Culture Vulture

2006-02-19T07:38:00.000-08:00

ON READING THE SUNDAY PAPERS

"Against stupidity the Gods themselves struggle in vain"
Schiller

Each week I find myself considering giving up the Sunday newspapers, in fact all newspapers and news in any medium, only to reconsider at once, such is the addiction to being informed. And it is a real addiction. What astonishes me is the apparently huge proportion of the population who seem immune to the addiction and are quite happy to be uninformed - to the extent that they are unaware of things which will affect them massively and personally. I envy them their insouciance. Ignorance may truly be bliss.

What is so repellent in newspapers and other media is the catalogue of almost unbelievable stupidity affecting nearly all areas of life. The mind actually does boggle. Logic, informed decisions, self-preservation instinct, sheer common sense are almost nowhere in evidence. In their place reign vacuity, this month's fashionable cant, downright irrationality and criminal irresponsibility. Values are inverted or non-existent. The 10th rate is always preferred to the 1st rate. Society seems to have gone literally mad. It is all profoundly depressing because it appears utterly unstoppable. One feels like going mad oneself, if only to be in step with the world.

Can anyone suggest a remedy? A Trappist monastery on a desert island, perhaps? I think I can suggest the cause - wealth has caused our decadence. We would and could not have a lunatic society like this if we didn't know where our next meal was coming from. Reality in its hardest form would see to that. As it is, we are the fools of Kipling's 1919 poem "The Gods of the Copybook Headings"; and, as its last lines promise, our come-uppance is ineluctable.

"As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man-
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return."

2006-02-03T11:26:00.000-08:00

THIS REVIEW WAS SENT IN BY CEC

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

How to change the circumstances of one’s origins in order to improve one’s chances in life, and the consequences arising therefrom, is what Roth explores in the above novel. His subject is Coleman Silk, a young boy born into an impoverished but cultured Negro family. His father has come down in the world, lost his optician’s shop after a bank crash, and is now a dining car attendant, and his mother works as a nurse at the local hospital. Coleman’s father does not talk about the racial humiliations he experiences, instead he brings up his three children to value honesty, uprightness, gentleness, teaches them correct English by reading them, and making them read aloud, broadsheet newspapers, and exposes them to the Anglo-American ethos in every way, for he and his wife are as proud to be Negroes as they are of being Americans.

When they discover that Coleman has secretly learned to box at a boys’ club they are perturbed because of the intrinsic violence, the need to hurt another person for financial reward. Coleman explains that he boxes for sport, not for money, but his parents remain troubled, his father particularly fearing to lose his parental authority and guidance. Coleman prevails, and is invited to a prestigious boxing match away from his home patch. His instructor advises him beforehand not to mention that he is coloured because everyone will assume him to be Jewish on account of his exceptionally light colour. Coleman laughs about that, but the seed is sown.

He enters the all-Negro Howard college as his father wishes, who wants Coleman to study medicine, and then marry a light-coloured Negro girl, have children with her, and perpetuate their family. The boy does extremely well, but also has his first experience of racism in Woolworth where he is prevented from buying a hot dog. Others slurs follow, such as not being invited to a birthday party because of his colour, and later, after having joined the navy, a prostitute refusing to serve him. These incidents do not cause him to dislike white people, rather he blames whichever individual inflicted this on him. He is, however, infuriated to have the word “nigger” flung at him. He is a Negro, but he is not a nigger.

Having left Howard after his father’s death, he joins New York University, where he does brilliantly. He falls in love with a white girl who returns his love, He does not tell her that he is black, hopes that she will simply assimilate the fact when he takes her home to meet his mother and family. The girl is politely received and entertained, but when they return to New York the girl breaks down, confesses that she cannot accept the situation, and the relationship ends with many tears.
When eventually Coleman forms another relationship with another white girl he still cannot bring himself to tell her of his race although he believes that she would probably not mind. Instead he tells his mother that he will marry her, and that he now will live as a white man. This means, as his mother makes clear to him, that he will no longer have a mother, or a brother, or a sister, or any relatives. Coleman accepts this. He marries the girl, has four white children, becomes a brilliant Classics professor at a college in New England, and is finally made the outstanding, innovative, deeply respected Dean of the Classics faculty.

It is at this point that Roth begins the novel. The shattering conclusion is somewhere in the middle as in AMERICAN PASTORAL, and, again as in that book, it is the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who reconstructs and relates the intricate events. Coleman’s retribution? He is accused of racism against a black student! Having spent his life as a white man the only defence he could present is not available to him. The resolution is as exciting as it is devastating. Read it, and find out for yourself.

2006-01-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

BRITISH AND (NOT ALWAYS) PROUD OF IT

So Gordon Brown wants us to celebrate being British. This is a rather clumsy and obvious ploy by the Chancellor: playing down his Scottishness and emphasising his Britishness in order to further his leadership aspirations. But, that aside, has it not been a recurrent theme over the last 30-40 years? Anyone remember the "I'm backing Britain" campaign? I even recall a clearly pre-2nd World War metal sign in a Birmingham suburb (it might possibly have dated from the 19th century) which proclaimed: " Bernstein's Mantles: British and Best!".

Dr. Johnson's famous remark that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", with its implication that the aim is to cover up or distract from one's failings, may be apposite for Oor Gordon's campaign. But whatever the (even charitably interpteted) political motive, the point is surely why should any of the rest of us celebrate.

There are many aspects of Britain I for one am not tempted to feel proud of, let alone boast about. For example, that considerable section of our young people whose drunken, foul-mouthed depravity is unequalled not just in Europe but perhaps in the world. Or the corollary of our filthy, litter-choked town centres. Or the proud-to-know-nothing philistinism which pervades our public institutions, resulting in mindless "political correctness" and the cult of stupidity and coarseness. How can one celebrate a country which does not laugh to scorn the ignorant, pompous moron who decrees the pinning-up over the cots in a maternity hospital the po-faced notice "I am a small person. Please do not coo at me." ? And political correctness is just one facet of the most worrying trend for me - the steady erosion of our freedoms; so admired by Voltaire and so characteristic of our national tradition.

Of course, there are still plenty of things to be proud of in Britain. We can all make our own list and no doubt many of them would be found in most people's list. One, I would suggest, is (pace Gordon Brown) not feeling any need to trumpet our virtues but rather treating them as so self-evident that they require no advertisement! Or is that actually the very summit of arrogance?

Finally, I should like to address the very vexed question of "Britishness" itself. There are many learned voices today arguing that the British identity has outlived its usefulness with the end of Empire, that it was always an artificial construct with little real echo in people's hearts. It is equated with those other artificial polities in Europe now crumbled or crumbling such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union (alias The Russian Empire). I once thought this way myself, but now am not so sure, believing we are essentially more cohesive than these countries for many reasons of culture, history and sentiment. And, after all, the relatively recently created artificial polities of Italy and Germany show few signs of disintegrating!

But one great wrong must first be righted if Britain is to survive. It is what I call "The English Question", and others "The West Lothian Question". As a Scot, I can feel both Scottish and British. And, yes, I do object to English people's lazy or thoughtless use of the term England for Britain. Nevertheless, I find it monstrous that there is no English parliament, while both Wales and Scotland have devolved bodies. Westminster will not suffice - it is the parliament of the United Kingdom with representatives from all over the United Kingdom. As by far the largest component of the UK, England must obviously have its own legislative body if the whole devolution business is not to remain a farce. In the meantime, a way must be found to prevent MPs with seats in Scotland from voting on purely English matters - not only absurd but grossly unfair. If Britain ever falls apart, it will be because of the wholly justified resentment and anger of the English at the present indefensible constitutional arrangements.

So, while I am chary of wishing yet more politicians on our already over-"governed" country, might it not be a task worthy of Gordon Brown's envisaged future administration to ensure a more equitable, sensible set-up as a priority. Then perhaps we might continue to have a Britain in which to celebrate our Britishness.

2006-01-24T11:02:00.000-08:00

THIS POST WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN

The Canterbury Tales

We went last week to Stratford upon Avon for one of our weekend theatre trips to the RSC and, as well as their ‘Great Expectations’, which was good, but not as good as ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ produced some years ago, we saw two three hour presentations of Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’, comprising about sixteen of the tales all told.

I can highly recommend these performances as they were extremely funny, provided of course that one is not offended by bawdy, indeed downright vulgar humour. As anyone who has read Chaucer will know his work reflected all the uninhibited attitudes that those of medieval times took towards sex and other bodily functions and the RSC certainly didn’t pull any punches.

In accordance with the requirements to include more than a little Christian element in his work Chaucer began and ended with more uplifting stories, such as that told by the Knight, which provided the structure within which the drunks, lechers and sodomites sought to entertain their fellow travellers with their tales. Perhaps the most jarring note was that told by the Abbess, which had a very definite anti Semitic element, true to the time but unpleasant for modern ears.

Nevertheless by far the majority of the six hours was enjoyable entertainment and much appreciated by the audience.

2006-01-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

SOPHIE SCHOLL

The other day I saw the film SOPHIE SCHOLL, the full title being SOPHIE SCHOLL: DIE LETZTEN TAGE (THE LAST DAYS). And indeed it all takes place in the single month of February 1943, and for the most part in Gestapo Headquarters in Munich.

The film deals with the destruction of The White Rose resistance movement, composed of students and certain academics at Munich University, following mainly the capture, interrogation, trial and execution of Sophie. It is based on documents of the time, plus recollections of eye-witnesses and of those who knew the resisters. It looks and feels extremely authentic, sometimes quoting directly from the surviving documentation. As the White Rose, like other anti-Nazi German resistance groups , is little known in this country, I can vouch for the accuracy of the details, setting and atmosphere of the film. It was, for instance, a shock to recognise unmistakably the University of Munich, outside and inside!

Above all, it is brilliantly acted. There is a chilling cameo of "Raging Roland" Freisler, President of the People's Court, which is terrifyingly accurate. Sophie's Gestapo interrogator, Mohr, is another wonderful performance; a sinister figure, no doubt, but not the one-dimensional demon beloved of Anglo-Saxon war films, rather a thoughtful and dutiful man hobbled by his commitment to a mad ideology. There are many other fine and subtle performances, especially, of course, that of Julia Jentsch as Sophie herself. She shows, in what is inevitably a dark and tragic story, just how young and thus sometimes how "youthful" in various ways she was. Her courage and dignity, but also the waste of what her life promised, are deeply moving.

"Authenticity" is striven for by modern cinema. There are limits, of course, if one is to tell a story, and this film is no exception. Some of the episodes may be inferentially imagined, some are certainly composites of several happenings. Nevertheless, the essentials of the historical reality are here. One sees, for example, that the Gestapo were actually looking for evidence(!!) as well as further conspirators' names, that somehow German society had retained a sense of law and due process, however distorted by the Nazis' efforts. This is the puzzling other side of the infamous extra-legal phenomena of concentration camps and murderous illegality towards Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians etc., more characteristic of Stalin's regime, where millions clearly known to be innocent were murdered or shipped off to camps with or without ludicrous extorted confessions, or with the many nasty regimes of South America and the Third World whose first resort was (is) torture for its own sake and little interest in truth or proof. Somewhere the Nazis instinctively knew one couldn't treat Germans like that, while disconcertingly in many cases flouting this same instinct. For those with no German who see or have seen the film, a case in point is that, for example, the interrogator always addresses Sophie formally as Fräulein Scholl and uses the polite Sie form of you!

Another disturbing aspect of this film was the uncomfortable echo of our present plight, where our troops are in a dangerous no-win situation, our government is lying and distorting the truth, we are implicated in detention without charge and in torture by proxy etc., while protestors are harrassed and broadcasters intimidated, because "the end justifies the means". Clearly, British or US democracy are very different from Nazism; but it's still food for thought! This is the real link: The White Rose movement did not advocate violence but distributed leaflets urging mass protest by the German people against the horrors being perpetrated in their name - a hopeless dream, since the worst atrocities were a state secret and the regime was felt by most to be their "own, true" form of government. And there was the fear, of course.

In the film, the accuseds' closing speeches at their trial are, in fact, mainly composed of extracts from the real closing speech of Professor Huber, the leading academic of The White Rose movement, who was tried and condemned later in 1943. His speech revealing and denouncing the crimes of Hitlerism and stating why he had, in conscience, to act against them, (again, amazingly, the regime permitted him to do so at great length and publicly - unimaginable under Stalin) ends with a quote from the philosopher Fichte written under Napoleonic oppression, which I will translate but not attempt to make rhyme:

Und handeln sollst du so, als hinge
Von dir und deinem Tun allein
Das Schicksal ab der deutschen Dinge,
Und die Verantwortung wär' dein.

And your duty is to act as though
Upon you and your actions alone
The fate of all things German depended,
And the responsibility was yours.

These words are a fitting epitaph for the brave, doomed resisters of The White Rose.

2006-01-05T03:45:00.000-08:00

A happy New Year to all readers!

DOKTOR FAUSTUS by Thomas Mann

I promised before Christmas to write a piece about this novel. As you can see below, I have cheated rather by lifting this survey of the book from Wikipedia. I did so because it is a very fair summary of the contents and themes and I was afraid of omitting something important, so rich and multi-layered is this great work of art. I will add my own comments afterwards as a guide and hopefully a help for potential readers.

Doktor Faustus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

"Doktor Faustus" is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as "Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde" ( Doctor Faustus. The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend). The novel documents the life of its fictional hero, Adrian Leverkühn, from his early childhood to his early death. Leverkühn--a musical prodigy, an early twentieth-century German--intentionally plays out his own life-story along mythic lines resembling the German medieval morality tale of Faust, who sold himself to Mephistopheles. As Leverkühn, impassioned by demons, develops artistically toward a fated reckoning day, German society simultaneously develops politically toward its catastrophic fate.

Contents
1 Structure
2 Themes
3 English translations
4 References

Structure
Doktor Faustus consists of a vast array of characters, fables, world events, theories, memories, ideas, and places, sometimes directly and sometimes tangentially linked to the story of Adrian Leverkühn's life. For this novel, Mann studied musicology and biographies of major composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Hugo Wolf und Alban Berg, but also philosophers, especially Nietzsche. He contacted contemporary composers like Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Hanns Eisler for further details. But the most important and direct contribution came from the philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno. Thomas Mann himself aknowledges that in his book 'The Genesis of 'Doctor Faustus' (1949), where he states that some observations from Adorno made him rewrite whole parts of the book. Other people made contact with the book too during its writing, as Mann read regularly chapters to groups of friends , a 'technique' also used by Kafka, in order to test the impact of the text.

A single narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, threads these items together to the best of his ability and energy. Mann: "Zeitblom is a parody of myself. Adrian's mood is closer to my own than one might -- and ought to -- think."

Themes
The novel is concerned with the intellectual fall of Germany in the time leading up to World War II. Leverkühn's own moods and ideology mimic the change from humanism to irrational nihilism found in Germany's intellectual life in the 1920s. Leverkühn (the name means "live audaciously") becomes increasingly corrupt of body and of mind, plagued by syphilis and insanity. In the novel, all of these thematic threads--Germany's intellectual fall, Leverkühn's spiritual fall, and the physical corruption of his body--directly relate to the political disaster of Germany. Mann's sense of the inseparable nature of art and politics may be seen in the published version of his 1938 United States lecture tour, The Coming Victory of Democracy, in which he said, ""I must regretfully own that in my younger years I shared that dangerous German habit of thought which regards life and intellect, art and politics as totally separate worlds."" In Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn's personal history, his artistic development, and the shifting German political climate are tied together by the narrator Zeitblom as he feels out and worries over the moral health of his nation (just as he had worried over the spiritual health of his friend, Leverkühn).

Another central theme is music. In the novel, Adrian Leverkühn develops the twelve-tone technique actually invented by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg, who lived near Mann in Los Angeles as the novel was being written, was very upset that Mann had appropriated the method without attributing it to him, and at his insistence, later editions of the novel included a disclaimer at the end describing Schoenberg's invention of the technique.

Although Leverkühn's time as a student of theology is but brief, metaphysical considerations continue to permeate the novel, culminating in an imagined dialogue with the devil. Here, Leverkühn foregoes love to gain knowledge, paralleling the pact of Faust with Mephistopheles.

English translations
H. T. Lowe-Porter translated many of Mann's works, including Doktor Faustus, almost contemporaneously with their composition. Mann completed Doctor Faustus in 1947, and in 1948 Alfred A. Knopf published Lowe-Porter's English translation (referenced below). It is quite serviceable, and if in certain instances Lowe-Porter's rendering becomes convoluted or arcane, it yet preserves most deeply the linguistic spirit of the author's own era (a stylistic sensiblitity so difficult to reproduce in subsequent generations).
John E. Woods' translation of 1997 is a competent, intelligible, English version. Necessarily, in achieving its goal of unified readability by English speakers of its own generation, it sacrifices a good deal in those sections of the text where characters speak in Early New High German.

References
Mann, Thomas; translation by Lowe-Porter, H.T. (Helen Tracy). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. ISBN 0-679-60042-6.
Mann, Thomas; translation by Woods, John E. (John Edwin). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0-375-40054-0.
Reed, T.J. (Terence James). Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1974. ISBN 0-198-15742-8 (cased). ISBN 0-198-15747-9 (paperback).
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doktor_Faustus"
Categories: 1947 books | German novels

As can be gathered from the above, DOKTOR FAUSTUS is not an easy read! But I have no doubt whatsoever that it is one of the 20th Century's greatest books, an immense artistic achievement by a literary genius, and of a kind almost certainly no longer achievable in our linguistically and culturally diminished age. Ideally it should be read in German, because so much nuance inevitably is lost in translation - German is very rich in synonyms and near-synonyms, each with its own subtle emotional loading. Even the mention above of the subject's name as meaning "living boldly" omits his first name Adrian - and Hadrian is famous for building a wall, an important facet of the hero's character. In fact, the names of all the many characters in the novel say something significant about them; until recently quite a common feature in German literature. The best English translation is that of Helen Lowe-Porter, who tries to convey the different registers and the frequent irony of the language, but it might be best to have a critical "crib" handy for the meaning of the names and for the historical echoes in certain personages of the novel - notably Nietzsche and Luther as well as several composers.

If I have made DOKTOR FAUSTUS sound daunting, so be it. Great art is not always easily accessible, and there is so much in this work that it is astonishing that the complexity could be so brilliantly woven into a seamless unity. There are passages of great pathos, of mystery, of horror, of irony and comedy, of bitter tragedy. It is the most complete examination of the Faustian, divided soul of a great nation. It is at the same time a study in the temptation and tragedy of genius. It is also a very gripping story, not always easy but ultimately very rewarding.

2005-12-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

THIS POST WAS SENT IN BY CEC

Notes on Graphology

My interest in handwriting began when some years ago I read the analysis of a married couple’s dispositions by a certified graphologist. Both people were known to me. So I studied the two documents with particular attention, especially as the husband was trying to force his reluctant wife into a divorce so that he could marry his teenage sweetheart. I thought both surveys so grossly unfair, the husband being depicted in glowing terms and his wife portrayed in solely negative language, that I have wondered ever since whether such testimony should carry legal weight. Does it, in fact?
If the wife had had prior knowledge about her handwriting being analysed, could she have altered it sufficiently to achieve a better reading? Are people able to change their handwriting? I for one am not, though I have tried, and still do now and then.
There must be other people who dislike their acquired script, who would like to change it, perhaps to make it look more adult, more intellectual, or hide their national background, as in my case. Having recently helped a friend to decipher some early 18th century German legal documents, mostly handwritten statements and letters by various persons, I realised that I was facing a well-nigh impossible task because the German script I had been taught had been replaced by the utterly different Latin kind. So no matter how hard I try I shall rarely be able to transform my Germanic “t” stroke into the Latin kind when writing spontaneously, and when I try to do that deliberately, in a hand-written CV for instance, my hand begins to “stutter”.
However, my father, who was a political prisoner for fifteen years, was forced to use print for all his private and official letters, so that he was never able to write cursively again for the remainder of his life. He even produced a bulky manuscript about his incarceration in this hand-printed manner. Moreover, his previously right-leaning script was now upright – did that mean he had undergone a personality change? Right-leaning script is said to denote amicable, generous persons. I could discover no alteration in him, but what would the above mentioned qualified graphologist have made of that?

2005-12-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

SIGNING OUT

For various reasons, I feel unable to continue this blog. It will therefore close down as of today.

May I thank everybody who has been kind enough to read it, and especially those who have made contributions in the form of posts and/or comments. I have found these most interesting and often enlightening.

I would be very pleased if readers would kindly direct me to their own blogs (or another) which they think would interest me. I will certainly have a look and offer comments now and then, or even posts if desired.

2005-11-28T09:36:00.000-08:00

THIS REVIEW WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN

Testament of Youth, Testament of Friendship, Testament of Experience by
Vera Brittain

These three books are the history of one woman's life lived during
perhaps the most tempestuous century our planet has ever seen. Her story
moves from the tranquil world which was destroyed forever by the First
World War, through the two greatest conflicts in which our country has
been embroiled, taking in the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War,
the rise and then the destruction of fascism, until she closes her tale
in the 1950s.

No one can feel anything but admiration when reading her account in
Testament of Youth of how a young girl of eighteen, about to go up to
Oxford, instead spent four long years nursing the wounded, while
watching so many of those she loved dying in the trenches, including her
brother and the man she loved. The conditions under which she worked
were dreadful and the constant presence of death a burden which she bore
bravely.

Her second volume, Testament of Friendship, concerns her affection for
her friend Winifred Holtby, another writer whom she met at Oxford and
who remained close to her until the latter's early death at the age of
37 in 1935, while the final volume, Testament of Experience, covers the
great historical events of 1925 to 1950, including the experience of the
second great war. However, partly because of what she saw in the first
war, and partly because of her membership of the intellectual elite, her
attitudes to the second conflict do detract somewhat from the view I at
least formed of her after reading the earlier accounts. She refuses to
recognize the very real truth that, for a considerable period, the only
way the British were able to take the war to the Germans, and force them
to remove troops from their assault on our Russian allies, was to use
Bomber Command to hit at the German homeland. Indeed, so great was her
obsession with decrying this that she refused to believe the stories of
the concentration camps, thinking it merely propaganda.

I feel that this ivory tower view of the war against Nazism, combined
with her rather irritating intellectual loftiness which is evident
throughout her work, undermines to a certain degree the admiration
engendered by the great courage and stoicism she showed during the first
war. Nevertheless these books should be read by all interested in the
history of the twentieth century. Her influence can of course be seen in
the political career of her daughter Shirley Williams

2005-11-28T01:05:00.000-08:00

THE END OF ART?

It seems virtually impossible to establish a generally agreed definition of art. I remember that there was some discussion of this question more than once in this blog, with several thoughtful and more or less convincing definitions advanced. Likewise, it is just as difficult to define what is not art.

I have come back to this problem because of John Carey's recent book: WHAT GOOD ARE THE ARTS? I have not read the book yet, but gather from reviews that his general thesis is that "high art" is a snobbish and exclusive phenomenon operated by an intellectual establishment with the aim of keeping out the general public. He argues, so I understand, that popular taste is just as valid as that of the self-anointed elite; and that, briefly, art is what one personally thinks is art. Now, I'm obviously on shaky ground here, not having read the book, and I may have utterly distorted Carey's views. But what interests me is whether Professor Carey, who is in my view one of the most percipient, learned and witty cultural critics of our time, really believes what he is propounding. I have the impression that the book is at least partly a cry of despair at the loss of all criteria in the arts and an attack on the "establishment" which has allowed this to happen and even connived at it. For well over a century there has been a steady erosion of artistic criteria, partly driven by the monetary and status interests of Arts Councils etc., so that the individual is left with a stark choice: accept what the arts establishment tells you is art; or simply rely on your own judgement and experience.

In an age where a silence of a precisely stated number of minutes (+ fraction thereof) is certified by the establishment as a piece of music; where a concept is presented as an artwork without the originator's having had any physical contact with the making of it; where the pages of a book are loose in a box and readable in any random order; one must choose oneself or the "experts" when deciding what is art. I cannot believe that Carey would equate a TV soap opera with Hamlet, so I'm convinced that he has deployed his considerable powers of wit to send up the arts "authorities" because the alternative is incoherent rage at their betrayal. I have personally become completely self-reliant in matters of artistic judgement. This is no doubt arrogant, but feels a lot more comfortable than believing patent absurdities.

2005-11-24T07:34:00.000-08:00

UNACCEPTABLE

Did you know that there are magic words? Just like "abracadabra"(which is hopelessly outdated nowadays), merely saying them makes whatever you want come true. These modern magic words are much loved by all sorts of public figures, business people, administrators, the police, hospitals and service providers in general. My current favourite magic word is "unacceptable". When someone proclaims a situation to be unacceptable, it is at once magically transformed into what it ought to be like.

In reality, of course, if something is deemed unacceptable, what it usually means is that you have to carry on accepting it. The person calling it unacceptable appears happy to continue accepting it because, after all, duty has been done by identifying it as unacceptable. To say so makes it acceptable. The magic word has been uttered. Problem solved. No further action required.

We don't call them "magic words" anymore. The correct modern term is "wishful thinking" or, more succinctly, "bullshit". This term encompasses fashionable-cant words and phrases designed to suggest that things are other than they appear to be; that talk is the equivalent of action; that the magic words can alter reality. The aim is deception, above all self-deception. The best are those that aim to reassure us into deceiving ourselves rather than the crude, far-fetched ones (e.g. your call is important to us). There are lots of amusing examples all around us every day in the media and in our dealings with the service providers. They are a never-failing source of fun.

Here are a couple of others I like: "untenable" is great, because it is always paired with "position", and the fun consists in watching the position being desperately "tened" for as long as possible, thus disproving the meaning. Moreover, used after the event, it conveys an air of wisdom, as in the semantic nonsense: "His position was always untenable", i.e. clever me to have foreseen it. Another is the concept of "empowerment": if a woman wants to make easy money by taking her clothes off, the fun is waiting for her inevitably to declare it "really, really empowering", rather than "it beats working" or "it's a fast buck" or "may as well get paid for my exhibitionism".

The glory of magic words lies in cognitive dissonance: reality is what you can convince yourself (or better still, others) it is. Whenever you hear a magic word, you won't go far wrong if you pay attention to what the sayer does, or frequently, does not do rather than what is said. Please keep us laughing by sending in your own favourites.

PS Some translations of "unacceptable":

1. People are upset. I can't be bothered doing anything since it doesn't affect me, so I'll fob them off with empathy.

2. People are upset. I don't know what to do. Heads will have to roll, but not mine, so I'll blame my subordinates.

3. People are upset. I must appear to be doing something, so I'll introduce some measures off the top of my head. Who cares if they work or not? Will that do?

