Date: 2008-07-19 02:27 Subject: Footnote to the Nation Public

The case I mentioned has finally reached the English-language media: here is the New York Times piece on it, with a coda on the Netherlands: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/world/europe/19france.html?hp.

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Date: 2008-07-12 11:50 Subject: La Nation (and the others) Public

I have a friend who hates the word, and the concept, of ‘nation’ with a passion. He was born in Morocco of a French father and an Armenian mother, grew up in France, and has lived for many years in Quebec. To him, nations are the source of all evil: wars, prejudice, hatred of all kinds.

On the other hand, there is a lovely song by Jacques Debronckaert about French expatriates in Australia, ‘Adélaïde’, which begins: ‘I love people who are from somewhere; who carry inside them wherever they are some place, some town or village, where they can find their way in the dark.’ Of course, such ‘places’ for a Frenchman are not nations but ‘pays’, for which in this sense there is not really an English word. The city equivalent would be ‘neighbourhood’. I remember in Dorset friends lived in the Marshwood Vale, which was a ‘pays’ in the French sense, as, more largely, was Dorset itself.

So what about the nation? Again in France, it is a sacred concept, since the Revolution. It is the home and guardian of all the Enlightenment ideas of citizenship: liberty, equality, fraternity; and also secularity and progress. Interestingly, to the dwindling band of the ancient right wing, it is also sacred, but in a different way: as the home of Joan of Arc, the kingdom of Clovis, the sacred soil of the Gauls, the natural if sometimes difficult daughter of the Catholic Church, the soul of ancient knightly honour.

Obviously, neither of these concepts is easily reconcilable with unlimited migration, mushrooming ethnic and cultural diversity, and street combats between gangs of black African 12-year-olds and gangs of Zionist Jewish 12-year-olds, all with bicycle chains, clubs, and knives.

They are also not compatible, it has been recently ruled, with Salafist Muslims who apply for nationality but have no intention whatever of conforming to the mores of the Republic. A burqa’d woman who did so, accompanied and spoken for by her husband, was refused, then applied to a higher court, and eventually to the Council of State, the highest arbiter of such matters. This council has now upheld the original decision that her way of life is incompatible with French citizenship, i.e. active membership in a Republic that has equality (in this case, of women) and secularity (i.e. religion as a purely private matter) among its core values.

In today’s Figaro newspaper, this only got a small paragraph, but it seems to me momentous. Momentous, but very complex: both sides can be argued with perfect integrity.

On her side: why are fundamentalist Catholics and Baptists, including those who wear monks’ habits on the one hand and those who actively try to convert everyone, on the other, allowed citizens and not she? What about Hasidic Jews?

On the Republic’s side: the Republic is not just a country, it is a Nation, i.e. a conscious community of citizens who have their part to play and subscribe to its basic values, though they are free to choose the relative importance of such values and the degree of their own activity (for example, the Netherlands used to have not just the right but the obligation to vote: if you did not vote in an election, you paid a fine and not a light one; in France as in most places nowadays you can stay home and eat pizza instead). Those who not only do not subscribe to these but actively oppose them are bad enough if they were born citizens, and should nto have citizenship awarded to them if not.

It is all part of the Great Debate about immigration. Should immigration be wide open? Should it be selective, and if so, on what grounds? In France, the Left constantly argues on behalf of regularisation of illegal immigrants. On compassionate grounds, they have a good point. But then is there any point in immigration control at all? Might one not just as well simply open the borders to all and sundry? The Right tries to control immigration but while it finds its arguments on the whole supported, in practice the controls often don’t work.

And even in America, Obama recently had to back off from a suggestion that immigrants should at least be required to speak the language of the host country. This I would support. In fact, I’d suggest that countries which attract immigrants have small language schools attached to their main consulates in the countries from which most people want to come, and make a certificate of basic competence a condition of a residence permit.

But in any case, the Great Debate continues, and it would be apity if it simply became cannon fodder in the Culture Wars.

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Date: 2008-06-30 23:10 Subject: The incomprehensible drool? Public

I have noticed, over several years of intermittent blogging, that the only two subjects my three-and-a half readers (you know who you are) absolutely do not respond to--the subjects that ring not the shadow of a bell, even backwards, in their breasts--are 1) anything to do with (gulp, snif) religion, or even God, and 2) cars.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, as the Canadians would say (what other country has, somewhere in the ramifications of its constitution, a 'Notwithstanding Clause'? Don't ask.)-- I cannot resist putting on this blog this photo (one of many) of what I think, after or possibly together with the Bugatti Atlantic, the world's most beautiful car. What is worse, it's for sale. In St Louis, Missouri, yet. Oh, dear.

