Literature

Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950)

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A few blogs back I wrote about the fantasy world of Ursula K Le Guin and recalled the appeal of browsing the array of science fiction book covers on the shelves at WH Smith’s. One of the giants of that genre – and one that I actually went to the trouble of reading – was Isaac Asimov.

Born in Smolensk in 1920, Asimov was the son of Jewish parents who emigrated to the US in 1923, and the young Isaac was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, where he helped his father run a sweet shop (a “candy store”, I suppose). It was there that he was first exposed to the classic Amazing Stories magazines that his father also stocked, and he was soon diving into the fantastic worlds of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, and writing short stories of his own.

Although Asimov’s writing career for many years played second fiddle to his professional scientific career (he became a lecturer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University), his output of science fiction was nonetheless prodigious, and eventually the glut of ideas and the success of his writing encouraged him to become a full-time author. My exposure to Isaac Asimov came in the form of his Robot series, notably I, Robot, which my memory tells me I inherited, rather than bought, probably from my Uncle Geoff.

Asimov wrote 37 short stories and six novels about robots and in fact had coined the term “robotics” in a 1941 story. He also came up with his famous and influential “Three Laws of Robotics”:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

These Three Laws of Robotics, which Asimov‘s robots were supposed to obey, have resounded down the ages to the present day when the modern preoccupation with artificial intelligence toys with the idea that those laws might be breached, as they clearly were in The Terminator!

Here’s a selection of book covers that gave many an illustrator free rein to portray Asimov’s robotic world, and starting with the brilliant Terminator-like cover that I remember having.

Isaac Asimov
Film, TV, and Theatre

Hugo Weaving in Bodyline (1984)

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A drama about cricket, at first sight, doesn’t smack too much of a great idea for television. The desperate pitching of ideas by Alan Partridge to that programming commissioner in I’m Alan Partridge springs to mind (“Monkey Tennis”?). Well, how about a brilliant, riveting TV drama about cricket that doesn’t even require you to be a cricket fan to enjoy? If that sounds oxymoronic, check out 1984’s Australian-made TV mini-series Bodyline, telling the story of the 1932/33 English Ashes cricket tour of Australia.

Stick with me.

First, the historical setting: in 1932, the England cricket team set sail to Australia to face an Australian team hugely bolstered by one Donald Bradman, who had come to England in the 1930 Ashes and scored 974 runs with a batting average of 139.14. The England cricket authorities felt that some new tactics were needed to curtail Bradman’s extraordinary batting ability which threatened to be even more prodigious in the upcoming tour on his home turf.

Enter Douglas Jardine. Oxford University-educated, and from the upper echelons of British society, Jardine had been moulded to be England captain from an early age. He had already toured Australia and had developed an antipathy to the crowds there who had jeered him. And now he was lead tactician on how to defuse Bradman. With his fast bowlers Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, he devised “fast leg theory” bowling – later called “bodyline” – which entailed delivering the ball short and fast so that it bounced dangerously towards the batsman’s body. When the batsman defended himself with his bat a resulting deflection could be caught by one of several fielders standing close by on the leg side.

The tactic turned out to be effective: it seriously discomfited the batsmen and England won by four Tests to one, but it created a furore that threatened to turn into a diplomatic incident. The watching crowds were outraged and most commentators thought the tactics unsportsmanlike, intimidating and downright dangerous (who thought that it would be the English to employ tactics that were “just not cricket”?).

In the TV series, Douglas Jardine is played mesmerizingly by a young Hugo Weaving (best known later for his portrayals of Agent Smith in The Matrix and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings), who admirably captures the arrogance and certainty of a born leader, and one who doggedly pursues his strategy against mounting criticism.

Let’s watch the self-assured Jardine discussing Bradman with his Surrey teammate Percy Fender and others prior to the tour. He’s great to watch, and note also the lovely camera work circling him as he talks. One last word for the writer of the theme music for the series; the music is so emotionally moving (see the second clip of the opening credits) that I thought at first they had borrowed a classical piece from someone like Pachelbel but not so: credit to Aussie composer Chris Neal.

Hugo Weaving as Douglas Jardine
Poetry

Edwin Muir’s The Horses (1956)

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Despite being a natural optimist, I have for some reason always been attracted by the genre of dystopian fiction, although I’m not the only one judging by the enduring popularity of dystopian classics such as Orwell’s seminal 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The inspiration informing this genre comes from many and varied sources, including, just for starters, the rise of industrial-scale warfare in the World Wars, the development of the atom bomb, totalitarianism, AI and Big Tech, genetic engineering, deadly viruses, the surveillance society and climate change. It seems we have a perpetual collective curiosity, and fear, about where our society might be going.

