Category: A toast to …

A toast to … Jackson Lamb

Cafe Katja.

The week ends on a moderately high note: the Eagles won their first game of the 2025-2026 season last night, so a little cautious optimism is in order. You still have a few days to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert production of Tristan und Isolde. And a reminder that Pursuit, the new podcast series from the National Constitution Center, premieres next week.

If you find this a good weekend to cuddle up with a little British TV, you can start it off with the new season of The Great British Baking Show, which launches its new season on Netflix today. Also, I’ve come a little late in the game to Slow Horses, the spy drama which premiered on Apple TV a few years ago, but I highly recommend it. Gary Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, a cynical, flatulent, foul-mouthed, and very likely alcoholic version of George Smiley who oversees a bunch of MI5 agents; they’ve badly screwed up intelligence operations in one way or another and find themselves languishing in a shabby London outpost of the intelligence service. (Oldman has played Smiley, too, in the 2011 film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and he received an Oscar nomination for his performance.)

It’s a well-constructed and fast-moving thriller that enjoys delving into the eccentricities of its characters, not to mention dropping a few shards of social and cultural criticism along the way; it’s won some awards here and there, and Oldman himself has been nominated for an Outstanding Acting Emmy this year (it’s also been nominated for Outstanding Drama Series, as well as Writing and Directing nods). As Lamb describes the men and women under his supervision, “I think they’re a bunch of fucking losers. But they’re my losers.” My kind of spymaster.

A toast to …

Nibelungenlied Manuscript C, Folio 1r, about 1220-1250. Owned by Landesbank Baden-Württemberg and Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Permanent loan to the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe (Codex Donaueschingen 63).

Reflecting the increasingly Austria-centric concentration of this journal, I posted items this week about the late Professor Marjorie Perloff and the holiday offerings of radio klassik Stephansdom.

In addition, I raise my glass today to the Nibelungenlied; as part of my continuing education and immersion in all things German and Central European, I’m reading the Penguin Classics translation by A.T. Hatto, a rather interesting fellow himself. A page of the manuscript, from a 13th century codex, is above. I’m just past the midpoint now, as Kriemhild  stopped at Melk and then proceeded to Vienna for her marriage to Hungary’s King Etzel. As it happens my family and I were in both Melk and Vienna just a few months ago; no sign of Kriemhild, but that was some time ago.

Compared to the much older epics of the Mediterranean Sea — the Iliad and the Odyssey for starters — the Nibelungenlied is far sparer and relatively god- and goddess-free, with more of an emphasis on the internal lives of its characters; apart from Siegfried’s cloak of invisibility, there’s very little supernatural about it. I suppose you could say that, like the climate from which it emerged, it’s much colder than Homer’s poems, but I rather like that; although of course there’s considerably more Christian and chivalrous material, there’s also an awareness that paganism was still an element in social, cultural, and religious life (indeed, a Christian Kriemhild marries a pagan Etzel, a point made by the anonymous Nibelungenlied poet). In addition, both Brunhilde and Kriemhild possess much more agency and are far more energetic than Homer’s female characters — the Nibelungenlied is much sexier and erotic, for want of better words, than the earlier epics. Wagner’s Ring operas have a rather scant resemblance to this poem, relying more on the Volsung Saga, but the Nibelungenlied itself is still quite a wonderful read.

Reading the rest of it is how I’ll be spending much of this weekend.