Sunday, November 17, 2024

Mediterranean November

 

Torrenostra


Dead Aleppo Pines

Lots of dead Aleppo Pines in 2024. This photo is from Sagunto, near Valencia.




Swathes of this white member of the cabbage family across the Valencian plains.


Another plant in the cabbage family, not much smaller overall but with relatively tiny yellow flowers.


On the same theme, the large leaves and small flowers of Mediterranean Stork's-bill, Erodium malacoides



A mud cliff at Villajoyosa. We saw a pair of Black Wheatears here (Oenanthe leucura).

Peter Jones' fascinating article about them:






We're a bit later in the Med than usual. So I never caught the dramatic blooming of Cape Honeysuckle before. 



Books I read or acquired during our trip. Most of them I've only dipped into.

Contes per a tot l'any is a Catalan children's book (Stories for all the year round). The only thing I've taken in is the intriguing way of differentiating certain double-L type words, e.g. il·lustració, col·lecció ...

I had to download the Catalan keyboard to my phone to type that. 

I did read Balzac’s great novella Le Colonel Chabert in its original language; generally his French is too difficult for me. 

But I came across Stendhal's short stories in Spanish translation. This was on top of a hill on the edge of Aranjuez. 

Also in Spanish, the 1950 noir thriller Portrait in Smoke by the US author Bill S. Ballinger. I have the impression he's now better known here than in the English-speaking world. At any rate, his Spanish Wikipedia entry is much more detailed. 


Saturday, October 26, 2024

Largo do Espírito Santo

 

Largo do Espírito Santo 





I.e. The Square of the Holy Spirit. 

A cobbled plaza above the bullring, containing the small Capela do Espírito Santo and a large nettle tree.

The Capela

Capela do Espírito Santo


Nearby waterfall


Eight vultures


Millipede




Southern Nettle Tree 

Bullring

Inscriptions from Egitânia




All through England, France, Spain, and even here, the Conyza fleabanes are now one of the most familiar sights of the autumn. There are several species, not very easy to tell apart. They are native to the Americas, but Conyza canadensis was being noticed in England as far back as the late 17th century.   


Largo do Espírito Santo 








Southern Nettle Tree 

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Quatuor






'Kwatt-oo-or

'Kwatch-or

'Kwatt-roar

Those are three ways that you can -- very approximately  -- pronounce "quatuor", which is the French for quartet.

(String quartet = quatuor à cordes)

I never knew before that there are exceptions to the rule that French "qu" is pronounced like k. 

I should have known, because of "aquarelle". Usually these "kw" exceptions are in borrowed words (e.g. quatuor from Latin) and usually they come before the letter a.

A quintet in French is "quintette" and this exemplifies another unusual pronunciation of "qu", though not by all French speakers. Some pronounce it koo-ang-'tett, though many just say kang-'tett. 

In English, too, quartet and quintet demonstrate two different ways of pronouncing "qu" : at least for me and everyone I know. We pronounce quartet kor-'tet, but Google Translate gives the pronunciation kwor-'tet.

"Quartet" derives from an older French word "quartette", ultimately from Italian "quartetto". The oldest English uses seem to be in the context of vocal pieces, e.g in operas. 



Sunday, October 06, 2024

feet up on the picture thinking homemaker


Reconstruction of Etemenanki ziggurat, Babylon.

[Image source: Wikipedia  . Created by Jona Lendering after Hansjörg Schmid.]


actually cramped in standardized          firm
quarters
draped asbestos ranked statuesque 
in situ 
its figurate living mind whose nature   feet
strolls
within the floor area the budget will 
afford 
pace Mayakovsky’s pacing breath         then
stretcher
atop a concrete slab laid upon 
minimalists 
whose song of the box or cupboard      slippery
draw 
drives a coach and fiat through the 
whole 
will to reside in architectonic                 tops
vocabularies 
no bulky buffet arrangement 
needed here
later deployed in low brow                     nature
configurations 
all hail Ikea and the stripped soul 
flooring 
the cause economy in light brown        makes
parquet 
strung out vacantly over gypsum 
lego sets 
till vermiculite sheathing holds             no
each whole 
of resin-bonded wood chips in 
rigid ranch 
the blue-collar coffee set dreaming      bounds
a buck 
this is plywood world on the verge 
of mdf 
a legacy of military design in every      etc.
trainer 
slash freedom’s no blank indeter-
minateness 
how goes it bonnie maid versatile         trenches
linoleum 
under which circumstances a dou-
ble want 
as a counter-poise to the absolute         puckered
standing 
partly too for something fixed and 
secure 
feet up on the picture thinking              lips
homemaker 
while glamour steals a march on 
the bath 
before sitting pretty up on execu-         in
tive foam 
every picture window brought to 
you by 
technology sanctified in modernist      furrows
points 
yonder the hum of happy wreck-
ing crews
and the inherent problems of an-         faces
gular form 
giving way to the revenue view or 
upkeep 
left to run from elegance to stark         come
brutalism 
hey you stop roaming in empty 
abstraction 
keep your eyes open for lay                  physic
Althusserians 
then there’s the horizontal cadence 
calling

I've been reading Drew Milne's Blueprints & Ziggurats, which is one of the two long sequences that were published for the first time in In Darkest Capital: The Collected Poems of Drew Milne (Carcanet, 2017).

