Prandia virumque cano - "I sing of lunches and the man". Who knows whether perhaps Virgil sat down one day, after lunch of course, and began his Aeneid thus, musing that all those battles and sacked citadels were after all rather a grisly subject to tackle on such a pleasant Roman afternoon...before the fact struck him that outselling Apicius would be rather a stiff job (a bit like running a Christmas TV cook-off special head-to-head with Nigella, I suppose), and that mythology was, after all, what Mr Gaius Maecenus had ordered. Having secretly divined the poet's first inspiration, I take the liberty of borrowing it for my own purposes, namely, in order to introduce this blog post in even higher style than the first on the same subject. Perhaps this will even reach such epic proportions as to actually justify beginning it in Latin...
If one finds oneself on the Uxbridge Road around lunchtime, where should one look for a satisfying repast? Depending exactly where one is, the prospects may not seem all too prepossessing. Supposing, for instance, that you have just exited, stage right (so to speak), from Shepherd's Bush Hammersmith and City line tube station (soon to be rebranded as "Shepherd's Bush Market"), the first two establishments you stumble across are a chicken restaurant and a fish and chip shop ("Rooster" and "Empire", respectively). The number of fast-food chicken joints on Uxbridge Road is in fact scarcely less than on any run-down London high streets. But look more closely! - this "Rooster" will do you tarka dal and naan bread for £1.50. You're not ever going to find that at KFC, let me tell you. Nor is it unusual: having once lived on the third floor flat above a similar Uxbridge Road establishment by the name of "Tasty Treats" (on Shepherd's Bush Green), I can recommend very highly the curry and freshly cooked naans home-prepared by the owners. Perhaps this strange symbiosis of fried chicken buckets and perfectly spiced saag aloos and chana masalas exists elsewhere in London; the frazzled poultry keeps the tills going, but all the proprietor is really interested in are his wife's Punjabi delicacies...
However, I would still recommend our newcomer to pass these places by, for Shepherd's Bush has much more to offer. Over the road from the tube at the top end of the market are two of the finest falafel joints you could wish for, "Cafe 2000" and "Mr Falafel". There is some controversy, but although Mr Falafel (who also has a sit-down branch half-way down the market) is slightly cheaper and provides an "extra-large" falafel roll that has stunned grown men into submission, the subtlety of Cafe 2000's approach has, I think, always won out. His Jamaican green chilli sauce, if it really exists in Jamaica, shows the way toward the future cultural expansion of the falafel; and if he asks you if you want aubergines with it, you must accept with alacrity. I also recently tried the falafel at King Solomon's, a neat-looking place next to the mosque after Loftus Road, and was pleasantly surprised - the falafel are very fresh and the balance of parsley, onion and tomato altogether commendable. If you want to try making these finest of vegetarian snacks yourself, both Al Abbas and Damas Gate sell them ready-fried in boxes near the counter (Damas Gate's have the edge in my opinion). They need warming up in a pitta-bread and then adding salad and whatever else you feel like, although I must point out that hummous is utterly superfluous here. (No-one needs so many chickpeas all at once: it's the equivalent of serving steak in bolognese sauce.) Roasted aubergines and peppers, either home-made - if you have time, whole in jars, or mashed into a spread (producing "baba ghanoush" and "ajvain" respectively), make the best complement.
Wondrous though a fine falafel is, which carnivore would not choose a really superb kebab instead, if given the choice? And the choice exists here, although strictly speaking it takes us somewhat off the topic of lunches, and onto dinners, whether first (7 pm) or second (1 am). For the latter or late variety I cannot recommend highly enough the "Sayed al-Saddat Restaurant", formerly known to all as Shabab (which according to a friend means something beautiful in Urdu, but we don't known what). Despite the new Arabic-sounding name, it is Pakistani-run; although their curries, samosas and bhajis are not really worth the effort, their naans are tremendous, and when you add to this cubes of fresh lamb and the most terrific sauces you have a combination that really ought to be more widely known in the capital. Their doners are genuinely fantastic too, not to speak of the mixed lamb/chicken and extra green pepper/tomato combinations. I have only had one kebab in the same league, which was opposite the Roundhouse in Camden, where the lamb was quite sensational (but the other ingredients probably only average). But on the subject of lamb we must now speak of the true mysterium tremendum of Shepherd's Bush cuisine, the Syrian restaurant Abu Zaad. I reveal its secrets here only in the knowledge that few will read them. (Certainly very few know of them at present: the Time Out review is a travesty - only a few local Arabic reviewers at myhammersmith seem to realise how great the food is here.) If anyone knows of anywhere in northern Europe that cooks better grilled lamb cubes than Abu Zaad, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. (Ditto with their whole grilled baby chicken.) Words can barely express the sublimity of flavour held within these apparently simple dishes...so I won't try. Not only that, the prices are unbelievable: around £4-5 for said dishes, for which on the Edgware Road you would pay twice as much.
Thursday, 6 December 2007
Friday, 5 October 2007
Tristes Tropiques
For those who have heard of him but little more, the name of Claude Levi-Strauss is likely to inspire a kind of intellectual terror not far short of that provoked by other grand French names like Derrida, Foucault or Lacan. The book of his that I'm going to discuss here, though, is not only his most accessible - surprisingly enough, it was also the one that first gained him his reputation as a public intellectual in 1950s France. Even though Levi-Strauss, like many since, rejects the whole concept of "travel literature", his Tristes Tropiques ("Sad tropics") of 1955 (translated, keeping the French title, in 1973) is at bottom a travel book, a memoir of adventures and encounters in foreign lands.
This membership of what is normally considered a "minor genre" of literature, with all the personal and anecdotal inflections that come with it, does not in any way reduce the work's importance. I think I would agree with Susan Sontag, one of the book's first champions in the English-speaking world, when she called it "one of the great books of our [i.e. the 20th] century. It is rigorous, subtle, and bold in thought. It is beautifully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp; it speaks with a human voice." (Her essay on Levi-Strauss is printed in her famous volume Against Interpretation, which I think would have to count, in turn, as one of the great books of criticism of the 20th century.) Although based around the journeys Levi-Strauss made in Amazonia in the 1930s as a young anthropologist, the author continually weaves in personal reflections on his own intellectual development or his position in between Western and native world-views. He is also a master at interspersing memories gathered in other times and places than those of the narrative (I always find this such an attractive technique in travel-writing); from his early tastes in music, to his experiences of the Indian subcontinent in Calcutta and Karachi, to his flight, as a Jew, from the Nazis in 1941, travelling on a packed steamer - whose other passengers happened to include the surrealist Andre Breton - from Marseilles to Puerto Rico. Details such as the last one impart a vivid sense of the chaos and serendipity that must have been so typical of that era: Levi-Strauss only learnt of the outbreak of war through a damp four-month-old newspaper left behind by chance in the hut of a rubber-tapper deep in the Brazilian rainforest, and mentions that he had the decisive military importance of the principle of atomic fission explained to him in a Martinique hotel courtyard by the later director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
The personal aspect of the book sits in an oddly uneasy, but perhaps also productive relationship with Levi-Strauss's theoretical ambitions. The latter have been criticized as overweening, anti-empirical and based on insufficient knowledge of native cultures - for as the British anthropologist Edmund Leach has observed, on the evidence of Tristes Tropiques itself, Levi-Strauss never stayed with any one tribe long enough to acquire a proper degree of fluency in their language. His was a study of culture from the outside rather than from the inside. And yet, at the same time, he wanted to reach a level more "inside" than was accessible even to the natives themselves; to discover the formal "structures" that governed their myths, systems of kinship, organizations of space, and styles of art, without their being aware of these structures. He famously described his approach to myth as an investigation, not into how men thought of their myths (invented, heard and elaborated them), but how myths "thought themselves through men, and without their knowledge".
This led to a formal and comparative approach that often seems at first glance either dangerously speculative or embarrassingly superficial, above all through blankly refusing to try to see things through the eyes of the people he was studying. And yet in Tristes Tropiques Levi-Strauss almost always manages to rescue his more absurd generalisations by hanging some brilliant apercu on the end. By the end of chapter 20, for instance, a prolonged speculation about the "structural" relationship between the geometrical face-painting designs used by the Caduveo people and their social hierarchy, bringing in European heraldry and playing-cards along the way, the reader might be inclined with some justice to dismiss the whole discussion as an intellectual game. Yet the very last two sentences contain an idea which is not only highly plausible in general terms (art not as expression of society so much as expression of what society lacks, of its longing), but crystallises perfectly that pathos which is so characteristic of the book: "If my analysis is correct, in the last resort the graphic art of the Caduveo women is to be interpreted...as the phantasm of a society ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand in the way. In this charming civilisation, the female beauties trace the outlines of the collective dream with their make-up; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age..."
Again, in the chapter on Bengal (15. "Crowds"), the author's attempts to make sense of the poverty around him and its place in the social structure often seem banal or even insulting, and one begins to wish he had spent more time getting to know the culture before disparaging it. But then we come across an appreciation of the link between religion and the modesty of life which is genuinely moving. I think anyone who has travelled on the Indian subcontinent will feel the truth of this sketch: "Very little is needed in order to exist: little space, little food, little joy, few utensils or tools; it is life on a pocket-handkerchief scale. But on the other hand, there seems to be no lack of soul; one is aware of it in the bustle of the streets, the intensity of the look in people's eyes, the passion which marks the most trifling discussion...Only quality of soul can explain the ease with which these people fit into the cosmos. Theirs is indeed a civilization in which a prayer rug represents the world, or a square drawn on the ground marks out a place of worship." And as an illustration, a memory of walking along a deserted beach near Karachi, and finding a turbanned old man who "had fashioned a small mosque for himself with the help of two iron chairs borrowed from a neighbouring eating-house...He was all alone on the beach, and he was praying."
The beauty of images like these encloses a sympathy that is somehow more than human, or humanist. It reaches its peak in the deeply moving chapters on the Nambikwara, a poverty-stricken yet strangely carefree people living on the bare central Brazilian plateau. It is less directly empathetic and at the same time wider in compass than a humanist vision: Levi-Strauss can write with the same detached affection of a travelling companion and of a pet monkey he picked up (named Lucinda) - indeed the very final image of the book, disconcertingly, is "the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat." And this lack of willingness to prize human consciousness above nature must be somewhere behind Levi-Strauss's rigorously cold-toned formalist analyses. Levi-Strauss belongs namely on one side of a great division in early/mid twentieth-century thought, one which he locates himself in the chapter on his intellectual education, "The Making of an Anthropologist". On the one side, as his great influences, are psychoanalysis, Marxism (in its social-analytical variety), sociology and structural linguistics, all of which attempt to explain the human world through the use of causal models similar to those of the natural sciences. (Levi-Strauss mentions geology as a particularly inspiring model for his own thinking.) On the other side are history, political/radical Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism, most of which tendencies came together in the person of Levi-Strauss's great opponent, Jean-Paul Sartre.
You could define the split - perhaps crudely - as one between types of thinking concerned with objective necessity, on the one hand, and subjective freedom on the other. The fallacies each falls into when badly practised are equally characteristic: if the first tends toward pseudo-scientific absurdity and hyperbolic, overstretched generalisation, the second can often seem based on nothing more than "dressed-up" common sense. (Trying to explain Heidegger's phenomenological analyses in everyday language, for instance, has made me wonder whether he wasn't alarmingly close to stating the obvious much of the time. On the other hand, maybe the value of his approach was precisely in reasserting the need to see human experience in its own, "common-sense" - but also sometimes very poetic - terms, instead of reducing it to a scientifically-conceived model like Descartes'.)
On a deeper level though, the two strands embody two fundamentally different ways to make sense of the human world. The late 19th-century cultural historian Wilhelm Dilthey called these Erklären (explaining) and Verstehen (understanding); and the second, which he thought fundamentally necessary to the study of history, involved just that act of empathy or "trying to see things through the other's eyes" which, as I mentioned earlier, was so uncongenial to Levi-Strauss. The dilemma is acute in both history and anthropology: trying to think one's way inside the "common-sense" world-view of a society massively different from one's own is no mean feat, and may be more rewarding, as well as more time-consuming, than putting together grand causal models (in history, incidentally, this was done at about the same time as Levi-Strauss by Arnold J. Toynbee). But it carries the risk of obliterating a detachment which also has its value - particularly for thinking objectively about a society's faults, illusions or contingencies.
It is his preference for this detachment, and the ironic but compassionate attitude springing from it, that explains one of the most surprising intellectual confessions in the book: Levi-Strauss's allegiance to Buddhism. At a temple in the Chittagong hills on the Burmese border he feels that "between this form of religion and myself there was no likelihood of misunderstanding. It was not a question of bowing down in front of idols or of adoring a supposed supernatural order, but only of paying homage to the decisive wisdom that a thinker, or the society which created his legend, had evolved twenty-five centuries before and to which my civilisation could contribute only by confirming it. What else, indeed, have I learned from the masters who taught me, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have visited and even from that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the Sage at the foot of the tree?" For in a way, even when unsuccessful in its attempts to "explain", the whole of Tristes Tropiques is a "meditation" in the Buddhist sense: an attempt to rise above the chains of necessity in which we find ourselves caught (no different from the Caduveo or Nambikwara) and see our limitations from a more universal perspective.
