Books Do Furnish A Room

Paul Sandby at the RA

 
Soon after it opened, I went to the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Paul Sandby watercolours (which remains open until 13 June, so plenty of time still to visit).  Sandby (1731-1809) is called “the father of English watercolour” because of his particular genius, which paved the way for Girtin, Turner and others, but also because he elevated the watercolour to the status of serious art.  Previously, there had been a feeling that watercolour was a working tool, perhaps for colouring maps, or an effete thing that young ladies might play at, but that art meant oils.  This may have been more than a social or cultural issue – depth of colour and opacity may have been technical problems in the earlier periods, though I am straying well beyond my knowledge now.

In this light, the exhibition is full of interest.  First, of course, it is pleasant to walk through half a dozen rooms lightly hung with paintings, and to admire them free of crowds (even on a Friday evening, there were perhaps five to ten people in each room) – thinking of the sweating, obscuring hordes elbowing each other in the rooms below, straining for a glimpse of a Van Gogh at the RA’s main exhibition.

The work of Paul Sandby is varied: there are maps that he worked on for the government, aids to the suppression of Scotland; there are vicious cartoons in the style of – and ridiculing – Hogarth; there are the famous cries of London series of illustrations of street traders; and there are topographical and landscape paintings of countryside, great houses, and other striking views.  As far as I recall, everything is British – I don’t think he painted outside the country, unlike the habit of the painters after him.

I enjoyed it, and I shall probably revisit.  I shall also visit the concurrent exhibition, in an adjoining room, of eighteenth century watercolours from the RA’s own collection, to see what others were painting during his lifetime, and what the young bloods were doing as Sandby came into old age.  But I did feel that, for me at least, Sandby’s work was more purely illustrative than I would like, and seemed at times a little flat on the paper.  This is, I realise, setting a very high standard indeed, and I wouldn’t want it thought that I was dismissive of his work at all.  There is a quiet elegance, a congruity of colour and composition which is very attractive, and a subdued sense of drama in several paintings, especially of trees, and one or two of the views of Windsor Castle (eg View of Windsor on a Rejoicing Night, 1768 - below).  There is also a delicate and sly humour in the characters he portrays – the mincing elegance of two passers-by in one painting, or the improper advances being made in a pavilion in one of the Windsor views (top).

  
Sandby’s work is delightful, and I will visit again.  But I shall look out for opportunities to drink the headier drafts of Girtin and Turner soon, too.

Incest: a pillar of the Victorian professional classes?

In the TLS, just read a review of Adam Kuper's Incest and Influence, a study of family relationships in Victorian middle class England.  His contention is that many, many families - think Darwins, Wedgwoods, Rothschilds, Barclays - kept their wealth and influence "in the family" by encouraging marriage between cousins.  At the same time, marrying your deceased wife's sister was for long illegal, on the grounds that the man and wife were one, so your wife's sister was your sister - and that's incest, even though the blood tie is non-existent.  Kuper argues that effectively, many Victorian marriages were incestuous, through cousinly marriage oft repeated - very much to the alarm of public health experts and eugenicists later in the century. 

It's a fascinating, if slightly disturbing thesis - and family trees become complex to the point of mania, with, for example, brothers-in-law also being fathers-in-law; Timothy Bevan married a Barclay, then a Gurney widow (the Gurneys and Barclays married much between themselves and with each other), and was known as "his wife's husband's wife's sister's widower"!

If you're interested, you can read the full review by Norma Clarke.

Kindle, kindle, little book

Kindle, kindle little book / How I wonder do pages look / Up above the shelf so free / Like cybertext you can see?

 

I've had a Kindle (Amazon's e-reader, for those of you who have been in a library for the past couple of years) for about two months now.  I was persuaded to buy a Kindle, not the Sony reader, because the Sony is small, the pages turn in a way I find visually disrupting, and the Kindle has many more reader-user friendly features, including the ability to download books remotely without a computer.

I've enjoyed it hugely.  It's not like reading a book, and I can't quite imagine curling up on a sofa in front of a roaring fire with my Kindle - and I certainly wouldn't read it in the bath - but the actually experience of reading is very easy on the eye, and you can do lots of things which make it very practical to use:

• You can put in lots of bookmarks
• It knows what page you were on, on every book you have on the go
• You can write marginal notes or excerpt passages
• .. and email them to yourself (for preparing a blog or lesson notes, perhaps)
• It lasts a very long time - 4000 page turns or something like that
• You can read lots of books at the same time

It's not backlit, so the page is easy to read and no strain, and you can vary the typesize to suit you. I found no difficulty for reading two or three hours at a time on journeys, for example. It's light and sleek and easy to carry around, and it can do lots of things a book can't:

• Download periodicals automatically (so on holiday I read The Times each day in the mountains of Peru, and now get the TLS each week)
• Carry dozens of books at a time
• You can get a free trial chapter of a lot of books to try before you buy
• Order and receive new books remotely, in a matter of a minute or two (so, dis-satisfied with guides in Peru, I found and downloaded a book on Inca culture in two minutes on a coach on a mountain road)

Modern best seller type books are cheaper than print versions, but not massively so.  But out of date books can be fantastic value - $2 or $3 for a lot of books, and the same amount for some huge compendia including many, many books - I paid that amount for almost all Rudyard Kipling for example, and the same for dozens of murder mystery short stories and novels - so I'll always have something to read, even if my mood changes from when I packed my bag.  It does have some disadvantages, of course:

• No colour
• The cheaper books have less good internal navigation (though its not really a serious problem)
• Graphics can be small (you can zoom, but a map in a guide book is designed to be seen all at once)
• Papers like The Times don't have the crossword or the bridge column!
• So far, the book collection, though large and growing, is not comprehensive and has a slight US bias - but that is changing already

I am thrilled with my purchase, and will continue to read it regularly.  For me, its ideal as I travel a lot and carrying several books can be cumbersome, and you don't always know what you'll want to read in three days time.  And, to answer Cornflower's question, I don't think it affects your propensity to snooze - the page turning button is, if anything, less strenuous than turning a real page!

Stewed oxtail

In the Dorset cottage recently, and without an Aga (yes, jokes about Aga sagas have been made), I decided to try the woodburning stove as a cooker, and stewed a dish of oxtail.  It worked very well, and the result was delicious - but temperature control is either very slow indeed or non-existent for all practical purposes.  Here is the oxtail bubbling happily away.  The marrow gives the sauce a wonderful richness and consistency, but do give it at least three hours, preferably more.

 

Women reading: November

The November painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) from 1868.  Jane Morris, of course, was William Morris's wife, and has the ultimate "pre-Raphaelite" face, heavy haired, sensuous, but rather distant and remote, suitable damsel for chivalric danger.  Across the top of the picture is an inscription which names the sitter and gives the date, then continues (in Latin) "famous for her poet husband, more famous for her face, may she now be famous for my picture".

I love these pictures in a guilty way, so technically accomplished and yet so near kitsch and sentimentality - and often in the pre-Raphaelite canon, stepping boldly right over the line into insufferable, cloying sickliness.  But this is a woman you would, must admire, but perhaps one you would take care not to be introduced to, lest she should be "La Belle Dame Sans Merci".

She seems to be reading a manuscript, perhaps a mediaeval one, more likely some faux-ancien concoction of her husband's.  Perhaps it's his 1868 poem, The Earthly Paradise, or perhaps its a draft of the forthcoming (1869) Grettis Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong, which he translated (with Eirikr Magnusson) from the Icelandic; either of these, in a manuscript of his own, would fit the picture tellingly!

 

Books in the dark

Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night is one of those books which looks as if it will be really interesting when you get around to reading it – bit it looks quite serious, and in the meantime, there’s a tense thriller or a weepy novelette to tempt you away.  While, after several months, I ceased to be tempted away recently, and opened the Manguel in earnest, starting with a description of his own library in a medieval barn in the Loire valley.