The whole sequence, as you may have surmised, is preoccupied with architecture, design and construction. Perhaps we could be more specific and say it's about the human players; the architects, the bankers, the builders, the dwellers and everyone else who's impacted by what's built or (often) not built. 

Though (mindful of Althusser) I could be placing too much emphasis on individuals and not enough on social structures. But when I think of the robustly demotic vein in Milne's poetry, I feel I'm right. 

Near the start we have the spectacle of the superannuated Frank Lloyd Wright, when invited by the oil-rich King Faisal II to make proposals for developing a westernized Baghdad in the 1950s, suggesting a grandiose scheme for an opera house that would be topped off with sculptures of a heritage camel and Aladdin's lamp. (The scheme foundered when Faisal and his family were killed in the revolution of 1958.) It was a story that had lost none of its grotesque eloquence at the time Milne was writing the poem and Baghdad was being patrolled by US tanks.

My extract comes from a section titled "The bruise that Heidegger built". This may just possibly be in highly critical dialogue with Heidegger's paper "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951) [PDF], though I say this with an uneasy feeling of either being stupid or stating the obvious. 

But having gone this far I may as well venture another guess, that "hey you" refers to Althusser's concept of interpellation, i.e. how social structures persuade people to self-identify as subjects (which he illustrated by the way someone feels they have to turn round when a policeman calls "Hey, you there!").


Embrasures:

Embrasures at Keoti Fort, India.

[Image source: Wikipedia . Photograph by Timothy A. Gonsalves.]


            here an almshouse there 
            a palladian disability unit 
            baldachino for ciborium 
            and embrasures of within 
angular                                          lean to 
capital                                            roofing 
bloods                    care                  single 
capital                    shed                 roofing 
block                       tree                  screen 
capital                    folly                 framed 
cushion                                          rip offs 
capital                                            scallop 
             old style scandal mews 
             in debt to public private 
             injection traceries swag 
             now a pension torus in 
             wall to wall vernaculars

(from "Embrasures")

City of dogs:

Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Teotihuacán. 

[Image source: Wikipedia  .]


The poem "City of dogs" is available online, here:

https://blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/issues/issues-1-10/issue-2/drew-milne

It's all about Teotihuacán, the ancient meso-American pyramids and temples near Mexico City.

In the post below 'Laura' visits the site, and talks about the "city of dogs" aspect:

https://funlifecrisis.com/visiting-teotihuacan-pyramids-in-mexico-city/


Skylon song:

The Skylon was a vertical cigar-shaped steel tensegrity structure that appeared to stand in mid-air, created for the Festival of Britain, 1951.


The Skylon illuminated at night.

[Image source: Wikipedia  . Photograph by Bernard William Lee, 1951.]

                   o  
                 sky 
                song 
              skylon
            half way 
           house and    
         paths lost but 
        summit meagre 
      brick charred ruin 
     burning burning so 
     still the none comes 
   and portals to watery 
   beds how sweet flows 
   concrete steel a thread 
   its once and future city 
  shows this slender cigar 
  steel that floats and flags 
 bonfire of the modernists 
 how each visible support 
  does a lash propaganda 
 sleek symmetry as cakes 
 for the millions who saw 
  who came who felt a sky 
  high into vertical breeze 
  to scrap of ashtrays and 
  satellite dishes air spear 
  here over the whimsy of 
  fabric and braced bulbs 
 their aluminium lattice of 
  something darkly atomic 
  who gave us the housing 
 scheme as advertisement 
 such as its fallen to furies

(Opening lines of "Skylon song")




Labels:

Thursday, September 26, 2024

Starter kit for Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches

Sometimes we just start again. It's 45 years since I've read anything by Turgenev. But there we are, A Sportsman's Sketches is on Gutenberg in Constance Garnett's 1895 translation, which is divided into two volumes.

Volume 1:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8597/pg8597-images.html

Volume 2:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8744/8744-h/8744-h.htm


Here's the Russian text: 

https://ru.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%BE%D1%85%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0_(%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B2)


Our extract begins with the sportsman and his companions up to their necks in water, after the sinking of Sutchok's punt.


'I will go and find the ford,' continued Yermolaï, as though there must infallibly be a ford in every pond: he took the pole from Sutchok, and went off in the direction of the bank, warily sounding the depth as he walked.

'Can you swim?' I asked him.

'No, I can't,' his voice sounded from behind the reeds.

'Then he'll be drowned,' remarked Sutchok indifferently. He had been terrified at first, not by the danger, but through fear of our anger, and now, completely reassured, he drew a long breath from time to time, and seemed not to be aware of any necessity for moving from his present position.

'And he will perish without doing any good,' added Vladimir piteously.

Yermolaï did not return for more than an hour. That hour seemed an eternity to us. At first we kept calling to him very energetically; then his answering shouts grew less frequent; at last he was completely silent. The bells in the village began ringing for evening service. There was not much conversation between us; indeed, we tried not to look at one another. The ducks hovered over our heads; some seemed disposed to settle near us, but suddenly rose up into the air and flew away quacking. We began to grow numb. Sutchok shut his eyes as though he were disposing himself to sleep.

