Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Pictures from Binche
I've just put my photos from the Carnival of Binche up on flickr: they're all in a single set - http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreakirkby/sets/72157629215518248/
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Binche and the Carnival
A fortnight later and the tune in my head is still there; less insistent, less forceful, not as loud, but still beating away like a pulse.
You don't forget the Binche carnival easily.
The parade on Sunday seems ordinary enough; groups of revellers in costume, with their brass bands. There are devils, ghosts, musketeers, peasants, little Chinese mandarins, huge contingents of Smurfs (this is Belgium); there is Michael Jackson, there is Che Guevara - no, there are at least a dozen Ches - but sadly no Elvis.
But it's not choreographed; one contingent is mainly Che Guevaras, but also contains a couple of phantoms and some peasants, and a couple of guys in strange Tommy Cooperesque outfits with fezzes and stripey waistcoats. Every one carries something in his right hand; a placard, a tray with champagne bottle and glasses, a billhook, a basket of strawberries, a huge plastic foam rifle. From time to time, marchers drop out and wander into one of the local bars, or share a bottle of beer and a fag with a friend in the crowd, or stop to exchange kisses on the cheek with their acquaintances. It's all a bit shambolic, and that's the case for everything that goes on during Carnival; timings are approximate, and any procession is likely to include numerous beer or champagne stops.
They don't really dance, either. They shuffle, and turn round and round within their company, and punctuate the music by lifting whatever they hold in their right hands; but that's all. Not the shimmying samba of Rio or the rhythmic verve of calypso or soca.
Yet there seems to be one rule that isn't transgressed; they only play one tune. There are 26, some people say 27, tunes allowed in the entire carnival, and tonight somehow they're only playing one. When I went to bed, it was playing in my head, and it carried on doing so for the next fortnight.
Fast forward to the ramassage, in the early hours of Shrove Tuesday morning. It's still dark; Binche's houses loom dark in the orange lamp-light. From a long way away we hear the shrill, plaintive tone of a clarinet playing a snatch of melody. Somewhere else, a bass drum starts; bom, bom, bom, bom, interminable, like a death march.
Down below the great walls, a first detachment of Gilles lumbers, their white-covered heads stark, their drummer pushing them forwards. Their inexorable march, the clack of their wooden clogs on the granite setts of the road, the fierce sharp rattle and snap of a snare drum from one of the side streets; it is all faintly sinister.
They stop at a house, dancing on the spot. The door opens. Time for champagne. (It's five o'clock in the morning.) Glasses are handed out. We wait. Some time later, they set out again. Now there are six Gilles, instead of five; like giants or ogres, wearing those huge clogs, their torsos stuffed with straw, their suits covered with symbols - crowns, and lions, and stripes and flags, all in the Belgian colours of black, yellow, red.
Glimpses of interiors every time a door opens make us feel as if we're in a gallery of Vermeers, but with starker lighting - a contrast to the dim streets. One house seems right out of the nineteenth century with its caged canary, a crucifix and a two years out of date calendar on the wall; another is a modern artist's house, full of bright stained glass and polished wood. By the time the procession reaches the main street it's nearly seven-thirty, and the Gilles are massing outside the bars, and inside the bars, holding glasses of champagne in their hands. The Gilles drinks champagne, and eats only oysters and salmon; this is the last of the fat days, before the rigours of Lent.
One little boy Gille is accompanied by an even smaller boy with a snare drum, and his mother - a procession of one. (How could you not smile?) A Gille goes everywhere with a drummer. That's one of the rules. In the crowd, two Gilles decide to visit their friends in the next bar - confusion, as they try to find a drummer, and then the shattering fusillade of noise as they set out, bludgeoning their way across the packed pavement outside.
Up by the station, the Gilles are gathering in their hundreds. And at last, on go the masks, the symbol of Binche, with their sightless green spectacles and curly painted moustaches; and the Gilles are terrifying, battalions of them all marching on the Town Hall. In the afternoon, the terrible Gilles show their softer side; the masks are laid aside in favour of tall ostrich-feather hats, and the bundles of twigs they carry in the morning are replaced by baskets of oranges, which they throw into the crowd.
Standing on a wall to get a better view, I'm next to a red devil. Aged about eight, I think. She catches fifty oranges; I catch none.
And this is only the second parade - there's another to come, by lamplight, that evening. In the narrow streets, the Gilles dance to the red light of flares. The carnival started in the early hours, and it doesn't finish till the fireworks are over, at nearly eleven; and even later, as we head for our car, we can hear the brass bands still playing.
I can still hear that tune. I don't think it will ever go away. It will fade, it will become less insistent; but it will always be a part of me, and my feet will somehow always know that rhythm.
You don't forget the Binche carnival easily.
The parade on Sunday seems ordinary enough; groups of revellers in costume, with their brass bands. There are devils, ghosts, musketeers, peasants, little Chinese mandarins, huge contingents of Smurfs (this is Belgium); there is Michael Jackson, there is Che Guevara - no, there are at least a dozen Ches - but sadly no Elvis.