2005-11-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

Sorry, there is no new post today. The next one will be either on Thursday or next Monday.

2005-11-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

NOSTALGIA AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

from AT LORD'S by Francis Thompson (1859-1907), Lancashire-born poet and cricket-lover.

I have never quite accepted the explanations of nostalgia, the reasons why we see the past as better than the present: We were young then, we had hope then, we were at an age when impressions were more vivid, we have passed through too many disillusionments since then etc., etc. Sport is, as in the poem above, a fertile field for nostalgia. Personally, I cannot see past Keith Miller in cricket - Bradman was before my time - or Hoad and Rosewall in tennis (all Australians, interestingly enough) and as for football - the heroes of my youth, the very game itself, seem far superior to what is on offer today. Popular music and films are other very powerful nostalgia-markers, and there are many more.

But when does nostalgia start to dominate? It seems to me that it begins about the mid-thirties and is well in command by the mid-forties. If I am approximately right about these ages, then nostalgia is a clear indicator of the end of youth. It remains puzzling, however. Hardly anyone sane looks back in a golden glow of nostalgia to genuinely traumatic experiences (NB Old soldiers may miss their war, but only if their experience was not too bad and/or of short duration); yet on a more mundane level, we can long for a generalised better past even when many individual features of that past are obviously inferior to the present. From my own past, I remember a world when very few people I knew had a telephone or a car or a refrigerator - or even a bathroom! I experienced primitive, indeed incompetent dentistry. Cooking, cleaning and doing washing were laborious and often heart-breaking tasks in cramped and unmechanised circumstances. Food choice was very limited. What machines there were - including cars - were unreliable and labour-intensive. The whole society was manifestly unfair in terms of class and privilege and wealth. When so many things are indisputably better for most people now, and we acknowledge this and can cite a long list of improvements, why do we still look back to a Golden Age? (Actually a continuum of Golden Ages, for the bad features and the sporting heroes I detailed above come from at least two decades.)

Clearly, nostalgia has something to do with no longer being young. But is there a really conclusive psychological explanation of the phenomenon?

2005-11-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF IT?

A BOOKSHIP IDYLL
Kingsley Amis

Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY
Comes the brief POETRY shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

‘I travel, you see’, ‘I think’ and ‘I can read’
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter
for several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
Girls aren’t like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;
They write about it,

And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn’t strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
We sat up half the night
Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn’t write.

This poem might at first glance be deliberately calculated to annoy feminists, but it is interesting that Wendy Cope, who must have read it, did not directly mention it let alone criticise it in her "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" (1985?) - whom she had in fact never met! Cope is an ambiguous and elusive poet, who parodies and satirises the male poetic "greats", but is, I imagine, deeply suspect to the feminist establishment too. How is one to know when she is being serious and when tongue in cheek? Such a figure always makes the humourless ideologue very uncomfortable. Although she has become more obviously serious recently, her early humorous poems are probably the ones she will be remembered for. And it may be this very acute sense of humour which made her recognise the humour, the kindness, the truth and the rueful backtracking of Amis in the poem. It is interesting to note that Kingsley, a notorious (though again, how serious? he is after all mainly a comic writer!) male chauvinist, who played this aspect of himself up for all it was worth, really liked Wendy's poems and especially that she knew about rhyme and metre. He remarked approvingly: "You would think she had never heard of Ezra Pound."

I think this poem falls into that category of being unbalancing and ambiguous and teasing. Is one to take it seriously or not?

2005-11-10T11:06:00.000-08:00

SOME THOUGHTS FOR REMEMBRANCE DAY

I do not see all that many people wearing poppies in the street, although all the presenters on TV have them, as do the politicians. This may be just a local phenomenon or, more probably, people have poppies but forget or don't want to wear them. Or are we, as a nation, starting to forget what is now really history? Anyway, it started me thinking. Below are are some tangential musings.

Now that we are well clear of the 20th Century, it is strange to think how different the world looked before that century began and wrought its huge changes. In the latter half of the 19th Century Britain had the largest empire the world had ever seen, and we really did rule the waves. For leaders of opinion in Britain, France was still the hereditary enemy, so much so that proposals for a Channel tunnel were quashed on the grounds that the French might invade. Conversely, all things German were widely admired and there was much talk of our German cousins. As for America, it was seen as a brash frontier land with little part to play in the affairs of Europe, the only continent that really mattered. Russia was a distant and benighted autocracy, while Japan and China were exotic curiosities. How utterly changed all these perceptions and realities are today. And how utterly changed too our way of life, much of it in so many respects for the better. It is now inconceivable that European countries could ever go to war against each other; but it is also becoming clear that the future power in the world will not lie with Europe. Were these terrible 20th Century conflicts Europe's last great acts on the world stage?

More directly connected with Remembrance Day, (or Armistice Day as we used to call it, for it falls on the date of the end of the First World War) is the astonishingly successful aesthetic commemoration of the Great War by Britain. We had the luck to have in Lutyens an architectural genius to design the British monuments and war cemeteries and in Kipling a poetic genius to provide the inscriptions on the monuments. Their touch was brilliantly sure. I do not think that the simplicity, restraint and dignity they achieved were equalled by any other country. Similarly, although the other combatants had their war poets (and good ones too), there is nothing to rival the amazing galaxy of exceptional poets, all very different but each as striking as the next, who emerged from the British war experience. Perhaps it has been this aesthetic triumph that has kept our Remembrance Day so fresh hitherto and allowed it, reinforced by the futher memorable aesthetic of Churchill's speeches, to encompass the 2nd World War so seamlessly and naturally.

But will we now in a new century gradually start to let remembrance fade away? There are already some voices calling for this, as the generations who fought in those wars inexorably disappear. Should we begin to forget? I see few poppies on the streets, but I hope we shall not.

2005-11-07T06:36:00.000-08:00

MORE MAGIC OF NAMES

My recent post on the magic of names was confined to place-names, whereas there are, of course, interesting, charming, puzzling and allusive names all about us. We are the only species which bestows names; indeed our world is inconceivable without names. Flowers, trees, plants, birds, houses, people and pets, trade-names, categories of all kinds - we just cannot get along without them. It is a human compulsion, even a necessity.

Rather than go into the existential, social or political aspects of this phenomenon, for which I am anyway ill-equipped, I want to look at the non-essential category of names. Often these are names which could be replaced by a number or other cipher for organisational purposes, and which frequently do have a number as well, so that the name is effectively a flourish. For example, ships and boats are nearly always named, often beautifully, but where there is an organising reason (navies, fishing fleets) they have a number too - a relatively modern development, by the way.

The names I wish to highlight are from the railway age of steam, and especially from Britain. When Britain invented the steam locomotive and the railway, names like Rocket and Lion and Puffing Billy were given to these early locos, and our imitators abroad all followed this practice when they built their early railways. But for some reason only the British continued to name whole classes of engines right up to the end of steam in 1967. If anybody knows why, I'd be grateful for the reason; and why the French, Germans, Americans and everybody else stopped doing so. Intriguingly, other countries did not cease naming TRAINS as opposed to engines - so there were Le Train Bleu, the Lorelei Express, the Spirit of St.Louis etc. and many others in many lands to match our list of named trains. This is still the case, for example, in America, Spain, Italy etc.; while every German Intercity or Eurocity to this day bears an appropriate name besides a number.

In Britain, it was mainly express passenger locomotives which carried a name as well as a number. The Southern Railway had Schools, King Arthur, Lord Nelson, Battle of Britain and Merchant Navy classes. The Great Western had Castles, Kings, Halls, Granges and Counties. The LMS had Jubilees, Patriots, Royal Scots, Princesses and Duchesses. My own favourite was, however, the LNER whose named classes included Hunts, Football Teams and classes named mainly from the works of Sir Walter Scott! The most superb name-source for their engines, however, was the world of racehorses. Here are some examples: Flying Fox, Salmon Trout, Blink Bonny, Tracery, Sun Castle, Solario, Pearl Diver, Sugar Palm, Hornet's Beauty. So one might see the train The Master Cutler (London - Sheffield) hauled by the loco Kittiwake; or The Heart of Midlothian hauled by Prince Palatine. I think many of these names are beautiful. What sort of mind could have replaced them in the diesel age with the banality of (no kidding!) The Permanent Way Institution?

Do any readers have a favourite category of "superfluous" names like this?

Nebuchadnezzar

2005-11-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

THIS POST WAS SUBMITTED BY MW

FOLK REMEDIES

Because I was brought up by my grandmother, my various ailments were often treated by old-fashioned remedies dating from an earlier generation. Most children of the 1940s-1950s will be familiar with several of the medicines I had to ingest: castor oil administered for a stomach upset; a daily dessertspoonful of cod-liver oil and malt, which started off tasting sweet but left a sickening fishy flavour on the tongue; and the dreaded worm cakes, which looked like chocolate drops decorated with coloured speckles but tasted disgusting. Even then I felt indignant at the deceit - it was medicine and should not have appeared in the guise of a sweetmeat.

Some even more old-fashioned remedies were a burden other children of that era probably did not have to endure. When I had a deep cut, a piece of raw bacon was bound about it at night. (Perhaps the salt disinfected the wound?) If I complained of chilblains, I had to run barefoot in the snow before whipping the swellings with holly twigs. ( I imagine this got the circulation going.) If I was constipated, small bullets were formed from soap and inserted into the appropriate area. (Don't try this at home - it is excruciating!)

Not all the remedies were unpleasant, however. Some were comforting, like the poultice on the chest to ease a painful cough: this was a bag filled with some hot mixture, perhaps oatmeal or flour with hot water and mustard. But best of all was toddy: a little whisky topped up with hot water and plenty of sugar. I loved toddy so much that I can clearly remember standing up in my cot coughing as hard as I could in the hope of being offered yet another glass.

2005-10-31T06:39:00.000-08:00

THIS POST WAS CONTRIBUTED BY MW

AN ENQUIRING MIND?

I like to think that the following little episode, which I can remember as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, shows that I had an enquiring mind at an early age, and also refused to believe what adults told me until I had tested the evidence.(This is said tongue-in-cheek, as later blog entries will show I believed in all sorts of unlikely tales fed to me by cruel or unthinking relatives)

At the side of our house there was a bed of magnificent delphiniums, and one day I noticed some strange winged creatures buzzing around the flowers. I was still only 3, and rushed indoors to announce my discovery to my Grandmother.
"Those are bees", she told me. "Do not touch them, or you will get stung".
I immediately ran outside and placed my small index finger with great precision on the rear end of the only bee within reach. The results do not need to be described. I can still remember the pain and humiliation.

Do other readers recall similar experiments carried out at a tender age?

2005-10-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

THIS REVIEW WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN

The Collapse of the Third Republic by William L Shirer.

I have just re-read this book after a gap of twenty years and recommend
it to anyone who wishes to see how a nation can be destroyed from within
by self interested politicians, short sighted policies and a decrepit
and incompetent military establishment.

Shirer shows how the factors which culminated in the fall of France in
1940 were present in the Third Republic from its outset, such as the
anti-Semitism illustrated in the Dreyfus affair, but most particularly
in the failure of class interests to give way to those of the nation.

Many of the personalities involved in the latter days were truly
unworthy of a great and civilised nation such as France. Bonnet was the
archetypical appeasement politician, Gamelin a disgrace as the chief of
the High Command of the French Army and Laval and Petain in the end
merely traitors. Britain's shameful behaviour when Chamberlain was Prime
Minister is also hard to behold. He must have been the most incompetent,
and pusillanimous holder of the post of PM, whose betrayal of the
peoples of Czechoslovakia was only partially washed away when Britain
finally defeated Hitler and it is painful to read of the rank stupidity
of this umbrella carrying nincompoop who, together with the French
leaders, handed over so many to Hitler's tender mercies.

This is a very long book and, for the period of 1940,covers much of the
same ground as Shirer's Rise and fall of the Third Reich. It is just as
good a book as the latter and shows how the West could have destroyed
Hitler on a number of occasions, without the need for a great war, had
they stood up to him instead of cowardly bowing the knee. In particular
a show of strength at the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland
would have finished the Nazis in 1936 without the need for any
bloodshed.

The honour of the France we know and love today was restored by General
de Gaulle and the French resistance, while thank God, ours was restored
by Churchill. Nevertheless this book should be required reading for all
schoolchildren so that they may be aware of how easily dishonour and
defeatism may undermine even great nations.

Colin Bullen

2005-10-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY CEC

AMERICAN PASTORAL

This novel by Philip Roth is not about life in rural America but about a father’s heart-rending and sometimes gut-wrenching search for who or what turned his beloved sixteen-year-old daughter into a quadruple murderess. The three parts of the book: Paradise Remembered, The Fall, Paradise Lost, imply that he searches in vain, for it is not the single bite from a forbidden fruit but the opening of Pandora’s box that brought about the catastrophe.

All begins so well for Seymour Levov, the Jewish boy who is so blond and blue-eyed that his schoolmates affectionately nickname him “The Swede”, and who, because of his height and athletic prowess, becomes not only an outstanding basketball player, but is also allowed to join the notoriously anti-Semitic Marine Corps.

After the end of the war he marries an ex beauty queen, Dawn Dwyer, an intelligent girl of Irish Catholic extraction. He buys an old stone farmhouse that he has dreamed of owning since he was a boy, his wife buys herself a herd of cattle, so while he runs a successful glove factory she equally successfully manages her handsome cows and splendid prize bull.

Their only child, a lively, precocious girl, Mary but called Merry by her parents, is cherished by all her family, and is the very apple of her father’s eye. Despite having had uncontrollable screaming fits when she was a baby, especially when someone peered into her cot or pram, Merry seems a healthy child. She does have a stutter which distresses her mother, but which her father discusses with her to ease her mind, and even sends her, ineffectively as it turns out, to a speech therapist. One day Merry, knowing that her father will grant her every wish, asks him to kiss her as he kisses her mother. Shocked he refuses, but fearing that he has hurt her he gives in. This incident is the first of countless others he broods over when Merry, in protest against the Vietnam war, throws a bomb into a general store and kills the local doctor.

She succeeds in fleeing, and during the many years when she is lost to him, her father examines every element of Merry’s life, and the influence that members of her family, friends, and strangers might have had on her. Had he failed, he asks himself, in his fatherhood when he gave her the kiss she had demanded? Had he been guilty of misalliance by marrying a Catholic beauty queen? Had he laid too much emphasis on her stutter by sending her to a speech therapist while at the same time making light of it? Did her Jewish grandfather’s slanderous attacks on certain American politicians encourage her to become a terrorist? He endlessly tortures himself, is tortured by others, and finds his daughter only when she is finally lost to him – by becoming a Jain she has undertaken to live as an ascetic, to injure no living thing, to abstain from lying and stealing, to be chaste, and without possessions. Her vows cause her to live in grime and poverty so dreadful that her father retches, thus creating more filth.

The novel makes for grim reading, but is rich, riveting, ironic, and funny too. The funniest is, to my mind, Seymour Levov’s father interrogating pre-marital Dawn to discover whether his future grandchildren are going to be baptised or bar-mitzvahed. The book also contains the worst pornographic account of an attempted seduction I have ever come across. The end? There is none, or if there is one it is there not far from the beginning of this magnificent book.

2005-10-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

THE MAGIC OF NAMES

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

.......................................

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at at Champmédy.
I shall not be there, I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Not a very good poem perhaps but with some effective lines, relying mainly on the names themselves. I can understand Benét's love for American place-names. There are many wonderful and evocative ones, often taken or translated from Native American languages but also frequently biblical or harking back to the "Old Country" etc. and combining powerfully with the almost obligatory state-name as appendage, e.g. Tombstone, Arizona - English/Spanish but unmistakably American! However, a less remarked feature of America is the repetition of certain place-names in so many states that one understands the reason for adding the state-name; can there be many states without their Springfield or Lexington or Concord? PS The only Medicine Hat I know of is certainly American; only not in the USA but in Alberta, Canada!

So, while savouring the strangeness and the sound of American names, I would like to put in a word for Montparnasse and Winchelsea. I find place-names in all countries fascinating. Some are funny, some portentous, some simply beautiful, some laden with historical doom or romance. In Britain alone one can find all of these in our place-names. Everybody knows about Wyre Piddle or Pity Me or Auchtermuchty or Ashby de la Zouch. There is a Lamancha in Midlothian, a Strelitz in Perthshire. Dorset is full of lovely double-barrelled places like Wimborne Minster. And in other countries the same origins apply. One of my favourites is the Slavonic name Visegrad, which means high castle; and so I was thrilled recently to visit a Visegrad in a non-Slav country (Hungary)and find it was a village dominated indeed by a fortress on a hill.

I will come back to names, not only of places, in another post. Meantime, would any readers like to send in the place-names anywhere in the world which they most appreciate and tell us why? Is it just the sound or is it some association or other factor? I, for example, hear a deepening threat (from history, of course) in the sequence of names on the long road to Moscow - Brest-Litovsk, Minsk, Smolensk, Borodino.

2005-10-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

The Conservatives' search for a new leader has dominated their Conference and taken up much media time recently. Personally, I found little to be excited about. Even assuming they have any chance of returning to power, which is very dubious, what did the contest actually tell us about the qualities expected in a party leader? The answer to that seems to me to be profoundly depressing.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have utter contempt for politicians of all parties. With a tiny handful of honourable exceptions, their priority, as evidenced by their actions not their fine words, is to award themselves a vast array of privileges as well as large incomes. Next comes their party interest. A poor last comes the public interest. NB I am not talking about policies. I had little disagreement with what New Labour SAID they wanted to do when they got in in 1997 - it was just a mite late for me, as I had wanted much the same over 40 years ago! What they have delivered however is, inevitably, disgracefully different in both letter and spirit from their glowing promises. These characteristics of politicians are not confined to Britain, but constitute a worldwide phenomenon; the differences across the world are merely of degree not of kind.

But coming to the above poor last, the public interest, what kind of person does the Conservative Party think will best achieve their version of the good society? All the evidence from the leadership contest suggests: exactly the same kind of person as New Labour or Liberal Democrats would choose. That is, a snake-oil salesman. Apparently the important thing is to make a good speech; then you are qualified to be a good leader. This ignores the fact that the most famous politician to gain power by virtue of persuasive oratory was Hitler. Conversely, that modest and unassuming man, Clement Atlee, no orator he, was a brilliant leader of the best and most progressive government we have ever had.

I have therefore sadly to draw the conclusion that a large part of the electorate is only able to cope with politics in the guise of advertising and public relations in their crudest form. Worse, the electors are evidently gullible not just once but repeatedly. Politicians may often be unintelligent , but they are not stupid. On the contrary, they are clever and see this very clearly. So they present themselves accordingly. There appears to be no likelihood of any change in this state of affairs; rather it is likely to get worse. So the first major party to pick a Big Brother contestant or other vapid but marketable celebrity as leader has a bright future. Tories, take note! Was it just accidental that the other day I misread in the papers the word "cabinet" as "cabaret"?

2005-10-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

"TOO MUCH ART IN THE WORLD"

I offer the following news item without comment. Nebuchadnezzar

Tate unveils new work made up of 14,000 boxes. Monday October 10, 01:31 PM LONDON (Reuters) - Artist Rachel Whiteread unveiled her giant "Embankment" installation on Monday, a work made up of 14,000 plastic boxes commissioned to fill the Tate Modern museum's giant Turbine Hall.

Arguably the country's most important showcase for large-scale contemporary art projects, the Turbine Hall space has hosted five previous works including the widely acclaimed "The Weather Project" by Olafur Eliasson in 2003.

"Embankment", inspired both by the artist's reflections on a cardboard box she found in her mother's house and by a recent trip to the Arctic, will be on view from October 11 until April next year.

Whiteread, who won the Turner Prize in 1993 for her most famous sculpture "House", a life-sized replica of the interior of a condemned terraced house in London's East End, said she was initially daunted at having such a huge space to work with.

"It's intimidating when the space is empty," she told reporters. "I took a deep breath and tried not to have the image of it in my head."

The 14,000 boxes are arranged in piles of differing sizes, some symmetrical, others asymmetrical and rising as high as 12 metres from the ground.

Early reaction to the piece was unflattering.

"This is another example of meritless gigantism that could be anywhere, and is the least successful of the gallery's six attempts to exploit its most unsympathetic space," wrote Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard newspaper.

Whiteread said she would have the boxes ground down and recycled when the work was taken down in 2006.

When asked why, she replied: "There's too much art in the world."

2005-10-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

THE SHAKESPEARE BUSINESS

Recently I have been reading that yet another academic has claimed that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's works. This scholar names a fresh candidate to add to the familiar list of Bacon, Marlowe etc. who are the "real" authors of Shakespeare's plays and poetry. Frankly, I am now utterly bored by this quest for "anybody but Will". So tedious has this mini-industry become that I can hardly remember the latest person proposed (some Neville, a diplomat) nor the supposedly cogent evidence presented, still less the academic's name.

Why can't they just leave Shakespeare alone? The purpose seems to be less a search for the truth than a desire for academic glory. Or is it because it is inconceivable to English class-snobbery that a country boy from the lower middle class could be the author of such work? This is poor thinking anyway, because among the little we know for certain about Shakespeare is the fact that he attended the local grammar school, where he would have received an education of a breadth and depth astonishing to us today. And who can say how he educated himself over and above this? In a later age, after all, the Edinburgh literary bourgeoisie hailed Burns as the Ploughman Poet, when he had in fact had a rigorous and thorough education and read widely in his spare moments. (His works show complete familiarity with the English literary canon.) The same applies to Shakespeare.

Does the search for the "real" Shakespeare not verge on triviality? Surely the important point is the glorious work rather than speculation about the author? The case is unlikely to be irrefutably proven one way or the other. Should we then not give the benefit of the doubt, if doubt there really is, to Will of Stratford upon Avon? There is much evidence, and I suggest better evidence than for any alternative, that the author of the greatest of literary achievements was - William Shakespeare!

Nebuchadnezzar

2005-10-06T09:35:00.000-07:00

THIS POST WAS SENT IN BY CEC

IN THE HITLER YOUTH (last instalment)

Having watched the recent TV programme “Hitler’s Children” I could not help but reflect how different being in the Hitler Youth had been for me than was shown there. Of the four programmes only one had been about the girls’ section, probably because the male Hitler’s Children's terrible war death-toll was plentifully filmed, whereas the rape of the female kind, their lingering end in the rubble of their fire-stormed homes, was not recorded on camera. None of this happened to me.
Soon after I had been transferred at the age of 14 to the senior section of the BdM (Bund deutscher Mädchen) my mother decided that I should join the group of school mates who had been evacuated to Saxony. Unlike English children we were not sent to families but to camps, for which pubs and other large houses were requisitioned and adapted.

For our group this was a pretty pub, set in the forests around Meissen, the former publican and his wife now being in charge of domestic arrangements.
I entered now a somewhat strange world where we were still controlled by the state through the young woman in charge of the camp, the resident Hitler Youth leader, and other such from our guest town. For our formal education we had been enrolled in the local schools, which proved to be quite a handicap because the strong Saxon accent and pronunciation were incomprehensible for us. To this day I sing certain Lieder I learned there with soft consonants, e.g. “Tache” instead of “Tage”. Otherwise we led very comfortable, well-fed lives. True, there were marches through the town, much singing of political and war songs during the weekly lectures, and having to watch the so-called duty film, such as “Bismarck”, “Ohm Krüger” and “U-Boote Westwärts”; but when the camp leader was replaced by a schoolteacher, culture took the place of those activities,including visits to Dresden and the Sächsische Schweiz (Saxony’s Switzerland), taking steam-boat trips up the Elbe river, excursions to local parks where we were read a fairy story instead of a political homily, watching women painting flowers on delicate tableware in the Meissen porcelain factory, and seeing a performance of The Magic Flute.

We were all at a critical stage of adolescence, were rebellious, contrary, wanting adventures and excitement, and of course romance. With the removal of the camp leader, who had absorbed all adoration with ease, the customary discipline fell apart, and the elderly teacher now in charge had a very difficult time holding the camp together. We turned to one another for reassurance and affection, and the atmosphere soon became highly charged with amatory emotions. When a few months later the camp was dissolved, some of us were transferred to a much larger one in a former monastery in Bavaria. Here we were totally isolated from normality; nuns were doing the domestic work, classes were held within the complex, and emotions, negative and positive, were intensified.

In neither camp was war service done. Such tasks were organised by my school and the Hitler Youth after I had returned home. I remember picking strawberries under a hot sun from an endless field, peeling jute sacks of potatoes in an army hospital, making animals with a fretsaw and painting them for orphaned children, packing field post parcels with donated goods, and for some months picking up a child from Kindergarten and taking her back on my bike to her mother.

Camp life had changed me, had brought out the defiant streak that my mother must have found impossible to control. Perhaps I did not tell her that I now insisted on saying “Guten Tag” when I met people or walked into a shop. That was due to the appearance of small notices with the directive “Der Deutsche grüsst ‘Heil Hitler’”, which I refused to obey. It may well be that somebody told my mother, but she said nothing, and so I got away with being insubordinate. For the time being. The moment of truth came after I had left school, when I was declared to be in need of re-education, i.e. concentration camp, which made my mother pray that the British would come soon despite the price she would have to pay. They did, just in time, but that is another story.

2005-10-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This short book has, in my opinion, a strong claim to be "The Great American Novel". It is obviously set in the USA, but the important point is that it captures some of the essential features of America, its promises and contradictions, which have endured throughout its brief history.

The author's style may not be to everybody's taste, managing to be at times both simple and obscure, but the story moves forward at a good pace. There is, however, in the end something unsatisfactory about the novel which is hard to pin down, but which is reflected in the difficulty of filming it. The last Hollywood version (late 1970s?) with Robert Redford opted for being beautifully composed and shot; and it does some justice to the novel without fully illuminating it.

Some of the cinematic problems come from the novel's device of a narrator, never the best basis for a visual medium. And this narrator, Nick, is absolutely essential. He is deeply involved in the action yet stands apart, and, as in real life, sometimes doesn't tell us enough and sometimes too much, so that the story is always dependent on his viewpoint and his judgements. Through his eyes we see the a love story turn into a tragedy, a tragedy prefigured from the outset.

Gatsby himself remains an elusive figure because he is essentially a self-invention. The only real things about him are his love for Daisy, which no obstacle or setback or warning can diminish, and his crazy optimism and trust that he can command the future and even the past. He is a symbol of America, as indeed are all the characters. Here is the sometimes dangerous combination of emotional naivety and financial ruthlessness, the belief that anything is possible, that one can reinvent oneself completely, that "money answereth all things". Above all, this centrality of money in American culture; and its corollary the contemptibility of poverty. The message of the book is the persistence of the "American dream" and its ultimate futility. The ideal and perfect life, which has a lot to do with wealth, is apparently within our grasp if we strive hard enough, yet is ultimately unrealisable.