The genre extends to poetry, too; at school I became aware of this enigmatic poem called The Horses, by Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959). Muir was born on the island of Orkney and had an idyllic childhood which was curtailed in 1901 when his father lost the family farm and they had to move to Glasgow. For Muir, this was a move from Eden to Hell: within a few short years, his father, two brothers, and finally his mother died in quick succession, and meanwhile he had to endure a series of mundane jobs in factories and offices.

Such a change in his life must have had profound effects on his future poetic works, although balanced by the happiness that he eventually found when he met his wife, the translator and writer Willa Andersen. He found great purpose with Willa and teamed up with her to translate the works of many notable German-speaking authors like Franz Kafka. Anyway, although I haven’t read much else of Muir’s work, the poem that found its way into my schoolboy hands nonetheless stayed with me as a slightly disturbing piece of weird and prophetic dystopia right up to the present day.

The poem gets stuck in from the start:

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep

So no messing: we know where we are, we’re in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world…and then the very next line of the poem wastes no time by introducing the horses of the title:

Late in the evening the strange horses came

Thereafter, fifty lines of an imaginative conception of what it might be like to be in a post-apocalyptic world…but with added “strange horses”! Of course, interpretation of the poem and what the horses represent, is entirely up to the reader. A few years ago I wrote an electronic soundscape to catch the poem’s atmosphere and to accompany a reading of the poem. More recently, I revisited this recording and noodled about with some images and footage and have set it to video, which I’d like to share with you here. I like to think I have captured the mood of Muir’s poem and I hope he would approve!

Edwin Muir
Art

George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884)

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One of the great treasures in the trove that is London’s National Gallery is this masterpiece of Neo-Impressionism, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It’s actually one of a pair of Seurat masterpieces, alongside A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (held at the Art Institute of Chicago), with each sister painting depicting one side of the Seine river and portraying the different levels of French society that frequented them in their leisure time: the wealthy society relaxing at La Grande Jatte and the working-class residents hanging out on the left bank at Asnières.

The two paintings are leading examples of the technique developed by Seurat and known as pointillism, involving the use of thousands of small, distinct dots of colour and relying on the ability of the eye and the mind of the viewer to blend the individual dots into a fuller range of tones. The term was actually first used in a pejorative sense to mock Seurat (a reaction commonly experienced by art pioneers of course) but it stuck, and the technique is representative of the hunt by artists in the 1880s for interesting new methods.

Here, we’re focusing on the working-class residents of the city. They line this picturesque spot by the river as they enjoy the sunshine. There are around five figures in the foreground and down the bank we see other people and boats in the background, plus a cityscape behind that. All of the buildings are low level and don’t take too much attention from the figures nearest us. There are no trees (unlike at La Grande Jatte where the bourgeoisie enjoy the shade) and the characters are flooded with sunlight.

Seurat was just 24 when Bathes at Asnières marked his arrival into the art world. The paintings are monumentally sized (15 by 6.5 feet) and Seurat knew that size would need to be met with technical brilliance and so he prepared very carefully with thirteen oil sketches and ten drawings before embarking on the real thing. In the end, he achieved a stunning luminosity and plenty of interest to hold the viewer’s attention. Sadly, Seurat died at just 31 and so we will never know what sort of direction his style might have taken in the next decades.

Bathers at Asnières
Literature

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957)

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Back in late 1987 I set off backpacking around the world for several months, a most amazing experience that I could write a lot about but won’t as the point I wanted to make was that travelling presents a multitude of opportunities to read books. In the back of the journal I was keeping, I listed all the books that I had been reading along the way, on buses, in hotel rooms, and on the beach, and it’s interesting to me to review that list as I peruse it now. I’m quite impressed: I see some classics of the dystopian genre (Orwell, Huxley, Kafka), some great American literature (Hemingway, John Irving, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut), some stars of Brit Lit (Graham Greene, G K Chesterton, John Fowles, William Golding), and of course there had to be a classic about travel and freedom…and that classic was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

On the Road was based on Kerouac’s travels with his buddies across the United States in the late 1940s. Being a voracious writer, Kerouac had channelled reams of stream-of-consciousness narrative (he called it “spontaneous prose”) into multiple notebooks and then spent a three-week period in April 1951 copying them all out into one long reel of writing; it would eventually be published in 1957 and become one of the great American novels of the 20th century, the crowning glory of the burgeoning Beat movement.

