Istanbul

Some people recollect their childhood memories with perfect clarity; I cannot. Mine are oftenest clouded, their details hard to pick out. They seem as though telescoped away more distantly than they should be. My earliest memories: a step leading down into a kitchen with a tiled floor, or a sunlit backyard, with my sister, her arm around me… where someone is taking our photograph.

When I was five years old my father broke his pelvis in a fall from the jib of a crane at his place of work. A large part of the compensation he was paid for this injury was spent on a family holiday that we could not have otherwise afforded: a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Oriana. Our itinerary: Southampton, Athens, Istanbul, Kos, Palma, Lisbon, Southampton.

This was my sole childhood experience of overseas travel, and, while I retain a disproportionate freight of memories from this vacation, very few of these carry with them any emotional or sensory charge: most are no more than sun-bleached mental snapshots. There are exceptions. I recall our ascent of the Acropolis for the baking noontime heat and the dry yellowness of the stones; and I recall the fragrant warmth of the evening breeze, with the ship moored overnight in Istanbul, as my sister and I, having escaped from our cabin, played at quoits on the deserted poop-deck, enchanted by the lights and distant sounds of the city.

The images above were lifted from this on-line gallery. The first two images are Copyright © Faruk Koçak (2003), and the third is Copyright © Nejat Akdaş (2004). They are reproduced without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence here.

Father Cats

Jacob Cats (1577-1660) was a Dutch jurist, diplomat and poet. He was a prolific versifier, whose didactic yet homely works won him much respect and popularity (he became known, among his countrymen, as ’Father Cats’), but whose stolid humourlessness meanwhile attracted some ridicule. Cats was inspired by the international popularity of Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum Liber to produce an emblem-book of his own, but one in the vernacular, such that his less well-educated countrymen could still profit from the moral insights that emblems could encapsulate. Cats’ first emblem-book was published in 1618. The current images are lifted from a later publication (1627) entitled Proteus Ofte Minne-Beelden Verandert In Sinne-Beelden.

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Helpfully, besides the usual Latin, and Cats’ Dutch, this 1627 edition also includes translations into French and, in a separate section, into English. Even supplied with the translations, though, it can still be difficult to figure out what is happening in some of the images, and just how they are supposed to complement the texts. For example, the Englished version of the motto for the first image, above, cryptically states:

In true love there is no lack
All is the bride nover so black

Presumably ‘nover’ is a misprint for ‘never’, but, even so, I have no idea what that means. This couplet from the accompanying verse seems to shed a little more light on the matter:

What blynd-folde doltinge love is this, appearinge in our sigt
How that the ape takes in her younge such wonderfull delight.

The second image, which depicts the God Pan recklessly embracing the flames, is complemented by texts advising against over-hasty marriage.

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The English mottoes for two preceding emblems are as follows:

In outwarde show, appeares no wounde,
but inwardly, my grieffe is founde.

If that thyne eyes be conquered, sure,
Then loves torments thou must indure.

And, for the two emblems below:

T[h]ough clamorouse tongues both curse and blame,
A constant harte is stil the same.

Who unto Idlenesse doth yielde,
is as a but in Venus fielde.

A couplet from the relevant verse may help clarify this last motto a little:

The spyder will not once come neare the serpent him t’offend.
When she perceaves hee busie is, or watchfully doth tend.

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The final two images below both strike me as quite obtuse. The motto of the first of them boils down to a simple ‘love conquers all’, but the image, with the piper and the dancing apes, seems to have nothing to do with that, but rather puts together some of the images in the final lines of the accompanying verse:

The Ape in dauncinge soone forgetts, true measure for to keepe,
As soone as he preceave the nutts came trinlinge too his feete.

Similarly, the motto for the second image below is a straightforward platitude:

True love increaseth day by day,
and knows no bounds whereat to stay.

So why the crocodile and the creepy guy? In this case, the verse more readily provides an explanation - just like true love, a crocodile will never stop growing, until, that is, it meets with Death…

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My source for these images is yet another of the fine on-line editions presented by the Herzog August library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, although this time around I arrived there via a different route, through the emblem-books indexed as part of the Mnemosyne project. See also my previous entries here, here and here.