But it's not choreographed; one contingent is mainly Che Guevaras, but also contains a couple of phantoms and some peasants, and a couple of guys in strange Tommy Cooperesque outfits with fezzes and stripey waistcoats. Every one carries something in his right hand; a placard, a tray with champagne bottle and glasses, a billhook, a basket of strawberries, a huge plastic foam rifle. From time to time, marchers drop out and wander into one of the local bars, or share a bottle of beer and a fag with a friend in the crowd, or stop to exchange kisses on the cheek with their acquaintances. It's all a bit shambolic, and that's the case for everything that goes on during Carnival; timings are approximate, and any procession is likely to include numerous beer or champagne stops.
They don't really dance, either. They shuffle, and turn round and round within their company, and punctuate the music by lifting whatever they hold in their right hands; but that's all. Not the shimmying samba of Rio or the rhythmic verve of calypso or soca.
Yet there seems to be one rule that isn't transgressed; they only play one tune. There are 26, some people say 27, tunes allowed in the entire carnival, and tonight somehow they're only playing one. When I went to bed, it was playing in my head, and it carried on doing so for the next fortnight.
Fast forward to the ramassage, in the early hours of Shrove Tuesday morning. It's still dark; Binche's houses loom dark in the orange lamp-light. From a long way away we hear the shrill, plaintive tone of a clarinet playing a snatch of melody. Somewhere else, a bass drum starts; bom, bom, bom, bom, interminable, like a death march.
Down below the great walls, a first detachment of Gilles lumbers, their white-covered heads stark, their drummer pushing them forwards. Their inexorable march, the clack of their wooden clogs on the granite setts of the road, the fierce sharp rattle and snap of a snare drum from one of the side streets; it is all faintly sinister.
They stop at a house, dancing on the spot. The door opens. Time for champagne. (It's five o'clock in the morning.) Glasses are handed out. We wait. Some time later, they set out again. Now there are six Gilles, instead of five; like giants or ogres, wearing those huge clogs, their torsos stuffed with straw, their suits covered with symbols - crowns, and lions, and stripes and flags, all in the Belgian colours of black, yellow, red.
Glimpses of interiors every time a door opens make us feel as if we're in a gallery of Vermeers, but with starker lighting - a contrast to the dim streets. One house seems right out of the nineteenth century with its caged canary, a crucifix and a two years out of date calendar on the wall; another is a modern artist's house, full of bright stained glass and polished wood. By the time the procession reaches the main street it's nearly seven-thirty, and the Gilles are massing outside the bars, and inside the bars, holding glasses of champagne in their hands. The Gilles drinks champagne, and eats only oysters and salmon; this is the last of the fat days, before the rigours of Lent.
One little boy Gille is accompanied by an even smaller boy with a snare drum, and his mother - a procession of one. (How could you not smile?) A Gille goes everywhere with a drummer. That's one of the rules. In the crowd, two Gilles decide to visit their friends in the next bar - confusion, as they try to find a drummer, and then the shattering fusillade of noise as they set out, bludgeoning their way across the packed pavement outside.
Up by the station, the Gilles are gathering in their hundreds. And at last, on go the masks, the symbol of Binche, with their sightless green spectacles and curly painted moustaches; and the Gilles are terrifying, battalions of them all marching on the Town Hall. In the afternoon, the terrible Gilles show their softer side; the masks are laid aside in favour of tall ostrich-feather hats, and the bundles of twigs they carry in the morning are replaced by baskets of oranges, which they throw into the crowd.
Standing on a wall to get a better view, I'm next to a red devil. Aged about eight, I think. She catches fifty oranges; I catch none.
And this is only the second parade - there's another to come, by lamplight, that evening. In the narrow streets, the Gilles dance to the red light of flares. The carnival started in the early hours, and it doesn't finish till the fireworks are over, at nearly eleven; and even later, as we head for our car, we can hear the brass bands still playing.
I can still hear that tune. I don't think it will ever go away. It will fade, it will become less insistent; but it will always be a part of me, and my feet will somehow always know that rhythm.
Friday, 27 January 2012
Our household gods
Lares et penates; the household gods. We think of God as a single, omnipotent presence; but if you were Roman, you had your own gods, the gods of your household. Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, were all very well, but it was the household gods who had to be propitiated every day, and the ancestors, whose masks were kept in the house.
In India, too, there are household gods; Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, guards thresholds and ensures wealth, or Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune and learning. Near me in Norwich, an Indian cafe has a little Krishna shrine in it, just the way it might have a Cats Protection League calendar on the wall. In a house just outside Aleppey, where I waited for my canoe to pick me up, I took tea under the watchful eyes of two Krishnas and a hologrammed Shirdi Sai Baba, as the portable TV flickered.
That's the great thing about household gods. We worship them but we also take them for granted. They're not distant, transcendent gods, but involved with the business of our lives - the baking, the banking, the sweeping of the floor, the joys and the sorrows and even the frustrations.
In Russian Orthodox homes there's a 'red corner' for the ikons. Protestantism, alas, offers no household gods, but instead an all-seeing eye to watch for and punish transgression. It's unforgiving in that way. Nor is a pious text a household god; you can't go to a text and ask it for help, nor weep in front of it. You end up making your own little shrines, of dead butterflies or airfix skeletons or collections of shed cats' claws, whatever it is, some kind of magic like the mummified cat built into the wall in the Aitre Saint-Maclou, in Rouen.
