The television critic James Walton, in his review of a sitcom’s Christmas special, observes: “After all, as Samuel Beckett suggested, the tragedy of life is the certainty that you’d do better next time coupled with the certainty that there is no next time.”
In his Low Life column Jeremy Clarke describes his visit to a Marseilles hospital and beautifully disregards the old writing rule about never using multiple words when one will do. “I located the department of nuclear medicine, finally, at the end of a corridor along which the curvature of the Earth was visible.”
Among the gifts under the tree on Christmas morning was 10,000 Not Out: The History of The Spectator 1828-2020 by David Butterfield. The number in the title refers to the number of weekly issues published since the early 19th Century (it is larger now). Matt Ridley in his Foreward states that The Spectator is “the oldest magazine in the English language” while the author declares in his Preface that it is “the oldest weekly magazine in the world.”
The drawing on the book’s cover shows a crowd of people in a cafe, including a man in a top hat and one in a bowler. A wigged barrister is reading an early, unillustrated version of the magazine and a young woman is reading a recent edition on an iPad. In the background the former editor and current prime minister Boris Johnson appears to be biting the shoulder of a waitress.
In years past I have sometimes devoted a long post to the bits of wit and wisdom found in The Spectator’s special Christmas issue. This year I’ve decided to spread these bits out, in part because, now getting the magazine online, I am reading it earlier than ever this year, and in part because, thanks to the pandemic, my own life is so unremarkable.
We’ll go back to front, which is how I read the magazine (even online, despite the inconvenience).
In his Sport column, Roger Alton writes: "As we have observed before, politicians are furniture movers, not furniture makers.”
I subscribed to HBO Max because it carried two movies that promised – at least to my vulnerable, house-arrested mind – the enticements of travel.
The first, The Flight Attendant, had little travel and a lot that was implausible, beginning with the main character’s behavior. It was a struggle to make it through the first episode.
The second, Let Them All Talk, takes place on a crossing of the Queen Mary 2. As someone who sailed to France in 1975 on the QE2 – taking advantage of a special and short-lived youth fare – I was looking forward to this one. (The shipboard experience was so delightful I sailed home one year later on the Mikhail Lermontov. Those were the days.) Also, it is about a writer (played by Meryl Streep) who invites her two college friends (Dianne Wiest and Candace Bergen) to join her on the voyage.
I thrilled to views of the ship – the galley, the staterooms, the library, even the shot of churned waves outside the window as Wiest and Bergen play Scrabble – and cringed every time that Streep appeared. Her character is everyone’s worst nightmare of the pompous author, and further grates by rarely uttering a sentence without a long pause somewhere in the middle. The acting was good, and the screenplay was interesting, but it portrayed the contemporary crowd on trans-Atlantic crossings – at least to this viewer, who made three of them with dreams of becoming a travel writer – as jaded and grim. Sad to think this may be the movie’s most realistic aspect.
It’s bad enough that there will be no holiday concerts this year – at least not in halls and churches full of people. But now SiriusXM has discontinued its Met Opera station in the month with the most beautiful and moving choral music.
It’s quaint and naïve to complain about a music service in an age of infinite options and personal choice, but I am a person who loves serendipity. And learning. One of the pleasures of driving for me – the greatest – is wondering what I’m going to hear on my way to the store or the tennis court. And Met Opera was a station – along with Symphony Hall, Bluegrass Junction, Coffee House, Ici Chansons – that pleased me a lot. Not when they played Wagner, as they often did (I’m not really a big opera fan) but when they played shorter pieces. I heard old favorites, like Canteloube’s Songs from the Auvergne and Rachmaninoff’s Vespers (most recently while driving along Lake Okeechobee) and discovered new gems, like the songs of Schumann and Schubert. And every December I would eagerly await the little-known carols, the Swedish choirs, the gorgeous Medieval and Renaissance works that would swell in my Honda as I drove I-95 like a small Christmas miracle of their own.
Of all the indignities of 2020, this, admittedly, is a minor one. But they could have at least waited till January.