2005-09-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

DRACULA

Everyone has heard of Dracula and most will have seen at least one of the Hammer horror films in which he stars. Hollywood has been making vampire movies from the early days and still does, though now less often. There is a sense in which the sophisticated, computer-generated special effects of our day have activated the law of diminishing returns - over-exposure and increasingly explicit gruesomeness have blunted the edge of the horror for all but the very young, and the element of tension and surprise has been lost. This is, of course, a familiar pattern in film and TV on any theme.

For me, the greatest cinematic impact of the Dracula legend was in the original British Hammer film and in Murnau's 1922 silent "Nosferatu". Christopher Lee was simply terrifying in the former film, which was brilliantly directed; while one can only guess at the tremendous force which Max Schreck's definitive vampire must have had in its time.

Fewer people have read the Bram Stoker novel. Although not great literature, it is a very powerful and gripping read, which I commend to anyone who does not know it. Some of the incidents and descriptions are shockingly unforgettable. Much of the effect comes from it's being in the form of diaries and letters, producing a distance which only increases the believability of the story and giving the reader a knowledge or apprehension of the meaning of occurrences where the diarists and letter-writers are in the dark. The book also shows clearly one of the reasons for the strength of the vampire legend, viz. the powerful sado-masochistic sexual element, which must partly account for the persistence of the superstition in many cultures.

Of all "ghost stories" or horror themes, the vampire (and its close relative the wolf-man) is the one which, for me, has always felt almost possible. I no longer am frightened by it, but it took many years to get over the suspicion that there might be something in it and therefore to avoid certain situations. Do any readers feel the same? Or is there some other horror which is or was more potent for you?

Nebuchadnezzar

2005-09-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

THIS POST WAS SENT IN BY CEC

A light-hearted look at the English Language

Recent delvings into websites by teachers of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) caused me to reflect on the idiosyncrasies and difficulties of English, and not only for foreigners. I myself taught TEFL in Italy, where at the end of every academic year my colleagues united in pinning their students' most amusing, and sometimes most endearing, malapropisms onto the staffroom notice board.

My own delight was giving my newest classes copies of the famous poem from what used to be the Manchester Guardian, so I was told, and read it aloud to them. Just in case you do not know it here are a couple of stanzas:

"I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness' sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)"

And so on. You can download all of it from the internet by quoting the first line – the bard him/herself appears to be anonymous.

I also read in our own blog about people discovering that their children did not find it easy to understand Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland, particularly the humour. I have never read Winnie the Pooh, so can't pontificate pn that book, but Alice in Wonderland presented no particular problem to erstwhile migrant me, especially as the really difficult bits such as the Jabberwocky have been translated into German (Es brillig war, die slythen Toven wirrten und wimmelten in Waben), and into Latin, too. The Hunting of the Snark, however, is, so far as I know, beyond anyone's interpreting ability, although a clever friend of mine has recently had a go for his family and friends. It must have been a feat of determination and intuition, but I find it almost totally incomprehensible. It was easier for me to understand W. W. Bartley's " Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic", and that really is no mean feat. I am willing, though, to be further educated if anyone cares to attempt it.

2005-09-15T01:31:00.000-07:00

THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM

THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM is the title of a book by Irshad Manji, a young American Muslim, who also happens to be a feminist and a lesbian. As she admits, these latter factors do play a part in her critique of Islam, but far more important in my view is her intellectual honesty and refusal to accept current half-truths and fashionable cant from any source at all, Islamic or Western. Significantly, she has not become an atheist or converted to another faith but remains a Muslim. What she has to say is devastating, convincing and searingly honest; and the West and Israel do not escape criticism either. It is not heavy stuff; on the contrary, the tone is light and conversational.

Rather than recapitulate the arguments of the book, I would urge anyone who appreciates intelligent observation and reasoning and would wish to know the basis of Islamic thinking and action in the world today to read this short book. Its subtitle is: "A wake-up call for honesty and change". It is without doubt the most enlightening book I have ever read about Islam, and it points the way to a better future for one of the world's great religions.

Irshad also includes her website address: www.muslim-refusenik.com

Nebuchadnezzar

AS I MAY HAVE TO GO AWAY FOR A TIME< THIS BLOG MAY NOT APPEAR NEXT WEEK 19-25 SEPTEMBER. WATCH THIS SPACE.

2005-09-12T02:42:00.000-07:00

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY MW (Should a Scot be writing this?)

GIVE US OUR BEAR BACK

I know that Jack Straw has more weighty problems to deal with than the sad fate of a bunch of English exiles, but from time to time I feel like dropping him a line, drawing his attention to the plight of Winnie the Pooh and his friends. The loveable bear, together with Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and Kanga, are languishing at present in New York Public Library, imprisoned in a bullet-proof glass case.

I just know they are longing to be repatriated.

Winnie was bought from Harrods by A.A.Milne in the early 1920s, and the other dolls joined him over the years, though Christopher Robin lost Kanga's baby Roo in an orchard, and the whereabouts of Wol the owl is unknown.
In 1947 Milne's American publisher asked if he could take the dolls on a promotional tour of America. The Pooh 5 never saw England again.

Let us all write to our MPs demanding their safe return. Pooh and his friends are so quintessentially English that they cannot possibly feel at home in the USA. What do Americans know of elevenses? Poor depressed Eeyore is not upbeat enough for New York, and little Piglet is too small and timid to deal with the brashness of Americans.

No doubt, if they returned, they would end their days in an A.A.Milne Heritage Centre in another glass case, but it would be an English glass case. Kanga did not begin life on English soil, I know, but she has been here so long she is naturalized. As for the ebullient Tigger--well, he could represent our new emphasis on multi-culturalism. He would find asylum here once more, as he did when he first arrived demanding breakfast.

2005-09-08T22:08:00.000-07:00

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF A DISTANT SEA.

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY JANET MARSDEN

I remember scooping out shells with gritty toes. Some pink and dainty as fairy fingernails. Mussels embellished with linings of pearl. Shells so large the sea ebbs in their depths. Shells rattling excitedly all the way home like pebbles ferried by the recent waves.

Searching the shore for sapphires and emeralds fashioned by the ocean. For translucent fragments frosted palely green like smooth jewels of ice. For rubies and for amber.
At home I empty out a pocketful of glass.

Following the serrated wreaths and garlands draped by the receding tide. Finding crabs' claws, starfish, bladder-wrack, curiously-turned oddments of driftwood, and finely-wrought bird skulls.

Waiting for the incoming waves to catch my feet and make them fizz with foam.

Gazing deep into the green clefts of rockpools, icy even on the warmest day. Glossy monsters in miniature pick a precise path over the pebbles. Sudden little fish flit and pause.

I remember walking over the hard-ribbed sand to reach that distant sea.
.

2005-09-05T01:22:00.000-07:00

POST SENT IN BY MW

CHANGING WORLD

In the last chapter of "Cider with Rosie" by Laurie Lee, the author
describes the coming of the motor-car and the demise of horse-drawn
transport, heralding a whole new way of life. In an earlier chapter,
Lee explained that, until then, the village "was like a deep-running
cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were
cluttered by spirits and laws vaguely ancestral.This cave looked
backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings, the
blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the
stone age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper
caves sealed off for ever."
.
LAST DAYS

The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village.
I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a
thousand years' life. The change did not really show itself in our
Cotswold valley till the late 1920s
.
Myself, my family, my generation, were born in a world of silence; a
world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the
ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth;
of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking
distances between them; of narrow white roads, rutted by hooves and
cartwheels, down which people passed rarely, and almost never for
pleasure, and the horse was the fastest thing moving. Man and horse
were all the power we had, abetted by levers and pulleys. But the
horse was king, and almost everything grew around him: fodder,
smithies, paddocks, distances and the rhythm of our days. His 8 miles
an hour was the limit of our movements, as it had been since the days
of the Romans. That 8 miles an hour was life and death, the size of
our world, our prison.

Then, to the scream of the horse, the change began. The brass-lamped
motor-car came coughing up the road, followed by the clamorous
charabanc; the solid-tyred bus climbed the dusty hills and more people
came and went. Soon the village would break, dissolve, and scatter,
become no more than a place for pensioners. It had a few years left,
the last of its thousand, and they passed almost without our knowing."

2005-09-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

OUR FIRE AT HOME.

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN by MW

I remember all the sights and sounds of the coal fire in our living room, especially the crackling of the kindling sticks and the sparks thrown up as the first coals were piled on.
The flames would lick the coals for many minutes before being able to make the slightest impression. Then a hesitant glow would appear at the base of the lumps, gradually asserting itself and finally taking hold.
As the coals became incandescent from underneath, only the tops remained black, until a fragile bridge of soot spanned a sea of flame. I would watch fascinated as the bridge grew thinner and thinner, trembled above the abyss, poised only on one frail pillar which finally gave way, plunging it into the burning depths.

From moment to moment the scene changed: castles, mountains and fragile palaces rose, flickered and glowed before disappearing in their turn.
Restless black shadows suddenly stained the red-hot coals, only to fade as quickly as they had come.

Sometimes the fire, after burning away steadily and quietly for an hour or more, would abruptly spit out a salvo of vicious sparks onto the coconut matting. Or an apparently quiescent black lump would unexpectantly emit a powerful blue jet of hissing flame from a hidden vent.

Above our heads shadows flickered and trembled. "Look", said my Grandmother, "The ceiling is knitting!"

NEXT POST MONDAY

2005-08-29T01:46:00.000-07:00

THIS REVIEW WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN

THE ISLAND

This film has all the usual Hollywood ingredients of the romance between
impossibly beautiful people, the exciting chase and the improbable
triumph against all the odds. However the importance of the central
theme makes these features irrelevant for, although it touches upon such
matters as the nature of objective reality, dealt with in greater depth
by such films as The Matrix, it is the issue of how far morality can
control mankind's use of his technological advancement and whether or
not we face a future where the human soul still has any meaning, that is
the heart of this production.

The main protagonists live what appears to be a sheltered, healthy life,
residing in a complex which has survived a world-wide contamination,
doing little in the way of work and ever hopeful that they will be
chosen by lottery to live on an island paradise they are told awaits
them all. The reality is that the world still exists as we know it, that
they are clones of the rich, bred to be walking containers of the organs
that the latter will need in order to prolong their lives far beyond the
normal human span, and that the call to the island is actually a one way
trip to the operating theatre and death. The clients are told that the
clones never achieve sentient awareness but the doctors in charge have
found that the brain must be activated if the organs are to remain
viable so they allow them to become thinking beings.

The story concerns the escape of two of the clones, the realisation of
the truth, the struggle to reveal it to the world and the efforts of the
controllers to prevent this happening. The chase is exciting and the
romance pleasing but it is the example of how far Man will go to survive
when unfettered by the absolute morality imposed by religion that is
truly chilling.

There are echoes of 1984, with the constant surveillance, the underlying
great lie, the doctors as the inner party, the clones as the outer party
and the ignorant bulk of humanity as the proles, but the more apt
comparison is with Mengele, the Nazi mentality and the gas chambers.
This latter is most obvious when the doctors seek to cover up their
crimes by destroying the clones, locking them in chambers to be killed.

If humans could survive by the death of those they consider to not to be
human then, in the post Christian world, would they? As a practising
Catholic I pray that the answer is no but we have the 20th Century
examples of the Nazis persuading so many Germans that the Russians and
the Jews were Untermenschen, the Japanese using stones to massacre
millions of Chinese because they considered them to be unworthy of even
the expenditure of a bullet and the tribal slaughters of Africa and
elsewhere when no empathy existed between fellow human beings. In the
film one character tells the clones that they have no soul while
another says, of the attitude of the clients, that the meat eater enjoys
the steak but has no wish to meet the cow.

I think, despite the violence, my local priest would approve of this
film as it graphically illustrates the consequences of the slippery
slope we are now on and does more than any Papal encyclical to bring
home the consequences of divorcing morality from scientific progress.
Perhaps the very existence of this film will help to prevent the
nightmare, as it is as stark a warning as any given by Orwell

2005-08-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

WILLIAM WALLACE: A UNIVERSAL HERO

Last Sunday I attended a ceremony commemorating the 700th anniversary of the martyrdom of Sir William Wallace. In brilliant, warm sunshine in front of the finest Wallace statue in the world, the event was a great success and very well organised. What was noticeable was that there were so many nationalities present, apart from the transatlantic members of Clan Wallace etc. who had come over specially for the occasion. What could Wallace mean to all these people of such varied race and background? And why is Wallace indisputably THE Scottish hero, the people's hero, so much so that many places all over the country are keen to claim him in some way (by birth, education, marriage etc.) for their own?

The answer, I think, and as the excellent main speech by Billy Kay emphasised, is that Wallace stood and stands for freedom. And that is something that has universal appeal. (Unless, of course, you are an actual or potential bully, oppressor and tyrant; in which case the only freedom you are interested in is your own.) Freedom indeed was the theme of the much-criticised film "Braveheart". And despite the film's many infelicities, anachronisms and frankly cringe-inducing embarrassments, somehow a lot of the truth of the age and of the spirit of Wallace managed to survive the Hollywoodisation.

For what could have been Wallace's motivation if not freedom? He did not have a claim to the throne like Bruce or indeed Llewellyn in Wales. He was not a great nobleman. His knighthood came later from the clergy when he was named Guardian of Scotland. He was from the minor gentry and not the first son, so had not even an inheritance to expect. The kings and nobility in both Scotland and England were, with few exceptions, still essentially Normans; that is Frenchified Vikings, thinking and speaking mainly in French. The struggle for the Scottish crown was in many respects a question of Norman feudal thinking and competition among Norman magnates, who mostly scorned or actively opposed Wallace, with the idea of nation scarcely beginning to emerge. But this idea emerges with a vengeance in the figure of Wallace. The idea of national self-determination was also beginning in England too in resistance to French claims. And it was clearly seen in the almost contemporary assertion of a few Swiss cantons of their independence from the Empire. Interestingly, the only heroes of Switzerland and England of the period who do not represent royal or baronial self-interest are Wilhelm Tell and Robin Hood, both mythical; whereas Wallace was real, and he dared to take up arms against the greatest knight and the finest army in Christendom. There is much to say both for and against national consciousness, but this is not the place. It has certainly not gone away, however, and even today there are still many people who find it incredible that anyone could possibly NOT want to be, say, French or American or English!

The much more ambiguous figure of Robert Bruce(correctly, Robert de Brus) was one of these Norman barons, and his dynastic ambitions are as clear as his allegiances are murky. Educated at the English court, Earl of Huntingdon in waiting, sometimes fighting on the side of Wallace and sometimes for King Edward, ready to replace English overlordship in Ireland by that of his brother, he was in the end accepted as a Scottish hero because, after long hardships, he won independence. But he could never be THE Scottish hero. He was crowned King of Scots, and his eventually victorious army was the King's army - whereas Wallace's was the Army of the Commons or Community of Scotland! In the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, one of the greatest documents of the Middle Ages, King Robert is personally and specifically warned that should he betray Scotland into the power of the English crown the people will remove him by force from his throne. In England history has gradually ensured that Parliament is supreme. But from 1320 in Scotland, the nation, not any Parliament, is supreme: something our wee pretendy parliament in Holyrood seems to have forgotten! The Declaration also echoes Wallace in its insistence that Scotland is fighting against English claims not for glory, riches or honour but for freedom alone.

Attempts by the Lanercost Chronicle and other propaganda to portray Wallace as a mere brigand and outlaw are given the lie by his trumped-up trial and exemplary deterrent execution. A brigand is not given a show-trial for treason. Wallace was obviously a source of worry to Edward, someone to fear and hate, because he exemplified a dangerous idea. We know too little about Wallace, but this one thing seems clear: he had nothing to gain from revolt except his country's freedom, and he never gave an inch to the oppressor. This is why he is Scotland's national hero and, like the later, miraculous Joan of Arc, the very archetype of a national and international hero.

These are the words of the great English historian G.M.Trevelyan:

" This unknown knight, with little but his great name to identify him in history, had lit a fire which nothing since has ever put out. Here, in Scotland, contemporaneously with the very similar doings in Switzerland, a new ideal and tradition of wonderful potency was brought into the world; it had no name then, but now we should call it democratic patriotism. It was not the outcome of theory. The unconscious qualities of a people had given it reality in a sudden fit of rage.

Theories of nationhood and theories of democracy would follow afterwards to justify or explain it. Meanwhile, it stood up, a fact."

Nebuchadnezzar

2005-08-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY MW

THE LEWIS CHESSMEN

Last night, when looking through my scrapbook, I came across some
photos of the Lewis Chessmen. I first made their acquaintance during a visit
to the British Museum , and later I went to see the rest in Edinburgh . They should all be in Scotland by rights, since they were discovered in Lewis in 1834 .There
are images of them on GOOGLE IMAGES.

They are carved from walrus teeth and date from the 13th century.
The moment I saw these little figures I was deeply impressed, and you
may find that their expressions haunt your dreams.The eyes are what
make the faces strange and eerie: the Kings and Queens all look
aghast, with eyes fully dilated and almost springing from their
sockets, as if staring at some unspeakable horror, and the Queens have a hand pressed against one cheek, the way women do when they are very distressed.
The back of each throne is embellished with intricate patterns, and
you can see the elaborately curled locks of the Kings' hair cascading
over the decoration. The tremendous strength and force of their stern
appearance is added to by the way they hold their swords straight across their knees. Unlike most chess sets, each piece is different, a small never-to-be-forgotten
individual.

The rooks are warders, and you can see humour in the execution of some of these, for one is biting the top of his shield with a splendid set of strong teeth . The pawns are of varying shape, some like little tombstones, decorated with geometric or
foliate designs.

The horses of the knights are enchanting, with long forelocks
dangling in their eyes and beautifully plaited tails. From the elegant
saddles fall delicately decorated fringed cloths.

All the pieces reward close observation. It is not easy to
find words to express their tremendously forceful impact, though they are only 4 or 5 inches high. They remind me of these lines of Yeats taken from his poem "The Magi":

"With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side
And all their eyes still fixed---"

The rest of the words do not fit,of course, but the eyes of these chessmen look
as if they have gazed on ancient horrors.

NEXT POST ON THURSDAY

2005-08-19T01:52:00.000-07:00

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY NICKY BULL

MISS GARNET'S ANGEL by Salley Vickers

My church-based book group read this book and we all thoroughly
enjoyed it. The author, Salley Vickers, has worked as a university
teacher of literature, specialising in Shakespeare, and taught in
adult education where she specialised in the literature of the ancient
world. She is a trained analytical psychologist and lectures on the
connections between literature, psychology and religion. She lives and
works in London and Bath and her first name, Salley, is spelled with
an 'e' because it is the Irish for 'willow' (from the Latin: salix,
salicis).
Miss Garnet's Angel is the story of the retirement of spinster
teacher, Miss Julia Garnet, who decides, on the spur of the moment, to
spend a season in Venice. Julia has been a Communist and is an atheist
who appreciates the aesthetic value in spiritually inspired art, music
and architecture but has never really considered what lies behind
these beauties. In Venice, she comes across Raphael – an angel
depicted in statues and paintings. As Raphael's story unfolds – the
story of Tobias and the Angel, found in the Book of Tobit [in the
Apocrypha] – so too does the story of the people who come into Julia
Garnet's life in Venice.
The two stories are told in parallel and in the modern tale we learn
how Julia Garnet is brought face to face with her own feelings,
prejudices and intolerance and, having grown to know and appreciate
the people involved, finds her prejudices and intolerance melting
away.
The characters are totally believable and very easy to relate to.
Salley Vickers depicts Julia's personality and her insecurities
extremely well and a number of us related to the episode where Julia
realises that she is jealous of others who are receiving attention
from people whom she has come to regard as 'her' friends.
By the end of the story Julia has learnt a huge amount about life in a
short time, and she has become a much more sympathetic and likeable
person. This book – and another of Salley Vickers' novels, Mr
Golightly's Holiday – is a highly recommended read and very
thought-provoking!
Nicky Bull

2005-08-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

THIS POST WAS SENT IN ANONYMOUSLY

SHOES

There was an interesting programme on radio 4 recently - all about
shoes. Shoes in folklore featured - such as 7 league boots, and glass slippers, and the red shoes which took possession of the little girl in Hans Andersen's famous tale. One strange item was about the large number of shoes, mostly
children's, which had been found up chimneys in days gone by. There
was no satisfactory explanation for this, although the suggestion was made that there might have been some connection with fertility and the hope of having a large family .

But the most moving item was an account a woman gave of her father's
shoes: he was a pituitary giant, who grew to the height of 7 feet 4 inches. She
remembered vividly his shoes and his feet, for he was so tall he could not
reach down to wash his lower limbs, so that even when she was a tiny girl,
she had to do this for him. It was very touching to hear her describe how
carefully she dried his feet, making sure there was no dampness left between the toes.

Since it was the mother who went out to work, the two of them looked after each other at home, and they were inseparable. She remembered people remarking later how huge her father must have seemed to her when she was small, but no, not at all:to her he was just her dad, just the normal size.

Saddest of all was that, when she came home after his funeral, which
she was not allowed to attend , her father's room had been
completely cleared and emptied, giant-sized bed and all - but it was
his shoes she looked for and missed, more than anything else. She
supposed her mother just wanted to have everything changed, but I
couldn't help thinking such a very quick clearance suggested the
mother might have been quite pleased to get rid of her oversized husband.

Shoes, it was suggested in the programme, are more personal than other
items of clothing; and when you think about it, that is true, for they
form themselves to the shape of your foot much more closely than, say,
trousers or jumpers do to your body. When someone has died, they sit
there empty.

I found the whole programme very moving, and disturbing too. I thought
of Van Gogh's painting of a pair of old shoes. Do readers know it?

TOMORROW, FRIDAY, THERE WILL BE A BOOK REVIEW BY NICKY BULL

2005-08-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

EXTRAPOLATIONS FROM THE DEATH OF ROBIN COOK

I did not know Robin Cook, so can have no first-hand opinion on his qualities as a person. A couple of friends were in his class at university - opinions of him in those days not entirely flattering. I did use to have long discussions with John Smith and Teddy Taylor in my first year at university, both of whom I liked and respected. Most politicians, in private, tend to be pleasant and engaging people.

The trouble arises when they occupy their "role" as politicians. I was nauseated to hear the tributes to Cook's PRINCIPLES from other politicians who would appear to have few or none. Similar were the tributes to Edward Heath. Many of those paying tribute so fulsomely hated the guts of the deceased when he was alive. Political opponents, as well as party-colleagues, always line up to praise the late fellow-politician. Does this not rather give the game away? - that the opposing parties are just all in the same club; and the dispute is only about who runs the club, not about the public good? Naming no names, among those paying tribute to Cook and Heath were persons who thought it their just reward for abject political failure to be given highly lucrative quasi-sinecures; others, who prated of Cook's integrity, had long since jettisoned theirs in order to stay in office. Former raging left-wingers had turned into Thatcherites at the first taste of power. Many had known with total certainty what was good for the country (CND, nationalisation etc.) and, having turned through 360 degrees, still know with total certainty, only diametrically opposite things from before. And so on, ad nauseam.

How do they get away with it? Because they can. The media and the public, despite the much discussed cynicism and apathy, in practice actually take these people completely seriously at face value! "Question Time" on radio or TV is the perfect example. The politicos on the programmes can be heard deliberately tuning their responses to what they know the public wants to hear - and the bloody fools actually applaud. Meanwhile, forgetting they are not our bosses but PUBLIC SERVANTS, the politicians make sure they are vastly overpaid, with huge, bombproof pensions and an incredible list of privileges of many kinds. Does the taxpayer subsidise YOUR meals and booze, and are you paid travel expenses for CYCLING!! to work, travel expenses for even TURNING UP to your place of work, while you draw (as a mere backbencher) some £60,000 p.a. and average (completely unaudited) expenses of £250,000 p.a.? Are you on holiday for over half the year? Do you have no fixed hours? Can you turn up to work or not just as, if and when you feel like it? Do you have no job description? Do you need no qualifications for your work? Do you treat your job as part-time and spend as much time as you like on a lucrative sideline? Do you get free time-unlimited parking at any airport? I thought not. The list of such brazen impertinences is nearly endless. Many, of course, work hard as good constituency MPs; that is, as amateur social workers. But how many genuine professional social workers could you employ for what one politician costs? ( approximately £1+ million each per annum). I have not mentioned the sordid compromising of professed ideals, the lies and half-truths and spin, the cosy quid pro quo arrangements with party donors, for I accept that these are, sadly, often hard to avoid in politics. To cap it all, when in office, Ministers make such spectacularly bad decisions it takes one's breath away. You can think of numerous examples for yourself. Such glaring and astonishing incompetence normally leads to a peerage and/or another highly paid job in private industry. And we in Britain, God help us, probably have some of the least overtly corrupt politicians in the world! Just look at the EU or many UK local authorities.

We are to blame for not challenging their behaviour and for letting ouselves be conned. They are not more intelligent or competent than you, but they have persuaded you they are. If they are so great, why do they need so many advisers? And why don't the advisers have the politicos' jobs if THEY are so wonderful? Politicians' arrogance and cheek and, unfortunately, fully justified contempt for the public gets worse all the time. If you ask any one of them why they are in politics the answer invariably (and, I think, quite sincerely) is: "to be of service" or "to make things better for people". They never add: "But first and foremost to make sure I'm very much alright, thanks." Your answer should be: PROVE IT, ditch your self-awarded privileges and live under the same rules as everybody else, then I might respect you and vote for you. But this is obviously asking too much of the infinitely gullible public.

I realise that some people are paid far more than politicians, and are often worse than useless into the bargain. But they do not generally VOTE themselves privileges - and even where they do (NHS managers, company directors etc.), that, I'm afraid, is Capitalism and the daft cult of Management. Politicians, however, are NOT in a free market. If they were, they would be lucky to get the pay and conditions of a Big Issue seller. Since hundreds more apply than get the job, simple supply-and-demand would depress the pay rate to the minimum! Ask any economist.

Here is a small suggestion. People constantly moan about the state of public services, especially the NHS, education and transport. I suggest that no MP or Minister be permitted, as a condition of their job, to use private medicine or private education or VIP transport.(I realise this seems unfair, as anybody else with sufficient money can do so. But the point is that nobody WITHOUT sufficient money can do so). They would sign up, on pain of imprisonment, to joining NHS waiting lists, using the nearest school and travelling 2nd class, all on the exact same terms as anybody else. Then we would see who really cares, ABOVE ALL ELSE, about "making things better for people" and "being of service". I guarantee all these services would become excellent very rapidly indeed. What are the chances of this ever happening? You got it in one. Zero. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being ambitious: ambitious to make money, ambitious to seek privilege or fame, ambitious for political power. Only that the last should never, ever be combined with the others. The dire results of such combination are seen at their worst in Africa, and there is a continuum right down to our fellow parliamentary democracies. I am simple, so I have a simple political ideal: if you want, as politician or manager or whatever, to wield authority and make decisions for others, then you should have to suffer the consequences of your decisions every bit as fully as anyone else. The opposite of this is called injustice. (NB We have regressed since The Great War, when the sons of very many famous people and politicians were lost at the front! Hardly likely now.)

