It’s been a beautiful spring day today – warm and sunny.
I ought to be thoroughly knackered – I walked to the village to get on the bus, spent the morning walking around town shopping, hauled said shopping back from the village; had an hour off for lunch and a sit-down before joining B in clearing out the garage for a couple of hours. My feet and legs are aching, but I feel good-tired rather than my usual o-god-it-hurts-i-want-to-curl-up-and-die tired. The sunshine almost certainly made the difference, that and the green sprouts everywhere, and the birdsong and the beautiful sights from the bus on the way back – pink cherry blossom, white buckthorn blossom, yellow gorse flowers all along the banks and verges…. it really lifted my tired old spirits. If the weather is this good tomorrow, I’ll walk up the hill and see if the bluebells are out yet.
Seen Doc G again – my blood pressure is going down. It was 156 / 80 this morning – not especially good but a lot better than 170 / 90. He agreed with me that my raised BP was quite possibly due to the stress of dealing with B’s illness, so since it’s now on its way down he’ll give it another month before he gets out the prescription pad.
B is finally going into hospital the week after next – his bypass operation is due on the 20th. He’ll be in hospital for around a week, and should be well enough to potter about the house and do light tasks when he gets home – which is about all he’s been capable of doing for the last several months anyway. If all goes well, he’ll be fully fit four or five weeks after that. That should help my blood pressure considerably!
One of my Facebook friends recently posted a link to the following:
“When he was still a young man, Beethoven decided to compose a few improvisations on a music by Pergolesi. He devoted months to this task and finally had the courage to publish it.
A critic wrote a full page review in a German newspaper in which he launched a ferocious attack on the music.
Beethoven, however, was quite unshaken by his comments. When his friends pressed him to respond to the critic, he merely said:
‘All I need to do is to carry on with my work. If the music I compose is as good as I think it is, then it will survive that journalist.
“If it has the depth I hope it has, it will survive the newspaper too.
“Should that ferocious attack on what I do ever be remembered in the future, it will only serve as an example of the imbecility of critics.’
Beethoven was absolutely right.
Over a hundred years later, that same review was mentioned in a radio programme in São Paulo.”
It came from the website of Paul Coehlo. If the name is unknown to you, he’s a popular New Age writer, penning “inspirational” fluff that appeals to many – a modern version of Patience Worth. Like Worth, Coehlo specialises in dispensing uplifting essays and tales in bite-sized lumps. Quite a lot of it falls, like this particular tale, into the category of glurge.
The term “glurge” was invented by Snopes to describe these type of stories. Very often passed on by email, they usually (though not always) involve some combination of Jesus, kittens and children; are invariably presented as true; are short; are intended to make the reader feel all fuzzy-warm inside without asking them to actually think. The Beethoven story lacks Jesus, kittens and kiddies, but fulfills the other requirements. So let’s examine this tale.
Did Beethoven ever compose any Pergolesi improvisations? Almost certainly not. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710 – 1736) was an Italian composer of baroque music, comic operettas and sacred music. Almost unknown during his tragically short lifetime, his work became wildly popular in the decades after his death and many composers did in fact adapt his music. Beethoven wasn’t one of them; he composed some Bach improvisations, and the influences of both Mozart and Haydn can be detected in his early works. But he was proud of being original and Pergolesi’s baroque style wouldn’t have appealed to him anyway.
Did Beethoven ever get any bad reviews? Yes, but not many – most were favourable.
Did he ever say anything about his critics and / or his bad reviews? None that I can discover.
Is it possible that Coehlo is mistaken and the story is about some other composer? Maybe. Bach and Stravinsky are probably the best-known composers of Pergolesi reworkings; Coehlo wouldn’t be the first person to confuse Bach and Beethoven, and Stravinsky’s high opinion of his own genius was equaled by his loathing of critics. However, neither of these two appear to have written or said anything that resembles what Beethoven is alleged to have said. And no amount of web searches have yielded up comparable quotes from anybody else; in fact, all web-searches on key phrases from the story lead back to Coehlo (he likes it so much that he repeats it verbatim in at least three different places).
Could any contemporary review of Beethoven’s performance have been “mentioned in a radio programme in São Paulo over a hundred years later”? It depends on how you interpret “over”. Beethoven gave his last public concerts in 1824 and died in 1827. I’m not sure when public radio broadcasts started in Sao Paulo, but it probably wasn’t as early as the 1920s.
