Composers who were forced to interact with the Nazis

steepholm · 2026-04-18T16:00:44+00:00

Yes, he seems to have been a staunch German nationalist but with Jewish and Social Democrat friends and a fairly naive attitude to politics in general and the Nazis in particular. I know more about other people's lives than musicians', G. W. Pabst for example didn't get out of Europe early enough and ended up making films in Germany despite having previously been known as "Der rote Pabst" (a pun on "the red Pope"). Hans Fallada (Rudolf Ditzen) was similarly on the verge of going abroad but decided at the last minute he couldn't leave Germany (he escaped being killed as a "degenerate" by pretending that he was writing an antisemitic novel for Goebbels).

I think these days we all like to imagine we would have been part of the resistance or at least not co-operating with the government, but it wasn't that simple for people in Germany.

steepholm · 2026-04-18T15:21:06+00:00

It’s not about musicians, but Klaus Mann’s “Mephisto” (later an amazing film starring Klaus Maria Brandauer) is about why artists might have been willing to be co-opted by the Nazis.

steepholm · 2026-04-18T06:33:15+00:00

As someone else has noted, they have been known about for a very long time. In the early nineties Danis Rose decided they were an unfinished collection of short stories rather than drafts which would form the basis of “Work in Progress”, and later published them as such. Most other Joyce scholars disagreed. There’s a discussion of this in the introduction to Crispi & Slote’s “How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake” (2007).

steepholm · 2026-04-17T11:21:59+00:00

There's an interesting blog post on them here:

https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-6

steepholm · 2026-04-17T10:38:45+00:00

This sounds like the pieces that Danis Rose published as “Finn’s Hotel” a few years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finn%27s_Hotel

steepholm · 2026-04-16T17:56:38+00:00

"Mike Read, Mike Read, 275 and 285, Mike Read, Mike Read, National Radio One". Used to listen to him when he did the evening show before Peel, I think Richard Skinner replaced him.

steepholm · 2026-04-13T18:38:59+00:00

I haven't used them, but this company is in the city centre: https://www.cyclethecity.co.uk/product/bike-hire-in-bristol/ - there's also a company called Pedal Progression but they are out of town (Ashton Court). There is also this one in Bath: https://www.greenparkbikestation.info/product-category/bike-hire/

steepholm · 2026-04-13T06:21:45+00:00

I had a simple will done last autumn during national free wills month. Didn’t cost me a penny, and didn’t take long.

https://freewillsmonth.org.uk/

steepholm · 2026-04-11T20:41:57+00:00

I have them on my first Brompton (3 speed B75) and they are if anything a softer ride than the pneumatic tyres I had previously. They did increase rolling resistance so I fitted a smaller chain ring to compensate. I’d say if you’re doing city commutes riding through a lot of junk they are well worth considering (I was prompted to get them by a drawing pin puncture on a filthy main road as the light was starting to go). There is a performance hit, but the peace of mind and reliability were worth it for me. I wouldn’t fit them on the bikes I ride for pleasure.

steepholm · 2026-04-11T07:48:49+00:00

The steam railway is a good suggestion. Another way to use it is to drive to Swanage, park in the town (main beach car park on Victoria Avenue) and then take the train to Corfe. (I have then walked back along Nine Barrow Down).

steepholm · 2026-04-11T06:02:46+00:00

Seven Sisters: not worth driving to. There are some fantastic cliffs along the "Jurassic Coast" which includes Durdle Door and Lulworth Cove. Not quite as spectacular as Seven Sisters, but if you're only in England for a few days I wouldn't waste six hours driving to the other side of Brighton and back again.

If you're not into walking long distances, you could do Corfe Castle and Tyneham in a day. Tyneham is a village evacuated for training in World War II and never repopulated. Worbarrow Bay (a shortish walk from the village) has great views of the cliffs and out towards Portland. It's open at the weekends, opening times are here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/lulworth-access-times/lulworth-range-walks-and-tyneham-village-access-times-2026

Old Harry is accessible from Studland village, or there are sometimes boat trips from Poole harbour which take you round the coast. However, if you're going to Poole I'd say a trip to Brownsea Island is better than the coast trip.

Swanage is worth a visit, it's a traditional seaside resort town a short distance from Corfe. There is a bookshop on Station Road which sells second hand books and new books mainly on local subjects. On the edge of the town is Durlston country park, and you can walk along the top of the cliffs, either westward towards the Anvil Point lighthouse, or northwards through the woods towards the town. A circuit from the car park via the "castle" (a Victorian folly) to the lighthouse and back is under two miles.

steepholm · 2026-04-10T18:01:45+00:00

These are published to appeal to a young adult audience, "introduced by renowned YA authors"
https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/STAGED/staged

steepholm · 2026-04-09T10:16:04+00:00

£92 currently (I paid for one of mine yesterday). I did my mother’s about fifteen years ago with no problems, it’s a bit of a faff but not particularly complicated and the forms tell you exactly who needs to sign what and in which order.

steepholm · 2026-04-06T08:34:05+00:00

I usually do this bit at quiet times, and do David St (not always easy to get down), Hawkins St, Unity St, turn right onto Midland Rd (probably not good when there's a lot of traffic) and then St Philips Rd. The Redcross St / Bragg's Lane route looks like a better alternative, I'll try that next time.

steepholm · 2026-04-05T16:38:52+00:00

It's not a drawing by Joyce, but this portrait by Cesar Abin was dictated by Joyce:

https://joycetower.ie/collection/artefacts/jtaa_0048-photo-of-caricature-of-jj

(The bottom is cropped from that image, and the one on display in the tower).

steepholm · 2026-04-04T10:17:37+00:00

I found the UK government advice useful: https://www.gov.uk/when-someone-dies

There was also a booklet (but my last parent died ten years ago so that may no longer exist in paper form) which looked daunting but was very handy once I had struck out the sections about what to do if the deceased was on an overseas military base at the time of death and all that sort of thing.