At last, to our indescribable delight, Yermolaï returned.

'Well?'

'I have been to the bank; I have found the ford…. Let us go.'

We wanted to set off at once; but he first brought some string out of his pocket out of the water, tied the slaughtered ducks together by their legs, took both ends in his teeth, and moved slowly forward; Vladimir came behind him, and I behind Vladimir, and Sutchok brought up the rear. It was about two hundred paces to the bank. Yermolaï walked boldly and without stopping (so well had he noted the track), only occasionally crying out: 'More to the left—there's a hole here to the right!' or 'Keep to the right—you'll sink in there to the left….' Sometimes the water was up to our necks, and twice poor Sutchok, who was shorter than all the rest of us, got a mouthful and spluttered. 'Come, come, come!' Yermolaï shouted roughly to him—and Sutchok, scrambling, hopping and skipping, managed to reach a shallower place, but even in his greatest extremity was never so bold as to clutch at the skirt of my coat. Worn out, muddy and wet, we at last reached the bank.

Two hours later we were all sitting, as dry as circumstances would allow, in a large hay barn, preparing for supper. The coachman Yehudiil, an exceedingly deliberate man, heavy in gait, cautious and sleepy, stood at the entrance, zealously plying Sutchok with snuff (I have noticed that coachmen in Russia very quickly make friends); Sutchok was taking snuff with frenzied energy, in quantities to make him ill; he was spitting, sneezing, and apparently enjoying himself greatly. Vladimir had assumed an air of languor; he leaned his head on one side, and spoke little. Yermolaï was cleaning our guns. The dogs were wagging their tails at a great rate in the expectation of porridge; the horses were stamping and neighing in the out-house…. The sun had set; its last rays were broken up into broad tracts of purple; golden clouds were drawn out over the heavens into finer and ever finer threads, like a fleece washed and combed out. … There was the sound of singing in the village.

(End of #7 (Lgov))


Illustration for "Lgov" by Pyotr Sokolov

[Image source: Wikipedia  .]

*

1. Hor and Kalinitch 
2. Yermolaï and the Miller's Wife 
3. Raspberry Spring 
4. The District Doctor 
5. My Neighbour Radilov 
6. The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov 
7. Lgov 
8. Byezhin Prairie 
9. Kassyan of Fair Springs 
10. The Agent 
11. The Counting-House
12. Biryuk
13. Two Country Gentlemen 
14. Lebedyan
15. Tatyana Borissovna and her Nephew
16. Death
17. The Singers
18. Piotr Petrovich Karataev
19. The Tryst 
20. The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District
21. Tchertop-Hanov and Nedopyuskin 
22. The End of Tchertop-Hanov 
23. A Living Relic 
24. The Rattling of Wheels 
25. Epilogue: The Forest and the Steppe 




A Sportsman's Sketches was published in 1852, collecting 22 pieces that had nearly all been published in Nekrasov's magazine Sovremennik (The Contemporary) during the previous five years. 

[The only exception, I think, was "Two country gentlemen", written (like much of the collection) in 1847 but not published until now. Possibly the ending was too nakedly political for the magazine editors.]

In this 1852 version, the contents consisted of #1 - #21 and #25.

Twenty years later, Turgenev wrote and added three more pieces:

#22  The End of Tchertop-hanov (1872)
#23  A Living Relic (1874)
#24  The Rattling of Wheels (1874)


Trying to work all this out!


*

I thought my reading choice would be tasteful but light entertainment but of course that's wrong. Under the hood the sportsman's sketches are a devastating portrait of rural Russia during the serfdom era. Both the terrible ill-treatment of the peasants, and the corrupting effect on the landowners' outlook, are unsparingly portrayed. (This most toxic and dehumanizing phase of Russian serfdom was a relatively recent development; since the early 18th century really. Like chattel slavery in America it had attained a new level of ruthlessness.)

If Turgenev's book really contributed to the Czar's decision to abolish serfdom in 1861, then it's one of the most historically significant of literary fictions. Though there were other causes (e.g. Russia's ignominious defeat in the Crimean war.) And reform was in the air: Russia was backward, it was falling behind.... Besides, plenty of other Russian authors were idealizing the Russian peasant. Indeed Turgenev rather stands out for his restraint, his melancholy realism, his sense of limits. His sportsman may have access to the life of the country like no-one else of his class, but he's still an outsider. 

Anyway the czar left it to the landowners to organize abolition. They kept the best two thirds of the land, the ex-serfs had the worst third. The landowners were compensated, the ex-serfs had to pay. Since the ex-serfs had no money, their payment was in labour. So the best land still got worked for the landowner, while the wretched land from which the peasants were supposed to draw a subsistence lay neglected. In many ways their lives got even harder.

*

I've been looking up some basic information to assist my reading. I'll share my "research" (i.e. web searches) though I don't suppose it'll be much use to anyone else. In my youth I read thousands of pages of 19th-century Russian literature without ever bothering to understand these things, but now I want to.


