If there was only time for one book, there was also only time for one new CD. On this occasion it was Peter Doherty’s Grace/Wastelands. I saw Doherty live last year at L’Ancien Belgique with the Babyshambles. The songs were good, but Doherty’s act was disappointing. It was an act in more than one sense of the term. A lot of the atmosphere in his concerts used to come from the unpredictability of a tripper but at the time he was reportedly dry and under the watchful eye of his musicians/minders (or so it seemed to me). The result was somebody pretending to be what his fans expected him to be, but his body language showed – he hated acting the part. Now, with this album (and with a switch from ‘Pete’ to ‘Peter’), Doherty has allowed himself to be what he truly is: a subtle songwriter and a poet. The CD has so far had mixed reviews (as they say) but for me it’s a beautiful piece of work.

Glenys Kinnock once observed that busy people only get to read one book on holiday. My book this time was The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson. I was largely ignorant about the 1915-1919 war between Italy and Austria-Hungary until as a student in the summer of 1980 I babysat for an architect’s son in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomite mountains. One day we took the cable car high up above the piste of Ra Valles and, down below, I could see the remains of a wooden shanty town. Intrigued, I started to discover that the front line had run through those mountains. Thompson has written a brilliant book, a mixture of political, economic, social, and cultural analysis, as well as an account of the ghastly and disastrous tactics of Cadorna, Italy’s top general and every bit as much of a ‘donkey’ as the generals on the Western front (for long afterwards, to British troops ‘to do a Cadorna’ meant to screw up completely). This is also a cracking good read, with many a poetic insight or witty epithet. Just one will have to do here: ‘Sonnino (Foreign Minister) was silent in all languages he spoke, while Orlando (Prime Minister) was voluble in all the languages he didn’t.’ The study also provides sobering insights into the roots of Italy’s dalliance with Fascism and the Balkan convulsions that would, ultimately, lead to the reassertion of the nation states of the Western Balkans today. I warmly recommend this book not just to those interested in military history but to those who want to understand better why Europe is the way it is.

But then, just two days later, Italy was flung into deep mourning after the devastation of L’Aquila by a powerful earthquake. One Italian journalist described this experience as a ‘bitter ritual’ and there was indeed a sense of dreary familiarity and inevitability about what had occurred: October 2002, San Giuliano di Puglia; September 1997, Assisi and Umbria; December 1990, Sicily; November 1980, Campania and Basilicata. I remember visiting the Basilicata region in the summer of 1981. The old villages and towns had been abandoned. Tent towns and shanty towns had sprung up and seemed to have taken on permanent status. The same, inevitably, is already happening in L’Aquilla. Long after the immediate pain of loss and grief has dulled, the people of L’Aquilla will still be suffering from this particular bitter ritual.

The next morning we galloped away to northern Italy, to the lakes and the mountains, for a short Easter break.

In the evening to the Irish Theatre Group’s production of Edith, written and produced by Loretta Stanley, a member of my writers’ group (see 14 February post). This was a rich educational process for me. Like the other members of the group, I have accompanied this work since its inception. But whereas we had been critiquing dialogue on the page, now I could hear it on people’s lips. And whereas the roles had previously been neutral ciphers, now they were interpretations, by actresses and actors who brought their own understanding of what the play might be about. The biggest roles, Edith Cavell herself (as a ghost in the hospital named after her) and Eva (as an uppity young speechwriter confronting the ghastliness of breast cancer), played respectively by Liz Ross and Brontë Flecker (and played very well), were entirely believable. The stage, and the actresses, had worked their magic. I am sure Loretta sees this as a work in progress. There are things that work and things that don’t work so well, but now it is a question of adjustment and re-writing and, oh!, what a thrill it must be to see your work on the stage like this. As to Edith, she remains an enigma, in the play as in life. In our group discussions we came to the conclusion that her religion-fueled fervour to do good was the result of a displaced desire to impress her father. In his Courage, etc, Gordon Brown portrays Cavell as an all-round heroine. That was certainly the way the British propaganda machine portrayed her, jingoistically exploiting her death before a firing squad to consolidate the image of a brutal German war machine. But it can’t explain why, in her confession, Cavell gave away the names of all of the people in the clandestine network that had been smuggling allied soldiers into the neutral Netherlands (and hence back to Britain). She wasn’t tortured and the German-language confession she signed contained the names that only she could have given. ‘Patriotism,’ she declared just before her death, ‘is not enough.’ But what, then, was ‘enough’ for Edith?

