Los Disparates

The website of the Bioblioteca Nacional in Madrid plays host to a comprehensive Esposicíon Virtual of the graphic works of Francisco Goya y Lucientes. His engravings, etchings and lithographs are no less extraordinary than his paintings (for which, by the way, the Museo del Prado site is a very good resource).

These images are as though from a troubling dream, and like many of Goya’s works convey, to me, an uneasy foreboding. All the works pictured here are from his last published set of etchings, known collectively as Los Disparates or Los Proverbios.

I’ve picked those prints from the set that most obviously partake of what seems to me a pervasive quality of weightlessness, of oneiric flotation.

The complete set of Disparates can be found here: my source for all of the images above.

Toscanelli

The first cigars I ever tried were the long, thin ones that Dr. M________ brought back to Wimbledon from his ’89 Xmas trip home to Milan, along with a bottle of grappa. I wasn’t thrilled, at first, with the smoking experience, but alternating puffs with sips of the liquor made either one seem that little bit less unpleasant. It wasn’t until seven years later that I tried a cigar again, during my second visit to Paris, in the midst of a cold snap that had frozen the city almost solid. I was visiting Dr. M_____ (a different Dr., I should point out, his name spelled with five underscores rather than eight). Dr M_____ had accompanied me as I’d purchased Tour d’Eiffel keychains & snowglobes, when it struck us that we should buy a postcard for our absent, mutual friend, Mr. R_________. I think we eventually settled for one with a picture of a naked lady on it. We needed a stamp, and so headed for the nearest Tabac. Both Dr. M_____ and I had quit smoking cigarettes a short time before, and, once inside the exceptionally well-stocked tobacconist’s, were both dumbstruck with overwhelmingly intense nicotine nostalgia. We both really wanted a smoke, and I would have bought a pack had not Dr. M_____ suggested we try some cigarillos instead. I tried a puff, and, this time, I found it to my liking. I found that, moreover, they blunted my appetite for cigarettes.

Back in Rome a few days later I’d smoked the last of what I'd bought in Paris, and was in need of more. On my way to work I stopped in at the usual Tabacchi, where the grumpy man was used to handing me my Camel Filters. He automatically reached for them that morning too… No, grazie. I said, Volevo dei… sigari. The tobacconist gestured morosely at his selection, at which I ummed momentarily until a fellow-customer to my right suggested: Toscanelli? Si, I ventured, Toscanelli! The grumpy man looked doubtful, and warned me that they were rather strong, but I paid my 4500 lire & walked away with my first red-&-white pack of Italian cigars.

The cigars themselves resembled small bits of twig, and took an age to catch alight. They were indeed rather strong, overwhelmingly so if one made the mistake, as I did on several occasions, of inhaling… They were so strong, in fact, that they would make me hiccup, but nevertheless I developed a perverse liking for them. They’re the cigars that Clint Eastwood was always chewing on in those old westerns. A website devoted to the subject lists Giacomo Puccini, Arturo Toscanini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, George Sand, Gabriele d’Annunzio, and Eugenio Montale amongst other famous Toscanelli or Toscani smokers. A Toscano by the way, is a double-length Toscanello, or else a Toscanello is more-or-less half a Toscano. I find nothing accompanies a bitter shot of espresso better than a few puffs on a Toscanello: most anything less intense, even an undiluted shot of scotch, say, tends to be drowned out by the robustness of the cigar’s flavour.

In later years I found an independent, specialist tobacconist’s shop in Cardiff that stocked Toscani and Toscanelli, albeit at twice the price one pays in Italy. It’s an establishment which seems an isolated survival from those yellow-stained years past when tobacco was king. I dropped by there on Saturday, and bought myself a few packs.

The images above were lifted from the sigarotoscano site.

In the Fog

Having spent a hectic weekend in Cardiff, shopping and meeting up with a friend of my wife’s and having got together all-too-briefly with my mother, my sister, her family, and my father, we set out in our hire-car before 8AM on Monday morning, leaving ourselves plenty of time, so we thought, to board our 09:50 flight. A succession of navigational blunders on my part, however, soon saw us heading north-west out of the city, joining the M4 motorway, rather than south-west, in the direction of the airport.

