George Sand's Indiana

Detail from the oval Charpentier portrait of 1835

The celebrity of George Sand (1804-76) has travelled across both Channel and Pond. But her books haven't, really.  She wrote sixty-nine novels, but Penguin Classics have never published a single one of them .The only book of hers that appeared in that list (briefly, in 1988), was Lettres d'un Voyageur, impressions of  Paris and of time in Italy with Musset.

But I'm showing my age here. Once again it's Librivox I have to thank for introducing me to Indiana (1832), with Mary Herndon Bell doing an excellent reading job. But in younger circles Sand's work (especially this first novel Indiana) is certainly being studied and read, as the numerous reviews on GoodReads testify.

Why wouldn't it be?  Sand was a pioneer feminist and novels like Indiana are way ahead of the Anglophone world in the radicalism of their analysis of marriage and society. Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published sixteen years later, started to come close - and was considered outrageous - though of course it has very little of Indiana's awareness of sexual psychology and behaviour.* Think of the scene, in Chapter 7, where Raymon takes his "dishevelled Creole" (Indiana's maid, Noun) to have intoxicated sex in Indiana's maidenly bed; his erotic enjoyment of the double betrayal, followed the next morning by briefly troubled reflection on his own detestable image.

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I can't find much info about this portrait on the internet (though it's widely copied) - anyway, it shows Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin) when still a girl, maybe 18-ish. 

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"Ile Bourbon" is the older name for the island subsequently known as Réunion, where Indiana and Noun were born. As such they are both described as Creole - the term does not in this case imply anything about ethnicity. Later in the novel we visit the colony. Sand's realization of Ile Bourbon is very skilful, but she had never been there, and she took her information from a friend's travel book.

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George Sand dressed as a man

The best things in the book, probably, concern Raymon and the claustrophobic feeling of Indiana being trapped by his relentless pursuit. As we read, we are impressed again and again by Raymon's actions being natural and unthinking, from his own point of view;  yet ingeniously manipulative, i.e. to us who see Indiana's peace of mind being constantly eroded.

One of the things that makes Sand's analysis so devastating is the credible way in which she persuades us that neither the unprincipled Raymon nor the brutal Col. Delmare are really evil people but, on the contrary, rather ordinary. So the repulsion we experience is not an indictment of imaginary individuals, but of a real society's structures and values.

[Brecht made the same point about his Life of Galileo, urging producers not to present his churchmen as villains. That would only obscure his analysis of how authority behaves. Make them seem like bankers, he suggested.]

Many readers consider that the narrator is portrayed as definitely (not just grammatically) male, and that he expresses patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes that Sand doesn't intend us to accept. I think that this interpretation misses the narrator's irony. You will see that I am taking Sand and the narrator as being essentially the same person. (Perhaps this is because I have been listening to the book read aloud by a woman.)

This interpretation lands me in an apparent difficulty. The Conclusion, which takes the form of a letter to a certain J. Nébaud, is explicitly written by a young gentleman, and recounts his meeting with Ralph and Indiana in the wilds of Ile Bourbon. This young gentleman is presented as sympathetic but conventional and (in his wordy descriptions) a little ridiculous. At one point he seems to show cognizance of, if not take responsibility for, the previous chapter: "Sir Ralph... me raconta son histoire jusqu’à l’endroit où nous l’avons laissée dans le précédent chapitre." - By implication, then, you might assume that he is the narrator of the whole novel. Against this is the Conclusion's headnote, which clearly marks it off as a separate piece of writing.

But it is hard to recognize the novel's narrator in this young fellow. If he now knows nothing of Sir Ralph beyond what he is told by the islanders, how does that square with the earlier narrator's omniscience e.g. about Raymon and his political career, or the discussions between him and Ralph? Besides, isn't it primarily this earlier narrator who voices the book's most unexpected psychological insights? Some examples:

1. How Indiana moves automatically from an ultra-authoritarian father to an ultra-authoritarian husband, the way she repeats her pattern. This is traced in beautiful detail in the passage where it's pointed out that Indiana's sense of slavery is the very thing that Delmare can't stand, though he constantly creates the conditions of slavery. That another woman would "manage" Delmare easily enough.

2. After the affair between Raymon and Noun, whenever a servant speaks of Noun, Indiana notices that soon afterwards he finds himself driven to mention Raymon (though in another connection). The untold secret exerts an unconscious pressure that must be vented. 

