The thirteenth day

Today is the feast of the Epiphany, a word which appears more to describe millennial awakening than its religious, biblical context, these days

Technically the twelfth day of Christmas was yesterday, the 5th of January, the culmination of 12 days of feasting and observance in the midwinter of Merrie England (hence Twelfth Night).

So here is the great Matthew Shipp deconstructing, beautifully, We Three Kings:

..and here is one of the very finest of Bosch’s paintings, teeming with enigmatic images:

Hieronymus Bosch, Adoration of the Magi, 1485-1500. El Prado, Madrid

Merry Christmas, everyone.

After an eventful and tough year, and a very eventful Christmas Eve (in a good way), here we are again…

A scene of domestic bliss:

Conrad von Soest, Nativity, 1404, from the Niederwildungen altarpiece in the the Stadtkirche, Bad Wildungen

…and one of the very finest Christmas songs, almost a contemporary carol. Alex Chilton – one of the greats – would have been 70 in 3 days time. He died 10 years ago:

Thank you Alex

…and just to trigger a few folk, I endorse this message. Nicely done, with a top FLOTUS:

pic.twitter.com/ZrehVYMARl

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2020

Merry Christmas, 2019

This has been a tumultuous year, with lots of political anger and anxiety, and yet it seems in the UK with a very happy ending, even if the Remainer fraternity haven’t grasped that yet. As JFK said: a rising tide lifts all boats.

To celebrate what I hope will be a very happy Christmas, try reading this celebration of winter in art (in this case the truly great Peter Brueghel the Elder), and here’s a Northern Renaissance nativity from underappreciated Albrecht Altdorfer:

Albrecht Altdorfer, The Birth of Christ, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 1513.

…and may I offer a few Christmas musical favourites, all a little out of the ordinary…..

Merry Christmas!!

A Roman Christmas – sort of

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A small but perfectly formed piece by Andrew Ferguson, one of the smartest and wittiest writers in America. Given that the Weekly Standard is now defunct, there’s no certainty about what will happen to all of its online content, and in particular, that of its best contributor.

So here is Ferguson’s trip to Rome in the company of the legendary HV Morton, whose original book A Traveller in Rome sums up the Eternal City very well – no easy task – and also evokes the heady days of hassle free travel and effortless continental chic.

I went to Rome not long ago and took H. V. Morton along for the ride. He was an agreeable companion, for the most part. Through no fault of his own, he has been dead for 40 years, but before he clocked out he managed to publish a series of travel books that brought him fame and riches. His native England was a favorite subject and so was the Holy Land, but it was in Rome that he plowed especially fertile ground. Over a dozen years he managed to produce A Traveller in Rome, This Is Rome, A Traveller in Italy(with lots of stuff about Rome), A Traveller in Southern Italy (ditto), The Waters of Rome, and The Fountains of Rome. Thus he managed to match and exceed the freelancer’s mandate: “Publish every piece three times.” He’s a hero.

Morton’s first fame exploded when he broke the news of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1923. After that sensational ka-boom his work and career settled down. His tokens were the quiet anecdote and the picturesque detail. The best of his Rome books is the first, A Traveller in Rome, and I tossed it in my carry-on bag for inflight reading, hoping that once airborne I could resist the temptations of Black Panther and Fantastic Mr. Fox beckoning from the seatback screen 18 inches from my face.

Morton had the essential journalistic quality: absolute confidence in his own judgments. Without it a hack can never achieve the fluency needed to shovel words by the bushel. “Often wrong, never in doubt” was long the motto of editorial writers, but it can be applied to the journalism racket generally. And so: “To cut a good figure,” writes Morton, “to have panache, to preserve one’s ‘face,’ are necessary to the self-respect of the Italian, and to reduce him in his own estimation is to earn his eternal enmity.” Is this true? I have no idea—my knowledge of the Italian character doesn’t extend beyond Godfather I and II, which are about Sicilians. It sounds plausible enough, and whatever it is, it’s not mush. Morton gives his readers granite-hard assertions they can grab onto and use to hoist themselves into the next paragraph. He is full of assertions.

And he phrases them always in excellent prose. Common enough among pen-pushers of his day, Morton has a style that flirts with the fancy, approaches the purple, but always turns back in the nick of time. I never knew what would draw my companion’s attention. Rome, I learned early on, “has the most wonderful steps in the world,” a fact that launches him into a kind of prose poem about stairs, along with their effect on his leg muscles. He grows censorious when he contemplates Roman elevators. “Italy is a country of intransigent lifts,” he scowls. And the motor scooter Romans favored in the postwar years: “An absurd vehicle.”