To return to Robin Cook, none of the above tells us anything about him as a person. He was clearly very intelligent, well-read, witty and a great debater. No doubt he was excellent company. No doubt he is a loss to public life. I am absolutely convinced he had deeply held principles and ideals. However, many of the eulogies emphasised his qualities as a parliamentarian. Can anyone tell me what these qualities are and, more importantly, of what actual use they are?

Nebuchadnezzar

2005-08-12T01:27:00.000-07:00

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN

HENRY IV (Parts 1 and 2) - National Theatre

This is an excellent production, as is evidenced by the full house when
we attended the Saturday matinee and evening performances. Unlike so
many offering by the rival RSC there was no self indulgence by the
director, the set being sparse yet appropriate and the costumes being of
the correct period.

The leading actors were uniformly good but the older generation really
showed how it should be done. Those who have seen the TV series 'The
Vice' will recognize David Harewood, playing Hotspur, and giving a very
sound performance. It seems incredible now to reflect how forty years
ago the idea of coloured actors taking these sort of parts was
considered either unthinkable or dangerously radical yet now it seems
totally natural. His portrayal of Hotspur conveyed all that character's
intemperance, yet, despite his need to bellow at times, his diction was
faultless. The other young lead was Matthew MacFayden as Prince Hal. I
never really liked him in the TV series 'Spooks' but by the end of the
evening he had won me over. I remember seeing productions from many
years ago when Hal was played by such actors as Ian Holm, Alan Howard
and Michael Maloney and I found MacFayden to be a worthy member of such
company. It would be interesting to see him in Henry V, although he
would be up against stiff competition for those of us who have seen
Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Olivier in the role.

It was the mature members of the cast who really shone. Over the years I
have seen David Bradley take many roles at the RSC but his Henry IV was
one of his best. Unlike some, one could hear every word and he was a
faultless centre to the royal scenes. Other stalwarts of the RSC such as
John Carlisle as Scroop, the Archbishop of York, and John Wood, as
Justice Shallow, were their usual professional selves but of course the
heart of the play was Michael Gambon as Falstaff. Again I remember Joss
Ackland and Robert Stevens in the role but I enjoyed Gambon's
performance and he brought a true comic talent to the part.

The season is on until the end of August and I can only recommend that
those who enjoy Shakespeare make the effort to get to the Olivier before
then

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

2005-08-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY MW

DEATH AT THE FEAST
.
All lovers of medieval architecture are familiar with carvings of the
Dance of Death--a skeleton, often sporting a mock crown askew on his
skull, and brandishing a long scythe, leading an assortment of
skeletal followers, kicking out their bony shins in a macabre dance.

The most chilling variation on this theme I have ever come across, was
a series of paintings illustrating that "In the midst of life, we are
in death". I wish I could remember where I saw these--perhaps one of
you will recognize the description and be able to tell me.

Each painting depicted a scene from every-day life, and in each there
is a skeleton. At a masked ball, there rises from a silken low-cut
gown, instead of an opulent bosom, a delicate tracery of bones, and
behind the frilled mask grins a death's-head. In a crowded courtroom, a
skull peers hollow-eyed from under a judge's wig. In a sickroom, the
doctor will bring scant comfort to his wan patient, for when he bends
over the bed, his sleeve slips back to reveal fleshless bones. And so
it continues: in every scene Death is at the feast--at the wedding, in
the church, even in the kitchen.
.
But the picture which haunts my mind, and horrifies me more than any
of the others, is of a mother who has just given birth. The squalling
infant is being tenderly delivered by the midwife--but then we see,
with a shudder, that she is cradling the tiny head in fingers of bone.
Brand new life is delivered straight into the hands of Death.
.
Alas, this often happens even in our day and age, but nowhere have I
seen it depicted more chillingly.

TOMORROW THERE WILL BE AN EXTRA ENTRY: A REVIEW OF HENRY 4th PARTS 1+2

2005-08-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY CEC

WOLFRAM, A WAR BABY

As part of my war service I was detailed to do half a year's domestic work for a family in need of help, and thus found myself in the autumn of 1943 in the household of the heavily pregnant wife of a doctor, who was serving in that capacity on the Eastern Front. She had a little daughter, a delicate blonde chatterbox called Gudrun, who lightened everybody's life. I found the work very hard, but for the first time after having lost our home to incendiary bombs I had a room of my own in what used to be the surgery. I was pretty well exhausted when I was at last left to my own devices at night, but I liked Frau Arnold, a composed and affable lady, while little Gudrun and I adored one another.

Life was as good as then possible, for all of us received extra rations, Gudrun and I because we were both still growing, and Mrs. Arnold being a "werdende Mutter" (a mother-to-be). Gudrun spent all her extra calories on running, jumping, following me around, and conversing endlessly on every subject of her little universe, while her mother and I grew fatter, she legitimately, and I by way of stuffing myself with her delicious sweet dishes, for she had an affinity with sugar.

The frequency of bombing attacks, now called terror raids, was increasing sharply both on my home town, Hamburg, and my present home, a suburb of Leipzig, which often left us without gas, telephone contact, transport, and my family. One day my brother turned up unannounced, black and stinking of smoke, and told me, half crying, that he had been bombed out again. He was allowed to clean up, have a rest, obtained some food coupons from the local distribution office, and set out to seek my mother, who crushed him to herself, having believed him dead.

During one such air raid the baby was born, five weeks earlier than expected. Gudrun, wailing pitifully, had to be farmed out to neighbours, and I was sequestered in the kitchen where my first task was to prepare a pot of strong coffee from real beans, not Muckefuck (thin corn coffee, ex mocca faux), and then to keep every container filled with boiling water while the midwife cycled to us as the ground shook and quivered, the air screamed, and the flak stuttered. The baby refused to enter such a nasty world, and eventually had to be induced. By that time the raid had ended, Gudrun had been returned, but refused to be put to bed so I sat her on my lap and listened nervously to the subdued murmurs and moans next door. Suddenly Frau Arnold gave forth an agonised shriek, so did Gudrun, and I quaked with the shock. Then the baby squawked - it was done.

"Come and look," said the midwife after an interminable rustling silence. The baby lay in a cradle, was red and ugly but sweet, pronounced Gudrun after a brief glance, and then climbed into her exhausted mother's bed. "I'm hungry," she declared, "can I have my breakfast?" "How about a glass of milk to start with?" asked her mother. Gudrun nodded her head. She and I watched in stunned silence as Frau Arnold put a glass container with a rubber bulb to her breast and drew out some watery milk, poured it into a tumbler and handed it to Gudrun. She was delighted, declared it a very nice milk and henceforth refused cows milk until her brother was weaned.
The baby was named Wolfram, after Wolfram von Eschenbach, knight and poet, author of Parsifal. I had to leave for the next stage of my war service almost immediately after his birth but kept in touch. In the confusion after the end of the war, and especially when Germany was split in two, Leipzig of course being in the Russian sector, the contact broke off. I sought them for years, wondering if the family had been destroyed, but I never quite lost hope. Two years ago I found them with the help of the German Red Cross. They were all alive and half laughed, half cried with delight about the diary I had written and illustrated for Gudrun those many years ago. Gudrun is now a very attractive mother and busy GP, Frau Arnold looks a bitter-faced resigned shadow of herself, while her husband returned safely from Russia but seems still arrogant and unapologetic, and Wolfram is a middle-aged man, the very image of his mother. And so we are in touch again, after fifty years.

2005-08-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

FROM COLIN BULLEN

Impressionism abroad: Boston and French Painting

In common with all exhibitions in the Sackler wing this one is not
large, but it contains many more great paintings than one would find in
the Pompodou Centre and Tate Modern combined.

The exhibition revolves around those Americans who either collected the
works of the French Impressionist school, or emulated their style in
their own paintings, or both. Consequently there are pictures included
by Millet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Manet, Corot and others, not all of
whom were actually impressionists, plus a number by their American
admirers.

Naturally those by the French artists would be enough to make a visit
worthwhile but the additional works are also very interesting and
admirable. I found 'Mother and child in a boat' by Tarbell, Gloucester
Harbour by Hunt and La Blanchisseuse by Vinton, particularly attractive
and there were many more which were very worthy to be included in such
an exhibition.

As one who loves nineteenth century culture, particularly that of
France, I quite understand how those Americans felt and am grateful
that the Royal Academy was able to borrow so many excellent pictures from
Boston to create this exhibition. I recommend it to anyone who shares
my love of the period.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2005-07-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

THIS POST WAS SENT IN ANONYMOUSLY

ONE SPARKLER

One small firework illuminated my childhood.
I was standing in the meadow opposite our cottage, on the outside of a circle of adults and children, trying in vain to catch a glimpse of the flickering bonfire, listening to the cries of excitement, and staring with wonder at the occasional glowing bauble which rose above the small crowd, and burst, scattering stars. It was one of the few occasions when I felt sorry for myself as a child, for I had never had any fireworks.
Suddenly someone thrust a sparkler into my gloved hand. That never-to-be -forgotten sparkler ! How bravely it hurled its hissing sparks into the night, lighting up my darkness with its sudden flowers of flame, exploding with vigour and continuing to sputter and sizzle valiantly until the very last second, when I was left with a small black shrivelled twig smoking in my astonished hand.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2005-07-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

MUSIC AND LANGUAGE

A recent study by the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego has identified a strong link between speech and music. It seems that music in many ways mimics the speech patterns of the national language. The initial languages chosen by the researchers were French and English, the representative composers being respectively Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Elgar, Holst, Bax, Vaughan Williams. Pitch and rhythm were the principal factors measured. The study suggests that composers unconsciously build into their music speech patterns absorbed since childhood, and moreover that listeners with the same speech patterns respond particularly well to this music. Thus " British and French people are especially attuned and responsive to the sounds of Elgar and Debussy respectively. Music does indeed have a national character."

To make the study more scientific, songs were excluded, since the lyrics force the music to comply to some extent with their rhythms (NB Land of Hope and Glory is an example of words added to an existing tune). Also, British and French music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was studied, the heyday of course of musical
nationalism. A problem arose, however, when German/Austrian and Italian music of the late 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was subsequently studied. Whereas the Italian music matched the speech patterns, as predicted, the German/Austrian music did not seem to fit the theory! It was somewhat lamely concluded that the earlier strong Italian influence on German/Austrian music was the cause, and that as it waned in the 19th century the rhythm and pitch became ever closer to German speech patterns. Russian music was not studied.

Now I have a problem with all this. Having no technical understanding of music, I am nevertheless pretty good at identifying French, English, German, Russian etc. music even if I have never knowingly heard the piece before, or the composer (although I sometimes get it wrong, e.g. thinking a piece by Massenet to be by Schumann). To that extent, I can agree with the study. But I don't agree that I am especially attuned and responsive to English music rather than to music of another "nationality", and I suspect that the same goes for most people. Surely the genius of music is that it soars above the limitations of language, which makes poetry in translation for example so poor a reflection of the original? Although I know something of several European languages and two at least very well, this cannot explain why I should respond to their music, since I respond powerfully to Sibelius without a word of Finnish. And was Mussorgsky not orchestrated by Ravel, a most un-Russian character? And was not some of the most "typically Spanish" music composed by Frenchmen? Do readers feel that they are most responsive to the music of their own country or do they agree that music transcends nationality?

PS A caveat: I cannot tell the national origin of "modern" music nor do I repond to it at all - it mostly seems wilfully dissonant and boring wherever it comes from.

2005-07-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT GARDENER...SENT IN BY MW

I am a fully paid-up atheist,so depictions of the Godhead enthroned
amid angel hosts and emitting shafts of golden light have always left
me cold. Only Nolde's "The Great Gardener" (1940) touches me.

Though the colours are bright, the mood of the painting is subdued.
God is tenderly putting the finishing touches to the trees and giant
flowers which lift their blooms of searing yellow and throbbing red
above the greenery.

. It is a gentle, rather melancholy God we see here, absorbed in his
meticulous care for his colourful creation. There is not a trace of
sternness on his downcast features; we can be pretty sure he would
never punish a couple of humans for a moment of idle curiosity by
casting them out of this richly-hued Eden.

No other Expressionist painter produced such a large number of
religious works. Nolde was not a conventional Christian, but was
attracted by the drama and intensity of many scenes in the life of
Christ. Whatever his personal religious beliefs may have been, and it
is not easy to pin them down, there was a strong element of pantheism,
which finds expression here.

It is interesting to note that in one of his journals he states that
the image of the Creator corresponds to his image of himself as an
artist, creating beauty and value "from line and form and colour, with
the most tender and the strongest emotion".

PS This article refers to the oil painting of 1940 in the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, not to the earlier water colour on which it is based.

FOR THE TIME BEING THIS BLOG WILL HAVE NEW POSTS ONLY ON MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS

2005-07-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

TODAY'S ENTRY IS BY MW

PRIM TALES

In her book "The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales" Maria Tatar
traces the evolution of some of the best-known stories, and shows how
the brothers bowdlerized the folk tales which they collected in order
to make them more suitable for the nursery. Here is one of the most
amusing paragraphs:

"Pregnancy was a subject which made the Grimms uncomfortable. In
fact,any hint of premarital sexual activity must have made Wilhelm
Grimm in particular blush with embarrassment. A quick look at "The
Frog King" reveals the tactics he used to cover up the folkloric facts
of the story.

When the princess dashes the hapless frog against the wall, he
"falls down into her bed and lies there as a handsome young prince,and
the king's daughter lies down next to him." No printed edition
contained this wording. Only the original draft is explicit about
where the frog lands and about the princess's alacrity in joining him
there.

In the first edition, the frog still falls on the bed. After his
transformation he becomes the "dear companion" of the princess. "She
cherished him as she had promised", we are told, and IMMEDIATELY
thereafter, the two fall peacefully asleep.

For the second edition, Wilhelm deprived the frog king of his soft
landing spot and simply observed that the transformation took place as
soon as the frog hit the wall. In this version, the happy couple does
not retire for the evening until wedding vows are exchanged,and these
are exchanged only with the explicit approval of the princess's
father. The Grimms' transformation of a tale replete with sexual
innuendo into a prim and proper nursery story with a dutiful daughter
is almost as striking as the folkloric metamorphosis of frog into
prince"

A similar amusing bowdlerization takes place in "Rapunzel".In the
first edition, after Rapunzel has for some time been pulling up her
visitor by her hair, her daily romps in the tower have weighty
consequences, for she says one day:"Tell me Godmother, why my clothes
are so tight and why they no longer fit me?"
In the second edition, Wilhelm made the passage less "lewd", and a
good deal less colourful. Now the girl asks her Godmother:" Tell me,
Godmother, why are you so much harder to pull up than the young
prince?" "Wicked child!" was the reply.

2005-06-23T23:21:00.000-07:00

.TODAY'S ARTICLE WAS SENT IN BY CEC

Neue Vahr Süd by Sven Regener

This is a book I was given by my grandson, who in turn had it recommended him by his fellow students in Munich. Though even our German-speaking friends will probably not want to read it - it is written almost entirely in cliché and youth-speak - I thought I would tell you about it because it raises some interesting issues.

Neue Vahr Süd is a fictional lower middle-class district in Bremen, where Frank Lehmann, the central character, lives with his parents. He is a pensive young man, thinking deeply about whatever subject has presented itself to him, or at any rate proposing to do so, but tends to forget to act in accordance with his deductions once he has reached them. One such is that he neglected to seek opting out from compulsory military service, which it is his right to do. As a result he is drafted into a garrison near Bremen, from where he is permitted to come home every weekend. After only one week in barracks he discovers that his room has been turned into a hobby room for his father. Mildly put out he reflects on this, and then moves into a student commune, whose members are or have been communists, and which is also inhabited by an ever-changing group of punks.

The novel then describes the two very opposite lives he must now lead: the disciplined one in the army, and the crazily uncontrolled one in the commune. In both he excels: he becomes a model soldier, is elected, unwillingly it must be said, his comrades’ spokesman, and is grudgingly approved of by his superiors; in the commune he is a forbearing tenant, where he abides, and is protected, by the rules of low-criminal gang life.

Nothing dramatic happens in either existence, his life is entirely commonplace, but significant incidents occur, the kind that happen to all of us. In Frank’s case they gradually make him realize that he has to escape both his lives: the garrison, with its degrading training procedures, the humiliating codes of behaviour, the obnoxious bullying by junior officers; and the commune, where walls are knocked down and not repaired, where no one pays the rent, the electricity, or the water, so the lavatory stinks, food has to be eaten cold, and Frank’s favourite book must be read by candlelight.

The means to escape military service is written into the statutes, so he applies for it, much to the amazement of his chiefs, who do with his submission only what they must, which results in his request being refused. Escaping from the chaos of his communal life is similarly impossible because after being rescued from an attack by a gang of yobs by the commune’s most active criminal member, he is as good as bound to it. So what can he do? He can, he concludes, run away from both.

Frank resolves his problem by taking to the road in his shaky car to his brother in Berlin. At the time of the action Germany is still divided, and different laws pertain there, one of which is that he will not be extradited to the Bundesrepublik.

We are not told how he fares, for here the book ends. His story is continued in “Herr Lehmann”, which is a great success in Germany. What particularly interested me was how one should extricate oneself from an intolerable life without finishing up in yet another dull existence, and whether British lads and ladettes would gain if compulsory military service were reintroduced in Britain? Frank’s duties there are utterly derisory, quite inadequate to fit him for the private life he must lead after his discharge. But will it turn him into a useful member of the society, or will it merely break his spirit.

NEXT POST MONDAY

2005-06-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

TODAY'S ENTRY WAS CONTRIBUTED BY MW

THE LITTLE SONGBIRD

We can all think of examples from literature in which a small object, often of little value, plays a pivotal role in the drama, and is invested with a significance far greater than it would normally assume in everyday life. The example which comes most readily to mind is the handkerchief in Othello, but the one which moves me most deeply occurs in Hardy's "Mayor of Casterbridge."

Henchard, the central character, after doing his stepdaughter a great wrong by keeping from her the fact that her father, presumed drowned, is actually alive and came looking for her, has, too ashamed to face her,left the town where he used to be mayor, put on his working clothes and gone back to his former life as an itinerant farm-worker.

When he hears that his daughter is to be married, he trudges back to Casterbridge, wishing to give her a present. He cannot decide what to buy and, after long hesitation, settles on a goldfinch in a wire cage. On reaching the house, he puts the cage down for a moment, goes to the back door and asks for Elizabeth Jane. She comes, but cannot forgive her stepfather, and bitterly rejects his overtures, whereupon he leaves in great distress.

In the last chapter of the book Elizabeth Jane discovers "in a screened corner a new bird-cage, shrouded in newspaper, and at the bottom of the cage a little ball of feathers--the dead body of a goldfinch." The maid tells her that Henchard had been seen carrying the cage. The death of the poor creature moves Elizabeth Jane so deeply that she longs to make her peace with her stepfather, and sets out to find him .

Alas, she is too late.

The goldfinch dies because she was unable to forgive Henchard: if she had not rejected him, the gift would have been handed over. Now the death of the small bird moves her to seek a reconciliation, but the fate of the goldfinch foreshadows another death, a death in truly heartbreaking, pitiable, deeply tragic circumstances.

There are other layers of meaning too, but they would require very long explanations. If you have read the book, you already know what they are--and if you have not, there is a treat in store for you if you appreciate vividly-drawn characters, thrill to an excellent story, and can bear endings of infinite sadness.

NEXT POST MONDAY

2005-06-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

From NEBUCHADNEZZAR

I will try to do a "Rover rescue" on this excellent blog, hopefully with more success than Rover has had. The intention is to stick generally to the existing formula, but my contributions at least will obviously betray my own biases (there will be no Proust, for example, as I don't know enough),but there will be nostalgia and I will bring in some stuff from the news or some humorous item that has struck me. However, I need readers to send in contributions - to the usual address - to keep it going. Literature, painting, music, reminiscence, controversy, all are welcome. Even small items are OK, if they lend themselves to discussion. For example, with thanks to The Times, it appears that Cherie Blair has contributed to a book on Catholicism: in a stunningly insensitive burst of megalomania she reveals that, although a feminist, she has "an enduring soft spot for the Virgin Mary" and that "I admire her self-sacrifice". So that's alright then. The Vatican will be relieved!

MY FAVOURITE FILM

Last week the film critic John Walker listed The 100 Best Films. He even ranked them 1-100, which I would never have dared to do, since I believe that one's response to any work of art inevitably has a strong personal element. I had not seen all 100 films, but about 86 of them, many a long time ago, and found many brilliant, some OK and some pretentious, clumsy or downright boring. No film by Kurosawa or Stanley Kubrick has ever been anything but excellent for me, whereas certain celebrated Continental directors (I leave you to guess the names) affect me like Mogadon 50mg. Also, despite what follows, I have never made it beyond the first 20 minutes of Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch". The same goes for "Four Weddings and a Funeral" - bored stiff! In any case, there was no indication of the criteria Walker was using to judge or rank the films - photography, dialogue, story-line, acting skill, meaningfulnes, or a combination of some or all of these, or other factors? I agreed with a lot of his choices but would have myself have omitted quite a few in favour of other films I was surprised not to see in his list.

One of those not in the list is my favourite film. This is SHANE. What, you gasp, a Western! and from the 1950s! Well, yes. But this is not just a Western. It is a human document, with much to teach about decency, courage, loyalty, empathy for others, shame, dignity and modesty. Nor is it just a man's film - as neither is HIGH NOON.( One of the most telling shots in any film is when Kane is left alone in the middle of the dusty street to face the killers with nobody to help him. As his just-married wife and his ex-mistress pass in their buggy to the station, it is the latter whose head keeps turning to look back. Magnificent - a picture saying 1000 words!).

But back to SHANE. Let's clear up some things first. It IS a Western, so the fist-fights are nonsense and the gunfights are nonsense. These are Western conventions and essential to the story, but it just ain't like that in reality. But then neither are the equivalents in many "sophisticated" modern films, where supposedly normal characters often moreover have dialogue that no sane person would ever utter and psychological processes that belong to the padded cell. SHANE is a Western in which what the characters say and how they behave is as important as the archetypal story - a rarity indeed. Like the original novel it is seen through the eyes of a child, with his beautifully acted puzzlement at the adult world, his hero-worship etc. Apart from the hired gunman, there are no absolutely evil people, not even the baddies. The psychological truth of the film is astonishing. Watch how the animals behave, watch how the adults behave, watch how the adolescents behave, watch how the children behave - children still, even at a grim funeral. Notice how when the little boy asks Shane to shoot at a rock, the sound of the gun is massively magnified to show the child's shock. One sees in the course of the film the child beginning to grow up and have an inkling of the flawed nature of adult life, the unavoidable harms, guilts ,compromises, sadnesses - yet relapsing again into his child's world.
It is an exciting film, of course, but also very moving, not least at the end when Shane gently explains why he has to leave people he loves, why there is no escape for the sane person from a murder committed. SHANE is a seemingly simple story, which repays repeated viewing for the complications it reveals.

Now I would like readers to name their own favourite film, and give some reasons why.
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2005-06-06T23:54:00.000-07:00

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THE SEA

When I read recently that tourist chiefs in Eastbourne (nicknamed "God's waiting room) have introduced double deckchairs to encourage young couples to sit at the sea front, I was reminded of this passage from Ronald Blythe's "The view in Winter". When I was young, I often wondered why old people seemed content to sit staring out to sea for so many hours. Even now that I myself am older, I still could not sit watching waves for much longer than 5 minutes, 10 at most.But when I read this paragraph, I get an inkling of the state of mind of the aged sea-watchers.

"Different places create different out-of-doors elderly attitudes. On the south coast they are sea-watchers. Every fine day finds them on the esplanade looking at water and allowing the mesmeric effect of its sound and movement to wash through them until nothing matters any more. There is a unique calm to be found at the front on a fine Sunday morning as the ancient sea-watchers take up their positions and begin their day's staring. Debussy's sea is caught in their grey gaze from one meal to the next and there is an oceanic contemplation which is soothing and which is, at the same time, wide awake.
These old people are uncertain why they watch the sea. They talk vaguely of its being healthy, or they intimate that it is what they are paying for with the effort of leaving their inland homes. But they do not admit to its being a powerful drug to the over 75s, which it mysteriously is. It seems to extend life by exercising the intelligence outside all the factors which formed it. Those at the tail-end of life are dragged into its pull and immersed in life's origins. Its amorphousness and monotony devitalizes them , but the draining can be exquisite. The deck-chairs touch, but everybody is alone. The old who have drifted to the sea are the great idlers. They spend every hour the climate allows looking away from their own element, the land, and into the depths.It is a quiet way to go, via the coastal route."

NEXT POST WEDNESDAY

"Do you know, I could look at the sea for ever!" they say. "It gets a hold of you."

2005-06-02T23:54:00.000-07:00

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. THE FAIRY GARDEN

When I was a child, one of my regular tasks was to weed the garden and throw the rubbish on the compost heap, but some of the weeds were so delicate and beautiful--the scarlet pimpernel, the tiny blue speedwell, and a little lacy white weed I still do not know the name of--that I could not bring myself to throw them away, so I transplanted them into a secret spot, watered them and visited them daily, imagining that the jewel-like flowers were growing in a fairy garden. I often wished that I could stumble on a real garden planted by fairies, beings in which I still half-believed at that time.

Then, a few years ago, I saw an amazing sight at the side of the abandoned railway line along which I cycle on sunny days-- a sight so out of the ordinary that I put pen to paper the moment I got home, and this is what I wrote:

27th June 2000

"Today I came across a fairy garden just beyond the ruined station. What else can I call it? Who could have planted it? It is so astonishing that I would not be surprised if I returned tomorrow to find it had been whisked away during the night.

