polvo indescifrabile

Invisible plot twists...

2010-03-16T13:35:00.001Z

Last night I read Stefan Zweig’s short story, ‘The Invisible Collection’, prompted in part by the mini ‘Zweig Controversy’ that seems to have broken out in the wake of Michael Hofmann’s splendidly vituperous attack a couple of months ago in the London Review of Books. There’s a pretty lazy article by Nicholas Lezard on the Guardian referring to this and pretending to make some sort of rather watery rebuttal of Hofmann’s argument (why are the Guardian's 'culture' pages so consistently shoddy?). I haven’t read enough Zweig to lean either way. Reading ‘The Invisible Collection’, though, I had the sense that there was a particular twist in the plot missing, and that as a result of its absence the story fell flat.

Subtitled ‘An Episode of the Inflation Period in Germany’, the story is framed by an encounter on a train, and recounts how a dealer in art and antiques journeys into the countryside of Saxony to visit a former customer, a collector of old prints, in the hope of purchasing from him some wares for his near-empty shop. Upon the dealer’s arrival, the old man, who is now blind, offers to show the dealer his wonderful collection, flattered by his interest. The old man’s wife, however, extremely flustered, intervenes, suggesting that the dealer may have other engagements and should come back after lunch. The dealer, picking up something of the intent of her piteous glances, agrees. While he is in the dining room of his hotel, the couple’s elderly daughter comes to him and explains that the family have had to sell the old man’s prints one by one in order to feed both him and themselves, substituting them, each time, with sheets of cartridge paper of equivalent size and weight. This they have done so that when, as is his wont, he pulls out the folders and runs his fingers over the prints, recalling their clarity and beauty, he will not realize that his beloved collection is dispersed. On her mother’s behalf, the daughter begs the dealer to go along with the deception. This he agrees to do, and, when he returns to their simple dwelling in the afternoon, he seconds the old man’s praise of prints by Dürer and Rembrandt on what are in fact blank sheets of paper. The deception goes off without a hitch, the old man drinks up the dealer’s words of praise for his collection, and the old women are delighted to see him in a state of near-ecstasy. The dealer leaves as, in his own words, ‘a sort of angel of good-luck, lying like a trooper in order to assist in a fraud which kept the old man happy’ (35). And so the story ends, with the dealer setting out for home and old man wishing him on his way in reinvigorated tones.

The twist I was expecting which never came was that of the old man having been fully aware of the deception being practiced upon him from the start, but going along with it for the sake of his family and their desire not to cause him pain. There is nothing in the story that explicitly makes such an interpretation impossible, although it’s a reading that has no support in the text - it is undoubtedly an ‘improper’ reading, even an ‘inadmissable’ one, yet now that it has once come into my head, I find it impossible to let go of the conviction that the cheerful face with which the old man sees the dealer in art and antiques on his way is a mask, perhaps concealing a truer joy at having successfully gone along with a deception that keeps his family happy in their conviction of not having shattered a happiness of his own.

As for what is to be done with such idiosyncratic readings, and what in this case it means for the/my evaluation of Zweig, I’ve not much of an idea. On the one hand, my perverse reading seems to point to a coming short in the tale, but on the other, the tale itself suggested it. I’m not sure this is what Simon Jarvis means when he says the following, but Jarvis’s essay on ‘Prosody as Cognition’, from which this is taken, is so interesting that I’m happy to crowbar it in anyhow. Jarvis is interested in ‘a rethinking of the place of idiosyncrasy in the experience of poetry’:

the truth about such experience cannot be reached by trimming off what are thought of as the merely private extras. This kind of route to supposed objectivity starts with some individual shudder of experience – as when the thought that I should have been a pair of ragged claws | Scuttling across the floor of silent seas flits half-noticed across the cerebral cortex of one participating in some grim festival of functions – and then deletes the contingent, the accidental, or the merely personal. It thus deletes, in the event, everything about that experience which makes it an experience: in bracketing out the festival of functions, the functions themselves, and whatever else in the moment should be thought to pertain only to this single point in space-time, it presents a mutilated rump known as ‘the effect of the metre upon the reader’. Here is the experience ‘the’ ‘reader’ as mechanical doll, in which the range of experiences which readers historically have had, are having, and might have, much know themselves for their own silly and quite private idiocies, and so must measure their lack against this timeless, placeless zombie.

More on Jarvis’s line of thought here to follow soon, probably…

adymatonics...

