the generation game

Some thoughts on

I couldn't love you more
by Esther Freud
Bloomsbury 2021

I've been following the work of Esther Freud since the time when we both turned 30, and as we both turned 60 last year, that's half our lifetimes, scary thought. The mix of dysfunctional families and artsy / intellectual people populating her novels always speaks to my own views and experiences to a certain extent, even if my family doesn't have quite as famous people in it as hers. Thanks to this I always find something in her books to relate to, although more of it in some books and a bit less in others.

My favourite so far has been Summer at Gaglow (read before I had a regular blog so I may not have reviewed it, will have to re-read and review!), which reflects her mixed German/British heritage to great effect. This, her ninth novel, is at least as rich and rewarding as I remember Gaglow to be, so it may well be my new favourite (until I re-read Gaglow).

Whereas many of the other novels feature on young(ish) people's experience (eg Love Falls, Lucky break), this one skilfully interweaves three generations (plus a young girl in a smaller role) of women, who have suffered from various degrees of male awfulness and society prejudice in their different lifetimes. The connecting thread is that the middle generation woman becomes pregnant and is forced to deliver her daughter in a convent in Ireland where children born "in sin" are routinely offered for adoption. Freud has written about the real life background that informed this side of her novel in the Guardian. In real life, her mother shared many of the experiences of the middle protagonist but narrowly escaped the fate of giving birth in the convent.

It is both helpful and scary that Kate, the younger protagonist born in the convent, is my age (as many of Freud's protagonists happen to be, because it also happens to be her age). So it is easy to imagine the other generations in the novel, as they neatly align with generations in my family. And of course I am also taking notes re how to turn one's family history into fiction.

All in all, highly recommended to readers of all ages and generations.

I'm loving the photo by Willy Ronis used for the cover of my edition. It shows Gaston Berlemont's pub, The French House, in Soho, in 1955.

PSA: As I now have separate tags for literature written in French, Spanish, Galician, I should reserve the literature tag for books written in English - this will need some tidying up as I appear to have used it randomly over the last 15 years.

a book is born

The publishers told me this week that first copies of my new book have arrived at their offices, and on checking up I see it can now be pre-ordered from their website as well. So here are the full details now:

Intertwined
From Insects to Icebergs
by Michael Gross
Johns Hopkins University Press
15. October 2024
424 pages
ISBN 9781421449975
Hardcover $32.95

Also available as an e-book for the same price, ISBN: 9781421449982

watch this space for excerpts and further horn-tooting ...

travelling pathogens

When humans travel, they tend to bring their infectious diseases along. With Covid and air travel we have seen that an outbreak can become a global pandemic within weeks. With historic, slower mode of travels, the situation is more complex. Consider a sailship going half way round the world - by the time it reaches the destination, the pathogen may have run out of hosts to infect and thus the disease may have died out without any intervention. I spotted a paper applying the tools of ecological theory to the intercontinental transfer of pathogens in the times of sail and steam and found that topic really fascinating, so I mixed in a bit of Covid and air travel and some pre-historic travellers to widen the scope and made it my latest feature which is out now.

Travelling pathogens

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 16, 19 August 2024, Pages R747-R749

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

This painting by Jacob Knijff (1639–1681) purportedly shows “Ships, Galleys and Other Vessels off an Italian Port”, although the location could not be identified and the scene is not thought to depict a specific event. (Image: Jacob Knijff/Wikimedia Commons.)

a river landscape

Somebody in Düsseldorf put an actual oil painting out with their bins this week and I liked the look of it when I cycled past it, so I am now the proud owner of a landscape by Jakob Weitz (1888-1971) which looks like this:

It measures 40cm x 50cm and came with a bulky frame which isn't quite to my taste so I took that off to hang it just as the canvas (with the light wood frame underneath on which it was painted). The canvas has two bumps, a big one in the clouds which is interesting as it makes the clouds look more real, and a smaller more inconspicuous one in the landscape which also involves a little bit of tear. I'm wondering if it may become a bit more luminous if I try to wash the surface. Then again the paint is cracking in places so humidity may get in?

When I saw it by the roadside I thought the riverside landscape looked like it might be near here and my first thought was Volmerswerth, on the southern edge of the city. However, a bit of DuckDuckGo research (Google had fewer relevant results) revealed a similar painting by the same artist, which is captioned as Kaiserswerth, so that is still on the edge of Düsseldorf but on the opposite end, downstream from the city centre.

Hotlinking here to contrast and compare:

A few other paintings by this artist are shown on this auction site. Nothing to raise a gasp from the Antiques Roadshow audience, but some of them come with estimates of a few hundred euros.

women and the blue rider

Some thoughts on

Malerinnen und Musen des »Blauen Reiters«
by Hildegard Möller
Piper Verlag 2007

I am definitely going to see the current exhibition on German expressionists of the "Blue Rider" group at the Tate Modern (Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, until October 20), but as I haven't quite made it yet, I read this book in preparation, which is a joint biography of five women associated with the group, namely the painters Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin, and Maria Marc, and the muses and wives Lisbeth Macke and Lily Klee. We have had the book since it came out in 2007 but I hadn't read it yet. Partially, I presume, due to the misguided feeling that there wasn't much left to discover in it, as the four core members of the group (Marc, Kandinsky, Macke, Klee) represent the art I grew up with. (Funnily enough, these are also the ones that are represented in the compact art books series from Taschen.) Jawlensky is the one rider I am less familiar with - strangely the one work I associate his name with appeared on a postage stamp in the 1970s. Of the women I was aware of Gabriele Münter as a painter but not so much of the other two.