Beneath a high wall there is a perfect semi-circle brimming with wildflowers, all of which are totally unfamiliar to me--except for a scattering of brilliant orange poppies. These are the only full-sized flowers--all the others are absolutely tiny: minute snapdragons of all colours--orange ones tipped with carmine, pink ones with red lips, others scarlet with yellow hearts, yet others violet tinged with indigo. I just stared and stared, transfixed. Little sapphire blue cups holding up brilliant white stamens; tiny yellow stars; spangles of silvery white--so many blooms that the plot seemed to foam with colour. A living, moving kaleidoscope. It is like a dream come true"

I visited the spot day after day, and over the next two weeks a forest of poppies grew up, drowning the carpet of minute blossoms-- not the familiar poppies of suburban gardens, but exotic pale pink blooms as crimped and delicate as frills of tissue paper, and frail white flowers looking as if a puff of wind could waft them away, and purple ones so dark they appeared black at first sight, and dark red, indigo, violet... I had never seen poppies like these. Between them grew marigolds of burning orange, and carmine dog-daisies.

It was only some weeks later that I discovered the secret of the ruined station. As I stopped one morning to stare at the flowers yet again, I saw a man's head appear just above the high wall behind the colourful little plot. He told me he had planted a sack of wildflower seeds labelled "foreign", watered and weeded them and watched them grow. Of course I told him what a source of wonder and pleasure the blooms had been to me, and when I got home, I pondered for a long time what sort of chap would plant and tend a garden OUTSIDE his wall, which only passers-by could see and enjoy. To this day it strikes me that he did a truly extraordinary thing.

Every summer I revisit the spot, but the generous gardner has not renewed his effort, for each year fewer plants remain as the plot is gradually invaded by marauding weeds of the commonest sort. This year there are only a handful of orange poppies dotted among the thistles to remind me of the magic day when, for a moment or two,before I came to my senses, it seemed to me I had discovered a fairy garden, for the semi-circle was so perfect and the flowers so minute.

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

2005-06-01T23:53:00.000-07:00

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THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN

THE R.S.C.

Those who enjoy good shops, meals in small bistros and excellent
performances at the theatre should consider taking a weekend break in
Stratford Upon Avon to see a number of productions by the RSC. My wife
and I went last weekend, enjoyed beautiful spring weather and saw three
plays.

The first one was 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and it was reassuring to
see that, after the upheavals of the Adrian Noble years, the RSC is
getting back on track with fine ensemble acting, a largely young
company
showing that abundant new talent is available, with a few older members
also being present to provide continuity. Bottom was played by Malcom
Storry, whom I remember playing the husband of Edith Piaf in the
eighties at the Pit, and he was largely responsible for the fact that
the play within a play was one of the funniest versions I have seen.

The Saturday matinee was 'A New Way to Please You', a Jacobean play
with
a modern message. Set in a country whose ruler decrees that all men of
80 and all women of 60 are of no further use to the state, and must be
put to death, it was surprisingly funny, albeit with certain knowing
anachronisms included, and, as one would expect for the time, ended
with
the triumph of duty over selfishness. However, in our days, when we
hear
of old people in Holland being pressurised by their families to elect
for euthanasia to avoid becoming a burden on them, and when the ratio
of
working to retired people is forcing fewer and fewer workers to support
more and more old people, the play did have a chilling warning for our
possible future.

Finally, the production of Twelfth Night, on the Saturday evening was
again very enjoyable, although the young man playing Sebastian seemed a
little too hesitant at first, improving towards the end. Fans of ITV's
'Heartbeat' might be interested to know that Aislin McGuckin, who took
the part of the doctor last series, was Olivia in this production. Due
to sickness the part of Sir Toby Belch was taken by an understudy and
he
gave a very fine performance.

The fact that one can walk back to the digs in about ten minutes,
rather
than face a journey home of possibly hours, is an added bonus and I can
thoroughly recommend a weekend in Stratford.

NEXT POST FRIDAY

2005-05-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

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BEWARE OF PITY by Stefan Zweig

I do not know why I usually turn away from books, films and plays dealing with disability and death. I know they are very popular with audiences(I may be the only person who ever walked out of "Love Story")
I certainly think a great deal about such things, but do not care to read about them.

So when, some years ago, I took up Stefan Zweig's "Ungeduld des Herzens"(rather feebly translated as "Beware of Pity") I was unaware that it was about a young cripple, hardly more than a girl, and by the time I did find out, I was hooked.

The story begins when young Lieutenant Hofmiller in the summer of 1914,makes the acquaintance of Edith von Kekesfalva, the daughter of a wealthy businessman and property owner. There is a very dramatic scene early on, when Hofmiller is invited to the house and asks Edith to dance, not having noticed that the carefully placed table and flowers in front of her conceal a wheelchair. The girl has a reaction which is quite terrible to behold: whipping her body back as suddenly as if she had been struck, turning chalk-white as she stares at the young man, then gripping the table with all her strength as she makes a desperate attempt to rise, trying again and again with increasing frustration and distress, before falling backwards, sobbing--a sobbing which is "as wild and elemental as a smothered scream".

Zweig's style is almost always highly dramatic but here the narrative is enhanced by this, for there is a whole series of emotional, heartbreaking moments from which he wrings every ounce of feeling. There is no sentimentality--just raw emotion, and at times I felt quite breathless under the onslaught of my own reactions to the story.

The crippled girl falls in love with the Lieutenant, setting in motion a series of misunderstandings, temporary reconciliations, good intentions, false hopes, betrayals, promises, shamefaced admissions of guilt and remorse, moments of desperation--and a tragic conclusion.

There is one passage I have never forgotten, in which Hofmiller first realizes that Edith has fallen in love with him:

"I, in my foolishness and ignorance, had only seen the cripple in her, the child and not the woman. Not for a single moment had I ever taken into account that under the concealing blanket a naked body drew breath, felt, waited--the body of a woman who felt desire and longed to be desired. Never had I, at the age of 25, ever dreamt that the sick too, the immature, the aged, the rejected, the deformed DARED to love. That is why I had been so free and unguarded when I was in Edith's company. I never imagined that in her stunted body, the same organs became aroused, and gave her the same urges as other women.

Only now did I begin to understand that it is precisely the deformed, the rejected, the faded, the stunted, the crippled who feel a desire more urgent, more dangerous that that experienced by the healthy; for they love with a fanatical dark, black love, and no passion on earth is more greedy and desperate or rears up with a more violent despair than that of these hapless, hopeless stepchildren of God"

NEXT POST WEDNESDAY

2005-05-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

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RUSSIAN SPECTACULAR

On Saturday I went to an evening event in Aberdeen Music Hall billed as a "Russian spectacular". Never was a title more misleading. To begin with, there was no spectacle, unless you count one row of coloured lights trained on the members of the surprisingly youthful band. They were all percussionists of one kind or another, with a few wind instrumentalists dotted here and there. I will admit they blew, banged, thumped and blasted with gusto, and the sound system must have been adjusted to suit the hard of hearing, for it was so loud it made the seats vibrate. Luckily I carry with me a supply of cotton wool to protect my ears when cycling on particularly windy days, so I made good use of this,and settled back to listen.

To dub the event "Russian", was also misleading. Certainly the puffing and crashing youngsters up on the platform came from the correct region on the map, and they did start proceedings with an over-enthusiastic rendering of Tchaikovsky's "Marche Slave", but after that there was very little on the menu that could have been called Russian.
We were treated to a loud recorded spiel about the 60 th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, the glorious victory of the allies, the naming of many of the gererals--and so on and so forth.This I could have put up with, in spite of having heard the same material covered many times in recent weeks, BUT THEN (you couldn't make it up!) they launched into a rumbustious version of all the rum-te-tum old Brtish favourites from the 40s, encouraging the audience to join in, helpfully pointing out to those of us benighted enough to be ignorant of the words that these were printed in the programme. So all the older inhabitants of Aberdeen (minus yours truly) sang away with gusto--and the man behind me kept time by banging his feet on the back of my chair. I looked round pointedly several times, but gave up in the end, since I could hardly claim he was spoiling my enjoyment. I was not enjoying any of it.

Then a dance interlude was announced. I had been looking forward to the rows of athletic leaping and bounding dancers one is now is used to from seeing films of Red Army performances, but only 4 dancers appeared. Yes, the two men had the correct tunics and boots, and the girls wore attractive embroidered peasant blouses and bright skirts, but there was no athleticism here: the men kicked up their boots now and again and their partners twirled their aprons demurely. My spirits sank a little lower.

I perked up slightly when, just before the interval, a soprano was announced. I am an opera addict, so I took the cotton wool out of my ears and sat up. BUT (I know this is hard to credit) we were treated to AVE MARIA and an aria from CARMEN!

I could take no more. At the interval, when the audience was rushing to the bars, I made my escape and took a taxi home.

NEXT POST MONDAY

2005-05-25T22:57:00.000-07:00

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TODAY'S SUBJECT FOR DISCUSSION HAS BEEN SENT IN BY GARY

WHERE DO YOU PARK?

A common Monday morning topic of conversation in the office is what we did
at the weekend. When I say that I went to the art gallery, or the theatre or
opera or whatever it was, the most common question is not something like
"How was it?" or "Do you go often?" or "Do you like that sort of thing?"
(usually asked with a rising inflection), but "Where did you park?". The
people who ask that last question are usually taken aback when I reply that
we went by bus.

It is becoming the case, more and more, that people will not go to events or
places if they cannot go by car. Sealed up in their steel, plastic and glass
capsules, they have even less contact with the rest of humanity than ever.
Maybe we don't often engage our fellow bus or train passengers in earnest
conversation, but at least they are there and we could do so if the need or
opportunity arose.

This could become a self-reinforcing and ultimately a self-defeating
process. As more and more people turn to using their cars the roads will
become more and more clogged and in the end people will simply give up
venturing from their homes. Does this mean that culture and entertainment
will be confined to what can be downloaded from the internet?

For a glimpse of what such a society could become I recommend Chapter 12 of
"Foundation and Earth" by Isaac Asimov.

2005-05-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

....NONE SO PRETTY

Over the years I have read several interesting articles about the expressive and beautiful names of many British wildflowers :"Love-Lies-Bleeding," "Shepherd's Purse", "Lady's Smock", to name but a few. Garden flowers, too, can have interesting names; at this time of year most gardens are brightened by a clump of "Nancy Pretty", also called "London Pride."

For years I paid little attention to these green clumps, dull for most of the season but decorated in late spring by what looked like a haze of pinkish white flowers, until the day I learned that the French name is "Desespoir des Peintres"(" Artists' Despair") My curiosity was aroused, and I went to take a closer look.

As soon as I inspected one of the tiny blooms, I understood: inside the delicate white petals there are many minute dots of crimson and a few of bright yellow, each one separate and looking as if they had indeed been painstakingly applied by the most meticulous of artists with the finest brush imaginable. In the centre of the flower is a plump peachy-pink bottle-shaped pistil, branching out at the top into a small tuft of filaments. But best of all are the stamens : when you see these you will have to smile, for they are just like fairy lollipops--stiff white stalks with bold round tops of shocking pink.

Have a look today and give yourself a treat

PS Look around for fresh blooms, for when they are slightly faded, the spots are no longer clear.

COLIN BULLEN SENT US THIS REVIEW OF THE CARAVAGGIO EXHIBITION

The Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery is not large, consisting of only sixteen paintings in five rooms but it more than makes up for quantity by its quality. Whereas I have walked through room after room of the Tate Modern or the Pompidou Centre without seeing one picture I would value, every canvas in the Caravaggio is worthy of study. The artist is described by the programme as the first great realist and this is undoubtedly true. When one considers some of the flat and insipid offerings from other painters of the time, his use of dark backgrounds, beautiful lighting effects on the figures and contemporary models results in truly outstanding pictures.

Of course, were one not to be aware of the details of our religious heritage the subject matter of Caravaggio's work would need much explanation. Christ and the disciples at Emmaus, the denial of St Peter, the raising of Lazarus and the story of Salome and St John the Baptist are among the events covered and nowhere in this selection does one find a painting without religious connections.

Although we are all aware of the stereotype of the artist as alienated from the norms of society, in Caravaggio's case he took this to extremes. All of the works in this exhibition were painted while he was on the run, first from Papal justice for killing a man in a duel, and later from the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, located in Malta, for brawling with other knights. That he died during his journey back to Rome was a tragedy for art as he was only 39 and might have produced so many more masterpieces had he lived longer.

The exhibition itself is about to close and the crowds in the rooms did detract somewhat from the experience. However, it was very enjoyable and I can only recommend that where one can view other works by this artist one should certainly try to do so.

NEXT POST WEDNESDAY

2005-05-20T23:48:00.000-07:00

.TODAY'S POST IS UNSIGNED

.....NOT SO HOT...

I got married in a registry office straight after University and could afford no honeymoon, so the day after the 2 minute ceremony (there was just one short sentence to say, no promises, no homily) we took the train to Birmingham, where my husband had got a job, and where he had found us a shabby little room with a gas stove in a cupboard down the corridor. I also had found a job, but was not due to start until the following week, so on the very first day of my life as a new wife I turned my thoughts to producing an evening meal. I had never cooked anything as a student, not even a boiled egg--if I was left to cater for myself and there were only eggs in the cupboard, I used to break them into a cup, hold my nose tightly, and swallow quickly. They were quite difficult to get down, as the consistency was very rubbery, and they kept threatening to reappear.

The only cookery book I had was one which had come free with my aunt's new electric cooker. She had no need of it, and passed it on to me. I cast my mind back to what she cooked most: mince and potatoes was the answer. That must be easy, I thought, and went to the shops to buy the raw ingredient. Back in the cupboard/kitchen, I got out the book and thumbed the index. No entry labelled "mince." I now felt a slight panic, since my aunt was away on holiday and could not, therefore, be consulted, and I did not know anyone in Birmingham, having only arrived the previous day. Wait a minute! I suddenly remembered I had the phone number of the woman who had rented us this apology for a flat. She would know all about mince!

So I found the necessary number of pennies, and phoned. She listened to my enquiry, then said: "You simmer the meat in salted water for an hour and a half".

Now, if a student phoned me, today, this minute, and asked the same question, I would tell her how to brown the mince, add a chopped onion, make a cup of stock with an oxo cube or two, etc. etc. But nothing like that was mentioned, so, full of confidence, I went back to the stove-in-a cupboard. It took some time to force the dauntingly solid ball of mince down into the water, but I managed eventually, took great care to add the salt, guessing at the amount since I had forgotten to ask the landlady how much to put in, brought the contents of the pan to simmering point,then took out a book and read a few chapters until I thought it might be time to deal with the potatoes--for which there was also no recipe.

A couple of hours later, we sat down to our first meal together. It was not a success.

I had managed to guess how to cook the potatoes, and they looked reassuringly normal, but even I could see there was something not quite right about the mince: pallid grey fragments of meat floating in a sea of pale greyish-pink liquid, very reminiscent of lukewarm greasy dishwater after too many plates have been swilled in it. We did taste this brew, bravely, but I do not have words to describe the flavour. Salty, certainly.

We did not attempt a second mouthful.

Have you any culinary failures we can all laugh at? Do share them please!
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NEXT POST MONDAY

2005-05-18T23:44:00.000-07:00

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TODAY'S SUJECT FOR DEBATE WAS SENT IN BY GARY

LITERARY CRITICISM

Literary Criticism

The following phrases written by W Somerset Maugham in the preface to his
novel "Theatre" caught my attention: "the critic has long since forgotten
both the book and his criticism, and the generality of readers never trouble
their heads with criticism anyhow".

Are you influenced by critical reviews of books? Does the critic have a
valid role to play? Do critics, in general, act ethically in the way that
they treat the books they review?

Personally I am undecided. A year or two ago a book called "The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night" (for children and teenagers) published
here received two conflicting and contradictory reviews. I have not read it,
so cannot comment. "The Da Vinci Code" has been universally panned by
critics, both for the quality of the writing and the absurdity of the ideas
expressed therein, but it has been an international best seller. I read the
first three pages, then threw it across the room in exasperation at the
grotesquely stilted prose.

Please note that I am not looking for someone to tell me what to like and
not like. These are genuine questions, stimulated by curiousity about how
others see this.

NEXT ENTRY FRIDAY

2005-05-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

THE BLOGGER TODAY WISHES TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS

NUTWOOD

Does anyone remember Nutwood? Rupert Bear lives in this little village, together with a band of furry chums. (They are called "chums", because it is so easy to find suitable rhymes:'come' 'thumb' 'hum' and so on--'rum' 'gum' and 'bum' also spring to mind, but never in a Rupert story.)

Nutwood has no post code and it cannot be found on the map; it is a sort of furry Never Land, where animals are half human--though there are fully paid-up members of the human race there as well. That has always puzzled me. The street is still unpaved, and the teacher is a monkey.(No comment) The holiday landlady is a tigress--just the way they always used to be in Blackpool. There is a PC Growler somewhere about, but he has little to do, for no one is going to hold up the village shop or sniff a line of coke.

"SO English", I hear you murmur, "So insular", "so old-fashioned". In some ways, you would be right. BUT--this is a multicultural community, complete with a Chinese conjurer, who is also a single father with a small daughter called Tiger-Lily! (I wonder what she will be when she grows up) A non PC Golly sporting Afro locks flies in from time to time on a miniature aeroplane--no one has searched his luggage for nail scissors. Podgy Pig is an obese schoolboy, always splitting his trouser seams. Freddy and Ferdie Fox may well have an ASBO plonked on them before long, as they are always up to some mischief or other.

Maybe some kindly soul can tell me if life in Nutwood has "moved on". Have new initiatives been "rolled out?" Do computers click and video games howl and screech? I see the annuals are still for sale at Christmas, but I have never dared to open the covers, afraid of what I might find.

One thing MUST have changed:Rupert enjoyed the same freedom I had as a child; he was allowed to go off for the whole day, equipped with nothing more elaborate than a packet of sandwiches, done up in brown paper and tied with string. It was always made clear he had to ask permission, but Mrs Bear never seemed to refuse. Then he would be away all day. If the magic carpet dropped him off a bit late for tea, Mr Bear hardly looked up from his newspaper. Today Rupert would have a mobile phone, and Mrs Bear would drive Rupert everywhere in her 4x4.

"The past is another country." Tell me, but tell me gently please, do they do things differently in Nutwood today?

NEXT ENTRY WEDNESDAY

2005-05-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY CEC
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IN THE HITLERJUGEND

Lately there has been so much intelligence about the Hitler era that what I have to impart must be lacklustre by comparison. I have no tales of yellow stars on people’s clothes because I never saw one; no shop windows were defaced or shattered where I lived; and when I heard the word “Kristallnacht” I thought it had been some pretty event I had missed, like a celebration of something. The reason for my innocence was that after my grandmother’s death in February 1936 both my brother and I spent a great deal of our time in a children’s home at the other end of Hamburg, where we were completely cut off from the outside world. Ergo, I have no horror to relate, at least not the bloody kind.

My first year in the Hitler Youth scarcely happened because my grandmother had enrolled me before I had reached the proper age. All I remember is standing forlornly in the market place surrounded by what seemed hundreds of immensely tall girls. Nobody paid the slightest attention to me, so at the end of whatever business was conducted that day I must have gone home, not to be called again until a year later.

Had my grandmother lived until September 1935 she might have thought twice about putting my name down, but she died six months before the racial laws were introduced. Not that she would have had much choice, for membership of the Hitler Youth became compulsory in December 1936.

By then I had become a Jungmädel, and had been fitted out with the appropriate uniform: a short fawn leather jacket (Kletterweste), black button-on skirt (after one’s 14th birthday the buttons were dispensed with), white blouse, and a triangular neck scarf held in place by a leathern loop. The insignia my mother sewed on said Schleswig-Holstein, for my town was not then turned into a nondescript suburb of Hamburg. So now I was an approved Jungmädel.

The Hitler Youth has been compared with the Scout and Girl Guide movement, which was not as unlikely as it now seems. There had been a similar organisation before Hitler’s rise, the Wandervögel, which furthered young people’s, particularly students’, interest in nature, hiking, folk music and folk dance. Belonging to the Hitler Youth, however, was obligatory, the other two were not.

My commitments therein were to attend Heimabend one afternoon a week, and to take part in sporting activities every Saturday. I liked neither. Sitting around a table with girls I did not know was an unnerving experience for retiring me, and the screaming and yelling horde of running, jumping, ball-throwing sporty types was a nightmare. While the latter was undoubtedly beneficial to all but the physically laziest children, listening to what our group leader (Schaftführerin) told us was uninteresting and, to me at least, incomprehensible. All I remember learning in those early days was that the chief of the youth movement was Baldur von Schirach, which sounded deeply romantic to my bookish mind because of my fascination with Norse myth, especially Balder, the gentle son of Odin.

Fortunately our leader liked folk music better than politics, and she also had an attractive personality. She soon registered my ear for music and good singing voice, so when she was allowed to form a Singgruppe, she taught us few chosen ones traditional tunes, and, as must have been the true purpose of the our group, every new political song, which we would then teach other groups. I enjoyed this much more of course than listening to dull politics and German history.

Other German girls of my generation probably will have quite different tales to relate, but there will be very few who did not enjoy the camping holidays, to which we were taken now and then. Bathing, walking, picking flowers, telling tales around a camp fire, and even being frightened out of our wits at night by the horror stories some of us had stored, was pure fun. It was dangerous too, for our leaders were themselves young girls, who while doing their best to look after us, did occasionally have little parties of their own in locked rooms. I very nearly drowned in the Elbe river because I had inadvertently strayed beyond the non-swimmer buoys. My efforts to jump up to shout for help, but being able only to gasp enough air before I sank down again will stay with me for ever.

Hitler youth life changed when I was transferred to the true BDM (Bund deutscher Mädchen) on my 14th birthday. By then Germany was at war, I was growing up, learning too to be critical, and when to keep quiet. More of that, if you wish, next time.

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

2005-05-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

TODAY'S SUBJECT HAS BEEN SENT IN BY GARY
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CARTOONS AND COMICS

Once upon a time the daily newspapers carried whole pages of cartoons, most
of them better forgotten. I don't know about the UK, but there are still a
few here in Australia. My all-time favourite would have to be "Peanuts",
mainly because of it's aptness and real humanity. Amongst currently running
series I like "Bristow" (being an office worker and former public servant
myself) and "Cathy", an American series about the trials and tribulations of
a 30-something modern woman. "BC" and "The Wizard of Id" show flashes of
brilliance from time to time.

Does anyone else like to read "the funnies"? What are your favourites, and
why? Is the cartoon or comic strip mainly an English-speaking world
phenomenon (apart from such obvious masterpieces as Tintin and Baba The
Elephant)?

NEXT POST FRIDAY

2005-05-09T00:16:00.000-07:00

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THE ORCHID AND THE BEE

In his journals, Gide says that in conversations with Proust, the author admitted that he nourished the heterosexual side of his novel by transposing everything his homosexual memories suggested to him of what was gracious, tender and charming into the narrator's love of young women, with the result that nothing is left over for the description of male homosexuality except what is grotesque and abject.

Yet, in the following passage,although the comic and the grotesque elements are present, we cannot shut out eyes to the fleeting aspects that are touching and beautiful.

The narrator, who has gone into the courtyard to look at a magnificent orchid, hoping to see the arrival of a bee to fertilise the flower, witnesses instead the first meeting of Baron de Charlus and Jupien the tailor. We watch, amused as the world of plant and insect is mirrored in this encounter.

"The Baron, having suddenly opened wide his half-closed eyes, was gazing with extraordinary attentiveness at the ex-tailor poised on the threshold of his shop, while the latter, rooted suddenly to the spot in front of M. de Charlus, implanted there like a tree, contemplated with a look of wonderment the plump form of the ageing Baron. But, more astounding still, M. de Charlus's pose having altered, Jupien's, as though in obedience to the laws of an occult art, at once brought itself into harmony with it. The Baron, who now sought to disguise the impression that had been made on him, and yet, in spite of his affectation of indifference, seemed unable to move away without regret, came and went, looked vaguely into the distance in the way which he felt would most enhance the beauty of his eyes, assumed a smug, nonchalant, fatuous air. Meanwhile, Jupien, shedding at once the humble kindly expression which I had always associated with him, had--in perfect symmetry with the Baron--thrown back his head, given a becoming tilt to his body, placed his hand with grotesque effrontery on his hip, stuck out his behind, struck poses with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the provident arrival of the bee. I had not supposed that he could appear so repellent.

This scene was not, however, positively comic; it was stamped with a strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which steadily increased. One might have thought of them as a pair of birds, the male seeking to make advances, the female-Jupien- no longer giving any response to these overtures, but regarding her new friend without surprise, with an inattentive fixity of gaze, doubtless considered more disturbing, and all that was called for now that the male had taken the first steps, and contenting herself with preening her feathers.

At length Jupien went out through the gate. It was only after turning his head two ot three times that he disappeared into the street, towards which the Baron, trembling lest he should lose the trail, hurried briskly to catch up with him. At the same instance as M. de charlus disappeared humming like a great bumble bee, another, a real one this time, flew into the courtyard.....

I no longer had any doubt, in the case of a very rare insect and a captive flower, of the miraculous possibility of their conjunction when I considered that M. de Charlus, who for years had never come to the house except at hours when Jupien was not there, had, by the mere accident of Mme de Villeparisis's indisposition, encountered the tailor and with him the good fortune reserved for the Baron's kind by one of those fellow-creatures, who may even be infinitely younger than Jupien and better-looking, the man predestined to exist in order that they may have their share of the sensual pleasure on this earth: the man who cares only for elderly gentlemen."

2005-05-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES

Last week an email friend and I were discussing some of the programmes and books which have recently appeared around the subject of various aspects of the war and the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of VE day.

I was so deeply moved by one of his letters, that I asked if I might put it on this page, and he kindly gave me permission. This is only an extract--the passage about Hitler was part of an earlier discussion, but it is such a vivid image that I wanted to include it. (I chose the title and subdivided a paragraph or two.)
.
ON BECOMING AN OLD MAN OVERNIGHT

"For many years I was fascinated by the Battle of Britain. It was the aircraft themselves, I think, which drew me to it initially. There will never be a more beautiful aeroplane than the Spitfire, and the sound it makes stirs something primaeval in many of us. I collected all the literature, visited the museums and sites, and started to compile masses of data on the aircrew who took part. I spent many hundreds of hours at the PC, collating all the data into a useful source of reference, finding in the process that the published sources were seriously prone to factual error, to varying degrees. It was my mission to sort it all out; the lads deserved nothing less. Zeal was what I felt, and my enthusiasm for the task was boundless.

Until I woke one morning without it. It had left me in the night, quite unexpectedly. I had fallen out of love. All I could feel was a weariness, and an overwhelming sadness at all the destruction, and the loss of so many fine young people in such horrifying circumstances. I put the work aside, it surrounds me as I write this now, but I do not suppose I shall ever take it up again. The feelings of gratitude and admiration are as strong as ever. Of course they are, perhaps even stronger. But the zeal had been swamped by something else. Grief? Hopelessness? Distaste? You tell me.

