briankeaney

 At the moment I am obsessed with Brahms, particularly his clarinet sonatas but also his quintets. I go around with headphones clamped to my ears listening to them over and over again.

Recently I read in the November edition of Prospect how differently Robert and Clara Schumann reacted when Brahms, still unknown at the time, visited them in October 1853. Here is what Clara wrote in her diary.

'Here is one who comes as if sent from God! He played us sonatas and scherzos of his own, all of them rich in fantasy, depth of feeling and mastery of form. Robert could see no reasons to suggest any changes. It is truly moving to behold him at the piano, his interesting young face transfigured by the music, his fine hands which easily overcome the greatest difficulties (his things are very difficult), and above all his marvellous works. A great future lies before him, for when he comes to the point of writing for the orchestra, then he will have found the true medium for his imagination.'

And here is what Robert wrote in is diary.

'Visit from Brahms (a genius).'

A weird thing happened the other day.

I've been reading a certain amount of Latin recently, trying to regain the degree of fluency I had nearly forty years ago when I took it at A level. Prior to this for a number of months I'd been having one-to-one Italian lessons but I allowed them to lapse after coming back from an Italian summer holiday.

Then two days ago I was sitting in a cafe with my wife. We were in a shopping mall to buy a new tv. I wasn't thinking about much, just enjoying the coffee, when I started eavesdropping on an elderly couple at the next table. She was telling her husband that she remembered when she was a child, drinking peppermint tea with her grandmother. Then she went on to add that her own children thought of peppermint tea specifically as a medicine which they took when they had colds.

Suddenly it occurred to me that they were speaking in German. I had dropped German after O Level, before I'd dropped Latin. So definitely forty years ago. I'd not been very good at it, didn't enjoy the way the German teacher taught it, felt completely out of my depth and generally found it so difficult that I was heartily glad to see the back of it. I had not tried to speak it, read it or even think about it ever since. Yet suddenly I had been able to understand a conversation in it with considerable ease.

When I told my wife she suggested that maybe somehow all the Italian and Latin I'd been reading had reawakened some area in my brain dealing with knowledge of foreign languages. 

At the moment I am reading Robert Fagles new translation of Virgil's Aeneid. I can't compare it with other translations because I haven't read any but I can say that it reads beautifully, both silently and out loud. I'm also trying to improve my Latin to the point where I can read the original with some degree of ease and appreciation. I did Latin at A Level but that was nearly forty years ago so it's a long haul. I've been finding parts of the Cambridge Latin course particularly helpful. I really enjoyed the little collection of passages called Short Latin stories, edited by Philip Dunlop. Now I've moved onto a collection of excerpts from Cicero, Pliny et al edited by Patricia Bell called Imperium Et Civitas. It's harder going. 

I'm also reading the second book in Patrick Ness' trilogy for young people entitled Chaos Walking. This one is called The Ask And The Answer. It's very good but also very harrowing. The genre is science fiction but only loosely. It's really satire - an examination of the way that politicians seek to impose themselves upon society and the way that individuals respond. I find the passages where the settlers, originally from Earth, create concentration camps, for the Spackle, the indigenous people of the planet, very disturbing. I wonder how a teenage or pre-teen reader would feel about these.

I'm listening to Glass Houses by Ann Southam, a Canadian minimalist composer. It's wonderful. And Pianoworks by Howard Skempton, a British minmalist. I find his skeletal melodies evocative and helpful when it comes to thinking up plot. I'm also listening to the remastered version of Revolver by the Beatles. It's absolutely glorious. I looked up the entry in Wikipedia about the composition of the track Tomorrow Never Knows. It's fascinating. I had no idea how all those effects were created.

At my younger daughter's wedding, no-one was dancing so she put on Love Me Do by The Beatles. Immediately, the floor was flooded with dancers. 'What's going on?' my sister-in-law asked. 'I mean. the Beatles were our generation.' (She saw them play in Ipswich before they were big.) 'It's just the best pop music that's ever been made,' one of the dancers replied in passing. 

What I'm really preoccupied with though is the outline for my second Magical Detectives book. The first one comes out next Spring (if my publisher ever manages to design a cover that is). My outlines get longer and longer. They started out as ten bullet points on the back of an envelope. Recently they have tended to be about 10% of the length of the final novel. Nowadays they are heading towards 30 per cent. It's the best way to do it though. Ultimately saves you so much rewriting and heartache.