Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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June 18, 2012The weekends belong to Ethne
Here is our garden, so far this year: nicer than last year, our only worry being that once the garden is established Ethne will be headhunted or something and we will have to move again, especially since she has planted asparagus. Here she is sitting on her new garden bench, and Louie the Cavalier (in his summer haircut) is racing away from the camera.
On Saturday we went to the Stahl’s Pottery Preservation Society’s 25th Annual Summer Festival in Zionsville Pennsylvania, toured the old pottery, founded by Charles Stahl in the 19th century; sons Thomas and Isaac built a kiln on the present site in 1933, last fired in 1956. The old family home is a nice little museum, where some children were making and selling dew drops, a sort of home-made ice cream, and there were over 30 potters displaying their wares in a marquee. It was a lovely day out.
The weekends belong to Ethne, and of course so do I, for whatever that’s worth. Last weekend we cleaned the kitchen cupboards, and yesterday we worked the whole day in the garden. But having quit my job at Barnes & Noble, I looked forward to having weekdays free to play with my music and to read a book now and then. And we made a day trip upstate to see old friends from Texas, vacationing in the Poconos; and then an overnight to New York City for a function at the Lotos Club, where we met all kinds of terrific people. And I have taken the dog to the kennel and done some shopping and mowed the lawn and taken the dog to the groomers…
But today is Monday, and this week there is nothing on the calendar! And right now I am blogging and simultaneously transferring Artur Rodzinsky’s old recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony for my pals on SymphonyShare! Oh joy, oh bliss!
June 18, 2012The Italian mysteries
I have written here before about mystery novels set in Italy. Donna Leon is an Englishwoman who has lived in Venice for many years; her stories are set there, and her detective, Commissario Brunetti, is the sort of chap you’d like to have for a friend: he loves the city, has a wonderful family, and copes marvelously with the various types in the questura (police headquarters). (His wife is a professor of English with a special interest in Henry James.)
Michael Dibdin, who lived in Seattle, has passed away, so there won’t be any more of his novels about Aurelio Zen, who is also Venetian, and therefore an outsider wherever he goes in the police service, also an outsider because he is honest to a fault and willing to solve a mystery using unorthodox means as necessary, occasionally making enemies. He gets kicked around Italy, transferred or even promoted to get rid of him. The penultimate Zen novel, Così Fan Tutti, is a hilarious tour de force, set in Naples and borrowing its plot from the Mozart opera.
Andrea Camilleri is the odd one out here, a home-grown novelist writing in Italian; his Inspector Montalbano, like Aurelio Zen, has an eye for the ladies. The novels are set in Sicily, and contain many a literary reference. All three of these fictional policemen have to deal with the inconvenience, incompetence and corruption in modern Italy, as well as the beautiful women and fascinating people, and all three also like their food, and end up making me wish (for the zillionth time) that I could afford to live there.
In all of these novels a mystery is solved, but sometimes the guilty are not brought to justice, occasionally because they’re dead. Sometimes the mystery that is solved is not the one we thought we were reading, and once in a while it turns out that there was no crime committed at all.
Last night there were three things on TV we wanted to watch: the modern western Longmire on A&E, whose laconic eponymous sheriff has to cope with disloyalty in his own office; the beautifully designed and well-cast Borgia series on Showtime, and an Aurelia Zen movie on PBS. We had seen the Zen before, set in Rome, but it was fun to watch, and I hadn’t remembered how it ended, but we had to stop watching at ten o’clock, because we were recording the other two shows, and the DirecTV gizmos will let us watch one show while we are recording another, but will not let us record two shows while watching a third. Imagine! Nothing on TV all week except dismal melodramas (a disproportianate number of them about violence against women, for some reason), then on Sunday evening three things we want to watch, and it turned out there’s a limit to the digital dexterity of the devices cluttering up the place.
I have read all the Donna Leons and the Michael Dibdins, but the first time I picked up a Camilleri I was put off by what appeared to be very clumsy translation of attempts at American slang. In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, however, there was a feature article about Camilleri and his Inspector Montalbano, and Ethne tiold me that the phony slang is in fact part of a joke: in some of the novels there is a character who tries to talk in American gangsterese. So last night I started reading the first Camilleri, The Shape Of Water, and finished it this morning, Imagine! I finished a book! There is life after birth after all! And I’ve got my reading cut out for me for a while.