It’s clearly a book to read in instalments, and I shall pick it up from time to time when in Dorset, where I have left it.  But the first essay – The Library at Night – has an interesting observation: that during the day, Manguel is in charge, is orderly, productive, sequacious of learning and successful in finding the books and references he needs.  But at night, the library is in charge – Manguel is lead astray, ideas coming from the books themselves, producing a chaos and litter of meaning only half understood, of books in the wrong places, of time expended without progress.  Maybe this is why Montaigne famously did not venture in his library after dark, though I find any experience I have in a library always combines the two states, whether my visit is diurnal or nocturnal.

Each successive chapter of the book is called The Library as ...; the first three are The Library as Myth, Order, and Space ...  These are delightful exercises – full of wit, insight and instruction – with comments that every collector of books will recognise:

The existence of every library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present.  It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here.

And everywhere there are discussions of the key problems of the library – what to keep when space is limited, whether to discard (No, never!), in what order to keep the books.   Again and again, the tendency of the books to govern the reader or librarian, rather than vice versa, raises its head.  We learn about the library of Alexandria, about the ordering of the earliest Chinese catalogues, and about the life of digital media.  For the book lover, there is delight on every page.

I have arranged, in homage to Manguel's vision of the library at night, that this post will appear at 13 minutes after midnight - a suitable dark time of the soul, although I might well still be reading.

Of the mallygolder and the dumbledore

I am an enthusiastic collector of words of all kinds, and also a keen reader of the magazine British Wildlife, a serious publication, but one without serious academic pretensions.  So you can read quite learned articles about identifying a particular class of beetles, or about conservation techniques, or about the species affected by global warming.  Or, as in the last issue, you can read about "the folk-names of invertebrates"!

This is a wonderful treasure trove of ancient words, most obsolete or of at least extremely restricted usage, but some still common - and many deserving of resuscitation!  The 'mallygolder' for example is a Cornish word for a jellyfish, and the 'dumbledore' is a dialect word for a bumblebee.  And as you cross the country (England, I mean) from Devon to the Thames valley and up to the north, the woodlouse changes from ' zow-pig' to 'chisel-pig' and then to 'slater'; and if instead of travelling in space, we travelled in time, they would be called 'chisleps' or 'esselchans'.  Other names for the same creature include 'bibble bug', 'cheesy-bob' and 'pissibed'.  What a lexicon for a small and unregarded crustacean.

The earwig is another with many names - many of them stubbornly clinging to the ridiculous notion that they entered the human ear and casued serious damage, a belief reflected in medical textbooks for many years.  They are 'forkie-tails' in Scotland, or 'gallochs', which means the same in Gaelic.  And in Elizabethan England, it was dreaded under the name of 'twitch-ballock' from its predilection for the warmth and humidity of the codpiece.

I could go on - dragonflies are 'devil's darning needles', and the garden snail is the 'hodmandod', and starfish were 'cassock'cats' or 'devil's hands', but the last insect I want to focus on is the charming flying beetle we all known as ladybirds - 'Our Lady's Bird', the bird of the Virgin Mary.  The venereal term, or group name, is also wonderful - 'a loveliness' of ladybirds.  But they were also called 'clock-ladies' from the belief that they flew from your finger in the direction of the hour (with 12 at due north) - and no-one knows why they have to fly home, 'because your house is burning down and your children gone'.

Women reading: October

The October painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Renoir's Reading Woman, painted around 1900.  This is a loose, blowsy image, without much concentration on the act of reading or allure in the woman or her setting.  But I know I will be in a massive minority here!

She's clearly reading a paperback novel; in France in 1900, this could be so many things - but what about some Emile Zola - the psychological thriller La Bête Humaine (1890), or the first volume of his own Les Quatre Evangiles, Fécondité (1899)?

Los abrazos rotos

To see Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) - the new Pedro Almodóvar film, starring Penelope Cruz as Lena, a secretary - and much else - who is dead before the action begins.  However, she completely dominates this complex, shifting film which is extraordinarily clever and witty, but seldom emotionally involving or moving. The other main character is the blind film maker with two names -and there is much to think about with names, creativity, vision, and perception.  But there's also a rattling good story!

It's well worth seeing, but eat some fish beforehand, concentrate at the back there, and no need for hankies.  Here's a trailer:

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1943339545/

When yellow's on the broom

The Economist - probably the best edited periodical on the planet - has a weekly obituary.  Sometimes it's a famous statesman, a political philosopher, or an economist.  But engagingly often, it's a writer, artist or collector - perhaps someone you've never heard of, but who lightens your day with their achievments and the recognition thus bestowed.

One of these occurred last week - on Stanley Robertson, of whom I'd never heard (yes, I'm an ignorant Sassenach), but who captured my imagination immediately through this brilliant obituary.  Stanley Robertson was a fish filleter in Aberdeen for 47 years, but he was also a traveller (not quite a gipsy or a Romany, but close in spirit), a folk singer, a story teller, and a guardian and creator of this folk tradition, speaking a language which was Scots (a dialect of English, in case you're wondering), Doric, Gaelic, and Cant.

He wrote a book of stories, Reek Roon A Camp Fire, which I feel I must read, and you can hear him on a pair of CDs of his singing and storytelling.

I cannot improve on the  prose of The Economist, so here are two brief extracts.  First, time to go on the road:

Since 1945 or so his family, weary of a life of gathering flax or hawking rabbit skins, had settled ... in an Aberdeen tenement. But a time would still come every year when Mr Robertson knew in his bones that it was time to go away:

I’ll tak’ ye on the road again
When yellow’s on the broom.

They would go up the Old Road at Lumphanan, a green drove road peopled with spirits and with a venerable oak tree, Auld Craobhie, who had to be greeted each time they passed. (“We ca’ them the guid folk,” Mr Robertson said, “for they can dee ye an awful lot of damage.”) There they would camp, light a “glimmer”, or a fire, sing songs and tell stories, with each teller throwing on a piece of peat as they began.

And second, a one sentence summary of his life, working and storytelling:

... kippers hoisted on tinter-sticks, fish baskets swirled in water, one herring every second dropped into the splitting machine - all that his busy, careful hands were doing, while his head was in Fairyland.

Women reading: September

The September painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Marianne Stokes' Slovak Woman at Prayer, painted around 1905.  Stokes was born in southern Austria (1855-1927), and studied widely on the continent.  She married the English landscape artist Adrian Stokes, and her work shows a wide range of influences as a result, with some pre-Raphaelite tendencies.  The picture below is, I find, utterly charming - primitive, strongly delineated, and clearly expressive of the woman's concentration and devotion.  You can see more of Marianne Stokes' paintings here and at these amazing pages on the Art inconnue blog, where there are dozens of "women reading" paintings, many of them completely unknown to me.

 

Now, she's at prayer.  But I wonder what she might be reading at home, in Slovakia in the first decade of the nineteenth century?  Well, if she was really up to date, she might be reading Martin Kukučín (1860-1928), whose best-known full-scale novel is his Dalmatian work Dom v stráni (House on the Hillside) (1903-4), an acutely observed picture of Croatian rural life, about two lovers from different social classes.  (My thanks to James Naughton for the history of Slovak literature.)  I shall try and find a copy, and report back!

Peculiar London

Cornflower quotes Iris Murdoch on London in the summer, and reminds me of two or three wonderful passages about London from favourite authors of mine.

First, Powell in Temporary Kings:

How unchanged remains the French view of English life - phlegmatic, sadistic aristocrats, moving coldly and silently from one atrocity to another through the fogs of le Hyde Park and les Jardins de Kensington.

Then T S Eliot in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes   

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,    

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,   

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,    

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And then, the magnificent Lugg in Margery Allingham's Tiger In The Smoke:

The fog was now at its worst, rolling up from the river dense as a featherbed.  It hung between street lamp and street lamp in blinding and abominable folds ... [whilst driving the car] Lugg manoeuvred into Park Lane and sat on the tail of a late bus for Victoria.  "I could do with with a spot of p and q in a padded cell myself.  That was Marble Arch I was 'ootin' at.  I thought she was taking her time."