The Kings of Redonda

As I mentioned a few entries ago, I recently read M.P. Shiel’s novel The Purple Cloud, a ripely Late-Victorian melodrama following one lone man’s survival of a global catastrophe. I read it in the new Tartarus Press edition which is set splendidly between purple endpapers and covers, with a purple marker-ribbon to keep ones page. After that, I started reading Tomorrow In the Battle, Think On Me, a sophisticated literary novel of secrets & lies by the contemporary Spanish writer Javier Marías, which I finished only yesterday. I never would have imagined any link between these two authors, had I not glanced at the acknowledgements on the reverse of the Tartarus edition’s title-page, where I read the following:

This edition is made possible by the kindness of Javier Marías (Xavier of Redonda), the executor and holder of the estate of M.P. Shiel. The publishers would like to express their thanks to King Xavier, [...] and the Redondan Cultural Foundation.

So, I had to wonder, what was all that about? King Xavier? And where, or what, was Redonda? The internet had the answers, of course, which I will now attempt to summarise.

Marías had bought a collection of private papers that had formerly belonged to a writer and literary enthusiast by the name of John Gawsworth, at an auction at Sotheby’s in 1995. Gawsworth had previously figured as a character in Marías’ Oxford-set novel All Souls (which I haven’t read yet). With the papers came literary executorship for the estates of Gawsworth and Shiel. The title of King of Redonda, Marías claims, also came to him as part of this package. It was only some five years later that King Xavier laid any public claim to the Redondan crown, to the dismay of King Leo of Redonda, who had considered himself the King since 1989. Marías used his title as part of the background to a new publishing venture, and has conferred dukedoms on authors and other public figures he admires.

John Gawsworth was the pen name used by the poet and editor Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong (1912-70). Gawsworth had, as a young man, been a tireless supporter of and campaigner for the pre-modernist writers he idolised - notably Shiel, Arthur Machen, Ernest Dowson and Richard Middleton. By the ‘30s, these authors had become altogether unfashionable, and Machen and Shiel had every reason to appreciate Gawsworth’s efforts on their behalf (Dowson and Middleton had both died young). Shiel expressed his gratitude by designating Armstrong as his executor, and as his successor as King of Redonda. Shiel had married twice, and had at least two children, but must presumably have been estranged from them. Gawsworth’s later career was, alas, blighted by chronic alcoholism, and his reign as King Juan I of Redonda descended into chaos.

Gawsworth’s talents as a poet and man of letters failed to sustain him in the bleak post-war years, and he gradually fell on evil days, taking odd jobs, suffering from ill-health, and spending much time in the bar of the “Alma” tavern in Westbourne Grove, West London. Here he often held court, and knowledgeable tourists would frequently track him down. In return for buying His Majesty a drink, it was sometimes possible to receive a Dukedom, inscribed on the back of a beermat. Such prodigality, together with Gawsworth's undoubted skill in keeping the Realm in the public eye by newspaper reports (usually compiled by himself) eventually brought the Realm into disrepute - source here.

Gawsworth gave dukedoms to writers such as J.B.Priestley, Dorothy L.Sayers, Arthur Ransome, Henry Williamson, George Barker, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, and Lawrence & Gerald Durrell. The actors Vincent Price and Dirk Bogarde were also honoured thus, as, incongruously, was Diana Dors. Gawsworth attempted to sell his kingdom to a member of the Swedish Royal Family, but the sale was never concluded. That there are now as many as nine pretenders to the Redondan throne is a testament to the confusion of Gawsworth’s last years.

M.P. Shiel (1865-1947) had reigned as King Philip (or Felipe) of Redonda since 1880. During that time he had written some twenty-five novels, and dozens of short stories. Many of his books were romantic mysteries and adventure stories in a popular vein, whilst others had a science-fictional basis (The Purple Cloud, for example), or were concerned with the supernatural. Shiel also penned philosophical and religious texts. His works earned praise from such diverse figures as H.G. Wells, August Derleth and Dashiell Hammett, but he was perhaps his own greatest admirer, considering himself ‘the best prose writer living.’