2010-03-10T18:18:00.000Z

Jerome McGann has written admiringly of Kathy Acker’s argument that ‘The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless’, identifying it as a less polite version of Laura Riding’s representatively modernist lapse of faith in poetry as art. ‘Adequate’, as he points out, reaches right back to Matthew Arnold’s inaugural lecture in the Poetry Chair at Oxford (1857), throughout which forms of the word ‘adequate’ recur. There it defines the determinate characteristic for Arnold of ‘the Modern Element in Literature’: ‘adequacy, and the “intellectual deliverance” it is supposed to bring’ (McGann 2009: 131). Both Riding and Acker (from positions, as it were, respectively above and below normative cultural institutions) judge the demand for an adequate mode of expression to be problematic ab initio. So far, so good. But the notion that this is something new and revolutionary seems to me extremely dubious. It’s there implicitly in Petrarchan poetry, to name just one place. It is perhaps most evident in the use of adynaton, the rhetorical figure which draws attention to the failure of expression in order to express strong emotion. As Huw Griffiths notes, in the England of Elizabeth’s ‘second reign’, one of the genres that makes habitual use of adynaton is lyric verse, and in particular Petrarchan poetry. Griffiths cites a witty example from the third book of Sidney’s Old Arcadia. This opens, bawdily enough:

What tongue can her perfections tell
In whose each part all pens may dwell?

before proceeding over 140 lines to give an extended, comprehensive blazon of every ‘part’ of the woman’s beauty, concluding

As I began, so must I end:
No tongue can her perfections tell,
In whose each part all pens may dwell

Griffiths argues that Sidney’s use of adynaton here serves to comment ironically on the inadequacies of language and the impoverishment of the Petrarchan tradition, claiming more broadly that as a rhetorical figure it can offer the reader a critique of the language being used, exploring its limitations. Its users can deploy it to indicate their scepticism about their own rhetorical strategies. Adynaton clearly has relatively localized rhetorical uses, but in Petrarch, the best Petrarchists - and perhaps, sticking my neck out, implicitly wherever it is used – it points to the ultimate incommensurability of language with the real. Of course, it remains to be shown that this is so, and I’m still not sure that pushing together these two fragments from my recent reading for teaching and for the thesis respectively isn’t wholly missing the/a point. Ah well, if nothing else I’ve added to my shamefully limited lexicon of rhetorical terms.

Leftovers...

2010-03-09T17:30:00.000Z

This is something I started to write for the blog last year, and abandoned. Perhaps rightly.

...

I’ve been trying to snatch moments between coaxing the thesis along and working on the journal to read up more on Cezanne. Our deadline for submissions for the next issue having just passed, bringing with it a rush of tasks, this hasn’t been easy, especially when combined with making urgent decisions about moving or not moving house. I have at least worked out what I want to read when I can, though. More so than Courtauld’s (see blog entries below) the true modernist encounter with Cezanne (leaving aside actual painters, of course) was perhaps that of Rilke. As for Courtauld (and for me, nel mio piccolo), Cezanne’s art seems to have revealed itself to Rilke in a kind of epiphany, only after he had already been grappling with it for some time. When that moment came, Rilke believed himself able at last to see Cezanne's paintings because, as he put it, “I had just reached it [the turning point] in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready for a long time, for the one thing which so much depends upon”. For Rilke, Cezanne was starting afresh from the bottom up, clearing away the sentimental stylisations of the visible that clogged so much contemporary art. There is an interesting, more detailed discussion of Rilke’s engagement with Cezanne by Michael Heller, here.

Cezanne's favourite poem was Baudelaire's ‘La charogne’ (‘Carrion’), where dead flesh is made beautiful. Rilke dwells on this in one of his letters.

Here are the first three stanzas of Baudelaire’s poem:

Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint

And here’s Roy Campbell’s translation of those stanzas:

The object that we saw, let us recall,
This summer morn when warmth and beauty mingle —
At the path's turn, a carcase lay asprawl
Upon a bed of shingle.

Legs raised, like some old whore far-gone in passion,
The burning, deadly, poison-sweating mass
Opened its paunch in careless, cynic fashion,
Ballooned with evil gas.

On this putrescence the sun blazed in gold,
Cooking it to a turn with eager care —
So to repay to Nature, hundredfold,
What she had mingled there.

There have been at least four translations into English of this poem (you can see them here) and

probably many more. Of the four I looked at, Roy Campbell’s was the only one I could go for once I got to line five. The other translations of “Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique” are “Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman” (William Aggeler); “Its legs raised like a whore's in lubric play” (Jacques LeClercq); and “Legs in the air, like a lascivious woman” (Geoffrey Wagner). The first is hopelessly colourless, and the third is similarly anaemic and lacking in any emulation of the rhythmic thrust of the original. The second is better. Does ‘lubric’ sound overly medical-scientific? Would ‘lubricious’ be better, and has he gone for lubric to keep meter? Reading it again, perhaps I’m being unfair – maybe ‘lubric’ works well precisely because of the coupling of its vicinity to ‘ludic’ with its coldblooded gynaecological feel. But what I really like about Campbell’s, and what the others throw into relief, is how the very fall of the line contains and communicates an excess of wearied comprehension that cannot overwrite physical shock. This is prosody as cognition: the shorter, obscenely jutting phrase before the comma, then the drawn-out, far-gone after, stretching the line out to a hendecasyllable. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