So go visit, and drool. Breathes there a man (or woman either) with soul so dead, that this beauty stirs no whisker of a noogie?

Still, I do try to explain things, at least to myself. One of the better results of the Industrial Revolution was the concept of Design -- entirely alien to the pre-industrial world, where there was Craftsmanship and there was Art.

Design is born of the arbitrary nature of industrial production. Something that can be made one shape can equally well be made another. So it needs to be Designed: drawn, in fact (dessiner in French). It needs (unlike the pot of a 3,000 year old potter) be given a shape that is not dictated by the physical material.

Now Design has gone through a number of evolutions. In the 19C, it created the gewgaws and thingumajigs of the Great Exhibition of 1851, drunk on the possibility that one could now do *anything*, even put Sphinxes on a salt-cellar and multiply the result by a production run of 2,000.

In the early 20C there was an austere reaction to this, called Form Follows Function (see Mies van der Rohe et al): yet few modern objects could be more lastingly beaitful than Mies's Barcelona chair.

In more recent years, there has been a development of playfulness, basically saying 'If we can do anything, however weird, well, let's'.

The history of automobile Design is strange and wonderful, and for anyone with the slightest interest, I'd say Google a few names like Louis Bionier, Gabriel Voisin, Gerald Palmer, Saoutchik, Figoni and Falaschi, Pinin Farina, Flavio Bertoni, and Jean Bugatti.

The really fascinating thing is that this glorious Jaguar, and a number of its sisters and daughters, were designed not by a great stylist hired for the purpose, but by the boss of the company himself.

William Lyons was not only one of the shrewdest businessmen of his time, but insisted on designing virtually every model that left his factory -- and almost all of them are still among today's most sought-after classics. He had an uncanny sense of what would appeal to the buyer's almost-unconscious sense of aesthetics, grace and power.

So -- take out a mortgage? Sell one's soul? Hock grandmother's diamond ring? Deal in illegal substances? I would not sell a ***** an Uzi to pay for this, but I should be conscious of resisting a temptation. Yes, I know...

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Date: 2008-06-26 23:55 Subject: EURO Public

I've been watching quite a lot of the current Euro football championships (no, we do NOT call it 'soccer'). And apart from the extraordinary enjoyment of seeing physical things done with grace and power (and yes, I know all the arguments about 'why should I watch 22 millionaires chasing a leather sphere around a field?'), there are two things that have struck me particularly.

In the first place, I have to say that almost (not quite, but almost) every time I go to the theatre these days, I come out disappointed, achy, tetchy, and cross. First, because theatre -- unless it is heavily subsidised and showcases famous Names -- has no money, and therefore spends a ridiculous amount of time creating shows that (surprise, surprise) feature one or two actors. A subsidiary problem is that most directors (at least here in France) think it old hat to put on a play, so they 'create a spectacle' instead; but since actors, as opposed to mimes, need to have something to say, they find someone to do a text, usually v-e-r-y badly. No wonder the crowds head for the movies, or for opera.

Now look at top-class football. No one without an expense account can afford to go to the actual games, but who cares? You see it better on TV anyway. And here we all are, BoBos, artists, ironmongers, stockbrokers, butchers and professors, glued to the screen, rooting for the good guys, excoriating the bad, bouncing up and down at the peripeteia, exulting or in utter gloom at the dénouement. There is grace and power, there is suspense (boy, is there suspense!), there is a surprising level of fairness, and one comes away either comically happy or tragically cathartic. So where is the good theatre these days, tell me?

The second thing that has struck me is that a great part of the joy for all the spectators in the last few days has come from two unlikely places: Russia and Turkey. Russia against the Netherlands was a white tornado, and though I was rooting for the Orange, the white tornado richly deserved its win. Yet tonight against Spain they were a starched bonnet, and were duly crushed 3-0 by the matadors. But when they are at their best, what a joy.
Turkey were the surprise and the delight of the tournament. They never knew when they were beaten, they surged tirelessly up and down the field, they scored when everyone had given up on them, they were having fun and making history.

