A little break...

Headed to points east for a conference and a couple of days of relaxation.  Be back soon.

Allowing the reader the unfamiliar feeling of having time (Books - A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor)

One of the early chapters of this book touches at some retrospective length on the way things began to change; how I moved from the fairly predictable company of fellow army-candidates into older circles which were simultaneously more worldly, more bohemian and more raffish: the remainder, more or less, of the Bright Young People, but ten years and twenty thousand double whiskies after their heyday, and looking extremely well on the regime. This new and captivating world seemed brilliant and rather wicked; I enjoyed being the youngest present, especially during the dissipated nocturnal ramblings in which every evening finished: ("Where's that rather noisy boy got to?  We may as well take him too").  I had reached a stage when one changes very fast: a single year contains a hundred avatars; and while these were flashing kaleidoscopically by, the idea of my unsuitability for peacetime soldiering had began to impinge.  More serious still, the acceptance of two poems and the publication of one of them - admittedly, only on foxhunting - had fired me with the idea of authorship.

But Patrick Leigh Fermor's self-study period as a writer fails to solidify as he had hoped.

Vacation Time for me and Contest for You

We're about to head off on vacation (at last!) with, in my case, a pile of books, walking shoes, and a good appetite. I'm looking forward to attacking at least the following:




Here is one picture for each of our destinations. List our itinerary (only the region of the country is necessary in the first case, but the specific locations are needed in the other three), and I'll enter you in a drawing to win a book about destinations exotic (Burma, Russia, and Serbia are among the possible choices so far). You can live anywhere. Put your answer in the comments and I'll read them when I return.

Always there at the collision of cultures... (Books - Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kauscinski)

When Poland still sat behind the iron curtain, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski traveled to far flung countries both Eastern and Western - Iran, Egypt, India, China. Early on he reported for the Soviet-run press services but he is now remembered as having been the writer of observant, beautifully written, book-length pieces of journalism about places most of his countrymen would never see - generally distant and sometimes dangerous places undergoing some political unrest or outright revolution. Many of his travels were made with Herodotus's 2500-year-old The Histories in tow. Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus looks back on his travels using The Histories as a lens through which to reflect on what forces influence the formation of a country from a clan or a culture from a country, and what happens when those cultures collide.

Thrust into India in the early 1950s with only Polish and Russian, he took both solace in and instruction from Herodotus:

Cast into deep water, I didn't want to drown. I realized that only language could save me. I started to think about how Herodotus, wandering the world, had dealt with foreign languages. Hammer writes that Herodotus knew only Greek, but because Greeks at the time were scattered over the entire planet, had their colonies, ports, and factories everywhere, the author of The Histories could avail himself of help offered by the countrymen he encountered, who serves as his translators and guides... I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells, but through words; furthermore, words not of the indigenous Hindi, but of a foreign, imposed tongue [English], which by then had so fully taken root here that it was for me an indispensable key to this country, almost identical with it. I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it.

Spoken like a writer.

There are three qualities Kapuscinski brings to his work that make him the ideal revealer of places. From reading his Imperium I thought that one was fearlessness, but this memoir reveals that that was not true. It was more like a nearly guileless innocence that seemed to bring him smack into the center of dangerous situations.

Once, as I was leaving the hotel, one of these people stopped me and asked that I follow him - he would show me an old mosque (I surmised that the man was one of them, as he always stood in the same spot, surveying what was probably his beat). I am by nature quite credulous, to the point even of regarding suspicion not as a manifestation of reason but as a character flaw; now the fact that an undercover agent proposed a visit to a mosque instead of ordering me to report to a police station brought me such relief - joy, even - that I agreed without a moment's hesitation.

The second was the recognition that he has much to learn about other people. The third was a quality that he brought to finding out about them - that is a curiosity coupled with imagination. The result is that what he sees on his travels or what he reads in Herodotus generates questions about the place he is in or the people he is with, questions about the specifics of their circumstances or their internal life. For example in reading of Herodotus:

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother's garments... Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with qeustions...and in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm at lessons? Does he slip others answers? Is he a tattletale?

As he reads Herodotus on the sixth century Babylonian uprising against the Persians:

Once their rebellion was out in the open, this is what they did. The Babylonian men gathered together all the women of the city - with the exception of their mothers and of a single woman chosen by each man from his own household - and strangled them. The single woman was kept on as a cook, while all the others were strangled to conserve supplies...

Our Greek says nothing more about this mass execution. Whose decision was it? That of the Popular Assembly? Of the Municipal Government? Of the Committee for the Defense of Bablylon? Was there some discussion of the matter? Did anyone protest? Who decided on the method of execution - that these women would be strangled? Were there other suggestions? That they be pierced by spears, for example? Or cut down with swords? Or burned on pyres? Or thrown into the Euphrates, which coursed through the city?

There are more questions still. Could the women, who had been waiting in their homes for the men to return from the meeting during which sentence was pronounced upon them, discern something in their men's faces? Indecision? Shame? Pain? Madness?

Travels with Herodotus is chock full of these waterfalls of marvelous questions. That is what encounters with history generate in Kapuscinski, and that is why he is such a marvelous writer - an artists, really - about the things which generate countries and cultures. They remind me of the kind of the questions actors and directors ask in order to translate the generalities provided by scripts into the specifics of behavior. They are the means Kapuscinski uses to make abstract ideas observed about places most of us have never been into human terms, recognizable to the reader as close to their own. Kapuscinski introduces many such ideas - the notion that the construct of culture is at base an aristocratic one, or this one, probably my favorite:

If reason ruled the world, would history even exist?

Travels with Herodotus is not a light read, but Kapuscinski's jaunty voice and his adventures provide rich insights on the world we live in and that is why I love reading him.

