Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-08-11 - 9:16 p.m.

Back home again (everyone wanted to stay longer) - an amazing feat of tidiness by James who has had the house to himself for two weeks. Can this be entirely normal in an 18 year old boy awaiting A Level results.

Some luggage is stuck in the Scilly Islands (lucky luggage). Those responsible make reassuring noises. The drive back was good fun - as always the bit between Bodmin and Exeter raised the question of why one doesnt spend more time in this incredible landscape (which includes T Hughes� hideaway in North Tawton). Vita and Emma played the new Red Hot Chilli Peppers smash as we hammered down the A 30.

The crossing had been quite rough. Vita suffered from sugar mice consumed earlier in the day to console herself at leaving the last remnant of Lyonesse. As the boat lurches towards Land End and the islands disappear in view into the mass of the Atlantic you do begin to wonder even more about exactly what kind of place you have visited - maybe it actually is mythical.

I read some of Susan Sonntag�s Illness as Metaphor - not a patch on Foucault in my view. I also tried to get to grips with William Carlos Williams via a 1970s compendium of criticism. Didn�t crack it - WCW is obviously American at a time when distinctive US poets were rare and he suffered a bit from the profile of T S Eliot when he was doing his most interesting stuff. There is an issue about rhythm which links across to a more general point about the underinflexion (allegedly) of spoken American. I began to wonder whether he was an antecedent of J H Prynne.

Back home, my post contains a job offer - pppppphhhhewwww. Also a CD from Gilbert I of his gtr interpretation of Face plus note saying that he will have a crack at Fifths. I am fascinated by the comparison between my first stab at Face from G�s manuscript with the composer�s guitar interpretation. Obviously the same tune but also quite big differences - especially of the second musical idea in the intro. Just possible I have made something of a feature the composer didnt realise was there. I have put the two versions alongside each other on a Minidisc.

I had a novel duty at Holy Trinity this morning - it required some preparation last week and I was a bit nervous about how it would go. Seem to have got away with it. Rachel gave me the new text for group study - on Celtic Christianity. Brian preached - he knows some people in Soham. I chatted to Regan von Schweitzer who is marking A level Business Studies papers. Many candidates have opted for a question about the Euro writing from a surprisingly low knowledge base.

After Church I bought some artpaper notebooks. I was really taken with the watercolour paper I used in the Scillies and so I decided to try some pastel paper - also to try a phase of more overt planning. I took my last planning notebook with me on holiday - it includes some songs from 1999 and 2000 and also the first sketches for Serious Music. Planning makes you realise just how many ideas and projects are on the go.

I bought the latest Jazzwise which has a whole article on something I have been trying to track down for a few years - a film soundtrack where John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis play together. I heard it (by surprise) one night on TV - the introduction is the best part of the film and is cinematically strong - starting in silence - well you can guess whats its like when the boogie kicks in. The John Lee Hooker biography has some details (including some interesting stuff about Miles in Detroit in the early 1950s) but I have never been able to find a CD. The film is the Hot Spot and the musical director was Jack Nietzsche - who in his own right has an amazing pedigree eg the choir parts on You Can�t Always Get What You Want and much of the MD work for the Phil Spector classics. An absolute MUST HAVE.

James reports a serious dispute with one of his mates over the validity of Communism. James is a sceptic based on his already vast historical knowledge and gives short shrift to starry-eyed romantics. We have been discussing the brevity of Nazi hegemony based on the 1938 Penguin Special I have bought on German Art - which shows clearly the extent to which (not knowing the risks they were taking) people were prepared to dispute the emerging Nazi canon of great German Art. Amongst the luggage is a book Yvonne has bought James about the Wanansee Protokol - published in 2002 it was an absolute snip at �10. The WP is the document that sealed Eichman�s death warrant and concerns a conference he organised at the end of 1941 to help implement the Final Solution. The author discusses the events and responsibilities that led to the conference - an utterly amazing story.

A key step seems to have been a decision by Hitler (after months of refusal) to allow the resumption of forced emigration of Jews to the East. This was tried initially not long after the defeat of Poland but was an utter disaster and abandoned - due to the objections of those with the tricky task of administering swathes of Eastern Poland with limited resources. The underlying question is that given that mass extermination is a rare event, what network of historical forces made it possible. Part of the answer seems to be that forced emigration to the East was an ideological project which made a lot of sense to people in Central and Western Europe. Whats more, the German plan for the invasion of USSR assumed total victory by Late Autumn 1941 - it looks barmy from this distance but obviously at the time they thought it was feasible, perhaps because it had taken them so little time to knock out Western Europe - just part of 1940.

Another key factor is the impact of the German military command of the atrocities committed by specialist groups in the middle of 1941 in the USSR - which seems to have shifted everyone�s mental framework in such a way that various normal constraints and restraints were removed. If one looks at the euthenasia programme in Germany in the late 1930s - the German Churches forced its abandonment. I guess this is part of the same cultural climate which made it possible for millions of people to attend an anti-Nazi art exhibition in Munich in 1938 featuring the artists the Nazi�s considered degenerate. Its the cultural gap between those events and Wannansee which are so deadly in their current fascination and cultural consequences.

previous - next