This membership of what is normally considered a "minor genre" of literature, with all the personal and anecdotal inflections that come with it, does not in any way reduce the work's importance. I think I would agree with Susan Sontag, one of the book's first champions in the English-speaking world, when she called it "one of the great books of our [i.e. the 20th] century. It is rigorous, subtle, and bold in thought. It is beautifully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp; it speaks with a human voice." (Her essay on Levi-Strauss is printed in her famous volume Against Interpretation, which I think would have to count, in turn, as one of the great books of criticism of the 20th century.) Although based around the journeys Levi-Strauss made in Amazonia in the 1930s as a young anthropologist, the author continually weaves in personal reflections on his own intellectual development or his position in between Western and native world-views. He is also a master at interspersing memories gathered in other times and places than those of the narrative (I always find this such an attractive technique in travel-writing); from his early tastes in music, to his experiences of the Indian subcontinent in Calcutta and Karachi, to his flight, as a Jew, from the Nazis in 1941, travelling on a packed steamer - whose other passengers happened to include the surrealist Andre Breton - from Marseilles to Puerto Rico. Details such as the last one impart a vivid sense of the chaos and serendipity that must have been so typical of that era: Levi-Strauss only learnt of the outbreak of war through a damp four-month-old newspaper left behind by chance in the hut of a rubber-tapper deep in the Brazilian rainforest, and mentions that he had the decisive military importance of the principle of atomic fission explained to him in a Martinique hotel courtyard by the later director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
The personal aspect of the book sits in an oddly uneasy, but perhaps also productive relationship with Levi-Strauss's theoretical ambitions. The latter have been criticized as overweening, anti-empirical and based on insufficient knowledge of native cultures - for as the British anthropologist Edmund Leach has observed, on the evidence of Tristes Tropiques itself, Levi-Strauss never stayed with any one tribe long enough to acquire a proper degree of fluency in their language. His was a study of culture from the outside rather than from the inside. And yet, at the same time, he wanted to reach a level more "inside" than was accessible even to the natives themselves; to discover the formal "structures" that governed their myths, systems of kinship, organizations of space, and styles of art, without their being aware of these structures. He famously described his approach to myth as an investigation, not into how men thought of their myths (invented, heard and elaborated them), but how myths "thought themselves through men, and without their knowledge".
This led to a formal and comparative approach that often seems at first glance either dangerously speculative or embarrassingly superficial, above all through blankly refusing to try to see things through the eyes of the people he was studying. And yet in Tristes Tropiques Levi-Strauss almost always manages to rescue his more absurd generalisations by hanging some brilliant apercu on the end. By the end of chapter 20, for instance, a prolonged speculation about the "structural" relationship between the geometrical face-painting designs used by the Caduveo people and their social hierarchy, bringing in European heraldry and playing-cards along the way, the reader might be inclined with some justice to dismiss the whole discussion as an intellectual game. Yet the very last two sentences contain an idea which is not only highly plausible in general terms (art not as expression of society so much as expression of what society lacks, of its longing), but crystallises perfectly that pathos which is so characteristic of the book: "If my analysis is correct, in the last resort the graphic art of the Caduveo women is to be interpreted...as the phantasm of a society ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand in the way. In this charming civilisation, the female beauties trace the outlines of the collective dream with their make-up; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age..."
Again, in the chapter on Bengal (15. "Crowds"), the author's attempts to make sense of the poverty around him and its place in the social structure often seem banal or even insulting, and one begins to wish he had spent more time getting to know the culture before disparaging it. But then we come across an appreciation of the link between religion and the modesty of life which is genuinely moving. I think anyone who has travelled on the Indian subcontinent will feel the truth of this sketch: "Very little is needed in order to exist: little space, little food, little joy, few utensils or tools; it is life on a pocket-handkerchief scale. But on the other hand, there seems to be no lack of soul; one is aware of it in the bustle of the streets, the intensity of the look in people's eyes, the passion which marks the most trifling discussion...Only quality of soul can explain the ease with which these people fit into the cosmos. Theirs is indeed a civilization in which a prayer rug represents the world, or a square drawn on the ground marks out a place of worship." And as an illustration, a memory of walking along a deserted beach near Karachi, and finding a turbanned old man who "had fashioned a small mosque for himself with the help of two iron chairs borrowed from a neighbouring eating-house...He was all alone on the beach, and he was praying."
The beauty of images like these encloses a sympathy that is somehow more than human, or humanist. It reaches its peak in the deeply moving chapters on the Nambikwara, a poverty-stricken yet strangely carefree people living on the bare central Brazilian plateau. It is less directly empathetic and at the same time wider in compass than a humanist vision: Levi-Strauss can write with the same detached affection of a travelling companion and of a pet monkey he picked up (named Lucinda) - indeed the very final image of the book, disconcertingly, is "the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat." And this lack of willingness to prize human consciousness above nature must be somewhere behind Levi-Strauss's rigorously cold-toned formalist analyses. Levi-Strauss belongs namely on one side of a great division in early/mid twentieth-century thought, one which he locates himself in the chapter on his intellectual education, "The Making of an Anthropologist". On the one side, as his great influences, are psychoanalysis, Marxism (in its social-analytical variety), sociology and structural linguistics, all of which attempt to explain the human world through the use of causal models similar to those of the natural sciences. (Levi-Strauss mentions geology as a particularly inspiring model for his own thinking.) On the other side are history, political/radical Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism, most of which tendencies came together in the person of Levi-Strauss's great opponent, Jean-Paul Sartre.
You could define the split - perhaps crudely - as one between types of thinking concerned with objective necessity, on the one hand, and subjective freedom on the other. The fallacies each falls into when badly practised are equally characteristic: if the first tends toward pseudo-scientific absurdity and hyperbolic, overstretched generalisation, the second can often seem based on nothing more than "dressed-up" common sense. (Trying to explain Heidegger's phenomenological analyses in everyday language, for instance, has made me wonder whether he wasn't alarmingly close to stating the obvious much of the time. On the other hand, maybe the value of his approach was precisely in reasserting the need to see human experience in its own, "common-sense" - but also sometimes very poetic - terms, instead of reducing it to a scientifically-conceived model like Descartes'.)
On a deeper level though, the two strands embody two fundamentally different ways to make sense of the human world. The late 19th-century cultural historian Wilhelm Dilthey called these Erklären (explaining) and Verstehen (understanding); and the second, which he thought fundamentally necessary to the study of history, involved just that act of empathy or "trying to see things through the other's eyes" which, as I mentioned earlier, was so uncongenial to Levi-Strauss. The dilemma is acute in both history and anthropology: trying to think one's way inside the "common-sense" world-view of a society massively different from one's own is no mean feat, and may be more rewarding, as well as more time-consuming, than putting together grand causal models (in history, incidentally, this was done at about the same time as Levi-Strauss by Arnold J. Toynbee). But it carries the risk of obliterating a detachment which also has its value - particularly for thinking objectively about a society's faults, illusions or contingencies.
It is his preference for this detachment, and the ironic but compassionate attitude springing from it, that explains one of the most surprising intellectual confessions in the book: Levi-Strauss's allegiance to Buddhism. At a temple in the Chittagong hills on the Burmese border he feels that "between this form of religion and myself there was no likelihood of misunderstanding. It was not a question of bowing down in front of idols or of adoring a supposed supernatural order, but only of paying homage to the decisive wisdom that a thinker, or the society which created his legend, had evolved twenty-five centuries before and to which my civilisation could contribute only by confirming it. What else, indeed, have I learned from the masters who taught me, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have visited and even from that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the Sage at the foot of the tree?" For in a way, even when unsuccessful in its attempts to "explain", the whole of Tristes Tropiques is a "meditation" in the Buddhist sense: an attempt to rise above the chains of necessity in which we find ourselves caught (no different from the Caduveo or Nambikwara) and see our limitations from a more universal perspective.
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Aesthetics and conceptual art
The following is an edited extract from a dialogue I took part in which originally appeared on http://www.beardscratchers.com/ (currently undergoing reconstruction - I'll put a direct link here when it becomes available), on the general topic of aesthetics. My interlocutor, in bold type, was a student of art history.
More than any other area of philosophy, in my opinion, philosophical aesthetics needs to be linked directly to aesthetic experiences, so that we don't remain wholly on the level of theory. Examples are good; or even better, let's start with direct 'criticism' (in the broadest sense - slapping a few labels on your reaction to a piece of art first of all), and then try and tease out more general implications. Unlike mathematics, where one's reaction to the shape of a specific triangle has to be suppressed in order to recognise the abstract properties it shares with other triangles, aesthetics is an area of theory which acknowledges its own basis in particular, sensuous experiences. Longinus' or Burke's discussions of the sublime are very good at exemplifying (reading Burke is a whole aesthetic experience in itself: meditating on which parts of a woman's body he finds most aesthetically pleasing, he calls attention to the region "about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried." Mmmm...sorry, got carried away there!)
Burke however, like Kant, was more concerned with aesthetic experience in general - our reactions to landscapes, people, animals or everyday objects. The question which has come to the fore of discussion since those two were writing back in the eighteenth century is, what links our aesthetic experience in general with the category of 'art'? I think it is a particular delineation of the contents of our experience, a certain 'marking off' in space and time - one which is emphasised in traditional art by the frame of a painting. By using a device like this, the painting is almost asking us to direct our attention in a certain way, to focus on it, so that everything outside the frame - both in the outside world of the gallery and in our just-passed thoughts and sensations of that hour or that day - is put, for the time being, out of focus, relative to the things within the frame. Which is not to say that there can't be a relationship between inside and outside - that the painting can't engage with feelings or beliefs that we had long before stepping in front of it, or that it must only be appreciated 'in itself' - but this relationship must be of a certain kind. It can be comparative, symbolic or metaphorical, for instance: allegories do this quite bluntly, but something 'realistic' like a Vermeer also creates its own little world, in which certain people or objects, or even something as insubstantial as the light entering a room, incite one's memory or sympathy, relate subtly to one's 'external' thoughts.
What I think it should not be - this would destroy the 'focus' I mentioned earlier - is a casual, everyday or 'environmental' relation (I'm grasping around for the right word here), such as exists among the other things one might find in an art gallery: when you go in the door, your attention scans over the walls, the labels, the skylight, the security guard etc, and you think, 'yep, typical art gallery' - you recognize the scene and nothing in it holds your focus. But if you do that with the paintings as well - and let's be honest, it's often hard not to much of the time, unless we happen to be real connoisseurs - then we're missing the aesthetic experience they are trying to provoke; this is 'gallery drift', where you walk past a wall of paintings with a glazed expression, glance at their labels for five seconds, look up, think 'oh yeah, another one of those...maybe the next one's more interesting...', and move on. Big 'blockbuster' exhibitions of famous artists often encourage this tendency.
In my opinion - I'm sure some of you artistic people out there will disagree, and please do! - a lot of modern, 'conceptual' art can do the same: partly because it challenges the traditional idea of 'framing' (the object, or by implication, one's attentive experience of it) by explicitly calling up our 'environmental' idea of 'what belongs' in an art gallery, or what should be in or out of focus, and trying to disrupt it. This is a great tactic for capturing one's attention straight off - 'a urinal in an art gallery?! wow - crazy! that'll shock the bourgeois!' (Duchamps) or 'hey, there's nothing in this gallery...wait a minute, they just turned the lights off...and they've gone back on again: this isn't just part of the gallery, this is the artwork. Now that's clever.' (Martin Creed). But once the point is realised, does it actually encourage the separate, sustained focus one needs to have an aesthetic experience? It challenges 'gallery drift', it makes one stop in one's tracks for a moment - but this kind of art also relies on our characteristic inattentive mode to achieve its instantaneous effect; what it doesn't do is help us out of it, because all too often there isn't the depth to develop our focus. You couldn't really say that Sarah Lucas or Tracey Emin create a 'world' with their art, one that draws you in in the way that Vermeer does - rather, they rely on the everyday 'world' of the gallery. (I don't want to exclude all modern art and sound horribly conservative, so I'll add that some modern installations can create their own world out of the gallery space - Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread have done it for me.) So, in that sense, when people pose the question a propos of Lucas or Emin, 'but is it really art?', they do have a point; such art may have value of a kind, but it isn't a kind that links our experience of it with other cases of 'aesthetic' sensation, something that is not only pleasurable, but 'marks itself out' from the rest of our experience, instead of blurring together (like too many similar boozy nights on the town!).
We no longer care about what art is, but what art can do and mean for people. Dada, conceptualism and Fluxus broke the mold of what art had to be, and I'm sorry if you lament that, but wake up and smell the coffee! Things have changed! A great deal of art these days is certainly not 'pleasureable' and may not 'mark itself out' from its environment, but that is no longer the ideal for many artists. I find it exhilarating that artists today are seeing themselves as political and social commentators rather than living room decorators, and I think it is this politically and socially conscious strain of art that we should nurture. We would be missing something if we abandoned the current practice of contextualizing contemporary art exhibitions with art historical ones, but I would hate to favor traditional painting and sculpture over the exciting things happening today.
