Oh You Pretty Things

It is a very long time since I actually went out and bought a brand new television.  So long, in fact, that:

• The last television I inherited from a friend still had a back on it;
• I only belatedly realised that the local shopping centre no longer contained any electrical stores, all of which have decamped to far flung retail parks;
• The sheer extent of techo-porn out there cannot be underestimated.

 Over several weeks, alternating between indecision and despair, I wasted the better part of far too many evenings comparing spec and pricing and availability of one model after another across a range of websites of varying degrees of poor functionality.  A Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch came very much to mind.   It was only when another week off work loomed, meaning that I might be able to avoid taking a special day off to sit on grim home-delivery watch, that I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and gave up my credit card details.

“I come bearing goodies”, said the delivery man, who, remarkably enough, turned up on the day that he was supposed to, at more or less the time that he was supposed to, with the correct items.  This was a good start.  And it only took several sweary hours of different permutations of cables and connectors and menu options before I had everything – TV, Virgin Box, DVD recorder, Amplifier and speakers – set up and talking properly to each other.

A television is almost, but not quite, a necessity (I have spent more-or-less happy periods of my life TV-less, going a year once on a radio-only diet): a wonderful invention spoilt by shysters and dumb-downers.  I have tried to future proof myself as much as possible within a sensible budget so as (hopefully) not to have to get involved in the grizzly business of buying another one for a few years.   For all of the rubbish that’s on there (and I long ago scaled my TV ‘package’ back to the minimum to avoid paying for another 100 channels of rubbish) there are still just enough gems to justify the expense, though I feel increasingly akin to a tosher if I simply sit down and start browsing in a “Now then, let’s see what’s on t’box” mode. 

 

More often than not the TV is used for watching films or for the occasional bout with a box set, the latest of which, that was sitting, still cellophane-wrapped, on the shelf, was the fourth season of Mad Men.

As a test case for the new TV, Mad Men probably couldn’t be bettered, what with the styles and the sets and the all-too-perfectly framed scenes in the bars and offices and suburbs of sixties New York.  And that ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of the show can be very addictive, leading to “just one more” back-to-backing of three or four episodes into the wee small hours.  Just as Waugh conceded that Brideshead Revisited was " infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, for rhetorical and ornamental language", a long session of Mad Men amounts to a binge of the indulgence and incorrectness of an America that was both better and worse than the America of today.  It’s only when you begin to really consider the plotlines and the situations that the characters get themselves into that the cracks begin to appear.

First and foremost is the terribly creaky back-story of Don Draper’s false identity.  It has always felt unnecessarily ill-judged and awkward.   Then there are the nods towards the Neanderthal sexual, social and racial mores of the day.  They feel just like that – nods – that are never properly explored or played out.  As Daniel Mendelsoh has put it in his admirable dissection of the show, “Mad Men keeps telling you what to think instead of letting you think for yourself.”

For all of that, Mad Men beats the hell out of anything being produced on British TV, most especially the recent, laughable, fifties-set The Hour.  I spoke to someone recently about modern British and American novels and just as there is still a vitality and sense of space in America, lacking in Britain, that leads authors such as Franzen to man-up and go into bat for the Great American Novel, there is a comparable level of ambition in American TV, even if it comes off half-cocked, like Mad Men, that the BBC simply isn’t capable, isn’t hard-wired, to even attempt. 

Amsterdam

“You’re the only person I know that’s been to Amsterdam without smoking dope.”

Yes, well.  It’s probably only by dint of circumstance that this holds true.  For whatever reason – lack of money, reservations about some members of the touring party, or other commitments – I never joined any of the occasional boisterous expeditions to Debauchery Central that took place through my twenties, one of which, that I’m particularly pleased to have missed, ended up in a holding cell at Harwich Docks from which escape was only achieved by strict adherence to the quickly constructed defence of “everybody deny everything” – which in itself is a pretty good album title.  But Amsterdam is one of those places that everyone naturally assumes that you’ve been to and looks at you rather oddly if you haven’t so, with a few days leave arranged, and no other calls upon my time, I finally got around to visiting the Venice of the North.