This would have been readily correctable, had there not been an accident blocking the entire westbound carriageway near Bridgend, which, in turn, brought all traffic heading in that direction to a near-standstill. The minutes scratched by ever so slowly as we crept forward at an average speed of less than five miles per hour.

We finally made it to the airport five minutes after our sceduled departure time, whereupon I hurried into the terminal and announced to the lady at the KLM desk I think we’ve missed our flight. Which flight? came her reply. The 09:50 to Amsterdam, I responded, hasn’t it already left? No, she said, to my very great relief, it’s only just landed. It turned out that the fog we had seen clinging over the nearby fields had caused a delay just sufficient to allow us to make our flight, but not so severe that our onward connection to Copenhagen would be jeopardised.

The pictures above are of, or taken from, the St. David’s Hotel and Spa, in Cardiff Bay, where we had spent three very comfortable nights.

Upon our arrival at Copenhagen, our outrageous good fortune at having made it there at all was soon undercut by two fresh setbacks. Firstly, one of our two suitcases had failed to make the connection at Amsterdam. This is a type of mishap to which we have become all too well-accustomed, having experienced a half dozen such lost luggage incidents over the past few years. We were reassured that, in this case, the whereabouts of the errant case were known, and that it would be forwarded to us the next day.

Secondly, moments after we had joined the approach-road to the Öresundsbron, the bridge, that is, which connects Copenhagen with southwestern Sweden, we ran into a new traffic snarl-up, caused, we gathered, by a bad accident in the 6km tunnel which precedes the Danish end of the bridge proper. We sat and watched from a stationary line of cars as police-vans, fire-engines and tow-trucks sped purposefully back and forth. We were pleasantly surprised when traffic began to move again after less than half an hour.

As we traversed the bridge, we could see that the Swedish coast’s outline was softened by a diffuse mist. We had not travelled far beyond it before the mist thickened into a prodigious blanket of freezing fog, one which cut visibility almost to zero in some places, as all but the very nearest and clearest of external referents dissolved into the profound, all-engulfing murk. What was more remarkable than this fog’s density was its extent: it clad the entire southern Swedish coast, a fact we discovered to our cost as we journeyed eastward, with what would normally be a two-and-a-half hour drive taking an eye-straining, disorienting and exhausting four hours. I’ve seldom been more relieved to reach a destination than I was on pulling into the Mañana’s parking garage that evening.

Recital

Yesterday evening I attended a recital of piano music at the konserthusteatern, whose outstandingly ugly façade mars one corner of the Great Square. This was the first such event I’ve ever attended, so my expectations were rather ill-formed. The artiste was Peter Jablonski, a virtuoso concert-pianist of at least some international renown who just happens to have been born in a neighbouring town: it is difficult to imagine a performer of a comparable calibre visiting a backwater like this for any reason other than an accident of birth.

The first I had heard of Jablonski was on a CD I’d borrowed from the town library a year and a half ago, featuring Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and, what caught my ear more especially, brilliant renditions of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto no. 1 and Lutosławski’s Paganini Variations. I happened upon some other CDs of his in the months that followed, but found nothing else that quite inspired me like that first one. His performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, for instance, was smoothly accomplished, but seemed short on the drama and pathos that the piece can be made to convey.

The concert hall was a little more than half-full, with a turn-out of about 350. A polished Steinway grand stood on the stage. After a short introduction, Jablonski entered, black-clad, from stage-left. With no ado he bagan a Chopin Polonaise (Op. 26), a piece which, as with everything else on the programme, I did not know. I tried to close my eyes and concentrate solely on the music, but found myself intensely conscious, at first, of the minutest of movements or the quietest of stifled coughs from those around me. I was uncomfortably aware, too, of the slight hearing impairment in my left ear, which provoked in me a vague feeling of imbalance for which some part of my brain kept wanting to compensate by tilting my head a particular way, which can have been of no benefit whatsoever.

After the Polonaise, we were treated to a sequence of three Chopin Mazurkas. As these unfolded, I found myself able to blank out the various distractions, and to focus better on the music, which, although pleasant, did not exactly reach in and move me. Next came a half-dozen of Rachmaninov’s Études-tableaux (op. 33), renowned for their forbidding difficulty. These spectacular show-pieces highlighted Jablonski's pianistic skill to excellent effect, and seemed better-suited to his bright & brash style than had the Chopin.