What is important about much contemporary art is that it does blur boundaries. It colors the way we interact with our environment and other people. Artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lee Mingwei personally interact with visitors in and outside of the gallery, the former cooking and eating meals with them, the latter asking them to give him a tour of locations of personal importance. Acts such as these require a sustained focus and surely result in later reflection on the part of the viewer/participant. Before you retort by saying that such artists cannot interact with every visitor, let me add that the resulting documentation of such events, exhibited in the gallery space, also requires sustained attention from viewers. Furthermore, there is still opportunity for a high level of craftsmanship if your aesthetics must require it. Artist Sarah Sze installs sculptural landscapes in uncommon places with uncommon materials. Last summer at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, she created aquatic environments out of surgical supplies that were displayed under glass tiles in the museum's conservatory. These landscapes were wondrously complex and delicate.
In response to your Martin Creed reference, I would like to cite an artist who can actually pull off conceptual pieces that hold viewers' attention: Robert Gober. He created one of the most arresting conceptual pieces I have ever seen, which I saw installed at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston a few years ago. He installed a fake window high up on the wall of a small room. Outside the window, which was barred to look like a jail window, was a bright blue sky. As soon as I walked into the darkened space, I felt claustrophic, sad and hopeful all at once. The work does not occupy a discrete space in the gallery but had the kind of magnetic impact that a painting can have. Yet Gober's window goes further than any painting can because it is formally beautiful but also affects the space around it, transforming it into a place that feels radically different from the gallery in which it places itself.
It is difficult to find works that satisfy all the requirements that many critics seem to put forth: that it be formally beautiful, maintain the viewer's attention and inspire contemplation, and have significant meaning. Works like Sze's can only offer meaning such as the viewer, curator, or artist herself projects it. Tirivanija and Mingwei's work cannot touch all viewers in the way the artists would like, but they continue their work anyway. After all, it is the gesture that counts and not just the time spent or the belly filled.
The Robert Gober sounds great, and that's precisely the kind of (supposedly) 'conceptual' art that I think connects to our non-artistic aesthetic experience in the way I'm talking about. The fact that it's not a painting makes absolutely no difference to what kind of art it essentially is. The way in which modern media allow the artist to affect so much more strongly the space the viewer finds him/herself in is a major advantage over painting; but I wouldn't say that this new use of space has anything innately conceptual about it - rather, it strengthens the potential of the core aesthetic experience. It's new, but it's still an 'artistic' resource in the strong, aesthetic meaning of the word I've been using.
As for Fluxus, it did explore, and cross, the boundaries - in music for instance, John Cage did much to disrupt those between music and noise, music and silence, musical performance and other kinds of performance. A lot of his work, and that of others at the time such as LaMonte Young, was very definitely not music by any even vaguely sensible use of the word; but as I said cautiously a propos of Emin, that doesn't mean it can't have value of some kind. The value you stress in conceptual art is that of social and political commentary, which is all well and good as an aim. But - this'll lead to more controversy, but what the hell, it's interesting - can it be a central aim of art? It seems to me that much of the most significant social and political commentary is in words, not in installations. Writers can express their vision of society precisely, at considerable length, utilising scores of ideas backed up with hard analysis, facts, metaphors and powerful rhetoric: artists are limited to ambiguity and a low level of structure to their 'commentary'. Until you show me a conceptual artist whose work has had, or could have, anything like the influence that the writings of Plato, Hegel, Marx and company have had on Western society, I remain unconvinced. Good traditional (in the broad sense, i.e. aesthetic) art can, as a side-effect, change the way people look at society; but the visceral impact that enables it to do so has nothing to do with concepts, or being clever - it arises from an aesthetic engagement.
Obviously I haven't experienced the works by Tiravanija and Mingwei that you cite, so I can't say for sure that they wouldn't have an impact on me, but your description doesn't convince me that their activity belongs in the same class of 'art' as Gober, or Whiteread. Again, it may have value - the similar ideas and antics of the Situationists back in the 50s-60s I think are great, wish I'd been there; and given that it doesn't have a recognised name, 'art' might do as well as any; but I think it's more a species of utopian philosophy-in-action than a genuinely aesthetic endeavour. If you think my critical requirements too narrow, I'll say that craftsmanship isn't a big issue for me. Craft doesn't guarantee aesthetic appreciation; the latter depends on values that go beyond pure skill. And I take back any suggestion that art has to be 'pleasurable', since in order to sustain it you'd have to stretch the meaning of pleasure so far as to be incomprehensible. But distinctiveness, depth, a 'metaphorical' rather than 'environmental' relationship to reality, and thus the capacity to create a 'world' - these feel to me to be important characteristics of art that are more valuable to explore than to throw aside.
More than any other area of philosophy, in my opinion, philosophical aesthetics needs to be linked directly to aesthetic experiences, so that we don't remain wholly on the level of theory. Examples are good; or even better, let's start with direct 'criticism' (in the broadest sense - slapping a few labels on your reaction to a piece of art first of all), and then try and tease out more general implications. Unlike mathematics, where one's reaction to the shape of a specific triangle has to be suppressed in order to recognise the abstract properties it shares with other triangles, aesthetics is an area of theory which acknowledges its own basis in particular, sensuous experiences. Longinus' or Burke's discussions of the sublime are very good at exemplifying (reading Burke is a whole aesthetic experience in itself: meditating on which parts of a woman's body he finds most aesthetically pleasing, he calls attention to the region "about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried." Mmmm...sorry, got carried away there!)
Burke however, like Kant, was more concerned with aesthetic experience in general - our reactions to landscapes, people, animals or everyday objects. The question which has come to the fore of discussion since those two were writing back in the eighteenth century is, what links our aesthetic experience in general with the category of 'art'? I think it is a particular delineation of the contents of our experience, a certain 'marking off' in space and time - one which is emphasised in traditional art by the frame of a painting. By using a device like this, the painting is almost asking us to direct our attention in a certain way, to focus on it, so that everything outside the frame - both in the outside world of the gallery and in our just-passed thoughts and sensations of that hour or that day - is put, for the time being, out of focus, relative to the things within the frame. Which is not to say that there can't be a relationship between inside and outside - that the painting can't engage with feelings or beliefs that we had long before stepping in front of it, or that it must only be appreciated 'in itself' - but this relationship must be of a certain kind. It can be comparative, symbolic or metaphorical, for instance: allegories do this quite bluntly, but something 'realistic' like a Vermeer also creates its own little world, in which certain people or objects, or even something as insubstantial as the light entering a room, incite one's memory or sympathy, relate subtly to one's 'external' thoughts.
What I think it should not be - this would destroy the 'focus' I mentioned earlier - is a casual, everyday or 'environmental' relation (I'm grasping around for the right word here), such as exists among the other things one might find in an art gallery: when you go in the door, your attention scans over the walls, the labels, the skylight, the security guard etc, and you think, 'yep, typical art gallery' - you recognize the scene and nothing in it holds your focus. But if you do that with the paintings as well - and let's be honest, it's often hard not to much of the time, unless we happen to be real connoisseurs - then we're missing the aesthetic experience they are trying to provoke; this is 'gallery drift', where you walk past a wall of paintings with a glazed expression, glance at their labels for five seconds, look up, think 'oh yeah, another one of those...maybe the next one's more interesting...', and move on. Big 'blockbuster' exhibitions of famous artists often encourage this tendency.
In my opinion - I'm sure some of you artistic people out there will disagree, and please do! - a lot of modern, 'conceptual' art can do the same: partly because it challenges the traditional idea of 'framing' (the object, or by implication, one's attentive experience of it) by explicitly calling up our 'environmental' idea of 'what belongs' in an art gallery, or what should be in or out of focus, and trying to disrupt it. This is a great tactic for capturing one's attention straight off - 'a urinal in an art gallery?! wow - crazy! that'll shock the bourgeois!' (Duchamps) or 'hey, there's nothing in this gallery...wait a minute, they just turned the lights off...and they've gone back on again: this isn't just part of the gallery, this is the artwork. Now that's clever.' (Martin Creed). But once the point is realised, does it actually encourage the separate, sustained focus one needs to have an aesthetic experience? It challenges 'gallery drift', it makes one stop in one's tracks for a moment - but this kind of art also relies on our characteristic inattentive mode to achieve its instantaneous effect; what it doesn't do is help us out of it, because all too often there isn't the depth to develop our focus. You couldn't really say that Sarah Lucas or Tracey Emin create a 'world' with their art, one that draws you in in the way that Vermeer does - rather, they rely on the everyday 'world' of the gallery. (I don't want to exclude all modern art and sound horribly conservative, so I'll add that some modern installations can create their own world out of the gallery space - Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread have done it for me.) So, in that sense, when people pose the question a propos of Lucas or Emin, 'but is it really art?', they do have a point; such art may have value of a kind, but it isn't a kind that links our experience of it with other cases of 'aesthetic' sensation, something that is not only pleasurable, but 'marks itself out' from the rest of our experience, instead of blurring together (like too many similar boozy nights on the town!).
We no longer care about what art is, but what art can do and mean for people. Dada, conceptualism and Fluxus broke the mold of what art had to be, and I'm sorry if you lament that, but wake up and smell the coffee! Things have changed! A great deal of art these days is certainly not 'pleasureable' and may not 'mark itself out' from its environment, but that is no longer the ideal for many artists. I find it exhilarating that artists today are seeing themselves as political and social commentators rather than living room decorators, and I think it is this politically and socially conscious strain of art that we should nurture. We would be missing something if we abandoned the current practice of contextualizing contemporary art exhibitions with art historical ones, but I would hate to favor traditional painting and sculpture over the exciting things happening today.
What is important about much contemporary art is that it does blur boundaries. It colors the way we interact with our environment and other people. Artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lee Mingwei personally interact with visitors in and outside of the gallery, the former cooking and eating meals with them, the latter asking them to give him a tour of locations of personal importance. Acts such as these require a sustained focus and surely result in later reflection on the part of the viewer/participant. Before you retort by saying that such artists cannot interact with every visitor, let me add that the resulting documentation of such events, exhibited in the gallery space, also requires sustained attention from viewers. Furthermore, there is still opportunity for a high level of craftsmanship if your aesthetics must require it. Artist Sarah Sze installs sculptural landscapes in uncommon places with uncommon materials. Last summer at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, she created aquatic environments out of surgical supplies that were displayed under glass tiles in the museum's conservatory. These landscapes were wondrously complex and delicate.
In response to your Martin Creed reference, I would like to cite an artist who can actually pull off conceptual pieces that hold viewers' attention: Robert Gober. He created one of the most arresting conceptual pieces I have ever seen, which I saw installed at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston a few years ago. He installed a fake window high up on the wall of a small room. Outside the window, which was barred to look like a jail window, was a bright blue sky. As soon as I walked into the darkened space, I felt claustrophic, sad and hopeful all at once. The work does not occupy a discrete space in the gallery but had the kind of magnetic impact that a painting can have. Yet Gober's window goes further than any painting can because it is formally beautiful but also affects the space around it, transforming it into a place that feels radically different from the gallery in which it places itself.
It is difficult to find works that satisfy all the requirements that many critics seem to put forth: that it be formally beautiful, maintain the viewer's attention and inspire contemplation, and have significant meaning. Works like Sze's can only offer meaning such as the viewer, curator, or artist herself projects it. Tirivanija and Mingwei's work cannot touch all viewers in the way the artists would like, but they continue their work anyway. After all, it is the gesture that counts and not just the time spent or the belly filled.
The Robert Gober sounds great, and that's precisely the kind of (supposedly) 'conceptual' art that I think connects to our non-artistic aesthetic experience in the way I'm talking about. The fact that it's not a painting makes absolutely no difference to what kind of art it essentially is. The way in which modern media allow the artist to affect so much more strongly the space the viewer finds him/herself in is a major advantage over painting; but I wouldn't say that this new use of space has anything innately conceptual about it - rather, it strengthens the potential of the core aesthetic experience. It's new, but it's still an 'artistic' resource in the strong, aesthetic meaning of the word I've been using.
As for Fluxus, it did explore, and cross, the boundaries - in music for instance, John Cage did much to disrupt those between music and noise, music and silence, musical performance and other kinds of performance. A lot of his work, and that of others at the time such as LaMonte Young, was very definitely not music by any even vaguely sensible use of the word; but as I said cautiously a propos of Emin, that doesn't mean it can't have value of some kind. The value you stress in conceptual art is that of social and political commentary, which is all well and good as an aim. But - this'll lead to more controversy, but what the hell, it's interesting - can it be a central aim of art? It seems to me that much of the most significant social and political commentary is in words, not in installations. Writers can express their vision of society precisely, at considerable length, utilising scores of ideas backed up with hard analysis, facts, metaphors and powerful rhetoric: artists are limited to ambiguity and a low level of structure to their 'commentary'. Until you show me a conceptual artist whose work has had, or could have, anything like the influence that the writings of Plato, Hegel, Marx and company have had on Western society, I remain unconvinced. Good traditional (in the broad sense, i.e. aesthetic) art can, as a side-effect, change the way people look at society; but the visceral impact that enables it to do so has nothing to do with concepts, or being clever - it arises from an aesthetic engagement.
