Stravinsky and Mozart

By mistake, I seem to have started a collection of quirky black and white photos of great modernists (don't stop reading). Here's Stravinsky for music, and a while ago I had Picasso to cover art. Both are on my kitchen wall. I need a writer to go with them.

It's a topsy-turvy world…

My downstairs neighbour has put a globe outside his front door. I wonder why it's upside down? It makes it quite hard to read the names of the countries. The occupant of the flat doesn't have an Australian accent, as far as I could detect, so it's probably not out of a patriotic desire to have his home country on top of the world. Perhaps he likes to confound expectations - it's actually a statement of his, erm, quirky, subversive personality. Maybe it broke and he glued it back together, only to discover, after all his efforts, it was the wrong way up? Thoughts on a postcard please.

Ash Wednesday

Pancakes were a must yesterday for Shrove Tuesday. (Why don't we eat them more often? Everyone else does.) Although I'll admit operating a double standard as I haven't given up anything for Lent. Nevertheless I thought I'd mark Ash Wednesday with some lines from one of my favourite poets, TS Eliot. Here's the third part of his Ash Wednesday, published in 1930 and dealing with his recent conversion to Anglicanism.

III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.

TS Eliot

Flying high

Spotted: the first hot air balloon of the year. Lazily drifting over a hazy sky early(ish) this morning. Spring must be near.

Decisions, decisions…

Iphigénie en Tauride

A little late blogging about this one, but last week I popped down to the Cinema de Lux in Bristol. That's a pretty rare event in itself: give me the smaller screens, and, admittedly hit and miss, 'arty' films of the Watershed over the popcorn-fuelled audiences and Hollywood blockbusters of Cabot Circus any day. Apart from, I've discovered, a handful of Saturdays this spring when the cavernous spaces and football-pitch sized screens are transformed into surrogate opera houses, in which case, count me in.

The Met Opera House from New York has been broadcasting its productions live to cinemas around the UK for a good while now, but I've been a bit slow on the uptake. Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, starring Plácido Domingo and Susan Graham as the seemingly doomed brother and sister, was my first taste of it. I'll be going back for more.

'Short of fainting I could not have been more moved than when I saw a performance of Gluck’s masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride,' wrote Berlioz. Fainting wasn't on my agenda, but Gluck's piece, written for the Paris Opera, is a gripping tale, which from the outset seems for a tragic ending.

To give you an idea, Iphigénie is obliged to sacrifice any strangers landing on the island of Tauride. Her brother Oreste, who she hasn't seen for 15 years and doesn't recognise, pitches up with a friend after being shipwrecked. You see where this is going… Oh, and the backstory is that their father was murdered by their mother, so Oreste killed their mother in order to avenge his father's death. It's not a cheery tale. Although, without wanting to give the ending away, I will say I wouldn't bother with the deluxe box of kleenex…

Secondhand memories

Bookshop memories from George Orwell, or, why you wouldn't want to open a secondhand bookshop…

Blog log

Over the past year lots of friends have started blogs of all sorts – from photography and sketching to explanations and ponderings . I've also been sent or recommended, not to mention stumbled across, new blogs that I enjoy following. Here they all are in no particular order. The descriptions are by the blog's respective authors. Where none are forthcoming I have improvised. Amendments and additions welcome. Happy reading!

• Adventures in Lomography: 'Steph//// Camera: Diana F+ (and bits and pieces..)///very occasionally, the odd Canon IXUS 50 snap'

• D for Dalrymple: 'D for Dalrymple is written by Christina. Christina is a freelance human who lives in London and is consistently bemused by her tendency to describe herself in the third person.'

• Harmony beat: 'William Harvey's thoughts about cultural diplomacy, including diary entries from his job as Violin and Viola Teacher at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music'

• DrawingaDiagnosis: 'Feeling inspired by all the patients and amazing people I met out in South Africa, I set out to do a drawing a day of things I see in medicine.'

• Amandapondo: How things happen and why they do

• Somewhere Boy: Where a music graduate and librarian writes 'superficial analyses of things I like and regurgitate the opinions of others'

• The inner workings of...: 'I am an Aardman Story man, currently boarding on the next stop-mo feature - The Pirates!'

• Gareth Across States: Life across the pond

• um blogue azul: 'Vários aspectos das suas vidas se associavam à cor azul.' (No, I can't understand Portuguese. Those few lessons when I was in France didn't pay off! But the YouTube videos are good for all.)

• The Age of Uncertainty: 'This is supposed to be a blog about books, but something went wrong..'

• Human Planet: 'On location with this landmark BBC Earth production'

• People reading poems: Erm, exactly what it says on the tin

Just buy a Venue!

I'm completely gutted to hear Bristol's Venue magazine faces closure. If you're reading this anywhere in the city, please go and buy a Venue now! There's no other local magazine that can touch it for comprehensive arts and culture listings, witty and provocative writing and general good humour. That's not to mention the genius of the 'I saw you' and 'I'm sore at you' pages. Help save Venue magazine now and buy a copy!

Eddie Izzard – Learning French

I've just remembered how funny Eddie Izzard is. Enjoy this sketch, otherwise known as The Tale of the Monkey, the Cat and the Mouse…

Time for a new book

I've been in reading heaven since yesterday. I have discovered George Eliot. Victorian novelists are an arena I've only explored in patches: lots of Thomas Hardy, two of the three Brönte sisters, a little Charles Dickens, no Anthonny Trollope. Does a TV adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters count? And George Eliot, shallow though it seems, somehow those volumes always looked so doorstop-like…

The happy coincidence of a friend's recommendation (I was devastated to realise that I'll never have the chance to read Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda again for the first time,' she mused wistfully) and the lucky find of a secondhand bookstall in Greenwich market selling Deronda, plus the capacious minutes on the Bristol-London train, means that the last few hours I've been immersed in the so-deftly observed world of Gwendolen Harleth as conjured by Eliot. Those 700 odd pages have been transformed from doorstop to doorway…

The Secret in their Eyes

The Oscar-winning film The Secret in their Eyes is both a love story and a thriller, set in the now, then and the yet-to-be. I'm not sure the trailer does its compelling tale justice, which is better, I suppose, than all those trailers that give away the best bits of the film. Anyway, it's a great watch.