Languages

The government is urging schools to devote some time to Mandarin because China is "the country of the future". However, Mandarin is not, it seems, an easy language to teach or learn and the High Master of St Paul's School, Martin Stephen, writing in The Times today, thinks it would be preferable if pupils learnt the language after school and that it should be taught with regference to Chinese arts, history, music and so on; in other words it shouldn't be taught as "a language subject" in the curriculum but as a sort of cultural experience. One reason is that if learnt as another language, a student can get it wrong. He cites a case of a man who learnt it on his own for a year, then when he greeted a local dignitary in China, instead of saying thank you, he appeared instead to compare him "to something rather unpleasant associated with a pig."
I recall a visit to the west of France and, in my schoolboy French, asking at a butchers' shop for a small quantity of meat only for the grateful butcher to come from a back room with a lump of meat the size of a bull's chest.
On another occasion I wished to know if there were any mosquitos in ther area and having to resort eventually to a mime of a flying creature buzzing about the room and landing on my arm. No one knew what I was trying to convey. Then someone said "an aeroplane?"
In general on the continent I usually found it more satisfactory to mime rather than speak. Tea of course is easy; sandwich is quite easy (slap one hand on the other and bite the invisible sandwich); wine is too easy.In Rome I asked for a half carafe of wine only to have delivered a whole carafe. It's not only easy, it's fun.

Amateurs

We had booked a few nights in Torquay and wondered what was on at the theatres. Mostly rubbish, except for an amateur company doing Arthur Miller's "All My Sons". I couldn't believe it: amateur companies don't do Miller. Or Ibsen. Or Shaw. Or Pinter. They do Aykebourne and "Sailor Beware" and farces and such things. I wondered if times were changing for the better so, later, I looked up what amateur groups were doing in South London (since we were going there on a visit). To my amazement one group was doing "My Son Jack" an excellent play George Haigh about Kipling and his son who got killed in WW1. Another company was actually looking for new plays. Another was doing a play by Shakespeare.
I go back many years to seeing Blackwood Drama Group doing plays by Shaw and Euripides and Shakespeare as well as, of course, the general staple diet of amateur groups - no Aykbourne then of course.
But Blackwood had a very good company and an enterprising set of people in charge. I recall Sybil Thorndike doing Lady Macbeth there with a small company which was added to by local actors. Also I recall a performance of "St Joan" by Bernard Shaw which was excellent.
I write plays for amateurs - actually I don't write them specifically for amateurs, professionals are welcome to try them out too! What I mean is that I write plays and that only amateurs perform them. Sometimes. Not often.
Incidentally the production of "All my Sons" at Torquay was superb: acting and (what often lets down amateur comapnies) the set. It was..... I'm looking for the right word...... it was "professional".

Old Records

Someone was writing in a newspaper last week about going to get rid of his collection of old vinyl records. Selling them or throwing them away (to make more space in his study). Of course he didn't; he couldn't. They meant a lot to him; they were part of his own history. He started playing some of them again.
So have I.
I thought about selling mycollection a couple of years ago but didn't. I couldn't. It isn't that I play them much; I don't until recently.
Someone on Desert Island Discs chose Beethoven's 3rd Symphony and it reminded me of my own old vinyl recording by Otto Klemperer and The Philharmia Orchestra, so I got it out and played it. Wonderful.
A long time ago John Freeman did interviews of famous people on a TV programme - "Face to Face"; in one of them he interviewed Klemperer. I can't remember anything he said but at the end they played the finale of his recording of Beethoven's 3rd symphony; the nest morning I went out and bought it.
Now today, I have bought another Klemperer recording of a Beethoven symphony: his 9th, the Choral. A vinyl record - or, rather, two records. They were in pristine condition; the recording had some of the top singers of their day, singers like Christa Ludwig and Hans Hotter. How much did I pay for it? £1.99 exactly. From an Oxfam shop.
Klemperer recorded all Beethoven symphonies twice (maybe more) one set before he had a brain tumour, the other set after his successful operation. I have known people who found his post operation recordings slow and dull. Certainly they are slower but not dull; they are in some way more assured.
This 9th symphony is magnificent.
There was, in the Oxfam shop, a Dinu Lipati recording of Bach and other composers. I must get it soon before someone gets to it first.

Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman is eighty. I thought he'd always been eighty - or thereabouts. maybe that's a bit of an exageration but you know what I mean - he's never been young. Indeed, his film career didn't start properly until he was in his forties; whether that long period of waiting for something to turn up made him the often bitter seeming actor in later years can't be proved but I think he played the gruff guy more than most and better than most.
Mark Stein writes today: "He's like an old-time movie star - Spencer Tracy or Jimmy Cagney - fellows with lived-in faces."
Like them he was never the romantic lead though Tracy could do romantic comedy ("Pat and Mike") as he got older. But there was a gruff side to both Tracy and Cagney though maybe not as gruff as Hackman's.
He was best in roles in which he played a villain where he could use that bitter smile which wasn't a smile but a show of a smile to pretend that underneath that gruff exterior beat a heart, but a heart with not much love in it.
Woody Allen cast him in a film which I have not seen; when asked why he had cast Hackman he said he wanted a man for the part that looked like an ordinary guy, not someone like, say, Paul Newman: "Imagine an ordinary wife coming home and seeing Paul Newman sitting there in froint of the fire".
He's given up ac ting; now he paints and writes novels. He'll be interviewed one day no doubt, and like Kirk Douglas, will say something like he wished he had taken up writing before now and that it's better than acting..... Pull the other one.