Obviously I haven't experienced the works by Tiravanija and Mingwei that you cite, so I can't say for sure that they wouldn't have an impact on me, but your description doesn't convince me that their activity belongs in the same class of 'art' as Gober, or Whiteread. Again, it may have value - the similar ideas and antics of the Situationists back in the 50s-60s I think are great, wish I'd been there; and given that it doesn't have a recognised name, 'art' might do as well as any; but I think it's more a species of utopian philosophy-in-action than a genuinely aesthetic endeavour. If you think my critical requirements too narrow, I'll say that craftsmanship isn't a big issue for me. Craft doesn't guarantee aesthetic appreciation; the latter depends on values that go beyond pure skill. And I take back any suggestion that art has to be 'pleasurable', since in order to sustain it you'd have to stretch the meaning of pleasure so far as to be incomprehensible. But distinctiveness, depth, a 'metaphorical' rather than 'environmental' relationship to reality, and thus the capacity to create a 'world' - these feel to me to be important characteristics of art that are more valuable to explore than to throw aside.
Thursday, 13 September 2007
"Atonement" or bifurcation?
The new film adaptation of Ian McEwan's "Atonement" is without a doubt an accomplishment, but not exactly a perfect one. The grand sweep a narrative like this seems to ask for is missing; the film has to change tone half-way through. Perhaps this was in the nature of the book (I'm afraid I haven't read it, so am entirely unqualified to be the film's reviewer, on that score); or of its plot: one expects that the atmosphere of the pre-war scenes should not be without frivolity, which in the nature of things sets them apart from the tragic mood of the later sections. (Then again perhaps this itself is a historical cliche - why should we automatically assume the interbellum years didn't contain their own share of personal misfortunes? or vice versa, that some people didn't have a "good war"? was the reaction of the friend I saw the film with last night.)
This break is enforced by a quite decided gap in cinematic quality (and consistency) between the first hour and the rest of the film. The later sections have their glories: one is the already notorious tracking shot around Dunkirk beach, which must have tested the film crew to their limits (as well as the composer, who had to fit several verses of "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" as seamlessly as possible into counterpoint with the full orchestral score). There were several fine bits of acting too I thought: the confrontation scene between Briony and the couple she wronged, and more subtly the television interview with Vanessa Redgrave playing Briony as an ageing novelist. But there were also some fairly stale parts - sentimental scenes like the dream encounter between Robbie and his mother, or Briony's conversation with a dying French soldier (- the sentiment inadequately disguised by playing the whole scene in French).
The first half of the film on the other hand felt extraordinarily fresh, beautifully judged in emotional tone and balance, and handled with startling fluidity and skill. The intercutting between the protagonists, obviously an essential feature in a drama of romantic separation, was superb: Cecilia, disgusted with the conversation, dives into the garden pool, and in answering motion Robbie surfaces from a duck in his bathtub, gazing upward meditatively - the camera follows - through the skylight to the bomber humming overhead in the blue summer sky. Or more ecstatically as both prepare for dinner, Cecilia dressing in blurred mirror reflection, Robbie typing the fateful note of apology to the strains of Puccini (if it was) on his gramophone, both somehow woven together in a sequence almost the equal in tenderness of Julie Christie's and Donald Sutherland's in Don't Look Now. (There was nothing correspondingly inspired in the later scenes - Keira Knightley looking sad on a beach cuts to James McAvoy looking sad in a field of poppies - both beautiful shots; but their editing the depths of banality.) The psychological transitions were just as acute. A hilarious satire of childish precociousness cunningly highlights the very trigger which sets off catastrophe - Lola's rape and Briony's misaccusation both appear as consequences of their "acting above their age". And in its early days, Robbie and Cecilia's romance is a fine mixture of comedy and passion.
What prompts the title of this post is the very end of the film. To be exact, the ends - plural: although not as even-handedly as the book (I am told), we are still given two conclusions for Robbie and Cecilia's story. One is more tragic, but at the same time less realistically played, so that the emotional power is for me undercut by ambiguity. It isn't that I can't handle ambiguity, or want everything cut-and-dried; but I am really quite uncertain what it is supposed to achieve here. I felt the same way about Yann Martel's "Life of Pi": what exactly is the motivation for two mutually-excluding stories? What is the interference pattern (if you'll pardon the gratuitous use of analogies from quantum physics) that is supposed to emerge from this strange narrative "double-slit experiment"? Because it seems to me that the introduction of this level of self-consciousness is signally inappropriate to the tragic themes of both books. Self-reference works in the comic or the ironic mode, but for genuinely tragic material, fate should appear (as it did for the Greeks) as the horribly inexorable, unshakeable structure and ultimate author of reality. We humans - whether characters or authors - cannot change it; we only come to terms with it. One kind of coming to terms is indicated by the title of the film. The word "atonement" has one of the plainest and yet profoundest etymologies I know: like many a German word, all you need to do is split it, and you have "at-one-ment"; to "make/set (at) one", to unify, to make whole. Can it really be right to create bifurcating stories, Borges' "garden of forking paths", in the service of an act whose whole significance is one of unification?
This break is enforced by a quite decided gap in cinematic quality (and consistency) between the first hour and the rest of the film. The later sections have their glories: one is the already notorious tracking shot around Dunkirk beach, which must have tested the film crew to their limits (as well as the composer, who had to fit several verses of "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" as seamlessly as possible into counterpoint with the full orchestral score). There were several fine bits of acting too I thought: the confrontation scene between Briony and the couple she wronged, and more subtly the television interview with Vanessa Redgrave playing Briony as an ageing novelist. But there were also some fairly stale parts - sentimental scenes like the dream encounter between Robbie and his mother, or Briony's conversation with a dying French soldier (- the sentiment inadequately disguised by playing the whole scene in French).
The first half of the film on the other hand felt extraordinarily fresh, beautifully judged in emotional tone and balance, and handled with startling fluidity and skill. The intercutting between the protagonists, obviously an essential feature in a drama of romantic separation, was superb: Cecilia, disgusted with the conversation, dives into the garden pool, and in answering motion Robbie surfaces from a duck in his bathtub, gazing upward meditatively - the camera follows - through the skylight to the bomber humming overhead in the blue summer sky. Or more ecstatically as both prepare for dinner, Cecilia dressing in blurred mirror reflection, Robbie typing the fateful note of apology to the strains of Puccini (if it was) on his gramophone, both somehow woven together in a sequence almost the equal in tenderness of Julie Christie's and Donald Sutherland's in Don't Look Now. (There was nothing correspondingly inspired in the later scenes - Keira Knightley looking sad on a beach cuts to James McAvoy looking sad in a field of poppies - both beautiful shots; but their editing the depths of banality.) The psychological transitions were just as acute. A hilarious satire of childish precociousness cunningly highlights the very trigger which sets off catastrophe - Lola's rape and Briony's misaccusation both appear as consequences of their "acting above their age". And in its early days, Robbie and Cecilia's romance is a fine mixture of comedy and passion.
What prompts the title of this post is the very end of the film. To be exact, the ends - plural: although not as even-handedly as the book (I am told), we are still given two conclusions for Robbie and Cecilia's story. One is more tragic, but at the same time less realistically played, so that the emotional power is for me undercut by ambiguity. It isn't that I can't handle ambiguity, or want everything cut-and-dried; but I am really quite uncertain what it is supposed to achieve here. I felt the same way about Yann Martel's "Life of Pi": what exactly is the motivation for two mutually-excluding stories? What is the interference pattern (if you'll pardon the gratuitous use of analogies from quantum physics) that is supposed to emerge from this strange narrative "double-slit experiment"? Because it seems to me that the introduction of this level of self-consciousness is signally inappropriate to the tragic themes of both books. Self-reference works in the comic or the ironic mode, but for genuinely tragic material, fate should appear (as it did for the Greeks) as the horribly inexorable, unshakeable structure and ultimate author of reality. We humans - whether characters or authors - cannot change it; we only come to terms with it. One kind of coming to terms is indicated by the title of the film. The word "atonement" has one of the plainest and yet profoundest etymologies I know: like many a German word, all you need to do is split it, and you have "at-one-ment"; to "make/set (at) one", to unify, to make whole. Can it really be right to create bifurcating stories, Borges' "garden of forking paths", in the service of an act whose whole significance is one of unification?
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
A tale of two conferences
As an aspiring academic of sorts, concern for the health of my CV drives me to attend conferences both in Britain and abroad - even when this begins (as it occasionally does in the wake of such occasions) to raise concern for my sanity. "Conference-land" is a peculiar place indeed - as you can discover at second-hand, without the pain and with extra entertainment, from the academic satires of David Lodge ("Changing Places" and "Small World"). I would recommend them to anyone either as a preparation or (better) a replacement for full exposure to an international confederation of those strange beings, bluntly yet so justly referred to by the Germans as Fachidioten (Fach meaning specialism or pigeonhole - you can work out the rest!).
But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.
The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.
Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).
Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.
In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.
The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):
But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.
The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.
Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).
Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.
In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.
The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):
After an unexpected and mysterious prelude in which someone (we could not yet see who) moved around slowly, spider-fashion, directly over the heads of the audience on a translucent sheet of perspex, we scaled ladders and hay-bales to reach the main performance space, a stage constructed as it were on the second "floor" of the barn. At the back was the musical half of the duo - the drummer Fritz Hauser - and tiptoeing and circling backward and forward over the stage was the dancer Anna Huber, now more fully visible. (The photo below is from her publicity.)
Both artists are Swiss, internationally recognised and highly professional, and doubtless more used to performing to well-heeled audiences of modern dance aficionados in Zurich, but having let themselves in for this peculiar one-off event, they had to accept that the atmosphere was going to be rather different (not least in the literal sense of being quite dusty).
And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.
What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.
The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.
Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.
And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.
What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.
The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.
Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.
Tuesday, 5 June 2007
Bananas!
I watched Woody Allen's Bananas for the first time all the way through last night. A fan loaned my flatmate Allen's complete films a while ago; we've now seen most (but by no means all) of them, and Bananas has got to be the funniest. The premise, which is "nerdy student (Allen) ends up by mistake as dictator of Central American republic", isn't that original or even that comic (compare Chaplin's The Great Dictator, where it's exploited properly); it's the stream of killer gags that doesn't let up for a single scene. God, even the credit sequence is funny! (It's just graphics and silly music, like the start of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it's brilliant.) Maybe it's because the humour is more random and surreal than the other films that it succeeds so well; a lot of it feels a bit like Python. For instance, the interpreter who "translates" from English to English for Allen the dictator when he steps off the plane, and who is chased off by two men in white coats wielding butterfly nets; or the black female witness in the court case who claims to be J. Edgar Hoover; or the guy on the jury who's drinking through a straw from a fishbowl. Don't ask why...but it works.
I would love to know when and why surreal humour works. I have a friend whose conversation functions for hours at a time entirely by surreal logic, but he won't tell me how, and I've never been successful in imitating him. You can't just say anything random and make it humorously random, even if you want to. I don't think an idea of "incongruity" or an intention to deflate seriousness would cover it, although a whole lot of Woody Allen does work by shoving together a serious theme (revolution! death! metaphysics! tragedy!) with references to his own, fairly easy-going, frivolous Manhattan lifestyle. (The Greek tragic chorus shimmying around singing musical numbers in Mighty Aphrodite is one of my favourites, but there are lots more jokes like this in his short stories. Some of the best involve philosophical interpretations of food...I won't spoil them; instead you should go out and get a copy of his Collected Prose as it'll probably be the funniest thing you've ever bought.) I hope the specific references he puts in don't mean that the comedy will date. It hasn't lost much over the last two or three decades, but maybe all that means is that our (Anglo-American) cultural reference points haven't changed much in that time. Judging by Plautus and Aristophanes I'm not sure any comedy is eternal anyway; but as Allen might say, neither is a Caesar salad.
I would love to know when and why surreal humour works. I have a friend whose conversation functions for hours at a time entirely by surreal logic, but he won't tell me how, and I've never been successful in imitating him. You can't just say anything random and make it humorously random, even if you want to. I don't think an idea of "incongruity" or an intention to deflate seriousness would cover it, although a whole lot of Woody Allen does work by shoving together a serious theme (revolution! death! metaphysics! tragedy!) with references to his own, fairly easy-going, frivolous Manhattan lifestyle. (The Greek tragic chorus shimmying around singing musical numbers in Mighty Aphrodite is one of my favourites, but there are lots more jokes like this in his short stories. Some of the best involve philosophical interpretations of food...I won't spoil them; instead you should go out and get a copy of his Collected Prose as it'll probably be the funniest thing you've ever bought.) I hope the specific references he puts in don't mean that the comedy will date. It hasn't lost much over the last two or three decades, but maybe all that means is that our (Anglo-American) cultural reference points haven't changed much in that time. Judging by Plautus and Aristophanes I'm not sure any comedy is eternal anyway; but as Allen might say, neither is a Caesar salad.