I know how hard this is to get right – I had to go back and look at my own translation of Elsa Morante’s poetry the other day, and it is painfully poor, full of moments as bad as any of these, and others far worse: I really repent of having let myself be persuaded into going ahead with publishing it before I was happy with it, or even properly knew why we were doing so. That said, the decision was entirely my own – I don’t want to give the impression I was bounced into anything. But even back then, though I knew it wasn’t ready, I wasn’t aware of how clunking it was: and on the other hand it’s probably true that I might never have let it be published at all if not then. And different kinds of translation serve different purposes: I suppose the LeClercq translation of ‘La charogne’ might perhaps be best for someone such as myself, with extremely dubious French, trying to grapple with the original. But as a poem in English that also gives you something of an idea of how the French might be, the Campbell stands out. It’s the only one that sounds remotely English. The Morante translation I think now, is not really a translation at all; at best it’s a useful crib for the reader with shaky Italian.

on the flyleaves of inexistent tomes

2010-03-02T21:20:00.000Z

Following on from my last entry, a couple of people have suggested their dream books, to sit on the shelf alongside Baxandall's On Memory: Tottel's Miscellany and G. K. Chesterton's introductory guide to Lacan. And then I thought of Ken Cockburn's poem 'On the Flyleaf of Jack Kerouac's Kidnapped', which imagines Kerouac in Scotland with Norman MacCaig:

Kerouac took to the Rose Street scene
like a duck to water, except water
was the last thing on anybody's mind.

But he quickly tired of the confines of 'Auld Reekie'.

It was MacCaig who opened him up to the mountains
on those legendary drives to the far north-west
on endless late-June nights [...]

A note to the poem refers the reader to Thomas A. Clark's 'The University of Pittenweem, Library of Scottish Culture', in Alec Finlay's The Libraries of Thought & Imagination. I'm going to look this up at the library in the next few days (if this stinking cold eases up). But wherever the idea comes from, the poem's presence in a collection of poems all written (so their titles assure us) 'on the flyleaf' of real books, such as Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parma or a monograph on Yves Klein, throws those works too into a shimmering fictional - or at least factitious - realm.

Anyway, if anyone else has good made-up tomes of either sort (that is, books never written by real authors, or 'what-ifs' combining authors and titles along the lines of Cockburn's poem/Clark's library) I'd love to hear them - if I get enough I'll try to put them together in a post (all attributed, of course!).

A Declaration of Intent, and lines from Chartres/Dunfermline

2010-02-27T22:14:00.001Z

I hereby declare this blog open for business again. Perhaps having an even more ludicrous amount to do (by my own procrastinatory, layabout standards, anyway) will actually get me writing here again. I had a few posts drafted and ready to go when I drifted into silence after that crashing victory for Spurs at Wigan, but was never quite happy with them, so held back. The anxiety of publishing, and a rabid, doomed perfectionism (doomed given my lethargic nature) - just what I started this blog to get over. So, nothing much for this post, but more, I hope, to come.

And in fact, so as not to begin again with a complete lack of anything remotely stimulating, a few lines read a few days ago in Dunfermline, with snow driving horizontally outside and my anvil eyelids propped up:

I went to Chartres for windows: angled my neck

to the stained light.

You did your cathedral thing: merged with the oak pew;

Lowered your lids over eyes as blue as the glass.

They stood out enough then for me to jot them down, but now seem like nothing special, banal even. But perhaps putting them up here again I'll see it again, if not now then later; or perhaps someone elsewe'll see something in them. They're by Dorothy Molloy, from a poem called 'Chacun à son goût' - they might even be the whole poem, now I can't remember, and the book was my father's, a Bloodaxe (?) anthology of new Irish poets, so right now I can't check.

If there's anything worth saying here (and I doubt there is, or at least that I'm saying it) it's how little time we tend to spend thinking - or at least writing - about this kind of reading experience, the text that seizes us at a particular moment, that assumes a luminosity as we drop into sleep that seems quite gone when we awake.

That reminds me of something else. The other night, in a particularly fevered state of anxiety over the thesis (although nothing like pre-Berlin days) I dreamed a whole library shelf of phantasmagorical titles of books I must look up and read. When I woke up I could only remember one: Michael Baxandall, On Memory: Tottel's Miscellany. If only it existed. And then, a day or so later, I had the urge to call my thesis something like Sonnet Sequences and Aesthetic Distinction, as a sort of antagonistic homage to Christopher Warley's Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction. He has a great piece on his blog, which takes Italian email addresses (specifically the '@', the chiocciola, or snail) as its slithering-off point - although it's perhaps not ideal reading for a timid blogger tentatively sticking his antlers back out into the pseudo-public blogosphere for the first time in months. Still, his idea of a slog - a slow-reading blog - is one I like. And I like too what he says about what English professors are for. I'm extrapolating from that to what GTAs - in what ought to be the final throes of writing-up - are for, too.