3. The inner compulsion that Raymon feels - when he has ceased to love Indiana and has freed himself from her -  to exercise his power by writing a letter that subtly misrepresents their parting and emphasizes the intensity of a love that he doesn't feel. (Indiana "sees through all this".  But it does her no good,  what reason says is irrelevant, the letter does its work anyway.)

I don't know enough about French literature to know how original these kind of observations of behaviour were at the time Sand wrote them down; observations that seem to depend on an awareness of the life of the unconscious and its consistent but often counter-intuitive logic compared to the life of reason. In British literature there is not much of this until, I don't know, Woolf? i.e. when Freud's ideas began to percolate through, almost a hundred years later.

Indiana must be one of the first books to prompt the startling thought that all love is abuse. (Flora Tristan's 1838 novel Méphis would develop this idea further.) This isn't what Sand generally believed (her most famous quote is about how the only worthwhile thing is to love and be loved) but as you read Indiana the thought comes into focus anyway. (For me it continues to resonate disquietingly through the first couple of books of Anna Karenina. The image of Vronsky shimmies and, for a few seconds, is transformed into Humbert Humbert.)

Some commentators have argued that the ending is not happy and that Ralph is as oppressive as Raymon or Col. Delmare. You can understand this. I think Sand meant Indiana's occlusion in the final pages to testify to her power in private life, a power beyond the mundane (inevitably society-coloured) material of narrative. Nevertheless, it's easy to feel in a troubled way that she is merely eclipsed. But whatever the merits of this view, it misrepresents the book, because Ralph is never a wholly credible character in the way that Raymon is, and he is not presented as a case that typifies a corrupt society; in fact he is a sociopath. No, the devastating insights are all around Raymon. In the book's final third, when Ralph starts to become more central to the action, we've said goodbye to all those devastating insights, it's more a matter of emblem, a picture of two troubled souls who can meet each other in love but only by escaping the pressures of civilisation.

[Behind the flight of Indiana and Ralph to Ile Bourbon lies the image of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788); his young lovers grow up idyllically on Ile de France (Mauritius) but their future is destroyed by contact with the corrupt society of France.]

But I'm generalizing a little too much. Sand has one remarkable insight about Ralph, too: she sees how his benevolence and self-abnegation are intimately linked to his egotism: in fact, these elements of his personality all developed at the same time - as the elements of a personality usually do.

What of Indiana herself? The logic of the story tends to emphasize the extent to which she is a passive and innocent victim worn down by those two malign grindstones, her husband and her lover. That makes her sound pitiable but potentially dull. If that was Sand's plan, then she wrote better than she planned. As in (1) above, Indiana is neither altogether passive nor altogether innocent because she has a well-developed victim psychology. And we should not patronize her. She miraculously escapes having sex with Raymon - this was perhaps a sacrifice to convention, avoiding a "ruin" that would be regarded as intolerable in a heroine who is to find happiness - but if the plan began as a sacrifice to convention then Sand makes a virtue of it. She splits her woman victim in two, i.e. into the unfortunate, sensual Noun and the unfortunate, but redeemed, Indiana. One upshot of this is that Indiana emerges as a personality who is psychologically frighteningly intense but is sensually tepid. Her "Creole" innocence can switch into a magnificent literalism that appals Raymon - he takes refuge in feeling bored by her. Indiana finds numerous and quite surprising ways to tolerate, justify, even celebrate, Noun's tragic demise. Though Indiana's character is not the centre of the book's interest, it quite thoroughly transgresses convention.

George Sand, aged 6

* The Brontës' adoption of male pseudonyms was apparently suggested by George Sand's example. It seems likely that Sand's early novels were among the books mentioned by Charlotte as being sent over from Gomersal in 1840. She called them "clever wicked sophistical and immoral" but Charlotte learnt natural French conversation from them and she was certainly influenced by them; perhaps Anne was too.

soundcloud

L and now K have recently headed off to work in foreign places, both leaving glittering trails of modern music behind them. I'm cautiously dipping in, too much exposure might blow my mind. 

From L's collection I found an unrelenting 1-hr mix from DJ Twigz,  apparently from October 2009. Twigz is from Orange County, SW California. It's a dance mix, mostly at very high tempo until the last five minutes: in its endurance-test aspect it reminds me quite a lot of the symphonies of Allan Pettersson, something that might come as a surprise to both artists.  Especially Petterssonian are the tiny repeated motifs, typically chromatic in nature, that Twigz favours here. The mix is also captivating and fun, maybe best suited to parties, suites, shops and clubs where your body listens all the time but your attention can tune in and out.