Now, go beyond the joy of a football tournament. This is the Euro tournament. And Turkey is the discovery and the joy. So how, when the rush is over after Sunday, can anyone still go around grouching that Turkey is not European but a bunch of nasty imperfectly civilised M*slims who belong in Asia? And how can anyone still think of even Putin's and Medvedev's Russia as a horrible Wild East beyond the pale when we are dying to see the St Petersburg team play with Arshavin in the ranks?

So yes, it's Shakespeare and the League of Nations in one. And you get to bounce up and down when 'your' team wins. What could be better?

[Only one thing. To play the stuff as well. My son-in--law the Anglo-Irish engineer plays serious pickup football every Wednesday night, coaches the under-8s on Friday nights and runs their games on Saturday morning. And my grandson his offspring (now 8) has only two consuming passions in life: football and rugby, both of which he plays once or twice a week. Couch potatoes, arise! You have nothing to lose but your gains.]

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Date: 2008-06-26 19:12 Subject: THE TIE THAT (UGH) BINDS Public

France is going to the dogs. But it is doing it its own way, with sartorial ineptitude.

As you can see from this BBC report, M. Sarkozy has celebrated France's upcoming EU presidency by sending all MPs a silver-grey tie. Men, wimmin, and others. And several of the wimmin (haven't heard from the others) are calling this blatant sexism.

It is, of course, simply stupid. The dimmest corporate memento VP would have known to send the men a tie and the wimmin a tasteful scarf.

But it gets worse. Because does anyone except German sales managers wear a silver-grey tie? Oh, Sarko.

And the BBC adds insult to injury by captioning its accompanying photo of a well-dressed if Gallic President: "Mr Sarkozy tends to favour discrete, sometimes spotted, ties."

There was a time when nervous foreigners, trying to brush up their English, would turn invariably to the BBC. No longer, I devoutly hope. If Auntie no longer knows the difference between "discrete" and "discreet", there is no lower she can sink, and may the waters mercifully close over her trendy shaved head.

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Date: 2008-06-24 23:36 Subject: Filioque? Public

As the Euro football championship enters its last week of serious competition to theatre everywhere, the Church of England (excuse me, the Anglican Communion) is squaring up for a far deadlier combat.

The decennial Lambeth Conference of bishops, quietly important, is being noisily boycotted by a clutch of bishops (what is the collective noun?) holding a rival conference in Jerusalem (as if that town didn't have enough controversy). The Global Anglican Future Conference or Gafcon (Gafcon? Really, Vicar!) is a gathering of forward-looking conservatives. The last time such a thing was heard of was when Canada boasted a Progressive Conservative Party.

To Gafcon, the Anglican Church is going to Hell. It is submitting sound theology to the dictates of worldly fashion, and changing doctrine to fit the whims of the moment. In a word, it is Wrong.

This has happened before. For seven hundred-odd years, Christians -- even members of the same Church -- not only disagreed but occasionally came to blows; but that was about the question whether, in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit proceeded, like the Son, from the Father, or proceeded from the Father and the Son (Patre Filioque). Now the mighty controversy, which is threatening for the first time to split this worldwide and venerable Church into two mutually hostile camps, is all about sex.

Specifically, homosexuality. Can two men who love each other get married, or is that an abomination unto the Lord? Can a man who lives lovingly and faithfully with another man and is also a priest become a Bishop, or does he stink to high Heaven?

Both sides have mounted such high horses of self-righteousness that dismounting has become almost impossible. Yes, both sides. Because those who take such things in their stride feel, all too often, that enlightenment should damn well be imposed upon the reactionary idiots.

One of the things confusing matters is that the 'abomination' camp is largely in Africa (which liberals ipso facto support) and draws more converts than the sophisticated Northern Hemisphere Church.

Another problem is that while both sides know they are right, the Bible rightly calls upon congregations everywhere to avoid 'scandal', recognising that if you antagonise your neighbour for the sake of righteousness it will be much harder for that neighbour to love you, and indeed to continue the life of mutual affection and respect enjoined by Christ and his apostles.

How to descend from those 24-hand chargers? Well, one stool might be the recollection that the man from Nazareth had dinner with collaborationists and hookers, and even talked in a friendly manner to Doctors of the Law. A second one might be to remember what Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said about the homosexuality laws of the time: 'the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation' -- a saying that might profitably be adapted to the Church.

And thirdly, how about some old-fashioned theological controversy instead? I recommend a return to the Filioque debate to clear everyone's minds. And perhaps the Coptic Church, which is the oldest surviving Christian organisation, could invite both Anglican camps to Egypt, once and for all to settle the Filioque fight in the desert, with paintball.