I suppose the Athena poster of the girl in tennis whites scratching her arse would be understood as a household god by any earth-visiting Martian with half a degree in ethnology.
But the days of our household gods are numbered. There's a new shrine on the block. The television first replaced the hearth; it became the centre of the household - so obviously where people have excavated the chimneybreast to put a screen there instead. (O tempora, o mores: I remember sitting in an inglenook in a friend's home in Somerset, reading in the warmth for an entire afternoon, undisturbed.) Now, it's replaced the household gods, too. We give our lives over to Big Brother instead of Ganesh, Nigella Lawson instead of Lakshmi.
We need better gods.
In India, too, there are household gods; Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, guards thresholds and ensures wealth, or Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune and learning. Near me in Norwich, an Indian cafe has a little Krishna shrine in it, just the way it might have a Cats Protection League calendar on the wall. In a house just outside Aleppey, where I waited for my canoe to pick me up, I took tea under the watchful eyes of two Krishnas and a hologrammed Shirdi Sai Baba, as the portable TV flickered.
That's the great thing about household gods. We worship them but we also take them for granted. They're not distant, transcendent gods, but involved with the business of our lives - the baking, the banking, the sweeping of the floor, the joys and the sorrows and even the frustrations.
In Russian Orthodox homes there's a 'red corner' for the ikons. Protestantism, alas, offers no household gods, but instead an all-seeing eye to watch for and punish transgression. It's unforgiving in that way. Nor is a pious text a household god; you can't go to a text and ask it for help, nor weep in front of it. You end up making your own little shrines, of dead butterflies or airfix skeletons or collections of shed cats' claws, whatever it is, some kind of magic like the mummified cat built into the wall in the Aitre Saint-Maclou, in Rouen.
I suppose the Athena poster of the girl in tennis whites scratching her arse would be understood as a household god by any earth-visiting Martian with half a degree in ethnology.
But the days of our household gods are numbered. There's a new shrine on the block. The television first replaced the hearth; it became the centre of the household - so obviously where people have excavated the chimneybreast to put a screen there instead. (O tempora, o mores: I remember sitting in an inglenook in a friend's home in Somerset, reading in the warmth for an entire afternoon, undisturbed.) Now, it's replaced the household gods, too. We give our lives over to Big Brother instead of Ganesh, Nigella Lawson instead of Lakshmi.
We need better gods.
Friday, 13 January 2012
The anti-technology backlash
Technology is a wonderful thing. But from helping us to achieve what we wanted to in life, it has started to fill our lives with things that it wants us to do. Facebook is useful when you want to organise a rehearsal schedule, or communicate with friends in another country. When you end up sitting in the pub looking at Facebook instead of talking to the person next to you, it's stopped assisting and started taking over.
Mobile phones. Wonderful things, except for people who expect me to have it turned on at all times and take calls at three in the morning. Except for marketers who want to send me relentless texts flogging some damn crap or other.
It's perhaps not surprising that we have something of a technology backlash. For instance The Artist has looked at James Cameron's idea that 3D is the future of cinema and said "I don't think so" - let's go back to the silent screen, to black and white, to simplicity. There's a real wilfulness in this - it's partly looking back to a more innocent and simple age in the way of recession-driven nostalgia through the ages, but also I think it's a refusal of technological capabilities that have come to seem too fussy, too overwhelming. (I really hated Avatar; it made me feel seasick, and my eardrums were simply crushed by the overdone soundtrack.)
Vinyl fans are pushing sales of vinyl records back up to levels last seen in the 1980s. A number of photographers and film makers are also heading back to the old tech. There are even those who are adapting their digital cameras as pinhole cameras, to work with the potential of a very limited technology indeed; blurry photos, often in greyscale, where the smeary, blurred nature of the image enables them to focus on atmosphere, to create photographs of incredible abstraction, like Chinese calligraphy.
I have no intention at all of reverting to longhand for my travel writing or novels. The computer has become part of my writing practice; I draft the plot within the document, then start writing the chapters within that plotted structure, gradually replacing the sketch by the worked-out version. But when I'm working on poetry, or thinking out vocabulary and characterisation, for some reason I naturally want to do that on paper. Journal keeping, too, wants a pen; on the PC I can't doodle, play with calligraphy or form, put little drawings in the margin.
And I utterly abhor technology in writing implements. Felt tip and ball pen are alike abominable (except when I'm travelling, and even then I'm picky about the pens I use - either one-euro mauve transparent plastic fountain pens I bought in a sale at Carrefour a few years back, of which I have about twenty, or little Rotring-style disposables). But at home, it's fountain pens; Waterman or Cross, since though I might aspire to a Duofold, my stingy Puritan heart won't let me pay three hundred quid for a pen; or sometimes, an ancient calligraphy pen with a broad nib, that makes swash capitals just the way I like them...
The anti-tech backlash is definitely with us. It seems to be driven by the same desires as the craft and the slow food movement; the desire to feel the real natural material in your hands, not to be alienated or distanced from it, the desire to disintermediate oneself, in a way. The act of writing and the writing itself are linked in a very intimate way by the stream of ink, in a way they aren't when you type on a keyboard.