Saturday, 2 June 2007
The legendary cuisine of the Uxbridge Road
My first post devoted to food (there will be more!). The title I have cheekily adapted from Margaret Shaida's excellent "The Legendary Cuisine of Persia", a book I intend to review here, once I've cooked a few more things from it. Cooking anything from such books relies on being able to get the ingredients, which even in London may take a bit of searching; and the wonderful thing about the Uxbridge Road in Shepherd's Bush (five minutes from my door) is that almost nothing is unobtainable...
I've just come back from shopping on the Uxbridge Road and made myself a spot of lunch. It consisted of: salad with frizzy lettuce, a wholemeal pitta, Iranian rice and split-pea dumplings, Lebanese foul moudammas and a stuffed aubergine. To drink, a glass of Turkish rose-hip syrup diluted with water and apple juice. If one shops frequently at the great Shepherd's Bush grocery emporium Al-Abbas, or any of the smaller Middle Eastern shops nearby, this sort of thing quickly becomes normal. I'm struggling to think of the last time I made myself a regular English ham sandwich or cheese-on-toast. In fact if I carry on living here, even the last time I cut a slice of bread off a loaf or put knife to butter will soon appear a distant memory. The crumpets of my childhood seem almost stale beside a tray of golden baklava, the toothsome filo pastry laden with nuts and filled to oozing point with its perfumed sap of honey and rosewater. What would a salad be without chunks of feta or olives? Why melt cheddar when you can fry halloumi? With such a bounty of spices to prepare lamb or chicken, one could even forget that there are no sausages. (Eating the Muslim beef substitute ones is possibly the only unqualified culinary error I've committed, although even there I might have just been unlucky.) My flatmates must have some responsibility for the change in my diet too, since I lived for six months with two Greeks and am now sharing with an Italian. I never realised olive oil could be this good - not to mention the home-made goat's cheese, fried calves' spleens and so on...
So here is what I've tried so far: this will take more than one post, so I've decided to devote this one to beverages. Starting with coffee: the Lebanese/Syrian variety with ground cardamom is my usual morning cup. The Hamwi brand comes mixed in about four different proportions of coffee to cardamom, up to one quarter cardamom - even with the weaker ones I find the cardamom a bit strong, so I mix it further with the regular stuff, and make it inauthentically with a filter. Sudanese coffee is made with ground ginger: I tried it for a while but couldn't get used to the heat of the spice. Somali coffee uses a milder blend of several spices, and tastes like Christmas. It's a bit like the "spiced chai" you get in some upmarket teashops - very pleasant and gives you a sort of glow, but probably a little rich to drink every day. My Greek ex-flatmate bequeathed me one of her brikis when she moved to Berlin, and taught me how to use it: I'm not sure if I remembered exactly, but I put a teaspoon of Bravo Greek coffee in, add water up to the line and dangle it over the gas until it froths up. The froth is called "kalmaki" [?], it's good to have a lot of it and if you let it froth several times that sometimes helps. (The other useful Greek word I learnt was "papara", which designates the action of soaking up the olive oil left on your plate with your pitta bread!) I make Greek coffee when I've run out of milk or when I want the stronger, earthier taste of it compared to filter coffee; now the briki has competition from the Gaggia espresso machine sitting in the corner.
Then there are the yoghurt drinks: Al-Abbas has several varieties of lassi (mango, cherry etc), which I used to love because of the thickness and sweetness, but thinner, saltier versions are appealing more to me these days. The Turkish equivalent is called "ayran", and has a little salt and I think a touch of cumin as well; it's delicious with almost any Middle-Eastern or Indian food. In Iran they have a sourer and surprisingly fizzy version, which I can only describe as yoghurt champagne - the taste really is almost identical! It's made by the excellent firm Mahan Foods, who supply Persian ingredients to a number of the shops on the Uxbridge Road. They just label it as "yoghurt drink", but according to Margaret Shaida it's called "doogh", and is (like most Persian comestibles) the origin of all the other versions to be found across India and the Middle East. In fact she quotes a travel writer of 1818 according to whom "the antiquity of this drink is so great that Plutarch mentions it as part of the ceremony at the consecration of the Persian kings"! The best mass-produced version is apparently made with aerated mineral water from a spring some 70 miles north-east of Tehran, and is known as "doogh Abali".
When it comes to juice the alternatives multiply to a point where one genuinely wonders if it's any longer possible to try every variety and combination that's available round here. There are some truly bizarre ones: cactus juice is, as you might expect, thick and green, and actually has quite a nice flavour; guanabana or soursop (made by Rubicon, who specialise in exotic fruit juices) was pleasant if not especially memorable; aloe vera, a plant better known for its dermatological value, can be bought as a drink in cans in Shepherd's Bush Market, but I really wouldn't recommend it - the texture is something like tapioca pudding! Tamarind juice also comes in cans; I wish someone would do a carton version, it's beautiful. (You can also get sweet tamarinds in boxes, they've got the same sweet-sour flavour - and are good for the digestion!)
Pomegranate juice is now widely available thanks to the cleverly-named brand "pomegreat": it's not much different from cranberry, perhaps slightly woodier but basically red, sour, and decidedly refreshing on a hot day. Sour cherry juice belongs in the same category: according to my Italian flatmate, whose mamma used to make it, it's produced by boiling the stones rather than pulping the flesh. You can also mix it with banana juice to make a very balanced and visually attractive mix - it looks a bit like raspberry ripple icecream - which in German cafes is called a "KiBa" (standing, according to the German system of abbreviation, for "Kirsch-Banane"). I'm trying to find another similar combination involving apricot juice. Rosehip juice provides another mysterious point of overlap between English and Middle Eastern/Persian ingredients (Margaret Shaida's book lists many more examples), as my mum remembers rosehip syrup, which the juice is presumably a dilution of, as being a common medicinal drink back in 50s Britain. Mango juice isn't quite as wonderful as fresh mangoes of course (fresh, sweet Pakistani honey mangoes and sharp Lebanese yoghurt make a terrific basis for a smoothie), but it can still be great, although guava I reckon beats it - "Enjoy" juices make a guava juice with such a delicate flavour it's hard to believe it comes out of a carton. They also make good carrot and orange, although the Uxbridge Road cafes (such as "Ramadan Juices") can make it fresh. The brilliant Syrian restaurant Abu Zaad on the corner of Lime Grove makes two juices that have to be tried: an addictive lemon and mint (which can be reproduced at home quite easily) and a mixed "special", where the glass is divided into pockets of different fruits.
As for tea, a bundle of fresh mint, about half a glass of sugar and a few spoonfuls of green tea thrown together in a pot gives you the most refreshing tea ever invented, Moroccan mint tea, best drunk with baklava, a bubbling shisha and a slow game of chess on a Saturday afternoon... Hibiscus flowers are cheap and make a delicate pink herbal tea. When I'm feeling up to it I occasionally make a ferociously bitter Caribbean brew called cerassie, which is supposed to cleanse the blood and give a "healthier, fitter and stronger body"! Anything to avoid sit-ups...
In the sequel to this post I'll talk about cheese, kebabs, vegetables (stuffed and non-stuffed), and other effortless lunchtime pickings of the legendary Uxbridge Road.
I've just come back from shopping on the Uxbridge Road and made myself a spot of lunch. It consisted of: salad with frizzy lettuce, a wholemeal pitta, Iranian rice and split-pea dumplings, Lebanese foul moudammas and a stuffed aubergine. To drink, a glass of Turkish rose-hip syrup diluted with water and apple juice. If one shops frequently at the great Shepherd's Bush grocery emporium Al-Abbas, or any of the smaller Middle Eastern shops nearby, this sort of thing quickly becomes normal. I'm struggling to think of the last time I made myself a regular English ham sandwich or cheese-on-toast. In fact if I carry on living here, even the last time I cut a slice of bread off a loaf or put knife to butter will soon appear a distant memory. The crumpets of my childhood seem almost stale beside a tray of golden baklava, the toothsome filo pastry laden with nuts and filled to oozing point with its perfumed sap of honey and rosewater. What would a salad be without chunks of feta or olives? Why melt cheddar when you can fry halloumi? With such a bounty of spices to prepare lamb or chicken, one could even forget that there are no sausages. (Eating the Muslim beef substitute ones is possibly the only unqualified culinary error I've committed, although even there I might have just been unlucky.) My flatmates must have some responsibility for the change in my diet too, since I lived for six months with two Greeks and am now sharing with an Italian. I never realised olive oil could be this good - not to mention the home-made goat's cheese, fried calves' spleens and so on...
So here is what I've tried so far: this will take more than one post, so I've decided to devote this one to beverages. Starting with coffee: the Lebanese/Syrian variety with ground cardamom is my usual morning cup. The Hamwi brand comes mixed in about four different proportions of coffee to cardamom, up to one quarter cardamom - even with the weaker ones I find the cardamom a bit strong, so I mix it further with the regular stuff, and make it inauthentically with a filter. Sudanese coffee is made with ground ginger: I tried it for a while but couldn't get used to the heat of the spice. Somali coffee uses a milder blend of several spices, and tastes like Christmas. It's a bit like the "spiced chai" you get in some upmarket teashops - very pleasant and gives you a sort of glow, but probably a little rich to drink every day. My Greek ex-flatmate bequeathed me one of her brikis when she moved to Berlin, and taught me how to use it: I'm not sure if I remembered exactly, but I put a teaspoon of Bravo Greek coffee in, add water up to the line and dangle it over the gas until it froths up. The froth is called "kalmaki" [?], it's good to have a lot of it and if you let it froth several times that sometimes helps. (The other useful Greek word I learnt was "papara", which designates the action of soaking up the olive oil left on your plate with your pitta bread!) I make Greek coffee when I've run out of milk or when I want the stronger, earthier taste of it compared to filter coffee; now the briki has competition from the Gaggia espresso machine sitting in the corner.
Then there are the yoghurt drinks: Al-Abbas has several varieties of lassi (mango, cherry etc), which I used to love because of the thickness and sweetness, but thinner, saltier versions are appealing more to me these days. The Turkish equivalent is called "ayran", and has a little salt and I think a touch of cumin as well; it's delicious with almost any Middle-Eastern or Indian food. In Iran they have a sourer and surprisingly fizzy version, which I can only describe as yoghurt champagne - the taste really is almost identical! It's made by the excellent firm Mahan Foods, who supply Persian ingredients to a number of the shops on the Uxbridge Road. They just label it as "yoghurt drink", but according to Margaret Shaida it's called "doogh", and is (like most Persian comestibles) the origin of all the other versions to be found across India and the Middle East. In fact she quotes a travel writer of 1818 according to whom "the antiquity of this drink is so great that Plutarch mentions it as part of the ceremony at the consecration of the Persian kings"! The best mass-produced version is apparently made with aerated mineral water from a spring some 70 miles north-east of Tehran, and is known as "doogh Abali".
When it comes to juice the alternatives multiply to a point where one genuinely wonders if it's any longer possible to try every variety and combination that's available round here. There are some truly bizarre ones: cactus juice is, as you might expect, thick and green, and actually has quite a nice flavour; guanabana or soursop (made by Rubicon, who specialise in exotic fruit juices) was pleasant if not especially memorable; aloe vera, a plant better known for its dermatological value, can be bought as a drink in cans in Shepherd's Bush Market, but I really wouldn't recommend it - the texture is something like tapioca pudding! Tamarind juice also comes in cans; I wish someone would do a carton version, it's beautiful. (You can also get sweet tamarinds in boxes, they've got the same sweet-sour flavour - and are good for the digestion!)
Pomegranate juice is now widely available thanks to the cleverly-named brand "pomegreat": it's not much different from cranberry, perhaps slightly woodier but basically red, sour, and decidedly refreshing on a hot day. Sour cherry juice belongs in the same category: according to my Italian flatmate, whose mamma used to make it, it's produced by boiling the stones rather than pulping the flesh. You can also mix it with banana juice to make a very balanced and visually attractive mix - it looks a bit like raspberry ripple icecream - which in German cafes is called a "KiBa" (standing, according to the German system of abbreviation, for "Kirsch-Banane"). I'm trying to find another similar combination involving apricot juice. Rosehip juice provides another mysterious point of overlap between English and Middle Eastern/Persian ingredients (Margaret Shaida's book lists many more examples), as my mum remembers rosehip syrup, which the juice is presumably a dilution of, as being a common medicinal drink back in 50s Britain. Mango juice isn't quite as wonderful as fresh mangoes of course (fresh, sweet Pakistani honey mangoes and sharp Lebanese yoghurt make a terrific basis for a smoothie), but it can still be great, although guava I reckon beats it - "Enjoy" juices make a guava juice with such a delicate flavour it's hard to believe it comes out of a carton. They also make good carrot and orange, although the Uxbridge Road cafes (such as "Ramadan Juices") can make it fresh. The brilliant Syrian restaurant Abu Zaad on the corner of Lime Grove makes two juices that have to be tried: an addictive lemon and mint (which can be reproduced at home quite easily) and a mixed "special", where the glass is divided into pockets of different fruits.