Liquid Room

To the Kaai Theater in the evening for Liquid Room, described in the programme as ‘new music in a rock festival setting or in a long night of electronic improvisation. The audience comes and goes, remains standing, and has a drink at the bar, while the music plays without interruption: in and out. ‘  Well, I did nip out for a quick drink but otherwise I was mostly ‘in’.  It was a rich feast, but if I had to single one piece out it would be Michael Schmid’s extraordinary rendering of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate for voice. I knew (vaguely) about Schwitters’ collage work but was ignorant about his sound poems. This was a tour de force, Schmid’s brilliant performance further enhanced by his ‘Kaoss Box’ (a sort of loop machine). The good thing about modern music concerts is that quite frequently you find yourself alongside the composers and musicians at the bar afterwards. A good evening.

A pride of Presidents

What is the collective noun for a gathering of Presidents? I suggest a ‘pride’. In any case, there was a pride of Presidents on view in the European Parliament this afternoon. The occasion that had taken me there was the inauguration of two new buildings, the Jozsef Antall building and the Willy Brandt building, and the Konrad Adenauer passarelle that links them together and to the rest of the parliamentary complex. For the occasion all of the surviving Presidents of the European Parliament had gathered. In a touching speech (sadly, not available on his website), the EP’s current President, Hans-Gert Pöttering, pointed out that the three personalities whose names were being remembered and honoured in this way together symbolised the democratic evolution of the European Union: from the Basic Law, through Ostpolitik to the democratisation of Central and Eastern Europe.

To La Monnaie this afternoon to see a brilliant production of Ligetti’s absurdist masterpiece, Le Grand Macabre. The set was extraordinary. Clearly inspired by the hellish images of Hieronymous Bosch and Breughel, the centrepiece is a vast crouching nude, seen from all sides during the production thanks to a revolve. The back half very cleverly detaches to reveal hellish interiors and the singers sprout from every single orifice (and the nipples). Moreover, through clever use of projected light the figure’s face is distorted and contorted into various expressions of grief and desperation. One of the jokes in the plot, that Nekrotzar (death, the devil) gets so drunk he misses his own apocalypse, reminded me of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest Tale, where four young drunks go out to kill death and end up killing each other. Good to see a brilliant young Brit, Leo Hussain, conducting. The Sunday Times published a review for those who want to know more (click here).

My better half was away for the weekend so I had to do a more than usually convincing imitation of a taxi driver: sleepovers, parties, sports, etc. However, there was one big consolation. All weekend a local radio station, Radio Nostalgie, played nothing but 1970s music. It was a wonderful aural trip down Memory Lane. The various hits and songs triggered all sorts of memories of my late teens and university years, but the feast also led me to realise just how extraordinarily rich and fertile that decade was in musical terms.

Agence Europe this morning carried a wonderful and touching story which (I am sure they won’t mind) I am cutting and pasting below.

While twenty-seven EU heads of state were attempting in Brussels to solve the challenges of the day (thankfully not related to war), a moving ceremony was taking place on a farm in eastern France, not far from Verdun, where the Robert Schuman European Centre (CERS in Scy-Chazelles in Mosel) was reading out a message of peace written by German soldiers fighting in the battle of Verdun, who were stationed at a farm in Fiquelmont. On 17 July 1916, when they left the farm, they left their message in a small bottle of Schnapps that they hid under a roof tile. This ‘message in a bottle’ was discovered by the farm’s owners and on Friday 20 March 2009, it was symbolically handed to a group of French and German schoolchildren. After reading out the message, written in French and English, the bottle and its consents were given to Jean-Luc Bohl, chair of CERS and Vice-President of the General Council of Mosel; Paul Collowald, chair of the Robert Schuman Association; and Richard Stock, Director-General of CERS, who will use the message during European events for young people at Scy-Chazelles which attract some 4000 visitors a year.

There follows an extract for the message by Karl Wahl of Leobschütz in Upper Silesia, Heinrich Peschel of Elsterwerda in Saxony, Willy Gissen of Krefeld, Corporal Franz of Altenroda Bad Bibra, Cavalryman Krahmer of Hamburg and Cavalryman Grünewald of Münster in Westphalien. ‘War is a brutally dangerous business and the communities of the occupied territories have had to endure horrendous suffering, such horrendous suffering. This suffering is generated by bitter hatred provoked by leaders, by the powerful. We soldiers do not share these ideas. We hate war and long for peace. The legacy for our grandchildren as the price of this senseless fighting, the legacy that must haunt the hearts of this world, in good times and bad, for some as a sign of what the future will bring and for others as a reality, a Utopia and a genuine Eden, whether people like it or not, the legacy of this war must be a Europe whose peoples are united with each other, a united Europe of friendship among the peoples and the realisation of the fact that we are all brothers.’