Hull 1 - 5 Tottenham Hotspurs

2009-08-21T22:01:00.000+01:00

Philip Larkin! David Whitfield! John Prescott! Maureen Lipman! Andrew Marvell! Can you hear me, Andy Marvell! Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!

Defoe (10, 45, 90+4)

Palacios (14)

Keane (78)

(I know almost no one likely to read this will appreciate it, but just couldn't help myself....)

L'Etang des Soeurs Osny

2009-08-07T23:17:00.001+01:00

Visiting the Coutauld Gallery over the weekend (a couple of weekends ago now - this should have gone up before) I 'got' Cezanne, or felt like I did, for the first time. Cezanne, for me, has always had an aura about him as the philosopher's artist (specifically, Merleau-Ponty's). As a philosophy undergraduate who knew only this, but couldn't get any visceral purchase on his work, even after reading Merleau-Ponty's essay 'Cezanne's Doubt', I always felt intimidated by it, and this probably obscured it from me even further. The short, grouped, sloping brush strokes in a lot of the paintings didn't cohere, yet at the same time were too solid, not gesticulatory enough to leave the eye free to impart movement to the images, as paintings by other impressionists and post-impressionists did. I was so frustrated by my sense of wholly missing something, and something important, that I nearly chose to write my undergraduate thesis on M-P and Cezanne, in order to get at what it was I wasn't getting. Walking into the second room of the Courtauld, though, not yet really properly tuned in to looking at pictures, this one grabbed hold of me before I'd had a chance to think about it.

The painting shows a view of a footpath running along the banks of a wooded pond, and was painted while Cezanne was visiting Pissarro in Osny. This reproduction inevitably doesn't do the painting justice, but what is especially muddied is the deep glittering clarity of the water, and the weight of the shadows in the foreground, which give the painting much more of a layered property than is clear here. The depth - as I wandered into the room, I dropped into the painting's planes, and didn't want to clamber out. Now I shall have to go back and read Merleau-Ponty again. I know that probably nothing I've written here suggests that I've 'got' Cezanne at all: it would be better to say that a Cezanne got me.

The Courtauld is my favourite gallery in London, despite its being next door to King's. Samuel Courtauld played a vital role in the reception of Cezanne in Britain. Cezanne was controversial in England in the 1920s. In May 1922 the Burlington Fine Arts Club mounted an exhibition, 'The French School of the Last Hundred Years', which brought about a significant change in attitudes towards the post-impressionists, and Cezanne in particular. It was here, apparently, that Courtauld was 'converted' to Cezanne's art, describing how 'at that moment I felt the magic, and I have felt it in Cezanne's work ever since'. It was uncanny reading of Courtauld's conversion just after experiencing my own. Another modernist encounter (Courtauld's, not mine), perhaps not quite up there with Eliot's poking at people with his umbrella during the premier of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, but still telling.

Much much more to be said on this, and much better, but as ever, the thesis calls.

The Man Without a Thesis

2009-07-29T21:37:00.001+01:00

"And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps never before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting [...] a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head remained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as if in a very transparent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy - but the connection between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sitting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like snow evaporating as it falls. He didn't know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experiences he had learned to stop dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to skip, and passed away like a troubled half-sleep.

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and

movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him with anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown."

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Mapping the thesis

2009-07-24T19:56:00.000+01:00

The storms continue... sporadic torrential rain in Edinburgh, with dirty brown rivers flowing down the New Town streets and riding up onto the pavements every time they meet the wheel of a parked car. No time to blog today - thesis calls. So here's a wordshot of said thesis to date (sorry for the size of the image, I don't seem to be able to make it any bigger):

No great surprises, I think, except perhaps Cambridge, which must be in there because I included the bibliography. Maybe I need to use more synonyms for 'however', 'might' and 'also', and I certainly use 'rather' rather too much.

No work, poems, and St Pancras

2009-07-21T19:25:00.000+01:00

A day of very little satisfactory work. Changeable weather - from not-quite-raining to raining to pouring to drizzling to showers to about-to-rain, while all the while really wanting to storm - has left me feeling restless. I have, however, had my hair cut and bought some second-hand books: an old English-Italian dictionary (I've needed a replacement for my Collins for ages); The New Poetry, A. Alvarez's 1962 anthology; The Best of Betjeman, an anthology of his poetry and prose edited by John Guest; and Penguin Modern Poets 8, which anthologizes Edwin Brock (of whom I know nothing), Geoffrey Hill and Stevie Smith. I like the fact that the Penguin gives absolutely no biographical details about the poets whatsoever, just their poems. Opening it more or less at random, these lines, from Brock's 'Turn the Key Deftly' found me:

Side by side under kind covers we try
to push the heavy years away, resurrecting
for a moment an afternoon beside a pond.
Yet, sophisticated, prefer to joke,
allowing sleep to do our dreaming for us.

I suppose the obvious parallel is with Larkin. As with Larkin, Brock's documenting of a refusal to dream shows the dreaming going on regardless. The melancholy doesn't quite overcome the sense of possibility, which, of course, remaining unrealized, itself intensifies that melancholy.