Morton isn’t a full-time grump. He would hardly have been worth taking along on a trip if he were. His eye for beauty is worthy of Rome, and he is always open to surprise. I find him especially useful for the unexpected fact with which a traveler can impress fellow travelers and feign worldliness. Did you know that it was once traditional, when a pope died, for the Cardinal Chamberlain (whatever that is) to enter the papal bedchamber and give the Catholic carrion three ceremonial taps on his forehead with a silver hammer? Me neither. But I know it now, and so do you, thanks to my companion’s tireless researches. Morton does not, unfortunately, go on to explain why this tapping ritual was performed. He’s not perfect.

It is commonplace to observe that in Rome history lies in sedimentary layers. The clay of imperial Rome covers the Roman Republic, that of Alaric and the barbarians is laid upon the remains of empire, the Middle Ages barely peeks through the Renaissance, and so on, up to the bullet-pocked façade of Mussolini’s headquarters. To these I now add an idiosyncratic layer of my own. When I walk the length of the Lateran basilica, I think not only of popes and saints and pilgrims; I think that this is where a British travel writer walked more than a half-century ago, author of what has become one of my favorite books, who left this holy place one afternoon for a quick bite to eat and recorded the event with his inexhaustible capacity for wonder.

“To watch an Italian faced by a gigantic mass of spaghetti is always to me an interesting spectacle. The way he crouches over it, combs it up into the air and winds it round his fork before letting it fall into his mouth and biting off the fringe, rouses the awe . . . ” 

Merry Christmas again, and happy travels in 2019

Christmas again

The eighth Christmas on this blog. No message, other than happy Christmas to any regular readers and passers by!

The 7th century Nativity icon from St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai. Still going strong after eighteen centuries, in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. They must be doing something right.

….from the British Isles, a history of Christmas…

….from Ireland, the legendary Flann O’Brien‘s translation of a 9th century Irish poem, Scel lem duib…

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….and from our American friends…

So it’s their fault…

One of the very best things that I’ve read recently is by Michael Mukasey, who was a distinguished Attorney General under George W Bush, still in active legal practice and still offering all sorts of cogent opinions.

The piece in question is in the Wall Street Journal. Given that in the face of tough competition, most people would concede that the defining event of the 21st century so far was 9/11, it’s always worth asking how we got there.

So, if you trace it backwards:

9/11 – Osama Bin Laden – Saudi extension of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as Sayyid Qutb’s brother became a tutor to OBL after fleeing Egypt – Sayyid Qutb (executed by Nasser in 1966) ran the Muslim Brotherhood  – Qutb had returned to Egypt after jacking in a travelling fellowship in the US awarded as he was a civil servant – in the US Qutb arrived at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in 1948, and lasted 6 months.

Got that?

And what did Qutb say about the US?

…contempt curdled into revulsion when Qutb dropped in on a church dance that followed a service—a shocking juxtaposition in itself: “The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs. . . . Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion.”

The song that was playing: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” For Qutb, it epitomized the West’s moral degradation. He condemned the “animal-like mixing of the sexes,” concluded that Americans were “numb to faith in art, faith in religion, and faith in spiritual values altogether,” and determined that Islam would have to be perpetually at war with such a society.

None of this is controversial – Qutb was indeed the founder of radical Islamic terrorism as we know it.

Happy Christmas when it comes!

Christmas, again

There are so many great takes on Christmas carols and related songs. Here are a few that cropped up in the past year.

The wrecked hedonist chic of English maverick Peter Perrett meets Silent Night:

…and the ragged genius of Tom Waits does the same:

…Ed Harcourt’s unique and awesome take on In The Bleak Midwinter:

Happy** Christmas!!

Here is the favourite Christmas image of the estimable @BeardyHowse – Joseph minding the baby while Mary reads in bed

Fitzwilliam collection, 15th century

 

**…although if you’re from the Guardian…

That’s the true spirit of Christmas

Christmas

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What I love about this fantastic miniature is – apart from the extraordinary skill and aesthetic sensitivity – the fact that the scene it depicts, a Christmas mass is essentially the same, 700 years later, as is happening right now, all over the planet. Technically it’s a different form, in the 14th century it would have been the pre-Tridentine Roman rite, but it’s basically the same, in all honesty.

This part of Les Tres Riches Heures is regarded as definitely being by the Limbourg Brothers. The delicate tracery and expressions on the faces fit with that – there’s a bit of chat and consternation in the congregation. Followed by a great version of In The Bleak Midwinter (genuinely)

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Christmas again

A wonderful, evocative, Betjeman poem, Christmas,  with its typically English postwar feel, It was published 60 years ago:

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
‘The church looks nice’ on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,
Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says ‘Merry Christmas to you all’.

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children’s hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say ‘Come!’
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

…and indeed, Dali’s nativity scene, produced, incredibly, by Hallmark cards in 1960

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..and lastly, the late Alex Chilton’s Christmas song to beat them all, I humbly suggest, from Big Star’s otherwise dark but brilliant Third/Sister Lovers

 

Merry Christmas

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