An interval ensued, before the second half of the programme commenced with some extracts from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons (Op. 37a), specifically the pieces meant to represent the months of October, November and December, and subtitled Autumn Song, On the Troika and Christmas-Tide respectively. Next came the second and third movements of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata no. 8, sporadically fascinating music, which was just dissonant enough to make some among the audience squirm uneasily in their seats. A pair of piano-adapted movements from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo & Juliet rounded out the set.

The audience loved their local-boy-made-good, and heartily applauded him through a pair of finger-blurring encores. I enjoyed the show & would go again if we’re still here when he next drops by.

A Walk in the Park

There was still some snow on the ground unthawed since the last fall three weeks or so ago. The moon seemed as bright & as full as could be. I felt a little spaced-out, having slept poorly the night before, and likewise the night before that. From the Great Square came a confusion of noises: work had begun on dismantling the circus marquees after the final performance there earlier in the evening. Will anyone run away with them, I wondered, when they go? We had just watched Donnie Darko on DVD, which we’d resorted to ordering from overseas, as it’s yet to be released in Sweden.

My thoughts were of that self-congratulatory kind that feel sure of their own importance. Typically, now that the time has come that I might fix them down in writing, I can’t recall what they were, only that they seemed profound at the time: evidently I was deluded.

Idleness/Wallpaper

An Essene sits idly on a bushel, and looks to the stars. Beneath he holds a torch, lit with fire. Sluggishness, in the appearance of the righteous, hidden by a hood, is of use neither to himself nor to others - Alciato, Emblem 81.

The word bushel always connoted, in my mind, an amount, a certain volume, as in ‘bushels of corn’: I never considered the bushel as container. Certainly the phrase to hide ones light under a bushel now makes plain sense to me, whereas before it did not. To be fair to the Essene, perhaps it’s a frosty night, and he's got a cold arse. I like it that the stars are black asterisks in the sky.

It’s been an idle weekend.

Further to my mention below of our trip to Rome last year, I attach the following image, a detail from a photograph my wife took of one of the paintings or frescoes in San Pietro. By chance, I tried it out as my Windows-XP wallpaper, and liked it so much that it's stayed there ever since. I wish now that I knew something about it - its subject, the artist; but I've been unable to find a specific resource about artworks in the basilica proper, as opposed to the Sistine Chapel, or the Vatican Museums. If anyone who might read this should happen to know, I’d be very glad to be enlightened.

Update, 9^th March I now know that this is at the altar now dedicated to St. Pius X, after having found an illustrated English-language Vatican guidebook in a local 2nd-hand bookshop. There was no specific mention of the artist or the painting's subject-matter though.

Lupercalia

Lupercalia was a spring festival celebrated in ancient Rome; an antecedent, apparently, of St. Valentine’s Day:

Celebrated on Feb. 15th, Lupercalia was a fertility rite in honour of the gods Lupercus, Faunus (associated with Pan) and the founders of Rome: Romulus and Remus. The celebration began at the Lupercal cave, where the wolf Lupa was said to have suckled the infant Romulus and Remus. Afterward, priests would sacrifice a goat (symbol of fertility) and a dog (symbol of protection) to the gods, anoint themselves with the blood, and run through the streets whipping onlookers with a thong made from the goat's skin. The whipping was believed to help ease childbirth and promote fertility.

Also during the festival, young men would draw the names of eligible girls from a pot or urn […] This drawing of lots contined into the middle ages in Europe. The young man would wear the slip bearing his Valentine's name on his sleeve, and attend to the lady with flowers, gifts, and words of affection…

My love and I spent our last Lupercalia in Rome. It was my wife's first visit to the city, and the first occasion I’d had to return there in years. That particular day we went to San Pietro, which was hardly more than a fifteen-minute walk from our hotel. I am usually shy of entering churches, not feeling, as a non-believer, that I belong. Saint Peter’s is an exception, however: a place I could never tire of visiting, and one that, it seems to me, is as much a magnificent Theatre as it is a Basilica, more an expression of temporal dominion than of pious faith. I could go on about the unique quality of the light & the mellow reverberation of the echoing voices &c, but I couldn’t do the place justice in a few hastily-chosen words.