Meanwhile from K's stack of listening wonder I liked the look of the Fulgeance CD To All of You (2011). I think Fulgeance comes from Caen in Normandy. It's electronica that is both primitivist and sophisticated, the music tends to transform in unpredictable (but ever-beautiful) ways. The tracks are named after places Fulgeance has performed - a sort of inclusive, romantic wave of the hand to an international network of small scenes. Hiver Normand, Glasgow Lunacy, Sweet Sofia,  etc. Once again a resonance from the classical world came to mind, this time Joaquín Rodrigo's "Por los campos de España", like this a charmingly concise musical travelogue.

Turns out that neither artist is particularly big-time, and one thing they both have in common is that they're on SoundCloud. I promptly joined up myself, so now you can check out all three of us.

Dj Twigz - Aug 2011 by DJ-TWIGZ
London Falling by fulgeance
Londonderry Air by michaelpeverett

november love

I've really enjoyed November this year. This is the winnowing month. It strips back the layers of summer growth,  exposing curious, eloquent details: a Norway maple holding a fragile cup of big yellow leaves; a roadside draped with a fringe of black beads: teazel,  wild carrot, knapweed.
 
Kicking the drifts of dry leaves along the pavement, like every child does. It seems I haven't yet grown out of it. I'm still fascinated by the kicked leaves shifting along the road and by the steady rhythmic noise, a chuffer train or an express lift or a tarmac-flattener. Makes me wonder what happened before machines existed. Perhaps children did not kick leaves in those days. But if they did, what did it make them think of?

The first half of November had a good number of those lovely sharp days of low yellow sunshine piercing through thin crowns, of skies with blue in them, and of dramatic glimpses of  the other gem-like colours in which November is so surprisingly rich - it is not only about yellow and black.

The second half is, apparently, more in the mood to get on with its work: leaden skies through weeping panes, sodden fields and the excited wind. Flat expanses of tarmac become decorated with swirls of water. Walking at night, sections of the westward horizon that are usually uplit by distant roads and towns are blotted out by marauding inky rainclouds. 

As the flooding spreads across Somerset we say things like:  "He'll climb through a river to get here."

An unwalked-on bit of woodland floor. Mostly Norway maple, hornbeam and beech, with a bit of sycamore, wych-elm and wild cherry.

Field Maple

Field Maple



Ivy



Mahonia

Norway Maple

Norway Maple

cluttered desk literary ephemera

[UNFINISHED DRAFT]

To be honest, I don't often do a huge amount of reading at my Desk.

My favourite places for reading, in no particular order, are beds, toilets, bus-stops, trains, cafes, floor-cushions, dining-tables, park benches and beaches. Though I  stop short of Wordsworth's famous marmalade-smeared knife (which he used for cutting the pages of Burke's Works) , my reading-matter of the moment does to tend to become dog-eared and defaced.

I have a desk at home, certainly, but it's used for Facebook, email, on-line banking, Spider Solitaire and that kind of thing. (Sometimes for writing.) I also have a desk at work but this is for being an IT engineer.

Of course, I DO read things at my desks, such as other people's blogs and things that I turn up on Google, and poetry that I find on-line. It can be intense for a page or two, but it's not deep-water reading. For example, I've still got a bookmarked link from last year to Aphra Behn's The Rover Part II. This is a play that, as it happens, I am highly motivated to read. If I'd had it in printed form I'd have read it ages ago. But since all I've got is the on-line text, I've read the opening scenes a couple of times, scanned and rescanned a few other passages, and my impression of the play is all fragmentary and broken. If this is true of a play (plays, after all, only take a couple of hours to read), it applies even more strongly to something like a novel.

If I added up all the literature that I've read on-line, it wouldn't amount to much more than a paltry, haphazard collection of momentarily diverting titbits. Literature minced into blog-posts, as it were.

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Elliott Carter died a couple of days ago, aged 103. I found this out by catching "Wind Rose" on Radio 3. There's an amazing amount of great Carter music, it's a world. Good excuse for a link, anyway.

Matribute (2007); I'm not sure who the performer is, maybe it's James Levine himself (for whom the piece was written).