By the way, the title comes from the nickname of the thick, choking fogs of coal-burning London - "a London peculiar".

Women reading: August

The August painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Ambrosius Benson's Young Woman Reading a Book of Hours.  Benson was a Dutch (Netherlandish) artist, working around 1495 - 1550.  I love the calm, the serenity, the concentration of the image, and the restraint of the palette and the composition.  This is one of my favourite periods of painting, and I could look at images of this sort all day long.  There is no need to speculate what she might be reading, as the title tells us - a book of hours was a devotional aide, including liturgical calendars, prayers for the different times of day, lists of saints, Gospel texts etc, and they were often lavishly illustrated in their own right.

Below is the kind of thing she is reading, the Dutch Bout Psalter-Hours from around the same period.

Tailors

I love words, and I am always amused by the different meanings of a word, especially when they’re slightly out of the way.  So, today’s word is “tailor”.  Yes, it’s a man who makes clothes, originally mainly for men, and now for everybody; but now the word has an upmarket connotation, and few of us have a tailor to design and make our clothes to order (though I have just watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on DVD, Le Carré’s Smiley masterpiece, based on the game for divining your career from plum stones – "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief”).  The tailor is, in folk tales, the man who cuts up the cloth - but in the trade, he's the cutter, and the tailor is the man who stitches them together.

 

But did you know, tailors are also small fish, and a kind of caterpillar?  And:

 

Nine tailors make a man – a contemptuous expression, suggesting that tailors were of such poor physique that nine of them would make a real man.  But also, the nine strokes of the funeral bell that announce the death of a man - "tailor" may be a corruption of "teller", a stroke on a bell.  See, in a a light hearted murder mystery, but one evoking the quiet desolation of the Fens, Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors.

 

It’s a tailor’s war – a World War II saying, meaning I know not what.

 

To tailor a shot – to bungle a shot at a bird or a deer, injuring but not killing it (I came across this in John Buchan's John McNab).

 

Any more?

Women reading: July

The July painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is August Macke's Elisabeth Reading, from 1911, towards the end of Macke's short life (1887-1914).  I love its clear, challenging, almost tropical colours, and the absolute elimination of everything superfluous. But there's something slightly sinister, too, about the blankness of everything, don't you think?

 

But what is she reading?  Well Macke was German, so one candidate would be Wellen (Waves), a novel by Eduard von Keyserling, first published in 1911.  According to Wikipedia (what do I know?), this is set during a long hot summer in a small fishing village somewhere on the Baltic.  It depicts a group of aristocratic city-dwellers spending their holidays in that remote part of the Empire (a far call from the Mediterranean feel of the painting!). Keyserling focuses on the follies of a doomed fin de siecle society whose self-imposed repressions eventually lead to catastrophe.

Or more realistically, it could be something written in the previous ten years - when a number of fine writers were just getting into their stride: might it be Robert Musil's Young Torless, or Thomas Mann's utterly wonderful Buddenbrooks?  Just too early for Kafka, sadly, or Mann's Death in Venice, which would suit the picture's mood rather well, I think.

Curiously, my calendar apparently prints this picture the wrong way round!  All the other references I can find show it this way, and there is no internal evidence that I can see.

Georgette's Georgian civilities

Cornflower’s book group read Georgette Heyer’s A  Civil Contract recently.  I read it too, but rather late, and felt a brief post of my own would be more sensible than a comment on hers, three weeks or more after the deadline.  Normally, I wouldn’t have read a book of this sort, but my mother was an enthusiast and I consumed many of the Heyer Regency novels in my early adolescence, enjoying the drama, the period detail, and the emotional chiaroscuro.  Later, I read some of her murder mysteries, which are workmanlike though a little affected and very mannered, not up to the standard of the Golden Age – Sayers, Allingham, Tey at her best, or even Marsh.

So I read this (for the first time, I suppose, as I did not remember it) with the expectation of not really enjoying it, but with some curiosity as to my taste in books at 12 or 13.  Well, it’s a very adolescent sort of book, convincing only at a superficial level, but with an easy charm and a fast moving plot which carries the hapless reader along.  I found it an incredible story, though, even for those dark ages, and found the wealth of apparently authentic detail stultifying not convincing.  But it doesn’t pretend to be a serious piece of fiction, so its cappuccino approach to love and history is entirely appropriate.

What I did feel odd was the language.  It does, certainly, have the feel of the Regency period, and is very convincing – the news of Waterloo arrives in this book which places it very definitely in 1814-15 – but is the language really realistic?  First, how would I know?  Am I just being taken in by charming but completely over the top pastiche, rather as if future generations were convinced that we all spoke like characters from EastEnders, only more so?  Two things convinced me that this was likely.  First, her detective stories (see, for example, Duplicate Death) produced an extremely mannered and indeed impossible language for the inter-war years, including a Scottish detective who talks Gaelic in a way which reminds you irresistibly of Inspector Closeau: perhaps she suffered the same fault in her Regency writing, but we are less attuned?  The second point is even more convincing for me – this is exactly the period of Jane Austen, who wrote of her own time, but she has none of this absurdity and extremity of language or behaviour – not even in the Bath passages of her novels – when the Quality were most in evidence – or Northanger Abbey, a clear parody and mockery of current tastes and mores.  No, I think Heyer has been seduced by – and seduced us with – a caricature of the slang of a tiny modish group which she has drawn as a template for a whole society.

Women reading: June

 

The June painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Thomas Pole's In The Library, St James' Square.  Pole lived 1753-1829, and this was painted about 1805-6.  I think it's absolutely splendid, and utterly charming, although it looks nothing like St James' Square today (assuming this is the London square just off Piccadilly, of course).  Perhaps the lady is a forerunner of the librarians and readers of the great London Library which is one of the most respected occupants of the square today?

Later:  Thanks to Cornflower's comment, I now know this is not London, but Bristol.  There are several other pictures of the square, also by Pole, in the Bridgeman Art Library for those interested - looks very fine.

 

Of course, she is writing as well as reading - indeed, she has at least two books on the go, with others to hand for reference.  I suspect that she is writing a dutiful letter to a friend or family member, and is writing out a passage from the Bible (and that looks like a prayer book just to her right), probably with admiring quotations from the morning sermon.  But she probably has pleasure in mind as well, and when she goes out into the sunny garden, I suspect she will take one of the other books with her - including, perhaps, the tragedy Edwy and Elvina by Fanney Burney.  If she was feeling more serious, she could have dipped into Coleridge's Lectures on Politics and Religion or some travel writing by the Gothick author, Ann Radcliffe - A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794.  (It's just a few years too early for Jane Austen, sadly).

Tigers edge Irish

To Twickenham last weekend to see the (rugby union) cup final between Leicester Tigers and London Irish.  My sympathies were not really engaged, though I had a sneaking sympathy for Irish as the underdogs.  It was a chilly, windy evening, though largely sunny, and the match was much more exciting than the 10 - 9 scoreline (in Leicester's favour) would suggest.

Below:  the Leicester mascot struts his stuff before the match; Delon Armitage misses one of several kicks, any of which would have been enough to secure the match; and an easy line-out win for the Tigers.

 

Where I write

The crowded and untidy space where I do my blogging - or at least most of it - is on show today at Cathy's blogspot.  If you go and have a look, you might be shocked at my untidiness, but you'll find something interesting on this varied, gossipy book blog.

Women reading: May

The May painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Edward Killingworth Johnson's Summertime: Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Hannah.  His dates are 1825-1896; the painting is undated, but as he seems to have been active in the second half of the 1800s in England, this gives us a wide range of things she could be reading. But it's a truly dreadful painting, soppy and vapid, and her head is at a very odd angle with a carved soap expression.  I am sure, therefore, that she is a an empty headed young frivol, caught in the country, dreaming of parties and balls in Town - but after such harshness, I have (entirely on a whim) decided that she is reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855), a fine novel but one that will not unduly tax her all too evidently fragile concentration!

