Tim Rice and Bernie Taupin excepted, we don’t tend to hear about lyricists; it’s the tunesmiths we’re interested in. So the death, announced today, of American lyricist Hal David would not normally be something this blogger would necessarily pick up on. But, then, when I started to look at his career I realised that his words, mostly together with Burt Bacharach’s music (what a partnership!) have been running through my head for years: “Three Wheels on my Wagon”, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”, “This Guy’s in Love with You”, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”, “Walk On By”, “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, “I Say a Little Prayer”,”(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me”, “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “What’s New Pussycat?”, “Alfie”, “The Look of Love”, “(They Long to Be) Close to You”, and “Walk On By”, to name just the most obvious. It’s an extraordinary record, and made all the more impressive by the fact that, as with Rice, David had mostly to write for a melody and structure that had already been established. So here’s to Hal David! He certainly deserved that star!

Sometimes, you just can’t help wondering whether artists and sculptors are playing some sort of elaborate joke on their publics. I was reminded of this in August at Bellagio, on the Lago di Como, as we walked across the sublime gardens of the Villa Melzi. Now, I don’t mean to be facetious or disrespectful, but where is the dog in my picture looking (and, I assure you, it doesn’t matter what angle you look at the sculpture from, as this alternative view illustrates)? The dog, supposedly man’s best friend, has even got a faintly sinister smile on its face.

Tonight we were at a most enjoyable dinner party where the guests around the table gradually discovered an extraordinary number of mutual acquaintanceships, many of them to do with the networks of the College of Europe, Bruges, and the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. One of the guests was Wolfgang Hager, whom I first met at the EUI in September 1981. He was then an Associate Professor in the Economics Department and I was a new researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences. We met rapidly because Wolfgang, who had been recruited to the EUI by the late, great Andrew Shonfield (a Professor at the EUI, he had died in January of the same year. He was chiefly known for his 1966 Modern Capitalism, but is known better among European circles to this day for his 1972 Reith Lectures, ‘Europe: Journey to an Unknown Destination’), was a political economist, and thus as present in political science seminars as pure economics workshops, and he was working on EU issues. Since then we have bumped into each other occasionally, and always amicably, as he has gone through several incarnations as academic, consultant, EU official, think tanker and, now, most attractively, in his retirement, he is a ‘liveaboarder’, which is to say that he lives on a yacht in the southern Mediterranean, sailing from port to port, eating fresh fish and playing tennis with his fellow liveaboarders (there is quite a community of them). Such a life would once have meant cutting oneself of from life but now, thanks to modern technologies, Wolfgang was as well-informed and up-to-date as any of the other guests sitting around the table.

It was a beautiful day and I spent most of it in our garden, cleaning up the jungle. I won’t bore you with what every gardener knows about the benefits of gardening. But I also profited from my labours by listening to the radio and hence to a fascinating debate, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from the Aspen Festival of Ideas in the USA. What effect does digital technology have on how we think, live and learn? Should we worry about creating virtual echo chambers where we only hear what we want? Or should we celebrate the increased interconnectivity the internet brings? The BBC’s Bridget Kendall chaired a panel composed of the following. Joi Ito, Director of the MIT media lab and a leading writer on innovation, global technology policy, and the role of the internet in transforming society in substantial and positive ways. He argued that the internet enables decentralized innovation, a type of openness which in turn is shaping approaches in science and education. Mike Gallagher, president and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the trade association representing U.S. computer and video game publishers. He argued that we can achieve connectedness and empathy through game play and that playing digital games are another way of forming communities. Lastly, Julie Taymor, a filmmaker and innovative theatre director who turned the animated film The Lion King into a big theatrical hit. She cautioned about the limiting power of two dimensional screens and argued for the irreplaceable immediacy of the real. The panel was agreed that the genie is out of the bottle and impossible to put back in. Joi Ito’s upbeat optimism about the capacity for society to master the internet’s downsides without undemocratic measures was interesting. He gave the example of spam, which is now, it is true, far less of a problem than it ever used to be – a reduction achieved without legislation, he pointed out. Also striking, to somebody working on a daily basis with many languages, was Mike Gallagher’s confident belief that in the very near future simultaneous electronic interpretation will open the world up in ways we haven’t even begun to think about yet. Well worth a listen.