The kingdom of Redonda had been a gift to Shiel from his father. Matthew Dowdy Shiell, a wealthy trader of Irish descent from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, had claimed the ‘rocky and uninhabitable remnant of an extinct volcanic cone’ as his own in 1865, to celebrate the birth of his first and only son: he already had nine daughters. Columbus had discovered the islet, naming it Nuestra Señora de la Redonda, in 1493, but no government had officially annexed it until the British Empire did so, ca 1872. Disregarding this imperial expansionism, Shiell senior abdicated his ephemeral throne in July 1880, on Matthew Phipps Shiell’s fifteenth birthday, and in a coronation ceremony performed by the Bishop of Antigua, passed the crown on to his son.

Paula Rego

The latest parcel from those dependable people at Amazon contained a copy of Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work. This volume collects all of Rego’s etchings, lithographs and screenprints: it’s a lovely book, and I couldn’t resist scanning a few of the images therein…

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The first four pictures are from Rego’s recent set of lithographs illustrating Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. The first image (above) is of Jane herself, and the second portrays Mr Rochester: in order to capture this scene, Rego apparently asked her model, dressed in period costume, to sit atop a life-size plastic horse posed next to a stuffed dog. The third image, below, is a strikingly imaginative way of showing Jane finding solace & escape by studying Bewick’s History of British Birds. In the fourth image (strongly reminiscent, to me, of Goya) we see Jane alone at night, having left Rochester’s house, knowing she cannot marry him…

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The remaining two images, below, are from earlier series of etchings: the first is one of Rego’s ‘Nursery Rhymes’, which I previously mentioned here, and the second is one of four crow-themed etchings made in 1994. I especially love the way that Rego has rendered the night sky in these two works.

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Click on the thumbnails above to see them much enlarged: note that the full images are all 500Kb+, and may take a little while to download. These works are are Copyright © Paula Rego, and are reproduced without permission, only for as long as nobody objects to their presence here.

The Apollo Prophecies

A CD arrived in the mail yesterday from Nicholas Kahn, containing a collection of images from Kahn & Selesnick’s new series: The Apollo Prophecies.

This installation features a continuous ten inch by thirty-six foot long black and white panoramic photograph depicting astronauts from the 1960s traveling to the moon and back. While on the lunar surface they discover a lost Edwardian expedition that may or may not be real. It was shot and assembled on sets or on location with miniature models and live actors. We are using the narrative techniques of Italian fresco cycles of the early Renaissance such as Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel cycle. The story is told in multiple episodes featuring the same characters, appearing numerous times, within a single long panel. The use of this quasi-religious format echoes the concept of astronauts as gods.

Some snippets from this panorama follow below: click on them to see larger sections of the ‘single long panel’, bearing in mind that the full-size images are quite large, and may take some time to download.

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In addition to the long panoramic photograph there is a mass installation of small drawings and photographs. These feature Edwardian photographs of moon rocks, schematic drawings and design notes, portraits of astronauts, beaked and ‘debeaked’ i.e. Edwardian and Aquarian, ephemera, etc.

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Sculptural pieces are intended as artifacts of the Edwardian expedition. The exhibition at Pepper Gallery includes a large Edwardian lunar rover constructed of wood, featuring an expandable McCroskeyen bellows pump, protective metal helmet hood, pig iron chamber pot, and optional carved yoke for oxen, man, or horse. Also featured is a long display cabinet containing samples of lunar rock and dust along with a large pile of cans of Edwardian moon paste, a devotional palliative/exfolliate with curative properties.

All images are Copyright © Kahn & Selesnick, and are reproduced here with permission. The Apollo Prophecies will be on show at the Pepper Gallery in Boston until June 19th.

Balli di Sfessania

In about 1622, an album of etchings by the French graphic artist Jacques Callot (1592-1635) was published, under the title Balli di Sfessania…

The prints in this series - Callot’s most exuberant and delightful - depict dances known in Neapolitan dialect as the sfessania. Such dances, as Callot’s etchings demonstrate in salacious detail, are characterized by violent and sometimes obscene physical contortions and gesticulations. Each plate features a pair of figures pulled from the repertoire of popular entertainers, their balletic interactions running a comic gamut from mock grace to blatant crudity - source here.

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Callot had lived in Rome from 1608, and then in Florence from about 1612. He was appointed to the court of Grand Duke Cosimo II in 1614, for whom he made numerous prints intended as official depictions of the various public festivities staged by the Medici Court. Presumably, Callot had ample opportunity to make sketches of the entertainers participating in these events, later to become source material for the Balli series, which Callot etched some time after he returned to his native Nancy.

