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I’m Back
Apologies for the absence of updates on the Culture Club blog. The Culture Club has still been running strong (we’ve had two meetings since my last post here), but I’ve been unable to update the blog for the past few months. This has been down to issues at work and home taking up lots of…
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The Culture Club: Theme for April-May 2008
More love-related shenanigans for the next Culture Club session. The works we will be absorbing and discussing between now and the next meeting are as follows: Troilus and Cressida – William Shakespeare (Drama) Troilus and Criseyde – Geoffrey Chaucer (Poetry) Jean de Florette & Manon de Source – Directed by Claude Berri (Movies) Carmen –…
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Wagner and Mythology
It takes a lot of work on the listener’s part to understand Wagner. I’ve been trying in vain for years, but I’ve recently made a kind of breakthrough. The catalyst was a few intense listening sessions with Tristan and Isolde. With its mythological setting, ambiguous themes, overwhelming length and dense musical chromaticism it’s not an…
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Quotes on Richard Wagner
The best witticisms in musical criticism are invariably about Wagner. Here are some choice quotes: Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. Edgar Wilson Nye One can’t judge Wagner’s opera ‘Lohengrin’ after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend hearing it a second time. Gioacchino Antonio Rossini Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but awful…
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CG Jung on What Art ‘Means’
I’ve written here before on meaning in poetry and it’s a subject that continues to fascinate me. Many of our discussions at Culture Club meetings concern meaning (particularly the heated debates around meaning in Bob Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts), and I still suspect that this is not necessarily the question we…
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The Theme of Regret in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry
One of Thomas Hardy’s most powerful themes is, as Joanna Cullen Brown puts it, that ‘one awakes to understanding too late’. Many of his poems cover this territory, but take the Self Unseeing as an example: Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet…
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Thomas Hardy’s Poems 1912-13: Ghosts, Memory and the Presence of the Past
Throughout Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13, written after the sudden death of his first wife and originally published in the volume Satires of Circumastance, there’s a dominant theme of ‘haunting’, in both the supernatural and the psychological sense. Often this is a direct allusion, such as in the poem The Haunter, where the ghost of…
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The Culture Club: Theme for January-March 2008
January-March 2008 For our next session we’re taking ‘love’ as our theme. The works we will be absorbing and discussing between now and the next meeting on the 18th March 2008 are as follows: First Love and Other Novellas – Samuel Beckett (Fiction) Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (Fiction) Poems of 1912-1913 (The Emma Poems)…
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The Beatles’ Yesterday and the Nature of Belief
As a non-religious person, I’ve always struggled with the concept of ‘faith’. It’s not that I disagree with it or oppose it, it’s just that I’ve never been able to fully understand it. Whenever religious people talk of their ‘belief’ and their ‘faith’, they seem to mean it in a different sense to the way…
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Free Download: Tasmin Little, The Naked Violin
The Guardian Media reports that Tasmin Little will be offering her next recording as a free download: Top violinist’s free digital download targets classical elitism. From the article: Little also hopes her recording, The Naked Violin, will be educative as well as enjoyable, and has recorded spoken introductions to the pieces to give technical and…