I've been re-visiting some books and films and been striking out into all new and uncharted territory as well.
Amongst my late night listening with my talking books, I've recently taken in, for a second time, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies which is simply bizarre and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence which is Americanised Jane Austin and, of its kind, tart and alluring.
In the world of real books, my bus journeys have been enlivened by Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the first volume of his His Dark Materials trilogy. I suspect that this will feature highly in the book of the year competition at year's end. It is a quite brilliant fantasy, full of metaphysical, historical, scientific and moral speculation, all told in a dramatic and exciting narrative. And it's a young person's book.
I suspect, at present, that what with these works, Artemis Fowl and, even, God bless him, Harry Potter young person's fiction is actually a lot more serious that the adult genre which seems more concerned with label culture, does my bum look big in this, will my football team do well in the League this year or how can I shag or kill someone preferably in a bizarre and extreme fashion.
Ross and I watched Jeepers Creepers on Friday night (dreadful old tosh which didn't know what sort of movie it was supposed to be) and Chocolat on Saturday night (and it is still as good second time around). Even Colin has contacted me to say that he bought it on DVD on my recommendation and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I've been listening to a variety of vocal CDs
I've been entranced by new ideas in the past few weeks. You'll remember that Andrew Graham-Dixon's A History of British Art gripped me. I'm still mulling over his thesis about English art and its history of embracing visual imagery and then violently rejecting it in a way that reflects a battle for the spirit of the nation.
Ross and I had also been talking through David Hockney's idea that the use of optics were used by the Great masters of the early 1500s and after as part of the process of creating their masterpieces. He claims that you can see it in the sudden way that portraits are drawn changes, the way that cloth and fabric is given bulk, texture, shadow and highlight, the way that still life is introduced as a subject matter. He strongly contests the notion that all of this can be laid at the door of the introduction of oil paints. He maintains that there must have been some other technological intervention.
What clinches it as far as I am concerned is the resistance of the art critic orthodoxy. It makes it less easy for them to condemn current artists for utilising current technologies if the masters of old used whatever they had to hand. Hockney is persuasively blunt at this point. He says, as a practicing artist, that artists use whatever is to hand to achieve the best result they can in pursuit of whatever truth they seek.
Elsewhere, an ancient underwater city has been discovered off the coast of south-eastern India. Divers from India and England made the discovery based on the statements of local fishermen and the old Indian legend of the Seven Pagodas. The ruins, which are off the coast of Mahabalipuram, cover many square miles and seem to prove that a major city once stood there.
The potentially exciting part of this is that flood myths exist in most cultures - think Noah and Atlantis. If they are all part of an aural memory of the end of the last Ice Age when climate warming released ice-locked waters back into the seas and flooded vast tracts of land, then this city might be more than 5,000 years old and force us to re-think our narrative for civilisation beginning in Egypt.
I do like new ideas.
And tonight I've been to a chamber concert at the Phil where the Brodsky Quartet gave us Britten's first, Schubert's Rosamunde and Tchaikovsky's third.
The Britten was superb. The difficulty was that the Schubert and the Tchaikovsky sounded exactly the same. And I don't think that that was because we were dealing with a bunch of old puffs. I think it was because the performers imposed the same sound on each composer in order to find the inner angst that is undoubtedly there.
I think the angst is much more telling and soul-clenching if discovered amongst charm in the Schubert and elegance in the Tchaikovsky.
But it was an interesting night in all sorts of ways. Ross was off doing work which involved him producing collages on a Mersey ferry boat. I was doing my own thing. Maybe we are going separate ways after all.