Hilton Head Island: The Admiral in her gig; what the weather can be; horror and more Shostakovich

 

Above is Audrey, Admiral of Audrey’s and Kent’s Armada of small boats, which numbers around twenty, sitting in their latest addition, HENNING, a 12’ Bahamas dinghy, built between 1937 and 1941, which makes it older than I am which as we know is really old.  Kent’s part in the Armada is self-described as ‘moveable ballast’, but he does a bit more than that, including being Fleet Photographer.

You can read more at:

http://smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com/2023/11/there-we-were.html

I thank John for sending me an image of the above painting which he tells me hangs in the San Francisco Yacht Club and is titled, What the Weather Can Be.  I like it.  I’ve not been to the yacht club.  I have been in that weather more times than I can remember.

I finished reading LENINGRAD:  SIEGE AND SYMPHONY yesterday and I also completed listening to Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony movement by movement.  I will now set aside an hour and twenty minutes and listen to it all the way through again.

However in the last pages of the book I read of the most horrible act I have ever known one of our species to perform.  I accept that it was performed by a woman who had been driven insane by the terror and deprivations of the siege.  Still she did something that I would not have thought possible for a human to do and that one did has expanded my understanding of our species.  I am not going to give details and I suppose I am only writing this because it is still troubling me and too close to the surface of my mind.

Other than that incident, I recommend the book, particularly if you have any interest in music, although it is about the siege as much as the symphony.

After finishing LENINGRAD, I read more in Wikipedia about siege and symphony and Shostakovich.

The almost three year siege is described as the greatest destruction and loss of life in any modern city.  The number of deaths is estimated at more than 1,500,000.

While part of the first movement of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony is generally considered ‘The Invasion Theme’ and to be about the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, there is evidence that Shostakovich wrote it before the invasion and that it was about the Stalin Terror in the 30s.  Shostakovich was twice denounced by the Party.  In the 30s and again after the war.  The second time he slept on the landing near the elevator outside his apartment so that when they came to arrest him his family would not be disturbed.  He never was arrested and in fact was compelled later to join the party, but he lived with the fear, as did everyone in the Soviet Union, from the mid-1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953, of being taken at any moment, tortured and shot.

Fortunately due to chance of birth, you and I do not.