A word on coffee shops.  I might have been tempted to indulge if I hadn’t gone solo.  But wandering about on my own I had neither the desire nor the inclination to get myself stoned in the company of the Euro-dope-bores.  There were plenty of them in evidence, young for the most part but leavened with a rancid crust of fucking old fools, and I could just see myself getting dazedly trapped with them for a whole afternoon and evening of my bare 48 hours in-country.  Besides, dope is so effectively decriminalised and available now that if I did determine to get battered I would much prefer to do it in the comfort of my own home with no risk of Pink Floyd or The Doors entering into the equation, thank you very much.

A word too about Naughty Ladies.   It rained almost constantly for all of the time that I was in Amsterdam.  Sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly, sometimes torrentially. There was a lot of rain. My exposure (probably the wrong word under the circumstances) to the joyless charms of the red light district and the ladies beckoning from beyond the glass came at a point when Noah would’ve been thinking about battening down the hatches.  For my part I was rather more concerned with getting my umbrella out of my bag and cursing at its recalcitrant mechanism than I was with the, no doubt, heavenly delights on offer and the shiver that ran right through me was much less to do with sexual anticipation than it was with the raindrop that had unerringly found its way down the back of my neck.  I made my excuses to no one in particular and left, heading off to drink another witte beer, dry off a little, and establish which particular canal I was going to walk along next.

From the highs of low culture to Low Countries high culture. The Rijksmuseum is undergoing an extensive renovation and while this is going on the finest works of their collection have been gathered all together in one annex.  I should like to take this opportunity to commend this approach to all other major museums in the world.  I’ve visited the Louvre and if I never ever go back there again it will be too soon and I’ve become footsore and art-weary trudging around a dozen other lesser edifices.  Being able to see every picture that I went there to see in a leisurely uncrowded hour and a half between late breakfast and early lunch doth not a philistine make.

It was pure coincidence that I had recently read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.   Set in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) enclave in Nagasaki harbour, it provided me with some context for the pictures of the fleets, the portraits of various VOC worthies and the items of trade booty in the Rijksmuseum.  As a book, I found it to be a rare page turner, vivid and entirely credible in its portrayal of that mysterious closed off society of 18^th century Japan though the more fantastical elements of the plot were unconvincing.  There was a quieter, better, novel here that got subsumed by over-ambition.  I note, too, that several women have, rightly, said that it made them feel rather queasy.

More rain.  The Van Gogh museum which, again, was a model of how museums should be – uncrowded enough to be able to walk around and simply absorb and enjoy.  More witte beer. 

 

On my final morning, before taking the train back out to Schiphol, I ventured a little further out from the city centre.  I had made a conscious effort to avoid the Anne Frank Museum, partly on account of the queues and partly on account of Third Reich Fatigue, but the Museum of the Dutch Resistance  was well worth a visit.  There were the expected portrayals of round-ups, hostage-taking and deportations as well as ingenious devices, hidden compartments etc. etc.  but what was most interesting (to me, at any rate) was a temporary exhibition on how the Dutch resistance was funded.

It’s rather a trite observation, but after seeing all of the sobering evidence of bravery and sacrifice and the betrayals and repression, one could not help but wonder, firstly, how Britons would have behaved under such circumstances and, secondly, how, or if, we in our society today could weather such a storm.

The Crystal Spirit

To the Royal Academy to view the exhibition Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century.

Central London on a Sunday morning always presents a strangely serene spectacle by comparison with the flurry of traffic and pedestrians, and the beggars and the chuggers, of the working week.  The sun broke through the clouds as I sat with a coffee and a cigarette and a newspaper in the courtyard of the RA in company with a garlanded Sir Joshua Reynolds, overlooked by the memorial to the Rainbow Division that has found a temporary resting place here.

Whether it’s London in the ‘Swinging Sixties’ or Paris in the 20s, there is a curious and occasional phenomenon in human affairs whereby there is a sudden and intense blooming of one or more of the arts at a particular place in time.  Oddly enough it was Hunter S Thompson who described this best, in the most profound, least pantomimic, paragraph of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In this case, whatever it was that was in the water in newly independent Hungary produced a clutch of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century: Brassai, Capa, Kertesz, Moholy-Nagy, Munkacsi.   The exhibition follows their careers at home and abroad for they all abandoned the authoritarianism of Admiral Horthy’s regime for more conducive climes in Germany and France and, subsequently, Britain and America.

