Morning

¶ Chant: What is it about Gregorian Chant? Why is it one of those things that are always, it seems, being “rediscovered”?

¶ Encyclopedia: In the Telegraph, the obituary of Wilf Gregg, a personnel manager with a sideline in murder. The late Mr Gregg co-edited The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

Noon

¶ Turner: The Turner show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hasn’t formally opened yet, but I was able to take advantage of a members’ preview this afternoon. As I always do, the first time I see a show, I breezed through the galleries. I didn’t see any of the really famous late paintings, but still…

Night

¶ Civil Pleasures: My new Web site, which will replace Portico, has been launched.
Oremus…

Morning, cont’d

§ Chant. For my part, I regard chant as the very worst kind of wallpaper, when it’s playing in someone’s home in the background. It’s all right to listen to chant, while doing nothing else, except, possibly, praying (see below, however); but having it “on” while one goes about one’s domestic routines is my idea of bad taste.

That’s because, for me, chant falls just short of what I think of as “music.” And what I mean by that is that it’s not intended to be listened to. Monks don’t break out into two groups, the singers and the entertained. Everybody chants, even the tone-deaf brothers.

Perspicacious readers of Mark Landler’s story in the Times will anticipate the mention of a recent Best Foreign Movie Oscar winner when they learn the name of the abbott of the monastery at Heiligenkreuz, Austria. (That’s where the latest chantastic CD comes from.) 

§ Encyclopedia. Some bibliomanes will be disinclined to remember Mr Gregg fondly:

Gregg owned one of the few complete sets of Notable British Trials in private hands, in all 83 volumes which he used to pick up for a pound or two a time during the 1960s. He needed just eight more to complete the set when he visited a bookshop in Flask Walk, Hampstead. The owner told him that a whole set had just come in, so Gregg bought the eight he needed – for £3 each – and left the rest.

Noon. cont’d

§ Turner. Turner’s is one of the most interesting Nineteenth-Century careers. He began as a protégé of Sir Joshua Reynolds and ended as the godfather of Impressionism. (One the last pictures in the Met’s show — Rough Seas, I think it’s called — could have been painted as an utter abstraction fifty years ago.) His paintings of Venice are matched only by Canaletto (who was, remember, very popular in England in his own lifetime).

The centerpiece of the exhibit appears to be the blaze of watercolors in which Turner represented aspects of the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834. The show will run from the 1 July to 21 September.

Night, cont’d

§ Civil Pleasures. There’s nothing much there at the moment, beyond a view to the north from the Huntington Museum, but I’ll be tinkering with it until I get the color scheme right.

Why a new Web site? Mainly to conform the name of the site with its URL. Having decided to make that change, however, I’m going to alter the navigation as well. I’ve been working with the same menu system — fiddling with it now and then on an ad hoc basis, like the cycles and epicycles of pre-modern cosmology — for eight years, which is a geological era in Internet time.

The Daily Blague, the current version of which was introduced last August, will not be altered at this time.  

Shouts to Steve Laico, at Searchlight Consulting, for doing all the heavy lifting!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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