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Date: 2008-06-23 23:26 Subject: ART AND PROGRESS Public

It has always seemed to me axiomatic that there can be no progress in art. There can be progress in technology; in science; in knowledge, in scholarship; but in art, surely not. There can be change, there can be renewal, there can be rupture and revolution; but not progress. Art does not improve with time.

Peter Schjeldahl’s recent review of Jeff Koons’s work seemed to me to support this point of view while not, apparently, wanting to do so. Schjeldahl goes out of his way to be fair to Koons, especially as a sculptor. Yet there are moments when alarm and despondency show through. Here are a few.

‘I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s famous “Puppy”, the forty-three-foot-high Scottie dog enveloped in living flowers. As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.’

This is neither alarm nor despondency. But Schjeldahl is one of the most perceptive art critics writing today: this is not, for him, a normal reaction, and he knows it. (Try to imagine such a reaction from an intelligent and knowledgeable art lover/critic concerning the work of Raphael, Rembrandt, Raeburn or Monet.)

‘Koons is hugely significant—grandly engaging themes of childhood, wealth, sex, and (as with an aqualung cast in bronze) death—while finally signifying precious little. That’s my nightmare: an intimation that intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark.’

This is, at least, alarm: and if it doesn’t lead to despondency, it is because no one any longer is willing to bet even a Eurocent on any definition of art.

Schjeldahl ends his review with the following words: ‘We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time.’

This sounds more insouciant than, of course, it is. It is not just alarm, it is not just despondency, it is despair.

For those of us who know artists personally, and see their often non-verbal struggles, and visit the result of those in the occasional hard-won gallery show, this is also in part bullshit.

In the sense that a) Schjeldahl, sensitive critic though he is, limits his view of an artist to one who ‘manifests his time’. What does that mean? It reminds me of feminist Robin Morgan shouting in a crowded lecture-hall that ‘To be a woman and to be conscious is to be full of rage!’ ‘In other words,’ my female companion sardonically muttered to me, ‘if you’re a woman and not full of rage, you are not what Robin Morgan acknowledges as conscious.’ Is an artist who does not ‘manifest his time’ an artist? Henri Rousseau; El Greco; Goya; Piero della Francesca: are they artists?

But every a) has a b). The b) in this case is that Peter Schjeldahl (whom I admire enormously) writes for the New Yorker and (whether or not that fact is relevant, you decide) would never spend a two-page review on a completely unknown artist from, say, Queens. Still less from the places where I could point him to three or four artists who may not ‘manifest their time’ but who also do not make one wish for a better time: Montreal (two painters and a textile artist), Toronto (a mixed-media artist working with Washi), the South of France (a textile artist and a sculptor). And even in New York there must be many. Some of these not only are good artists, they also earn a modest living with their art – which means that they manage to reach a discerning public that is willing to reach into its pockets (not at Christie’s prices, but into five figures) to be able to live from day to day with their work.

Now back to progress. Obviously, I don’t believe that the work of a Koons shows ‘progress’ --- and yet. And yet I hesitate. I remember being at Yale in 1967-9, when Claes Oldenburg offered the university his latest work, to be displayed in the exquisite square of the Beinecke Rare Book Library: a 20-foot high lipstick mounted on a tank base with caterpillar tracks. It did get to spend a few weeks there, but the university hid it away. The fact that I can see astounding beauty and meaning in a Rauschenberg or a Rothko – which would have baffled and annoyed my intelligent parents – points to something.

And this morning I was listening to an old LP with the magical performance of three Bach piano concertos by Maria Joao Pires, and it occurred to me that yes, maybe it’s wrong to say there is no progress in art. Here, for instance, there are two kinds of progress (not just change) at work: 1) the progress of technology: Bach’s audience never heard his work on such an instrument, because the piano had not been invented; 2) the progress (and I believe it is a progress) of feeling, of emotion. The exquisite crystal-bead playing of Pires, so infinitely removed from the strong-male Bach-bashers and the ‘I can play even faster than you’ ton-uppers, has a range of emotion I doubt Bach’s audiences would even have known existed. He did: listen to the St Matthew Passion. But they? Outside religion? In pure music? I don’t believe that range of emotion existed before Romanticism.