If you want to see a much more visually exciting picture on the same subject, visit Harriet Devine!

Fadiman U

Anne Fadiman has written two lovely books of essays, Ex Libris (1998) and At Large And At Small (2007).  The first is basically about books, though books approached from slightly quirky angles; the second is more general – and, I think, slightly less successful.  But in the art of essay writing (which has been dying ever since it was invented, so much so that Fadiman wryly observes that the essay mourning the passing of the essay is an important and vigorous sub-genre!) she is clearly very accomplished, and extremely witty.

In Ex Libris, in Marrying Libraries for example, she deals with the trauma of merging her husband’s and her own libraries, a mere eleven years after they started living together.  Now that is something I can understand; certain books are old friends, and someone else’s copy is just not the same, and other people have such contrary views on classification.  They do merge their books, but it involves long and tortuous negotiations, concessions and reluctant agreements, and it actually begins to unravel in some respects soon afterwards.  And in another essay, Sir, You Must Never Do That To A Book, her brother is rebuked by a note left by the chambermaid in a hotel for leaving a book face down (a crime I acknowledge I very occasionally commit myself), and she uses this as a starting point for discussing how different people treat books.  Some treat their books as sacred objects and insist on cleanliness and purity, while others regard the physical book as nothing, using torn out pages for notes, some even tearing out parts of a book they had read while travelling in order to reduce weight.  I am a man of the middle ground myself, but passions run high.

In The Joy of Sesquipedelians she looks at the joys of precise but unloved and unused words – and finds no less than 22 that she didn’t know in a single book.  O, alright then, they are: monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcade, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodeman, goetic, opopanax.  One friend knew no less than nine of these, I managed 4 that I really knew, and another 3 that I’d have recognised in context.  And how I've managed all these years without retromingent - "urinating backwards", I really can't say!  This is only fun, but anyone following me in reading C P Snow will know his predilection for such words, hebephrenia being the most recent example I can recall - "the insanity of pubescence".  My personal favourites are heteroclite and myristicivorous - do have fun with those!

Overall, I’d recommend Ex Libris to any booklover, they’re a joy; the essays in At Large And At Small, however, are of more general interest (coffee, collecting, working at night) but sometimes lack the brilliant spark of the other essays.

The title of this post, incidentally, is the name her family gave to themselves when competing against the television in an American quiz show, the equivalent of the British University Challenge.  They almost always "won"!

Jeudi Gras

The end of Lent – not that I have kept it in any way at all – maybe a good moment for my first post on food and cooking, especially as it is about fat, and specifically about the virtues of fat.  Jennifer McLagan’s Fat is apparently determined to put the case for fat, and although I haven’t read it, the reviews (eg, one by Alex Renton in The Times recently) were enough to make me want to write something.  (The two photographs are from blogs which know much more about food than this one - follow the links in the next two paragraphs).

The avoidance of fat has always seemed to me a foolishly exaggerated trend; of course, too much of it is both unhealthy and unattractive from a culinary point of view.  But often, fat is where the flavour is; lean meat is dead, tasteless – and therefore often dressed up with salt and flavour enhancing chemicals.  Your succulent restaurant steak is succulent because it has a marbling of fat in the meat.  The best chips are fried in beef fat, so I’m told.  A whole European tradition of charcuterie is testament to this obvious truth which we seem to have wilfully forgotten.

There are some things which have passed away from cooking unmourned because not understood.  My mother used to enjoy bread and dripping (admittedly in the war, when nourishment was harder to come by), which I believe it was a traditional energy rich and very tasty snack.  Certainly the dripping from the joint was saved and used for cooking breakfast.  And if you are so old fashioned as to make steamed puddings, just try making them with the suet freshly broken off from pig’s kidneys from your local butcher, assuming you’re lucky enough to have such a thing: it’s a revelation in taste and texture.  And potatoes roasted in goose fat, not olive oil – aahh!  But one thing is making a comeback – some recent research suggests that butter may not be the instant killer we have feared, which has to be good news, for who could prefer margarine?

And what is Jeudi Gras, or Fat Thursday?  Apparently, it’s an end of Lent festival in Bordeaux, marked by a procession of the fattest cattle, and the eating of the Bazadaise beef, red and yellow with meat and fat.  So, moderation in all things, but try buying the less lean steak or roast, and keep and use the dripping!

Women reading: April

The April painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva's At A Book.  Bashkirtseva was Ukrainian, and lived between 1858-84, dying young of tuberculosis.  Apart from her painting, she also wrote a journal about being a woman artist, called I Am the Most Interesting Book Of All.  The painting is presumably, therefore, to be dated to the late 1870s or early 1880s.  

 

Luckily, I am as much of an expert on Ukrainian literature as I am on Danish, so I am able to suggest that she is reading the first real novel in Ukrainian, written in 1845–6, which was Chorna rada by Panteleimon Kulish (The Black Council - 1846, a bit before the picture), a historical novel influenced by Sir Walter Scott, on the subject of the Cossack past.  But other ideas are welcome! 

Blinding light

Up unusually early recently, and just caught this brilliant morning sunshine on books in the study, chopped up dramatically by a wooden blind.

 

American π

3.142 .. and so on, forever - the ratio of the diameter of a circle to it's circumference, or π (pi).  We were plagued by this little chap at school, or we revelled in it, in the strange inexplicable precision of a number which never has an end.

These musings are inspired by Marcus du Sautoy's Sexy Maths article in a recent edition of The Times.  He talks about a whole range of pi things, noting that today is pi day, when mathematicians eat lots of pies to celebrate!  The article is quite fun, talking about the importance of pi in mathematics, but also about odd ways to calculate pi - including throwing a needle on to a sheet of paper where the lines are separated by the length of the needle (the proportion of times the needle ends lying across a line is 2 divided by pi).  But he also tells you that we (you? me?) know the value of pi to a trillion digits - and what use is that exactly, when a mere 39 digits is enough to calculate the circumference of the visible universe to the accuracy of a single hydrogen atom?

And why "American" pi in my title?  Well apart from the bad cinematic reference, the day for celebrating pi is taken from the first three digits of the number itself, so March 14.  In England, it would have been the third of the fourteenth month (oops), or the 31 April (oops again).  Curiously, mathematicians use this day to celebrate, but engineers - who du Sautoy says don't care about accuracy so much (?) use 22 July, after the fraction 22/7, a workaday substitute for pi in basic calculations.

Women reading: March

The March painting on my Women Reading calendar  (see also 1st of each month since) is Carl Vilhelm Holsoe's Girl Reading At a Sunlit Window.  Holsoe was Danish, and lived between 1863-1935, although I cannot find a date for this particular painting.  

 

What is she reading?  A novel, I think, not a letter or a book of devotion;  I think she is a modern young woman, serious and reflective, reading the best books of her generation, not frivolous or idling - there's no sexuality or mischief here.  So, from my extensive knowledge of Danish literature, I offer the following suggestion - Niels Lyhne, by the novelist and poet J.P. Jacobsen (1847-1885),which was published in 1880, and which apparently inspired (among others) Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the composers Delius and Schoenberg. 

According to one (anonymous) review I found on the web, "Niels Lyhne recounts the life of a poet, emphasising the influence of experience on psychological development and examining philosophical issues: the nature of reality, atheism, creativity and love. It is a dense narrative, striking at times in its richness of physical detail, although the prose, which occasionally sparkles, is baroque and at times rococo. The book's appeal to early modernists and champions of realistic fiction is understandable, but this modern reader found that the characters never developed into living creatures and with few exceptions were too obviously created and manipulated to address the author's aesthetic and philosophical concerns."

It's available in Penguin classics - maybe we ought to read it? (Do let me know if you have, of course!)

