New gadget - Toshiba e800

I've been distracted by my new toy for the last week or so.... I bought a Toshiba e800 PDA. The main reason for buying this was the 4" VGA screen, of which I had seen some very impressive screen shots on the Brighthand forums and at the Boston PocketPC Club site.
Toshiba shipped the PDA with this fantastic VGA screen, but only able to run four applications in VGA - all document viewers. Just enough to show you how truly impressive the screen is, and to make it really frustrating that nothing else would run in the higher resolution (except the NetFront browser, which has a special e800 VGA version and is excellent).
Thanks to deez at Brighthand, who has provided us all with a hack to run everything in VGA (at the Brighthand link above). And for free! The best things so far are (click on thumbnails for screen shots):

• huge today screen!
• browsing the internet using NetFront and being able to see more than a postage-stamp sized portion of the screen at any one time
• reading Word documents including tables with Textmaker (replacement Word program for PPC). The screenshots form the Softmaker site are in QVGA - it look so much better in VGA!
• Pocket Informant in VGA. I can actually see my whole weeks' appointments at once! The fonts are scalable so it's all readable
• reading ebooks with uBook, the best PDA ebook reader I have found. It allows you to select the font size and colour and read in landscape format
• taking handwritten notes with Phatpad from the people who make Calligrapher
• reading pdfs using the PPC version of Adobe.

Quite apart from the superb screen, this is a real step-up performance-wise for me. I was previously using my iPAQ 5450, which only had 64MB of memory and was running PPC 2002. The e800 has 128MB of RAM plus 32MB of flash RAM, and runs Windows Mobile 2003. I have all my favourite programs installed, even the ones that take up tons of memory, and I still have 60MB of internal memory free!! What's more, I can run memory heavy programs like RunningVoice GSM at the same time as listening to music and browsing the internet - this was never possible on the iPAQ, as the system just didn't have enough memory and would just freeze.

So I haven't been reading so much for the past few days - my spare time has been eaten up by browsing the Brighthand forums, installing programs, finding pictures to use on te today screen, trasnferring music across, etc, etc.

However, I have had time to read Howard's End - on the PDA in ubook - which I loved. The great thing about uBook is that it lets you make annotations (a bit like MS Reader) but then allows you to browse these annotations separately from the book. Great for making odd notes as I read, then reviewing later on. I'm saving my comments on Howard's End for my great piece on Forster (should i ever get around ot writing it) but for now, I'll just say that it's my favourite to date because it deals with the problem of how to reconcile commerce with art and 'sensitivity'.

Laurel Canyon

We went to see this with some friends at the weekend. The reviews I saw beforehand suggested that the film was an excellent vehicle for Frances Mcdormand, one of my favourite actresses and veteran of several Coen brothers films. The film does give Mcdormand - who plays Jane, a Hollywood music producer - plentiful opportunities to flex her considerable acting muscles (and she has been working out in real life as well, judging by her toned physique in the film), but it is much more than just a showcase for her. It is also a thoughtful exploration by Lisa Cholodenko of some murky areas of interpersonal relationships to do with fidelity, temptation and self-knowledge, although the patchy character development weakens it in places.

Sam (Christian Bale) has – against his better judgement – taken his straight-laced, bookish fiancée, Alex (Kate Beckinsale) to live with his mother, Jane (Mcdormand) in her house-cum-recording studio in Hollywood. Jane lives an ‘artistic’ lifestyle involving drink, drugs and transitory sexual relationships and is in the middle of finishing an album when Sam and Alex move in. Of course she is also sleeping (noisily) with Ian (Alessandro Nivola), the lead singer of the British band she is working with. Sam and Alex are both MDs: Sam is training as a psychiatrist and Alex is finishing her PhD on the sexual habits of fruit flies. Sam’s relationship with his mother is difficult, and he has rebelled against her unconventional lifestyle by entering a respected profession and becoming engaged to Alex, who was top of her class at Harvard and is from a wealthy New England family.