I enjoyed Betjeman's strange, small poem 'Dorset', too, perhaps largely for the incantatory repetition of familiar place names:

Lord's Day bells from Bingham's Melcombe, Iwerne Minster, Shroton, Plush,
Down the grass between the beeches, mellow in the evening hush.
Gloved hands that hold the hymn-bok, which this morning milked the cow -
While Tranter Reuben, Mary Borden, Brian Howard and Harold Acton lie in
Mellstock Churchyard now.

Elsewhere it's "T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells and Edith Sitwell" who are in the churchyard. A note at the end of the poem reads: "The names on the last lines of these stanzas are put in not out of malice or satire but merely for their euphony". Hmmm.

Betjeman's essay on St Pancras is also included. It describes the clearing of the very large and very crowded burial ground of old St Pancras in order that the Midland Railway's line might come into London. When the work started, Betjeman tells us, 'skulls and bones were seen lying about; a passer-by saw an open coffin staved in through which peeped a bright tress of hair'. The scandal forced the company to arrange for reverent reburial. The architect in charge sent one of his assistants, one Thomas Hardy, to supervise the carrying away of the dead. Hardy never forgot the event, and wrote 'The Levelled Churchyard' and 'In the Cemetery' out of the experience:

O Passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!

We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
"I know not which I am!"

I'll remember that "human jam", and hear it, the next time I'm pulling in to London.

St Pancras now - or at least the last time I saw it - is in the process of being transformed into a luxury hotel and penthouse flats that are selling for several millions each. Writing of the original building of the hotel, Betjeman observes that 'It could be a fine hotel again'. I wonder if it will be. At the close of his essay, Betjeman laments how 'the now old-fashioned with-itry of the fifties, which has given us the slabs and cubes of high finance, and ruined most of London, has made St Pancras all the more important to us for the relief it brings'. Looking at it in its spruced-up state will perhaps still bring relief, but that relief will be tempered by the knowledge that I am unlikely to ever be able to afford to explore it again.

When I was living in London in the late nineties, I went to a kind of art and design fair held inside the old hotel building - I can't remember who organized it, but it was probably Masters students from the RCA. This must have been around the same time the Spice Girls

made a video there. I remember exploring its grandiose but beautifully proportioned staircase and exploring dusty corners, rooms that gave off rooms with trailing cables, peeling murals and old-fashioned light switches. It was a glimpse into what St Pancras might have become - a space anyone could freely enter, part of London's - and Londoners' - patrimony. Visiting Tacheles, the squat in Berlin, reminded me of that trip to St Pancras - how great it might have been if the hotel had become London's version of the Berlin squats. Given that I was, technically, squatting at the time (in Vauxhall), perhaps I should have tried it.

Betjeman's essay closes with something a former Station Master said to him: it is a magnificent building, yes, and he was fond of it; and 'moreover it works'. Hopefully that's true of the station in its new guise, too. It's only a shame it isn't also true of the trains.

The storm that has been brewing all day has just broken. Dayadhvam!

Academic Nodding

2009-07-21T01:21:00.000+01:00

You know what I mean. Just don't. Please. I suppose the academic nod by the senior professor to encourage the postgrad giving their first paper can just about be understood, but it's patronizing as hell.

But maybe I'm wrong to get so wound up about academic conference nodding. According to some research, nodding is about 'self-validation'. Says Prof.Richard Petty, “If we are nodding our heads up and down, we gain confidence in what we are thinking. But when we shake our heads from side to side, we lose confidence in our own thoughts...nodding your head up and down is, in effect, telling yourself that you have confidence in your own thoughts – whether those thoughts are positive or negative.” So are all the academic nodders trying to persuade themselves that they do indeed think what they think they're thinking? Are the worst academic nodders those least sure of their own ideas, or most afraid of not being sure about their ideas? Are they not, actually, expressing their agreement with the speaker, or, as they often seem to be doing, signalling to everyone that, of course, they already know everything the speaker is saying, and rather better than the speaker evidently does him/herself?

So, maybe the nodding serves a purpose. It still makes me want to strangle people, though.

Something old....

2009-07-19T02:19:00.000+01:00

Pupils of black milk, whites tinged with the blue blur one finds on white bread as it turns. In this city of cavernous, volcanic, knife-snapping loaves one can live off for a fortnight, Paul somehow always manages to find a pair of fragile sweet stomach-white batons. He and Sarah eat them with anemic saltless butter and apricot jam in the mornings. By the evening what remains has begun to separate into a hoarse crust and a milky pap. After a hot night left out on the kitchen table a weak indigo fuzz spreads over the pappy bits. Every few weeks, when we decide to clean, one of us invariably finds under the piles of newspapers, flyers and burnt-out candles a rotting end wrapped up in brown paper. I’ve never asked Paul where he buys his bread. I prefer the hunks of pane cafone hacked off for me with a two-foot-long knife at the store at the end of the vicolo, or the warm crusty triangles the lean man with a son in Spain pulls out from the passenger’s seat of his van for me on Sunday mornings. The latter taste of wet dog, but I don’t mind. At least they taste of something. In a city of so many elementary culinary splendours, the bread here baffles.