So, well, although I was familiar with the art of the Blue Rider, I did learn a lot about the lives behind it, and it was an interesting experience to follow these lives from the perspectives of the women involved. Ironically, although I perceive many of the very colourful paintings of the group as joyful, the lives weren't all that much fun, seeing that Marc and Macke died young in WW1, while Münter and Werefkin had rather troubled relations with their more famous painter boys, and Klee only lived to age 60 and a half. So in significant parts this is the story of three widows and two women abandoned by the artist partners they supported to the point of self-sacrifice. Although the roots of the Blue Rider are in the Schwabing district of Munich, there is a lot about moving out of the city to remote farm houses, eg at Murnau, which I find a bit scary. The painters in the story shared the dubious honour of being branded "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) by the Nazis, which obviously has become a badge of honour since but didn't help the careers of those who were still alive when it happened.

Considering all the very exciting (to me at least) and brightly coloured art that is being created in this story, I find the author's writing style a bit subdued and grey. I realise she's obviously striving to stay neutral, not to make any feminist statements in support of the women wronged one way or another, but still I find this neutrality clashes with the revolutionary nature of the art in question and of some of the lives being lived as well.

It was interesting too to meet some of the marginal figures of the Blauer Reiter, including August Macke's less famous cousin Helmuth Macke, who hailed from Krefeld, so I will have a look at his art the next time I'm there, and will also have a look at his family history in case his maternal ancestry throws up anything connected to my Krefeld clan.

It was also interesting to learn that the one and only almanac "Der Blaue Reiter", which gave the group its name and identity, was published in 1912 by a young man called Reinhard Piper - whose publishing house survives to this day and has indeed published this very book as well. A paperback edition came out on the centenary of the almanac's publication. I'm surprised it hasn't been translated ahead of the Tate Modern exhibition - could have sold well there.

PS I'll take the opportunity to list here the relevant exhibitions I (may) have seen (the childhood ones still need research:
22.8.-12.9.1969 Museum Folkwang, Essen
Paul Klee, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen. No memory of this whatsoever but I found the catalogue of the exhibition among my possessions so assume I will have seen it as a 5-year-old.
1970s: Pretty sure I saw a generic Blauer Reiter exhibition at the Museum Folkwang as a child. Definitely sure I saw one about Karl Schmidt Rottluff a bit later (maybe ca. 1980). May have seen exhibitions featuring Campendonk and/or the trip to Tunisia undertaken by Macke and Klee.
1980s: Visited Lenbachhaus in Munich with the Jaenicke research lab in 1989/90?
1.8.-19.9.2004 Von-der-Heydt-Museum Wuppertal,
Wassily Kandinsky: Der Klang der Farbe 1920-1921
2.11.2013 Tate Modern
Paul Klee
2014 (ab 25.9.) Bundeskunsthalle Bonn
August Macke und Franz Marc: Eine Künstlerfreundschaft
25.2.2024 Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Münster
Brücke zur geistigen Welt: Meisterwerke des Expressionismus
17.5.2024 K20 Düsseldorf
Hilma af Klint und Wassily Kandinsky: Träume von der Zukunft

finding Rita Strohl

After bringing up a young cellist and spending quite some time obsessing with cello music myself, it was a bit of a shock to discover a couple of truly amazing cello pieces from a composer I never heard of before.

The composer is Rita Strohl (1865-1941)

source

As was the case with many other female composers, her music was played during her lifetime, but forgotten after her death as there was nobody willing to champion it. Some of her works have been rediscovered, published and recorded in recent years.

The pieces are

Grande Sonate Dramatique "Titus et Bérénice" (1898) played by Hermine Horiot & Hélène Fouquart, Youtube

It does have a story to tell, based on the eponymous tragedy by Racine, but on the first couple of hearings I was so blown away by the music I didn't pay any attention to texts between the movements. By the day I first watched this, the video had only around 5860 which is just scandalous.

Solitude for cello (or violin) and piano played by Hermine Horiot, cello & Hélène Fouquart, piano, Youtube

Sheet music for this one is available on IMSLP and it does sound as if it might be playable for mere mortals (unlike the sonata which is pushing the limits of cello technique). On closer inspection, the cello part reaches a couple of quite high notes that I don't use very often (up to the F just over 2/3 up the A string), but the violin version of the solo part fits the instrument range more easily, and it is also very handy for the flute without any alterations. Actually great fun to play on the flute alongside with the cello video.

Here's cellist Sandra Lied Haga raving about Strohl's work in Strad magazine, April 2023. She has released a recording of Titus et Bérénice together with César Franck's sonata in A.

Oh and I've added the two videos to my youtube playlist with female composers.

Thanks to lesser-known-composers on tumblr.

the AI tipping point is nigh

I am slightly allergic to the whole AI hype and the tendency to use it for everything regardless of risks and side effects (a hundred years ago it was radium). So I successfully avoided writing about it, but recently the news about new data centres for AI and their exorbitant carbon footprint piled up and that at least is an angle worth reporting, I thought.

So here goes, entirely written by my own two hands, no AI involved:

The artificial intelligence tipping point

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 15, 5 August 2024, Pages R709-R711

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

The rapid expansion of data centre facilities built to serve the demand of AI applications is at risk of endangering energy supplies and climate policies. (Photo: Rawpixel.com.)

other recent (anti) AI news published after I submitted my feature:

• Ed Newton-Rex: Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI
• VICTOR TANGERMANN STUDY FINDS CONSUMERS ARE ACTIVELY TURNED OFF BY PRODUCTS THAT USE AI
• AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data research paper in Nature (open access)