The film centres around three developing relationships: Sam’s increasing attraction to Sara, one of his fellow interns at the hospital (played by the toothsome Natascha McElhone); Alex’s attraction to Jane and Ian; and the beginnings of a proper adult relationship between Sam and Jane. The first two relationships are taboo because their primary motivator is sexual. But that is not the whole story: Sara encourages Sam to question his motivations for training as a doctor, and Jane takes Alex’s rather undeveloped views on ‘popular music’ seriously. So Jane’s house, which is beautifully captured in the film, and in which much of he action takes place, acts as a crucible for the development of Sam and Alex individually. Inevitably this leads both characters to question their reasons for being in the relationship and they are both tempted to stray. After some serious sexual temptation, including Alex, Jane and Ian swimming naked in the pool together, Sam and Alex both resist temptation and reaffirm their relationship in an emotional scene. Crucially, it is Jane who eventually pulls back from the brink and stops Alex from throwing herself at both her and Ian. She has realised that her love for her son is more important than immediate sexual gratification, and this realisation enables her to hold a meaningful conversation with Sam for the first time, and to apologise for being a bad parent. The film ends ambiguously. Sara has become attached to Sam and, from a brief telephone conversation, we realise that she is not just a sexual object but that she, too, has a heart, and would like to have a relationship with Sam (initially she just wanted to sleep with him). Alex also continues her relationship with Ian, although at a rather safer level. I think the strong hint from Cholodenko is that although the immediate storm has passed, Sam and Alex will have to continuously strive for fidelity if they want their future marriage to be a success. As will we all…

The script was beautifully written (also Cholodenko) and all the actors were blessed with some gem-like lines. There was a recurring theme of mis-hearings and misunderstandings, and some perfectly pitched strained conversations between Sam and Alex on the phone: “Do you want me to come to the party?” “Do you want to come?” My favourite moment was a much needed blast of bitter comedy at the end of the big party scene where Sam discovers Alex in bed with his mother and her boyfriend. Alex immediately takes responsibility for her actions – flirting with Ian – by saying “It was my fault”. Jane feels that as the older woman, and Sam’s mother, she should have stopped Alex earlier, and contradicts her: “No, it was my fault”. Ian, in true cocky British male style, cheerfully says, “Well, it wasn’t my fault!” This is a wonderfully wry comment by Cholodenko on the tendency of women to take the blame and of men to exonerate themselves (although to be fair to Ian, he does later admit some responsibility).

The script was rather rocky for the first ten minutes and the story took a while to settle down. By the end of the film, I had almost forgotten this, but I was left slightly puzzled by Alex’s actions, because there is no real explanation of her quick change of direction. One minute she is casting disapproving glances at Sam for having smoked pot with his mother, the next, she is smoking it herself with Jane and the band, abandoning her thesis for days in the studio, and snogging Jane. This did not ring true, as there had been no suggestion that Alex was repressed in any way: unless we are meant to infer that brainy, geeky girls are always repressed in some way and are just waiting for the opportunity to let themselves go.

I haven’t seen Cholodenko’s first film, High Art, but I would like to. She seems interested in some important issues around the difficulties of intimacy. I hope she continues to explore them.

Reading list roundup: Whitbread prize, Forster, American and French novels

I'm still working my way through EM Forster - I started with A room with a view and have read The longest journey and most of Where angels fear to tread so far. I'll write something properly about Forster when I've read them all, though writing a piece on Forster seems like a rather daunting task because he is such a giant of British literature. At most, I can expect to give a few personal reactions.

In the meantime, I'm window shopping, planning my next literary excursion. The Whitbread Prize list was published this week, and provides a few more interesting-looking British novels. An excellent article in the Guardian Review this Saturday on American literature has reminded me that I have to read some Pynchon and DeLillo. The Guardian article reminds me that I have been viewing contemporary American literature slightly through the wrong end of the telescope: I have read a lot that has been published in the last ten years (Frantzen, Updike, Irving, Roth, etc.) but I haven't read any of the books that were being published fifty years ago. I need to go back slightly further in time. So I can't really comment in an educated way on the view proposed in the article that American literature is 'stale and wearisome', except to say that I found The Corrections to be an engaging and intelligent novel. But then I like list-making and pedagogical novels, and have similar tastes in theatre - Tom Stoppard Coast of Utopia trilogy was a recent example of art that is both emotionally true, and also a factual learning experience. I would never have learned, and retained, so much information about mid-19th century European politics and philosophy through a formal teaching course.