The novel is a roman à clef, meaning that, whilst its story and characters represent real events and people, it is written with a façade of fiction, and his buddies (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, themselves key figures of the Beat Generation) appear as fictional characters, with Kerouac himself cast as the novel’s narrator Sal Paradise. The plot is centred around several road trips that the protagonists undergo, and the chaotic adventures they experience.

The narrative is full of Americana which appeals to my romantic side (indeed, it was the image of the Wichita linesman in my last blog that got me thinking about On The Road in the first place). We read about long roads and highways, Cadillacs and Ford Sedans, cheap motels and Skid Row, nightclubs and bars, jazz and poetry, drugs and bordellos, and along the way get acquainted with forties New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago and St Louis and a myriad other towns and cities of America.

Although my own travel journal remains little more than a log of events, of interest only to me, Kerouac’s journals turned into a tour de force of literature and a fascinating insight into America’s counterculture.

Jack Kerouac
Music

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman (1968)

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Glen Campbell started his career as a guitarist with the Wrecking Crew, that loose collective of session musicians that contributed to thousands of studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were also Phil Spector’s de facto house band). The list of artists whose recordings he played on is a who’s who of the American sixties music scene (he was best mates with Elvis, too), and all this was before he became a successful solo artist in his own right. His first real hit, in 1965, was a version of Buffy Saint-Marie’s Universal Soldier, and in 1967 he scored hits with Gentle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

That last song was written by Jimmy Webb and, buoyed by its success, Glen Campbell had phoned Webb and asked him if he had any other “geographical” songs to follow it up. He hadn’t, but he wrote one anyway: Wichita Lineman. Webb’s inspiration for the lyrics came while driving westward on a straight road through Washita County in rural south-western Oklahoma. Driving past a seemingly endless line of telephone poles, he noticed in the distance the silhouette of a solitary lineman atop a pole. In Webb’s own words:

It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song. I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere – working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings’.

Webb delivered what he regarded and labelled as an incomplete version of the song, warning that he had not completed a third verse or a middle eight. Campbell soon nailed the lack of a middle eight section with some of his Wrecking Crew pals (adding a baritone guitar interlude as well as the orchestrally arranged outro known to British Radio 2 listeners as DJ Steve Wright’s theme music!). Webb was surprised to hear that Campbell had recorded the song when he ran into him:

‘I guess you guys didn’t like the song.’

‘Oh, we cut that’

‘But it wasn’t done! I was just humming the last bit!‘

‘Well, it’s done now!'”

And what a lovely song it was, too!

Glen Campbell
Art

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Bacchante (1894)

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The art world is a funny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolted-on, world-renowned big name like your Rembrandts and your Van Goghs, you might find yourself in or out of fashion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many people outside (and probably inside) of France have never heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s preeminent academic painters in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Bouguereau executed some 822 known paintings during his career, often portraying quintessentially classical and mythological subjects: Cupid and Psyche, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick religious works, pastorals, and coyly erotic nudes. His portraits were rendered with near-photographic verisimilitude and with a consummate level of skill and craft. Given that a high percentage of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bodies of work ever produced by any artist. So what went wrong?

Well, Bouguereau represented the “old guard”, an upholder of traditional values and indeed one who contrived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being rejected by the ‘Salon de Monsieur Bouguereau’. In other words, he was a dinosaur and destined to be overshadowed by the Impressionists and the modernists of the dawning new century; his reputation sank after his death and for many years his work was regarded as irredeemably passé. He has, however, recently achieved something of a rehabilitation, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auction room. Quite right too, he was brilliant.

A representative work is this 1894 piece, Bacchante. A bacchante was a priestess or follower of Bacchus, the god of wine and intoxification, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depicted as wild women, running through the forest, tearing animals to pieces, and engaging in other acts of frenzied debauchery, Bouguereau here chooses to portray his Bacchante ‘before the party’!