And I think there's also a desire not to be distracted; to liberate oneself from the flickering fascinations of Facebook and Twitter and Perez Hilton, from the excessive photo-realism of the Photoshopped three-dimensional oversaturated picture, and be able instead to focus on the essence - a mood expressed in a haiku, the silhouette of a mountain, the monochrome lines of a sculpture, the effect of light shining on a grey day.
This of course has nothing to do with real tech refuseniks such as the Amish, or Jehovah's Witnesses who eschew blood transfusions. It's not a religious principle but an aesthetic one; but having been part of some art cultures for a while, I'm wondering whether the anti-tech backlash is now becoming mainstream.
Mobile phones. Wonderful things, except for people who expect me to have it turned on at all times and take calls at three in the morning. Except for marketers who want to send me relentless texts flogging some damn crap or other.
It's perhaps not surprising that we have something of a technology backlash. For instance The Artist has looked at James Cameron's idea that 3D is the future of cinema and said "I don't think so" - let's go back to the silent screen, to black and white, to simplicity. There's a real wilfulness in this - it's partly looking back to a more innocent and simple age in the way of recession-driven nostalgia through the ages, but also I think it's a refusal of technological capabilities that have come to seem too fussy, too overwhelming. (I really hated Avatar; it made me feel seasick, and my eardrums were simply crushed by the overdone soundtrack.)
Vinyl fans are pushing sales of vinyl records back up to levels last seen in the 1980s. A number of photographers and film makers are also heading back to the old tech. There are even those who are adapting their digital cameras as pinhole cameras, to work with the potential of a very limited technology indeed; blurry photos, often in greyscale, where the smeary, blurred nature of the image enables them to focus on atmosphere, to create photographs of incredible abstraction, like Chinese calligraphy.
I have no intention at all of reverting to longhand for my travel writing or novels. The computer has become part of my writing practice; I draft the plot within the document, then start writing the chapters within that plotted structure, gradually replacing the sketch by the worked-out version. But when I'm working on poetry, or thinking out vocabulary and characterisation, for some reason I naturally want to do that on paper. Journal keeping, too, wants a pen; on the PC I can't doodle, play with calligraphy or form, put little drawings in the margin.
And I utterly abhor technology in writing implements. Felt tip and ball pen are alike abominable (except when I'm travelling, and even then I'm picky about the pens I use - either one-euro mauve transparent plastic fountain pens I bought in a sale at Carrefour a few years back, of which I have about twenty, or little Rotring-style disposables). But at home, it's fountain pens; Waterman or Cross, since though I might aspire to a Duofold, my stingy Puritan heart won't let me pay three hundred quid for a pen; or sometimes, an ancient calligraphy pen with a broad nib, that makes swash capitals just the way I like them...
The anti-tech backlash is definitely with us. It seems to be driven by the same desires as the craft and the slow food movement; the desire to feel the real natural material in your hands, not to be alienated or distanced from it, the desire to disintermediate oneself, in a way. The act of writing and the writing itself are linked in a very intimate way by the stream of ink, in a way they aren't when you type on a keyboard.
And I think there's also a desire not to be distracted; to liberate oneself from the flickering fascinations of Facebook and Twitter and Perez Hilton, from the excessive photo-realism of the Photoshopped three-dimensional oversaturated picture, and be able instead to focus on the essence - a mood expressed in a haiku, the silhouette of a mountain, the monochrome lines of a sculpture, the effect of light shining on a grey day.
This of course has nothing to do with real tech refuseniks such as the Amish, or Jehovah's Witnesses who eschew blood transfusions. It's not a religious principle but an aesthetic one; but having been part of some art cultures for a while, I'm wondering whether the anti-tech backlash is now becoming mainstream.
Thursday, 22 December 2011
A year's reading - on the road and off it
One of the great things about travelling is that, deprived of the meretricious attractions of the internet, I get to catch up with my reading. It can be slightly random, depending on what I manage to find in second-hand bookshops - India gave me the chance to read children's versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as Henry James, Eric Clapton's autobiography, and JG Farrell's marvellous Siege of Krishnapur.
I can heartily recommend reading children's versions of myths as a first stop in a new culture. If I'd started off reading Valmiki, I suspect I would have got bogged down - children's books on the other hand give you the broad outlines of the story. Easy reading, too, for Indian trains, in those couple of hours between sunset and being ready for sleep, when you want satisfyingly big print for the dim lighting, and simple narrative for ease of brain.
Henry James. Wonderful. Long meandering sinuous sentences. Perceptions, misconceptions, cross-purposes. The tragedy of life lived as a misunderstanding. I read my copy of his various stories three or four times, finding something new each time; a word that had seemed innocuous on first reading would sparkle away balefully on second reading, with maleficent or sardonic purpose.
JG Farrell. What a find! The Siege of Krishnapur is a compulsive novel, richly comic despite its bleak subject - there's a lovely scene in which the young raja wants the Englishman Fleury to admire his scientific outlook, while Fleury is more struck by the 'oriental' weirdness that he can't quite explain... Throughout the whole novel, the political and sociological ideas of the Collector and his bete noire the Magistrate are discussed, and yet neither is able to cope with the scale of the historical events actually occurring. And the one thing that he gets absolutely right about India is the huge boredom of the plains landscape - the dusty, muddy, nothingness of the great flat land.