Kvas, kvass:

Popular beverage in the rye belt of Russia and Eastern Europe. The main ingredient is rye; it is top-fermented but has little alcohol (<1.5%) or even none. Comparable to Sweden's once-popular svagdricka (weak drink), which my great-grandfather Karl used to haul up and down the Baltic coast.


Preference

A card game, mentioned frequently.  Still played in Russia, but the height of its popularity was in the 1850s. A three-player game with contracts and tricks. Uses a piquet pack (32 cards). Reminds me of solo whist, but more complicated. Also played in other variants across Eastern Europe. The Swedish version was called Priffe.


Wormwood:

In his nature descriptions Turgenev often mentions it as an aromatic wild plant. Wormwood is Artemisia absinthium. Probably that's what Turgenev was talking about, but I wondered momentarily if he might have meant Artemisia vulgaris (Mugwort), another fragrant plant. (You may have heard that "Chernobyl" means mugwort in Ukrainian.) This thought may have been prompted by mugwort being much more common than wormwood in southern England!

Verst:

A verst is basically a kilometer (1.0668kms, to be precise). Constance Garnett translates verst as mile, which is not very accurate. 


Broken-winded (horse):

A horse condition aka recurrent airway obstruction, characterized by increased effort to breathe. Comparable to human COPD, it is an allergic reaction. Typically caused by dust or mould spores and associated with horses fed on hay or bedded on straw (though as with other allergic reactions it only affects certain individuals). Limits a horse's ability to work.


Little Russia, Great Russia:

Commonplace terms in the 19th century, but less so since 1917.

The former term refers, broadly, to Ukraine. The latter term refers, broadly, to what we now call Russia. Another term was "White Russia", referring to Belarus. 

For Turgenev, growing up in and writing about the Oryol region, south-west of Moscow and not far from Ukraine, these were useful everyday terms. 

Today "Little Russia" is a controversial term likely to cause offense. 


The steppes:

The Eurasian or Great Steppe is a more or less uninterrupted band of semi-arid grassland stretching all the way from Hungary to Manchuria. The segment relevant to Turgenev's book is known as the Western Steppe.

The steppe region in its strict sense supports scrub but not the formation of forests, due to insufficient moisture. 

Today almost all of the Western Steppe is under the plough, and is used to grow arable crops. The most dramatic expansion of agriculture was in the 1950s. There are only a few scattered reserves of "virgin steppe".

This is the distant country mentioned by Kassyan: "And beyond Kursk come the steppes, that steppes-country: ah, what a marvel, what a delight for man! what freedom, what a blessing of God!" (#9 Kassyan of Fair Springs).

The book's locations, typically in the countryside around Oryol and Tula, lie well to the north of the Western Steppe. They are in an intermediate region that geographers  sometimes call forest-steppe, where steppe grassland is interspersed with e.g. oak-wood. So Turgenev usually uses the term "steppe" to mean grassland in contrast to forest (e.g. #25 Epilogue: The Forest and the Steppe). He describes Lgov (#7) as a steppe village, though it's on a swampy river. The steppe village of #17 (The Singers) is an upland village, though it's only three miles from the narrator's home. 

[Contrary to Wikipedia, Turgenev's Lgov is clearly not based on the cathedral town on the river Seym west of Kursk. Other placenames in the story (Bolhov, Karatchev) suggest that he was thinking of the village called Lgov in western Oryol Oblast. But even so, Turgenev only borrowed the name; the topographical details don't match up. His book's villages and estates aren't intended to be precisely identifiable, as is normal in fiction.]


Nightingales:

Commonly mentioned in the nature descriptions. We also learn that people liked to keep them in cages, and hence it was possible to make a precarious living by catching them. 

The nightingales of Kursk were proverbially the best singers. Hence "piping like a Kursk nightingale". [Nadezhda Plevitskaya, the opera singer and Cheka spy, was nicknamed the Kursk Nightingale.]


Picture to yourselves, gentle readers, a stout, tall man of seventy, with a face reminding one somewhat of the face of Kriloff, clear and intelligent eyes under overhanging brows, dignified in bearing, slow in speech, and deliberate in movement: there you have Ovsyanikov. (#6 The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov):

The reference is to Ivan Andreyevitch Krylov (1769 - 1844), whose fables (1809 - 1836) made him famous throughout Russia. He had a reputation for indolence as well as wisdom. He was also fierce against modern fashions and strongly attached to old Russian ways; the sportsman mistakenly assumes that Ovsyanikov will be like that too. 


Ivan Krylov, 1839 portrait by Karl Briullov


[Image source: Wikipedia.]

You can read Krylov's fables here (in W. R.S. Ralston's prose translation):

http://www.pierssen.com/cfile/kahf.html#f049


I had once had a brother knocking about, with the English disease in his neck, but he soon died . . . (#20, The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District):

The "English disease" is rickets. Daniel Whistler, the first physician to describe it, found it invariably fatal in infancy, and often fatal later. "When the neck can scarcely support the head they seldom survive" (see https://www.jstor.org/stable/24619850 .)



Illustration for #18 (Piotr Petrovich Karataev) by Pyotr Sokolov


[Image source: Wikimedia Commons .]


