Without Lifting A Finger

Enjoying Barnes' new book on Shostakovich. Am I enjoying Barnes' storytelling or the story of Shostakovich (which I knew next to nothing about) more? Hard to say. I did download some of Shostakovich's music though (listening to his string quartets now). And am inspired to reread Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (after reading Shakespeare's Macbeth) this summer -- and then perhaps get a copy of Shosti's operatic version (based on Leskov's work) that so irked Stalin. * Excerpt from Barnes' Noise : Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his det...

No pics from my walk. A little rain and some wonderful clouds (reminding me of Otto Modersohn's obsessive sketching of Wolken). Waiting for Julian Barnes' new book on Shostakovich. Have been flip-flopping between Herbert and the early poems of Thomas Bernhard. From Bernhard's Auf der Erde und in der Holle  (very last poem): In the Bushes, I Know, Are the Souls In the bushes, I know, are the souls of my fathers, in the corn is the pain of my father and in the great black forest. I know that their lives, erased before our very eyes, have found refuge in the ears of corn, in the blue brow of the June sky. I know that the dead are the trees and the winds, the moss, and the night which lays its shadows upon my burial mound. [ Translation by Peter Waugh ]