Learning

In "seven" today, a magazine that comes with The Sunday Telegraph, there is an interview with James Patterson who is "one of the world's most prolific authors with 70 odd titles to his name and over 170 million books sold". Phew!
I read one or two of his books some time back - I think I reviewed one for Wales on Sunday, a newspaper that started literary and went downhill to pop-like stuff - and enjoyed them; he's one of those writers who write books which are often called "page turners"- you can't put the darn things down once you start them. He admits he writes such books and is rather proud of it I think; once, he says, he read only what is called great literature and said he was a bit of a snob but when he came to write he found he was best at more popular kinds of writing. He said something that at first I thought was rather strange: he had been studying literature for a PhD but gave it up because "studying literature would destroy his love of reading". Hello? Shouldn't it do the reverse? Isn't that what studying literature is all about - making great literature more enjoyable, not less?
Well, I can actually appreciate what he is saying. I have two "case histories" which go some way to proving the truth in his remark. One has to do with a man I knew who wrote plays for the BBC, radio and TV plays, but had no education to speak of. He was urged by people he got to mix with in drama circles to attend Harlech College and get himself educated. Not only did he do that but from there he went to Oxford University where he got a 1st in literature. After leaving the university he never wrote a play again. It had destroyed his powers to create characters.
Another case is of a young woman who also had been to university when, again, she came away with a 1st in English; she said she wanted to write stories for children; we were on a course together and I tried to help her. But I couldn't. She did not know how to write a story, never mind a story for children
It seems they had both been educated to criticise literature to such an extent that they could no longer create stories, as if their critical faculties were so strong that when they started to write something they were too critical of it.
James Patterson didn't want his studying of literature to destroy his love of reading. I think you could probably add his love of writing to that as well.

Parliament

MP's have a lot of fun sometimes. Cameron is having fun at the present time in Prime Minister's Questions pointing out weaknesses in Gordon Brown's "reign" but Matthew Parris in The Times today thinks he is going too far by not concentrating on things that matter to the public but on trivialities; while he is getting a lot of shouting support and laughter the remarks may rebound on him and make him look trivail.
Quite true. Looks like bullying which is the last thing David Cameron should be doing coming as he does from a priveleged background: one might have a vision of that public school rascal Flashman roasting kids over fires in "Tom Brown's Schooldays", and I'm sure that would be the last thing he'd want.
But parliament can be fun sometimes without too much rancour and bullying.
My father told me of an MP who was a very big drinker; he also had a very big pot to go with it. One day Lady Astor was making one of her speeches about the evils of drink and there, across the chamber from her, was the fat, boozy MP chuckling and making snide comments. She turned on him saying something like: "and look at the honourable member for (whatever), over there with his big, fat belly." To which he replied: "I'd put my belly up against yours any day of the week."
I liked a remark made a few weeks ago when Nick Clegg got to his feet. You have first to know that Nick Clegg had (unwisely, I think) admitted to having "had" 30 lovers before marrying. He said: "A young lady in my constuituency came to see me...." He didn't get any further - "thirty-one" shouted some wag.

James Ellroy

James Ellroy, who wrote "L.A.Confidential", a good film but, to me, an unreadable book, had a most peculiar choice of records on his "Desert Island Discs" this week. He started with Beethoven's 3rd symphony, then chose the Hammerklavier piano sonata by Beethoven, then to Sibelius's Violin Concerto, a couple of symphonies by Bruckner and, at the end, "the greatest music ever written" he said - Beethoven's 9th Symphony, "The Choral". The overall choice seemed to reflect his personality which could be summed up by the word "obsessive". There was a darkness about the works he chose, a sombreness; there was no lightness at all, no Mozart or Percy Grainger or Stravinski at his cheekiest.
One thing he said about Beethoven's 3rd symphony struck me as true: that it was a turning point in classical music. It seemed to mark the end of classical and be the beginning of the romantic. Certainly the symphony is, and must have been then, something new to audiences not least in its length. I was told once that a certain conductor of those days would threaten an orchestra with making them play another 3rd symphony if they didn't keep up to speed, sort of thing. Also I recall someone remarking that the first movement is longer than most of Haydn's symphonies with their 4 movements.
I think there is something salient in the fact that Beethoven dedicated the work to Napoleon, calling it "The Eroica": he wasn't just writing music in the classical tradition but he was thinking thoughts outside of music, romanticising. As Bernard Shaw said about Beethoven: he was the first composer to put himself into his works - or something like that.
It has to added that Beethoven, on hearing of Napoleon's nefarious exploits, crossed out the dedication to that warlike monster, another romantic/moral act.