The Siege of Krishnapur is similar to The French Lieutenant's Woman in its range of references - Victorian culture, political philosophy, history. But it seems so very much more readable. And Fowles never had that wicked sense of humour.
From my perusal of Indian secondhand bookshops in tourist destinations, I note that many travellers read travel books about the destination while they're there. I'm not sure that's always worthwhile. Do I want to see Dalrymple's Delhi, Mark Tullow's Great Trunk Road? (It intrigues me that no one ever writes about Kochi or Bangalore - perhaps not picturesque enough, and yet Kochi is such a marvellous city. Never mind the tourist bits, Ernakulam is the most amazing mix of Gulf-Arab, American, Indian, and Christian culture. Where else can you eat shish tawuk and shawarma and then go to a Carnatic music gig with electric guitar and German jazzers, and end the day with whisky chasers?)
I found Chetan Bhagat more interesting than any of the more touted Indian writers. He helped me understand the world of the thirty-something Indian professional, and and the regional differences between north and south. And it was a laugh reading his books. Some days, you can't ask for more.
Meanwhile 'back at the ranch' I re-read Spenser's Faerie Queene and Dante's Divina commedia. Spenser intrigues me, not so much for the allegory nor for the political aspects of his work, but for what I find almost a prefiguring of space opera - a feeling of the universe as dynamic, oozing and seeping and pathless. It comes through very strongly when he talks about the sea, and in the dream-landscapes he creates; and there's a brutality in his tales of hostages and robbery that seems gritty, at odds with the pseudo-chivalric allegorical superstructure. It's very different from what I saw in it when I first read it twenty years ago.
Dante surprised me with his verbal invention and his ripe vein of scatology and swearing. My Italian is good enough to know when the parallel translation takes refuge in euphemism. Dante's Inferno is a marvellous verbal invention - he coins the language afresh as he goes, both in curses and in imagery. And he gives the spirits real life; Ulysses may be cast into darkness, yet his lines about the need to pursue knowledge -
have the ring of a real truth about them. I think also what I love about Dante is the sheer size of his ambition; his subject is the whole of history, the whole of literature, the whole world on its axis, the creation of an entire mythos and a whole new language.
I also had a mammoth Terry Pratchett slugfest as a result of acting in Wyrd Sisters. I didn't quite manage to finish every one, but I got pretty close. Thank the great A'tuin, Mr Pratchett's infirmities haven't stopped him producing a new work this year, which I really ought to get my hands on. Some of my friends are a bit sniffy about Pratchett, but his best novels are capable of being read on several levels - as a journalist I particularly loved The Truth, full of good in-jokes but also asking questions about what exactly the media is there for. The only thing missing is a phone tapping inquiry...
This year, I'm reading Gibbon and Proust - two very big tomes indeed. I can already tell you that Proust is often extremely funny - like Waiting for Godot - something you're rarely told. Tante Leonie with her self-importance and hypochondria is a comic masterpiece; her maid Françoise cursing at the chicken she's trying to kill would make horribly true stand-up. And since we live an hour or so's drive from Illiers-Combray, I'm going to treat myself to a trip to Combray and Guermantes (Villebon) when I finish the whole seven volumes.
As for travel writers: I've read very little this year, preferring to do the travelling rather than read about it. But I enjoyed Graham Coster's A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, a book about long distance trucks and truckers; not a classic, but a gently quirky and satisfying story. And I also read William Dalrymple's Nine Lives; a work in which he has the tact to remain in the background, letting each of the religious figures in the book tell their own tales of India and their faith. Strangely haunting.
I can heartily recommend reading children's versions of myths as a first stop in a new culture. If I'd started off reading Valmiki, I suspect I would have got bogged down - children's books on the other hand give you the broad outlines of the story. Easy reading, too, for Indian trains, in those couple of hours between sunset and being ready for sleep, when you want satisfyingly big print for the dim lighting, and simple narrative for ease of brain.
Henry James. Wonderful. Long meandering sinuous sentences. Perceptions, misconceptions, cross-purposes. The tragedy of life lived as a misunderstanding. I read my copy of his various stories three or four times, finding something new each time; a word that had seemed innocuous on first reading would sparkle away balefully on second reading, with maleficent or sardonic purpose.
JG Farrell. What a find! The Siege of Krishnapur is a compulsive novel, richly comic despite its bleak subject - there's a lovely scene in which the young raja wants the Englishman Fleury to admire his scientific outlook, while Fleury is more struck by the 'oriental' weirdness that he can't quite explain... Throughout the whole novel, the political and sociological ideas of the Collector and his bete noire the Magistrate are discussed, and yet neither is able to cope with the scale of the historical events actually occurring. And the one thing that he gets absolutely right about India is the huge boredom of the plains landscape - the dusty, muddy, nothingness of the great flat land.
The Siege of Krishnapur is similar to The French Lieutenant's Woman in its range of references - Victorian culture, political philosophy, history. But it seems so very much more readable. And Fowles never had that wicked sense of humour.
