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Tocatta and Fugue

Come for a walk with me to the musical instruments section of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. One of the exhibits is a set of - and I don't even know if there's a word for them in English, never mind in German - resonating pipes. Varying in length, they're a bit like a cross between the pipes on a church organ and an ear-trumpet. Put your ear to the aperture of one of the pipes, and it allows you to hear snippets of conversation from any of the visitors in the exhibition hall who just happens to be speaking on the particular frequency that the pipe is adjusted to. The longer the pipe, the deeper the voices it can pick up and vice versa. Move to the next pipe up or down the range, and the first voice disappears only to be replaced by that of someone talking at a higher or low frequency.

Even if the person that you're listening to is whispering, the pipe effectively filters out the entire hubbub that is going on around them, allowing you to focus on the one conversation in the midst of the cacophony. Take your ear away from the aperture and you return to an indistinguishable melee of voices.

I really like the analogy that this situation offers. There can be so many people clamouring for your attention and making so much virtual (and actual!) noise in the process that it's impossible to hear individual voices. But occasionally you encounter a person with whom you resonate so closely, (or, to put it another way "you're both on the same wavelength") that despite the noise that's being made around you, their voice cuts through the clatter and hits home.

Perhaps, therefore, if you resonate with me, you'll understand what I'm saying!

A Minor Identity Crisis!

I'm becoming intrigued by some of the applications that can very easily be bolted on to blogs such as this, especially ones from the "what I'm currently reading" stable, where you can display a list of books that you have read, are reading, or are planning to read.

Assuming that you're a wide reader, which books do you add to your personal list: the ones that you expect others also to have read, or the ones that are probably more obscure?

At a deeper level, this actually raises the issue of personal identity: are you defined by what you have in common with others, or by those things that mark you out as different?

So, which books should I add to those already displayed on my list on here? Do I opt for safety in numbers and go for Remains of The Day, something of Bill Bryson or one of the books of contemporary poetry that I know a few of you will have read, or potentially flag myself as being somewhat eccentric and add The Dominion of Wyley McFadden (excellent and disturbing debut novel by Canadian author Scott Gardiner), English Society In the 18th Century by Roy Porter, and Olympisches Feuer by Liza Marklund (German translation from Swedish of a psychological thriller)?

I guess that the simple answer is that they should all be added! Just wondering though: if I added Fahrenheit 451, might my PC burst into flames?

How to read Shakespeare

Recently I've been re-reading plays of Shakespeare that I studied at school.

It's often stated that, without an inspirational teacher, a poor dose of Shakespeare can inoculate you against an appreciation of The Bard later in life. I guess that my teachers were as adequate as most, and therefore failed to totally prevent me from enjoying the great classics later in life.

The question is: how should an inhabitant of the 21st Century read a work written for an Elizabethan England?

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to undertake a month-long German language course run by the Goethe Institute - one of the major providers of language training in Germany. Their advice to those learning the language on how best to read anything from a newspaper article to a novel seemed to be eminently sensible and practical:

First, read the passage from beginning to end just to get the gist of what it's about.
Second, identify the words and phrases that were difficult or unclear, but use the overall framework of the passage to hint or guess at their meaning.
Third, only when a particular phrase that seems to be crucial for an understanding of the passage eludes you should you reach for the dictionary.

I've regularly applied this approach not only to articles that I've been reading in German, but also to Shakespeare, with surprisingly successful results!

It's very easy to overlook the fact that Shakespeare's plays wouldn't have become popular in the playwright's own time had they not contained such fast moving plots and dramatic tension. If you read Shakespeare in the same way that you'd read a contemporary thriller, it's surprising how the problems of archaic language seem to evaporate!

Currently on the radar . . .

Richard III (Shakespeare), Summoned by Bells (John Betjeman), 12 Books That Changes The World (Melvyn Bragg)

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