A head of fire waiting to break out. You please me much, I can’t be with you. It is better that we don’t see each other. How can I make you understand that it is better for us not to see each other? You must cancel my number. You must not call me, you must send me no more messages. I have been with him for two months. I think I may be coming to love him. I don’t want to think of you when I am making love to him. If you won’t cancel my number, I will buy a new card for my telephone, I will change my number. I will go now and buy it. Please do this for me, for my sake. It is only your fixation, I am only a fixation for you. I am a pessimal fiancée. I am pigheaded, you are pigheaded, it would be impossible. I will not see you. I have decided, I’ve decided already. I’m capricious. That she retracted when I pressed her for examples, that old trick young men soon learn from women. I asked her what she wanted, not from me, not from him. To be loved. Without guile, and looking at me. I could see the rim of violet where her contact lens overlapped the iris.

Paul and I stand on opposite sides of the toilet bowl, each drinking and pissing at the same time. A philosophical experiment, one hand tilting back the bottle, the other pulling back on the foreskin slightly to avoid splashing. Paul got the idea from some book in America. Our bathroom’s long and brown as the era in which it was installed, the huge bulbous brown bidet doesn’t work, the big blue plastic tub that once held cement mix, left behind by the builder-plumber, still stands in it. The smudged ash of his cigarette is still there on the bidet rim. Still pissing a saltire, two crossing streams that don’t touch, both watery, mine slightly the yellower. Somewhere in the palazzo there is music, a sentimental falsetto Neapolitan wail which calls us back to the nearer music left on in the hall, something Yiddish. The cockroaches that inhabited the bathroom a few months ago when we moved in have been replaced by tiny ants that seem rather purposeless for their species. We christened each cockroach “Caravaggio,” a mishearing of the Italian that fitted their gleaming black carapaces and made alluding to their presence in the company of delicate sensibilities much easier.

Sarah has gone back to Paris for a week, and suddenly Paul has exploded into life. He spent yesterday befriending the vicolo, and I am invited along with him to visit the mosque with Mohamud. Mohamud lives halfway down the vicolo with five other Algerian men in a one-room basso. We go to call on him in the morning, his is the first door after the little shrine to the virgin encrusted with seashells and photographs of dead relatives. Paul eases open one of the grubby white plastic slats over the window and calls for Mohamud. An indistinct murmur, as of woken sleepers, comes from inside. After a few minutes two men appear in loose crumpled clothes and sandals. We greet them, Paul introduces me, we all exchange warm pleasantries in French, Neapolitan and Italian, and they head off, shambling down to Forcella. After a little longer Mohamud emerges, linking. More introductions, and we set off. Mostly he speaks in French to Paul, but also a free-running burble of Italian and Neapolitan, French and English with me. He explains that there are two mosques in Naples, the one we are going to near Piazza del Mercato, and another near the main railway terminus in Piazza Garibaldi. Paul has already told me of the obsession of one of the other Algerians with Jaques Cousteau, who discovered a part of the ocean where salt- and freshwater meet but do not mix. On learning that the Koran spoke of this, Mohamud now tells me, Cousteau was converted to Islam. I had no idea that Cousteau was Muslim.

From afar I caught the flare of her hair, moving past Garibaldi, blue bag as ever on her lowslung hip convincing me it was her. Garibaldi indifferent, moustaches heavy over the heavy moustaches of the Albanians and Algerians sprawled in vacant anticipation on his monumental pedestal. I moved after, knowing already where she was going, timing my arrival between the trams and buses, and caught her before her blue pullman. Her eyes and mouth showed simple gladness, and I wanted a more tortured fear at my presence.

well, it won me £60 when I needed it....

Gauche lines from Berlin...

2009-07-19T01:43:00.000+01:00

...but I was very happy writing them, so I do not mind that they are not good.

Sitting on the balcony
Torstrasse 167
Legs in the sun
Peonies, basil, and red heather in the window boxes
Fronds on the bamboo trellis soaking up the sun
Swigging water from a plastic bottle
Wondering if my feet are burning
(Thankful that, at least, the soles, now, aren't,
After nearly a week of traipsing Berlin, East and West,
North and South, in high humidity
In heavy brogue boots

Bought with Alessia in Florence,
Boots supple and forgiving as clogs.)
Drinking and drinking
to ward off a hangover
the clear clean beer of Berlin
probably wouldn't bring
anyway.

Traffic and works and low chatter
come up through the boulevard trees.