From the Basilica we took a long loop back to our hotel by way of via Cola di Rienzo, a broad, shop-lined avenue, along which we walked slowly, hand-in-hand, peering through every second or third shop-window, and where, at length, we found a street-side pizzeria that proved the perfect place to take the weight of our aching feet, & where we enjoyed a delicious late lunch. That evening, after a few hours’ rest we opted to go to a Tex-Mex place called Oliphant, on via delle Copelle, which I’d walked past that morning, recalling, if only distantly, having enjoyed a good meal there years before on the happy occasion of my loathsome boss’ odious boss’ departure.

I'd lived and worked in Rome for two gruelling years, quitting my job there in October ’97. I was burnt-out from the continual stress of the work I’d been doing, as an IT Project Manager for a satellite TV company. Even so, I felt fortunate to have had the opportunity to live in such a place, even if the experience had been far from painless. There was a leaving party of sorts, to which only a half-dozen people showed up. As a parting gift, I was presented with a silver cigarette-case, which, on occasion, will resurface from some accumulation of domestic clutter, all dented & tarnished, like my memories of that time. One recollection that shines out clearly, though, is the ride home from the restaurant that night on the back of my colleague Mr. R_______’s motorino, through quiet cobbled streets shining with autumn rain.

I took a few days out, after that, to pack up my things and bid my silent farewells to the city. This I did by walking one last time along my favourite thoroughfares, sharing as I went in that palpable sense of continuous habitation, the feeling that others had been walking these same byways every day for twenty centuries & more. I left by train, to Venice, where I had planned to spend a week before returning to the UK.

This year we are celebrating the feast of the three Saints Valentine here in Sweden, where it goes by the name of Hjärtansdag, Heartsday. It is an occasion only slightly tainted by the lurid commercial abandon one meets with in the English-speaking world. Then again, how does one best celebrate love? With tasteful restraint or an with an effusion of kitsch? With a long weekend in Rome or Paris or Las Vegas? With chocolates, flowers, champagne and a candlelit supper? With a love-sonnet, or a handmade token? Or with animal sacrifice, public nudity and mild bondage, Lupercal-style? Should one save up expressions of love for this particular date, as custom dictates, or ought spontanaiety be allowed to prevail?

The images here are engravings by Giam Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), from his Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome) series. Clicking on the images will display them in a larger format. Even larger versions of these, and many more of Piranesi's works can be found here.

In the Care of the Gods

I placed my latest order for classical music CDs the other day. I use Crotchet rather than MDT or Amazon, as they strike what is, for me, a good balance between browsability, value and depth of stock. I ordered: (i) Marc-André Hamelin’s recording of the complete Scriabin sonatas, as I’d been intrigued on one hand by a rendition of one of them, the 7th, by Roland Pöntinen on a CD compilation of Russian virtuoso piano music I’d picked up second-hand, and on the other by a delightful account of a set of Scriabin’s early (and distinctly Chopinesque) Op. 8 Études by Nikita Magaloff, on the Italian budget label Ermitage; (ii) a set of Beethoven’s late quartets having been struck by an extract from Op. 130 on a Gramophone cover disc recently; (iii) a ‘best-of’ compilation of the music of Gavin Bryars, based more, to be honest, on what I have read than on what I have heard; and (iv) a disc featuring compositions for cello and orchestra by Paul Hindemith, my first foray beyond this composer’s chamber and instrumental works.

It’s not the ideal way to explore what remains (for me) the largely undiscovered continent of classical music, as I’ve no trustworthy map, and proceed with little innate sense of direction: I have oftentimes been necessarily disappointed with music that looked great on paper, but that fell leadenly flat on my ears when I actually listened to it. For now though, I can afford a measure of recklessness, and mean to continue regardless, heartened that I've bought as many gems as I have worthless baubles.

A much cheaper means of musical exploration has been amongst the LPs, often sold at a pittance, which crowd the bins in the local junkshops. I bought four discs in the course of a couple of junktrawls on Sunday and Monday. Out of these, alas, only one stood out as a keeper on first listening: a 10-inch 33 of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with David Oistrakh as the soloist. I think I’d heard the piece before, and had thought little of it... but sometimes it takes a particular performer to animate a work, and make it dance and sing where others simply cannot - and, even through the haze of hiss & crackle from a record a long, long way past mint condition, I listened, transfixed by the intense brilliance of Oistrakh’s playing.