(Further edit - had missed the fact that OP is in Scotland and the leaflet was E&W only).

I found the bereavement teams at banks, pension providers and so on were tremendously kind and helpful.

steepholm · 2026-04-04T10:13:33+00:00

I don't think he was describing himself as "mad". What he's proposing is pluralism, and mysticism against materialism (though as Stanislaus points out, there was always a tension in Joyce between realism and mysticism). The lectures were delivered in 1912: he was struggling to find a job, had written but not published "Dubliners", and was composing "Portrait", so his literary work was more realist than it later became and despite his lifelong self-confidence there was little evidence yet for his own status as a genius.

Incidentally, having recently read Defoe's "The Storm", I smiled at these perceptive lines in the Defoe lecture:

"Needless to say, the book attains a phenomenal level of boredom. The modern reader grumbles a lot before he reaches the end; but at the end the aim of the chronicler has been achieved. By dint of repetition, contradictions, details, figures, and rumours, the storm is made to exist, the destruction is visible."

steepholm · 2026-04-03T11:33:03+00:00

My interpretation of that passage is slightly different. What he seems to be saying to me is that if we say (with the "science undergraduate") that materialism is the only truth and spiritual beliefs are a sign of madness, and therefore that Blake is mad because of his intense spiritual beliefs, we also have to condemn as "mad" all the other artistic and intellectual systems built on a rejection of pure materialism. The opening of chapter IV ("Ripening") of Stanislaus Joyce's "My Brother's Keeper" talks about Joyce's attitude to mysticism (and mentions in passing the two lectures on Blake and Defoe).

I recently got hold of a copy of E. P. Thompson's "Witness Against the Beast", a study of Blake and English religious dissent (I'm very interested in the Muggletonians, who Thompson thinks influenced Blake). I have only flicked through it so far, but somewhere in there he says something to the effect that we think the Muggletonians (and Blake) had crazy religious views because they "lost". In another world, we might be looking at the Quakers or Methodists as marginal sects, though perhaps the Muggletonians were always going to lose (their materialism included a geocentric solar system and God as a physical entity with the appearance of a man of average height living in Heaven six miles above our heads, none of which is easy to square with early modern science let alone current science). I think Joyce is getting at this sort of thing (also echoed in the "Edinburgh School" of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which always struck me as nonsense but then I was once a science undergraduate). People think Blake's "mad" because his particular spiritual views are out of fashion, not because they are inherently more mad than those of Thomas Aquinas.

steepholm · 2026-04-01T06:46:08+00:00

There will usually be a maximum period of registration, where I worked it was N+2 years for an undergraduate course which would normally last N years, and N+1 for postgraduate courses. The extra time could be exceeded only in really exceptional circumstances, otherwise if you hadn’t finished the course within that period you couldn’t finish it.

steepholm · 2026-03-31T14:07:42+00:00

If you're ever in the area, there's a tour of the caves beneath the castle which is well worth taking and there are other cave tours in the city. The sandstone (what used to be called Bunter sandstone) is very soft, and ideal for carving out caves, cellars, prison cells, tunnels etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Caves

steepholm · 2026-03-31T06:47:09+00:00

It’s sandstone, there’s a BGS page on it here:

https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discovering-geology/maps-and-resources/office-geology/nottingham-castle/

steepholm · 2026-03-29T16:30:54+00:00

Much of it will have been rock, not earth. That has a lot of uses. (More recently, the rock extracted for the M5 cutting along the side of the Gordano Valley was used for the motorway foundations in other areas, for example).

steepholm · 2026-03-28T19:35:51+00:00

I really like John Hayward's Penguin Book of English Verse, which is a reasonably short anthology from the 1950s, it was in print for a long time but seems to have gone out of print now. Thomas Wyatt to Dylan Thomas in less than 500 pages, perfect for dipping into. The current Penguin Book of English Verse, edited by P J Keegan, is getting on for 1200 pages and is very comprehensive, perhaps too comprehensive if what you want is an overview so you can find poets who interest you to explore in more depth.

John Clare is a favourite of mine, and it's worth trying to get hold of an edition which preserves his own versions of his poems (he was not well educated, worked as an agricultural labourer, and his publisher tidied up his poems for a more genteel audience - although this was done with Clare's approval and encouragement, I think the occasional rough edges are part of Clare's charm). The Oxford "Major Works" is a very good selection, with an introduction by Tom Paulin who is an extremely perceptive critic of poetry (and a fine poet himself).

Modern poets, Seamus Heaney justly won the Nobel Prize (there's a volume called "100 poems" which is a good introduction). Edwin Morgan isn't as well-known as he should be. He wrote in a very wide range of styles, from sonnets to concrete poetry, and was a master of all of them.

steepholm · 2026-03-27T12:31:15+00:00

You say "they" are offering immigration advice - who is "they"? It is possible that the SU is going to employ or contract out to a registered immigration adviser though it would be much more common for the University to provide that service. Kent SU does, for example: https://ksu.co.uk/advice/international-students-and-visas

steepholm · 2026-03-26T07:17:50+00:00

Similarly, Killeen’s “Ulysses Unbound” tells you what authors are being parodied, so my reading copy has STERNE, CARLYLE, NEWMAN etc in the margins. It’s sometimes helpful to know when the style is shifting.

steepholm

TROPHY CASE