Today’s excerpt from Clives James’s Cultural Amnesia is about Edward Said. I’ve tried to read On Late Style several times since it was given to me, but I haven’t made much headway; the writing is clear and elegant enough but the thoughts are rebarbative. And I can’t help snorting at the idea of Mozart’s “Late Style” — as if the composer had the sense of an approaching end that so clearly inspired Beethoven (and Said’s book). By the unhappiest of accidents, Mozart happened to be fulfilling a commission to write a Requiem Mass when he died. But as this was composed for a knucklehead aristocrat who had the habit of passing off such purchases as his own work, the Requiem is not what we would call a personal project. Mozart was far more engaged with the professional projects that, in my opinion, cost him his health and then his life: two opera premieres, in the far from neighboring towns of Vienna and Prague, within the space of three weeks, and on the cusp of classically eighteen-month-long depression.  

¶ In the Decameron, V, ii, Boccaccio presents me with an aspect of medieval warfare that — what? had never occurred to me? It’s gruesome but pathetic and funny at the same time.

[The Sicilian pirate Martuccio — incidentally the romantic lead in this tale — advises his captor, the King of Tunis, as to how to win an impending battle against an enemy from Grananda.]

“My lord,” said Martuccio, “it can certainly be done if you have a mind to do it. Listen, and I shall tell you how. You must see that the bows your archers are fitted with much finer string than that which is normally used. You must then have arrows specially made, the notches of which will only take this finer string. All of this must be done in great secrecy so that the enemy knows nothing about it, otherwise he would take suitable counter-measures. The reason for my advice is this: as you know, when you enemy’s archers have fired all their arrows, and your own men have fired theirs, each side will have to gather up the other’s arrows for the battle to continue. But the arrows fired by your archers will be useless to the enemy because their bow-strings will be too thick to fit into the small notches, whereas your own men will have no difficulty at all in using the enemies arrows because a fine string goes perfectly well into a wide notch. Thus your own men will have an abundant supply of arrows, and the others will have none at all.”

Being a man of some intelligence, the King approved of Martuccio’s plan and carried it out to the letter, thereby winning the war.

Imagining the exhausted survivors of a volley of arrows scurrying about among the dead and wounded, scavenging the enemy’s arrows, is simply too ridiculous! One is almost grateful for the atomic bomb — it put an end to the little-boy nonsense that is at the heart of all warfare.

¶ At the opening of Book VII of the Aeneid, Virgil shows how far short of Greek elegance his epic falls. Where Homer would simply refer to rhododactylos Ios — if you’ll stop and think about it for a moment, you ought to be able to figure out what that means, even if you’ve never studied Greek — Virgil klutzes up the works with two references to color:

Iamque rubescebat radiis mare, et aethere ab alto
Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis

Now the sea was going red with the rays of Dawn,
from the heavens gold Aurora shone in her rose-red car.

A side note: the Loeb Classical Library splits the Aeneid between two volumes, understandably, with the first six books gathered together with the Eclogues and the great Georgics. My copy is almost a wreck. (When I had a garden, I endeavored to glean weed-killing tips from the Georgics). My copy of the second volume, in contrast, was never opened before this morning’s read.

¶ Reading through Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle, I’m impressed by the craft but almost embarrassed by the banality of some of his subjects. “A Clip,” for example, is about a childhood haircut. And that, really, is all that it’s about. There is a fatal disjunction between the “Loose hair in windfalls blown across the floor” and the small-bore elegance of a finely-wrought sonnet. Although this line,

Cold smooth creeping steel and snicking scissors

Reminds me that the sound and sense of barber’s shears gliding alongside the hull of my head is an intense pleasure that I would enjoy every day if my hair grew fast enough.

¶ Clive James’s note on Edward Said, written just before the latter’s death a few years ago, shows enormous respect, considering the subject’s avowal of many ideas that the writer takes to be wrong-headed.

At the end of his encounter with Pontecorvo [the maker of the film The Battle of Algiers], he is disappointed to discover that Pontecorvo has been making commercials without telling anybody. The implication is that if Pontecorvo had lived up to the seriousness of his early masterpieces, he would now be living in a tent, and proud of it.

This reminds me of a phrase in Brian Morton’s Breakable You, where a woman fears that reconnecting with an old lover who happens to be a union organizer will subject her to his “cranky frugality.”

¶ A very long chapter in Le rouge et le noir — so long, in fact, that I cheated and read it in English, and still barely understood it. I exaggerate… There’s no missing the fineness, however, of Stendhal’s send-off of the Abbé Pirard:

Le vulgaire, aveuglé par l’amour de l’argent, n’était pas fait pour comprendre que c’était dans sa sincérité que l’abbé Pirard trouvé la force nécessaire pour lutter seul pendant six ans contre Marie Alacoque, le Sacré-Coeur de Jésus, les jésuites et son évêque.

(Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque figures in one of Heaney’s poems as well. I’m glad I had to look her up.)

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Scott McNulty of TUAW. The administrator of a (Windows-based) university computer system by day, Mr McNulty would blog about the world of Apple “even if they didn’t pay me.”

Although there are days when I just don’t even want to read anything about Apple, let alone write anything about them.

Blogger’s Blues. Mr McNulty’s observation that “Negative comments can discourage other bloggers from commenting” is so true that I’ve decided this very minute to delete any and all negative comments received by this site. Not that I can remember the last one.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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