Clint Eastwood’s soliloquy yesterday in Tampa demonstrated what a loss he has been to American Shakespearian theatre. This evening, in his honour, we watched the 1975 thriller, The Eiger Sanction, directed by and starring… Clint Eastwood. Actually, we watched it because, like Stagecoach, it is another film with a Monument Valley connection (a good quarter of it was filmed there). The film, a sort of James Bond-type spy thriller with Eastwood improbably cast as an art-loving government-hired assassin, is largely forgettable but it is worth watching for its authentic depiction of a climb up the north face of the Eiger. I quote from the Wiki entry: ‘Filming in Grindelwald, Switzerland began on August 12, 1974 with a team of climbing experts and advisers from America, England, Germany, Switzerland, and Canada. The climbers were based at the Hotel Bellevue des Alpes at Kleine Scheidegg. The Eiger at 13,041 feet is not as tall as other mountains in the Swiss Alps, but it is treacherous climbing. Eastwood’s decision to brave the mountain was disapproved by Dougal Haston, director of the International School of Mountaineering, who had lost climbers on the Eiger, and by cameraman Frank Stanley, who thought that to climb a perilous mountain to shoot a film was unnecessary. According to cameraman Rexford Metz, it was a boyhood fantasy of Eastwood’s to climb such a mountain, and he enjoyed displaying heroic machismo. A number of accidents occurred during the filming of The Eiger Sanction. A twenty-seven-year old English climber, David Knowles, who was a body double and photographer, was killed during a rock fall, with Hoover narrowly escaping with his life. Eastwood almost abandoned the project but proceeded because he did not want Knowles to have died in vain. Eastwood insisted on doing all his own climbing and stunts.’  The climbing passages are also worth watching for the period mountaineering clothing and equipment – punily twee by modern-day standards. Curiosity piqued, I read about the mountain itself, and its treacherous north face. The account of the failed 1936 attempt, resulting in the agonisingly slow death of poor Toni Kurz, just an ice-axe’s distance away from help, is worth a film in its own right.

I realise that, in covering our summer US trip I somehow failed to mention two unavoidable phenomena in American society; obesity and loneliness. The former was particularly apparent in the stations. The redcaps ferried three sorts of passengers around: the old, those with a lot of luggage, and the obese. The images reminded me of the portrayal of the fat people in the film Wall-E (picture) and I realised that the film must have struck much closer to home in the States. A bigger bang for your bucks is what all Americans expect but, when it comes to food, such a bigger bang means that, well, you get bigger. Soft drinks are sold by the litre in many restaurants (I understand New York’s mayor is trying to put a stop to those outsize portions). There is reverse social stigma in finishing everything and, when you can’t, taking the rest home in the so-called ‘doggy bag’. There is plenty of salad on offer in most ‘eateries’ but also plenty to go with it. There is, more generally, plenty in the land of plenty. The resulting obesity rings false with a country that regularly tops the Olympics medal table. I wonder if this phenomenon has something to do with the loneliness that is also so apparent; food as comfort, especially at home in front of the TV or PC. The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once wrote ‘America’s a very lonely society, because it’s so mobile and because it’s a nation of immigrants who don’t have extended families, so there are all these people that, no matter what their trouble is, can only call the police department or the fire department. There’s nobody else to ask for help.’

Another piece of summer reading arising out of the Nevius book about New York has been Jacob A Riis’s 1890 How the Other Half Lives, a reformist study and indictment of the crushing poverty that then existed in New York and, above all, a trenchant critique of tenement housing. Himself a Danish immigrant, Riis gradually established a career as a police reporter, work that brought him into direct contact with the horrors of the Lower East Side slum district. Riis turned his journalistic skills to good effect, aided by the new medium of flash photography. The result, a powerful combination of campaigning journalism and photography, led to a more enlightened form of architecture that would gradually do away with the cramped and impoverished living conditions that, in Riis’s account, were like a pressure cooker about to explode. This work inspired Jack London’s 1902 The People of the Abyss, a journalistic first-hand account of poverty and living conditions in London’s East End which, in turn, inspired George Orwell’s 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London. Riis clearly found the conditions he described morally abhorrent but in a concluding chapter he cleverly stressed enlightened self interest: the people were a resource (labour); more decent housing conditions would enhance productivity and prevent rioting;  rebuilding the slums would thus be a worthwhile investment; ‘the tenement has come to stay, and must itself be the solution of the problem with which it confronts us.’ The book included designs of a new-style tenement building, with air, light and proper sanitation. It was the beginning of the end of the slum.