Hiking, opera, tea, theatre, book shopping, friends, and home again...

This is the B&B we stayed at in the Cotswolds and its garden. Some rain gave us lots of time for reading, but we also took several hikes on the wonderful network of pubic footpaths that cut through fields and woods across the U.K. Unlike the U.S., where keeping other people off one's land seems a priority, in England, although the farm belongs to the farmer, its beauty is shared with walkers. One can walk for hours uninterrupted and mostly skirt main roads, enjoying a quiet walk in a natural setting. It appears that hikers are respectful, we did not see a single piece of trash along the way. After one of our hikes we had a great afternoon tea in Chipping Camden. I love meeting artists and visiting their studios and try to do this wherever we visit. Our hosts introduced us to a local artist whose work we we found interesting and we had some coffee with her and checked out her work. Our long hike from Chipping Norton took us to an ancient stone circle known as the Rollright Stones. Chipping Norton also boasts a very nice independent bookshop and Cafe - Jaffe and Neale. As you can soon read in a future post, I was pretty wowed by Molly Fox's Birthday and was able to find a copy of her earlier novel One by One in the Darkness there.



We also attended the Glyndebourne Opera Festival in Sussex, seeing our friends there, 2 completed productions, and 1 in rehearsal. Giulio Cesare, a revival, has justifiably been a great sensation. I had seen it on DVD but it's much more fun live. Our friend, Danielle de Niese, sings, dances and acts Cleopatra (pictured below left) in a performance of gob-smacking energy and beauty. Falstaff is a wonderfully conceived production by Richard Jones set in World War II England. Christopher Purves blends great singing and detailed acting into one unified whole is the title role and Marie-Nicole Lemieux is fantastic as Mistress Quickly. The Fairy Queen, which we saw in rehearsal, looks like it is going to be great fun as well. It features The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under the always strong direction of William Christie and I thought the choreography by Kim Brandstrup particularly strong.





We stayed in the big house at Glyndebourne (pictured above left) which was a lot of fun. Sussex was also the stomping grounds of some of my favorite Bloomsburyites. We visited Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's house - Charleston (above right) - and it is well worth a visit. Having worked on a play about Virginia Woolf and her circle for years, finally standing in those rooms next to the wall paintings, their studios, and garden was amazing. Unfortunately, we did not get to see Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Monk's House. Maybe next time.

We also visited Oxford, just strolling around for a few hours. The Blackwell Bookstore there is amazing. Having enjoyed William Fiennes The Music Room so much, I found his The Snow Geese there and picked up a copy. Finally, we spent several days in London. We found the Wellcome Collection's exhibits about mental health and art very interesting and they have a great bookstore as well! We also saw Sir John Soane's Museum, which we missed on our last several visits. His collection includes the Hogarth A Rake's Progress and many antiquities. It's quite a house to spend a few hours in (and it's free). We also attended two productions, both at the National Theatre, J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways - certainly a play before its time in terms of cinematic use of time. The productions is, sadly, an unimaginative bore - lazily substituting screaming and cliches for acting, actors working from the neck up only. The production would have required some sort of physical language to reveal the special qualities of this play. Sadly, they never didn't come up with one in the first two acts and I wasn't waiting around for the third. The second play we saw was a very hot ticket - Hellen Mirren is playing the title role in Phedre in a strong and accessible translation by Ted Hughes. The production also features Margaret Tyzack and Dominic Cooper. There were some nice moments here and there. I thought John Shrapnel as Theramene turned in the strongest work of the evening. Dominic Cooper's peformance was pretty intelligent and centered and Stanley Townsend had a couple of moments where he was filled with the pain of Theseus's circumstances, but sadly those did not a Phedre make. I found most of the actors substituted vocal technique for real connection with these extreme circumstances. Mirren told us she was moved, horrified, devastated, but rarely succeeded in actually showing us that that was so. When she did her connection seemed banal, theatrical, rarely human. We attended the production with my cousin and his fiancee and heading off to the restaurant, he said to me that he couldn't understand why anyone would want to mount Greek tragedy (via French neo-classicism) as it had no meaning today. This seems to me the one reason for mounting any play - that it has some meaning in the context of our own lives. This production has a clear financial motivation for its mounting and one that would fascinate fans but it did not ably communicate to me any esthetic one. We didn't luck out with our theatre-going in London this time but our visits with friends and family and walking around the beautiful city were pleausures enough.

On holiday for a bit but I may check in from the road

We will be here, here, here, and here...




doing some of this, this, this, and this...




and taking along this, this, this, and this...and probably acquiring a few more.




I'll try to check-in and post from time to time. I'll see you soon.

Travel Journal - volume I

Trolled around Bloomsbury yesterday, paying my respects to Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West, Lytton Stratchey, and company. Walked around Tavistock and Gordon Squares and hit a few bookshops in the neighborhood, picking up copies of Rose Tremaine's new novel, The Road Home, Thirteen, by Sebastien Beaumont - a recommendation of Scott Pack's and not yet available in the U.S., and Juan Gabrile Vaquez's The Informers, a recommendation of Dovegrey's.

We attended a production of Bertold Brecht's The Good Soul of Setzuan at the Young Vic in the evening with the fantastic Jane Horrocks. Really splendid production directed by Richard Jones. If I could figure out how to do pictures on this computer I would - but it's not in the cards.

Our first day we took the Tate Museum's boat between the Tate Britain and Tate Modern museums, a lovely way to see London! And the Tate Modern - a converted power plant - is a tremendous space to view modern art and has a terrific permanent collection.

Now I have to get into my tux for this evening's performance of Incoronazione di Poppea at Glyndebourne. We'll have an elegant picnic lunch between the acts - so it should be quite an affair!