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[Here formerly appeared a review of Paul Brown's, A Cabin In the Mountains (Reality Street, 2012), now complete and moved to Intercapillary Space...]

http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2012/12/paul-brown-cabin-in-mountains.html


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E. M. Forster, Howard's End, via Librivox and Elizabeth Klett, who lets us into the novel as through a doorway. After I had heard it and enjoyed it, I went off browsing the internet for commentary, and the commentary closed the door on me again.

I  have side-stepped Forster for more than thirty years, since "doing" A Passage To India at university. I was apt to go off books that I did at university. Perhaps I also took exception to something - a lack of appreciation for Scott, was it? - in his Aspects of the Novel. Well, I consider it's high time to get over that.

The trouble with commentary on novels, especially novels, is that it tends to be commentary on the book remembered after reading, not commentary on the book as you experience it while you're reading it. Often it is not even that; it becomes commentary on the topics that are in effect pre-selected by previous commentary. Soon we are dealing with wearily familiar tropes: Forster's ideas of cross-cultural connection, or of connection across class barriers; their strengths and weaknesses. I know these discussions air important issues. Forster seems to have been especially prone to attract this kind of commentary because he devotes so much of his book to ideas, to a sort of philosophizing. And he was a humane and liberal man. Forster seems to be easily recognized as well-meaning, yet easily vulnerable to attack for having failed to go far enough; to be praised for having shone a light in darkness, and damned for his light's faintness. See how tempting it is? Now I too have slipped away from Howard's End to "the debate around Howard's End", I too am taking part in this abstracted Forster-conversation.

One has, often, to get through this thicket to arrive at the coal-face. I'm determined to say something about Howard's End, though, so how about this? As everyone knows, one of its more unexpectedly prominent themes is moving house. And I just want to point out that Howard's End was published in 1910 and, the year before, Jerome K. Jerome's They and I dealt with the same theme. (In both books, men talk of building a kitchen, or knocking the hall into the parlour, as if they were doing it themselves; when they really mean, paying someone else to do it.) And this theme also plays a part in Galsworthy's The Man of Property (1906).

[I suppose I should add something more about They and I, not a book (I'd imagine) that finds its way to many modern readers; though, of course, it is on Gutenberg (text) and indeed Librivox (audio) - I urge you to take a listen to the first chapter. It follows the pattern of more celebrated Jerome books in presenting most of the author's best comic routines early on; the later part of the book tending more towards wistful philosophizing (distant comparison with Forster is in that respect, too). They and I ( like Three men in a Boat) is a fiction that looks autobiographical, partly because there is no attempt to develop a story beyond the incidents of a week or two - during which a father and his three children rent a country cottage, while superintending the aforementioned house-building - and partly because the narrator is a literary man just like Jerome or J. Nevertheless, They and I is not autobiographical, this family is invented.]

Second listen (Spoilers imminent...):

A book like Howard's End is pretty well always worth reading (or listening to) twice, because our experience is so different the second time around.

For example: Aunt Julie's lift in the car with the Wilcox who she supposes is Paul, but is Charles. The first time through, we share her error, for at least a few miles. Even before we discover this error (since we already know of Helen's telegram) the sense of approaching ruin is dominant; the damage that Julie is unintentionally doing to people whom we already sympathise with, even though we haven't met them. And the fact, when it emerges, of her speaking to the wrong Wilcox just sets the seal on it. The scene is too absorbingly upsetting for us to quite appreciate the comedy.

The second time around, this is all different. Now we enjoy it as a comic prelude, because nothing of consequence followed. But other things come into view; we know now how Julie dies (or almost does), we know now that Charles will go to prison; we experience a new curiosity about them, a deeper curiosity than when they were more or less blank canvasses.

The loss of anxiety about "what's going to happen" has other surprising effects. In the first scene with Leonard Bast, the one where he has to come and collect his umbrella, I now have less fellow-feeling with him, I am no longer anxious on his behalf, my attitude is colder. A little of that surplus sympathy is now put to new use, it attends to Helen and Margaret.

Howard's End is an incredibly highly wrought novel, one of those books that expects the reader to hold in her mind everything that has been said in it. The goblins of the Beethoven concert are still in Leonard Bast's last rail journey. The discreet anti-naturalistic veins of symbolism: Evie's wedding is on Bast's birthday, or his premonitory fear of swords.  These ornamentations tend to cluster around Bast, perhaps to compensate for Forster's failure to completely realise him as a character. Anyhow, the second listening allows these details to emerge a little further into consciousness.