From my perusal of Indian secondhand bookshops in tourist destinations, I note that many travellers read travel books about the destination while they're there. I'm not sure that's always worthwhile. Do I want to see Dalrymple's Delhi, Mark Tullow's Great Trunk Road? (It intrigues me that no one ever writes about Kochi or Bangalore - perhaps not picturesque enough, and yet Kochi is such a marvellous city. Never mind the tourist bits, Ernakulam is the most amazing mix of Gulf-Arab, American, Indian, and Christian culture. Where else can you eat shish tawuk and shawarma and then go to a Carnatic music gig with electric guitar and German jazzers, and end the day with whisky chasers?)
I found Chetan Bhagat more interesting than any of the more touted Indian writers. He helped me understand the world of the thirty-something Indian professional, and and the regional differences between north and south. And it was a laugh reading his books. Some days, you can't ask for more.
Meanwhile 'back at the ranch' I re-read Spenser's Faerie Queene and Dante's Divina commedia. Spenser intrigues me, not so much for the allegory nor for the political aspects of his work, but for what I find almost a prefiguring of space opera - a feeling of the universe as dynamic, oozing and seeping and pathless. It comes through very strongly when he talks about the sea, and in the dream-landscapes he creates; and there's a brutality in his tales of hostages and robbery that seems gritty, at odds with the pseudo-chivalric allegorical superstructure. It's very different from what I saw in it when I first read it twenty years ago.
Dante surprised me with his verbal invention and his ripe vein of scatology and swearing. My Italian is good enough to know when the parallel translation takes refuge in euphemism. Dante's Inferno is a marvellous verbal invention - he coins the language afresh as he goes, both in curses and in imagery. And he gives the spirits real life; Ulysses may be cast into darkness, yet his lines about the need to pursue knowledge -
Fatti non fosti a viver come bruti
Ma per seguire virtute e conoscenza -
have the ring of a real truth about them. I think also what I love about Dante is the sheer size of his ambition; his subject is the whole of history, the whole of literature, the whole world on its axis, the creation of an entire mythos and a whole new language.
I also had a mammoth Terry Pratchett slugfest as a result of acting in Wyrd Sisters. I didn't quite manage to finish every one, but I got pretty close. Thank the great A'tuin, Mr Pratchett's infirmities haven't stopped him producing a new work this year, which I really ought to get my hands on. Some of my friends are a bit sniffy about Pratchett, but his best novels are capable of being read on several levels - as a journalist I particularly loved The Truth, full of good in-jokes but also asking questions about what exactly the media is there for. The only thing missing is a phone tapping inquiry...
This year, I'm reading Gibbon and Proust - two very big tomes indeed. I can already tell you that Proust is often extremely funny - like Waiting for Godot - something you're rarely told. Tante Leonie with her self-importance and hypochondria is a comic masterpiece; her maid Françoise cursing at the chicken she's trying to kill would make horribly true stand-up. And since we live an hour or so's drive from Illiers-Combray, I'm going to treat myself to a trip to Combray and Guermantes (Villebon) when I finish the whole seven volumes.
As for travel writers: I've read very little this year, preferring to do the travelling rather than read about it. But I enjoyed Graham Coster's A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, a book about long distance trucks and truckers; not a classic, but a gently quirky and satisfying story. And I also read William Dalrymple's Nine Lives; a work in which he has the tact to remain in the background, letting each of the religious figures in the book tell their own tales of India and their faith. Strangely haunting.
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
The missing gene
Somehow I just can't get to love Paris.
I can love individual things about Paris. The beehives in the Jardin du Luxembourg, for instance. (Les ruches; they sound so much more interesting in French - you can almost hear the bees' wings rustling.) The little streets around Saint Gervais Saint Protais where medieval Paris seems so close. The Hotel de Cluny with its turrets and coats of arms; the luminous elegance of the Sainte Chapelle; the creamy stone and plane trees of the Ile Saint Louis glowing on an autumn afternoon.
But there are just so many things I don't get about Paris. And as a city, it feels very oppressive to me; it resists intimacy. Compare St James's Park with the Tuileries. In St James's, you have only to click your tongue and squirrels will flock to you, sitting expectantly, their tails shivering gently, their bright button eyes looking for food. There are the ludicruous pelicans, fat and oafish out of the water, piss-elegant galleons when they're in it. From nowhere in the park can you see the whole of it; there are hidden islands, drifts of daffodils that appear and disappear as you walk past, tiny tracks you can take that don't go where you expect.
In the Tuileries, there are some stunted pollards, and a few lawns, a pond with two lonely drunken nymphs balancing for three centuries already on one foot, without ever quite falling over, and there's expanse upon expense of firm, gravelly dirt. It's like a big petanque court with sculptures and a water feature. No squirrels, no pelicans; a single crow sat motionless in a tree, so black he looked more like a gap where the universe had ceased to exist, a piece of dark matter.
There are the great boulevards of Baron Haussmann, with their tall cliffs of apartments. Consider the porte cochère, the double-height, narrow gateway leading to the yards of these great slabs of building, for the coaches to get through. We don't have them in London; instead, we have the charming institution of the mews, the small cottage and stable streets behind the great houses, a sort of parallel London.