Women reading: February - Sunday Salon

The February painting on my Women Reading calendar  (see also 1st of each month since) is Robert Hope's The Yellow Silk Dress.  Hope was British (Scottish, I think), and lived between 1869-1936.

 

This has a lazy, slightly sensual air, without the exoticism of the January reader.  She is less a serious reader, one suspects, than a woman merely whiling away an hour or so with a fashionable magazine - for that is what she seems to be reading.  It's a large format, certainly, and appears to be mainly full of illustrations: assuming that the painting dates from around the turn of the century, could it be the famous Yellow Book of the 1890s, daring literary and artistic magazine of some decadence?  The echo of "yellow" is alluring, and the idea that this woman is looking at sketches by Aubrey Beardsley is a charmingly risque one!

Analysis without tears: Sunday Salon

There is a really silly thing you can do if you're a blogger or know one well - you can get their Myers-Briggs personality profile just by putting the blog address in Typealyzer!  This is a very serious and helpful personality test, and this is a really trivial way of doing it - BUT, it did get me right, because I've done it properly several times, and it was spot on:

INTP - The Thinkers

"The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."

Feel free to comment!!

 

Women reading: January

A very happy New Year to you all!

My calendar for January shows me Georges Croegaert's La Liseuse; he was a Belgian painter (1848-1923) who painted a lot of rather cosy and warm boudoir scenes.  This therefore presumably comes from the late nineteenth century (or possibly very early twentieth, though it doesn't have that feel for me.  The young lady is in a rich, fashionable apartment, decorated with many curios of travel and the East especially; she is obviously quite a reader, as her TBR pile is on the bottom shelf of the cabinet to the right.  The skin rug, the masks, the open cabinet, the dagger, as well as her good looks and languid appearance, make me speculate that she is mistress or lover, rather than wife, though I know not why.  There is certainly more than a hint of danger, of sexuality, in the picture.

   

This is not a particularly good quality image - you might want to look here instead to see more of the detail!

So what is she reading?  A novel, to be sure, and a French one - probably one which is ever so slightly racy or improper, certainly one which her father or priest would disapprove of.  What about Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô (1862), which Wikipedia tells me, "is largely an exercise in sensuous and violent exoticism".  Sounds perfect for the picture! 

Calendar girls

I trespass on Harriet Devine's territory here, but I have just bought myself a calendar, each month illustrated by a painting of a woman (or a lady - often both!) reading, from a wide range of social, geographical and historical backgrounds.   And I notice that both my editions of the Oxford Companion to English Literature and its Cambridge counterpart, the Guide to Literature in English, have covers sporting the same visual trope:  Gwen John's A Lady Reading for Oxford, and Red Berries by Albert Joseph Moore (who he?) for Cambridge.  The two pictures are shown here, but as for the calendar ...

I have set myself the challenge of showing you the ladies of the calendar (not, in spite of my come hither title, I hasten to say, the Calendar Girls!) one by one through the year, taking some guess as to their reading matter.  I hope Harriet will forgive me - and also help me when I get stuck.  It does occur to me that it would be hard to have a calendar of (gentle)men reading, but that might be my ignorance?

Great honour!

I am greatly honoured by Norman Geras, who has just featured me in his Friday blogger's slot over at normblog!  The link will take you to my answers to his questions, should you be interested - and on to a stimulating and intellectually challenging blog.   

Liverpool: Walker

During my recent visit to Liverpool, I also visited the Walker Art Gallery, one of a massive collection of Victorian public buildings in a heavy Victorian classic style, with good views out across the city.  Sadly, they've slightly lost their sense of place, with major roads too close behind them - but out to the front, there are gardens and a square - with Wellington on a huge column.  The Walker calls itself one of the great art collections of the world, which is frankly ridiculous, but it's a good collection with some interesting pieces.

There is quite a lot of Victorian sentimentality - sickly genre pictures and very dramatic pseudo-historical themes (And When Did You Last See Your Father?)  but I wanted to see two things. 

First was the well known painting just completed by Ben Johnson, an immensely detailed cityscape, which I found rather sterile and disappointing.  But the earlier cityscapes were of interest, showing Liverpool at the height of its mercantile prowess in the nineteenth century - and like Johnson's work, showing as complete various buildings which were in fact still under construction, which is why the cathedral has the wrong number of towers in one picture!

And my other aim was to see a handful of British and continental pictures of some distinction, and here are a few of them.  Below is Jan Beerstraaten's Warmond Castle in a Winter Landscape from the seventeenth century, a bright crisp winter scene of some drama.  The castle is an accurate representation of the building in question, but the church is imaginary!

Below are two powerful ladies: on the left is Marguerite of Navarre (wife of King Francis I of France) by Jean Clouet, active in the early sixteenth century; note the marguerites in her hair - and note also the ring-necked parakeet on her wrist, perhaps an emblem of chastity or a family emblem.  Then an exotic bird, it has become very familiar in south-eastern England, where its brilliant green, long tail, and loud screeching has become part of any walk along the Thames in west London, for example. And on the right is a very white Queen Elizabeth, allegedly by Nicholas Hilliard, though he normally worked, very finely, in the miniature format. It's known as the Pelican portrait, although it's not a good one, as the face is completely empty and something appears to have gone wrong with the perspective there - but as a political document, its fascinating, for this is presumably how she wanted to be seen, stern and slightly inhuman.

 

To the left is a British painting of 1577, but of hand unknown.  It is a detail from a double portrait of Sir George Delves and his wife - their conjoined hands are at the head of this post - and has an elegance and grace that the portrait of Elizabeth, which must have been painted with a couple of decades, wholly lacks.  I like the individual leaves on the tree, the careful detail of his ruff and his sword hilt, and I like the way the painter has fused emotional alertness with calm and delicacy.

And below is a detail from a large family portrait, of Sir Thomas Lucy and his family, showing seven of the thirteen children he was to have; it is an eighteenth century copy of a seventeenth century original by Cornelius Johnson.  I like the quiet solidity and calm of such paintings, which change in style as the centuries pass, but which are common over some three hundred years.

Liverpool has a whole number of galleries and museums I didn't have time to visit, and I must arrange another visit - though sadly, I gather the lambananas have gone, auctioned off for charity at several thousand pounds apiece.

Birthday numbers: Sunday Salon

Cornflower and Sarah have been celebrating birthdays recently - and I'm pleased about that, because there is clear statistical evidence that the more birthdays you have, the longer a life you will lead (though there are some curious statistical outliers in February, who live around four times longer than everybody else on a per birthday basis).  But the interesting point about these two bloggers is that they share their birthday - 11 September (they even share the year, though that's not relevant today - I guess it's sometime in the late 1970s).

What interests me is the sense of surprise you have when you find someone shares your birthday; given that there are only 365 (or 366) possible dates, and billions of us on the planet, it should be quite routine.  So, question for the day - how many people do you need on a bus so there's a 50-50 chance two of them have the same birthday?  And how many before it's, to all intents and purposes, a certainty?  Answers below the heron (courtesy of Dark Puss, taken in Regent's Park, and of almost no relevance to this post except that it's a fine photograph of a noble bird).

But, as this is really a literary and bookish blog, some birthday words.  First, from Dylan Thomas, in Poem in October:

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
    Above the farms and the white horses
            And I rose
        In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
        Over the border
            And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

Or, in a rather different mood, this from Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers:

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

 

Answers:  If there are 22 people in a room, there's a 50% chance two of them have the same birthday (Note, this is NOT the chance that one of them has the same birthday as you).  With 46 people, that becomes 95%, which is "very significant" in statistician speak.  And with 72 people, it's indistinguisahble from certainty at three decimal places - though of course, absolute certainty isn't achieved until you have 367 people (with 366, all of them could have different birthdays, though it's staggeringly unlikely).

Anyway, I hope Cornflower, Sarah, and all other birthday readers have lovely days!