*

A Sportsman's Sketches feels like quite a seminal book in Russian literature but of course it isn't that simple. The book was published in 1852, though many would have read individual stories in magazines from 1847 onwards. 

Anyway, what books had Russian readers already read? Here's some notable predecessors:

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1830)
Gogol, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1832)
Pushkin, The Queen of Spades (1834)
Gogol, Taras Bulba (1835)
Pushkin, The Captain's Daughter (1836)
Lermontov, A Hero Of Our Time (1840)
Gogol, Dead Souls (1842)
Dostoevsky, Poor Folk (1846)
Dostoevsky,  The Double (1846)
Goncharov, The Same Old Story (1847)
Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova first part (1849)

(Tolstoy was ten years younger than Turgenev. His first notable publication, Childhood, was published in The Contemporary in November 1852.)


*

Записки охотника

Zapiski Okhotnika ... : that's the title in Russian. It means Notes of a hunter, or A hunter's notes. "Zapiski" (= notes) is exactly the same word as in Dostoevsky's title Notes from Underground.

Constance Garnett gave the title as A Sportsman's Sketches. More recently it has even been rendered as Sketches from a Hunter's Album. As far as I can see this idea of sketches is an invention of the English translators. "Zapiski" means notes, e.g. short letters, or memoirs, but there's no pictorial connotation. (In French the book is known as Mémoires d'un chasseur.)

I wouldn't wish away any part of A Sportsman's Sketches, but I'm surely not alone in finding it quite an uneven reading experience. #2 (Yermolaï and the Miller's Wife) seems to me just a perfect short story; not a word wasted and everything contributing to its stunning impact. But what about #6 (The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov)? It certainly packs a punch too: the tale about the narrator's own grandfather is one of the book's unforgettable pages. But after that the story seems to become an elongated ramble, moving on to other landowners of the past, landowners of the present, the activism of Osvyanikov's son ... the names of people we'll never hear of again pass back and forth, our attention wanders. Most inconsequently of all, the medley ends with the shoehorned story of Frantz Ivanitch Lejeune, a French drummer boy left behind by Napoleon who escaped drowning and ascended to the Russian nobility. Turgenev's mock-apology to the reader seems to acknowledge that he's pushed it a bit. 

This accommodating quality of the fictional memoirs is clearly important. We're invited to picture our sportsman spontaneously writing his unfiltered notes -- things he's heard or seen -- without troubling to decide what interest they may or may not have.

So even in #7 (Lgov), another perfectly concentrated story (and with something tragic at its heart, for all its comedy) -- even here, we find the sportsman taking the trouble to note down the details of the inscription about the Vicomte de Blanchy in the churchyard.

So Turgenev plays off the expectation of everything being relevant (e.g. in a literary work such as a short story) against his fictional setting of a sportsman jotting down random notes.

In #8 (Byezhin Prairie) our sportsman pretends to be asleep -- a common motif -- while he listens in to the chatter of the peasant boys. It's realism ... just such spooky tales as boys would recount during a night in the wilds; their way of talking and limited vocabulary, the resort to physical gestures, the boys wandering off the point and forgetting to finish the tale they began... But behind the ramble readers can find a deeper unity if they want to, faintly preluded by the lost sportsman nearly stepping off a precipice; the boys' trying to make sense of their difficult, chancy peasant existences, in which death and catastrophe are never far off; both mocking and supportive of each other, both afraid and brave, both innocent and too experienced. 



*


Ratik Asokan's introduction:

https://4columns.org/asokan-ratik/a-sportsmans-notebook



Labels:

Thursday, September 12, 2024

My novel





"It hasn't all been bad, but it's changed my thinking. The main upshot is that I'm writing a novel. Finally!" I announced; shyly but with a certain quiet assurance, I thought. Obviously this novel was no passing whim, I knew what I was about. I wasn't one of those fantasists who come to grief on page 6, or even page 206. (As it happened I had only reached the top of page 2, but that's not the point.)

"Who about?" 

This was an unexpected angle.

"You had better not think of putting me or my family in your book. I know your sort. You don't know when to zip your lip. You're a blab. You don't even know you're doing it until I pick you up on it."

Later on, Godfrey returned to the subject.

"You'll do anything to get attention. I've caught you before stealing other people's ideas and trying to take all the credit. You're always feeding off other people's energy."

Godfrey meant, his idea. There had been some unpleasantness recently about a joke of ours that I'd recycled. I claimed I couldn't remember if it was him who first said it or me. Godfrey said that was a lie, and that my memory was a very convenient excuse. 

When I said that my novel was of course pure fiction, he returned to that theme. 

"Yes, you'll twist it any way you want, just to make people like you. There's no honesty about you."

The fact is, Godfrey didn't want me to write a novel, and I regretted having mentioned it. He foresaw that anything I wrote would be grossly pretentious and self-absorbed. It would also be an ignominious failure, receiving three reviews and selling zero copies. He saw me becoming ever more distracted, down-hearted and arrogant. No-one grows humbler from writing a novel.

