Last week a new musical featuring W.H. Auden as a central character began previews at New York’s Public Theater. Entitled February House, the musical concerns an improbable ménage that occupied a picturesque but shabby little row-house in Brooklyn Heights during the early years of the Second World War. Besides Auden, who lived on the top floor, the tenants were Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and – most improbably of all – Gypsy Rose Lee, who at the time was busy writing a mystery called The G-String Murders. Other occasional residents included Paul and Jane Bowles, Louis MacNeice, Richard Wright (who lived with his wife and child in the basement), and Golo Mann (who holed up in the attic). It was Anaïs Nin, a frequent visitor, who named it ‘February House’, because so many of the residents, including Auden, had birthdays in February. The address of the house, which was subsequently torn down to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, was Middagh Street, number 7. More »
‘Sostiene Pereira’
The late Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira is set in Lisbon in the summer of 1938. The protagonist, Pereira, is a journalist, a veteran reporter on a national daily who now edits the culture page of Lisboa. The paper describes itself as ‘apolitical’ (which means it doesn’t cover the Spanish Civil War) and ‘independent’ (it prints what the Salazar regime would like it to without having to be asked). Pereira is a widower; his closest confidant is the portrait of his wife that hangs in his hallway. He’s overweight, and has a heart condition, not helped by his fondness for omelettes and sugary lemonade.
His semi-retired routine is disturbed when he hires a young man, Monteiro Rossi, to prepare obituaries of famous writers. Rossi’s pieces – either attacking Fascist writers or praising left-wing ones – are all unpublishable. But Pereira pays Rossi for them anyway and puts them away in a folder. Eventually he gets drawn into helping hide Rossi’s cousin, who’s in Portugal recruiting for the Republican cause in Spain, and as one thing leads to another Pereira soon finds himself in serious trouble with the authorities. More »
Tweeting Leveson
A day at the Leveson Inquiry, as tweeted by @Diski
Although I have an old-lady crush on Lord Leveson I do think he should say ‘good morning’ to start the day.
‘Unspoken understanding = science fiction’ Actually science fiction is a human being who doesn’t know about unspoken understandings #leveson
How to spend my day? Watch the #leveson inquiry or read Mrs George Osborne’s new novel: Park Lane ‘One address, two very different worlds’
Now that’s a novel concept. Where do you get your ideas from, Mrs Osborne?
Especially adore Leveson because one can get so much private thinking done while he chooses each precise phrase with glacial lack of hurry.
And his Lordship is so considerate to the help. Where can I apply to be his shorthand writer so he can give me a break? #gratefulforanycrumb
Will sign off all communications in future with DOLL: Dote On Lord Leveson More »
Rise of the Pirates
The first European Pirate Party emerged in Sweden in 2006, when a group calling itself the Piratpartiet was formed to campaign for the right to download everything. The German Pirates were first elected to the Berlin Landtag last September. Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein followed, and now they have been elected to the assembly in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state. The Pirates have won support at the expense of all the other parties, and there is talk of their joining a coalition government after the federal election in September 2013. More »
Incite!
Timothy Alborn is the dean of arts and humanities and a professor of history at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and a scholar of Victorian business history. From 1989 to 1998 he ran Harriet Records, which released singles and CDs by never or not-yet famous pop groups such as the Scarlet Drops, Twig and Wimp Factor XIV. From 1985 to 1998 he also published Incite!, a fanzine with perhaps as many as several hundred readers, fans of obscure pop and rock bands from Boston to Dusseldorf to Melbourne. (During the 1990s Alborn taught at Harvard, where I met him and became a fan of his work.) More »
Know Your Guns
A vast Tube poster for Anthony Quinn’s Half of the Human Race follows the same format for First World War lit as Birdsong, Early One Morning and War Horse; a poignant image of a solitary soldier, somehow not engulfed in a hail of gun fire despite being silhouetted on top of a trench. But the scramble to promote Quinn’s book after its endorsement from Channel 4’s TV Book Club perhaps led the publishers to paste in haste from the image library. The blurb yells ‘1914’ and the book is stuffed with cricket, class, war with Germany and tragically repressed romance, but the soldier appears to be holding a modern day M-16 assault rifle and an American GI’s helmet.
At the Lighthouse
Ernesto Fernández Nogueras: Playa Girón después de un bombardeo
Beyond the Frame, an exhibition of Cuban paintings and photographs in aid of the campaign to release the Miami Five, is at the Lighthouse in Glasgow until Sunday (it was at Gallery 27 in London last month). Many of the works are apolitical but some are inspired by the various attempts by US governments to destabilise Castro’s Cuba. More »
Atomic Guitars
Two canary yellow stratocasters, mounted on stands to face each other and wired into squat black amps, buzz with a tentative open string drone. Next to the guitars hangs the shell of a radiation-proof suit. The stage is set for a band that never arrives: Fuyuki Yamakawa’s Atomic Guitars – recently on display at the Tokyo Art Fair – are played by decaying atoms. More »