Music is in the care of the gods...

Calligraphy

The calligrapher Hassan Massoudy was born in Baghdad in 1944, but has lived and worked in Paris since the late 1960s.

What can be admired in Hassan Massoudy is the masterful use he makes of colours in his compositions. He has opalescent washes, flows of emerald, monochromes of beiges enriched with deep wood tones and sandalwood fragrances. This is a new era, which is then open to calligraphy. Indeed, lovers of exoticism and antique may be disappointed. Hassan Massoudy is not the living fossil of the old Arabic calligraphy. He is an artist of our time. His art belongs to that very end of the twentieth century, despite the ancestral roots that he immerses in the tradition of the Orient. - Michel Tournier.

The colours are most certainly vibrant, even within the restrictive confines of reproductions such as these. I'd love to see some of these works in their original state.

The sense of community is essential for Massoudy, and that community is most emphatically not limited to Islam. Much of his work focuses on peace and tolerance as a prerequisite of all that has value, and this quite naturally leads him into work with Amnesty International, UNICEF, and other related organizations. If peace forms one of Massoudy's major themes, it reaches back into one of the basic social currencies of his tradition, the proverb - Karl Young.

Whether derived from proverb or quotation, the texts and titles of Massoudy's works seem as though chosen with the utmost precision and tact.

Hassan Massoudy's calligraphies enact a rhythm, a musical structure which echoes back to the very remotest times. Powerful emotions are evoked by the movement of his lines, their weight, their lightness, their transparency; the balance between black and white, the fullness and the vacuum, the concreteness and the abstractness... The artist has retained from his training the noble spirit of an artisan able to make his own tools and to fix his own inks and pigments...

Numerous books about Massoudy's art, or otherwise illustrated by him, have been published in France.

All but the last of these images were taken from this site. All are © copyright Hassan Massoudy.

I found the last image here. It is one of several simply entitled Peace.

Damascene

I often play a word game in which one tries to make up as many words as one can in two minutes from a random selection of ten letters. In general, the more words one assembles, and the longer they are, the better the score. On one occasion, some time ago, I was very pleased with myself for coming up with a nine-letter word: damascene, although it bothered me at the time that, whilst I’d recalled the word from somewhere in my mind, I didn't know what it meant.

I looked it up, & found that it derives from Damascus, the ancient Levantine city - apparently the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. Although many have been on the road that leads to Damascus (figuratively speaking), it is likely that few who might read this will have actually spent time in the Syrian capital. Damascene is to Damascus as Roman is to Rome, or Parisian to Paris.

Damascene, or damaskeen, is also a style of decorative iron- or steel-work, famed for its hardness, suppleness and texture, wherein the metal is imbued with a peculiar marking, as that in watered silk, or is inlaid, or incrusted with silver, or gold, by means of etching, engraving or carving. Dryden refers to Mingled metal damasked o'er with gold. A synonymous term is damask, which drifts in to us accompanied by a complex harmony of other connotations. Damask may be silk, elaborately woven with a floral design; it may be linen so woven that a pattern is produced by the different directions of the thread, without contrast of colour; and it may be wool or worsted stuff similarly made, for furniture covering and hangings.

Then there is the Damask rose, a fragrant bloom, or its deep pink colour, praised by poets. A type of small oval plum of a blue color, once known as a Damask plum, is, lastly, now known to us as a damson. So there is the sharp flavour of fruit, the heady fragrance of a rose and the rich glow of its colour. There is the glint reflected from the exquisite decoration on antique swords. And there are the sounds and smells of a Biblical city more imagined now, than seen.

It sounds like a tale, or a novel: well, it's that too, Damascene: a hypertext by Serbian fantasist Milorad Pavić.

Emblemata

Futile effort.

A dog gazes at the moon by night, as if at a mirror. And seeing himself, he believes another dog is in the moon. So he barks; but his ineffectual voice is carried away in vain by the winds, and Diana pursues her course without hearing.

So runs the text, translated from the original Latin of Emblem 165 in Andrea Alciato's Eblematum Liber or Book of Emblems.

