Author: Mark Hannam

I recently visited the north German city of Lübeck, which was, a millennium ago, a leading member of the Hansa League that dominated the shipping-trade in the Baltic and North Sea, and, much more recently, the birthplace of Thomas Mann, one of my favourite novelists and to whom I had come to pay homage.  A scholarly friend tells me that Lübeck was also the adopted home of Dieterich Buxtehude, the Danish composer and celebrated organist from the Baroque period and that when Johann Sebastian Bach was a young man, he walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck – a distance of 400km – to hear Buxtehude play.  Unlike Bach, I took the train from Hamburg, a journey of merely seventy-five minutes, and I spent several enjoyable hours walking around the city, stopping briefly to sample some kaffee und kuchen in a café owned by Niederegger, a local company that has been making marzipan flavoured confections for the past two hundred years.  I can confirm that the cake in Lübeck is excellent.

I discovered Thomas Mann’s work as a teenager – Death in Venice plus some short stories – and during my twenties I worked my way through several of his major books, including The Magic Mountain, The Holy Sinner, and Buddenbrooks, his famous early story which was set in Lübeck.  In recent years I have read Dr Faustus and re-read most of the earlier novels, and this year’s challenge is Joseph and His Brothers, the tetralogy set in Biblical times.  First question: why is Thomas Mann’s four volume novel referred to as a tetralogy, whereas Laurence Durrell’s and Elena Ferrante’s four volume novels are always called quartets?  Is there a reason or is this simply convention.  Second question: why do I find Mann’s work so impressive and engaging, always a pleasure to be reacquainted with?  It was this latter question that preoccupied me as I strolled around Lübeck in the winter sunshine.

Continue reading “Lübeck”

When I was a student, I was twice elected to be one of the two undergraduate representatives on my College Council.  Looking back, I realise that I was rather ineffective, never fully understanding the relative importance of the various items on the agenda, nor knowing how to be persuasive in discussion, nor being able to build alliances with those academics who were sympathetic to the student viewpoint.  It was, as they say, a learning experience.  During this time, I thought it important to attend the monthly student union meetings, to be informed about the issues that my fellow students were discussing and aware of anything that might need to be presented to the College Council on the students’ behalf.  It was at one of these meetings that I witnessed a disreputable breach of good process, that was successful in the short term, but caused sufficient reputational damage that it was soon rescinded.

The student union in the College was responsible for distributing funds to societies and clubs, generally according to their popularity, adjusted for the costs of the activity.  The newly elected head of the student union was keen to reallocate money away from one of the big sports clubs, to fund other societies with which he had more sympathy.  His plan had some merit, but it would be controversial.  His proposed funding allocations were due to be debated at an open meeting, under item 10 of a long agenda.  It would likely take an hour or so to get to this item, after various reports, updates, and a discussion about the annual college party, had been dealt with.   As I headed to the meeting, I passed the College bar, where members of the under-threat sports club were gathering.  They were going to drink beer first, prepare their speeches, and then show up at the meeting to vote against the proposed cut in funding.

The meeting started, sparsely attended, and the minutes from the previous month were approved.  The head of the union then suggested a change to the order of the agenda: we could, he said, take item 10 now, to approve the new funding allocations, and then go back to item 2, ‘matters arising from the previous meeting’.   The attendees all laughed, thinking this was a joke but the chair, persisting with his plan, invited anyone who wished to speak for or against the recommendation on club funding allocations to raise their hand.  One student – clearly briefed beforehand about this ploy –spoke in favour of the redistribution of resources, after which the resolution at item 10 was passed without dissent.  The multitude of sport club members who were about to lose 20% of their annual funding were still sitting in the bar, unaware that they had been disenfranchised.  An hour later, when they arrived at the meeting, there was uproar when they discovered that the motion they had come to vote down had already been approved. 

Under “any other business”, the captain of the sports club proposed a motion of no confidence in the head of the student union, which was passed by a show of hand.  A constitutional crisis loomed.

Continue reading “Due process”

The first week of the new year provided me the opportunity to visit an exhibition of paintings by Winslow Homer, at London’s National Gallery.  His work is surprisingly under-appreciated on this side of the Atlantic: according to the catalogue, this is only the second exhibition ever held in Britain devoted to his work; furthermore, and shockingly, there is not a single work by Homer held in any UK public art collection, despite him spending over a year living and painting in England, near Tynemouth in 1881-2. 