One theory is that old men see warfare very differently from young men. It is an evolutionary/hormonal/group-survival thing which an animal behaviourist could have a ball with. For some reason, during that night of dreamless sleep long ago, I suddenly became an old man.

.....................

The fascination with Hitler is perhaps simpler. After the terror, when it is safe to come out, we poke the corpse of the dragon to reassure ourselves, and rebuild our shattered confidence. The counsellors call it 'closure'.

........................................

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

My friend's letter reminded me of a passage from Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", a novel about German trench soldiers of the first World
War. In the extract the hero, after an attack, in a moment of weakness, is tormented by memories of scenes from his youth--the cloistered courtyard of a cathedral,a row of old poplar trees along a stream, tall rose trees in a garden.

"It is a strange thing that all the memories are full of quietness;
even when things were not like that in reality, they still seem to
have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speak to me
by looks and gestures, wordless and silent...and their silence is
precisely what disturbs me, forces me to hang onto my rifle so that I
don't abandon myself to this seductive dissolution in which my body
would like to disperse itself and flow away towards the silent powers
that lie behind all things,

The pictures are so silent because that is something which is quite
incomprehensible to us. There is no silence at the front and the spell of the front is so strong that we are never away from it. Even in the depots behind the lines, or in the rest areas the muted thundering of shellfire is always in our ears. In the last few days it has become unbearable.

The quietness is the reason why these images awaken in us not so much desire as sadness---a vast and inexplicable melancholy. The scenes existed once--but they
will never return. They are gone, they are another world that is in the past for us. When we were doing our basic training, those scenes called up in us a wild and rebellious longing, they were still part of us then, we belonged to them and they to us, even if we had been taken away from them. They rose up out of the soldiers' songs we sang, when we marched off to the heath for exercises on the long long trail a-winding between the red rays of dawn and the black silhouettes of the forest, they were still a strong memory that was inside us and came from within us.

But here in the trenches we have lost that memory. It no longer rises up from inside us--we are dead and the memory is far off on some distant horizon, an apparition, a puzzling reflection come to haunt us, something we are afraid of and love
without hope. It is strong, and our desire is strong; but it is unattainable, and we know it. It is just as impossible as the chance of becoming a general.

And even if someone were to give us it back, that landscape of ouryouth, we wouldn't have much idea of how to handle it. The tender secret forces that bound it to us cannot come back to life. We should be in the landscape, wandering around; we should remember and love it, and be moved by the sight of it. But it would be just the same as when we see a photograph of one of our friends who has been killed, and we stop to think about it. The features are his, the face is his, and the days we spent with him take on a deceptive life in our memories; but it isn't really him.

Nowadays we would no longer have any real links with the way we used to be. It wasn't the awareness of how beautiful it was that meant so much to us, but the way we all felt a kinship with the objects and events of our existence. That's what set us apart and made our parents' world a little difficult to understand; because somehow we were always gently bound up with that world, submissive to it all, and
the smallest thing led us onwards along the path of eternity. Perhaps it was just the privilege of our youth--we were not yet able to see any restrictions, and we could not admit to ourselves that things would ever come to an end; expectation was in our blood, and this meant that we were at one with our lives as the days went by.

Now we would wander around like strangers in those landscapes of our youth. We have been consumed in the fires of reality, we perceive differences only in the way tradesmen do, and we see necessities like butchers.. We are free of care no longer--we are terrifyingly indifferent. We might be present in that world, but would we be alive in it?

We are like children who have been abandoned and we are as experienced
as old men, we are coarse, unhappy and superficial--I think that we
are lost."

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

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2005-05-04T23:41:00.000-07:00

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THIS ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN
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La Traviata

This is my favourite opera, written by Verdi, who in my opinion is the
greatest Italian composer, and set in Paris, the beautiful city of
light
and love. Of course the events of this famous 19th Century love story
must seem very alien to those brought up in the late 20th, as a modern
day Violetta would certainly reject Germont's impertinent interference
and indeed his daughter would hardly marry a pathetic individual who
could not accept her brother's life choices. However, the social milieu
and mores of the time were very different and Dumas' novel La Dame aux
Camelias is reputed to be based on a true story.

What made this production a delight was that it was not performed at
the
ROH or ENO where so many of us have grown tired of self indulgent
directors distorting the original conception and presenting us with
weird scenes and absurd interpretations. This version was at the
Assembly Halls in Tunbridge Wells and was sung by the Ukrainian
National
Opera of Odessa. Anyone who has not experienced the Eastern European
touring companies is missing out on Opera as it should be seen for they
give us beautiful sets, exquisite costumes, fine orchestras and
excellent performances. In this instance the leading parts were taken
by
marvellous singers, Alfredo being sung by a tenor who looked like a
young Placido, Violetta reminding me of Stratas in the film, it not
being impossible to imagine her dying of consumption, unlike some of
the
weighty sopranos of the past, and the baritone playing Giorgio Germont
being fully equal to the others. The chorus was also very good, the
famous drinking song, the Brindisi, being rendered with great gusto.

For me, to see a production as good as this, only fifteen minutes drive
from home, and at one third the price of the ROH, is something too good
to miss. These companies perform all over the country and I can only
recommend that opera lovers seek them out, rather than spending their
money at over priced West End theatres.

NEXT ENTRY FRIDAY

2005-05-01T23:42:00.000-07:00

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MATISSE at THE ROYAL ACADEMY

This exhibition is entitled "The Fabric of Dreams", because, in
addition to many familiar and less familiar works by the artist, there
is a display of some of the fabrics and garments which directly
inspired some of the paintings, for Matisse assembled during the
course of his career a whole wardrobe of dresses, blouses, harem pants
and swatches of brightly-patterned cloth. He dressed his models in
loose oriental robes, and positioned them behind decorative pierced
screens draped in fine materials sporting bold designs rich in vibrant
colours, thus creating the series of paintings known as his
"Odalisques", redolent of the atmosphere of the harem.

Although I was interested to see some of the patterns which had
inspired the artist, what draws me back again and again to Matisse's
creations, is always the brilliant kaleidoscope of colours, which
dazzles my eyes and makes my heart sing.

Apart from the famous portrait of Greta Moll, little care has been
taken in the depiction of most of the women here: the faces are mere
masks, the features often indicated by the dots and slits a child
might have sketched in. In "Odalisque with Yellow Persian Robe and
Anemones", the colours and shapes of the flowers and the dress are
startling, but the woman is carelessly drawn, one hand almost
disembodied and resembling nothing more than a bunch of thick
sausages.

In the Still Life studies, once again the patterns dominate the
compositions. Where does the design of the carpet end and that of the
wall-hanging begin? Impossible to decide! What is pattern and what is
real object? Again, we cannot be sure: bowls of fresh flowers appear
less real than the flowered sofa which rises behind them; fruits are
blobs which are lost in the cloth on which they rest.

If you are excited by design and colour, this is an exhibition you
must not miss. But if realistic portraiture and Still Life studies in
the manner of Cezanne are your preference, you may not like it.
.

NEXT ENTRY WEDNESDAY

2005-04-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

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TODAY'S ARTICLE WAS SENT IN BY CEC

HITLER AND I

I have never met Hitler, have seen him in passing only once, and had no personal or political attachment to him. I must have thought of him simply as the legitimate though at first embattled leader of Germany, and though eventually I fell foul of the system I did not blame him personally.

From my earliest childhood I lived in the shadow he cast over all our lives, particularly as my grandmother, who looked after me and, until he had passed the toddler stage, my brother, replaced the lost Kaiser with Hitler. Here then are a few early recollections.

My first conscious memory of the actual man was in 1933, when my mother, grandmother, and a group of female neighbours crowded around a picture postcard, talking excitedly. When the neighbours had gone my mother showed me the postcard. It was a photo portrait of Hitler, but his usually sleek hair was disturbed, as if it had been taken in a gale. Among the hair, she told me, one could see the burning Reichstag. No matter how hard I looked I could not spot the leaping flames, but Hitler’s visage engraved itself upon me memory so thoroughly that I can see that postcard in my mind’s eye even now.

I do not remember whether it was before this incident or afterwards that I found my grandmother crying in her favourite window seat. I anxiously reported this to my mother, who explained that “Oma” was afraid Hitler might go blind on account of the gas poisoning he had suffered during the first World War. Many years later I learned that it was particularly elderly women who loved and even adored Hitler, not for political reasons, as my grandmother did, but because he appealed to them emotionally.

Another very vivid memory is standing by my grandmother in the same location, and looking at our stained swastika flag. Around the corner, on my way to school, there was an abundance of similarly red flags, but their motifs were a cross formed from a hammer and a sickle. “Oma” explained that we were National Socialists, that the others were Communists, that they hated us, and had thrown eggshells filled with green paint at our flag. Hence the stains. It might have been on that day that I and our next-door neighbour’s daughter Ulla, five or six years older, sat on my bed and composed a poem about the foreigners who had invaded Germany, and which must be driven out again. She wrote the words, I added a painted rose, and then our work was pinned to the wall of my bedroom.

I remember too being given, or being sent, coloured picture books with drawings of extremely ugly, dark, hook-nosed, fat men lusting after blonde women. I did not understand that these ugly men were meant to be Jewish. If I had understood it would have made no impression on me because my grandmother had many Jewish friends. I do not recall seeing any other such books, maybe because my grandmother threw them away before I could see them.

Most disturbing were the almost daily newspapers reports about battles between the political factions, and the photos of dead or horribly injured men of the SA (Sturm Abteilung), which were more gruesome in black and white than they might have been in colour. I was familiar with the SA’s most famous hero, Horst Wessel, who was killed during on of those confrontations in 1930, because his name was included in the title of what became the secondary National Anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied. When the SA’s leader Röhm was executed in 1934 on a charge, I believe, of treason, my brother, who had a set of toy SA soldiers, and I dealt with his toy Röhm by chopping his head off.

In 1935, just before she died, my grandmother enrolled me in the Hitler Youth although I was too young. I was never allowed to participate in its activities until I had reached the proper age. Of that and more, if you wish, next time.
CEC

NEXT WEEK THERE WILL BE NO ENTRIES as I am going to the Matisse exhibition-armed with a ticket this time.
NEXT ENTRY WILL BE MONDAY 2 MAY

2005-04-21T23:37:00.000-07:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN
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TURNER, WHISTLER, MONET AT TATE BRITAIN

I feel that the supposed link between these three artists may be a
little strained, given that the latter two were only teenagers at the
time of Turner's death, but obviously subject matter and to a certain
extent, Ruskin provide links. The major features of the majority of the
works in this exhibition are water, be it the Thames, the Seine or the canals of Venice, and the effects of industrial pollution, most
particularly in the case of London.

Obviously the swirling atmosphere of Turner's pictures are familiar to
everybody but Monet's views of the Thames, and the Houses of
Parliament, obscured by pea souper fogs may be less well known. As
usual the colours of Monet's works are brilliant and the images of
London
stand comparison with anything he produced around Paris.

Until going to this exhibition I had not appreciated the range of
Whistler's
work but there are many interesting examples to be seen, including a
series of his 'Nocturnes'. This includes the famous 'Nocturne in Black
and
Gold: The Falling Rocket' which was the cause of the libel case between
Whistler and Ruskin after the latter described the former as 'a
coxcomb,
flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. From our perspective,
having
seen what has passed for Art throughout much of the twentieth century,
it
seems incomprehensible that Ruskin could have been so offended by what
would now be considered almost conventional painting but the legal
action
bankrupted Whistler and may have precipitated the mental problems that
overshadowed Ruskin's final years. That Ruskin was Turner's greatest
supporter clearly influenced his view of what he saw as Whistler's lack
of
moral depth and matters were not helped by their diametrically opposed
political views.

There are also a number of lithographs by Whistler shown and, while
these
don't particularly appeal to me, the contents of the final room, with
its
evocative views of Venice is a fine finish to an interesting
exhibition.
Overall, given my love of nineteenth century Art and of landscape
painting,
I found the visit enjoyable and would recommend it as worth the £10
admission fee.

2005-04-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

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TODAY'S DEBATE SUBJECT HAS BEEN SENT IN BY GARY

ROMANTICS

After my response to a recent topic another regular contributor said that I
was "not a romantic". Fair enough. Maybe I'm not. She knows who she is, and
I will soon too. As everyone who has been to the movies in the last few
years knows, anyone with a laptop and a wireless connection can, at any time
and in any place, with a mere 20 or 30 keystrokes, find out everything about
anybody. She will be dealt with!

Seriously though, this raised in my mind a question: what is a "romantic"?
Songs, plays and literature overflow with the word, but no writer or
librettist has ever said what one is. Dictionary definitions don't really
help, and saying what romantics do (eg walk on beaches or watch sunsets)
doesn't answer the question. I'm not looking for OED precision, but at least
a working definition that more than one person will agree with.

Can anyone help this curious non-romantic?

TOMORROW THERE WILL BE A REVIEW OF THE MONET/WHISTLER/TURNER EXHIBITION

2005-04-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY GARY

CHILDHOOD GAMES

Is it just me, maybe looking back to a "Golden Age", or is there anyone else
who thinks that as children we played more imaginatively than children do
today?

One game my two sisters and I played was pretending to make radio
broadcasts. At one stage we had been given a set of wooden building blocks
in it's own box, which was on four casters. Emptying the blocks out, we
would tip the box on it's side and one of us would put our head inside it,
while the other two stayed on the other side, twirling the casters like the
knobs on a radio set. The one with their head in the box would talk or sing,
as if making a news or music broadcast. Of course the content of the
broadcast had to change if the station were changed by the other two. It was
a favourite game and a lot of fun.

These days I think a lot of parents would rush children who did that sort of
thing off to therapy, on the grounds that they were detached from reality.

Does anyone else recall favourite childhood games?

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

2005-04-13T23:47:00.000-07:00

TODAY'S ARTICLE WAS SENT IN BY ROY.

FLAMENCO

Anyone who has been on a package tour to the Spanish Costas in the last forty years is almost certain to have been given an introduction to Flamenco. It will probably have taken the form of half a dozen young, raven haired ladies in long brightly coloured polka-dot dresses, with those enlarged combs, or peinetas, in their hair and a mantilla, or shawl, draped about their slender persons. They will have stamped their feet, clapped their hands and swirled their skirts with great energy, beaming irresistible show-biz smiles at their audience to the accompaniment of music provided by a cassette recorder. I recall an occasion when a wind-up gramophone was pressed into service in a Torremolinos hotel foyer. For a finale, holidaymakers will have been dragged or cajoled onto the little stage to dance with the girls, and demonstrate that it is, after all, nearly as easy as it looks. The sangria will have flowed, endless cameras will have clicked and flashed, and a good time will have been had by all. That is what the Costas are, and what true flamenco, most emphatically, is not.

The world-renowned luthier and guitar maker, José Ramirez III, in his charming book “Things About the Guitar” explains in this extract that the authentic Flamenco is a far more intimate, personal and private affair.

“To listen to genuine flamenco, the only people needed are those that can be sheltered under an umbrella. A flamenco gathering, usually at night, consists of one guitarist, two singers, (one specialised in “cantes” of lower Andalusia and the other in those of the Levant), and two aficionados. This is just the right number of people; two guitarists are permissible if each one is specialised in different forms of playing, plus a maximum of three aficionados. Four would create an inadmissible turmoil.

The gathering or “fiesta flamenca” follows a line of behaviour that is very similar to a rite; congenial conversation, a few guitar “falsetas” (chords), “cantes chicos” (light flamenco), then “cantes” of a greater category, until the moment comes when sheer magic descends on the people gathered there; something incredible envelops the air around them, everything is seen in a different light; it is then that the singers and guitarists start deriving more pleasure from their own art - if at all possible - than the aficionados themselves. Finally the moment arrives when the great and deep “cantes” are presented in all their regal solemnity, while through a window, accompanied by a soft breeze, the dawn timidly steals in, probably lured by the spell cast there, because there is ecstasy in its presence. Remote and forgotten ancestors imprecisely make their way in, to whisper with their vague presence, into the ears of the soul – echoes of passion, challenges, love, battles, sacrifice, heroic deeds …

When they all go to retire, they do it in silence. It hurts to pronounce commonplace and everyday words since these could shatter the gossamer-like fragility of the spell. On awakening, a few hours later, the intricate and tantalizing beats of the “solea” still linger in one’s soul.”

Different, isn’t it?

2005-04-13T23:38:00.000-07:00

REPLIES TO YESTERDAY'S LETTER

Thanks for replies and e mails, and all the appreciative comments.

Plymouth's suggestion is the most sensible, I feel, so after this week there will be posts on MONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS and FRIDAYS.

TODAY'S SUBJECT FOR DEBATE WAS SENT IN BY GARY
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NOW WHAT?

Most, if not all, of the people who contribute to this blog are "culture
vultures" themselves to some extent. Why else would we bother? We are all
widely and deeply read, have seen much art or have listened to a lot of
music of lasting value and so on.

What have we got out of it? More than casual amusement and entertainment I
hope. I'm sure I can speak for all in saying that our minds have been
improved and expanded, and our outlook on society and our fellow citizens
changed in positive ways. In other words, we consider ourselves to be better
people than what we would have been if we hadn't taken the various cultural
journeys that we have as individuals.

The question I have is this: now that we are better, what are we going to do
with this improved state of being?

2005-04-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

OPEN LETTER TO ALL READERS

CULTURE VULTURE has been appearing most days for well over a year. In spite of a stream of excellent regular contibutions from CEC, Urschel, and Nebuchadnezzar and the occasional very welcome post from Gary,Colin, Ben, Roy and Thresse, I am now gradually running out of ideas.

For a long time I have been aware that far more people read this page than ever contribute or even comment, and, since I would love to keep the blog going, I wonder whether it would be a good idea to request articles which are not necessarily about culture as such--rather like the Friday spot: reminiscences, personal anecdotes, wry reflections on life and the news, even, on a RARE occasion--politics.

Would readers then be more willing to send me articles? Is there a danger of turning ourselves into the "Lifestyle" section of newspapers? Please put your views in the comments box, or send to mo.walker@gmail.com

Here is a sample of the sort of post I mean. As my penfriends already know, this is a true incident which happened to me last week

...............FOILED !!

I have often wondered why so many passengers stand in front of the
huge notice board at Kings Cross ,London, waiting for the moment when the platform number finally goes up. This always happens about 10 minutes before departure, when every able-bodied traveller makes for the train as fast as possible--some almost power-walking, others trotting along pulling their trolley-type cases behind them. Only now do I see the advantage.

Last week I decided I no longer wished to be caught up in this crowd so I decided to really sprint. I am small and slight, and was only carrying a light rucksack so I was able to run very fast indeed and climbed into the train well before anyone else. I found my reserved seat easily and made myself as comfortable as is possible in the hard-bottomed, narrow seats allocated to passengers of the 2nd class..

Later on people started to crowd in, and I noticed a middle-aged poshly-dressed couple staring at me in a pointed manner. I wondered why, but tried my best to ignore them, pretending to gaze out of the window. Eventually the man said in a la-di-da English voice:

"I'm afraid you've got our seat. My wife and I always sit
together and we have numbers 53 + 54."

Well, I know I can make mistakes about numbers, so I obligingly checked the back of my seat, saw that it was indeed marked 53, and stayed calmly where I was.

The couple started to get indignant, made a fuss, stood over me and stared,insisting I was wrong, exerting all the moral pressure they could muster. However, I'm pretty good at withstanding that particular brand of pressure, especially the English variety, and I said to myself: "This old guy is not going to bodily
haul me out of my seat. I'm staying put."

Eventually there was such a commotion that a flustered official appeared.
I promptly showed my ticket+ he affirmed that it was correct. Then the posh guy handed his over; after a cursory examination the official made his pronouncement: "Yes sir, but this number has been tippexed out and changed."

"Oh no! Impossible!--that is the way we got it!"

"I'm afraid, sir, it has been altered since you got it!"

And so it went on. I was having GREAT FUN listening to all this and sat there happily vindicated, sporting the sort of smirk on my face which the Cheshire Cat would have been proud of. In the end the official, still coldly polite, said quietly but firmly:

"The best thing, sir, would be to make your way to coach F, where there are unreserved seats available"

I could not resist giving them a last triumphant smile as they retreated. Imagine--posh people like that trying to cheat, and willing to eject a diminutive Pict from her rightful seat!

I shall be busy practising my sprint for my next visit to King's Cross in two weeks time.
.

2005-04-11T23:49:00.000-07:00

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DER KNABE IM BRUNNEN by STEFAN ANDRES

IN DISGRACE

Last week I quoted a poignant passage from "Der Knabe im Brunnen" by
Stefan Andres, so, by way of contrast, here is one of the many amusing
incidents

It describes the Kaiser's fleeting visit: this august personage was
due to pass through the village in a motorcade, and Burx, the
schoolmaster, saw to it that his charges were well drilled in advance,
provided with small flags to wave, primed with two patriotic songs and
lined up along the side of the main street. Unfortunately, nothing
went according to plan: the pupils were duly in place at midday, but
the Kaiser failed to put in an appearance at the allotted hour and the
children were still waiting at 2, both songs having been sung to
order, all in vain.

"The sun burned our bare heads. In the first hour, no-one dared to
utter a word. In the second, we began to whisper, but fell silent
whenever Burx approached. By this time I really wanted to know where
the Kaiser had got to, because for quite a while I had been aware of
the need to knock at a nearby door and ask Granny Dixius if I could
use her privy.
But, if I went away, even for 5 minutes, the Kaiser might choose that
precise moment to drive past.

The growling in my belly got worse, and with it grew the fear that
something might happen, which for me, at the age of 6, would be every
bit as shameful as leaving the line-up. In the end I told the boy
standing next to me what the matter was. He stared at me earnestly, as
if in a state of shock. "Best do it in your pants", he finally
whispered. "The Kaiser only comes once." So I gloomily surrendered
myself to my fate, knowing that later that day I would have to stand
in front of my mother and brothers with my legs wide apart like a 2
year old and my head hanging in shame.

When the fleet of big black cars finally drove past, about 4 in the
afternoon, we shouted 'Hurra' and waved our flags. The car windows
were all closed, and we only caught a glimpse of the passengers
through the glass. I thought that the Kaiser's car would be painted
gold, and that he would be wearing a purple cloak and a crown, but all
I could see were uniforms. I found out later that the splendid-looking
fellow with lots of gold braid on his shoulders and chest, the one I
thought was the Kaiser, was only a steward after all. The Kaiser
apparently looked just like Zillichen, the gamekeeper, for he was
wearing hunting garb.

I cried bitterly as mother removed my trousers. She tried to reassure
me with a laugh, that it wasn't such a terrible tragedy really, for
you didn't get the chance to see the Kaiser every day...

I buried my head in her lap, sobbing :" But Mother, I DIDN'T see him !"

2005-04-08T04:53:00.000-07:00

Having been raised in a town house without even a balcony the only garden creatures I saw were in the park opposite. No birds, butterflies, cock-chafers, or ladybirds came to visit our third-floor apartment, and the frog spawn at school, collected in the near-by copse during a biology lesson, rotted in its stinking green tank. What a difference, I thought last year, when I saw the tiniest imaginable froglet sitting on a water lily leaf in my garden pond, its minuscule limbs as fragile as the transparent fingernails of a newborn child. We stared at one another for a long minute, and then it leapt, gigantically, into the water and was gone.
This year, with ladybirds already having emerged from their hibernation quarters, I remembered how my brother and I ceremoniously buried one we believed to have died, in the same park. There, too, used to be masses of cock-chafers in May, which buzzed and bumbled through the trees, and banged into whoever crossed their path. We collected them in matchboxes, but having no-one to bury them, like Max and Moritz, into some detested adult’s bed, we released them again.
Recently, during my friend’s visit, we experienced a very English garden wonder. We had both been weeding when I, striving to reach a garden seat, noticed a movement near my boot. Another bumble bee, I thought, and stopped dead. But what emerged from under the thick greenery was an infant butterfly, the colours of its wings so bright that it must have just freed itself from its chrysalis. As it tremulously stretched and inflated its wings my friend declared that it was a Small Tortoiseshell. As I gingerly stepped across to sit on the bench it fluttered up and, incredibly, settled on my hand. I froze and stared tenderly at its fragile beauty, the dust on its wings, the probing antennae. A slight movement caused it to set off again, in the direction of my envious friend. She held out her own hand, and, lo, it accepted the kind offer, and rested there for another long while, while she, as is her wont, made mental notes of its particulars. Finally it flew off, upward this time, fluttered into my neighbour’s garden, and was gone. We looked after it, feeling in some way blessed. We smiled at one another. Such a happy day...

CEC

2005-04-07T23:42:00.000-07:00

TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN
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PILATE - the biography of an invented man by Ann Wroe

If one were to ask the man in the street to name the most famous Roman
of them all then almost certainly the answer one would receive would be
Julius Caesar, although those who knew more of classical history might
mention Augustus or the more scandalous characters such as Nero or
Caligula. However the Roman whose name has been spoken by millions each
week throughout the world, wherever Christians have worshipped
together, is a Roman provincial governor, about whom little definite facts are
known, beyond the overwhelming truth that it fell to him to condemn
Christ to the Cross.

This book draws together many of the myths and fables associated with
Pontius Pilate, presenting very different views of his attitudes, of his
actions before, during and after that fateful day in Jerusalem, and of
the way in which he has been regarded since in the Christian world. It
is remarkable that so little is known about someone who played a
significant role in the most important series of events in human history
but, of course, this has enabled many to shape the way in which he is
seen to meet their own ideas about the Crucifixion.

What is certain is that as, like Judas, his actions were foreseen by
both the ancient prophets and by Christ himself, he illustrates that
there is more to the world than can be explained by material
philosophies. Either his responses were predetermined and he could not
have chosen to act otherwise than he did, or, if he did possess free
will, then some can stand outside time and observe what choices are made
by mortal men. Neither explanation can be encompassed by those who
would deny the existence of anything beyond the visible.

This book is worth reading for any interested in the history of the
Holy Land, in the manner in which different traditions have seen the impact
of the Easter story or in the wealth of different views that exist of
the life of an ordinary man who found himself, for a few hours, at the
centre of human history.

2005-04-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY GARY

UPDATING

Last week I saw a performance of Shakespeare by a professional company, a
number of whose productions I have seen before. This particular production
was nearly up to their usual high standard.

Not just this time, but during past performances I have wondered about the
possibility of updating the language of Shakespeare's plays. There are times
when it can be a bit hard to follow, and I find that this diminishes a
little my full grasp of the drama.

Full well do I realise that any such proposal will draw strong opposition,
the wrath even of some people. One of the grounds for opposition to an
update of the language is that the poetry would be lost. It doesn't have to
be if the update is done well enough, and in any case we surely don't go to
performances of Shakespeare to listen to poetry, but to witness the
presentation of a stage drama.