And what about the French literature I was going to write about? I have slightly run out of steam (and books, I need to place an order with amazon.fr again). I read Antechrista by Amelie Northom, which was no more than a piece of teenage fiction, and kept me occupied (more or less) on a plane journey recently. I got really stuck with Luc Lang's book on 11 September. It is just too abstract for my grasp of the French language. It has been sat on my bedside table, at the bottom of the pile, for the last month, so I think it's time to admit defeat and take it off the reading list. Similarly with Rousseau's Confessions: it's just slightly too hard-going, and I don't have the patience to sit there with a dictionary by my side. I want to read more Beigbeder, and I'll see what else I can find.

Remembrance day concert

Wednesday was Remembrance Day so some students from the college put together a concert of music and readings. We have some very talented musicians in college at the moment - singers and instrumentalists - and a very strong conductor, who also planned the concert.
The music ranged from an arrangement of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus for viola and three cellos, through Elegies for cello by Faure and Kenneth Leighton, Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, and finishing with the Faure Requiem. The music was interspersed by readings of poetry. The Faure was interleaved with some Hardy war poetry. I didn't know these poems at all - and they weren't published as a set, they just have a common theme - but they worked really well with the music. And I learned something about the Faure from the juxtaposition with the Hardy: this Requiem is not all sweetness and light and eternal rest, there is some real fear and trembling to get through first.
I can't remember the last time I sang properly, so it was good to be singing again. But I had no voice at all thanks to the remnants of a cold. If I want to join a choir locally I will have to get back into practice, as I have no stamina at all. In fact the only part of the singing equipment that was working at all was my diaphragm. So I had breath control but was hardly making any noise.

Iraqi bloggers

I've been reading Riverbend's excellent blog on life in post-invasion Iraq for a little while now, and it's excellent to see so many Iraqis now enjoying the freedom to blog. Since Britain seems to have forgotten the people of Iraq - the only news we get is of how many Brits or Americans have been killed today - it's very important that these everyday stories are heard. New Iraqi bloggers:
Healing Iraq
The Messopotamian (somebody should point out the odd spelling to him)
Iraq at a glance
And Riverbend's new recipe site, I look forward to trying some Iraqi-style lentils.
But what has happened to Salam Pax? He hasn't been posting very much recently, I think he is now working for the Guardian and doing lots of interviews (probably equally important) but now a couple of strange posts have appeared. I hope that his blogger account hasn't been hacked.

Beethoven Symphony No 9 - LSO

Beethoven
Elegischer Gesang Op. 118
Opferlied Op. 121b
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor

Michael Tilson Thomas conductor
Janice Watson soprano
Karen Cargill mezzo-soprano
Anthony Dean Griffey tenor
Peter Rose bass
London Symphony Chorus

Last night I filled a gaping hole in my musical education by attending a performance of Beethoven’s ninth for the first time. I’m not quite sure how I’ve got to this point in my life without hearing this cornerstone of Western music – maybe something to do with my slight natural antipathy towards large-scale orchestral concerts. It was a last minute decision to go – we had a free Saturday night and there was nothing on near Cambridge except a performance of Berlioz’s Requiem. Andrew is not a Berlioz fan – and I decided that the Requiem was not the best way to convert him. So we decided to make the (not very long) trip to the Barbican for this LSO concert. I do like the Barbican hall, partly because it only takes and hour and a half to get there, and partly because the seats are so comfortable. After being squashed into the amphitheatre seats in the Royal Opera House rather a lot recently, the amount of leg-room at the Barbican seems positively luxurious. We were in the front row of the side stalls, on the first-violin side of the stage. We were slightly too close to the stage to get a proper balance (we got a lot of strings and not enough woodwind) but it was an advantage to be so close to the performers; we got a real sense of being in the performance, not just observing it.