The image used to advertise the exhibition –- The Gulf Stream, 1899 – was a poor choice as it borders on cliché.  A black man lies on the deck of a small boat, staring impassively to the horizon.  The mast is broken, and a storm is fast approaching, yet he appears unconcerned.  He is surrounded by symbols: a handful of loose sugar canes lie on the deck to remind us of the importance of the sugar trade and the slave economy that maintained it, although it is unclear why the sailor would have need sugar on this fishing trip; on the distant horizon there is a bigger sailing ship, another symbol of global trade, but probably too far away and too busy to come to his assistance; his damaged vessel is circled by three grey sharks, coloured to match the uniforms of the soldiers of The Confederacy; the sea is tinted with splashes of dark red, perhaps the blood of previous victims of sharks, or perhaps a sly reference to the poetry of the artist’s namesake, whose heroes once sailed over “wine-dark seas” of the Mediterranean.  The nonchalance of this man in the face of nature’s threats divests the picture of emotional power.  It presents a puzzle for the mind to decode rather than a pleasure for the eye to linger over.

Continue reading “Homer’s yule seas”

It’s that time of the year.  Before the time for the giving of gifts comes the time for the making of lists.  What were the best twenty books of the year, the best ten tv shows, the best five art exhibitions, and the top three recordings of baroque music on period instruments.  I try to avoid spending time reading through such lists, although as I write this sentence it occurs to me that perhaps I should pay more attention, allowing me to compile my own list of the Best Lists of the Year.

Part of the problem is the calendar.  The advent of the year’s end seems to provoke within us the desire to review the current and then to make resolutions for the next.  The prevalence of this desire should not blind us to its oddness.  For most of human history the “year” that mattered was the crop-cycle for basic food supply.  In Europe these cycles are annual, with a season for planting seeds, a season for tending the growing plants, a season for harvesting crops, and a season when it is too cold for arable farming, during which the preservation of stored food supplies is paramount.  In other, warmer climates there are two or three crop-cycles each year, but these countries had little influence on the development of the Western model of annual thought. 

Continue reading “Slow Train”

When it started, seventeen days ago, there were thirty-two teams drawn from all over the world: four from Latin America; four from North, Central America, and the Caribbean; five from Africa; six from Asia (which includes the Middle East and Oceania); and thirteen from Europe.  The playing styles and levels of experience on show were highly diverse, the fans uniformly raucous, and there was plenty of early entertainment blended with a few surprise results. 

Now, we are down to the final eight teams, and it is evident that FIFA’s world rankings are reliable predictors of World Cup success.  Six of the remaining eight teams are ranked in FIFA’s top ten: these are Brazil (1), Argentina (3), France (4), England (5), Netherlands (8) and Portugal (9).  They are joined by Croatia (12) and Morocco (22). 

Of the five teams ranked above Croatia that are not contesting this year’s quarter finals, Belgium (2), knocked-out in the group stage after losing to Morocco, were weakened by several of their “golden generation” carrying recent injuries and one or two others looking slightly past their prime.  Italy (6) very surprisingly failed to qualify for the tournament finals, coming second in their qualifying group behind Switzerland (15) and then losing to North Macedonia (65) in the semi-final of the second-round tournament for second place group teams (the North Macedonians losing to Portugal in the final).  Denmark (10) failed to progress beyond the group stage after losing to Australia (38), as did Germany (11) who lost to Japan (24).   Spain (6) made it through the group stages but lost their last-sixteen game to Morocco, who are the surprise package of the tournament. 

Despite these upsets during the qualifying process and the group stages, the composition of the last eight suggests that FIFA rankings are good indicators of success in tournament football, where consistency matters, along with the ability to take penalties (as Japan and Spain have found to their cost).  International football is basically predictable, which does not mean that it is not exciting.  Over ninety minutes, quality trumps effort and secures its reward.  The delight of the games for the fans is provided by the way that the top teams find the route to victory.  There is nothing dull about watching the best players in the best teams, searching for glory on the biggest sporting stage.

Continue reading “Pieces of eight”