Alciato's book had enormous influence and popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries. It is a collection of 212 Latin emblem poems, each consisting of a motto (a proverb or other short enigmatic expression), a picture, and an epigrammatic text. Alciato's book was first published in 1531, and was expanded in various editions during the author's lifetime. It began a craze for emblem poetry that lasted for several centuries.

A contemporary English imitation clarifies the intended meaning, or perhaps overclarifies it, as the attraction of emblem-books would, I guess, have been due to a combination of picture, poem, and puzzle, with a meaning or moral to be teased out by the reader. I spent an hour or two this week revisiting these images, and, whilst some of them seem hopelessly opaque in their meaning, and others rather banal, there are many which remain thought-provoking, or instructive. I may return to some other examples in entries to come. I wonder, by the way, as people see a man in the moon, would dogs indeed see a dog in the moon?

The links page at the Alciato site led me on to a few other interesting places, one of which, project mnemosyne, links, in turn, to a rich, searchable collection of mediaeval manuscript miniatures. From their highlights section under the heading of Labours of the Month, one finds the following examples amongst those grouped under February.

February's labours then, not surprisingly, were all about keeping oneself warm. Brrr. Another of the links leads to the University of Mannheim's MATEO pages, which include a painstakingly scanned collecton of old, rare books. One such, Bibliotheca chalcographica, hoc est Virtute et eruditione clarorum Virorum Imagines, is a collection of engravings from the renowned de Bry publishing stable, which portrays important humanist figures. Among them, sure enough, is Alciato...

Fox & Anchor

We went to the Fox and Anchor on Wednesday evening for a meal and a few drinks with our friend Mrs. T______. The F&A opened about a month ago in the premises of what was formerly a nightclub. It is the third English/Irish-style pub to have opened in the town where we live, which now seems to boast more such establishments than it does Swedish bars. A good deal of money had evidently been spent in creating a quite convincing simulacrum of English pub decor: with dark wood, brass lamps, stained glass skylights, and old prints and plates on the walls. If an English pub-goer were kidnapped, blindfolded and brought there, it would be a few minutes, perhaps, depending on how much he or she had had to drink, before an uncanny realisation that something was not quite right might begin to dawn. One such false note that registered with me only in retrospect was that the lighting was slightly too bright.

Wednesday being the main weekday drinking night in these parts, the place was busy, and the atmosphere was good. The food was nothing special, but there was an impressive range of draught beers, virtually none of which are available elsewhere in town. After starting with a German weißbier I switched to Krušovice Černé, a delicious dark Czech brew. I had another few of those before wandering off, ready for bed, at about eleven, leaving Mrs. T______ and my wife, chips in hand, at the poker table in the gaming room. The very presence of a gaming room offering blackjack, poker and roulette, would be in itself, of course, a strong indicator to our notional abductee that he or she was not in England anymore...

Notarius

I wanted to know the Swedish word for notary, so I referred to the Skoldatanäten Lexin web-site which gave the answer notarius, or, in full, notarius publicus. I was a little surprised, as one sees relatively few such obvious latinisms in Swedish. Indeed the only other one that comes immediately to mind is centrum, when referring to a town or city centre.

I wanted to know this because my wife is in the process of renewing her passport, to which end she required a person of suitable standing to sign a form confirming that she is who she claims to be. A Google™ search subsequently led me to the address and telephone number of the sole notarius in the town where we live. We went to his office this morning.

I had never visited a notary's office before, and didn't quite know what to expect. I imagined our provincial professional in a wood-panelled office with a large, ornate desk, and leather-upholstered chairs. In the computer game I started playing at the weekend, Syberia, one of the first things the protagonist has to do is to visit the notary in the French Alpine town to where she has been sent by her employers. The office of this fictional notaire is an elegant essay in art-nouveau...

Such decor would not have been entirely out of place in the building we visited earlier today, which may well date back to the 1920s. We made our way up to the 3rd floor in a somewhat rickety old elevator, where we found the offices of Messrs W_____ and F_______, advokaterna, lawyers. Our entry through the office door rang a bell, but we were left to linger hesitantly in the hallway for a short while before a secretary brusquely motioned us into a waiting room, which contained a couple of sofas, and some cheap-looking book-cases tightly crammed with legal tomes.

