BBC Radio 3 in general

[LMcD]

I think it was probably about the time that FoR3 started that we were in touch with GR. We culled this quote from her for our homepage:

A constant anxiety across Radio 3's 60 years, expressed in many voices, was what the network was for, what it was supposed to be doing, whether it should be a creator, a pacemaker, a "great aesthetic endeavour", offering "something larger to cling to". That argument persists. These days, I long for something larger to cling to in the way of philosophic and aesthetic discourse.

She was always more R4 speech than R3 music, but both provoke the same thought about presentation: what kind of a listener are they addressing? I was going to comment on the Jon Vickers interview on another thread where he said that opera wasn't 'entertainment' - by which I suppose he meant 'mere light entertainment', drop in, listen if you've nothing better to do ... For me entertainment means, above all, requiring me to engage my brain, to think, to analyse, to criticise, to stretch. Anything that doesn't do that doesn't interest me. Most of R3 no longer interests me.

In the same article in the i, she says that 'Radio 4 doesn't want me any more'.

[french frank]

In the same article in the i, she says that 'Radio 4 doesn't want me any more'.

Exactly how I feel about R3.

[Pulcinella]

Sounds like R4 has the same contempt for its listeners as R3 does: or did she do something to upset them?

[french frank]

Sounds like R4 has the same contempt for its listeners as R3 does: or did she do something to upset them?

But it's everywhere, isn't it? It's how society evolves, how culture changes, how education changes, how attitudes change, how fashions change, how art changes. Go with the flow or join the 'left behind' generation/class.

[eighthobstruction]

...hey, the kids just want to dance and wave torches....(and pay a lot of good money to do so)....

[vinteuil]

But it's everywhere, isn't it? It's how society evolves, how culture changes, how education changes, how attitudes change, how fashions change, how art changes. Go with the flow or join the 'left behind' generation/class.

I am reminded of the elegiac final para of Borges's 1940 story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius -

"At that French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the earth. The world will be Tlön. That makes very little difference to me ; through my quiet days in this hotel in Adrogué, I go on revising (though I never intend to publish) an indecisive translation in the style of Quevedo of Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall."

.

[eighthobstruction]

Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall."

.

....several versions on Amazon at this very moment....<<"The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. These are the circles Browne's thought's describe.">>

....Written after the discovery of over forty Bronze Age burial urns in seventeenth-century Norfolk, Sir Thomas Browne's profound consideration of the inevitability of death remains one of the most fascinating and poignant of all reflections upon the vanity of mankind's lust for immortality.....Ah yes Sebald connection....I remember now (though not well enough)

[oliver sudden]

I was going to comment on the Jon Vickers interview on another thread where he said that opera wasn't 'entertainment' - by which I suppose he meant 'mere light entertainment', drop in, listen if you've nothing better to do ... For me entertainment means, above all, requiring me to engage my brain, to think, to analyse, to criticise, to stretch. Anything that doesn't do that doesn't interest me. Most of R3 no longer interests me.

A long time ago I was up for a scholarship that would go to a student from one of the schools of the Victorian College of the Arts. I was the music candidate of course. A panel interviewed me and when they were done with their questions asked me if I had any questions for them. I asked: what do you want from music? One of them said: to be entertained, to which the others chimed in in agreement. I asked: not to be challenged, provoked, stimulated etc? No. Oh well, I thought, I’m not getting this scholarship am I.

[french frank]

I am reminded of the elegiac final para of Borges's 1940 story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius -

I think my favourite writer. So comfortable just being himself. I love that when he was asked what he thought of the English translations of his work, he said they improve it - his sense of humour would suggest he didn't really think that was true, but it would be all the same to him if it was.

[vinteuil]

I think my favourite writer. So comfortable just being himself. I love that when he was asked what he thought of the English translations of his work, he said they improve it - his sense of humour would suggest he didn't really think that was true, but it would be all the same to him if it was.

re : translations. The one I provided above (and again here) is that in the more recent penguin edn [1998], by Andrew Hurley -

"At that French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the earth. The world will be Tlön. That makes very little difference to me ; through my quiet days in this hotel in Adrogué, I go on revising (though I never intend to publish) an indecisive translation in the style of Quevedo of Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall."

I think I prefer that in the earlier penguin, by James E Irby [1964] -

"Then French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising in the still days at the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial."

For those with the Spanish -

"Entonces desaparecerán del planeta el inglés y el francés y el mero español. El mundo será Tlön. Yo no hago caso, yo sigo revisando en los quietos días del hotel de Adrogué una indecisa traducción quevediana (que no pienso dar a la imprenta) del Urn Burial de Browne."




.

[LMcD]

Sounds like R4 has the same contempt for its listeners as R3 does: or did she do something to upset them?

She mentions the following issues:
The Archers are no longer convincing
Comedy shows too often feature comedians who laugh at each other
'Today' presenters don't allow enough time for answers to their questions.

[french frank]

"Entonces desaparecerán del planeta el inglés y el francés y el mero español. El mundo será Tlön. Yo no hago caso, yo sigo revisando en los quietos días del hotel de Adrogué una indecisa traducción quevediana (que no pienso dar a la imprenta) del Urn Burial de Browne."

I have the Hurley hardback edition. I think I should have preferred 'planet' to 'earth' or 'globe'. I'm not quite sure what Borges had in mind with 'mero'. It sounds as if he was suggesting that Spanish doesn't quite measure up to the grandeurs of English or French. 'Indecisa' sounds typically self-deprecatory, probably 'vaguish, not quite accurate'. On further consideration he might have liked Hurley's Urne Buriall.

[Serial_Apologist]

But it's everywhere, isn't it? It's how society evolves, how culture changes, how education changes, how attitudes change, how fashions change, how art changes. Go with the flow or join the 'left behind' generation/class.

You make it sound like the weather - something that just happens to come along. We don't have to think that way! I can't be alone (surely!?) in detecting a pattern in the evolving (or more likely declining) character tone of news and more general information dissemination - if (as I do) you understand output in the sense of intended opinion formation. The way in which what was initially a welcome new medium, the radio/TV phone-in, has now become the denizen of the inarticulate circular argument=spinning line hogger, and the subject's framing has been narrowed into tramlines of orthodoxy to the exclusion, or time-limitation, of alternative viewpoints. Panel shows that perennially ask the same issues and get the same answers ad nauseam reinforce the notion that nothing can be done or there is no alternative, as Thatcher so condescendingly put it. The defeatist and the escapist acting in harness making for obedient compliance.

[french frank]

You make it sound like the weather - something that just happens to come along. We don't have to think that way!

The individual doesn't have to think that way. Groups of individuals who don't think that way can act together to resist in whatever way seems possible. They succeed or they fail. Historically, such resistance movements are rare; and even rarer are the successes.

[Anastasius]

But it's everywhere, isn't it? It's how society evolves, how culture changes, how education changes, how attitudes change, how fashions change, how art changes. Go with the flow or join the 'left behind' generation/class.

Did you really mean 'evolve' ? Surely the general consensus of the word is that the evolved state is 'better'. I suggest that that can hardly be said of the current iterations of Radio 4 (of which I listen to less and less) or Radio 3 (of which I listen not at all now).

SA puts is far better than me.