Recommendations:

Terry Castle's memoir of Susan Sontag in the LRB is very amusing, and true to my own impression of Sontag (from the one time I met her). It's rather cruel and catty, but so funny you can't really feel guilty. I like how Castle casts herself as a clumsy ingenue.

Last year I heard Jill Crossland perform in Balliol College. I sent her a very appreciative e-mail, asking if a Händel CD was in the works. Her secretary wrote to thank me, and say that there was no Händel CD nor would there be one for a while. I didn't reply, because I didn't really have anything more to say. Then a few weeks later this kind soul wrote to me again, apologizing that she, and not Ms Crossland herself, was writing, and saying that there was a homemade recording of Händel's Suite No. 5 (which includes the miraculous Harmonious Blacksmith variations), would I like a copy? Would I! And how thoughtful and excessively modest of her to apologize for not being Jill Crossland. Anyway, I got it in the mail a few weeks ago — Händel's Suite no. 5 and the Chaconne. I love love love them. Especially in the Chaconne, the way it slows down after that marvellously self-confident, majestic entrance (so typical of Händel). "Let me savor this," it seems to say, and goes into variations (explorations really) that range from the contemplative to the energetic. After five minutes it modulates into minor and you think, "This is just another variation; such self-confidence can afford to entertain self-doubt." But after a while it becomes clear that this is no entertainment: the poison almost makes the music grind to a halt, until suddenly it catches a kind of despairing energy: "If it must be, so be it!" Might as well go down in style. It gathers momentum (baroque music is the best at conveying extremes of bitterness and despair without ever losing shape, quite a feat when you think about it; gives the lie to Johnson's comment about Milton's "Lycidas"). And then all that running in a miserable panic through a wasteland leads one to, of all places — I don't know, a sunrise, a banquet, a loved one, all rolled in one — the joy of the beginning, except that this time it feels earned. It starts out majestically, and then it starts running too. But this is a happy running.

What a piece! All that in under twelve minutes!

Then I started listening to John Potter's recordings of John Dowland. At first I thought I only liked "Come Again" (I bought the CD for that song) but then I discovered "Fine Knacks for Ladies" and "Now, O Now, I Needs Must Go." They're excellent. (All the other songs promise to be real downers: "In Darkness Let Me Dwell," "Lachrymae Verae, " "Lachrymae Tristes," "Lachrymae Amantis," "Flow My Tears," "Go Crystal Tears.") The liner notes for the CD are interesting. They start out defending the use of the saxophone in a recording of Elizabethan music, and end up as an impassioned declaration of artistic independence from historicism. It's very well-written, and it struck a chord with me since I read it during a period when I was spending days and weeks with boring historicist criticism. (The saxophone, in case you're wondering, works astonishingly well in Dowland's songs.)