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A line from Federico García Lorca´s "El Rey de Harlem":

bajo las pinzas y las retamas de la celeste luna de Cáncer.

Greg Simon and Steven F. White translate:

under the pincers and Scotch broom of Cancer's heavenly moon.

This was puzzling to me, because I didn't know that "Scotch broom" is what Americans call the plant that we call broom, i.e. Cytisus scoparius. In fact "retama" refers to a similar Mediterranean plant, perhaps Retama de Olor (Spartium junceum). Since Lorca uses it in the plural, I think he means sprigs of that plant, which could distantly resemble the moon in being curvy and yellow with flowers. However, Lorca's metaphors are often not about close physical resemblance.

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(Image from Gillmark Gallery, Hertford)

I am also reading 2 Henry IV, very slowly. This falls into the "toilet category". It's a tiny book, 2 inches by 1.5,  that can be carried in a back pocket or the palm of my hand, thus avoiding the workplace embarrassment of being seen carrying a book down the corridor. These mini-Shakespeares were published by Allied Newspapers Ltd, apparently in 1932. When I was a child I inherited  - I'm not quite sure who from - a miniature oak desk containing about half of them (the full set is shown above). I guess it was one of a pair.  I've since lost a few volumes and ruined some others - this one hasn't benefitted from getting  too close to an uncapped tube of Rescue Cream. Anyhow. Of greater interest to bibliophiles, this edition manages to omit the climactic "I know thee not, old man" by accidentally printing a page from 2 Henry VI instead.)

2 Henry IV  is one of those rather rare works that is unashamedly a sequel and proceeds to discover peculiar kinds of excellence that only a sequel can have - like The Godfather Part II. These works are absolutely not freestanding, each is totally dependent on its predecessor.And in each there's a sense of fragmentation, glorious but diminishing returns, nostalgia for the first part, of a structure miraculously holding together as it becomes increasingly atomized.

An essay I found useful for the play, interesting for its own sake, and attractive to read (what more can you ask?) is Paul A. Jorgensen's 'The "Dastardly Treachery" Of Prince John Of Lancaster', PMLA 76 No 5 (1961).   [What?? I'm giving you a link to JSTOR?? Yes, I sure am. Because (if you don't know), there is now a Beta program called MyJStor and anyone can register, which  I strongly urge you to do. It gives you free access across all JStor's resources, the only restriction is that it's throttled down to three articles per fortnight. A big step in the right direction!].  The gist of Jorgensen's essay is that he identifies a new trend in the 1590s towards accepting the practice of dealing treacherously with the enemy, and he connects this new attitude with Elizabeth's miserable Irish wars. Jorgensen also emphasizes that the distasteful scene in which Prince John captures the rebel leaders by breaking a truce (IV.2)  is incurred deliberately by Shakespeare - he found its germ in the histories, but he transferred the agency from a general to a prince; and the historic event wasn't even decisive, so it could easily have been missed out. Clearly it was Shakespeare's intention to raise the treachery issue starkly (though drawing back from making Hal the agent) - to let it sit alongside the cold rejection of Falstaff.

This is another work about which it's difficult to say anything new, its character and tone have been so persuasively delineated by others. I just want to emphasize - nothing excitingly new about this -  the prominence of a "nothing actually happens" motif in the play. Examples:

Northumberland plans to revolt. He changes his mind. 
Mistress Quickly tries to get Falstaff to pay up. He isn't made to.
Prince Hal plans a big night out with Falstaff. Business calls them away after a few minutes.
The rebels and the royal forces expect to fight each other. They aren't required to.
Henry IV is dead. No, he isn't.
Falstaff plans to take advantage of Shallow and Silence. Business calls him away before he gets started.

Well, and so on. Drama in its primary key portrays action, but 2 Henry IV interests itself in what happens while waiting for actions that don't materialize.

Remember Henry IV, waiting for sleep?

Shakespeare always keeps the king's personality a little in shadow and there are possibilities that arise from this. Because Henry is neither a notably bad nor notably good king, because he is a bit troubled,, a bit guilty about vaguely sharp behaviour that is not really spelled out, but still a father, still kind of a businessman, he can articulate things about kingship.

This soliloquy is a difficult challenge for an actor. The speech is driven by personal troubles, but Henry does not tell us anything about them. I am sure the impression made on us needs to be a sympathetic one, yet it does not sit particularly well with kingship (especially a kingship that was eagerly seized on) to be moaning "it's so unfair". The speech must convey, simultaneously, contradictory emotions: a sensitive pity for the sufferings of the labouring poor and envy for their snoring oblivion.