I looked at his sandy, thinning hair, sitting out here in the September sun. It had rained yesterday and probably would rain tomorrow.  The afternoon sky was filling up with contrails. Closed shops, scaffolding, people on mobility scooters. An ordinary scene in an ordinary town. Love, grief .... what was I honestly feeling? Or was it nothing much at all, just fabricated emotion with an emptiness beneath? 

Lying often requires you to tell a lot of truth. That's how it comes about that people who receive their news from sources we personally despise end up knowing a lot of the same things we know. You can't tell lies, for instance about Vietnam, unless you first guide your audience to the site of deception.

Should I be as free with this word "lie" as Godfrey was? Most falsehoods were spread by people who largely believed they believed them, exactly like truths. There was a process of selection; you can't tell everything. Unspoken laws of discourse enforce putting a consistent case together;  you select mutually supporting examples that lead to a clear conclusion. That is how you are taught to write in the classroom. You learn to deceive others just as you were deceived all through school. 

Godfrey was a workshop manager, he fixed fuel systems, told the office what parts to order, rearranged the schedule when a truck failed to show up. He deceived people a bit, neither the customer nor the office knowing exactly what had happened inside a vehicle. But it was small beer; he had a right to speak of honesty. 

It was when I thought about the professions, teacher, lawyer, journalist, academic, doctor, novelist, politician, priest... then I saw that what society rewarded (though understood as responsibility) were really the arts of deception: knowing what to say and not say, the approved narratives and the condemned narratives, how to head things off, how to gently dismiss, how not to get caught out, the language that can't be impeached and the reserve that isn't noticed. The model professional had integrity as an accountant has probity: as a reputation, valuable in the service of corruption and fraud. 

Would my novel betray Godfrey and his large family? Yes. I wanted to tell him that it was set in Ceylon, or in the court of Victor Emmanuel, but what was the use in pretending? There were other kinds of novelist (I was already a novelist!) but the only kind of novel I could write or would write was the treachery kind. It would be full of covert unauthorised reporting. If in my novel there should ever be a hand drumming on a tabletop, it would be a hand I knew as intimately and saw as clearly as Godfrey's hand now.

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Saturday, August 17, 2024

Five stanzas of Childe Harold

 





CLXXI.

   Woe unto us, not her ; for she sleeps well :
   The fickle reek of popular breath, the tongue
   Of hollow counsel, the false oracle,
   Which from the birth of monarchy hath rung
   Its knell in princely ears, till the o'erstrung
   Nations have armed in madness, the strange fate
   Which tumbles mightiest sovereigns, and hath flung
   Against their blind omnipotence a weight
Within the opposing scale, which crushes soon or late,—


CLXXII.

   These might have been her destiny ; but no,
   Our hearts deny it :  and so young, so fair,
   Good without effort, great without a foe ;
   But now a bride and mother—and now there !
   How many ties did that stern moment tear !
   From thy Sire's to his humblest subject's breast
   Is linked the electric chain of that despair,
   Whose shock was as an earthquake's, and oppressed
The land which loved thee so, that none could love thee best.


CLXXIII.

   Lo, Nemi ! navelled in the woody hills
   So far, that the uprooting wind which tears
   The oak from his foundation, and which spills
   The ocean o'er its boundary, and bears
   Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares
   The oval mirror of thy glassy lake;
   And, calm as cherished hate, its surface wears
   A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake,
All coiled into itself and round, as sleeps the snake.


CLXXIV.

   And near Albano's scarce divided waves
   Shine from a sister valley ;—and afar
   The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves
   The Latian coast where sprung the Epic war,
   'Arms and the Man,' whose reascending star
   Rose o'er an empire ;—but beneath thy right
   Tully reposed from Rome ;—and where yon bar
   Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight,
The Sabine farm was tilled, the weary bard's delight.

CLXXV.

   But I forget.—My pilgrim's shrine is won,
   And he and I must part,—so let it be,—
   His task and mine alike are nearly done ;
   Yet once more let us look upon the sea :
   The midland ocean breaks on him and me,
   And from the Alban mount we now behold
   Our friend of youth, that ocean, which when we
   Beheld it last by Calpe's rock unfold
Those waves, we followed on till the dark Euxine rolled

CLXXVI.

   Upon the blue Symplegades : long years—  ...

(Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto IV (written 1817, published 1818), Stanzas 171-176)

171.1 her . Princess Charlotte, in line to the throne, whose death in childbirth, aged 21, on 6 November 1817, led to a national outpouring of grief. Byron and Hobhouse heard about it on 23 November, while riding on the Lido in Venice; and, anti-monarchists as they were, were as shocked as other British subjects. Their general view of sovereigns was similar to what many of us think today about big businesses: that they're all, essentially, criminal enterprises. But (also like many of us today) they had no particular idea of what to do about it. And they were easily inconsistent; much of Canto IV seems to honour old despotisms while pouring scorn on new ones. These contradictory feelings are apparent in the lines about Princess Charlotte. (They must have been a late addition to a poem whose first draft had been completed at the end of July.) 

171.5-6. till the o'erstrung Nations have armed in madness . Byron was writing this off the back of twenty-five years of war in western Europe. But it still feels quite apposite. 

