrence (essays)
• The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence (novel)
• Studies for Player Piano – Conlon Nancarrow (music)
• El Salón Mexico – Aaron Copland (music)

William Shakespeare, the so-called Chandos Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London.

January – February 2010

Happy new year to all Culture Club readers!

This month we’re looking at some of the greatest poetry in the English language, and some other works that relate to it. Here’s the list:

• The Sonnets – William Shakespeare (poems)
• The Portrait of Mr W.H. – Oscar Wilde (short story)
• Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life – Anthony Burgess (novel)
• Crystal Tears: John Dowland and His Contemporaries – Anderas Scholl and Julian Behr (music)

Scene from The Duchess of Malfi, Directed by David R. Gammons, Boston, January 2009.

August – September 2009

The theme this month is Revenge.

Obviously there are many works to choose from with this theme, but I think we’ve come up with an interesting list. There’s quite a breadth of material here too, stretching from Elizabethan to contemporary works. As always, I’m looking forward to the forthcoming discussions.

• The White Devil – John Webster (play)
• The Duchess of Malfi – John Webster (play)
• Of Revenge – Francis Bacon (essay)
• Suite from Abdelazar, The Moor’s Revenge – Henry Purcell (music)
• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon (fiction)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel García Márquez (fiction)
• Blasted – Sarah Kane (play)
• Phaedra’s Love – Sarah Kane (play)
• Oldboy – Directed by Park Chan-wook (movie)

The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) by Pieter Bruegel.

June-July 2009

The theme this month is hell, heaven and the garden of eden.

• Inferno – Dante Alighieri (poem)
• Paradise Lost – John Milton (poem)
• The Creation – Music by Joseph Haydn, text by Gottfried van Swieten after John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Oratorio)

Francisco d'Andrade as Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera, painted by Max Slevogt, 1912.

March-May 2009

This time we’re looking at the Don’s – Giovanni and Juan (although we’re saving Quixote for a future session).

These two are based on the same story, the legend of Don Juan, which probably first saw light of day as the play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina, published in Spain around 1630.

I’m very excited that we’re tackling Mozart at last, and especially this opera, which many think the finest of all (including Kierkegaard, who called it ‘a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection’ – see this essay on Kierkegaard’s view of Don Giovanni).

• Don Giovanni – music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte (opera)
• Don Juan – Lord Byron (poem)

The theme for these two months is Samuel Johnson, plus a bit of Schubert. Apparently these two were Samuel Beckett’s favourite artists (but that’s a coincidence). There’s a lot of stuff here, so we’re allowed to skim the Boswell for the best bits about Johnson!

Samuel Johnson

• The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (prose)
• The Life of Mr Richard Savage (prose)
• Plan and Preface to a Dictionary of English (prose)
• On the Death of Dr Robert Levet (poem)
• The Vanity of Human Wishes (poem)
• The Rambler no. 32 [Stoicism] (periodical essay)
• The Rambler no. 60 [Biography] (periodical essay)
• The Adventurer no. 67 [The Benefits of Human Society] (periodical essay)
• The Adventurer no. 85 [The Role of the Scholar] (periodical essay)
• The Idler no. 61 [How to Become a Critic (1)] (periodical essay)
• The Idler no. 62 [How to Become a Critic (2)] (periodical essay)
• The Idler no. 85 [Autobiography] (periodical essay)
• The Idler no. 89 [Limitations of Human Achievement] (periodical essay)

James Boswell

• The Life of Samuel Johnson (biography)

Franz Schubert

• Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat, Op.99 D.898
• Piano Trio No.2 in E flat, Op.100 D.929

I’ve just discovered (how did it take so long?) a brilliant culture blogger named Molly Flatt. She writes with great wit and style about all aspects of the arts and literature on her blog Hitchcock Blonde, as well as contributing to the Guardian Books Blog. Here’s a taster of her fine prose:

In my imagination, I know exactly how it goes. Bedecked in nothing but a ragged top hat, a pair of cashmere socks and a tremulous snakehipped boy, I finally breathe my quavering last in a secluded riad, ravaged by a life of intellectual and sensual excess. As weeping acolytes pile in to preserve any secreted scraps of unpublished prose, one sobbing lover burrows ‘neath the Nobel, pushes aside the Pulitzer, and nudges away the nest of squeaking ermines to unearth two hundred slim volumes bound by a blood-stained garter and crammed with sloping script.

Rejoice! The Blonde Journals! The ultimate, intimate insight into the greatest scribe of our time! Finally her iconoclastic, eclectic originality, engaged with every important issue of the age, can be revealed, free from the constraints of society, salary or shame!

Here are the works we’ll be looking at for the next couple of months. We’ll be focusing on two American poets of the 20th century:

Wallace Stevens

• The Poems of Our Climate
• Of Mere Being
• The Course of a Particular
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
• Domination of Black
• Nomad Exquisite
• Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
• The Idea of Order at Key West
• The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
• The Snow Man
• Sunday Morning
• Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
• Of Modern Poetry
• Auroras of Autumn

William Carlos Williams

• The Act
• The Savage Beast
• Raindrops on a briar
• The words lying idle
• Picture of a nude in a machine shop
• The stylist
• A place (any place) to transcend all places
• New Mexico
• The horse show
• The three graces
• 3am The girl with the honey colored hair
• The girl
• The gentle rejoinder
• Turkey in the straw
• The wrong door
• The artist
• The drunk and the sailor
• Construction
• Cezanne
• The loving dexterity
• The chrysanthemum
• Song
• The children
• The gossips
• Portrait of a woman at her bath
• To my friend Ezra Pound

Plus two roughly contemporary American orchestral pieces.

• Quiet City – Aaron Copland
• Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – Samuel Barber