Note to the mathematically inclined:  This is in essence a very simple calculation, but 29 February adds complication - either you do the calculation with 365 and ignore the extra day, or you do it with 366 and assume 29 February is just as likely as any other date.  Both assumptions are distortions, but they don't make any practical difference.

Liverpool: bananas, lambs and gulls

On my recent visit to Liverpool, I could not help seeing "lambananas"! Apparently the original was 18 feet high, yellow, and made of concrete - the creation of the artist Taro Chiezo, it was somewhat pompously conceived as a warning against the dangers of genetically modified food.  But it was never intended to breed itself, which is what's happened in this year of culture in Liverpool - they're all over the place.  Here are a few of my favourites - although I see from a few minutes web exploration that I saw only a tiny proportion of those dotted all round the city - four foot high, and painted in every conceivable way.

Above, the bronze "original" - except it ain't.  And below, the 5 a day lambanana in the Walker gallery.

And, above, workmen and the community - but there's a whole lot more and wilder - there's a show on You tube which proves that there are lambananas everywhere.  As my favourite babe with brains would say - interesting, but slightly weird.

And for no real reason at all, a herring gull paddling for worms on the lawn of the gallery:

Liverpool: Tate and Klimt

In August, I visited Liverpool as I often do, on business; but this time, I took a day out to visit the city itself, in all its pride as City of Culture.  First port of call was the Tate in Albert Dock, to see the Klimt exhibition.  But first, I had to pass a lightship for sale - the temptation to buy it and moor it in London, on the Thames opposite my office, was quite considerable!

In fact, this was not really an exhibition of Klimt at all, but one about the Vienna Secession, and the vibrant world of art and design in the city in the first decade of the last century.  Imagine, Mahler, Freud, Klimt and countless others in the city at the same time.  So, if you went to see the great blockbuster pictures, Klimt's glamorous and erotic women, you would have been largely disappointed.  Not entirely, as the picture on the left shows - his Judith II (Salome) from 1909, like many of his women combining sexuality with predation, violence, threat.  Other portraits in the exhibition show a softer vision of women - and exceptionally, a man - but the great dramatic portraits of golden patterned beauties are not here.

But there is a very fine series of rooms on the Werkstatte and the Secession, twinned movements in art and design which threw off the shackles of the old even more emphatically than impressionism (to which the Secession gave a warm welcome) and art nouveau - or jugendstil as it became in German.

A particular symbol of the Secession was their own building, the famous "golden cabbage" which you can see in Vienna today, as proud and glorious as ever.  It was opened in 1898  -  with the motto Der Zeit Ihre Kunst; Der Kunst Ihre Freiheit above its doors - To every age, its art; to every art, its freedom.  Personally, I think it sounds better in German.  Here were the famous annual exhibitions, with wonderful posters and challenging art from Klimt, Schiele, Kokoshka and many others - most famously the 14th exhibition in 1902, with Max Klinger's Beethoven statue and Klimt's great frieze.

Above is the colourful portrait of Eugenia Primavesi from 1914, brilliantly patterned and much less threatening than some of Klimt's more famous work.  He also painted a lot of landscapes, wallpaper rich meadows and orchards, flowers rich and symbolic, but with a childlike, impressionistic feel to them as well.  Another part of the exhibition was the wonderful architecture and design - here is a magnificent adjustable armchair by Josef Hoffman, 1908, in beech and mahogany -what a joy in the library that would be.

Below is Klimt's portrait of Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann from 1901, a glamour portrait recalling Sergeant or Whistler, with a soft palette and still an edgy, sparkling feel to her jewelry and dress.

And another piece of exquisite design, a marvellous silver fruit basket, also by Hoffman, from 1904, and only a foot high - one of a number of very fine smaller pieces for dining table or desk.

And to end with, a 1903 painting called Life Is a Struggle (The Golden Knight) from 1903, which has a stiff, determined knight, upright in the stirrups facing bravely that which was unknown, and which must surely defeat him, but with bravery and commitment.  Apart from the Uchello like harmony of the masses and spaces, look at the exquisite designs - the bridle, the flowery sward, the helmet.  In the end, life was too much of a struggle for Vienna itself, where an empire and a way of life passed in the First World War more completely, more finally, and less regretted, perhaps than anywhere else in Europe.  Klimt died in 1918, sui generis but still influential and entrancing.

 

Seeds, seeds, glorious seeds!

I do suggest you visit this marvellous slide show from Kew Gardens, five gentle minutes illustrated with fantastically beautiful highly magnified pictures of seeds.  Stunning just aesthetically, even if you're not a plant buff! (Don't forget to turn the captions on if you want to know what they all are).

And, you'll learn why you never see a fig tree in flower (I have one in my garden, and in 12 years I'd never noticed).

Calves-foot jelly

Readers of novels older than the readers themselves often struggle with words and phrases which would have been so well known to the original audience as to excite no comment at all.  So dozens of novels refer to calves-foot jelly and to negus.  I knew that one was a common food for invalids, and that the other was a drink much served at balls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but my knowledge went no deeper. So I was intrigued by an excellent article in Intelligent Life about calves-foot jelly - which has a sweet and a savoury form.  To my surprise, the sweet form is the classic English one, including cinnamon, citrus fruit or juice, and Madeira or brandy. 

I hadn't realised how long calves-foot jelly lasted in literature.  Here it is, in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow - a fine shot at the fads and fashions of the day, in 1921, by an author quite unjustly neglected nowadays (Read After The Fireworks or Brief Candles for shorter tales, or Eyeless in Gaza for a major novel - not to mention Brave New World for an early view of a technical elysium which is in fact hell).

[Earlier that day, George had caught the sisters scoffing in secret] ... At luncheon it was noticed that the sisters ate a little more than usual. Georgiana toyed with some French beans and a spoonful of calves’-foot jelly. "I feel a little stronger today", she said to Lord Timpany, when he congratulated her on this increase of appetite; "a little more material", she added, with a nervous laugh. Looking up, she caught George’s eye; a blush suffused her cheeks and she looked hastily away.

In the garden that afternoon they found themselves for a moment alone.

"You won’t tell anyone, George? Promise you won’t tell anyone", she implored.

"It would make us look so ridiculous. And besides, eating IS unspiritual, isn’t it? Say you won’t tell anyone."

"I will", said George brutally. "I’ll tell everyone, unless...[you marry me.]"

"It’s blackmail."

"I don’t care, said George. ’I’ll give you twenty-four hours to decide."

And, of course, she does marry him.  The thought of being outed as a girl who enjoyed her food was just too much to bear.

And negus is made with  - among other things - calves-foot jelly.  Odd to the modern taste to have a sweet thing and an alcoholic drink based on meat.  I know that Cornflower will look up a recipe and make calves-foot jelly, and I look forward to her report.

Never marry but for love: Sunday Salon

The most important reading of the past week has been of the active variety - two friends asked me to read a piece of William Penn at their wedding in Rye yesterday.  I was of course happy to oblige, though the gravitas and simplicity of the message hides some complex stress shifts in the prose.  I love reading in public, but this was trickier than it looked.  But it has a fine, sonorous quality, and I thought you might enjoy it:

"Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely. He that minds a body and not a soul has not the better part of that relationship, and will consequently lack the noblest comfort of a married life.

Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love. As love ought to bring them together, so it is the best way to keep them well together.

A husband and wife that love one another show their children that they should do so too. Others visibly lose their authority in their families by their contempt of one another, and teach their children to be unnatural by their own examples.

Let not enjoyment lessen, but augment, affection; it being the basest of passions to like when we have not, what we slight when we possess.

Here it is we ought to search out our pleasure, where the field is large and full of variety, and of an enduring nature; sickness, poverty or disgrace being not able to shake it because it is not under the moving influences of worldly contingencies.

Nothing can be more entire and without reserve; nothing more zealous, affectionate and sincere; nothing more contented than such a couple, nor greater temporal felicity than to be one of them."

And today, I am carry reading of a different quality to a god-daughter - Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, which I am sure will be much appreciated too!