171.8 blind omnipotence . Not literally omnipotence, but the staggering amount of power invested in a single person that ought, you might imagine, be insurance against disaster. And yet it isn't. One reason being that consciousness of great power seems to induce a more than usual absence of common sense, which is where the blindness comes in. 

172.3 great without a foe . Byron acknowledging that "greatness" tends to be attributed in circumstances of adversity and conflict. His poetry is looking around for a better way of conceiving greatness. 

172.4 But now a bride and mother—and now there ! . Charlotte had been married for a year and a half. She became a mother (to a stillborn son) just hours before she died. "There" is the "abyss" of stanza 167.

172.6 thy Sire . The Prince Regent, who would become George IV in 1820. Byron refers to Britons as "his" subjects because he was the acting monarch (George III having been permanently mad since 1810). 

172.7 electric chain . The phrase sounds a bit odd today, but metal chains were often used in early electricity experiments. See e.g. accounts of Galvani's contracting frog's legs, which Mary Shelley knew all about. But maybe Byron was thinking more of a human chain, like those in the Abbé Nollet's sensational demonstrations at Versailles (1746), where a hundred people holding hands received a near-simultaneous shock that made them leap into the air.
 
173.1 Nemi . The Lago di Nemi is a lake set in an ancient crater surrounded by woods. For near on a hundred stanzas we've been in Rome, but now the poem has leapt without warning into the countryside: the area known as the Alban Hills, about 20 miles to the SE. It was a well-established part of the Grand Tour: Addison wrote about it, e.g.:

In our Excursion to Albano we went as far as Nemi, that takes its Name from the Nemus Dianae. The whole Country thereabouts is still over-run with Woods and Thickets. The Lake of Nemi lyes in a very deep Bottom, so surrounded on all Sides with Mountains and Groves, that the Surface of it is never ruffled with the least Breath of Wind, which perhaps, together with the Clearness of its Waters, gave it formerly the Name of Diana's Looking-Glass.

Speculumque Dianae.
Virg.


173.7 calm as cherished hate . One of Byron's unexpected analogies, and a reminder that his poetry is usually thinking about several different things at once. The hate that Byron attracted in England, and cordially returned, though he tried not to, was a topic that came up earlier in this canto (e.g. stanzas 133-137). As for the beautiful lake, secure from the ocean buffeting that Byron so revelled in, it briefly takes on a sinister aspect: a cold heart, an enemy you can't touch. 

174.1 Albano . Another crater lake, very near to Nemi ("scarce divided"). This is not apparent when beside the lakes, only from above: a first hint of where Byron is standing. It's worth jumping on Google Maps at this point! 

174.3 Tiber . On the north-western horizon the course of the Tiber runs through Rome to the sea at Ostia.

174.4 The Latian coast . On the western horizon: a part of the Tyrrhenian coast that was the setting for much of the Aeneid, its first line quoted here. (Aeneas is the "Man" whose star, after the fall of Troy, eventually reascended when he established a new homeland, later to become an empire.)

174.6-7. but beneath thy right Tully reposed from Rome . There are various places which claim to be the site of a Ciceronian villa; Byron is talking about Grottaferrata. (There is no trace of a villa there, but the abbey might overlie it.) The word "but" marks the jump from Rome's distant origins to the time of Cicero ("Tully") and a Roman civilization so bustling you might want to get away from it sometimes. If Byron (and the reader) are looking directly at the Latian coast, then Grottaferrata is precisely "beneath thy right", about three miles away. 

174.9 The Sabine farm . The "weary bard" is Horace. Byron's farewell to Horace "whom I hated so" in stanza 77 proved premature; in fact the new satiric manner of Beppo and Don Juan brought Horace back into Byron's thoughts. His Sabine farm (or villa) was at Licenza, in the hills NE of Rome...  some 30 miles, as the crow flies, from the viewer's current location. (But Byron did go to Licenza (letter to John Murray, 4 June 1817).)

175.1  But I forget.—My pilgrim's shrine is won . Refers back to stanza 164, where the pilgrim's wanderings are said to be done. (This led to thoughts of fame, oblivion and death, hence the "abyss" which supplied a cue for Byron’s lines about Princess Charlotte.) The pilgrim, of course, is Childe Harold, the now-spectral figure who in Canto IV is only mentioned when being finally ushered from the scene. 

The idea of a poem ending with pilgrims reaching a shrine vaguely recalls The Canterbury Tales (at least in its putatively adjusted scheme). But where or what is this shrine that Childe Harold has "won" (i.e. arrived at)? I suppose Byron could mean St Peter's in Rome (stanzas 153-159). At a deeper level, Childe Harold's pilgrimage is over when the poet himself attains psychic congruence and no longer needs his doppelganger. 

175.4 Yet once more let us look upon the sea . Initiating the final movement of the poem, a celebration of the sea and of Byron swimming in its waves: "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!" (179). 

175.6 the Alban mount . After three stanzas of views Byron finally tells us where we're standing: on the summit of Monte Albano, more commonly called Monte Cavo, "the dominant peak of the Alban Hills" (Wikipedia). In the poem this exultant glimpse of a wider world springs forth without warning after a lengthy scrutiny of Rome and its antiquities. In reality, during his visit to Rome in April-May 1817 Byron took frequent rides out of the city, including to here (letter to John Murray, 9 May 1817 [PDF]).