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I recognized some of the figures in these dances, or at least their names, as stock characters of the Commedia dell‘Arte: Pulcinella (not pictured here) and Scaramouche, for example. Many of the other names were unfamiliar to me, though: I had never heard of Maramao, say, or Cucurucu.

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Interestingly, Callot’s works in this vein had a delayed but decisive literary influence. Amongst the first publications of the 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann was a collection of tales entitled Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier ‘Fantastic pieces in the manner of Callot’ (1814/15). A later story of Hoffmann’s, the marvellous Princess Brambilla (1820) was subtitled ‘Ein Capriccio nach Jakob Callot’.

The present images were all lifted from a Commedia dell‘Arte page at Guy Spielmann’s marvellous site Spectacles du Grand Siècle, which collects many fascinating images relating to theatre in the 17th/18th Centuries. The final image, below, belongs to a different series of etchings, also by Callot, called Varie Figuri Gobbi (‘Various Hunchbacked Figures’)…

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Recent Reading

The books I’ve read over the last couple of months include Salamander by Thomas Wharton and Moscow Stations by Venedikt Erofeev (both briefly mentioned here); Robert Aickman’s novel The Late Breakfasters (mentioned here); Kahn & Selesnick’s Scotlandfuturebog (here); Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade (courtesy of the book giveaway at socialfiction); and, in an altogether different vein, a little of Jeffrey Friedl’s textbook on Mastering Regular Expressions. I also finished Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean (previously mentioned here), and read (and geatly enjoyed) Penguin Lost (pictured, left), by Andrey Kurkov, which I liked every bit as much as Death and the Penguin, despite the notable absence of Misha, the penguin in question, from much of the story (necessarily enough, I suppose, his being lost). A few days ago I finished M.P. Shiel’s Victorian Sci-Fi novel The Purple Cloud, and have just started Javier Marías’ Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Besides all these, I also read the books shown below, from each of which I present a quotation, as I find myself altogether lacking the presence of mind to rustle up a quartet of pithy reviews…

Who has never harboured suspicions, who has never doubted his best friend, who, at some time in his childhood, has never been betrayed or let down - at school you encounter everything that will await you in the longed-for outside world, the obstacles and the disloyalties, the silences and the traps, the ambushes; there's also always some classmate who says: “it was me”, the first expression of some recognition of one's responsibilities, the first time in your life when to feel obliged to say or to hear: “I have done the deed”, and then, as you grow up and the world seems less worldly because it’s no longer beyond your grasp, you say and hear it less and less, childhood language disappears, is rejected as being too schematic, too simple, but those stark phrases we used to think so heroic never leave us, they live on in certain glances, attitudes, in signs, in gestures and in sounds (in interjections, inarticulate utterances) […] In adult life, which is dominated by words, you never hear a yes or a no, no one says “it was me” or “It wasn’t me”, but you still see them (more often “It wasn’t me” than “It was me”), acts of heroism soon join the list of mistakes - from A Heart so White, by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.

Captain Ariza’s words continued ringing in his ears: “This isn’t a country for people like you.” He thought perhaps there really was no place for him in the world, no country where he could end his wandering. Just like the poet who had been his companion on long visits to countless bars and cafes in a rainy Andean city, the Gaviero could say, “I imagine a country, a blurred, fogbound Country, an enchanted, magical Country where I could live. What Country, where? … Not Mosul or Basra or Samarkand. Not Karlskrona or Abylund or Stockholm or Copenhagen. Not Kazan or Kanpur or Aleppo. Not in lacustrian Venice or chimerical Istambul, not on the Ile-de-France or in Tours or Stratford-on-Avon or Weimar or Yasnaia Poliana or in the baths of Algiers,” and his comrade continued to evoke cities where he perhaps had never been. “I, who have known them all,” thought Maqroll, “and in many have turned life’s most surprising corners, now I'm running […] without knowing exactly why I let myself be caught in the most stupid trap that destiny ever set for me. All that’s left for me now is the estuary, nothing but the marshes in the delta. That’s all.” from ‘Un Bel Morir’, in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Álvaro Mutis, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.