B. O. P.

I mentioned a few days ago that I had bought an Annual of the Boys’ Own Paper (or B.O.P. as it called itself) for 1908-09.  This was partly to “replace” one I had in childhood, inherited from an elderly great-uncle, although it’s actually not the same year.  Partly it was just out of sociological interest; and partly, I was conscious of following the example of Erridge in Powell’s Dance.  For Erridge, this was a regression to childhood when worried or irritated; for me, it is just mild fun.

The first thing about the BOP that you notice is how dense it is; the print is small, and words crowd the page.  There are a lot of illustrations, but they are drawings and photographs, with no cartoon strips at all.  There’s almost no colour, except in the very occasional special plate, and the quality of the photographs is understandably poor – low contrast, low definition.  The tone is very serious, very improving, and very patriotic and public school (or at least, traditional male schools with uniforms, classical curricula, and fierce discipline).  There are adventure stories, lots of soldiering and scouting, and lots of articles on ships, trains, and other boys’ toys of the time – and lots of ‘doing’ articles: how to make a boat, a kite, a fishing rod et cetera.  Lots of animals are shot, Britain is naturally top country, and the Empire is a force of beneficence throughout the world; indigenous people are respected but in need of the white man's guidance, and they are sometimes “niggers”.

Yet, however uncomfortable all this is, there is a wholesomeness and an innocence too.  Good wins out, boys are basically honest and decent, and are encouraged to do outdoor things, play games, and support their school, country and chums.  BOP unashamedly puffs itself at any opportunity, and the general standard of humour is schoolboy in the juvenile not the scatological sense.  With a little social re-orientation, one would be very happy to see boys (there is no place here at all for girls) reading much of this today, rather than watching some of the video, television and computer games they spend so much time with (“Hrrmph!  Said cross of Tunbridge Wells”!).  The tone is unashamedly avuncular, and would certainly not be tolerated by any boys I know in the right age group (8-14, I guess?).

Let’s look at an issue at random – Saturday, February 13, 1909 - a drawing of a rugby match on the cover, "Dr Silver:  a school story" (part 3), "In the Heart of the Silent Sea" (an adventure story, part 20 (!)), two other adventure stories, another school story,  a not very good drawing of a white man in Africa shooting a native who has attacked him - but no story attached, a hockey story, an article on the Privet Hawk moth, one on football in Australia, a long article on "The Romance of Surveying: Thrilling Stories by the Men who are Mapping our Possessions", a school humourous poem and a weak cartoon.  Other editions can be very different, with columns on chess, draughts, puzzles, etc, but there is a strong strain of serialised and thrilling stories in school and around the Empire. Altogether 16 very full pages, quite a long, serious read.

As I hope I've made clear, it is very much of its time, and really has a pretty limited social outlook.  But I can take it for what it was, discount its Imperial attitudes, and look forward to getting a good deal of quiet enjoyment out of it over the coming weeks - though I doubt I will ever read all 800 pages!!  Frustratingly, as I have only one volume, some stories will start before my volume begins, and others will not finish - but that probably doesn't matter; it is the flavour of the beast, not the outcome of the story, that I am after.

Liquorice afternoon: Sunday Salon

Allsorts of books building up on my desk at the moment, and here, at Sunday Salon time, are four that are under way at the moment (I always read more than book at a time, often five or six!).

• Regis Debray's Against Venice, recommended by a blog reader as an antidote to the occasionally overwhelming hype about Venice.  Debray is one of those of overarching political-cultural intellectuals that only the French can really produce - supporting Che Guevara in Bolivia, then advising the Mitterand government in France, and now interested mainly in "mediology", the study of the transmission of signs in society.  Against Venice is a slight work, provocative and stimulating, and is a blast against the canonisation and excessive veneration of this city.  He sets out his stall early:  he says it is "[not] my fault that Western history has set the family jewel at the top of the Italian boot, glittering obscenely and tenaciously in the fold of the groin"!  For him, Venice is a drug, of which only the first trip is a good experience.  He makes a passionate case for prefering Naples: "Naples has a cheerful skeleton, with merry winking eye-sockets.  Venice fades the flesh, the honeymoon temple hastens the end of love".

• C S Forester's Lieutenant Hornblower.  The first of the full length Hornblower novels in some ways, as Midshipman Hornblower is really a collection of short stories strung together by a thinnish storyline.  Forester is the first, and still the best, of the naval storytellers - and some of his work is distinctly respectable, notably The Gun.  If it's good enough for Churchill, it's good enough for me!

• Primo Levi's The Wrench, which I have been reading because I mentioned cranes in a recent posts - the feathered kind, in Japanese prints - and these stories of an Italian workman, a skilled rigger of cranes and bridges came to mind.  These are wonderful stories, told by the rigger in the first person, about his work around the world, full of human detail about triumph and failure, and full of the warmth and pride of the man who builds things, rather than just talks about them.  I love Levi's writing, and this is one of his most compelling books, a kind of counterpoint to the wonderful stories based, very loosely, on chemistry in The Periodic Table.  I recommend all his work, but these two books are particularly accessible and entertaining.

•   Last week, I went to the Cranach exhibition at the Royal   Academy, which - though it was small and didn't include all the famous pictures I knew from around Europe - was very enjoyable and had several lovely gems - including nudes of Venus and Eve.  I bought the catalogue, and will spend the next few weeks occasionally flipping through it and reading a little here, admiring a painting there.  He lived around the turn of the C15-16th, working in Vienna around 1500.  He was a close friend of Martin Luther, and this exhibition contained many fine portraits, some of Luther himself, a number of nudes of various subjects - a rather new and daring departure for the German renaissance - and several beheadings, notably portrayals of Salome.  It's almost too late to see it, but go if you can.

Cartoons that shake Presidents

This will be hard to write: my subject is Doonesbury, the great American cartoon, written by Gary Trudeau, whose humour has enlivened political debate in the US for three decades or more with wit, charm, and savagery.  He has entered the political field as no other, being regularly banned by some states' newspapers and immediately reinstated under huge protest.  He gave readers cut out coupons to send to Tip O'Neill about corruption, and they sent them by the hundred mailbags.  His characters are charming, real, and wonderfully adapted to capture the moods, social and political, of America.

Trudeau/Doonesbury is one of the consciences of America, with a warm liberal tolerance that reassures you in the face of some of the narrow intolerance and ignorance that we sometimes hear from .. well, you know who we hear it from!  But how can I tell you about him, without showing you a few strips?  That would undoubtedly be anti-copyright, so I will send you to his website and the Wikipedia entry.  I will try a few pieces of text without the drawings, but they do lose a lot, although they are very text rich strips, as beautifully written as they are drawn. 

As an example, Senator Lacey Davenport is in Palm Beach, when her aide Willy Royce is stopped by the police.  He's black, and they assume he's a servant, who therefore has to carry ID (this is 1985!).  In the following strips, each of four panels, Royce talks to the police, and Lacey talks to her Palm Beach host, Consuela:

Strip 1: (first Royce and then the police)  Pass card?  Officer, this isn't Pretoria.  - No sir, its Palm Beach.  All hotel and domestic employees must carry IDs. - So?  That's their problem. - No sir, it's yours.  If you don't have ID, then I'll have to arrest you for loitering. - Loitering? How could I be loitering at 35 mph?  - I meant speeding.  If you'll get out of the vehicle, please, sir. - This is definitely because I'm black, isn't it?  No, sir, Hispanics are entitled to the same treatment.

Strip 2: (Lacey, then Consuela)  Well?  - I'm dreadfully sorry, dear, your Mr Royce didn't have an ID, so he was detained. - You mean arrested?  For what?  For being an undocumented black man? - Ordinarily, dear, it's a good system.  In fact, our employees love it.  It gives them a sense of security, of belonging.  The cards make them feel like members of our big Palm Beach family! - Are they?  - Don't be silly, dear.  It's just something they can show their friends.

