Journal

Scott Walker and Frank Sinatra

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I have been listening to Scott Walker recently, having strayed across some of his recordings of Jacques Brel’s songs. His voice seems to come from the depths ‒ literally, from somewhere beneath the surface of existence.

Boccaccio and Dante: The miracle of free speech

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One of the many wonderful aspects of Boccaccio’s genius is his relationship with Dante. Bocaccio greatly admired Dante: he knew him, he wrote a biography of him, and he lectured on The Divine Comedy – becoming in the process the first person in the late Middle Ages to lecture formally on a contemporary author.

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Cities as ideas

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14 August 2017
Rome Airport
I am beginning to understand that great cities are always infinitely more than themselves. By this I do not mean simply that a city comprises its present existence together with all of its history: I mean, rather, that it comprises all these things plus all attempts, in the past as well as in the present, to imagine it differently – or, alternatively, to reconstruct its long-lost past.

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The Presence and the Absence of Rome

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The Presence and the Absence of Rome
My visit to Rome of October 2016, and this current one, seem to have completely reversed the negative impression I developed of the city in 1982, when I first visited it.

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Aguirre, the Wrath of God

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Saw – at last – Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God yesterday. A marvellous film, all the better for being viewed in German: it allowed me to concentrate entirely upon the images. The experience of watching films in foreign languages inclines me to think that in the best films, dialogue is all but irrelevant.

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Diarists

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Last night in bed, I dipped into the second volume of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, and the Diaries of Franz Kafka. The desire to imitate a diarist is extraordinarily strong, I find

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Finishing a book

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There is nothing quite comparable to the sensation one experiences on finishing a book, whether one is writing it, writing in it, or simply reading it. The reassurance that there are endings is narcotic:

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Maigret

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Maigret is like barium – an iridescent die introduced into the body to reveal its operations and frailties. In many of the novels, he uses a long, slow, steady process of immersion in the setting of the crime in order to understand what might have been the motivation of the criminal – an understanding which is the precondition for his being able to identify and ultimately apprehend him or her.

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Cesare Borgia

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Dante created with the Inferno a completely new idiom for discussing sin. The idea of damnation was nothing new for Dante and his contemporaries, nor the concept of the punishment fitting the crime. But Dante imbued these notions with a completely new poetic and symbolic resonance.

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Cesare Pavese

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The thing that makes Cesare Pavese so difficult to read is his simplicity. For Pavese, nothing is complicated. It is all simple. And agonising in its simplicity.

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