This building, with its carved cracked windowframes
elegantly decorative -
its somnolent portals of black wood
and high-ceilinged bulky mass
survived my ancestors somehow
and now,
small five-petalled white flowers
delicate as my nephew's hands
grow here, lovingly, casually tended
as, perhaps, do I
if with less knowledge.

It is clouding over,
But the heat remains. Berlin is on my skin,
Its claggy promise clinging.

A bronzed fly alights upon the hairs of my leg
And rubs its hands, hoovers the skin for filth
Jumpjets, hovers, alights again. Life tickling me,
Taking me for a turd. The clouds thicken from white
to bruised grey. Soon will come the thunder. Ya.

Sparrow city, sweet-tongued, smiling and free.

With Britain, my thoughts wither.
But here the leaves have a rained-on look before the storm,
A bee comes, bumbling from glowing flower to glowing flower,
My water bottle is almost empty,
Two litres nearly drunk,
the unformed hangover, like the gathered clouds,
dissipating.
Tones of blue --
violent celebration
and the purpling velvet of petals.
Even - tender exaggeration of the city, pushing me into cliche -
a cream-finned butterfly visits, briefly,
the yellow flowers, then takes off, dancing to the sparrowed trees
and then away.

This is my home
nor am I out of it, however absurd that sounds
and however much I had to drink last night.
This is my holy day
sitting surrounded by flowers I cannot name.

Indecipherable dust

2009-07-19T01:25:00.001+01:00

I suppose, by way of partial explanation (and to remind me to learn Spanish) this should go up here:

El espejo que no repite a nadie

cuando la casa se ha quedado sola.

Las limaduras de uña que dejamos

a lo largo del tiempo y del espacio.

El polvo indescifrabile que fue Shakespeare.

* * *

The mirror which shows nobody's reflection

after the house has long been left alone.

Fingernail filings which we leave behind

across the long expanse of time and space.

The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.

from 'Cosas', Jorge Luis Borges

Dentro il Palazzo Fuga

2009-07-18T23:52:00.000+01:00

How do you begin a blog? I don't know, and all those I've checked seem to have been going so long as to have never begun at all. So, I shall jump straight in.

I am reading Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Auberge des Pauvres - that is, I am reading L'Albergo dei Poveri, the Italian translation, which Serena gave me months ago when she came to stay, and which I have finally got around to tackling. I'm about half-way through. The story is narrated by Bidun ('senza', or 'without'), a Moroccan professor of Comparative Literature and minor writer, who comes to Naples on a creative writing grant to write a book about the city, and to find the Italian woman with whom he has been in correspondence. At the Albergo dei Poveri, the enormous, delapidated, almost abandoned almshouse on via Foria, he encounters 'la Vecchia,' an old bag lady and collector of stories who lives within.

As the title suggests, the Albergo is itself an important 'character'. Built by Charles III to house his poorest subjects, it is one of the largest eighteenth-century structures in Europe, and, until its recent makeover, sat in the middle of Naples like a 'transatlantico arrugginito', a rusted transatlantic liner. Within the novel it is described as "l'asilo dei Rifiuti", the asylum of the discarded, "il rifugio della grande solitudine", the sanctuary of grand solitude, and, perhaps above all, "l'Albergo degli Amori straziati", the hotel of broken loves. It is "l'Albergo dei Naufraghi dell'Amore, o se vuoi dei Naufraghi della vita", the hotel of love's shipwrecks, or, if you prefer, of the shipwrecks of life. The tales told within are all tales of broken love, and of an accompanying fragmentation of the sense of self that is at the same time its assertion of wholeness.

The book hasn't yet been translated into English, so far as I can gather. The edition I have, which is published by Pironti, prefaces the novel with eight pages of black and white photographs of Naples. The photos are good enough in themselves, if rather predictably evocative of the sinister Baroque Napoli of old women in catacombs tending the skulls of adopted strangers. Their connection to the novel, though (and bear in mind I'm only half-way through, so who knows) seems tangential at the very best. The back cover declares that the novel was born 'almost by chance' at the table of a Neapolitan restaurant during a conversation between the author and the editor, who offered to put him up during his stay in the city. We're left to infer from the book's existence that Ben Jelloun took advantage of this invitation. Luciano Ferrara, the photographer, acted as the author's guide, which would explain the photographs' presence here.

On his official website, however, Ben Jelloun describes this edition so:

Pironti, a former boxer turned editor, gets hold of the French edition, has it translated and publishes the novel without a contract. A few months later, the book is published by my regular publisher Einaudi. A lawsuit for piracy follows. Pironti counter-sues for defamation, as I have called him “a thief and a pirate”. Rift with my friend and translator Egi Volterrani, who deceived me and was responsible for my problems with Pironti.

It sounds like there's a whole novel there. Volterrani is the translator of the Einaudi edition - the Pironti translation is by Filomena Vitale. If the National Library catalogue ever comes online again I'll see if I can get hold of the Volterrani and compare the two. This row over the translation I'm reading - and, probably, the fact that Pironti is based in Naples (at Port' Alba,

scene of the one attempted mugging I managed to foil) - makes me wonder if it isn't simply a pezzotto knock-off job. But then Ben Jelloun's snobby little reference to Pironti being an ex-boxer (so what?) irritates me too, and his website certainly suggests he might be a difficult character.