 

Art

Raphael’s The School Of Athens (1511)

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Back in 2006 I went to Rome, visited the tombs of Keats and Shelley, sat on the Spanish Steps, had my camera stolen on the subway (holidays are often mixed affairs, after all), discovered a penchant for liquorice liqueur, marvelled at the Coliseum, got a sore neck looking up at St Mark’s Cathedral and the glorious Sistine Chapel…and spent some time in contemplation of the famous fresco that is the subject of today’s blog. The School of Athens is one of four wall frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, the apartment in the Vatican palace whose walls and ceiling were painted by Raphael between 1508 and 1511.

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) was commissioned by Pope Julius II, the same man who also commissioned Michelangelo to paint the nearby Sistine Chapel (this Pope clearly knew his painters), and, like that work, the Stanza della Segnatura is an embodiment of all that was great about the classical spirit of the Renaissance. It’s hard to think of a better symbol for the marriage of art, philosophy, and science that was the hallmark of the Italian Renaissance than The School of Athens.

The frescoes depict the themes of philosophy, theology, literature and justice, and personifications of the same four themes decorate the ceiling. The School of Athens, representing philosophy, is notable for its accurate perspectival projection, which Raphael learned from Leonardo da Vinci (whose likeness Raphael used for the central figure of this painting, Plato). The two central figures are Plato and Aristotle, each holding a copy of one of their books (Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), and around them is an assortment of figures from the worlds of philosophy and the natural sciences, including Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid and Ptolemy. If you’re ever in Rome, be sure to visit the Stanza della Segnatura, but do look after your camera!

Music

Aaron Copland’s Fanfare For The Common Man (1942)

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In May 1942, soon after the United States had entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, F D Roosevelt’s Vice President James A Wallace delivered the speech of his life, in which he cast a future world peace as meaning “a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China, and Latin America–not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan”

“Some have spoken of the “American Century”. I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come into being after this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.”

As well as being translated into 20 languages and millions of copies being distributed around the world, the speech also inspired the leader of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Goossens, to commission a fanfare. He asked American composers to submit patriotic pieces to support the war effort, reprising a similar initiative during World War I and each one to precede the CSO’s orchestral concerts. A total of eighteen fanfares were submitted, including Fanfare for Paratroopers, Fanfare for the Medical Corp, Fanfare for Airmen, and one that became very famous, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

The fanfare is written for four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, and tam-tam, and is as stirring a piece of brass soundscape as one can imagine. It captures wonderfully the spirit of Wallace’s optimistic theme of ushering in a just future world. Below, let’s watch this dramatic rendering by the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, and then listen to the brilliant prog rock version released in 1977 by Emerson Lake and Palmer (and which was my first exposure to Copland’s music).

Aaron Copland
Music

Paul Robeson’s I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Troubles (1927)

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The injustices endured by enslaved African Americans in the United States between the 17th century right up until the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, but then also the residual racism and segregation that simmered after its abolition well into the twentieth century, makes for difficult reading. A podcast I have been listening to about the history of slavery in the US opens with a slave song, I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Troubles, sung by Paul Robeson in that famous baritone of his, and it’s worth looking at the life of the man Paul Robeson, whose story is really about how you can’t keep a good man down, against all the odds.

Robeson was both an academic and an athlete, and won a scholarship to Rutgers College in 1915, the only black man there at the time. He excelled for the Rutgers football team, the Scarlet Knights, although at one point he was benched because a Southern football team refused to take the field because the Scarlet Knights were fielding a negro. But he kept going and flourished both athletically and academically, ending up finishing university with flying colours and accepted into the prestigious honour societies Phi Beta Kappa and Cap and Skull.

He went on to study law at Columbia University, whilst simultaneously playing professional American football for the Milwaukee Badgers and promoting his fine singing by acting in off-campus productions. After graduating, he became a figure in the Harlem Renaissance with performances in the Eugene O’Neill plays The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and gave up both his football and his fledgling law career. He was later to find worldwide fame from performances such as his “Joe” in Show Boat at London’s Drury Lane Theatre, featuring the benchmark song Ol’ Man River, and as Othello in three separate productions of that play.

Robeson soon found himself welcomed and courted by elite social circles, but this did not turn his head, and he was to become a prolific political activist for civil rights and other social justice campaigns throughout his life, as well as supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and communism caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era, but his reputation as a strong and respected voice for justice had already been sealed, and he never gave up.

Between 1925 and 1961, Robeson recorded and released some 276 distinct songs, spanning many styles, including spirituals, popular standards, European folk songs, political songs and poetry. I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Troubles was released as the B-side to Deep River in 1927, and is a deeply felt expression of life under the yoke.

Paul Robeson

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