So yes: perhaps there is a kind of progress possible in art. But there is regress too; and a world where intelligence is obsolete is a world inviting the thoughtful to suicide or emigration to a distant planet: because no progress of feeling, no subtle emotion, is possible without intelligence.

We have lived through about a century of provocation glorified. It has become second nature: see the obituaries on George Carlin, and their mention of the banality his shocking work has now become. What is seriously unclear is how we can get out of it without becoming fundamentalists. This needs more thought.

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Date: 2008-06-10 22:52 Subject: A Man for Our Season Public

I have been struck by three things in the last few days. In the first place, of course, the Obama phenomenon and more specifically his recent speech on the economy; secondly, David Brooks's New York Times column on debt as a greater catastrophe than tobacco; and finally, Jonathan Rosen's magnificent New Yorker article on John Milton (which I urgently recommend to all those who thought Milton was boring or who 'hated him in school', etc.).

I am starting to believe that the three are connected. There really is a Wind of Change starting to blow, and if I am sensing it correctly it is austere and slightly unnerving but deeply right, and something of which Milton might well have approved. I think there is a new sense of responsibility for which people are ready, a new sense of what I should like to call, with a Classical/Renaissance term, "virtue".

I believe people are ready for a new narrative to interpret the world, and the new may just be the old, i.e. Paradise Lost. Milton, says Rosen, was a "sensuous Puritan", and that wonderful term may just describe where we might be going.

We are in need of great resounding language, but language that is not hollow.

We are in need of leaders that feel the presence of something, of Someone, greater than themselves, who from time to time may tell them they are wrong.

We are in need of large people, who may be blind and divorced and care about poetry only slightly less than they care about God, or who may be almost black and brought up in Indonesia and dare to change '"Washington".

We need to feel unashamed of enthusiasm and of admiration.

We need to feel that we are appreciated for what we do, even more than for what we are; and that "respect" is not our existential due but something we must, but can, earn.

This is a very inchoate thought, but we will work it out in time.

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Date: 2008-06-08 11:56 Subject: Berkeley Square in France? Public

It's most peculiar. This has become the year of the nightingale. For well over a month now, we have been hearing their incredible song, piercingly loud, day and night. It wakes us up in the morning, just outside our bedroom window; and in the middle of the night, if you wake, there it is, as proud, loud and lovely as ever. But no matter how you stare at the tree it's coming from, even with good binoculars, you never see them.

For some reason the nightingales have arrived in force. A guest whose parents are ornithologists told us that the daytime song is the parents teaching the young their trade, while at night it's the real professionals you hear.

It was sad to lose the chorus of frogs in the valley below, and the whistling toads in the garden field and on the terrace; but the nightingales are a magnificent replacement. Long may they stay.

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Date: 2008-06-05 21:52 Subject: THE BIG ONE Public

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. But Obama's full endorsement of Jerusalem as the undivided historic capital of Israel yesterday -- apart from its capacity to enrage Saeb Erekat and embarrass Mahmoud Abbas -- threw into all our laps the question we would rather avoid: 'So what should be done with Jerusalem?'

Now that the word Change is in the air, and a few positive unthinkables may become thinkable, we should think very seriously about this:

The United Nations, urgently in need of a) support (which it should get from an Obama Administration) and b) respect (which it will only get if it learns to act fearlessly and independently for the common good) should create a Directorate of Holy Places. Certain places of extreme traditional sanctity, and Jerusalem may as well be the first, should be internationalised and become UN Protectorates. Their inhabitants should have a special citizenship, like those of the Vatican. (In fact, come to think of it, Vatican City might well be the second.) All members of the UN should guarantee the inviolability of such places. I am open to suggestions for others: personally, I have long thought Tibet should be one, but then, I read Lama Govinda at an impressionable if adult age.
This would make the UN once again a beacon of something beyond war, which it was conceived for in the first place.

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Date: 2008-06-05 21:39 Subject: SAVOUR THIS Public

Yes, savour it. As an American colleague wrote to me on Tuesday night: '45 years ago we were still lynching people perceived as colored.' It is wondrous, and not to be demeaned with cynicism, not even to be relativised with skepticism. It reminds me of the fact that when I was a nipper, two West European countries were at deadly shooting, bombing WAR with each other -- literally unthinkable today. NOT to be relativised, but to be savoured every June day. So yes: let's admire, and rejoice, and be solemn for a moment, and thoughtful. Such a state of mind is good for us. JFK said in Berlin, 'Ick bin ein Berliner'. This week many of us, whatever else we are, are Americans also: and hoping once again to be able to be proud of this.