As for tea, a bundle of fresh mint, about half a glass of sugar and a few spoonfuls of green tea thrown together in a pot gives you the most refreshing tea ever invented, Moroccan mint tea, best drunk with baklava, a bubbling shisha and a slow game of chess on a Saturday afternoon... Hibiscus flowers are cheap and make a delicate pink herbal tea. When I'm feeling up to it I occasionally make a ferociously bitter Caribbean brew called cerassie, which is supposed to cleanse the blood and give a "healthier, fitter and stronger body"! Anything to avoid sit-ups...
In the sequel to this post I'll talk about cheese, kebabs, vegetables (stuffed and non-stuffed), and other effortless lunchtime pickings of the legendary Uxbridge Road.
Wednesday, 23 May 2007
Virtue and openness in "The Life of Others"
Saw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen the other evening.
Das Leben der Anderen ("The Life of Others") is too secure, too polished a movie for me to criticise on the aesthetic level. It shows you, like a good play (perhaps one by its playwright hero), how a powerful storyline makes pretty much everything else subordinate to it - acting, images, words, music, and the rest. So for once I have to climb off my aesthetic hobbyhorse - it may not be the last time - and talk about the ethical content that in this film simply cannot be ignored. (I'll leave it to my German friends to answer the tricky question of whether that content was historically realistic.)
The plot turns on the points of intersection between politics and human morality, in particular the questions - how far should one go in supporting one's political beliefs, and when is it right to betray one's own side? One could merely say that immediate human or moral decisions end up dictating the answer to both questions, first for the characters and then for the nation as whole, when belief in the total political project of the GDR collapses and the joy and hopes of millions of individuals have free rein once more. The message of the film's last scene (Dreyman's personal dedication "in gratitude") does seem to be that such decisions and feelings are what count - not what you believe in or which side you are on. But to leave it at that would be too simple. It is a true, but relatively easy, point to make, to say that ideologues often lack a human side, that abstract political ideals are dangerous when they are followed with disregard for one's sympathetic instincts. And it is easy to make it in order to justify a lack of interest in politics.
This is not what "The Life of Others" does. Indeed its central characters, the Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler and the playwright Georg Dreyman on whom he spys, both have high political ideals, and distinguish themselves from the real villains of the piece - Wiesler's superior Grubitz and the Kulturminister Hempf - precisely because they have them. They are not supporting the system hypocritically for personal gain, whether sexual or careerist - they believe in what it ultimately stands for, while at the same time they desire to lead a human and morally good life. (This is signalled clearly by their common enjoyment of Brecht; a deeply humane poet but also a deeply political one, who himself returned out of American exile to the GDR after the Second World War out of loyalty to his communist ideals.) If the choice between altruism and selfishness on a personal level was the only basic one here, it would be impossible to understand the (political) motive behind the plot's nouement, Dreyman's conspiracy to publish an article on the East German suicide rate in the West German magazine Der Spiegel. The answer to the question, when is it right to betray one's own side? does not have to be - when politics matters less than people. It could just as easily be - when the people on one's "own side" are betraying their own political responsibilities. The scene between Dreyman and Hempf in the wings of the theatre (after the Wende) shows this: Dreyman despises Hempf because he has sacrificed the dignity of his political calling for mere lust. (His parting shot is, "Dass Leute wie Sie unser Land wirklich gefuehrt haben" - "[to think] that people like you actually governed our country".)
The courage that the characters need for the film's moral turning-points (Dreyman's volunteering to write the article; Wiesler's stealing of the typewriter to protect him) is partly reliant on political belief, on the belief that something more than oneself and one's immediate circle of friends might matter (that "the life of others" matters). This courage is a part of moral virtue - a part one needs in order to be able to make the ethically right choice. (Courage was indeed at the centre of virtue back in Homeric times, before the philosophical concept of "ethics" was even invented.) Yet it is not, I would argue, the only part. Many reviewers have commented on Dreyman's moral stature, compared to Wiesler, of which the spy steadily becomes conscious in a kind of slow redemption as he observes the former's everyday life. Dreyman really is the "good man", to whom the title of the piano sonata he is given by the theatre director Jerske refers. Why is he so obviously good?
Our and Wiesler's sensation of this (and perhaps it is worth stressing that word "sensation", to emphasise that ethics exists for us through feelings and not merely through reasoned judgements) cannot be because of the courage to act, which he will only manifest later. Early on, as it happens, Dreyman is upbraided by a more actively dissident friend at his party for fence-sitting; but although we feel his helplessness, this does not destroy our confidence in his virtue. What whispers to us the hints of this confidence, when we compare his life to Wiesler's, is its spontaneous quality, its openness. The first we see of him is a spontaneous kickabout in the street with a group of children as he returns home. Wiesler, by contrast, has an iron routine: even sex happens by appointment. It is paradoxically his surveillance of Dreyman, the central piece of malevolence in his politically-motivated career, that produces in him an openness to the extra-political dimension of life, above all to moral beauty. His courage to act is founded on that newly discovered openness, and is admirable, I think, chiefly because of it. Dreyman's own courage to act, to argue analogously, derives from his openness to the criticisms of his dissident friends, and even more from the emotional openness - the openness to pain - of his grief for one of them, Albert Jerske.
"Openness" here means a lot of things. It is much more than the colloquial meaning of being "frank" or "free and easy" with one's views, one's emotions, one's social or even sexual intercourse (as in an "open" relationship). One can be that, and be quite without the sensitivity and responsiveness which are closer to what I mean by openness. It could be called sympathy - but that only captures one side of it; sympathy implies a human bond, and would not include the moments of freedom - of release from bonds - in Dreyman's behaviour and demeanour. One could also call it innocence: Dreyman has this quality throughout the film.
I'm tempted in fact to expand it altogether beyond the realm of ethics, conceived as the study of right action (what in analytic philosophy is called "deontology", the study of duty), and see it as a fundamentally desirable relationship to the world in many spheres at once. The sphere of knowledge and reason, for instance: intellectually we should strive to be open, which means to doubt, to criticise (oneself above all), and to question (but in the sense of quest-ing or searching towards something even more than the polemic sense of a challenge to authority). Aesthetically, in terms of experience, openness is just as important; here it is a fascinated, self-renewing attention to the world, like that of the poet, that does not limit itself through pre-given concepts and priorities. And morally too, such prejudices (above all relating to definitions of identity or status) are habitually set aside by the genuinely open person in his or her dealings with others.
On a national note, I would like to think fondly that the English distrust of "causes" and ideology (I recall the astonishment of a Greek communist friend when I told him that in English "ideology" had for most people a negative meaning) is proof that the English are after all more open than our famous insularity and xenophobia suggest. The lack of party-feeling in the great English essayists, Browne, Addison, and Lamb, or the skeptical, empirical slant of our philosophical tradition (Hume), the universal sympathy of Shakespeare, and the innocent wonder at experience of Wordsworth - all of these (selective examples, of course) are in some fashion testament to a native understanding of the virtue of "openness". Keats even provided a definition of it in his famous idea of "negative capability". - At the same time, openness is of course by its very essence not something to be en-closed in national boundaries.
To return to the specific theme of morality, the inevitable concluding question for the arguments I have been pursuing must be: How can one reconcile the resolute courage to act morally (which I connected with beliefs, ideals, and active political engagement) with this strangely passive and doubtful quality of openness, which feels like a suspension and not a resolution? I've suggested that openness forms the basis for truly moral action, as otherwise one's acts have from the beginning only a limited and partisan significance. But for those acts to be decisive, won't some of the free potentiality of openness be renounced?
Given the difficulty of the question and the length of this entry, the most appropriate thing I can do is leave that question open; and hope that the courage to answer it will come to me at some later date.
Monday, 21 May 2007
Richard Linklater
Richard Linklater is one of my favourite filmmakers. I was reminded recently by a TV screening of his animated feature Waking Life of how original his subjects and style are, just as I was frustrated that the development of these has been interrupted again by a “mainstream” feature (Fast Food Nation, released a few weeks ago). So this piece is in praise of his genuinely independent films (or those of them I’ve seen).
The films of Richard Linklater fascinate me. In them I find peculiar tensions I have not found elsewhere. Between their obvious artfulness and what they lack in conventional craft (sutured narratives, purposeful dialogue, climax). More than this, the tension of subject with generic ambition: tragedies and epiphanies play out among students, drifters, the unemployed, people moreover who Linklater has taken no trouble to idealize or round out, but whose banalities and eccentricities are taken straight from the everyday. It would be interesting to compare him to Jim Jarmusch, on the face of it a similar director, whose self-conscious, indirect playfulness (watch Coffee and Cigarettes) conceals a very direct empathetic interest in his characters. (I’m thinking of Night on Earth especially.) Both elements are lacking in Linklater, whose indirectness is contemplative and not playful, and who is interested in human situations (the last day of school, the chance romantic encounter abroad), and ideas and possibilities, rather than characters as such. The camera waits for these to show themselves – in this Linklater remains the classic documentary director, the interviewer; but he knows how to nuance his presentation in the most subtle ways, and to give it forms resonant with historical meaning. Because of his politically activist, anti-establishment “agenda” (which comprises a philosophical justification of "slacking" quite in the tradition of Bertrand Russell's superb and cogent In Praise of Idleness) it wouldn’t naturally occur to one to look for such nuances, yet they are what I am most of all interested in here. (In this I'm taking a different tack from Ben Lewis, whose Channel 4 film a few years ago, "St. Richard of Austin", set out to unravel the messages and meanings he thought must underly Linklater's work. He more or less failed, which didn't stop the resulting documentary being very interesting - but does show the limits of that kind of interpretation.)
A potent set of meanings emerges from the unity of time which repeatedly characterises these films. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Tape, and Before Sunset all take place within 24 hours (or considerably less in the case of the last two). In the case of Tape, in some ways the most atypical of Linklater’s films, the other classical “unities” are obeyed too, and the effect is positively Greek in its concentration. It remains confined to a motel room and two characters arguing, with a third (the girl they are arguing about) arriving half-way through. The tension is carefully increased, the dialogue is guarded, the use of the single, eponymous prop a stroke of pure theatre. But the intention is not, as in classical theatre, to impress the weight of fateful reality on the audience, but to make them doubt what they are being shown and told. The perspectivist paradox of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (did a rape take place? whose account can be trusted?) is heightened by the realist implications of recorded media. Not only the audio tape of the crime, but the video on which the film itself is shot (using clumsy but “true” panning shots at numerous points in preference to untrustworthy edits) imply presence, objectivity, truth. Yet the whole, true story is withheld from us, leaving only the claims of the characters themselves.
Before Sunrise is also a classical, temporally unified tale about sex (and love), although otherwise utterly different from Tape. A fleeting student romance is given the pathos and dignity of Dido and Aeneas’ – not my reference but Linklater’s, signalled during the credit sequence by the overture to Purcell’s opera. (Linklater’s musical editing is superb. He opens from a black screen during the slow introduction onto a shot of the track speeding away underneath the train that carries the to-be-lovers to Vienna, coinciding with the fugal Allegro: the cut is utterly compelling.) Other eighteenth-century musical excerpts give the drama an antique gravity that its sequel lacked: the lovers dance on the street at dawn to a harpsichordist playing the twenty-fifth – the bleakest, the most grief-stricken – of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and another Bach slow movement arches over the intensely moving final montage sequence, showing the places in Vienna the two have wandered through, talked in, made love in, in the cold light of morning (an old woman shuffling past the empty bottle and discarded wineglasses on the park lawn…).
Otherwise, unity of time is not interpreted as unity of story, but in a more open-ended, quasi-Romantic fashion. The time of the film is a frame, flung down arbitrarily over an area of life rather like one of those wire squares I remember throwing around on school biology field trips, to capture a finite segment of the local flora. Linklater’s flora is typically the oddball population of his home town, Austin, Texas, as in Slacker and Waking Life. The camera bounces pinball-style (pinball being another favourite Linklater image) from one conversation to another, neatly propelled (in Slacker) from dawn to dusk through the town by the serial encounters of its denizens, drinking, driving, (conspiracy-)theorizing. Conversations, especially speculative ones, are of central importance (as in the “philosophical” novels of Thomas Love Peacock). Linklater’s characters are extremely loquacious, and he loves to show the joy that springs from perpetuating interminable dialogues, free of all purpose and power. Talk is fascinating because it can take one anywhere, it is a continuous dérive or drift (the watchword of the Situationists, and the spirit of Godard, Rohmer, Eustache, Linklater’s French forebears), just like the movement of these characters or the camera that follows them. It is extravagant, pretentious, it fails to establish anything or “move the discussion on” (like a police officer!); but it is never mindless filling of empty space either, it knows very well the meaning of silence. It is after all, always referring to moments of silence and stillness – to dreams (Waking Life), to love (Before Sunset), to nature (the final scenes of Slacker and Dazed and Confused) – relating them with unconcealed excitement. (I find that very American, somehow! the excited refusal to concede ineffability to anything.) Sometimes, briefly, in the pauses between scenes of dialogue, those moments of stillness are echoed in the present tense – the camera lingers, refuses to cut, and makes one aware for just a second of the dumb mystery of the place we find ourselves in. In such moments too, the souls of the characters seem retrospectively to find their true weight, as Maeterlinck said in his great essay on silence (in Le trésor des humbles) “like gold and silver are weighed in water, and the words we utter have only their sense by grace of the silence in which they are bathed”. The achievement of Linklater’s style is that (as Maeterlinck also demanded) it bears this weight so lightly, in free, gentle, intimate rhythms, without resort to crushing dramatics or the apparatus of convention. I’m looking forward to the next film in which he will push this style on.