I'd be very interested to get the reaction of others (says he, donning steel
helmet and flack jacket, and retreating into his deep concrete bunker).
Interestingly, my 31 year old son was with me, and when I made the
suggestion to him he replied that the language made him concentrate more.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

COMMENT (MW)

Dear Gary,
I apologize for putting my comment here. I tried several times to fit it in the box, but it was too long, and when I struggled to get it into 2 boxes, the lines of poetry were cut--and the effect lost. Sorry again!

If the plays were updated, some of the most magnificent poetry ever written, would be lost to everyone except scholars. Imagine being the writer trying to update these lines from "Measure for Measure".

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick ribbed ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling, 'tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed wordly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

2005-04-05T20:17:00.000-07:00

SEALSKIN TROUSERS by Eric Linklater

All Scottish children used to be familiar with the tale of the Silkie, the seal woman who leaves her home in the sea for love of a fisherman. But there were also corresponding tales of the sealman, who came from the waves to capture a human bride, and took her back to his briny lair.

Eric Linklater draws on the memory of such tales in his "Sealskin Trousers", in "the Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories". A young woman, named Elizabeth Barford, is revisiting a cliff ledge which she had discovered with her fiance some time before and is disappointed to see she is not going to be alone.

"Their gazebo, she perceived, was already occupied by a person of the most embarrassing apperance. He was not only naked, but obviously robust, brown-hued, and extremely hairy. He sat on the very edge of the rock, and down his spine ran a ridge of hair like the dark stripe on a donkey's back, and on his shoulder-blades grew patches of hair like the wings of a bird. Unable in her disappointment to leave at once, she lingered for a moment and saw to her relief that he was not quite naked. He wore trousers of a dark brown colour, very low at the waist, but sufficient to cover his haunches."

Of course, the reader is immediately alerted by the strange appearance of the man, but over the following pages, suspicions are gradually lulled as Elizabeth recognises a fellow student with the perfectly ordinary name of Roger Fairfield. They chat of student dances, about the role of science in the modern world, even about T'ai Chi. It all becomes a trifle dull.

Then the young man does something so startling, so amazing, and so deeply frightening, that the story moves onto quite another level, although the scene does not change, and the matter-of-fact narrative tone continues. But now the girl whispers "Who are you?" "What are you?"

The seduction which follows is truly mesmerising, beautifully written, and there is a paean of praise to life in the deep:

"Human beings have to carry their weight about, and do not know how blissful it is to be unconscious of weight: to be wave-borne, to float on the idle sea, to leap without effort in a curving wave, and look up at the dazzle of the sky through a smother of white water, or dive so easily to the calmness far below and take a haddock from the weed-beds in a sudden flash of appetite".

There is a twist at the end of the tale, for the very last sound is the scream of someone who cannot stop screaming.

Someone else!

WHO?

Read the story, do !!

.
.

2005-03-30T22:11:00.000-08:00

ALBERTINE ASLEEP

Proust wrote numerous pages about sleep, mainly about his own sleep and all the various stages between slumber and waking, the uncertainties, the dawning of consciousness. Yet, more than all these, I love this passage in which he describes the sleep of his mistress.

"Stretched out at full length on my bed, in an attitude so natural that no art could have devised it, she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had been laid there. I had an impression of possessing her entirely, which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath.

I listened to this murmering, mysterious emanation, soft as s sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight, that was her sleep. What I felt then was a love as pure,as immaterial, as mysterious, as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of nature. Her sleep brought within my reach something as serene, as sensually delicious as those nights of full moon on the bay of Balbec, calm as a lake over which the branches barely stir, where, stretched out on the sand, one could listen for hours on end to the surf breaking and receding.

I spent many a charming evening talking with Albertine, but none so delicious as when I was watching her sleep. Granted that she had, as she chatted with me or played cards, a naturalness no actress could have imitated; it was a naturalness as it were, at one remove, that was offered me by her sleep. Her hair, falling along her pink cheek, was spread out beside her on the bed, and here and there an isolated straight tress gave the same effect of perspective as those moonlit trees, lank and pale, which one sees standing erect and stiff in the backgrounds of Elstir's Raphaelesque pictures. If Albertine's lips were closed, her eyelids on the other hand, seen from where I was placed, seemed so loosely joined that I might almost have questioned whether she really was asleep. At the same time those lowered lids gave her face that perfect continuity which is unbroken by the obtrusion of eyes. There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

From time to time a slight tremor ran through her, as the leaves of a tree are shaken for a few moments by a sudden breath of wind. She would touch her hair and then, not having arranged it to her liking,would raise her hand to it again with motions so consecutive,so deliberate that I was convinced that she was about to wake. Not at all; she grew calm again in the sleep from which she had not emerged. Thereafter she lay motionless. She had laid her hand on her breast with a droop of the arm so artlessly childlike that I was obliged, as I gazed at her,to suppress the smile that is provoked in us by the solemnity, the innocence, and the grace of little children.

I,who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again reposing by my side. Whenever she moved her head she created a different woman, often one whose existence I had never suspected. I seemed to possess, not one, but countless girls. Her breathing, as it became gradually deeper, made her breast rise and fall in a regular rhythm, and above it her folded hands and her pearls, displaced in a different way by the same movement, like boats and anchor chains set swaying by the movement of the tide.

NEXT ENTRY WILL BE ON TUESDAY 5th APRIL

2005-03-29T22:43:00.000-08:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY NEBUCHADNEZZAR (in posting, I have missed the cedilla out from under the "francaise".Sorry! --the article was correct when given to me.)

A LOST OPPORTUNITY

The French are rightly proud of their language and culture.I often
feel sorry for them as they gallantly fight their doomed battle
against the unstoppable tsunami of Americanisation and the English
language. Yet, in many areas of life France continues to pursue a
distinctly French way of doing things. Other countries do so too, but
perhaps to a lesser extent and with less patriotic defensiveness.

However, they missed a great opportunity to assert a permanent and
constantly inescapable difference, and moreover one that was and is
aesthetically pleasing. France should have retained the Republican
Calendar; as Russia retains the cyrillic alphabet and its broad-gauge
rail lines.

The French Revolutionary calendar was introduced in 1793 by the
Convention. The year began at the autumnal equinox and was divided
into 12 months of 30 days each, with 5 or 6 extra days for Republican
holidays. The months were given very evocative and descriptive names.

AUTUMN vendémiaire
brumaire
frimaire

WINTER nivôse
pluviôse
ventôse

SPRING germinal
floréal
prairial

SUMMER messidor
thermidor
fructidor

The names of the 10 day weeks of these 3 week months were far less
attractive. But it seems a shame that such lovely names for the months
were discarded. They would have been a constant reminder of "la
difference francaise" and a most beautiful one too.

Of course, it would all have been extremely inconvenient in all sorts
of ways, not least in international relations, to have a calendar
different from one's neighbours. But Napoleon managed to impose many
of the laws and customs from the Revolution on these neighbours. So
why not the Republican calendar?

PS (by MW)

AUTUMN

V: from "Vendange"= the harvest
B: " "brume" =mist
F: " "frimas" = icy fog

WINTER

N:from "neige" = snow
P: " "pluvieux" = rainy
V: " "vent" = wind

SPRING--all obvious

SUMMER

M: from Latin "messis"= harvest, and Greek "doron"= gift

The last two are obvious.

2005-03-27T22:50:00.000-08:00

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DER KNABE IM BRUNNEN by STEFAN ANDRES

My one and only child owes his existence to the above book, which I read years ago while on holiday in Germany. I do not know if it has been translated, but the title means "The Boy in the Well".

I had been married for 4 years and, happy with the way my career was progressing, had never given a thought to children. Yet, after reading this enchanting account of Andres' childhood in the Moselland, I began to long for a little boy. I did not sit dreaming of a baby, you understand, but a ready-made small boy, old enough to throw a ball to me, to climb trees, to accompany me on picnics, and, above all, to let me share in the magical realm which his childish imagination would conjure up.

For every chapter of this wonderful book is enlivened by the images which spring from little Steff's dreamworld. The face he sees at the bottom of the well is, he imagines, that of a small boy who, disobediently raising the heavy cover, fell into the water, and is now destined for ever to tend the sheep of the Wassermann. He can see the fluffy white sheep quite clearly floating behind the boy's head.

The episode which moved me most deeply was about a pair of stilts: Steff needs some in order to compete in the village races, and Jul, the carpenter, who longs for a boy of his own, makes him a pair "as if for my own son." Steff is delighted, especially since Jul has decorated them with blue and white stripes. Unfortunately, this makes them so conspicuous that the bigger boys begin to make fun of him, and he has to find a quiet place to practise. He ends up in Matti's back yard; he is not supposed to play with Matti, but he has never been sure of the reason, so he decides to stay there anyway and try out his new toy.

As soon as Matti catches sight of the colourful stilts, he decides he has to have them, grabs one and refuses to let go. Steff tries to prise it out of his grasp:

"His fists would not open. I saw his face grow pale and become distorted by a sickly-sweet smile. Suddenly a terrible rattle came from his nose. His lips turned purple and I heard him babble:' I'm going to die! I'm going to die!'Then he screamed--a scream I remembered having heard before. He fell to the ground and lay there twitching,while I stood staring, rooted to the spot."

Steff finally makes his escape whem Matti's mother runs out of the house to see what is the matter. He is convinced he has brought on Matti's attack, and is so frightened, he forgets all about the stilts. When he returns the next day, Matti shows him a pile of wood at the side of the yard: "And I saw a bit of wood that had blue and white stripes on it and was exactly the right size to fit in a stove. I bent down and found many other similar bits of wood. I took them out of the pile one after the other and fitted them together until they lay on the ground, apparently all in one piece, but actually as broken and powerless as a skeleton. I began to weep. 'I did it',began Matti, 'because I can't use them. I have the falling sickness.' I stared at him, and something deep within me felt he had right on his side."

Whe Jul asks Steff a little later why he has not come round to show off on his new stilts, the boy, unwilling to admit the whole sorry affair, tells him Matti stole them."Matti? Matti?" exclaims Jul. "But don't you know he died last night? This is his coffin I'm working on now." And he gave me a bit of sandpaper to polish the lid."

"And while I sandpapered, I thought calmly of how it had all come about--how Jul had made the stilts with so much love, and Matti had longed for them with such intensity, and how it had not been granted to either of us to take a single step with them, and how the destoyer of my joy had now forgotten the stilts, how I was now preparing the wood for his coffin, and how the stilts had turned to smoke and ashes.

And a tear came: it was just as salty as all tears are, yet it brought a gentle glow with it, which comforted me in my sorrow."
.

2005-03-25T23:52:00.000-08:00

TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY URSCHEL

LOUIS, aka Uli

When I was at primary school in Hamburg my way took me past a group of
tiny houses in the Königstrasse, in front of which I often saw
children playing hopscotch, spinning tops, or trundling their hoops.
They had straight black glossy hair, and were altogether so beautiful
and lively that I always looked forward to seeing them. Then one day
they were gone, their house empty. Soon other people moved in, and I
forgot them.

One day my mother took me to visit friends who lived close to a wooded
area called The Coppice. And there I saw them again, this time playing
their outdoor games among the trees. "Look," I said to my mother,
"there are the children from the Königstrasse." She turned to glance
at them, and hastily pulled me away. "They are very unfortunate
children," she whispered, and hurried me away. "Unfortunate?" I
remember wondering. They were now living in a much nicer area than
where I had seen them first. I was not told that they were Jewish
children, and if my mother had told me it would have meant nothing,
for my family always had had Jewish friends.

It was in fact a couple of these we were going to see that day. It was
always an exciting and mysterious occasion, for
whenever we had arrived at their house my mother would tell me to wait
under one of the trees while she went across the road and entered,
probably after a pre-arranged knock. I would watch the windows on the
upper floor, where eventually a hand would emerge and waved at me.
This was the signal that I was to join her. I thought this strange,
but did not ask. The woman, slim and red-haired, always looked
anxious, while the man, who was often at home, seemed more relaxed.
They had a little boy, whom I had to learn to call Uli instead of
Louis, because children in those days had to have a Germanic name. It
intrigued me that he was accompanied by a nursemaid when he went to
his private school.

His parents must have realised the danger they were in, but my mother
too knew what threatened her. Whenever she chanced to meet the woman
in the street she always put up the right lapel of her coat while
chatting to her. Now I know, or rather I assume, that she was hiding
her party badge. The family did eventually escape to England, where my
mother asked me to trace them after the end of the war. She succeeded
in establishing that they were alive and well, but was told that they
declined to renew the contact with her.

What happened to my mother is another story, for she did not escape.

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

.

2005-03-24T00:22:00.000-08:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY CEC

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE by ALISON WEIR (LAST PART)

The couple's first child, William, Count of Poitiers, had died at the age of
nearly three, so his brother Henry, Duke of Normandy, succeeded him as
heirto the throne. When Henry was five he was officially married to Marguerite
of France, who was three. The little bride was taken into the royal
household and brought up by Eleanor, while the bridegroom was sent to Thomas
Becket to be raised alongside a few other noble boys Becket already had in
his household. When the King and the Archbishop fell out Henry was removed
from Thomas Becket, was not, however, returned to his mother's care, but was
given, at the age of eight, his own establishment and servants.

But despite being crowned king at the age of 15, and henceforth known as the
Young King, his father had no intention despite young Henry's urgent and
persistent pleas, to let him have any political power although his younger
brothers already had domains of their own. Soon he began to plot, persuading
his brothers and other nobles to join him. Although the King had an idea
that something was in the wind, he was an affectionate parent, and did not
dream that his children would conspire against him.

After the murder of Thomas Becket the King's reputation had plummeted both
at home and in Europe, so this and his highhandedness turned Eleanor's
sympathies towards her children. Despite being implored by the Archbishop of
Rouen to return to her duties as the King's wife she participated and
advised her sons in their rebellion against their father. When it failed,
the King forgave his sons, who paid homage to him as their overlord, but he
forced Eleanor to live in semi-imprisonment for over a decade. She was not
released until Richard, who brother, the Young King, had died of dysentery
and fever, set her free after the King's death.

Thus a prophesy that her joyful time would come with her "third nesting" was
fulfilled when her third son, Richard (the Lion-Heart), became heir to his
father's domains. Although she had by then been out of the public eye for so
long, she became active in the country's politics, Richard having returned
all her rights to her. She prepared and organised his coronation, and then
looked after and effectively ruled the realm during his disastrous crusade.
When he was captured and held to ransom by the Duke of Austria she kept his
kingdom together, even wrecking his brother John's attempt to usurp
him. Itwas she who organised the payoff, and then went personally to collect
Richard and bring him home. When he died without an heir John became king
after all, and it was his mother who despite everything supported and
advised him.

By that time she was nearly 80 years old, and yet she crossed the Pyrenees
to fetch her granddaughter from Castile and married her to the son of the
French king because she feared the disintegration of the Plantagenet empire.
That was the year in which her grandson, Arthur of Brittany, Geoffrey's son,
held her against her will in Mirebeau, hoping to ransom her when he was
trying to capture Anjou and Aquitaine from John. The latter came to her
rescue, took his nephew prisoner, after which the boy disappeared, and may
well have been murdered by his uncle. John's possessions in France had been
secured by the aged Eleanor's refusal to surrender to Arthur.

After this last worldly task she settled at last in her favourite convent in
Fontevrault, where she had lived as a nun for some years, but still had the
privilege to leave if state matters required it. She continued to interest
herself in life outside, endowed many monasteries, and died four yearslater, in 1204. Normandy was lost to John (Lackland) that same year, but her
own ancestral lands remained loyal to England.

"She was beautiful and just,imposing and modest, humble and elegant", it was said of her, and the nuns
wrote in their necrology that she had been a queen "who surpassed almost all
the queens of the world."

2005-03-23T23:58:00.000-08:00

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JOURNEYS IN THE MIND

Proust has been accused of a certain pessimism:love is only savoured in anticipation, for example; once the loved one is taken possession of, desire dies and can only be revived by jealousy. The immediacy of the life of the senses seems at times to take second place to the ecstasy afforded by the memories of earlier experiences.

In the following passage, the narrator deliberately turns his back on the present in order to dwell on the past. He openly states that his memories do give him more happiness than he would have enjoyed, had he accompanied his mistress on her morning outing. Some of the lines would doubtless give great comfort to those too sick or old to leave the house, especially the one beginning with "for a sense of our well-being..."

"If I had not gone out with Albertine, my mind would stray all the further afield, and because I had refused to savour with my senses this particular morning, I enjoyed in imagination all the similar mornings, past or possible, or more precisely a certain type of morning of which all those of the same kind were but the intermittent apparition which I had at once recognised. This ideal morning filled my mind full of a permanent reality identical with all similar mornings, and infected me with a joyousness which my physical debility did not diminish: for, a sense of well-being resulting far less from the soundness of our health than from the surplus of our energies, we can achieve it just as well by restricting the scope of our activity as by increasing our strength.

Francoise would come in to light the fire, and in order to make it draw, would throw upon it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a year past, traced round the fireplace a magic circle, within which, glimpsing myself poring over a book at Combray, I was as joyful, while remaining in my bedroom in Paris, as if I had been setting out for a walk along the Meseglise way.

It often happens that the pleasure which everyone takes in turning over the keepsakes that his memory has collected is keenest in those whom the tyranny of physical illness and the daily hope of its cure prevent, on the one hand, from going out to seek in nature scenes that resemble those memories, and, on the other hand, leave so convinced that they will shortly be able to do so that they can remain gazing at them in a state of desire and appetite and not regard them merely as memories or pictures.

The scent, in the frosty air, of the twigs of brushwood was like a fragment of the past, an invisible ice-floe detached from some bygone winter advancing into my room, often, moreover, striated with this or that perfume or gleam of light, as though with different annular rings, in which I found myself once more submerged, overwhelmed, even before I had identified them"

2005-03-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

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THIS DEBATE SUBJECT HAS BEEN SENT IN BY THRESSE

In a recent article the art critic Januszczak wrote a review of the Matisse exhibition at The Royal Academy, criticising the artist for distancing himself from the 2nd World War, staying in the south of France, ignoring what was going on around him, draping models in swathes of patterned cloth to create his "odalisques", continuing to have exhibitions and broadcasting occasionally on Vichy radio.
Picasso, the critic claims, "was in Paris, subtly taunting the German occupiers with his two-faced insouciance."

"You either hold it against Matisse that he spent the war years continuing with his Pasha fantasies or you don't mind at all", continues the critic. "I am firmly in the first camp".

Which camp are readers of this blog in?.

2005-03-21T00:12:00.000-08:00

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THE HIGGLER by COPPARD

"The Higgler" is, to my mind, the finest tale in the volume "Dusky Ruth and other Stories", which I bought on line for one penny(BUT was charged £3 for postage). Coppard is at his best when, as in this tale, there is a strong erotic charge. He likes to place his protagonists in situations where powerful passions smoulder, are repressed, then express themselves, not in dramatic outbursts, but in a slow increase of tension, which the author ratchets up until its intensity is almost unbearable.

In "The Higgler", Harvey Witlow,in the course of his poultry trading, often visits a farm owned by a widow, and is strongly attracted to Mary, the beautiful daughter :"red hair, a complexion like the inside of a nut, blue eyes and the hands of a lady." He tries at every visit to help her with her small tasks in the orchard and to engage her in conversation but the girl says hardly a word and blushes at his attentions.

Time passes with no change, until Harvey is invited to a meal one Sunday. When they have finished eating the widow takes him aside on some pretext and, after a few moments beating about the bush, finally gets round to suggesting he should marry Mary, who will,of course, eventually inherit the property. He is taken aback, for the offer seems too good to be true. Of course he is tempted to accept immediately, but suspicion clouds his mind: why is she making this amazing suggestion? Is there something wrong with the girl?

Read the story to find out! You will be surprised at the bitter-sweet ending.

Meanwhile, to whet your appetites, here is one of the tense passages I described above:

"Under the cherry trees Mary was walking to and fro, twirling a clapper to scare away the birds. He stood watching her from the gateway. Among the bejewelled trees she passed, turning the rattle with a listless air, as if beating time to a sad music that only she could hear.
The man knew that he was deeply fond of her. He passed into the orchard, and, lifting his ladder into one of the trees nearest the hedge, began to pluck cherries. Mary moved slimly in her white frock up and down a shady avenue moving the clapper. The brightness of sun and sky was almost harsh; there was a little wind that feebly lifted the despondent leaves. He had doffed his coat; his shirt was white and clean. The lock of dark hair drooped over one side of his forehead; his face was brown and pleasant, his bare arms powerful. From his high perch among the leaves Witlow waited for the girl to draw near to him in her perambulation. His soul had an immensity of longing for her, but she never spoke a word to him. She would come from the shade of the little avenue, through the dumb trees that could only bend to greet her, into the sunlight whose dazzle gilded her own triumphant bloom. And always as she passed, his mind refused to register a single thought he could offer her, or else his tongue would refuse to utter it. But his glance never left her face until she had passed out of sight again, and then he would lean against the ladder in the tree, staring down at the ground, seeing nothing."
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2005-03-18T00:14:00.000-08:00

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CIDER WITH ROSIE

The first chapter of "Cider with Rosie" by Laurie Lee conjures up for me memories of my own childhood decades later. Since I was brought up by my grandmother, much that happened at home dated from an earlier era. I do not know whether children still have household chores to do, but I had many, some of which I enjoyed, such as stamping up and down on the blankets when my grandmother washed them in the huge sink, and many which I hated--dusting, polishing furniture and brass, and weeding. Still others I enjoyed moderately if in the mood--beating the carpets, picking fruit, preparing vegetables for the pot, watering the garden--and others too numerous to mention. None was beyond my strength, for I was never given heavy cleaning jobs. Some, however, were downright dangerous--such as chopping logs into kindling sticks with a sharp heavy axe. I could have so easily cut off my thumb. Mangling, too, had its own risks, as it was difficult to feed the sheets in between the heavy wheels without flattening a finger.

Here is the passage which reminds me of those days

"Thick steam of Mondays edgy with starch; soapsuds boiling, bellying and popping, creaking and whispering, rainbowed with light and winking with a million windows. bubble, bubble, toil and grumble, rinsing and slapping of sheets and shirts, and panting Mother rowing her red arms like oars in the steaming waves. Then the linen came up on a stick out of the pot, like pastry, or woven suds, or sheets of moulded snow.

...Walk in to the morning disorder of the scullery and all the garden was laid out dripping on the table. Chopped carrots like copper pennies, potatoes dipped and stripped clean from their coats of mud, the snapping of tight peapods, long shells of green pearls, and the tearing of glutinous beans from their nests of wool.

Grown stealthy, marauding among these preparations, one nibbled one's way like a rat through roots and leaves. Peas rolled under the tongue, fresh cold, like solid water; teeth chewed green peel of apples, acid sharp, and the sweet white starch of swedes. Beaten away by white hands gloved in flour, one returned in a morose and speechless lust. Slivers of raw pastry, moulded, warm, went down in the shapes of men and women--heads and arms of unsalted flesh, seasoned with nothing but a dream of cannibalism."

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

2005-03-17T23:44:00.000-08:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY CEC

ELEANOR of Aquitaine, by Alison Weir( Continued )

Eleanor was an affectionate and caring mother, very rare at a time
when royal children and those of other high-ranking persons were
raised practically out of sight of their parents until they were
considered to be adults. That might be as early as at 12 years of age,
and by that time they were probably either betrothed or married to
some other elevated infant. However, when after the annulment of their
marriage Eleanor lost the two daughters she had had by Louis she does
not seem to have minded. She may have been too relieved that Marie and
her sister Alix had been declared legitimate because the incestuous
marriage of their parents was deemed to have been undertaken in good
faith. This meant that they were able to continue living safely in
Louis' care, and allow Eleanor to settle into her new life as Queen
consort of England. She did become reconciled to them after they had
reached adulthood and been married.

Henry gained greatly from the union with Eleanor, for all her
territorial possessions in what is now known as France reverted to her
after the annulment, thanks in part to Louis' generosity. When Henry
was crowned King of England his dominion's western border was
therefore vastly enlarged, right to the foot of the Pyrenees. Despite
being with child so often Eleanor took whatever small part Henry
allowed her in the management of the realm, but she did not neglect
her own domains in France, where she patronised the arts, particularly
poetry, and encouraged the courtly life and manners quite unknown in
England.Initially Eleanor was happy in her marriage to Henry. They had
a lot on common: both were intelligent, shared cultural interests, had
strong and dynamic personalities, and both had strong sex drives. Her
many pregnancies ( she bore Henry eight children) - prove that he
visited her bed much more often than the religiously zealous Louis had
done, but he was not a faithful husband. He had many bastard children,
one of which, Geoffrey, probably conceived before his marriage to her,
was brought up with his own sons. Eleanor was expected to accept both
her station and be submissive, which cannot have been easy for her.
She did, however, spend a great deal of time, often many months, in
her own domains, governing them with Henry's approval. They usually
held court together at Christmastime, or Easter, but gradually they
grew further apart until Eleanor let it be known that she wished to
live on her own permanently along with her son Richard, her favourite
and heir of her own realm. Nobody quite knows the reason for their
separation, but it was to have serious consequences for Eleanor.

2005-03-16T00:14:00.000-08:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY NEBUCHADNEZZAR

HERE I STAND

In Times2 on 14 March, Richard Morrison had an article on "the greatest words ever spoken." It seems the town of Luton(!!) organised an internet poll on this, and the top 3 responses were:

1 'All you need is love'--The Beatles
2 'Unto thine own self be true'--a misquotation from Hamlet
3 'All journeys begin with a first step' --unattributed, but surely another misquotation from Mao Tse Tung.

Apart from the fact that number 1 was sung and the other two are from writings, so none is strictly the SPOKEN word, the poll is a depressing reflection on those who respond to internet polls. Morrison categorises these top 3 as: 1. "mushy tosh"; 2. "dubious exhortation" 3. "dreary truism".

But it got me thinking. What would I consider "the greatest words ever spoken"--at least from my Eurocentric viewpoint? Obvious candidates might be Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or one of Churchill's great wartime speeches, although both contain a fair amount of political calculation. Montaigne, Voltaire etc. and all fiction are excluded, for it must be spoken, and by a real person in a real situation. And Jesus is too remote and unattested.

Actually I never had any doubt. For me, the greatest words ever spoken are those of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, 18 April 1521:

" Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me. Amen."

Many events have a good claim to be the beginning of the modern world; but here surely, for good or ill--and there has been a lot of ill, is the beginning of the modern mind: the absolute primacy of individual conscience over all authority.