So, what’s left of the tale? A fictional anecdote relating the zinging comeback of a renowned historical figure to a critic who rubbished him. (Give the composer some made-up name, expand it, perhaps move it to the present day and change the composer to a temperamental genius music star – and you have the the first part of a possibly decent short story. But it badly needs an ending). It’s intended to make the reader feel good: That’s how you should respond to those pesky people who keep telling you you’re wrong! All those critics told Beethoven he was wrong! What do critics know?. Everybody likes to feel that they’re right, that they know better than others.
Reminding people that even Beethoven wouldn’t have got anywhere if nobody had ever told him he was playing the wrong notes or writing bad music would of course dilute that feel-good warmth; it would require the reader to think a little, and reflect that maybe he or she was doing something wrong, or could do something better. It would put them in serious danger of thinking and even – gasp! – gaining some self-knowledge.
So, next time you receive some mass-forwarded “This is SO true!!!” emailed story, just run it through your glurge filters, asking yourself why this story is trying to make you feel good about yourself.
After a week, things started getting better, slowly. By that time I had run out of eyedrops, so I trotted along to Doc G for a diagnosis. He reassured me that it wasn’t an infection, but simply my old dry-eye problem. I’d had only the one occurrence of this, years ago; it seemed odd for it to suddenly come back and he couldn’t explain it.
On my way out, I mentioned my increased tachycardia attacks and episodes of irregular heartbeats. Lucky that I did; he immediately took my blood pressure and found it was very high – he mentioned 170 over something. Which is Not Good.
Last month, I had my annual blood test to determine my thyroxine level; this time, it was on the low side, so I’m now certain that low thryoid is causing most of my current symptoms, including the dry eyes and the HBP. But, I have to wait until I get a second reading in May. If I start feeling worse (I’m now getting my old morning headaches again – another symptom of HBP), I may just start self-medicating with an extra dose of levothyroxine every other day.
But atm, I’m doing extra daily exercise. I spend far too much time every day slumped in front of the computer or on the sofa, so I’m trying to get in a daily walk. I have to go back next week for a further blood pressure reading; I’m extremely reluctant to take any more pills, and exercise is recommended for getting BP down. So, yesterday, I walked up the hill and over the top, through the woods – my first time this year. I’d taken my camera and managed to get in some shots, including the encouraging sight of bluebell shoots poking through last autumn’s leaves. Three buzzards spent much of the time circling overhead, calling to each other; a persistent call from some bird or beast echoed through the trees – it sounded like a crow with a very sore throat. Could have been a fox, could have been a jackdaw.
I returned much refreshed. But my knees complained later….
Oh well.
I know, I’ve not been writing a lot here lately. Mostly, I can’t seem to think of much to write that will interest anybody else. Also, like lots of people I have trouble starting to write anything; I gaze at the empty page and wonder where and how to begin…..
No answer to the first problem has presented itself as yet. But I may well have found the answer to the second problem.
750Words is a website that aims to get you writing. What you do is sign up (it’s a new site and everything is free for now); then each day you log on and write at least 750 words before your local midnight. They can be any words at all – sublime poetry, the earth-shaking novel you always wanted to write or “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typed out 75 times – your entries are completely private and only you can read them. You collect points for word count, plus frequency and speed of writing, but there are no prizes apart from personal satisfaction. There’s no penalty for not completing the required 750 words, or for missing days. You can’t go back and edit your entry once the magic hour of local midnight has passed (although you can export each month’s entries as a text file and edit the hell out of them thereafter) which teaches you to get things more or less right the first time. Various bits of software analyze your words for mood and so on, and present you with nice coloured pie graphs; I’m not sure how accurate these are, but they’re interesting to look at and further encouragement to write.
The idea is to get you into the habit of regular writing and to overcome the block produced by the terror of an empty page – you learn that it’s perfectly safe to write and that mistakes won’t be punished. I’ve been using it for about a fortnight and I’m improving perceptibly. I’ve only missed two days (and one of those was when we had a local power cut) and I’ve managed to pass the 750-word mark three times.
OK, so far, I’ve not produced anything that I’d care to show to anybody; mostly whinges and inane burblings about my boring day. But if – no, when – I produce something worth reading, I’ll copy it onto here.
Busy with computing-related work. Got to get the Elfin Diary for next year finished pronto, which means spending days keyboarding in stuff. I really wish now I was better at programming – a bit of (relatively) simple VB or C++ magic would probably get the whole job done in hours instead of weeks.
And I’m changing the look of this blog. The success of the new design for my main site has made me go looking for a similar ‘responsive’ WordPress theme for this blog, so that it can be viewed in a variety of devices. I’ve found two free themes so far – Whiteboard and Responsive TwentyTen.
