Tag: books

Songs on the deaths of children: where racism leads you.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Brother Martin, are you sleeping?

Today’s busker at the junction of George St and the High St was a woman playing the accordion in a series of slow waltz like tunes that were hard to identify. One sounded a bit like “Chim Chimmeny, chim chimmeny, chim, chim cheeree” as reimagined by a Klezma band from Bucharest. There was something quite mournful about the tunes, but infectious enough to walk along in a waltzy sort of way, one, two, three… one two, three. Walking any other way would have been walking against the rhythm, in the street, in my head. As it was, I was the only one in step.

When Stephen Spielberg asked John Williams to compose the music for Schindler’s List, Williams told him that to do justice to the full horror of the death camps, he’d need a really Great Composer. Spielberrg said he agreed, but, regretfully, they were all dead. Implication, you’ll have to do.

In the event, Williams did a pretty moving job, but, listening to a version of the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, I think he could have used that. A slow tempo, mournful version of Bruder Martin (the German version of Frere Jacques) composed as a funeral march and reflecting on the deaths of children.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the child mortality rate in Austria – where Mahler lived – ran at roughly four children out of every ten dead before they reached the age of five. Every year for a hundred years. This only started to decline at the beginning of the twentieth century; too late for Mahler, eight of whose 14 siblings died in infancy, as did his eldest daughter.

Knowing that, its hardly surprising that he wrote a song cycle called Kindertotenlieder (songs on the deaths of children).

But, all that was from natural causes, poverty, squalor. The Nazi extermination drive was to kill 1.5 million children, mostly Jewish, on an industrial scale. The local library has a Holocaust Memorial Day table with a selection of reading. It struck me that there was nothing on it by Primo Levi, whose memoire stories like Moments of Reprieve and If This is a Man are remarkable for finding fragments of humanity in the most inhumane possible circumstances which in no way diminishes the horror of it, quite the reverse.

I asked the librarian if they had any of his books. She had never heard of him and looked him up on the system. “The chemist?” having found his scientific book The Periodic Table, which he wrote after the Auschwitz books. She looked a little further and found them. I recomended that they be put on the table, and I think she was going to do it.

As I left I remarked, “you could probably do with putting a sign with the books reading ‘This is where racism leads you’.” She smiled, made moue and said “we can’t be that direct”. A pity.

Quite Wrong!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

It was quite disconcerting yesterday to be sitting opposite this poster on the Jubilee Line. Being stared at by Michael Gove in full condescending mode, dressed in a waistcoast and shirt sleeves, which is perhaps to indicate informality and “getting down to business”, but actually just makes him look like a bleached out version of Jarwahalal Nehru (but without the rose) while Madeline Grant (the Daily Telegraph’s Parliamentary Sketch writer) rolls her eyes; its hard to know what at, herself, Gove, or all those silly people out there who don’t think quite like she does.

The new Spectator podcast is getting a lot of advertising, full length posters on the platforms and these little ones staring down from a height in the cars. Its title is a weak pun. Quite right. As in quite RIGHT. So, its right wing, with the presumption that this also makes it “right”, as in “not wrong”; allowing the homynim to do a lot of heavy lifting. But also that its QUITE right. Nothing TOO right. Nothing vulgar. No street thugs, but maybe just a bit of gentle encouragement for them with a lot of plausible deniability. Just “common sense”, nothing that will threaten the presumptions of comfortably off people. And nothing to scare the horses, especially as these are by and for people who ride them more than most and can afford to be Spectators from a position of impunity and financially well padded social safety.

It struck me that it was missing a strapline. Underneath The new podcast for politics, culture and common sense – Quite right! – With Michael Gove and Madeline Grant, the words because at times like this you wouldn’t want to listen to actual experts, would you? would more accurately identify what this thing is for.

And the odd little yellow ribbon with OUT NOW on it should end with an exclamation mark and be in an arrow pointing at the presenters.

Kaiser Franz solves a problem.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Emperor Franz Josef V, sighed, pulled on his weaved mutton chop whiskers – now Imperial regalia – and twisted the dial on his wireless to shift the channel from Das Lichtprogramm – playing its usual diet of whirling Waltzes by Johan Strauss the very, very, very much younger, as if to prove that music, like History, had nowhere to go but interminable circles – over to Der Heimat- Service for the latest reports from Today in Parliament.

There was something oddly comforting about these reports. Like all the Sturm and Drang of the Shipping Forecast: all those rising squalls and Force Ten Gales, that menacing low visibility in Sea areas with comfortingly obscure and poetic names – Varangian, Black, Dogged, Austrian Bight, Trieste, Italian Sea, Palermo automatic lighthouse weather station – full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, to him, more than how much more comfortable it was to be sitting by the fire with a cup of tea and a crumpet.

Reports from the Diet were always incomprehensible. All the way across the Greater Austro-Hungarian – Balkan Empire, from Bavaria in the West to the Caspian Sea in the East and Naples in the South, members of the diet were allowed to make speeches in their own languages; on the proviso that no translations were allowed. This meant that members could sound off in full fury, to be approvingly written up in the local papers at home, blaming everyone else for local problems, securing their continuous re election as local champions – safe in the knowledge that no one else in the Empire, unless they understood Slovak, or Azeri, or Sicilian dialect, would have a clue what they were saying, so everyone could remain friends. All the broadcasts were also in the original languages, so everyone could tune into their own bit and be reassured that their worries were being expressed, if not heard. Thus, peace and harmony could be assured, as a grievance carefully nurtured, with no hope of resolution, is a soothing balm for everyone who enjoys suffering from it and being able to complain about it. If these problems were to be resolved, people would be lost. They wouldn’t know who they were any more.

Kaiser Franz scratched idly at his paunch, feeling a bit sleepy, when the newsflash he had been waiting for came up right on time. A solemn burst of Bruckner – titanic, overwhelming, monumental and oddly static, like the Empire itself – was followed by an announcer sounding even more po faced than usual. The troublesome, playboy heir apparent, Archduke Ferdy, had met with an unfortunate accident while trying to act out the bow flight scene from Titanic on the 3:30 Zeppelin from Zagreb to Odesa while drunk (and drugged too, though he knew it not) to be followed by an Inquiry and four days of official mourning – because there was no point in overdoing it – announced by the Prime Minister, in his familiar flat nasal tone; the one that sounds a bit like he’s been chewing cardboard most of his life. Satisfied that Plan B, with its aerodrome arson squad and threat of high profile collateral damage (and all the awkward questions that go with it) had not been necessary, the Kaiser chuckled to himself and put Zadok the Priest on his record player.

May the King live, may the king live, may the king live FOREVER, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Amen…