The impression I have from the Vitale is that Ben Jelloun has a clean, almost purposefully naïve prose style, which lets the stories take centre-stage. (I've no idea whether it would be correct usage to do so, but in Italian I'd be tempted to describe it as liscio). I've just been reading about the reaction in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries against florid Ciceronian prose styles, in favour of a Senecan simplicity - there's probably no properly legitimate parallel to make, but both in style and structure L'Albergo feels a refreshing antidote to some of the more ostentatiously postmodern metafictional stuff I've read of late - much of which I've liked too (Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London kept popping into my head as I read this, although for no good reason that I've yet managed to pin down). L'Albergo has all that metafictional stuff going on - it is about a writer, after all - but doesn't smell of the schools (Jonson's {unfair} bash at Drummond's verse).

Again, to ramrod my academic work in here, Morris Croll makes a distinction between two kinds of brevity that emerge as part of the Senecan, neo-Stoic reaction against Ciceronian embellishment: the curt, and the loose. I still need to get to grips properly with this distinction myself - I couldn't get hold of Croll's essay today, so this is a third-hand version at the moment - but what I understand is that the curt aims at transparency, letting the thing or thought stand clear from the texture of the prose, and finding an internal stability (associated with the exercise of reason); while the loose entails a freer experimentation with thought, is associated with Montaigne, who saw the deployment of reason as varying from individual to individual, and sets a pattern for the libertine mode that comes after.

Ben Jelloun's style here, at least as filtered through Vitale and my often deficient reading of Italian, seems closest to the curt, although that word could only be applied in a technical, Crollian (??) sense. In fact, the style throughout is engagingly conversational. Of course, there's a question here as to whose tone I'm talking about: the author's, or his characters' (and whether that distinction holds good anyway). All the characters' narratives (so far, at least) are transmitted through the voice of the narrator, and perhaps for that reason the style seems unified, smooth, notwithstanding the several, very different voices that are speaking.

One thing I like about L'Albergo is that it portrays a Naples I recognize, a Naples that faces across the Mediterranean to Africa, rather than Northwards to Rome, let alone Milan. It's the Naples of the Senegalese, i marrocchini, the senza documenti, and of those on the edge of society, in a city where the edge is sharp and at the centre. What Bidun says of Naples here is perhaps not particularly original, but comes close to my experience:

Napoli! Prima di arrivare qui da voi, ho cercato il centro di questa città; non l'ho trovato. Non ci ho capito niente. Sento che la città attrae e respinge perché, prima di tutto, è un porto in cui la vita è tumultuosa, fatta di lampi, temporali, fantasia, una vita cangiante, mascherata, brutale, sporca, piena di colori e di spezie, inverosimile, stupefacente, deludente, dove la verita non è mai unica, mai sicura, la menzogna è necessaria, il furto è un arte, il riso una volonta, dove le superstizioni si mescolano alla realtà, il sogno scende neo sotteranei e le rondini fanno il nido nelle moschee...

I never had that feeling of confusion - the confusion made perfect sense to me before I had a chance to try to understand it, perhaps corresponding to a consonant confusion within me at that time. But otherwise that's a fair description of my initial impressions of the city.

At the same time, there are things that trouble me in the novel. Sometimes it has a kind of seductive home-spun cleverness that makes me look at its evenness of tone more sceptically:

Le persone che hanno certezze, che non dubitano mai, sono incredibili. Sono come fatte di cemento. Ma non bisogna fidarsi del cemento. La minima crepa nel muro può provocare il crollo di tutta la casa.
People who are always certain, who never doubt, are incredible. They're like beings made of cement. But one shouldn't trust cement. The smallest crack in the wall can cause the whole house to collapse.

The first time I read this I hid my suspicions about it away somewhere and took it as a clever simile. But actually, what is most striking about it is that we do trust cement, or at least I do. Very few houses made of cement collapse, and very few cracks in cement do cause the whole structure to break. It's true that in Naples whole apartment blocks sporadically collapse into the ground - but this is the result of the warrenous sotteranea, the underground city that means Naples is essentially built on a honeycomb. And then what follows from this is that, in my experience, it's exactly those people who never do seem to crack. Petrify to a rictus, yes, and of course sometimes the breakdown comes, but often it seems to me it doesn't, and that's the tragedy, both for them and for those of us who crack up rather too easily and would like a bit of that solidity. The simile ultimately reads to me like wish-fulfillment. And I do wonder whether there's something sentimental going on here, akin to the worst magic realism. Of course, I'll have to wait and see where the book goes. After this I'd like to have a look at his book Racism Explained to my Daughter, which I discovered my French friend, Lise, was reading when I began L'Albergo.