And there's Louis XIV, a man who, it seems to me, had a sort of inverse Midas touch for art; he took great art and made it interior decor. Paris is full of buildings like the Louvre, which is big, but not very interesting. The Champs Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, are equally, big without really being impressive - so big that your eye gets lost, so big that the lampstands and statues seem stranded in space, as if the flooding Seine had washed them up and then retreated, leaving them stuck there.
The Madeleine really sums up what I don't get about Paris. The outside is fine, Greek-temple style, nicely posed so that the Madeleine and the Chambre des Députés on the other side of the Seine balance each other along a great axis. But inside, three shallow, saucer-like domes admit light through dim grey glass skylights, floating incompetently above the classical grid of the side walls. It's got no life at all; it's as if someone had got three square chapels and pushed them together. Even the statuary seems flaccid.
Even the front door makes you unwelcome; bronze panels of the ten Commandments, each one starting NON... NON.... NON.... the word tolling like a bell. Don't do this, don't do that - don't come in here, you are a sinner. (I seem to remember Jesus stating just two commandments, which were positive commandments, about love - but then sometimes I wonder when the Church is going to catch up with Jesus.) And it's interesting that these Biblically validated prohibitions were followed by the twentieth century version; NO mobile phones, NO food, NO shorts. In vain did I look anywhere for the word 'bienvenu'...
(If you want a welcome, go to the other end of the church, where the way opens into the basement. You can eat there for about eight euros, and make a donation too - the Madeleine does follow Jesus in one very practical way, feeding the hungry. Loaves and fishes are things the French know a great deal about, after all.)
I keep reading about Paris the City of Light, the romantic city, the city of love. But Paris as I experience it is Paris the City of Blag, the City of Empire, the City of Bling. It's a city where humanity has always come second to PR, and intimacy has been ditched in favour of the Big Statement. It's the city where the Sun King threw cats into the bonfire for Midsummer's Day, where Haussmann bulldozed his way through, where the Empire thrived on borrowed money and snobbery. It's a city that makes me very uncomfortable indeed.
I can love individual things about Paris. The beehives in the Jardin du Luxembourg, for instance. (Les ruches; they sound so much more interesting in French - you can almost hear the bees' wings rustling.) The little streets around Saint Gervais Saint Protais where medieval Paris seems so close. The Hotel de Cluny with its turrets and coats of arms; the luminous elegance of the Sainte Chapelle; the creamy stone and plane trees of the Ile Saint Louis glowing on an autumn afternoon.
But there are just so many things I don't get about Paris. And as a city, it feels very oppressive to me; it resists intimacy. Compare St James's Park with the Tuileries. In St James's, you have only to click your tongue and squirrels will flock to you, sitting expectantly, their tails shivering gently, their bright button eyes looking for food. There are the ludicruous pelicans, fat and oafish out of the water, piss-elegant galleons when they're in it. From nowhere in the park can you see the whole of it; there are hidden islands, drifts of daffodils that appear and disappear as you walk past, tiny tracks you can take that don't go where you expect.
In the Tuileries, there are some stunted pollards, and a few lawns, a pond with two lonely drunken nymphs balancing for three centuries already on one foot, without ever quite falling over, and there's expanse upon expense of firm, gravelly dirt. It's like a big petanque court with sculptures and a water feature. No squirrels, no pelicans; a single crow sat motionless in a tree, so black he looked more like a gap where the universe had ceased to exist, a piece of dark matter.
There are the great boulevards of Baron Haussmann, with their tall cliffs of apartments. Consider the porte cochère, the double-height, narrow gateway leading to the yards of these great slabs of building, for the coaches to get through. We don't have them in London; instead, we have the charming institution of the mews, the small cottage and stable streets behind the great houses, a sort of parallel London.
And there's Louis XIV, a man who, it seems to me, had a sort of inverse Midas touch for art; he took great art and made it interior decor. Paris is full of buildings like the Louvre, which is big, but not very interesting. The Champs Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, are equally, big without really being impressive - so big that your eye gets lost, so big that the lampstands and statues seem stranded in space, as if the flooding Seine had washed them up and then retreated, leaving them stuck there.
The Madeleine really sums up what I don't get about Paris. The outside is fine, Greek-temple style, nicely posed so that the Madeleine and the Chambre des Députés on the other side of the Seine balance each other along a great axis. But inside, three shallow, saucer-like domes admit light through dim grey glass skylights, floating incompetently above the classical grid of the side walls. It's got no life at all; it's as if someone had got three square chapels and pushed them together. Even the statuary seems flaccid.
Even the front door makes you unwelcome; bronze panels of the ten Commandments, each one starting NON... NON.... NON.... the word tolling like a bell. Don't do this, don't do that - don't come in here, you are a sinner. (I seem to remember Jesus stating just two commandments, which were positive commandments, about love - but then sometimes I wonder when the Church is going to catch up with Jesus.) And it's interesting that these Biblically validated prohibitions were followed by the twentieth century version; NO mobile phones, NO food, NO shorts. In vain did I look anywhere for the word 'bienvenu'...