The westward view from Monte Albano (Cavo). The crater lakes of Nemi (left) and Albano (right). In the distance, the "Latian coast" and the Mediterranean sea.


175.8 Calpe's rock . Not the Peñon d'Ifach at Calpe on the Costa Blanca, but an old name for the Rock of Gibraltar, past which Childe Harold is shown entering the Mediterranean in Canto II stanza 22. (But Byron himself only ever passed it in a westerly direction.)

175.9 dark Euxine . The Black Sea. The Greek name means "hospitable"; apparently an irony. 

176.1 Upon the blue Symplegades . The Symplegades were the clashing rocks negotiated by Jason; basically legendary, though subsequently identified with real rocky islets in the strait. They acquired the epithet "blue" in Latin literature (Cyaneae Insulae). Byron implies that they're now submerged. 
 

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Specimen of an annotated Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, based on just five of its 500 stanzas. (I've no intention of doing any more!)

A couple of months ago I was in Hastings Old Town and treated myself to a book, this slim pocket volume of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem I'd never read. 

Cassell's National Library was 209 volumes published weekly from 1886 to 1889. They were some of the earliest paperbacks, but were also published clothbound, like this one.

There are amusing adverts in the end-papers, but when we get to the poem the format is attractively uncluttered, about three stanzas on each page, and there are no notes. Even the first editions had Byron's own notes. 

Anyway, I found the attractive absence of notes stimulated me to do my own scraping about to understand Byron's many allusions. 

The extract I chose for my sample comes from near the end of the elongated final Canto (IV), at a point where the reader who has dutifully gone through the whole poem may well be struggling to concentrate (which was definitely my own experience). It felt good to put these easily overlooked lines in the spotlight, even if I was the only person in the audience. 

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No need to introduce Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Peter Cochran's lively editions are available as PDFs -- my grateful debts will be apparent.

Cantos I and II (1812):


Canto III (1816):


Canto IV (1818):





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roll on thou grate and restless ocean roll over the LOT", says molesworth in Whizz for Atomms (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, 1956). Our schoolboy hero perceives that Childe Harold's jejune nihilism continues to underlie Byron's celebration of the sea, and he eagerly adopts it for young Elizabethans of the atomic age. (But he dispenses with the Mediterranean dark blue; this "ocean" sounds more like the sea on a grey day in Margate.) 





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On Byron's The Corsair (1814):
On Byron's Manfred (1817):

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Saturday, August 03, 2024

More family history...birth stories





As mostly recounted by my Dad, probably with some legendary colouring. 

They were married at Sköns kyrka, a little bit north of Sundsvall (on the mainland opposite Alnö).

My mum's mum (Sigrid) was worried that Dad would faint at the altar for lack of sustenance. That morning she cooked him a plate of his favourite food, macaroni cheese. 

After their teetotal wedding reception, they set off on honeymoon (a lake stuga at Österström, near Liden). My dad managed to smuggle a bottle of wine onto the bus. When they got there, they found they weren't the only drinkers. Sounds of revelry surrounded an illegal still. My dad says there was someone playing the musical saw, too.

A year later (1958) I was born. My mum was in the hospital in Eastbourne. Dad, rather anxious, rang and asked if he could visit. "Husband? Certainly not! Stay out of it, none of your business," he was told. He saw me for the first time when I was presentable. 

Annika came along four years later. 

When mum's waters broke, they were in the middle of entertaining a male visitor who didn't know much about babies (not being "that way inclined", my Dad remarked). "Mightn't I just have one more cup of tea?" he inquired as they rushed about, getting everything together for the dash to Oakham hospital (in Rutland).

We were living in rural Leicestershire. Mutti (my dad's mum) had travelled up from Eastbourne to look after me. 

The hospital was short-staffed. Dad was instructed to wait with Mum and only to call for assistance when the baby was actually coming. 

After a couple of false alarms (for which he was told off) the baby really was coming. Now a nurse took his place, while he sat and waited behind a screen. Afterwards the nurse was ecstatic. "I've never delivered a baby before!" she told him. She had been drafted in from a nearby hospital that didn't have a maternity unit. 

It was at Oakham, too, that Mum unwontedly lost her temper. In those days newborns were looked after separately to allow mums to get some rest. But Mum could hear Annika crying and wanted her. The staff resisted until Mum threatened to get up and fetch her baby herself. Annika was very hungry. For some reason she had not been absorbing food properly in the womb. 

On the whole Annika is considered to have survived by the skin of her teeth! 

I remember when I first saw her, a red little bundle in the gloom of the Morris Oxford when we came to bring them home. 

Fifteen years later, when Mir was born, things had changed.  Fathers were now expected to be present and to hold their partner's hand during the birth. So Dad was there with Mum, but after a while with nothing much happening the nurse said that he might as well go and get a cup of coffee, because it's going to be hours yet. 

He set off dutifully to the restaurant. When he came back, Mir had already been born. "She took me by surprise!" the nurse remarked. 

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