  

Whether it truly is what it purports to be, between Capa’s image Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death and the memorial in the courtyard I thought of Orwell’s verses from Homage to Catalonia.

The Italian Militiaman

The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able


To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!


For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.


The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold—
Oh! who ever would have thought it?


Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.


Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?


For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.


Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;


But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

Enough Already

There has been something of a hiatus here on the Almanac as the One Eye has been focussed upon other matters.  An unseasonal bout of man-flu sees me unexpectedly at home and, with no cricket to listen to after England demolished India on the fourth day of the second Test, it seems like a good time to offer a personal cultural update, albeit one punctuated by a succession of fruity coughs and explosive sneezes.

It often seems to me that the Booker Prize reinforces stereotypes of literary fiction – joyless, earnest, wilfully ‘difficult’ and with oblique endings, as if wrapping everything tidily up is somehow wrong.  When I picked up Howard Jacobson’s 2010 winner, The Finkler Question, I began to think that my ignorant prejudices were just that – ignorant and prejudiced – until, that is, it became clear that the gentile character’s obsession with Jews and Judaism was going to be What The Book Was About.  ‘Enough, already,’ I thought.  And this was only at the halfway point.  When I set out on this blog I did aim to avoid gratuitous crudity but in this case I will break my own rule.  What a load of old shit this book was.

By contrast Martin Amis’s last book, The Pregnant Widow, proved a pleasant surprise.  Unburdened by much of the eye-rolling Wank that he’s always seemed compelled to introduce into even his best books, cf London Fields, this was a joy and a laugh to read, which may say more about me than the Booker Prize judges, who didn’t even elevate it to the 2010 shortlist.

I’d never read any of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books before seeing the film The Talented Mr Ripley a few years ago and subsequently getting hold of a copy of the book of the film, as it were.  I recently chanced upon a copy of Ripley Under Water, the last of the sequence.   The anally-retentive part of me rails against reading books out of order but I’d read several hefty volumes recently and this seemed just the sort of light offering that I was in the mood for.  As before, I was struck with Highsmith’s craftsmanship such that the reader engages with this amoral snobbish anti-hero and wills him to emerge unscathed.  That said, and without having read the intervening books in the Ripliad, it did strike me a little as Ripley-by-numbers and rather implausible

.     

A re-read of Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, about the Algerian war of independence, confirmed my thoughts that first time around that all of our politicians and top-brass should have been issued with copies of it before embarking on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Apparently he tried to press a copy on Rumsfeld, who didn’t want to know.  You can’t read this book, or The Last Valley, about Dien Bien Phu, without gaining some understanding of why France acts in the frequently obstreperous way that it does.  In retrospect it seems amazing that in the early sixties there was a genuine possibility of a military coup and civil war in France. 

 

More history: Dominic Sandbrook has now brought out three books charting the history of modern Britain from Suez onwards that are strike as lighter and less dry than the parallel marathon being run by David Kynaston.  State of Emergency covers 1970-1974, the bookends being the surprise electoral success and failure of Edward Heath’s Conservative government.  It’s interesting to note from this book how the, then powerful, Unions’ leaders recognised that Heath genuinely wanted to get on with them, even though they wouldn’t publically admit it.  There is a nice little vignette of a few of them visiting Downing Street, being entertained by Heath on the piano and him, on request, giving a rendition of the Red Flag.  From a personal point of view, it’s slightly disturbing to find the time of your own life beginning to become ‘history’.  There is more of this to come, of course.  And it’ll really be when the histories of the eighties and the nineties appear that I’ll be able to snort and say it wasn’t like that all.  But State of Emergency did bring back a couple of memories: sitting with candles in the dark during one of the power cuts – 1972, it must have been.  And, very vaguely, the furore over England failing to beat Poland and so missing out on the 1974 World Cup in one of the most one sided matches ever.

A recent shoe-shopping expedition to Oxford Street saw me emerging from John Lewis, successful but exhausted and in need of restorative Drink.  In the pub, I fell to talking with a Venezuelan academic.  We had a good old wide-ranging pub chat over a couple of hours and several pints and, grasping at straws for things-Latin-American to talk about, I seized upon the themes of Conrad’s Nostromo, another recent and well worthwhile re-read that gets better and richer each time.

