On Squeaking, and Arnold's Questionable Sweetness and Light

Yesterday I slept well and practiced scales, played 'stock' pieces that I memorized as a child, and *cough* 'exploring' the first and second Kreutzer études on the violin before I went to work. Admittedly there's a problem with playing the E on the A string, presumably because my pinky finger is not strong enough to hold down the note properly. It is generally quite off-pitch. And since that seems to be largely the point of learning the second étude, it is another puncture to the balloon of my ego.

Last evening I had another happily dazed YouTube session: this time I 'rediscovered' the performance of Mendelssohn's violin concerto with Yehudi Menuhin, and Antal Dorati as the conductor. I heard a weird militaristic strain in the orchestral part, which repelled me at times; but Menuhin himself was fantastic, and made me ashamed of my lackadaisical approach to the violin. He seems so terribly convinced in the superpowers of his instrument, if that makes sense. And I've been watching bits of his 'violin tutorial' filmed for the BBC; I find it pedagogically vague but personally charming. He seems a little flustered, and very proper — proper even when he upends himself into a yoga pose in the middle of the proceedings, as his pullovered young pupils, an ornate-looking side table, and four ascetic blank walls encircle (or should I say, ensquare) him.

Today the work day was not as stressful as it's been in the past weeks, and at the same time I think the hyperactive state into which the workload has pushed me is persisting. I still feel like beginning a hundred new projects at once. It's also as if my brain is rarely turned off, even if it isn't running at its finest quality.

But I was thinking of ending Culture and Anarchy as my U-Bahn reading. I've been worried about being a snob all my life, and yet this book is a consolation. All my pettiest and most fastidious moments are puny infantile efforts in the face of the author's supreme patronizing disdain toward such large masses of British, American and Continental society, that so far only Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt and his own illustrious self have apparently survived the selection process.

His tendency to glowingly picture a world where everyone wears a Matthew Arnold intellectual and theological straitjacket or sleeps in Matthew Arnold's Procrustean bed — witness his insistence that everyone in Britain should really be an Anglican (or Catholic, or Jew, just not a Dissenter, whom he persists in considering as Anglicans manqués) — is truly bizarre in a grown man.

So when I stepped into the U-Bahn this morning, I wasn't feeling too bad. But when I stepped out again, having read this balderdash, I felt like I was frowning sourly enough to curdle milk. And I tried to avoid making eye contact with passersby for fear of burning figurative holes through them with my fiery gaze.