These short, simple, dignified phrases are not the expression of the bloodymindedness of a self-satisfied "I'm as good as the next man" ignoramus. The path that led to them was long and tortuous and full of self-doubt and mental anguish. Luther had a brilliant intellect and was fully aware that he was overturning "the perfect harmony of the world". He had just heard the arguments of great theologians, had been subjected to persuasion, friendly overtures, bribery and threats. Yet he could not but speak these words, in the face of the enormous moral pressure of a believing continent and in defiance of the Holy Roman Emperor and of the greatest power in the world, the Church, a power moreover that claimed even the next world as its domain. Despite his temporary safe-conduct, he knew he was facing not only a terrible and shameful death but the eternal damnation of his soul. All sane people have a deep need to be accepted, to fit in, and Luther was no exception: he WANTED to be able to recant and return to the bosom of the Church and Christendom. But his conscience would not permit it. This is astonishing! Here is the great NO, the great NEVERTHELESS, which has echoed ever since down the centuries. From this moment the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the whole modern mindset become possible - again, for good or ill.

What would readers of this blog choose as their "greatest words", and why? PS I now discover that Carlyle agrees with me - which may not be a recommendation for everybody!

2005-03-14T23:35:00.000-08:00

A WATERY REALM

One of the best-known features of Proust's style is his use of extended images. In the passage I am going to quote, the Paris Opera is compared to a watery kingdom, inhabited by tritons and nereids.I shall be interested to read your reactions--personally, I do not care for such over-elaboration, which strikes me as precious. (There are, however, some exquisite descriptive touches here too.)

"The passage seemed to lead to subaqueous grottoes, to the mythological kingdom of the water-nymphs. In the boxes, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had taken refuge against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually however, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night which they spangled, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge into the chiaroscuro of the surface where their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful frothy undulations of their ostrich-feathered fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves. Within the boundaries of their domain the radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile up at the bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff, or towards some aquatic demi-god whose skull was a polished stone on to which the tide had washed a smooth covering of seaweed, his gaze a disc of rock-crystal....
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Like a tall goddess presiding from afar over the frolics of the lesser deities. the Princess had deliberately remained somewhat in the background on a sofa red as a coral reef, beside a large vitreous expanse which was probably a mirror and suggested a section, perpendicular, opaque and liquid, cut by a ray of sunlight in the dazzling crystal of the sea. At once plume and corolla, like certain subaqueous growths, a great white flower, downy as the wing of a bird, hung down from the Princess's forehead along one of her cheeks, the curve of which it followed with coquettish, amorous, vibrant suppleness, as if half enclosing it like a pink egg in the softness of a halcyon's nest. Over her hair was spread a net composed of those little white shells which are fished up in certain southern seas and which were intermingled with pearls, a marine mosaic barely emerging from the waves and at moments plunged back again into a darkness in the depths of which even then a human presence was revealed by the glittering motility of the Princess's eyes"

This is only the beginning, and the image continues for some pages, but this passage gives you the flavour of the whole. If you wish to read the pages in full, you will find them in chapter 1 of "The Guermantes Way"
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2005-03-13T23:47:00.000-08:00

TODAY'S SUBJECT HAS BEEN SENT IN BY COLIN BULLEN

THE GLEANERS by Francois Millet 1857

Subject: Three peasant women attempting to find any remnants of grain
left in a field which has just been harvested.

Although Millet was not considered an exceptional colourist his skills
at drawing were highly regarded, allowing him to invest the ordinary
with monumental weight and dignity. Unlike the realism of Courbet,
Millet's paintings had a strong emotive character expressing a
romanticized feeling for the soil, but not in terms of presenting an
idealised view. He did not follow the Dutch school in the portrayal of
the lighter side of rural life, such as village fairs, but concentrated
on the serious, indeed melancholy aspects of labour and toil. In this
picture the bowed backs of the women, concentrating on obtaining the
least piece of value from the field, which the farmer, whose harvesting
equipment is shown in the background, has just finished reaping,
illustrate the hard life the ordinary peasant lives. These women are
very far from the fresh faced village maidens dancing in the square,
and a world removed from the women of fashion whose portraits adorn the
salons of Paris. Their rough peasant clothes, and the back breaking toil
in which they are involved, cannot help but send a message about rural
poverty and the hard life endured by so many in the countryside.

This work by Millet which immediately invites comparison with "The
Gleaners" is "The Angelus" in which a man and a women working in the fields
pause to make their devotions. Here is seen the same peasant dignity
against the background of unremitting toil, the naturalistic image of
real people seeking to survive the realities of French rural life.
Millet invests his subjects with a character that is not the 'nasty,
brutish and short' image of proletarian life portrayed by so many but
rather the ennobling efforts of human beings to overcome the burdens of
life.

At the time the picture was exhibited France was ruled by Louis
Napoleon III, who had made himself Emperor in 1851, following the great
upheavals of 1848, and was run in the interests of the rich. As Marx remarked the
revolution of 1789 had been essentially one of the middle class and the
interests of the proletarian class were not represented in the French
political scene. A picture such as Millet's, with its obvious
sympathetic view of the toiling masses would not find favour in a
country where the Second Republic had so recently given way to a new
Imperial ruler. The socialist message was hardly calculated to appeal to
the establishment of the time.
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2005-03-11T00:18:00.000-08:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY HAS BEEN SENT IN BY NEBUCHADNEZZAR

GHOSTS

My mind plays the same trick on me time and time again. Even though I have now been alert to it for many years, it still strikes me with something very like a shock. It is this: when I see a photograph of a primary school class of a certain age group and from a certain era, I recognize all or most of the boys and girls and can name them. For they are my schoolmates from my own 5 year old primary reception class!

But this simply can not be the case. I have seen such photos in the local paper or in books or in an exhibition, and they are from Northampton or Swansea or Dundee or London, once even from somewhere in France, but always from a place where I did not attend primary school. And, moreover, I am nEVER in the photograph. Nor is it my reception class teacher standing proudly by.

Now, of course, there are many obvious explanations. The children are always from primary 1 to 3, and the photograph is always black and white, there is no school uniform, and the period spans only about 25 to 30 years, from around the late 1930s to about the late 1960s. Clearly these were less fast-moving times and fashions in dress and hairstyles were more limited in range and slower to change, for both boys and girls. Even posture and attitude were more prescribed. In addition, children of 5 or so have less formed features, so I am told; but I don't agree--how can I pick them out so easily one from another and give them names? There may even be such a thing as a range of British types--but don't forget the French photo!

So I accept, more or less, the reasons given above for my misrecognition of these children. Indeed, when I compare any such photo with the actual one which I have of my primary reception class, I can see they are not identical at all. What bothers me is that, having asked as many people as I can if they have had the same experience, only one person has agreed with me. Is there a psychologist out there who can explain why this aberration is so rare?

NB I also often have the much commoner experience of seeing aadults I recognise in the street etc., when I know them to be elsewhere, even on the other side of the world. The illusion is only from a rear or three-quarters or profile view, never face-on. Does this argue for humanity falling into a limited range of types? (PS I do not need to see an optometrist urgently)

NEXT ENTRY MONDAY

2005-03-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

TODAY'S SUBJECT FOR DEBATE HAS BEEN SENT IN BY BEN.

I heard yesterday on the World Service that the police in Mexico city will now have to read a book a month if they ever want promotion.This is supposedly to improve their communication skills.
One of the recommended books is Don Quixote, not an easy read.

Do members think this is a good idea, and should it happen here?

2005-03-09T00:04:00.000-08:00

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TODAY'S ENTRY WAS SENT IN BY CEC

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE by ALISON WEIR

The name "Eleanor of Aquitaine" has a magical ring, corresponding to stories
about troubadours and courtly love, and knights in shining armour fighting
to honour adored ladies. In the 12th century, however, when Eleanor was at
first Queen consort to Louis VII of France, and then Queen consort to Henry
II of England, the knights did not wear plate armour but chain mail, which
was usually blood-spattered from the endless internecine wars between
friends, allies, and even brothers. No doubt this goes on today, but there
cannot be many grandmothers who, like Eleanor, are plotted against, and even
in danger of being kidnapped for a ransom by their own grandsons.

The histories of England and France at that time are interwoven and
extremely complex, which would make the book demanding reading if Alison
Weir did not sustain one's interest by creating enticing chapter headings;
providing maps of the two countries as they were then; and showing Eleanor's
travels in Europe, the Holy Land, and the routes of two crusades. There are
also photographs and, most helpful in view of the many characters involved,
a series of genealogical tables that locate Eleanor in relation to her
possessions, varying ranks, and blood relations.

She was the consort of the two kings rather than a queen in her own right,
because queens with a capital Q did not exist then, although when knights
went on crusades their wives sometimes took on some of their territories'
business. But Eleanor was different, for she was unusually well educated,
was intelligent and headstrong, possessed leadership qualities, and physical
vigour. She was also "excessively" beautiful, appealed to men, and was
apparently drawn to them too. In her younger years she acquired a dubious
reputation which, though overlooked when she became the venerable and much
respected Queen of England, was revived after her death, and will therefore
be associated with her name in perpetuity.

As queen consort of a surprisingly tiny France, which was then centered on
today's Île-de-France from Paris to Orléans, she was able to influence Louis
VII quite considerably, sometimes not to his advantage. She not only
accompanied him on his crusade to Jerusalem, but even whipped up support
among the nobles, who were none too eager about the venture. She was only 25
years old then, but she "set to work on her vassals, and her enthusiasm was
such that before long several lords of Aquitaine were declaring themselves
keen to take the Cross". When the crusaders had reached Constantinople
Eleanor found herself in a country where women were kept apart. Little is
known of her stay there, which is due to Louis, who was deeply in love with
her, having become suspicious of her relationship with her uncle Raymond of
Poitiers, now ruler of Antioch, and therefore curtailed her activities.
There is no proof that Louis had any reason to distrust her, but Raymond
welcomed her arrival, threw lavish banquets in her honour, and seems to have
been alone with her so often that it caused a scandal. Moreover, she tried
to advise Louis to change his battle plans for Jerusalem, as Raymond had
recommended so as to serve his own interests better.

Eleanor had not been content with their marriage for some time, and it is
likely that she was already then thinking of an annulment on account of her
and Louis' consanguinity. After their return they became briefly reconciled,
but eventually she left him for Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou and duke
of Normandy, the grandson of Henry I of England. She had met him in Paris,
where he had been summoned to see if a peaceable settlement could be made
after he had refused to pay homage to Louis as his overlord. Eleanor was 29
at the time, was still beautiful, and the attraction seems to have been
mutual. She kept her wish to have Henry as her second husband secret from
Louis, but she succeeded in getting her marriage annulled, Louis eventually
agreeing to it, and then married Henry without Louis's knowledge and
consent.

TO BE CONTINUED

2005-03-08T00:18:00.000-08:00

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L'ASSOMMOIR by ZOLA

In 1877 Zola's novel was published, yet another work in the series "Rougon Macquart". It is set in working-class Paris, in the crowded streets and drinking dens, washhouses and backyards, gutters, hovels and building sites. It is a depressing tale, tracing the ravages wrought by alcohol in the lives of the poor.

The central character, Gervaise, is cast in heroic mould, and struggles to bring up her two children in difficult, then desperate circumstances. The fact that she occasionally almost seems to be keeping her head above water, only serves to make her eventual defeat even more painful to witness. We watch, appalled, her degradation, disintegration, and death. She is let down, not only by the cowardice and cupidity of the men in her life, but also by her own tainted heredity.

Yet she has a persistent dream: she longs to live a respectable life, doing an honest day's work for a fair wage, housing her children in a salubrious dwelling, being a faithful wife to a decent man.
There is a poignant passage when she goes to see her son at the forge, where she has managed to get him a place. Goujat, the blacksmith, is in love with her, and she is also attracted to him, but she is living with her ne'er-do-well husband, so the two of them enjoy a chaste romance, paying each other court with shy smiles and glances. Gervaise treasures above all things this one oasis of virtue in the midst of the mire which surrounds her and which is dragging her down.

"Before beginning, Goujat looked at Gervaise with eyes full of confidence and tender regard. Then, without haste, he took his stance, and, bringing the hammer down in a powerful sweeping movement, he found his rhythm--measured, easy, regular. Of course, it was not brandy he had in his veins, but untainted blood, which beat powerfully and regulated his task.

He was a magnificent sight, facing the full blast of the flames. His short hair, curling over his low forehead, his splendid yellow beard falling in ringlets, caught the light and illuminated his whole face with threads of gold. His neck was as thick as a pillar, the skin as white as that of a child; his chest was so broad you could have stretched a woman across it; his shoulders and arms were sculpted, as if modelled on the statue of a giant in some museum. When he got ready to raise his hammer, you could see his muscles bulge, mountains of flesh rolling under his skin, tightening it. He spread light around him, became magnificent, all-powerful,like a God"

And Gervaise, in her corner, well knows he is paying her court in the only way he can, displaying his splendid frame to full advantage, forging the best bolts he has ever made, for her alone.
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2005-03-02T00:13:00.000-08:00

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APPROACHES TO A TOWN

In some section's of Proust's novel, there are delightful passages in which even we, who are now so used to the telephone, the motor car and the aeroplane that we seldom think much about them, can imagine the wonder felt by those of Proust's time, to whom these inventions were still experienced as novelties. Cars were still the playthings of the rich, and the author reflects on the scenery changing at dizzying speed: "Gourville and Balbec, prisoners until then in the cells of separate days,... and which could never be seen by the same eyes in the course of an afternoon, delivered now by the giant in seven-league boots."

In the following fine passage, Proust contrasts the different approaches to a town made by the car and the train.

" It may be thought that my love of enchanted journeys by train ought to have kept me from sharing Albertine's wonder at the motor-car,which prevents one from thinking--as I had done hitherto--of the actual site as the individual mark, the irreplaceable essence of irremovable beauties. And doubtless this site was not, for the motor-car, as it had formerly been for the railway train when I came from Paris to Balbec, a goal exempt from the contingencies of ordinary life, almost ideal at the moment of departure and remaining so at the moment of arrival in that great dwelling where nobody lives and which bears only the name of the town, the station, with its promise at last of accessibility to the place of which it is, as it were, the materialisation.

No, the motor-car did not convey us thus by magic into a town which we saw at first as the collectivity summed up in its name, and with the illusions of a spectator in a theatre. It took us backstage into the streets, stopped to ask an inhabitant the way. But as compensation for so homely a mode of progress, there is the 'general post' of the perspective which sets a castle dancing about with a hill, a church and the sea, while one draws nearer to it however much it tries to huddle beneath its age-old foliage; those ever-narrowing circles described by the motor-car round a spellbound town which darts off in every direction to escape, and which finally it swoops straight down upon in the depths of the valley where it lies prone upon the ground; so that this site, this unique point, which on the one hand the motor-car seems to have stripped of the mystery of the express trains, on the other hand it gives us the impression of discovering, of pinpointing for ourselves as with a compass, and helps us to feel with a more lovingly exploring hand, with a more delicate precision, the true geometry, the beautiful proportions of the earth"

I AM GOING AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS SO THE NEXT ENTRY WILL BE TUESDAY 8th MARCH

2005-03-01T00:07:00.000-08:00

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ATHENA

Easily the most enchanting detail in Gill's "Nightingales" was, for me, that Florence had a pet owl, which she rescued when still a baby from some boys in Athens, who had been intent on tormenting it. I wish that Gill had given more information about this little pet, for anyone who has watched wild-life programmes knows how hard it is to rear an owl chick, diet and weight gain needing careful checking. We are told Florence "mesmerised" the little creature to get it into a cage (HOW exactly?), and named it Athena. Later, when sufficiently tamed (or mesmerised?) Athena,who was only 7 inches long even when fully grown," spent much of the day asleep in Florence's pocket." Here again, I long for more details. If the owl slept during the day, what happened at night? There must have been a time allotted for activity. When? And what about the problem of soiling? It is hard to imagine the fastidious Florence, with her zeal for a clean germ-free environment, harbouring an owl in the pocket of her plain yet elegant gowns.

When F. was not able to care for Athena, her sister Parthe took over. One summer it even accompanied Parthe and her mother on a tour of Germany, and F. wrote anxious letters, sending careful instructions about how to give Athena sand baths, and issued warnings that she must not be allowed to drink ink. (The mind boggles!)

The owl died while her owner was away from home, and Florence blamed her sister for neglecting the pet. The family had Athena stuffed, and when Parthe put the tiny body into Florence's hand, the latter said, sadly: "Poor little beastie, it was odd how I loved you!"

EDWARD HOPPER at Tate Modern ,sent in by COLIN BULLEN

Those who usually regard the contents of the Tate Modern as being far too avant-garde for their tastes might have been pleasantly surprised by the exhibition of the work of Edward Hopper, the celebrated American artist of the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike so much else shown in that gallery Hopper's work is determinedly figurative and presents a view of America that has been largely forgotten in recent years.

Despite the excitements of the Jazz Age and the Prohibition era those old enough to remember once regarded the United States as being much more reserved than the brash image it has today, perhaps because before the Second War it was Britain and not America that was the world superpower. Hopper's pictures bring back that time when it was thought of as the land of the man in the grey flannel suit and small town America had not been so overshadowed by Hollywood. His work captures the atmosphere of quiet towns and suburban landscapes peopled by individuals who often seem lost in contemplation, even when not alone. Indeed many of his pictures evoke memories of the nineteenth century German romantic artist Friedrich whose subjects seem lost in the natural landscapes of mountains, beaches and forest, often lit by moonlight.

Hopper's characters, such as the solitary woman in his famous 'Automat' or the young girl in 'Summertime' who are clearly in the city but gaze either into their coffee or into the distance, deep in their inner world. Perhaps Hopper's most famous image is the street bar in 'Nighthawks' where, despite there being four people present, they seem unaware of each other, and the night time street is deserted. This personal alienation is also true of his 'Cape Cod evening' where both the couple and their dog look as if they are each alone, the latter gazing at something outside the frame of the picture.

When Hopper leaves human beings out of the picture entirely there is an even more pronounced feeling of emptiness, such as his 'Drug Store' showing a lighted shop window on a dark and deserted street corner or even in the sunlit 'Lighthouse Hill' where the tower of the lighthouse makes one think of dangerous and stormy seas, even when the sky is blue and the scene calm. Occasionally Hopper does cause one to feel that there is an interaction between his characters as in 'Office at night' where the late night work scene seems to suggest a deeper relationship between the man and the woman and perhaps most poignantly of all, his very last picture 'Two Comedians' showing a couple in Pierrot costumes, taking their last bow before leaving the stage, representing Hopper and his wife as they reach the end of their lives.

This exhibition was well worth visiting, offering one a chance to look beyond the pictures themselves to wider issues and deeper concerns.

2005-02-28T00:20:00.000-08:00

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SCOTS WHA HAE

We Scots are well used to hearing what those South of the border think of us, for we are told over and over in the same old jokes about Scottish parsimony. We are often accused of being a dour race, opening up only after a dram loosens our inhibitions. If is true that we are over-careful with our money, in the past this was due to poverty, for the land is poor and farmers and crofters had to struggle to make ends meet.

In "Scotland, an Anthology" by Douglas Dunn, the author gathers together articles about many aspects of Scottish life and letters. In the first section he discusses the Scottish character. I agree with many of his findings, but am saddened that he considers Scots to be grudging of others' success, always keen to take people who have done well for themselves down a peg or two.

Here is my favourite paragraph about the Scottish character, written by John Buchan.

"It is to our history that we must look for the source of the two master elements in the Scottish character. These are hard-headedness on the one hand and romance on the other: common sense and sentiment; practicality and poetry; business and idealism. The two are often thought to be incompatible, but this is wrong. Almost everyone has a little of both. It is the peculiarity of the Scottish race that it has both in a high degree...

With all our prudence, our history is a record of the pursuit of lost causes, unattainable ideals and impossible loyalties. Look at the long wars of independence we fought under Bruce and Wallace. If we had had any common sense, we would have accepted the English terms and grown prosperous at the expense of our rich neighbours. Look at the Jacobite risings. What earthly sense was there in them? Merely because Bonnie Prince Charlie was a Stewart,and because he was young and gallant, we find sober, middle-aged men, lairds, lawyers and merchants risking their necks and their fortunes to help a cause which was doomed from the start. We have all of us, we Scots, a queer daftness in our blood. We may be trusted to be prudent beyond the average up to a certain point when some half-forgotten loyalty is awakened and then we fling prudence to the winds.

The truth is that we are at bottom the most sentimental and emotional people on earth. We hide it deep down, and we don a mask of gravity and dour caution, but it is there all the time, and all the stronger because we hide it so deep..."

2005-02-25T00:20:00.000-08:00

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TODAY WE HAVE THE FINAL CHAPTER OF GARRY GARRETT'S WAR DIARY

MEMORIES OF THE HOME GUARD

There were many exciting and amusing things during this time, after all the blitz was still with us. There were also many samples of the Londoners sense of humour. Here are a couple.

1. There were Air Raid Wardens all over the country and they had many tasks. Helping to dig people out of bombed buildings was one, clearing the streets when an alarm had been sounded was another. They also had to make sure that no lights shone out during the blackout.(Even the tip of a lit cigarette was supposed to be covered in case it could be seen by a German bomb-aimer!)They were given their own surface shelters, normally constructed of sandbags. There was an ARP Wardens post built on Threadneedle Street, behind the Bank of England and the Bank's wall had been used as part of the construction. Across the entrance door the Warden had placed a board that stated 'Built with a sound financial backing'.

2. Some of the trains on the London Underground come out of the tunnels in many places and run out in the open. A thick netting had been stuck over the windows and the glass on the doors to prevent them being blown in to the carriage by a bomb blast. During this time an advertising campaign was running that started with "Mr Brown of London Town says....... In the middle of the netting was a little poster that showed a picture of some one peeling the netting off the window and Mr. Brown saying, "I hope you will pardon my correction, but that is there for your protection". Under this some one had written, "I hope you will pardon my frustration but I can't see the bloody station."

I came home from the H.G. one night while a raid was on and went to the roof to look around. There was a large fire at the timber yard, up river, so I decided to go and have a closer look. Firemen would normally position themselves up wind of the fire but with the wind coming across the river this was not possible. They would have been too close to the fire if they worked from the towpath and too far away on the other side of the river. Instead they had to operate from alongside the fire. This meant that the positions they were working from were very hot and as a result they were being relieved every fifteen minutes or so. Spotting me, still in uniform, one of the Senior Firemen asked if I would care to help with the hoses, to which I said yes. My first shift was at ground level. The second was from the top of a turntable ladder. Luckily, although the raid was still going on, the Germans did not seem to be using the fire as an aiming point.

Across the road from the P o W was a police box. Along side it was the air raid siren. One night I was chatting to the duty copper when the 'phone rang. During the conversation I heard him say "There is a member of the Home Guard here" and then, "I'll tell him". It seemed that the signal man in the box on the Walthamstow Marshes had seen what he thought was a parachute come down somewhere on the Marshes and that the Home Guard at the Town Hall were getting a platoon together and would come along as soon as they could find a vehicle. They were some two miles away. Meanwhile I was to go out to the signal box, get a report from the signalman and then search for the parachutist.

To get to the box I had to walk nearly a mile along the riverbank, with the Lea Marshes on my right, until I arrived at the point where the railway bridge crossed the river. Here I had to turn right to pass in front of the various arches that supported the railway until I reached a point where I could climb up the embankment. I then had to walk just under a quarter of a mile along the line until I reached the signal box. Because of the blackout all this had to be done in the pitch dark. Having discovered the way the parachute was supposed to have drifted I was then to follow that line, searching until I reached `civilisation' and then try and make contact with the Platoon via a telephone!

The best part of the instruction was that if I came across a Parachutist I was to take him prisoner and bring him back with me. As a member of the H.G. I had been issued with a rifle so I was armed but, as I had not been on the rifle range, I had not been issued with any ammunition. Thank goodness I did not find anything, nor did the Platoon. The Germans had started to drop mines by parachute and in daylight the following morning one was found hanging from a tree on the far side of the marshes. I suspect this is what the man in the signal box had seen.

NEXT ENTRY WILL BE ON MONDAY

2005-02-24T00:07:00.000-08:00

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HAPPY ANNIVERSARY !

CULTURE VULTURE has been going, with only a couple of breaks, for a whole year now. Back posts can be seen in the Archives.
I want to thank everyone who has contributed, especially CEC, Nebuchadnezzar, Urschel, Roy, Gary with one R and Garry with 2, Colin and Ben. Thank you for your good will, your good ideas, and your hard work. I really appreciate it.
Thanks, too, to all the people who leave comments. Writing articles would be no fun at all if there were no feedback.

ODETTE

I have mentioned before that Proust's style often reminds me of Impressionist paintings, and nowhere is this more apparent than in this splendid description of Odette, the fashionable courtesan, now married to Swann. No detail is missing: we have the touches of colour, the gleams of light, even the framework provided by the dark figures of the surrounding men, plus the delicate movement of ribbon and parasol.(Think of Renoir's "Le Moulin de la Galette")

"Suddenly, on the gravelled path, unhurrying, cool, luxuriant, Madame Swamm would appear, blossoming out in a costume which was never twice the same, but which I rememder as being typically mauve; then she would hoist and unfurl at the end of its long stalk, just at the moment when her radiance was at its zenith, the silken banner of a wide parasol of a shade that matched the showering petals of her dress. A whole troop of people escorted her; Swann himself, four or five clubmen who had been to call upon her that morning or whom she had met in the street; and their black or grey agglomeration, obedient to her every gesture, performing the almost mechanical movements of a lifeless setting in which Odette was framed, gave to this woman, in whose eyes alone ther was any intensity, the air of looking out in front of her, from among all those men, as from a window behind which she had taken her stand, and made her loom there, frail but fearless, in the nudity of her delicate colours, like the apparition of a creature of a different species, of an unknown race, and of almost martial power.

Smiling, rejoicing in the fine weather, certain that her clothes were the most elegant of all, wearing them without exaggerated attention to them but also without absolute detachment, not preventing the little bows of ribbon on her bodice and skirt from floating buoyantly upon the air before her of whose presence she was not unaware and whom she indulgently permitted to disport themselves in accordance with their own rhythm, provided that they followed where she led, and even upon her mauve parasol, letting fall now and then, as though upon a bunch of Parma violets, her happy gaze.

The sight of her made me feel the more strongly a sensation of open air and warmth,persuaded as I was that her clothes were connected with the season and the hour by a bond both necessary and unique, the flowers on the flexible straw brim of her hat, the ribbons on her dress, seemed to me to spring from the month of May even more naturally than the flowers of garden or woodland; and to learn what latest change there was in weather or season, I did not raise my eyes higher than to her parasol, open and outstretched like another, a nearer sky, round, clement, mobile, and blue.