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Date: 2008-05-31 18:45 Subject: ANOTHER CLIMBING POEM Public

Also from Andrew Young:

The Paps of Jura

Before I crossed the sound
I saw how from the sea
These breasts rise soft and round,
Not two but three;

Now, climbing, I clasp rocks
Storm-shattered and sharp-edged,
Grey ptarmigan their flocks,
With starved moss wedged;

And mist like hair hangs over
One barren breast and me,
Who climb, a desperate lover,
With hand and knee.

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Date: 2008-05-26 09:43 Subject: FORGOTTEN POETRY Public

One of the few good climbing poems I know was written by the almost-forgotten poet Andrew Young. I'll have more on him soon. Meanwhile---

 

On Middleton Edge

If this life-saving rock should fail
Yielding too much to my embrace
And rock and I to death should race,
The rock would stay there in the dale
While I, breaking my fall,
Would still go on
Farther than any wandering star has gone.

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Date: 2008-05-16 15:56 Subject: Forgotten poetry Public

In the new edition of Charles Morgan's poems (Scarthinbooks, 2008), I found one poem published in the Sunday Times on 28 November 1954, for Winston Churchill's 80th birthday (November 30th, the same day as Sir Philip Sidney). Its third section is clearly inspired by A.E. Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries', and I reproduce it here:

He at the challenge of disaster--
The hour, for all men, else too late--
By act and word, of both a master,
Made England mistress of her fate.

What others doubted, he decided,
When Europe's lips were dumb, he spoke:
A faith, which half the world derided,
In one small island re-awoke.

And since the light which still prevaileth
Leapt from that re-awakened spark,
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
Though in the East the land is dark.

(The last line but one is, of course, a quotation of Arthur James Clough, 'Say not the Struggle Nought Availeth'.)

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Date: 2008-04-25 19:46 Subject: WE WEREN'T GOING THERE, BUT Public

麻煩

In Chinese, this (I'm told) spells 'trouble'. (The fact that the first character, reading from left to right, represents two women under one roof is neither here, as they say, nor there.) Trouble is what China is having in Tibet. Where I live, in France, the people one talks to, left, right, and centre, are massively on the side of the Tibetans, while the government, anxious to preserve the Olympics, good relations generally, and trade deals, is, er, hedging, and pretending that China is being an Enormous Help in resolving many, many world crises. Ahem.

What nobody is saying out loud, in the face of Chinese accusations that the Dalai Lama and all those who support him (especially in France) are filthy 'splittists' (or separatists as we used to call them in Quebec), is that Tibet is not an integral part of China at all. China conquered Tibet, annexed Tibet, in 1951, well within the lifetime of geezers like yours truly. We got all hot under the collar when Russia annexed Hungary, then Czechoslovakia. And the fact that the West Bank has been part of Israel for 41 years doesn't seem to stop anyone not accepting the fact. So why should the world pretend to accept that Tibet is an integral part of China?

Tibet should be left alone, and be an international United Nations protectorate. Like Jerusalem. These are holy places. Will we one day be intelligent enough, as a human race, to organise our planet that way?

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Date: 2008-04-20 23:08 Subject: SMELLS Public

When I first came to North America, I was startled to realise that the word ‘smell’ in American English is almost (not quite, but almost) a pejorative. Not as a verb: you can walk into someone’s kitchen and say, ‘Wow, that smells good!’ But it’s not really polite to talk of smells, except for bad ones. And even for those, the commercial world, puritanical as ever, prefers ‘odors’: Anglo-Saxon words are somehow always felt to be cruder than Latinate ones. (Notice that the proper word for what you and I gestated in is now ‘uterus’: ‘womb’ is reserved for literature but is embarrassing in real life.) Also, the English like to refer to the products of Guerlain and Dior as ‘scent’, whereas Americans find that crude and smelling of fox, and prefer ‘perfume’.

Smell, of course, is the most limbic of our senses. It bypasses reason almost entirely. I can still smell (in my head; but very occasionally I come across it in real life, and it brings instant tears) the study of my beloved literature teacher in high school, redolent of bookbindings, old paper, and years and years years of tobacco. (I wonder if any young people today will ever know the pure pleasure the smell of anciently-impregnating tobacco – as opposed to the beastly stink of yesterday’s ciggies – can bring to a space of habitation?) Or, sometimes, I catch a whiff of printing-ink and it brings back a cramped space on a canal in Amsterdam, a basement printing-shop long before computers, Xeroxes and Kinko’s, above which lived the girl who fed me tea, sympathy and good humour in the dark days.