I don’t think I have been to a concert conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas before. This was a good opportunity to observe him, because he was only a few feet away, and spent a fair amount of time turning towards the first violins, and hence in our direction. I liked him, because he isn’t too much of a ‘maestro’, at least to observe on stage (obviously I can’t comment on what he is like to work with). He gave us a brief introduction to the two choral works, which I appreciated, since the programme notes weren’t that helpful, and he spoke very well. Apparently these ‘quiet works’ were very close to Beethoven’s heart, because with his growing deafness, he found it increasingly difficult to hold quiet and meaningful conversations with people, and thus missed out on intimate discussions. Tilson Thomas is also a composer, although I don’t know any of his work, and he struck me as an intelligent musician. The Beethoven was all thoughtful, balanced and musical, without any histrionics. Maybe Beethoven needs slightly more revolutionary fervour for a truly stunning performance, but it was refreshing to find a conductor who doesn’t fiddle with the music unnecessarily. It felt as if he was letting Beethoven speak with minimal interpretation.
There was a last minute change to both the concert programme and the line-up of soloists. We won in one direction and lost in the other: we got two extra choral pieces at the beginning of the programme, but Alice Coote and the soprano were sick, and were replaced by Karen Cargill and Janice Watson. I was sorry to miss out on the opportunity of seeing Alice Coote in a dress after my recent Orlando experience, but Karen Cargill turned out to be a very respectable alternative. She’s a Scot who has studied in Glasgow, and seems to have achieved a lot given that she is only 28. She was very comfortable on the stage and with the music, and made the most of the Opferlied solo and her sections in the last movement of the symphony. Janice Watson was the complete opposite: she did not appear at all comfortable on stage, in fact she looked like she really did not want to be there. She was not in voice, and was distinctly ‘shouty’ in the top range. She did not even carry to us in the tenth row: I don’t know whether those further back in the hall would have heard her at all over the orchestra. Also, bizarrely, she was wearing her wedding dress. Why would anyone think that an ivory dress with embroidered bodice is suitable concert-hall attire?

The men gave a good account of themselves. Anthony Dean Griffey spent the whole evening with a beatific grin on his face, and camped up the tenor solo in the alla marcia section wonderfully. This was absolutely the right approach – how could anyone sing seriously over that ridiculous section of Beethoven’s band music?

The LSO Chorus confirmed my general view on big choruses, which is that the singers don’t sing, but rather shout over the orchestra. Of course they enjoyed themselves immensely in the symphony, which is an excellent shout, but their shortcomings were highlighted in the quieter choral songs. The tone in the more contemplative pieces was weak, and there were a couple of very hesitant entries from the tenors in the Elegischer Gesang. Intonation was not perfect throughout, hardly surprising when so much shouting is going on. It didn’t help that the average age of the tenor and bass sections was about sixty. There were a few younger women, but it must be very difficult to find decent tenors and basses.

Before writing about the symphony itself, I should set out my rather chequered history with Beethoven. The earliest Beethoven experience that I recall clearly was a performance of the 5th Symphony in Lincoln Cathedral when I was around ten. I vividly remember the music of the opening of the first movement, and given that this is now nearly twenty years ago it must have made a very strong impression on me to have stuck. Unfortunately, my other enduring impression from that performance is that I was willing the concert to end, watching the conductor turn the pages of the score and hoping each time he turned a page that it would reveal the last double bar. I must have found it too long a span of time to concentrate at that age.
More positively, I had a tape of Anne Sophie Mutter playing the violin concerto which I played endlessly as a teenager, so that the music got under my skin and is now one of those pieces that I return to at times of stress or emotion. It is a wonderfully exuberant and life-affirming piece.

I didn’t study Beethoven properly when I was a teenager, apart from learning the odd piano sonata movement, but I did once write a mammoth essay on symphonies I to V. I can remember sitting in the school library, really listening to the music, with orchestral score, being particularly astonished by the Eroica, which was such a leap from the previous ‘classical’ symphonies of Haydn and Beethoven. So the Eroica is also burned into my brain – and was refreshed recently by the excellent Channel 4 film ‘Eroica’ which was essentially a staging of the first performance of the symphony, with original instruments and in costume, with the composer huffing and puffing around being revolutionary to the shock of his patrons, the aristocracy of Vienna. The film brought a real sense of how shocking the symphony must have been to those who first listened to it (including the famous ‘false’ entry on the horn at the recapitulation of the first movement).

