Who's who

On the weekend I saw two works by Beethoven performed by the LA Philharmonic as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. My friend gave me a ticket to the 6th as she couldn’t go and I got a cheap ticket to the 7th because the seats were in the organ gallery, behind the orchestra and where a choir would usually stand, so I kind of felt on edge the whole time like I was going to be forced to sing a requiem. It was nice however, to see the conductor’s facial expressions and interactions with the orchestra rather than their mysterious coat tailed behind. During the 7th a lady in front of me kept filming, which you are not supposed to do, but I couldn’t interrupt her because of where we were sat, it would have caused more distraction, but she was filming in the direct view of the conductor and also the 1000 or so people sat behind him the stalls and circles, and also talking with her partner. It also brought back a horrible, embarrassing memory of performing in Die Zauberflöte as a child in which I turned to another child beside me on stage to point out and whisper about a fat man in the audience. The LA Philharmonic’s Beethoven was I thought quite dainty and sluggish, though their flute player Bouriakov was excellent, and despite the imperfections and distractions, how wonderful to sit with many other people ane listen to my beloved Beethoven . I left at the interval the first night once the 7th was done, not sticking around for a contemporary piece in the second half, but I stuck around the second night of the 6th for a piece from Dante, a ballet by Thomas Adès, set when Dante goes to hell and quite cartoony. The LA Philharmonic really came alive and energised during this music, like this was their thing, and had all sorts of bizarre percussion instruments . Not my favourite type of contemporary classical composition, the kind that has a Shostakovich fruitiness to it, but lacking his bathos, tragedy and irony. I would like to see it as a ballet, with lots of fantastical gore, I would probably enjoy the music more in that context, ballets are always kitsch by nature . When I watched the conductor whose movements were more bumblebee and whimsy rather than dictator, I thought Pnin.

I was going to make this post all about Beethoven as I’m having so much fun with a biography of him but I’ve been thinking of Nabokov’s Pnin alot this week, I listened to Aleksandar Hemon reading the short story version in The New Yorker, and just this morning as I write this, a I got a podcast notice that LRB Close Readings has released an episode on Pnin. ( Substack keeps trying to spell change it to pain!)

I have been thinking of Pnin because there are two stories of academic in the news this week, one story everywhere, one barely anywhere: In St Petersburg, a respected philosophy and theology professor was arrested on bogus charges . They barged into his home, when he was in his pyjamas, rifled through his books, made him read out a statement, all filmed and released , TikTok Stalinism, and have detained him until what will be a bogus trial as there have been for many journalists, classical musicians, academics, cleaners, artists, bloggers.

It’s hard not to think of the trial of Socrates. ( Benjamin Jowett’s translation)

As I write this, British media (or other western English language media outlets beyond MT ) haven’t reported on it at all, busy as they have been fixated on a somewhat Pnin like fantasist professor, Arday, at Cambridge University who killed himself as a result. If the media really did care about academic integrity and freedom, professors and universities, they would be reporting on the St Petersburg story. From my experience, as a writer attending academic conferences as an outside speaker, one in four academics comes across as just as nonsensical as Arday seems to have ( and I've also met graduate students who don’t know how to use a library ), most get away with it because they have private incomes to prop up their career. I think its sort of nice or beautiful perhaps when universities harbour idiots, and fantasists like Arday, along with exiled intellectuals and writers, a kind of charitable burrow, that universities at their best can have excess uses beyond providing ‘customer service’ for students and bureaucracy on their behalf and a pressure of endless research. When I was at university, some bizarre scholarly man had built a fort out of newspaper stacks in the library and as far as I remember he was just left to it while I was there. A small problem, when you compare it to the St Petersburg university now erasing the philosophy professor from their website as if he never existed at all.

From Pnin

A special danger area in Pnin’s case was the English language. Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as “The rest is silence,” “Never more,” “weekend,” “Who’s Who,” and a few ordinary words and phrases like “eat,” “street,” “fountain pen,” “gangster,” “the Charleston,” and “marginal utility,” he had had no English at all at the time he left France for the States. Stubbornly he sat down to the task of learning the language of Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Edison, and thirty-one Presidents. In 1945, at the end of one year of study, he was proficient enough to use glibly terms like “wishful thinking” and “okey-dokey.” By 1946, he was able to interrupt his narrations with the phrase “To make a long story short.” By the time Truman entered his second term, Pnin could handle quite a number of elegant clichés, but otherwise progress seemed to have stopped despite all his efforts, and in 1953 his English was still full of flaws. That autumn, he supplemented the usual courses of his academic year by delivering a weekly lecture in a so-called symposium (”Wingless Europe: A Survey of Contemporary Continental Culture”) ‘directed by Dr. Hagen. All our friend’s lectures, including sundry ones he gave out of town, were edited by one of the younger members of the German Department. The procedure was somewhat complicated. Professor Pnin laboriously translated his own Russian verbal flow, teeming with idiomatic proverbs, into patchy English. This was revised by young Miller. Then Dr. Hagen’s secretary, a Miss Eisenlohr, typed it out. Then Pnin deleted the passages he could not understand. Then he read it to his weekly audience.

What a disgraceful week for humanity, that we can kill a fool in the public eye, then turn away when a serious philosopher is detained.