What are good smells? Different for everyone, of course, but really good leather warmed by body heat – good shoes when you take them off, for example – is one. Fields after rain are another. Personally I like the smell of petrol – gasoline – if not too strong, but only my stepson seems to agree with me on that. Tar is good: I recall the smell of fishermen’s nets, tarred rope, drying in a hot sun on the shore in Holland, in the unpronounceable town of Scheveningen. And from tar I jump to the tarry, smoky scent of Lapsang Souchong tea, steam curling up from the cup, carrying one far away to the Himalayas (why the Himalayas? No idea), and always reminding me of Leonard Cohen’s haunting song ‘Suzanne’: ‘she brings you tea and oranges/that come all the way from China’ – and Lapsang does go wonderfully with oranges.

I’ve never really liked the smell of sweat, but after a rugby match in the locker room it can take on a kind of rough kindliness. Cooking, of course, has its symphonies of smell, and Indian cooking – which I love to do – joins this to the heaven, the Paradise, the Pantheon of spices. On the Saturday market in Cordes there is a woman with a spice stall that is pure unadulterated magic. All her spices (and there are about 80 of them) are in little paper bags rolled open, and they breathe out (as Virgil said of the hair of Aeneas’ mother Venus) ‘the scent of heaven’. The smell of spices is indescribable, quite literally. I love them all – the in-your-face crispness of cumin, the pretty-girl-hitchhiker seduction of turmeric, the almost painful intensity of cinnamon, the bluff poetry of nutmeg -- but the most delicate of them all, the quiet lute-music, the audible silence of spices, is cardamom.

And then there is the universe of scents, or perfumes. One of my missed lives, something I’d like to be in another life, is a ‘nez’ – a ‘nose’ – as the French call a specialist working in the industry of parfumerie. A few months ago, we went to one of the temples of that world, the old main shop of Guerlain on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. This is a place no lover of the nose and its pleasures can afford to miss. First you admire the Art-Nouveau façade, one of the best in Paris. Downstairs you are greeted by a smartly-dressed porter, and go into quite a small shop, but if you look carefully, there is an old chest of drawers in wood with tin or pewter drawers, each stamped with the name of one of the historic Guerlain scents: Vol de Nuit (named after the Saint-Exupéry novel), Mitsouko (named after a Japanese girl in a 1920s story that the Guerlain of the period fell in love with), L’Heure Bleue (the fascinating scent with a whiff of an Orient that never was), Jicky (the oldest scent still made, first created in the 1890s, of which the now-unfashionable lavender base can transport you directly back to the Belle Epoque), etc. etc. Then you go upstairs, and you cross an undulating gold-mosaicked space to enter the main area where all the Guerlain scents still made are arranged around a vast chandelier for you to try. There is also a wall-decoration based on the distilling equipment used in the making: glass tubes, pipes, rods and recipients where drop by drop the astonishing essences are collected. Guerlain – one of the very few perfume houses not connected with the fashion industry – is prodigal with its history, and your primitive limbic persona is soon enriched with the patina of all the years of romance and science in harmonious blend.

And so back to one’s sister-in-law in her cramped kitchen in a most unfashionable suburb, who is cooking a daube, say, or a civet de lapin – something in which meat, and dark red wine, and herbs (we haven’t even started on herbs, good heavens) and spices have been combining for hours into an invitation to the simple complex pleasure of ephemeral art. Thank you, Lord, for the small big things. Like a nose. What was it Chesterton wrote?

They haven’t got no noses,
And Goodness only knowses
the noselessness of Man.

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Date: 2008-04-18 17:46 Subject: A CURIOUS THOUGHT Public

Listening to a friend play Chopin the other day, the question occurred to me what a man or woman of the Renaissance would make of such music?

Imagine a reasonably musical Elizabethan, who might play the gittern or even the lute, who would be used to singing part-songs with friends around the table after dinner (sse the end of the BBC's excellent Taming of the Shrew), transported in to the 19th century and hearing this young man playing one of his Preludes or Nocturnes on a completely new type of keyboard instrument that could play soft or loud (piano-forte) according to the hand's touch.

