Brain Noodles: Beethoven’s Ninth, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

I’d always assumed that Beethoven became deaf as an older man but – apologies if this is common knowledge – Beethoven (1770-1827) began to go deaf relatively early in life, in 1801. To put that into perspective, he had just finished his second symphony when he first started to suffer from tinnitus – yet to come were the remaining symphonies, Piano Concertos Nos. 4 and 5, the Violin Concerto, Waldstein and Appassionata, the Hammerklavier, the Missa Solemnis, the late quartets, and much else. If you’re feeling a little prickly today about what you have or haven’t achieved with your life to date, I don’t recommend listening to the final movement of the Ninth Symphony (and its then radical use of a choral section) and reminding yourself that the man who composed it was stone deaf:

  Beethoven going deaf was a tragedy, of course, although given what he created even whilst entirely deaf, you couldn’t really say it held him back to any great degree – in the grand scheme of music, it’s not as tragic as, say, Schubert dying aged 31. But a certain kind of mind might wonder what God was so busy with around about this time (Schubert died in 1828, the year after Beethoven’s death) that He couldn’t intervene in mortal affairs. Which would lead a certain kind of mind to consider the following possibilities:

(a) There is no God;
(b) God, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, doesn’t really care for music;
(c) God was heedless, careless or jealously vindictive;
(d) God was too busy saving starving orphans; and anyway, if Schubert was really all that, he’d have been smart enough not to contract typhoid fever / syphilis / the bubonic plague (and, viz. deafness, ditto for Beethoven).

  Books-wise, I read PG Wodehouse’s JEEVES AND THE FEUDAL SPIRIT this week, about which there is very little to be said other than if you haven’t read PG Wodehouse yet, drop everything and rush to your nearest bookstore and buy every Wodehouse in sight. Actually, that’s a little previous – I’m a Johnny-come-lately to the Wodehouse world, and so far I’ve only been reading the Wooster novels. For all I know – although I’m inclined to doubt it – the rest of Woodhouse’s considerable output isn’t the most purely pleasurable writing you’re ever likely to read. But, as I say, I doubt it. For the time being, though, if you stick to the Wooster novels, you won’t go far wrong. Unless this - in which a butler admits a guest into the hapless-but-unflappable Bertie Wooster’s presence - is the kind of thing you don’t like:

Seppings flung wide the gates, there was a flash of blonde hair and a whiff of Chanel Number Five and a girl came sailing in, a girl whom I was able to classify at a single glance as a pipterino of the first water.

  Meanwhile, if it’s a good movie you’re thirsting after, you’ll go parched a while yet in this most barren of summers. This week in the Irish Examiner I reviewed Gods of Egypt, The Conjuring 2 and Bang Gang, none of which could be remotely described as the celluloid equivalent of a pipterino of the first water. If you’re still interested, the reviews can be found here …

On Mozart, Crab Cakes And Literary Snobs

I had that conversation again last week, the one that many crime / mystery readers and writers are familiar with when the topic turns to books and a certain kind of reader feels the need to assert his or her literary credentials. It included the phrase, “Oh, I don’t really read that sort of thing …” and contained a class of a sighing smirk between the ‘Oh’ and the ‘I’, and just the featheriest of light emphasis on the ‘I’, all of which was designed to promote the idea that said person was above all that robbery and murder and rape, but – in the interests of harmony – too polite to remind me of their innate superiority.
  I genuinely feel sorry for these people. I mean, it used to bug me. Now I just feel sorry for them.
  The reason why crystallised about forty minutes later, on the bus heading home. I’m on a bit of a classical music binge at the moment, and was listening to some Schubert on the iPhone, and it occurred to me that anyone who says they read only literary fiction – crime, romance, sci-fi or whatever being beneath them – is akin to someone saying they love music, but only listen to classical music.
  Now, I can understand why someone might say that. You could spend a whole lifetime listening to Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Chopin and Rachmaninov, et al. The music is fabulous – beautiful and awe-inspiring and heartbreaking and everything music should be.
  And yet, if you confined yourself only to classical composers, you’d miss out on The Stones and Dylan, The Beatles and Hank Williams and Dusty Springfield and Leonard Cohen and The Smiths and Antony and the Johnsons and Rollerskate Skinny and the Sex Pistols – well, you see where I’m going. And that’s without getting into soul, the blues, jazz, etc.
  Or what if someone was to say to you, “I love art, but only the impressionists. That Renaissance stuff is all a bit gaudy, isn’t it?” I mean, you’d be entitled to believe they simply didn’t know what they were talking about, wouldn’t you?
  And on it goes, in virtually any realm of the arts you want to choose. How could you call yourself a movie fan, say, if you confine yourself to a single genre?
  Ironically, anyone who tells you that they read only literary fiction is also conveying a subtext relating to their superior intelligence. That their sensibilities are so delicate and refined that only the finest of prose can tickle their fancy. The truth is a little more prosaic, and rooted in ignorance.
  The brain, that very fine organ, is a selfish bugger. And it’s in its best interests to make you as much of a moron as it can. That’s because the brain is designed to conserve energy at every opportunity in order to prolong its longevity – this is why humans are creatures of habit, slaves to routine and schedule. The brain hates it when we encounter new scenarios, thus forcing it to map new paths through the maze, get a whole heap of fresh synapses fusing. The brain much prefers it when a reader, say, sticks to a particular kind of book, a distinct kind of storytelling. And if the brain needs to persuade the reader that sticking to that kind of book means that he or she is a superior human being, well, the brain only needs to map out that particular path once.
  Personally, I’m of the opinion that life’s too short to read only one kind of book, or listen to only one kind of music, or eat one kind of food, or look at one kind of art. I’m a bit greedy that way – I want a taste of everything. I’ll be a long, long time dead, and I’d hate to be out there drifting in the vast, trackless wastes of eternity thinking, ‘Crap, I should’ve tried the crab cakes, just once.’