(If you want a welcome, go to the other end of the church, where the way opens into the basement. You can eat there for about eight euros, and make a donation too - the Madeleine does follow Jesus in one very practical way, feeding the hungry. Loaves and fishes are things the French know a great deal about, after all.)
I keep reading about Paris the City of Light, the romantic city, the city of love. But Paris as I experience it is Paris the City of Blag, the City of Empire, the City of Bling. It's a city where humanity has always come second to PR, and intimacy has been ditched in favour of the Big Statement. It's the city where the Sun King threw cats into the bonfire for Midsummer's Day, where Haussmann bulldozed his way through, where the Empire thrived on borrowed money and snobbery. It's a city that makes me very uncomfortable indeed.
Monday, 5 December 2011
How!
Some things you remember from childhood so clearly. Others fade with time. Some things stay with you for ever, but you can't remember their names. I remember a gorgeous illustrated book about a family living in a lighthouse on the north-east coast of America, full of icy blue sea and wild cranberries; I've completely forgotten the title, but that for me is what Maine should be (if I ever go there, will it be different?)
I-Spy books though remain a readily identifiable part of my childhood. I'm slightly perturbed that they've been relaunched - I rather liked the venerable distance that I'd established.
What was the attraction of the I-Spy books? I don't think I ever actually completed one or sent one off to Big Chief I-Spy for my Indian feather. But the books did something no other books did; they made you read the book and then go back and look at the world differently. (I know, that's supposed to be what great art does. I-Spy isn't great art; but it still showed me that a book is something that isn't escapism, that doesn't just get read and then put back on a shelf - that a book is a way of looking at the world. Evehalf-decent book is a pair of binoculars.)
And like another favourite format of mine, the Shire paperbacks, the I-Spy book was just big enough, and not too big. There was just enough in it to set you off, and enough for it to seem complete - but it wasn't daunting to a youngster.
Then there was also the enjoyable fiction of the secret codes, the secret words, OD HUNATINGO, the wig-wam, the badges. All my love I've rather loved in-jokes, romans à clef; when I was at Cambridge I made an eighteenth-century pastiche notice for my door stating that 'the honble Scholler is not now receiving' (in retrospect that feels rather childish, if well executed). A meretricious pleasure, I suppose, given that way we so often use shibboleths to exclude (by class, by race, by politics)... but it got into my blood early on.
And I-Spy explained some marvellous secrets. It actually told you what the track signs on British railways meant; something that continues to fascinate me to this day (almost as much as the 'ghost stations' of the London Underground).
I suppose the Red Indian concept wouldn't work any more. I don't remember an I-Spy book of Native Americans... But there was an English fascination with the American native; I read all of Grey Owl's books as a child, too, never realising that Grey Owl of the Canadian wilderness was actually an Englishman. (Though not a fake; he married an Ojibway woman and lived with the Ojibway people, and his concern for the environment was real, too.)
So no wonder I remember the I-Spy books. Well, even if there's no Big Chief I-Spy, and even if writing away to Hawkeye has now been replaced by getting a downloadable certificate, I'm glad they're being given to another generation of children. But I think I may not want to see the new books myself. Let's keep my memories undisturbed.
I-Spy books though remain a readily identifiable part of my childhood. I'm slightly perturbed that they've been relaunched - I rather liked the venerable distance that I'd established.
What was the attraction of the I-Spy books? I don't think I ever actually completed one or sent one off to Big Chief I-Spy for my Indian feather. But the books did something no other books did; they made you read the book and then go back and look at the world differently. (I know, that's supposed to be what great art does. I-Spy isn't great art; but it still showed me that a book is something that isn't escapism, that doesn't just get read and then put back on a shelf - that a book is a way of looking at the world. Evehalf-decent book is a pair of binoculars.)
And like another favourite format of mine, the Shire paperbacks, the I-Spy book was just big enough, and not too big. There was just enough in it to set you off, and enough for it to seem complete - but it wasn't daunting to a youngster.
Then there was also the enjoyable fiction of the secret codes, the secret words, OD HUNATINGO, the wig-wam, the badges. All my love I've rather loved in-jokes, romans à clef; when I was at Cambridge I made an eighteenth-century pastiche notice for my door stating that 'the honble Scholler is not now receiving' (in retrospect that feels rather childish, if well executed). A meretricious pleasure, I suppose, given that way we so often use shibboleths to exclude (by class, by race, by politics)... but it got into my blood early on.
And I-Spy explained some marvellous secrets. It actually told you what the track signs on British railways meant; something that continues to fascinate me to this day (almost as much as the 'ghost stations' of the London Underground).
I suppose the Red Indian concept wouldn't work any more. I don't remember an I-Spy book of Native Americans... But there was an English fascination with the American native; I read all of Grey Owl's books as a child, too, never realising that Grey Owl of the Canadian wilderness was actually an Englishman. (Though not a fake; he married an Ojibway woman and lived with the Ojibway people, and his concern for the environment was real, too.)
So no wonder I remember the I-Spy books. Well, even if there's no Big Chief I-Spy, and even if writing away to Hawkeye has now been replaced by getting a downloadable certificate, I'm glad they're being given to another generation of children. But I think I may not want to see the new books myself. Let's keep my memories undisturbed.
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