Saturday, 28 April 2007
American novels
These were my reactions to four quite different American novels read as I travelled across the States in May of last year.
Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is a fine work of literature. I feel quite confident in this opinion, despite having come across many derogatory references to it or its author, and few that claim any serious classic status for it. Although the descriptions are journalistically detailed, and utterly specific to a certain (now historical) time and place - I'm glad at least to have made the acquaintance of New York before starting in on it - the satire is not dated at all. On the contrary, it is on a universal level, quite worthy of the Roman satirists or of Schiller's definitions of the genre. This is a function of the essential simplicity of the book's plot: for whatever subplots Wolfe is spinning through the sultry Manhattan streets, we remain planted in the expensive patent leather shoes of his anti-hero Sherman McCoy, facing his inexorable downfall. There are no twists and no buffoonery: we are made to share his perspective and his horrible, pit-of-the-stomach sensation (over hundreds of pages) - "no, no, this is all a terrible mistake". In this sense the novel possesses more of a kinship to tragedy than to to the crime thriller - we are not being thrilled, we are being sickened. And yet even while looking through Sherman's eyes and feeling his self-pity, we know that the situation is not tragic (it is simply not serious enough: Sherman is not going to lose his life, and by the end of the book he seems to have gained more of a genuine purpose in it than he had to begin with). It is blackly comic; and Sherman is a dupe and a self-deluding fool, by the time of his final abasement a figure of pure slapstick mockery. The chasm between these two perspectives is the true measure of the book's understanding of human nature.
To take only one of the subtler examples: Wolfe depicts his hero at two high-society cocktail parties hosted by friends of his wife. At the first he is virtually ignored, made to feel small and dull: he cannot understand the treatment he receives, and why the other guests do not recognise him as a man of power, a financial "Master of the Universe". At the second, however, which occurs after news of Sherman's involvement in a hit-and-run incident in the Bronx has hit the papers, he is feted, the hostess and assembled dignitaries hang on his lips, their eyes gleaming with wonder and curiosity. Sherman finds it even harder to figure out what is going on here than he did at the first party. In the taxi home his puzzlement spills over, he tries to get some kind of explanation out of his wife - and receives nothing but a pitying shake of the head in reply, with the answer "Sherman, you're too easily pleased". Pleased with what, then? With the attention he has been given, the apparent social "success". But he can only take pleasure in that because he is so blinded by vanity as to think that the other guests are actually responding to him as a person, an individual with his own profound worth - which they recognise. Doubt plagues him because he cannot understand why they should be according him this recognition now, with all the scandal surrounding his name, and not when his achievement was still untarnished. Yet this doubt does not disturb in the least the innocence of his vanity, his assumption that his self-worth is what is at stake in such a scenario. (That is the awful, snakelike truth of this scene, that vanity and innocence pair perfectly with one another, in adulthood just as once in early childhood.)
The natural corollary of his wife's rebuke - that he can be "easily pleased" because he is shallow - is thus in one important sense untrue. Sherman is far more concerned to understand and to be understood at a deep level than anyone else at the soiree: the problem is that the other guests are shallow. They don't see anything of Sherman's character at all, either as he wishfully imagines it or as it really is (a mass of petty vanities: Wolfe demonstrates with clinical precision, the scalpel of prose slitting and probing a repulsively decayed yet still familiar psychology, how a man's life can be spent in almost every minute worrying about his self-respect). All that attracts them to him is the wish to hear the latest gossip from the horse's mouth, and to indulge a little vicarious nostalgie de la boue. The sadness of his wife's shake of the head finally symbolises, for me, this truth: what good would it even do Sherman if he saw what was happening? Why renounce the comforting illusions of vanity, if it merely permits one to fraternize with superficial and cynical people in the full knowledge of how superficial and cynical they are? Would the shock of that knowledge not make Sherman himself so cynical that any chance of redeeming such a situation, such a life, would be lost?
While Wolfe shows how minute observation of the details of a particular time and place can enhance writing's universal import as well as its satiric punch, the beginning of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence made me wonder if Wharton was not too close to the society she describes. She lavishes impressive powers of recall some thirty years after the fact (one is reminded of Proust!) on the fashions, turns of phrase and social customs of people one cannot to begin with feel any sympathy towards, so taken up are they by the strangely dutiful (and titularly "innocent") vanities of late-nineteenth-century New York. Characters who say things like "Oh my dear, how can you possibly countenance someone who wore black at their coming-out?" make you roll your eyes in disbelief. Yet the overall tone is not satirical, or at least ceases to be after one of the most effective "flash-forwards" probably ever written in a novel. The hero Archer has married, decided to renounce his great love the Countess Olenska, and raised children happily with his dignified but blinkered wife. The age in which her views and values seemed so firm, so self-evident has slipped quietly into the past, even before she herself dies as one of its last representatives - and Archer, who never represented it, but who has nonetheless defined the course of his life by an act thoroughly typical of its buttoned-up moral code, is invited by his son to accompany him to Paris. There, of course, Ellen Olenska still lives, the Count now dead, nothing standing in the way of a meeting and re-awakening of their love - and how does Wharton end the book? With a masterstroke, one of the most shattering endings I can remember reading; one unexpected but at the same time (as soon as one reflects on it) inevitable. For after all how could the lovers' meeting be played in a fashion that would do justice to the expectations, longings and frustration of two lifetimes?
One solution would have been to cut the novel short with Archer waiting, poised on the threshold. This I am sure Wharton could have managed well and movingly, but there is still something dissatisfying about it, not only because it's a "trick" that's often been used, but because it would end on a note of prospection, when the mood of the final section and of the novel as a whole is one of retrospection. So instead Archer lets his son go in ahead to meet Ellen and the assembled party, promising he will follow - and he never does. Seated on a bench on the other side of the street, he looks up to the brightly-lit windows of Ellen's apartment in the deepening dusk, and when the shutters are finally drawn down by the servants he returns alone to his hotel. Wharton shares little or nothing of what is going through his head, but she does not need to: the poignancy and dignity of the act are enough. With such a final image one can easily forgive Wharton that her style is not as "refined" as Henry James', or that the earlier part of the book had its longueurs and lapses into romantic cliche.
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Don DeLillo's Underworld portrayed the same America, I concluded after finishing them; even if Underworld is seven times the length of the Pynchon and in quite a different style. Bigger doesn't mean better: Pynchon's novel is the more successful for me, and more convincing in its imaginative delineation of the modern American "frontier", California. I forget the book's date, but it startled me: I had expected it to be twenty years later. All the themes of the American collective unconscious are there: motels, TV, freeways, shrinks, shootings, garbage, kitsch, paranoid hermeneutics, underground networks of conspirators, and the sense that in a completely interconnected universe "every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important" (that's E. M. Forster, quoted by Zadie Smith in an epigraph to White Teeth, but it's a very American-flavoured idea). In this last symptom of modernity lies a particularly crucial difference from the bourgeois world of experience of nineteenth-century Europe, essentially not much changed in 50s America. If you read Balzac or Flaubert's minute descriptions of bourgeois interiors you couldn't exactly maintain they thought trifles unimportant; but those details contain no promise of redemption, they merely confirm the deadlocked pattern of a "respectable" existence which can only be broken by a major catastrophe or by crime (adultery, suicide). In the networked world, freed from respectable isolation by automobiles and the media, one can find genuine meaning in the smallest observed thing, such as the logo on a postage stamp, and experience epiphanies at the most unpromising of moments, such as driving down a freeway (both of these prompt illuminations for Pynchon's heroine Oedipa Maas).
The excellence of Pynchon's book lies in spotting this era-defining change in consciousness without overplaying it: The Crying of Lot 49 remains short, light, disorientingly inventive, and comic to the core. Underworld, however, falls into the trap inherent in any attempt to conjure with "epiphanies". DeLillo's style portentously expects an epiphany at every juncture, and given how many junctures (not to mention disjunctures) there are in the jigsaw-puzzle plot, this makes for a superfluity of irritatingly "significant" moments. Not only the disconnections in the narrative, jumping back and forth from coast to coast and decade to decade, but the disconnections of DeLillo's sentences seem to want to enforce a plenitude of sensation and significance at every point. He writes very beautifully, there's no doubt of that. Often the prose is as densely worked, the words as carefully chosen as poetry, and sustaining that level of attention to the world and words over 800 pages is pretty miraculous. But also close to monotonous - because the intensity never slips, even as the tone and syntax are subjected to constant variation.
DeLillo's ambition in terms of theme causes similar problems. His "Great Post-War American Novel" must include: baseball (check) - B52s (check) - the Cuban missile crisis (check) - immigrants (check) - AIDS (check) - civil rights marchers (check) - teenagers, graffiti, urban deprivation, casual sex, Frank Sinatra, Vietnam protests, housewives making Jell-O, Sputnik, serial killers, waste disposal, TV replays, condoms, heroin, Arizona deserts, Russian nuclear tests, road trips, conceptual art and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (check, check, check, check...!). This is not quite as indiscriminate a list as it sounds: there's a reason why Korea and Vietnam don't really feature, for instance, which is that DeLillo clearly wants to keep the Cold War cold, stressing the dark potential of the symbolic (Sputnik or the first Soviet bomb tests) rather than the messy, blazing, meaningless realities of actual combat or its traumatic aftermath. But despite some degree of selection the list of themes touched on sounds suspiciously like the contents page from a twentieth-century history textbook (Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, for example). In the weakest section of the novel, subtitled "Selected fragments public and private in the 1950s and 1960s", DeLillo abandons his plot(s) to fill in 150 pages with a kind of free empathetic chronicle of all the "big stories" he hasn't managed to cover so far. It's almost as if he has deliberately covered all the historical bases so as to give himself the best possible shot at the title "Best American Novel of the 20th Century" - which he only narrowly missed in a New York Times Book Review critics' poll a year ago (Underworld came second to Toni Morrison's Beloved). Martin Amis in fact took DeLillo to task for the novel's looseness and "disparate" quality; yet it could only sound like a weak caveat beside its manifest skill, ambition, and sheer size.
I feel odd making these criticisms, because (as will unavoidably emerge in any future postings to this blog on critical topics) I don't find unity, especially narrative unity, an important aesthetic criterion; I like fragmentary forms, and enjoy skilled poetic craftsmanship on a local level more than anything. Moreover, much of my experience has been guided by the search for epiphanies of one sort or another (not that there's anything special in that). In these respects, Underworld ought to be a favourite book of mine. But - dazzling, multi-layered work though it is - it doesn't have the sustaining warmth that I need from a writer of fiction, and remains in the end strangely loveless and lustless, as if the desire for vision, stretched taught over the frame of every line, had finally shrivelled and gone slack. The central character, Nick Shay, looks back from the mod-con, cleaned-up, west-coast lifestyle he now leads to his gritty, driven, improvised existence as a teenager on the streets of New York, and feels a kind of regret. So cool and unemotional has he been, though - less a character than a perceiving machine to drive the aesthetic energy of DeLillo's sentences - that by this stage we find it hard to sympathise with the feelings DeLillo wants to claim for him. For a real literary epiphany, one might conclude, insight alone is not enough: it must occur in a human context, one that is after all built largely by the conventional apparatus of character and dramatic movement that modernism wished to escape from.
Monday, 23 April 2007
Sicily in the spring
I've just returned from a week-long holiday in Sicily – four days in Syracuse (Siracusa) and three in Palermo – and thought I would record some impressions.
Studying the Blue Guide to Sicily on the plane already gave me an impression of the island as offering almost a crash course in architectural history. (The book itself, like a lot of older guidebooks, is rich in detail and judgement about art and architecture, but deals with restaurants and transport in a few throwaway sentences; very different from the Lonely Planets and Rough Guides our generation has got used to!) Sicily has examples of every style from Doric temples to Baroque, and even some good modern design (the Venetian Carlo Scarpa, an unfairly talented designer who could sketch with both hands simultaneously, left his distinguished mark on the Palazzo Abbatis in Palermo). What I wasn’t quite prepared for was the impact of these styles being layered on top of or mixed up with each other. The duomo in Syracuse is a strange architectural palimpsest: to see the columns of a Greek temple emerging from the wall of a Romanesque church is a truly uncanny experience, not at all a successfully “unified” one of course, but a sort of perceptual flicker between feeling oneself loosely surrounded by spaced rows of ancient columns and tightly bound in by thick Norman walls. The façade is Baroque, recently restored to gleaming splendour at the centre of the main piazza. Some examples of this eclecticism, on the other hand, verge on the nauseating: La Martorana in Palermo had many of its Byzantine mosaics obliterated and replaced by Baroque fresco, styles that really have nothing in common with one another, and in juxtaposition produce a sort of fairground gaudiness.