No more than five minutes later, a man in his fifties, mustachioed and bespectacled, wearing a tweed jacket and with a wearily crumpled air about him, invited us into his office. To judge from it, one might assume that the legal profession is less lucrative in Sweden than elsewhere. There was an overproliferation of paper, in the guise both of books and of loose documents, which threatened to engulf the whole room. The furnishings were more functional than elegant, although there was indeed some leather-upholstered seating. A mismatched selection of mediocre paintings decorated the walls, yielding pride of place to a very large framed photograph of a yacht behind Mr. W_____'s desk.

The signing, stamping and general notarising took only ten minutes or so to complete, and cost us two hundred kronor.

Minims

One of the books I remember most affectionately from my youth was a very small square paperback entitled Minims. It comprised a series of fifty-odd line drawings, each illustrating a single apparently epigrammatic statement:

The bigger they are, the harder they hit.

Minim (n):a statement expressed in proverbial or sentential form but having no general application or practical use whatever - compare Maxim.

Pigs and goats alike care nothing for the opera.

It has been many years since I lost or gave away this book, which an aunt had given to me one Christmas when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, but I still remember many of the images, and the minims themselves, some of which have, in my mind, almost assumed the status of genuine proverbs, albeit absurd ones.

It is difficult to repair a watch while falling from an aeroplane.

The book's author, Tom Weller, has also written and illustrated works entitled: Science Made Stupid, Culture Made Stupid and a Book of Stupid Questions. One day, I shall have to try tracking down one or more of these.

Time heals all non-fatal wounds.

I'm indebted to Ole at 'about as funny as income tax' for posting a link to an on-line reproduction of the entire book.

The early worm gets eaten by a bird.

The images and captions are copyright © 1982 by Thomas W. Weller.

Fortune favours the lucky.

Ricardo Reis, Backgammon, Terragen

I finished José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis a few days ago. I found it a deliciously rich and heady book, of the kind best read slowly, for fear that a kind of literary indigestion may otherwise result. I had only previously read a single short work by Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island, to which I was drawn by the conjunction of the renowned author's name with that of Peter Sís, as illustrator. As it turned out, neither the tale nor its few illustrations sufficed to make a worthwhile stand-alone publication: it was just too slender a thing. Then, in the James Thin bookshop in Edinburgh last November I decided to give Saramago a second chance. There isn't much of a plot, Dr. Reis returns to Lisbon after years of exile in Brazil. He stays at an hotel for a while, during which time he becomes involved with two very different women. He converses at length with the ghost of his friend, Fernando Pessoa. He gets a locum job and moves out into an apartment. He has an unnerving brush with the state police. Despite the apparent lack of narrative propulsion, Saramago's prose is so exquisitely fine that one barely notices it. I shall certainly be reading more of his work, though I'll take the time to digest this one first. One sad observation provoked by the book is how far the quality of Harvill paperbacks has declined over the past ten years or so. The Saramago book is a shoddy thing when compared to early '90s editions. I suppose the years of being sucked in and spat back out by the big multinational publishing companies has left its inevitable mark.

When my wife and I bought a backgammon set, in luxurious tan pleather and psuede, last week, I struggled to remember the single set of circumstances under which I had played the game before.

I think it must have been my old friend Dr. M________ who tried to teach me to play, but whether this was during the Wimbledon or the Edinburgh years, I could not recall. In any case my wife and I played it for the first time on Saturday evening. We both had to re-learn the rules from scratch. We both found it an enjoyable game, though I am unlikely to master it. For a supposedly intelligent person, I have an alarming inaptitude for games of strategy and skill. Dr. M________ could beat me every time, just as he would at chess. Even my cellphone, I have recently discovered, can beat me at reversi more often than not. Reversi, I digress, was the first game I learned to play on a computer, specifically on our school's Research Machines 380Z, a hefty black CP/M box of ca. 1986 vintage. After a few weeks' play I found I could outsmart the program every time. My ability has lagged far behind the intervening years' advances in technology, and I can only just about beat the program on my Siemens SL45 phone when it's set to a medium difficulty level.

The other week, after reading a boingboing spot, I downloaded the Terragen landscape-design and rendering software. It's fun to play around with. Here is my best imaginary landscape shot to come out of the hour or so of playing around with it.

Click on the image to see the full-sized original.