Strip 3: (Lacey and Consuela again) Consuela, I hope you'll make my goodbyes for me. - Now, dear, I wouldn't make too much of this little incident.. We've really made great progress with the races recently.  Why, in 1979, we did away completely with an ordinance banning Negroes from owning property. - You did this in 1979? - That's right. - 114 years after the civil war?  - They seemed ready.

The storyline caused local outrage, and legislators moved quickly to overturn the law Trudeau was pillorying, a very typical Doonesbury outcome.  But he's often about social issues, or cultural ones, as well, and always worth reading.

And to end with, a few of the milestones identified in the Wikipedia article, most of which I recognise from hours reading and re-reading the strips in book form (I've left out some of the most controversial ones):

• During the Watergate scandal, one strip showed Mark on the radio with a “Watergate profile” of John Mitchell, declaring him “Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!” A number of newspapers removed the strip and one, The Washington Post, even ran an editorial criticizing the cartoon. Following Nixon's death in 1994, the strip was re-run with all the instances of the word "guilty" crossed out and replaced with "flawed," lampooning the media's apparent glossing-over of his image in the wake of his death.
• In February 1976, Andy Lippincott, a classmate of Joanie’s, told her that he was gay. Dozens of papers opted not to publish the storyline, with Miami Herald editor Larry Jinks saying, “We just decided we weren’t ready for homosexuality in a comic strip.”
• In November 1976, when the storyline included the blossoming romance of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, four days of strips were devoted to a transition from one apartment to another, ending with a view of the two together in bed, marking the first time any nationally run comic strip portrayed premarital sex in this fashion. Again, the strip was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers.
• In June 1978, one strip included a coupon listing various politicians and dollar amounts allegedly taken from Korean lobbyists, to be clipped and glued to a postcard to be sent to the Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, resulting in an overflow of mail to the Speaker's office.
• In December 1992, Working Woman magazine named two characters (Joanie Caucus and Lacey Davenport) as role models for women.
• April 2004: On April 21, after nearly 34 years, readers finally saw BD’s head without some sort of helmet. In the same strip, it was revealed that he had lost a leg in the Iraq War. Later that month, after awakening and discovering his situation, BD exclaims “SON OF A BITCH!!!” The single strip was removed from many papers—including the Boston Globe. An image of BD with amputated leg also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that summer (issue 954).
• May 2004: two Sunday strips were published containing only the names of soldiers killed in the War in Iraq. Further such lists were printed in May 2005, May/June 2006 and 2007.

123 .. why am I doing this?

Have been prompted by both Cornflower and Harriet Devine to do this, though am not clear why!  What you have to do is:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. Open it to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you.

I passed on the literally nearest book, as this was a volume of Doonesbury cartoons - brilliant, but not lending themselves to this exercise very well.  Next was a 99 pence purchase from Oxfam, George Moore's Esther Waters, which I haven't even started yet.  And the answer is:

5th sentence and the succeeding three:

Higher up, Esther saw a bedroom of soft hangings and bright porcelain.  Then another staircase, and the wail of a child caught on the ear, and Mrs Rivers said, "The poor little thing; it never ceases crying.  Take it Waters, take it. Esther sat down, and soon the little thing ceased crying.

Very intriguing - I'll let you know more when I read the book, in whose author I have a special reason for being interested. 

Chinese terracotta warriors

Late evening a week or so ago, to the British Museum, to see the Chinese warriors from the funerary complex of Qin, first Emperor of all China, at least in the sense we think of it today.  This extraordinary man used ruthlessness (soldiers were punished if their subordinates failed tests of skill), enormous organisational skill, and radical techniques of mass production (parts of crossbows were interchangeable, for example) to conquer his enemies and create an empire vastly larger and more homogeneous than the one he inherited.

The famous figures, 7000 terracotta soldiers found so far, are justly impressive.  But also, fine small artefacts on display, and - my favourites - a number of bronze birds such as cranes, geese and ducks, which adorned rivers and pools of mercury.  The impact is inevitably limited with a mere score or so of figures, but they - and the horses and chariots - were well arranged and undeniably effective.  I wish I'd had more time to read about them before I saw the exhibition, but a trip to see them in situ has now joined the long list of future holidays!

Welcome home, Harriet

A subversive image of a young girl reading, by Theodore Roussel, for Harriet Devine to add to her collection of reading pictures.

Tutankhamun

When I was a little boy, I wanted to be, not a train driver, but an archaeologist.  In fact, I wanted to dig in the Middle East, and discover new civilisations in Egypt and Iraq, but I gave this up because of a total inability to learn languages.  In the end, my archaeological career was confined to a few summers worth of digging in Saxon and mediaeval Southampton, which was interesting enough, and a visit to the British Museum with my father in the 1970s to the Tutankhamun exhibition.

That exhibition was wonderful, though after four and a half hours queuing, we were hurried through a very crowded set of rather dark rooms stretching to see over other people for a clear view of the wonderful artefacts, including the famous gold mask.  Last weekend, at the O2 centre in Greenwich, I went to a very different Tutankamun exhibition.  Modern exhibition management meant we had timed tickets which led to a completely uncrowded experience, with a very spacious exhibition with lots of wonderful pieces, excellently lit and clearly displayed.  There was a dearth of the really big items from the tomb itself, but lots of preparatory material from slightly earlier periods, and then some fine smaller items from Tutankamun’s tomb itself.

Highlights for me included some very French looking furniture, a marvellous black panther I immediately christened Bagheera, and an ostrich feather fan.  If you get a chance to go, and it’s on until the end of August, I’d recommend it.  Useful but tacky website here!

...So They Do!

This is by Ignat Bednarik, a Romanian watercolourist, 1882-1963.

Harriet's questions

I don't normally answer this  kind of circular quiz, but this one caught my fancy on Harriet Devine's blog, perhaps because several of her answers were the same as mine might have been.  So here goes:

What is your favourite word?   There are thousands, but plangent is very fine.

What is your least favourite word?   Posh is pretty dreadful; any word misused.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?  Mountains and green spaces, moving water.

What turns you off?   1960s architecture, pretension, sentimentality.

What is your favorite curse word?   It's a family site, so I couldn't possibly say.  But I used it for years at school not realising that it meant a sexual act that then I didn't even know existed!

What sound or noise do you love?   I'm with Harriet on this one - rushing water, also dry leaves around my feet, and the susurration of pebbles caught by a receding wave.

What sound or noise do you hate?   Fingernails on a blackboard.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?   Gardening, the law (as a barrister).

What profession would you not like to do?   Nursing (thank God for that, say all potential patients).

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?   Jane Austen reads from her books every Thursday; today, it's the completed version of The Watsons!

Trains

Two additions to Cornflower's trains.  First, the wonderful story of Brabazon, the Victorian dandy who had trouble with his 'r's, and was known as a result as Bwab.  He rushed onto the platform of his local station, to be told that his train had gone, to which he replied "Gone?  Gone!  Bwing another!"

And how can you think of trains without thinking of Night Mail?  If you don't know it, the link gives you the original wonderful black and white steam footage and the poem all in one.  Three minutes of nostalgic, poetic bliss - do watch it.

New Year's gift for Harriet

Trespassing on Harriet's territory here, to offer her a woman reading.  You are never alone when reading, but these beasties are not my normal company.  I always hope there is an angel on my shoulder, or at least a daemon (in Pullman's sense), but who knows?  This vision is by Otto Frello, 1975.

Moore mist opportunities

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Day, and are enjoying the feast of St Stephen. These pictures seemed an appropriate offering.

Just before Christmas, to Kew Gardens in a thick mist.  I will let these images speak for themselves, except to say that Kew, for all the winter weather, is always beautiful - and that however well you know it, you would have got lost as I did in these conditions!  Fantastic views of trees and the Moore sculptures, which have a primal, absolute quality in these conditions, utterly dissociated from the world yet hugely of it.  I hope to capture them under snow as well.  The leaf at the end is a sculpture, too, I think.