I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon customising the Whiteboard child theme, only to find it had a bug (the sidebar was forced below the main content on a normal-width screen) which would have required more hours work to correct. Sorry guys, but I haven’t the time for that. So now I’m going with the other theme.*
Finding a good design is hard for me – just cannot seem to do it from scratch. My usual method is to find a design that I like and bugger it around until it resembles something that I like. That means looking through design galleries for inspiration, which often makes me feel inadequate – I keep having to remind myself that I have all the skills for it and that if I had all day to spend on a computer that was equipped with the latest hardware and software, I too could produce something as striking. One web designer that I follow on Twitter has boasted about how he sometimes works straight through for 15 or more hours at a time. If I had that amount of spare time, I’d get the whole Elfin Diary finished in a fortnight!
But, as it is, there is shopping and housework to do (here, a drive to the supermarket means a 30-mile round trip), there are decent TV shows to watch, books to read etc etc. plus I need to spend time with t’other half, or he gets all complainy!
So I’d best stop meandering here and get on with some wurk!
* Well, the Responsive TwentyTen theme works as advertised – if you haven’t got a smartphone, iPad, blackberry etc to view this on, try narrowing your browser!
Have made a start on selling my photographs and set up an account at PhotoBoxGallery where people can buy prints; at the mo, I’ve only uploaded a few landscape photos. I have an old account at RedBubble, where I’ll probably sell my more ‘arty’ stuff; there’s just a few old images there now – when I get time, I’ll upload the new stuff.
So you’re all invited to my new show!
So I had planned to go on a little photography expedition today, attempting a walk to the loch to do some landscape pictures. Never make plans…
It was probably that early-morning bad dream that precipitated it. In this dream, Cleopatra had been reanimated by means of DNA technology and installed in a glass-sided pyramid for public viewing; she seemed quite happy with her new life and delighted in throwing elegant Egyptian poses for the paying punters. However, a group of Christian fundie fanatics, convinced that this was the Devil’s work, set out to destroy her and the pyramid. I’m unsure of what they actually did, but their actions somehow precipitated Armageddon. This particular Armageddon entailed rampaging monsters, howling zombies and rapidly rising floodwaters; I therefore found myself rushing around battling dinosaurs, escaping from zombies, looking for Cleopatra (who had vanished along with her pyramid), generally saving the world and wondering why I wasn’t writing scripts for Steven Spielberg.
Anyway-
I woke up at this point with the familiar 190 bpm THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of a tachycardia attack. They usually come at night and 4 out of 5 times they last no more than ten minutes or so. After about half an hour of THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP I decided it was time for an Oxprenolol beta-blocker; nine out of ten times, one beta-blocker, for me, is enough to stop a tachycardia attack in half and hour or so. (I take one 40mg dose a day routinely – that’s not enough to stop all attacks, but is enough to allow me function fairly normally, instead of sitting around in a stupified doze). But this was obviously the one time out of ten that this strategy wouldn’t work.
It wasn’t so bad, really – B regularly delivered cups of tea and made me toast when I asked. The THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP finally finished around 5 and I was able to get up and get myself something to eat.
Hopefully I’ll be able to get out tomorrow for some photography.
I’m starting to get into photography now that I have a new camera. My camera – a Fujifilm Finepix S2500 – does an excellent job of taking automatic point-and-shoot pictures. But it also has plenty of manual controls and I’d really like to explore that – I’ve already tried fiddling around with shutter speeds and exposures and produced some interesting results. But I have no idea what it all means; I’m just messing about randomly with the controls. So I’ll use some spare Amazon vouchers to get a beginners’ book on digital photography and start learning.
The picture, BTW, was taken on Sunday (yesterday) when there was still plenty of snow around. That isn’t the original image – I’ve played around with the saturation, contrast and so on in Paint Shop Pro to make it look a lot more interesting.
At last the year is turning; winter is still hard and frosty, but summer is on its way. We’re promised a thaw in a few days – can’t come soon enough. Lovely as snow looks, it gets boring after three solid weeks.
B is finally getting to see a consultant in Glasgow, next week. Hopefully, some sort of surgery will be definitely arranged then. I kept nagging B to contact the hospital himself, but he wouldn’t – eventually, three weeks ago (a good 10 weeks after the hospital told him they would be arranging some sort of surgery for him urgently), he got onto Doc G about the delay and the Doc obviously did some stirring.
I’ve had a quick trip down to Lancashire to see my new grandson – came back with a nasty flu-like bug that’s laid me up for nearly a fortnight. Had to give the Yule feast a miss because I was so ill; and I’ve hardly been out of the house at all. Getting very bored. But also getting better.
Must get down to some work.