What would such a person make of the sheer emotional charge conveyed by Chopin or Beethoven? The lute songs of Dowland were powerful and did convey emotion, but in a manner far more restrained.

We shan't know the answer until we are all translated into another key. But it's a fascinating question to speculate about.

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Date: 2008-04-18 17:35 Subject: Benedict XVI at the UN Public

Another test for the media -- more interesting than the depressing Pennsylvania debate.

This is a great theologian, the author of many extraordinary books (including the remarkable Jesus of Nazareth, for a wider public), and the head of the second-largest religion on the planet, visiting New York and the United Nations.

Will we be allowed to hear about God at all? I fear not.

It will be pedophilia again, and possibly gay priests; conceivably married priests, women priests, or the state of Church membership in US society; and quite probably abortion.

There will be a word or two about 'the Pope's remarks on Islam' (which weren't: it was a speech on Faith and Reason).

As in the Book of Esther, God will not be mentioned.

Sex is what sells. Oh, and scandal.

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Date: 2008-03-28 08:12 Subject: VINTAGE Public

The national bureau of statistics has revealed that there are now more than 20,000 centenarians living in France, while in 1990 there were only 3700. The advance is mainly due to better medicine; but the French are of course those Westerners also who have the best diet. Well-balanced meals, fewer snacks, and a fair amount of (mostly red) wine. And prodigious attention to good cooking...

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Date: 2008-03-28 00:04 Subject: MADNESS (BAD) Public

Yes, but where is the madness? In the film, and the man who made it, or in the thousands (no, not millions, let's not exaggerate) who, not having seen it, have taken to the streets to protest it and are the cause that its maker has to live under police protection?
Anyway, it seemed like a good idea (to this old Dutchman, anyway) to go and have a look at it and see for himself. And maybe to allow others to do so too. The title means, loosely translated (and it's a tricky word), 'Dissent'. There are two easily-available versions -- the official website has been yanked by a craven ISP--, but beware: the one on LiveLeak is good (one original version in Dutch, and a good one in English), but it is INTERMINABLE in loading; the one on YouTube is quick and dirty but the English subtitles are sketchy, inadequate, and occasionally downright misleading.

UPDATE 31/3:

On The Shotgun Blog at Westernstandard.ca I found the following:

Liveleak pulls Fitna

From LiveLeak:

"Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.
This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else. We would like to thank the thousands of people, from all backgrounds and religions, who gave us their support. They realised LiveLeak.com is a vehicle for many opinions and not just for the support of one.
Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one anothers culture.
We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high."

For now, the english version of the film can still be watched on Google Video. Or here, courtesy of Brussels Journal, where it is more likely to remain available:

Posted by Kalim Kassam on March 28, 2008 | Permalink

If you want to look at it, you need to keep a few things in mind.

One: Geert Wilders, the MP who had it made, is fringe, but Dutch fringe. In other words, he is not a patrician, nor a grocer, nor a left-wing schoolteacher, nor a CEO. But neither is he a Neo-Nazi. He is an oddity, a libertarian, a nationalist, whom many respectable Dutchmen would like to be able not to take quite seriously.

Two: the anger this film reflects is the anger of part of a small Northern country of deeply liberal tendencies, which emerged from a Calvinist past and a traumatic WW II with a fierce determination to do the decent thing, and which now finds itself with an immigration problem, a crime problem, a drug problem and, yes, a mosque problem, for which it really feels itself too small.
No, such Dutchmen do not refuse the 21C: but they don't see why they should have to harbour those who then go on to bomb London, Madrid, and New York.

It is also the country of Theo Van Gogh (who was neither respectable nor nice, but had bags of talent and a crude, rude and arrogant courage); and of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is worth a number of Van Goghs and Wilderses but admired, and was admired by, both.

Fitna is not a specially good little film: it is crude, home-movieish, and tails off into a series of Dutch newspaper headlines; it will win no prizes in a short-feature competition. But it boldly says what lots of people in a small equitable Northern country feel but daren't express, for fear, not of fatwas but simply of being (thought) unfair. We hear a lot about the 'anger of the Muslim street'; perhaps, in order to transcend all such angers, we might for balance's sake look at a little anger of the Dutch street?

It's all very difficult; and not to recognise that is perhaps Fitna's greatest handicap. Or strength? The Dutch -- like the English, and the French, and the Germans, and the Austrians, and the Swiss -- really are divided on the subject.  And not only divided among themselves: within themselves.

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