With any luck you can see an embed of the 2021 Anthony Burgess lecture by Laura Tunbridge above. As with so many things I write about here, I’m not sure how many readers will be interested in this. No one probably is as interested as I am with the exception of my brother. But this is a fun lecture. Tunbridge plays excerpts of Beethoven and does talk about Burgess quite a bit.
Tunbridge was asked presumably because of her book on Beethoven: Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces. I suppose any lecture that includes Burgess, Beethoven, Enderby, and a recording of Burgess playing a terrible electronic keyboard is one I don’t want to miss. The recording by the way is at the very end of the lecture if you want to skip to that. I found it instructive to listen to Burgess ramble at the keyboard since he describes his piano playing abilities in various ways most of which confuse me.
On a personal note, the terrible sound of the keyboard reminds me of a dream I had night before last.
I dreamt that a church had hired me as their musician. They seemed very pleased to have me and thought I was a bit of a whiz. I was in the church before service. A colleague of mine who shall remain nameless but not unrecognizable was playing at the organ. In real life this colleague cannot stand the sight of me and keeps me at an arm’s distance despite the fact that we have known each other for decades. In the dream he is playing a terrible electric organ whose sounds rival the insipidity of Burgess’s. There is a family of Hispanics in front of him. He is apparently playing something they have either requested or are sure to love. Their pleasure is evident.
I am standing nearby preparing to play for service. As I listen I muse that the first thing I will do is turn off the bloody vibrato and try to get a straight tone. I wonder (in the dream) just how this will affect the good opinion of the community that has hired me and is obviously used to the terrible sound. In the dream it does not matter to me. I speculate that they will just have to be disappointed.
The eye operation went well yesterday. I am scheduled to return this morning for the post op exam. As I write I can see out of my new lens in my left eye. The print on my screen is legible with it but not as clear as the right eye.
The appointment is for 8:00 or 8:15. We have received conflicting notices. I need to call Eileen at 7 which is in ten minutes. She has been extremely helpful with all this. Not only driving me back and forth to appointments, but also she has helped me with my daily regimen of eye drops which is considerable. I have two weeks left of drops in the my right eye and three in the left. These drops are anti-inflammatories.
While we were sitting in the car by the beach on Tuesday, Eileen read the NYT Times article about some of the participants in the January 6 insurrection at the capital that I linked here on Monday. She shared some but not all of my reaction to it.
Paul McCartney on Writing “Eleanor Rigby” | The New Yorker
It looks like David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, admires the Beatles enough to not only include the lame article by McCartney in a recent issue linked above, but also to write a different one himself. I’m interested in the Beatles but I’m not sure there’s that much that hasn’t already been said about them. I don’t listen to their recordings that much because I know them too well and don’t often have the urge to hear them again.