I have the Hanover Band’s recordings of the symphonies, also on original instruments, and was already beginning to think that I need a supplementary recording from a standard romantic symphony orchestra, as these performances, whilst very fine, were rather bloodless. This performance by the LSO confirmed my suspicions that I do prefer Beethoven with as much wallop as possible. The LSO didn’t overdo it, but having a full complement of metal-stringed strong sections does help the music.

The trouble with a piece as monumentally influential as Beethoven’s ninth is that it is impossible to have a first hearing of it that is unaffected by subsequent musical history. Although I had never listened properly to the piece before last night, I was already familiar with so many of the musical ideas: not just the Ode to Joy, but the Scherzo, and the first subject of the first movement. And of course the influence of this milestone in musical history can be felt in the symphonies of Brahms and Mahler, not to mention Wagner and Shostakovich. I don’t know anything about the history of the first performance of the ninth, but the massed forces of the choir and orchestra must have made a huge impact. As far as I know, this was the first time that choral voices had been employed in the formal structure of a symphony (but not of course the last) and this must be one of the reasons for the work’s importance.

Beethoven had already gone outside the proportions of the classical symphonic form developed by, most notably, Haydn and Mozart with his earlier works, and in particular the third and fifth symphonies. The ninth follows the standard classical structure of Allegro, Scherzo, Adagio and Allegro movements. However, the massive finale, which includes the famous setting of parts of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, is balanced out by the grand scale of the other movements, and the whole work is around an hour in length.
I tend to revert to my ten-year-old self when listening to a work on this scale: I can’t quite concentrate enough to follow it properly. This was most evident in the first movement, where I got lost after the first ten minutes of development. After a while, I stop analysing the music intellectually (following the modulations, the development of the thematic material) and just enjoy the noise. I always feel this as a failure, although maybe the whole point of Beethoven’s form of German Romanticism was that the listener should stop analysing intellectually and be overwhelmed by the emotions. Anyway, I find the sheer scale of the work rather daunting. But the first two movements are splendid to listen to, especially the scherzo/trio.
Once we get to the finale, there is a brief recapitulation of material from the earlier movements, which does serve to draw the threads of the symphony together. But all this is swept aside by the early entry of the Ode to Joy theme, which dominates the final movement until its end. The alla marcia section is definitely the silliest. It may be sacrilege to say so, but I find the Ode to Joy theme itself rather annoying in its simplicity – only five notes are used. By the time we have listened to it for fifteen minutes, the ear is rather dulled.

I did enjoy the performance, although I didn’t leave feeling full of joy at the brotherhood of man. It does fill a gap in my musical understanding, and I suspect that when I return to the Brahms symphonies they will make more sense with a better understanding of Beethoven’s late work.

EM Forster

I've started an EM Forster expedition. The book shelf was looking a little empty, and as I've spent far too much money on books recently, I decided to raid the 'classics' shelf. I was inspired by Zadie Smith's article in the Guardian Review on Sunday. Two novels to her name, and I think she's now working on a non-fiction book on the morality of the novel (according to the Harvard University Gazette in April). And she's younger than I am! Impressive.
Anyway, I've started with A Room with a View.

Vernon God Little - DBP Pierre

A worthy winner of the Booker Prize?
I think so - 'though it didn't give me the greatest pleasure of any of the shortlisted books (that honour goes to Astonishing Splashes of Colour). I found the language a little difficult to start with - the Texan idiom took a bit of getting used to - but by 50 pages into the book I was not noticing it any more. If someone had interrupted me I probably would have started talking like a Texan (an unlikely scenario).
What an excellent extrapolation and satire of the flawed 'trial by media' culture in the United States. It is particularly scary in Texas, where the dealth penalty is still applied. Americans who feel that their human rights record is better than the Iraqis should read this book.......