I was reading Nostromo as the whole News of the World scandal broke and a page caught my eye that seemed to strike a parallel between the influence of the San Tome mine (the Gould Concession) over the Republic of Costaguana and the seemingly unbreakable grip that News International exercised over our politicians.

“‘You call these men Government officials?  They?  Never! They are officials of the mine – officials of the Concession – I tell you.’

The prominent man (who was then a person in power, with a lemon-coloured face and a very short and curly, not to say woolly, head of hair) went so far in his temporary discontent as to shake his yellow fist under the nose of his interlocutor, and shriek:

‘Yes!  All!  Silence! All! I tell you!  The political jefe, the chief of police, the chief of the customs, the general, all, all are the officials of that Gould.’”

Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative murmur would flow on for a space in the ministerial cabinet, and the prominent man’s passion would end in a cynical shrug of the shoulders.  After all, he seemed to say, what did it matter as long as the minister himself was not forgotten during his brief day of authority.  (p. 102)

Incidentally, it was only on this third or fourth reading of the book that it dimly struck me that Costaguana means Shit Coast.

Making my, slightly unsteady, way back from the pub to the railway station, I popped into the British Library.  This was mainly in order to avail myself of the gents but I took the opportunity to have a quick look around the Out of this World exhibition.  In truth, an exhibition of books of any sort isn’t especially exciting, although if it had been a little less busy I might have lingered longer and played about with some of the audio-visual props that they had.  I did, however, buy a copy of a book that had been (low) on my Amazon wish list for a while: Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore.  I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for alternate history novels, even though most of them aren’t any good.  This is no exception: time traveller from an alternate 1930s, where the South won at Gettysburg and hence won the Civil War, intervenes accidentally to ensure that the Union wins.  It’s 1950s Sci-fi and reads like it.  An interesting curiosity, though.

It was with high hopes that I bought a copy of the Letters of Julian Maclaren-Ross, only to find that they amounted to two hundred pages of ‘lend us a quid’.  Much more fun was had on a recent literary jaunt to Fitzrovia with William Gazy and the Prof which was posited on being an X Trapnel* night but cast its net much more widely in terms of civilised and humorous book talk that ended in a late night amble along Percy Street, deep in discussion of the Battle of Waterloo.

*X Trapnel being Anthony Powell’s rendering of Maclaren-Ross in A Dance to the Music of Time.

I took for my recitation the following from Books Do Furnish a Room (pp 144-145):

“Aiming at many roles, he was always playing one or other of them for all her was worth.  To do justice to their number requires – in the manner of Burton – an interminable catalogue of types.  No brief definition is adequate.  Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur ;  to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age.  Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with possible exception of being poor – the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery…”

I popped into the National Portrait Gallery last Saturday morning, to take a look at the Hollywood exhibition.  Why don’t they ever show Laurel and Hardy on TV anymore, especially with all the channels that now exist?  I gave the 1961-2000 gallery a miss, as it would be sure to include portraits that would make me cross, but took another look around the familiar 1900-1960 displays.  

There is Still No Orwell.

Salaam

Here we go again.  Whatever the rights and wrongs and realpolitik of it, and I struggle to make my mind up, I wonder if any bookies are taking punts on whether we will get any thanks for stepping into the Libyan imbroglio.   Long odds I suspect. 

By pure coincidence I’ve been rereading John Latimer’s Alamein and, while the technology has moved on a bit from Panzer IVs and 25-pdrs, the North African geography remains as much of a constraint as it ever was.  For either side to carry out a ‘home run’ into Tripoli or Benghazi means extending themselves out over 650 miles of coastal road and still having the wherewithal to be able to sustain themselves for long enough to finish the job when they get there.  Think of it as two boxers attached to bungee ropes.    It’s as true now for Gadhafi and the mysterious ‘Opposition’ as it was for the Afrika Korps and the Eighth Army.  And that inescapable logistical limitation is the main reason why the desert war see-sawed back and forth across Cyrenaica and the Western Desert for over two years.  Incidentally, I haven’t seen any news reports at all that have actually referred to eastern Libya as Cyrenaica, a name which became all too familiar through 1940-42.

Latimer excels as an author of popular military history, balancing the grand strategy with the human.