This evening I finished a collection of Martin Amis short stories (thanks to John B. for the tip), published in 1998 under the title Heavy Water. Something of a mixed bag, the stories themselves were, variously, published in1976, 1978, 1981, 1986, 1992, 1995 and 1998 in the likes of Encounter, Granta, Esquire, the New Statesman and the New Yorker. There are also two previously unpublished stories from 1997. The collection thus covers several Amis periods. The State of England (1985), with its pre-London Fields cockney villain, Big Mal, is a Sopranos-like conceit about the way even gangsters, mobsters and bouncers have ambitions for their children, including putting them in top schools and expecting them to win prizes and be good at sports. Denton’s Death (1976) is a Kafka-esque tale about paranoia. Let Me Count the Times (1981) is a cautionary tale about a combination of obsessive narcissim and onanism. For my money, two inversion tales are both the cleverest and the wittiest. The first, Career Move (1992), has poets feted by Hollywood studio moguls, whilst screenplay writers struggle to get their work published in obscure low-circulation journals. It has what I think is the best comic line in the whole collection, a description of an angry Hollywood mogul; ‘…for a few seconds he looked like a dark-age warlord in mid-campaign, taking a glazed breather before moving on to the women and children.’ The choice of the adjective ‘glazed’ is Amis on top form. The second, Straight Fiction (1995), paints a society where to be gay is ‘straight’ and heterosexuals are a small but vocal protest group. Both are very funny but also clever ways of confronting our subliminal prejudices. Which reminds me that I learned from the Nevius book (see this post) that until as recently as 1967 it was a criminal offence in New York to sell alcohol to a known homosexual (see here, for example). The Janitor on Mars (1998) is Amis showing off some erudite science fiction but it sums up in one line what Olaf Stapledon took a book to explain about human beings: we ‘…are very talented adorers.’

Dinosaurs that we are, about three million light years after everybody else and then thanks to a kind loan from PP and M (to whom grateful thanks), this evening we finished watching the first season of The Sopranos. The series began to air in 1999 and holds up remarkably well. Its initial conceit is remarkably simple; (New Jersey) Mob bosses have families and problems and related tensions and mental and physical illnesses just like everybody else. Inevitably, we found ourselves comparing it with The Wire (which has had added poignancy for us since we gazed out last month from an Amtrak train at some of the broken-down Baltimore estates and housing that feature in the series). For us, on balance, The Wire (which came a few years later) wins because it is so raw and uncompromising and so frequently makes the viewer work at understanding the plot. The script of The Sopranos is less knowing, with far fewer memorable quotations and oblique philosophical and cultural references. (That said, The Sopranos first series has one clearly knowing winning memorable quotation: ‘cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this’ – the ‘this’ in question being Mob warfare.) However, all critics seem to agree that The Wire wouldn’t have been possible without the ground-breaking work of The Sopranos. What is clear is that both cleverly and entertainingly portray the combination of dispassionate amorality and passionate sentimentality that, if we are honest with ourselves, has never been limited to organised crime.

Another constant companion on my American trip was Olaf Stapeldon’s 1937 ‘science fiction classic’, Star Maker which I have, at long last, finished reading. I mentioned it in passing here. The narrator, who has rowed with his wife, stomps off up a hillside at night, gazing at the stars and reflecting on the greater futility of mankind. In a dream (the reader assumes), he leaves his body and travels through space and time, with gradual advances in his intelligence, telepathic abilities and awareness of other forms of intelligence. The narrator explores worlds and other human, or human-like, races before being absorbed into successively more powerful collective intelligences which enable him/them to witness both the beginning and the end of the universe. Mankind in all of this is of no more importance than ‘rats in a cathedral’. This is a scintilatingly brilliant work of the imagination, and Stapledon deserves to be up there in lights with the likes of H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Painting on a vast canvas (what could be greater than the entire universe?), Stapledon’s many inventions include such concepts as swarm intelligence, Dyson spheres and the detachment of planets as space vehicles. But the book is, perhaps inevitably, flawed. For a start, it is a very heavy read. There are no characters and there is no real dramatic development. Rather, Stapledon sets out a scientific discourse. This would be all right, but there are two deeper flaws. The first is that Stapledon falls into a trap that Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris brilliantly avoids: the worlds and societies Stapledon describes evolve basically in Darwinian and Marxist ways, whereas Lem’s alien intelligence is beyond human understanding and hence simply beyond human descriptive powers. Worse, second, Stapledon warns against the risk of anthropomorphism (‘To describe the mentality of stars is of course to describe the unintelligible by means of intelligible but falsifying human metaphors.’) and then jumps feet-first into the trap. Before we know it he is writing about nebulae gifted with ‘primitive but intense religious consciousness’ and about the love stars feel for one another. In a sense, Stapledon was positing a Gaia-like theory of the cosmos but, unlike Lovelock, felt the need to attribute intelligence (and, beyond that, sentiment, morality and religiosity). I put ‘science fiction’ in inverted commas because Stapledon did not think that was what he was writing. He was a philosopher who turned to fiction as a way better to explore his ideas. Like the trek up to Lago di Darengo, this was a tough read but well worthwhile.