It so happens that we have just left a sluttish inn as it begins to settle down for the night. II.4 is a disappointing scene (to us Falstaff and Hal) in that it is meant to climax in another magical celebration of the pair's unlikely driendship, but it doesn't work out, both have to leave suddenly. Perhaps it wasn't working out quite perfectly anyway. But if at the heart of the scene is an intentional sense of loss, the outworks are wonderful: Mrs Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, who start and end the scene, and the troublesome incursion of Ancient Pistol. 



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Scott, The Antiquary, Guy Mannering.
Galdos, Fortunata and Jacinta
Richard Makin, Dwelling
Ammianus Marcellinus
The Roman Wall
Bodil Malmsten
Selma Lagerlof (finishing up the Further Adventures of Nils)
Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York
Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Lisa Robertson, The Weather
Hans Christian Andersen
Kalevala
VLAK3
Bold/Braithwaite/Morgan
Forster Passage to India, Hoaward's End
Adrian Clarke, Eurochants
Chris Goode, History of Airports
George Sand, Indiana
Aesop
Le Festin D'Esope (Charles-Valentin Alkan, Op 39, 12) "Attempting this variation (XX) with improper technique is likely to cause injury to the wrist". Another pal of George Sand, by the way.

memories of diggiloo

The great Lasse Holm

Back in July I was lucky enough to catch Diggiloo 2012 in Jämtland. It was the revue's 10th anniversary, and Lasse Holm's farewell season with the troupe.

The front cover of the program. Back row L-R: Jessica Andersson (singer), Charlotte Perrelli (singer), Fridha (singer). Centre row L-R: Thomas Petersson (comic), The Moniker (singer), Magnus Carlsson (singer), Lasse Holm (singer, compere, bandmaster), Markoolio (singer, rapper). Bottom row: Lotta Bromé (singer, comedienne, compere), Mojje (singer), Magnus Johansson (trumpeter). The revue also has a full band and dancers: I could hardly take my eyes off Kristjan Lootus, truly a Master of Dance.

Here's some YouTubes to help me remember.

This take on the Black Eyed Peas' instant classic "I've got a Feeling" was their opener, but you can't get much of an idea of the show's dynamism from this video. You can get a better idea of it from this TV medley from Skansen: 

The Moniker

Some of the clever stuff, with Diggiloo debutante Lotta Bromé - a well-known presenter on Swedish radio - to the fore. The girls are celebrating Sweden's appearance in the finals of Euro 2012. In the event it was a down-and-up campaign. Sweden began badly, losing 1-0  to Ukraine, then (unforgivably) 3-2 to England, against whom they are normally invulnerable.* At least the team had finally started to perform.  In their farewell match they took out their frustrations on France, beating them 2-0. It made no difference, England and France went through and were duly dispatched by the eventual finalists Italy and Spain.

* A few days after writing this, Sweden restored normal service, christening the new Friends Arena national stadium with a 4-2 victory over England; Ibra scored all their goals, beginning with the merely top-drawer, ending with the surreal.

This is also from TV: Magnus Carlsson and Jessica Andersson doing a fine rendition of "The Time of My Life"

The much-idolized Mojje doing "Eye of the Tiger", with Kristjan Lootus as his opponent.

An extended Eurovision medley; the sound's pretty poor, I'm afraid. The culturally untranslatable genre "schlager" is the underlying context for Diggiloo, and the Eurovision song contest, fondly derided in the UK, has much greater significance to schlager fans. In fact the name "Diggiloo" refers to Sweden's winning 1984 Eurovision entry, a catchy number called "Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley" by Herrey's. The company always break into a chorus of  "Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley" to signal the end of the show.

Lasse, Magnus, Kristjan

Solidago canadensis

When I loosely call this Solidago canadensis, I don't really mean anything very definite except that it definitely isn't S. gigantea, because the stems are pubescent all the way down. The N. American species of Solidago (Goldenrod) are difficult, and garden material could be any kind of hybrid or varietal stuff. What stands out about this particular one, a gift from Ebs, is how late-flowering it is. These photos were taken on 16th October, when it was finally at its zenith.

Most other S. canadensis (using the name in its loose sense) is at peak in August or early September. It is now a familiar part of the British landscape, especially in the south, both in gardens and out of them, on the edges of fields, railway embankments, road verges etc.