 

While Axis forces usually relied on centralised cooking, the British often devolved the responsibility down to vehicle crews, allowing more scope for inventiveness.  Crews soon perfected the technique of ‘brewing up’ and moving on in 20 minutes, and 20 ways of cooking bully.  Whenever the British were close to Alexandria an enterprising unit would arrange for delicacies to be brought up by anyone with an excuse to make a visit there, however brief.  ‘Up the blue’ – in the open desert – very occasionally there would be gazelles to hunt for fresh meat, and sometimes a Bedouin would appear seemingly from nowhere, enabling a trade – the British swapped tea or cigarettes for eggs.  According to Harold Fitzjohn, these exchanges were not always straightforward, as the nomad would always ask for a written chit or pass to prove his loyalty to the Allied cause.  ‘He’d ask the Germans for the same.  I suppose he had a pocket full of them.  We used to make one out and it used to say “Whatever happens, do not trust the bastard.”  After much thanking and “salaaming” he would go on his way clutching his pass.’ (p.21)

Bookshop Memories

Surely a university town of some 200,000 people warrants a decent bookshop.  As the downturn continues to play itself out, the latest local example of corporate retrenchment was the abrupt closure of the branch of Waterstones.  There were several small bookshops in the town throughout my childhood and my teens.  All gone now.

In one of the side streets, off what once was the town’s major thoroughfare before the construction of a huge blight of a shopping centre, there was a cramped and dusty bookshop run, if memory serves, by two old ladies.  I remember going there when I was immersed in a school project on the history of aircraft, or the Second World War, or some such, and spending ages in deliberation before settling upon The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe . 

I don’t think it can have been of all that much use for the project as it lacked all the sort of cutaway diagrams necessary for that sort of thing in favour of a dense textual soft apologia for the life and unpleasant works of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, one of AH’s technocratic true believers.  In my defence, I’ll say that at the age of 10 or 11 I had no idea whatsoever of who David Irving was and I can only assume that I chose it because I was with my mother, who I had cajoled into the promise of buying me a book and so a book – any book – had to be bought.  Scanning over the online PDF just now reminded me enough to be grateful once again for the systematic inefficiencies of the Third Reich.

Eight or ten years later.  The old ladies and their dusty old shop had gone and I was working, rather unhappily, as a wages clerk by day and leading what I took to be an alternative lifestyle by night.  This involved a lot of music.  It was that time of life when you enter into no-holds-barred competition with friends to discover and lay claim to albums and artists for yourself before they do.  The Rolling Stones were quite unfashionable then but I had developed an interest in them as ur-Punks and was proselytising with the fervour of the convert and, predictably enough, I was especially enamoured with Sympathy for the Devil.  I’d picked up a copy of Anthony Scaduto’s biography of Jagger in the market and come across a reference to how the song was based upon the book by Bulgakov.

It felt like a big deal then, going into a shop and going through the whole officious process of filling out forms and leaving a deposit.  At that time there was a small independent though hardly, I think, cutting-edge bookshop on the fringe of the town centre and I went there during one of my lunch breaks and ordered The Master and Margarita.  I don’t know what I expected the book to be like, coming at it, as I did, courtesy of the Glimmer Twins.  I’m sure that it was the first translation that I’d ever read and I could see that it was an allegory of the same Soviet Union that I’d come across in Animal Farm at school.  I knew next to nothing about Faust but I found both the major story and the book within the book, about the ‘fifth procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate’, amusing and moving.

That shop is long gone too and probably unmissed by anyone.   For a number of years there was a book stall in the indoor market.  I passed by and had a browse on a fairly regular basis but there never seemed to be that much of a turnover of stock.  The only purchase that comes to mind now is Volumes 1-3 of the, then long out of print, Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, which prompted me into my first foray onto eBay to pick up Volume 4.  There are many Orwell collections, from one volume affairs through to the massive 20 volume Complete Works, but CEJL remains the connoisseurs choice for its mixture of the many Orwells.  The market stall closed a few years ago and now, with Waterstones gone, only WH Smith and the various charity shops remain. 

Out in the pub the other night I carried out a straw poll on the theme of A Town Without A Bookshop and the result was as near indifference as makes no difference with responses ranging from shrugs to mutters about doing all book buying online.  I think it’s a shame.  Not because I’m a fan of Waterstones but because, like libraries, bookshops are a Good Thing, providing the space for serendipity that online shopping, even with its Recommendations, somehow lacks.