Another effect of the passage of history could be felt in the texture of the stone used for many of the buildings and sculptures – the light, friable, originally volcanic tufa. It erodes easily and becomes “sunburnt”, so that the Baroque town of Noto, which is almost all built from it, is now after a few centuries almost the colour of apricots:
Studying the Blue Guide to Sicily on the plane already gave me an impression of the island as offering almost a crash course in architectural history. (The book itself, like a lot of older guidebooks, is rich in detail and judgement about art and architecture, but deals with restaurants and transport in a few throwaway sentences; very different from the Lonely Planets and Rough Guides our generation has got used to!) Sicily has examples of every style from Doric temples to Baroque, and even some good modern design (the Venetian Carlo Scarpa, an unfairly talented designer who could sketch with both hands simultaneously, left his distinguished mark on the Palazzo Abbatis in Palermo). What I wasn’t quite prepared for was the impact of these styles being layered on top of or mixed up with each other. The duomo in Syracuse is a strange architectural palimpsest: to see the columns of a Greek temple emerging from the wall of a Romanesque church is a truly uncanny experience, not at all a successfully “unified” one of course, but a sort of perceptual flicker between feeling oneself loosely surrounded by spaced rows of ancient columns and tightly bound in by thick Norman walls. The façade is Baroque, recently restored to gleaming splendour at the centre of the main piazza. Some examples of this eclecticism, on the other hand, verge on the nauseating: La Martorana in Palermo had many of its Byzantine mosaics obliterated and replaced by Baroque fresco, styles that really have nothing in common with one another, and in juxtaposition produce a sort of fairground gaudiness.
Another effect of the passage of history could be felt in the texture of the stone used for many of the buildings and sculptures – the light, friable, originally volcanic tufa. It erodes easily and becomes “sunburnt”, so that the Baroque town of Noto, which is almost all built from it, is now after a few centuries almost the colour of apricots:
Meanwhile the ornamentation on the facades – once perhaps as crisp and dazzling as some of the churches in Rome – has become soft and fuzzy, as if it had lain underwater or become overgrown with some organic substance. (This impression of calcification, of living growth and movement arrested yet preserved, is striking travelling through the landscape of central Sicily. Lampedusa in his great Sicilian novel The Leopard described it as "comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.") One bust in tufa of an old man that I saw in the archaeological museum in Syracuse had been dredged up from the bay, which can only have accentuated its boniness, the sunken cheeks and ridged brow. Of the more ancient of these sculptures scarcely anything of the form remains – the friezes from “Temple E” at Selinunte, now in the archaeological museum in Palermo, are decayed beyond recognition. The effect is haunting in conjunction with the knowledge that Selinunte itself (which I did not visit) was once one of the largest cities in the ancient world, a Greek colony with its own “acropolis” of five temples and a population of 100,000; it was (e)rased in three catastrophes, sackings by the Carthaginians and Romans and then an earthquake in the medieval period as coup de grace. The lust for utter destruction, apparently without reasoned or ideological motives, must be one of the most regrettable and incomprehensible things about the ancient world. One would love to know more about the lost cities of Tyre and Carthage (brutally sacked by Alexander and the Romans respectively), and the seafaring Phoenician civilisation that produced them, whose language was so similar to Hebrew that they were mutually intelligible and which left us the word “Bible” (the Greek root biblos is from the name of the Phoenician city Byblos, famous for its papyri).
Papyri were one of the many things on this trip that reminded me of the East, in this case of Egypt. Near the Fonte Aretusa (the subject of Greek myth and a Latin ode by Horace), with its clump of papyrus plants:
Papyri were one of the many things on this trip that reminded me of the East, in this case of Egypt. Near the Fonte Aretusa (the subject of Greek myth and a Latin ode by Horace), with its clump of papyrus plants:
we also found what looked uncannily like a banyan tree, with its aerial roots that drop down and fix themselves in the soil to form (given time) new “trunks”. (Calcutta’s botanical gardens have one of the largest examples in the world: it gives the impression of entering a small forest, and indeed the tree is so old and the secondary trunks so numerous that the original central stem has died away.) In fact it was not a banyan, but an originally Australian member of the same genus (Ficus microcarpa): in the Piazza Garibaldi in Palermo were two century-old exemplars. Their twisted branches look disturbingly animal, like muscles or tentacles:
Then there are the fruits: the loquats (Italian nespole), indigenous to China and already ripe in April in Sicily, with an acidic but sweet flavour, not at all bitter; the oranges, which were still bitter and unripe, at least when plucked from the tree; and the chinotto, also thought to be originally Chinese (hence the name), and available everywhere as a type of Fanta, which looks like Coca-Cola but is much more herby and interesting. Almonds are common, processed into milk as well as a very tasty granita, which may well have had a dash of almond liqueur when I tried it (although the owner of the gelateria wasn’t letting on).
The most intriguing example of eastern influence is by a long way the art of medieval Sicily. Here stylistic mixing is unquestionably successful on every level: the styles reflect the cultural, ethnic and religious diversity of the Norman kingdom that produced the great cathedral at Monreale near Palermo, as well as the many smaller churches and palazzi in Palermo itself. Many of these have a serene and dignified simplicity one would perhaps not associate with an eclectic approach:
Monreale is however a good deal less restrained. Inside a Romanesque structure, the iconic art of Byzantine mosaic, dazzling and affectingly naïve at the same time, crowns a dado striped with the elegant, aniconic, geometrical patterns of Arabic art. These are echoed in the columns of the cloister and burst out in the splendid exterior of the apse:
More subtle but also more daring was the geometrical sensibility I believed I could feel in a Sicilian painting of the later medieval era, the anonymous Triumph of Death in the Palazzo Abbatis. Across the swathe of collapsing figures down the right side of the picture the trapezoidal motif of the fountain at the top seems to be echoed in tiny details of drawing, from foreheads to eyelids to lips, all with delicately raised corners. And yet this fascination with abstract “lines of beauty” was present side-by-side with naturalistic, fully modelled and directly expressive figures of an almost Renaissance type. The composition as a whole does not “work” but this does not matter in the least: it is there, like a tapestry, entirely for the sake of the details.
Such a richness of styles and aesthetics made me curious about the culture which produced this artistic flourishing. So on my return I did a little reading, and discovered a historical personality of a cosmopolitan and enlightened cast of mind such as one simply doesn’t expect to meet with in the medieval era (if one isn’t a medievalist, I suppose). The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, stupor mundi (the astonishment of the world) and ruling much of it himself from Palermo, was half-German and half-Sicilian, combining a rough and energetic temperament with indefatigable curiosity about the arts and sciences. His education, which was eclectic and largely self-conducted due to political circumstances and the early death of his mother, took place in and was formed by Palermo in the late twelfth century, of which his early twentieth-century German biographer Ernst Kantorowicz gives a wonderfully poetic sketch:
“unsupervised, the eight-, nine-year-old boy roamed through the alleys, markets and gardens of the half-African capital at the foot of Mt Pellegrino, where a bewildering variety of peoples, religions and customs interpenetrated: mosques with their minarets and synagogues with their domes stood there next to Norman churches and cathedrals, that in turn were decorated with golden mosaics by Byzantine masters, and whose structure incorporated Greek columns in which Saracens had engraved the name of Allah in Kufic letters. Round about the city in the exotic gardens and vivaria of the Conca d’oro lay the summer palaces and fountains of the Norman kings that once so enraptured the Arabic poets, and in the markets the people in all their colourful variety went about their business: Normans, Italians, Saracens, Germans, Jews and Greeks. The youth depended on intercourse with all of these and soon learnt their customs and languages. Perhaps there for some time a wise imam might have taken over the direction of the youth’s education…we do not know.” (Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Munich 1961 [1927], pp. 30-1)
One should interpolate here that Kantorowicz, a member of the poetical circle of Stefan George, was much criticised by other historians for this sort of speculative description, however successful it was in conjuring up the “tone” of the period. What seems to be more generally accepted is that Frederick’s open-minded attitude and cultural and linguistic adaptability (he spoke half a dozen languages) had a great deal to do with his environment as an adolescent, for no other European monarch or kingdom of this era came close to it. The court he eventually established in Palermo included figures from many countries and areas of scholarship: Michael the Scot, an astronomer learned in Hebrew and Arabic, who was assisted by the Provencal Jew Jacob ben Anatoli in translating Aristotle; the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci, who introduced the modern system of Arabic numerals to Europe from Algeria; or the Italo-Byzantine poet John Grasso, who produced violent tragedies on classical Greek models. Frederick himself corresponded with Arabs and Jewish scholars in Spain, wrote a Latin treatise on falconry with some unusually accurate illustrations, and sponsored and allegedly contributed to the first school of Italian poetry, the “Sicilian school”, which fixed Italian as a literary language for the first time and coincidentally gave birth to the most prestigious European lyric form, the sonnet. (Given Dante’s acknowledged debt to Sicilian sources in his efforts to establish the dignity of the Italian vernacular, it seems rather ungrateful of him to cast Frederick into the sixth circle of his Inferno as an “Epicurean heretic”.)
Still more surprising was Frederick’s attitude to religion. He seems to have been more or less atheist according to many sources (one of which, quoted by Thomas Curtis van Cleve, lists his many talents and virtues, and concludes that he would have been a great Christian emperor – if he had only been Christian!), merely jovially sceptical according to others, and at all events tolerant and respectful of Judaic and Islamic tradition (the robe he wore at his coronation was embroidered in Kufic script). This emerged most strongly when he was called upon to do the duty of a medieval emperor and lead a crusade. The venture scarcely got off the ground before Frederick was excommunicated by the pope (twice!), thus nullifying the sacred purpose of the entire expedition. When he arrived at Jerusalem, accompanied by his Arab tutor and a small army containing Saracens alongside Christians, he spent five months in friendly negotiations and feasting with the Egyptian sultan in control of the city, Al-Kamil, reportedly enjoying hearing the call of the muezzin in the morning, and finally signed a truce by which he crowned himself “King of Jerusalem”. He then left and the city returned to Muslim control a few years afterwards. It was apparently the only “successful” crusade since the first – and considerably less bloody than any.
This cosmopolitanism went hand-in-hand with a rational and highly inquisitive attitude to knowledge: van Cleve notes that “it was [his] quality of cosmopolitanism, together with his intellectual honesty – his insistent search for truth as opposed to tradition – that was so clearly expressed in Frederick’s alleged remark: ‘One should accept as truth only that which is proved by the force of reason and by nature.’” (p. 305) Although many texts by Aristotle were translated (with their Arabic commentaries) at his court, he did not treat them as the quasi-infallible word of “The Philosopher” that they became for later Christian thinkers, but felt quite free to disagree with the Greek sage when he felt his own observations were superior, especially on his favourite topic of falconry.
One wonders why this episode in history has not received more attention, given the current debate about Islamic-Christian relations. (I could find hardly any literature devoted to it on the shelves of the major London bookshops, and David Abulafia’s soberly critical effort at debunking the Frederick “myth” is the only biography available via Amazon.) It seems to provide another strong example of how close contact between cultures and religions, even on an unequal and authoritarian basis (which Frederick’s rule was, after all), is not only socially viable but can foster many virtues: tolerance, intellectual curiosity and independence, and artistic inventiveness. Other examples would be the court of the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar in India, or late-twentieth-century New York: Norman Sicily would I think bear comparison with these.
I suppose I shouldn’t end an entry on Sicily without some mention of the Mafia, but to be honest, it didn’t really inform my experience of the trip to any great degree (in contrast to my brother, who’s at the age where it exercises enormous fascination, and imagined mafiosi around every corner). There were a few reminders of its continuing grip in Palermo: fly-posted stickers urging resistance to the pizzo (the “tax” or protection money shopkeepers pay), and a large iron monument near the harbour dedicated to “those fallen in the struggle against the Mafia” ( – one wondered how much bravery even the erection of the monument itself must have demanded). All that really came across was a certain aspect of the Sicilian temperament that I imagined as belonging to that way of life – an occasional tight-lipped, unforthcoming, almost owlish air to people (maybe here I’m merely recollecting the title of Leonardo Sciascia’s, the Sicilian crime novelist’s, most famous book, The Day of the Owl – but another story of his, Equal Danger, had some of this quality in its oblique style). On the other side, an almost childishly direct and naïve quality was equally evident, in the faces and animated conversations of pensioners on the bus to Monreale, in some of the art, or the ceramics with their bright colours and smiling suns – as if Sicily was after all a beamingly happy country, unafflicted by poverty, corruption and social ills. Perhaps that very contrast of temperaments is what is characteristically Sicilian. I would have to spend longer there to find out.
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