Sometimes I am mesmerized by the beauty of our joyous, ugly world. The Bay Bridge, for instance, I love it on that bridge, I love driving to San Francisco in all its modern exuberance, and ugliness. There I seem to see a thousand beings in the world, when I am driving, and I feel the world is wonderful, nowhere is it so wonderful, it is only good, and glorious to be alive. The sheer beauty of that experience is shaking. I see the grey shining towers of the bridge, arcing above, the great X-braces of the steel; the cars, in their hundreds, crossing the bridge in front of me; tail lights, the green light over the Bay, and the shining yellow light coming off the Bay water like phosphorescence. Then, every bolt-head on the bridge seems wonderful, the cars and the lights seem like beings; the light in the sky, the edges of the clouds are beings, the rainwater on the asphalt is a being, the small lights of a plane in the distance, the dark edges of the roadway […] what I experience when I drive over the bridge, when I gulp in like beer the beauty of my existence - the lights on the road, the cars, the trees, the sky. The inner thing, the beauty of that freeway, which makes us realize how marvelous it is to be alive, for one second only, one day, to experience all this. from The Luminous Ground (Volume 4 of The Nature of Order), by Christopher Alexander.

Long before I suspected the existence of the town near the northern border, I believed in some way that I was already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place. Any number of signs might be offered to support this claim, although some of them may have seemed somewhat removed from the issue. Not the least of them appeared during my childhood, those soft, gray years when I was stricken with one sort or another of life-draining infirmity. It was at this early stage of my development that I sealed my deep affinity with the winter season in all its phases and manifestations. Nothing seemed more natural to me than to follow the path of the snow-topped roof and the ice-crowned fence-post, considering that I, too, in my illness, exhibited the marks of an essentially hibernal state of being. Under the plump blankets of my bed I lay freezing and pale, my temples sweating with shiny sickles of fever. Through the frosted panes of my bedroom window, I watched in awful devotion as dull winter days were succeeded by blinding winter nights. I remained ever awake to the possibility, as my young mind conceived it, of an “icy transcendence.” from ’A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing“ in In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land, by Thomas Ligotti.

I should add that I may have never ordered any of Javier Marías’ books had I not read Caterina’s endorsement of them; that I very likely wouldn’t have begun reading Maqroll had I missed the glowing review of it at Banubula; and that I likely would never have thought to read The Nature of Order had I not seen it mentioned on-line: evidently, a good deal of my book-buying-&-reading these days is influenced and enriched by what I read in other weblogs…

Muhamara, Yllera, etc.

One day during our vacation last summer in the Stockholm archipelago, my wife and I made our way from our island cottage to a suburb of the city called Haninge, to do some shopping at the mall there. After walking awhile through this characterless locale, we decided to stop at at an undistinguished-looking place called Café Roma for a coffee and something to eat. Perusing the menu-boards we noticed that they served a Lebanese meal, which sounded interesting: some kind of marinaded chicken, I think, with grilled vegetables. It was all very tasty, but what really caught our attention was the delicious dip that accompanied it, a reddish paste that, the proprietor explained, was kind of like a Lebanese pesto. We asked the man if he’d sell us a bowlful of it (and one of his equally good hummus) that we could take back to our island, and he happily obliged.

Post-vacation, I figured out the the dip was called muhamara (aka mouhamara or moharama), and tracked down a couple of recipes for it on-line. Alas, my first attempt to re-create it failed, owing to what must have been a typo in the quantity of lemon juice in the first recipe I followed. Recently, though, I tried again, with much better results. Last night, I used the recipe from a book we bought only a few days ago, during a quick trip to Malmö, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons (‘Enchanting Dishes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa’). From the book, I’ve learned that muhamara is often served with other little snack-type dishes which are collectively called mezze.

So, last night, I halved and de-seeded four red (bell-) peppers and a red chili pepper, and my wife set about them with a blowtorch to blacken & blister their skins such that they could be readily rubbed off under running water. I toasted 125g of shelled walnuts in a dry pan, and put these and the peeled peppers into a food processor with a couple of chopped garlic cloves, 25g of dry breadcrumbs, 2tbsp of pomegranate syrup, 2tsp of ground cumin, a couple of pinches of chili powder (our chili pepper being of the mildest kind) and some salt and pepper. While blending that lot together we added 125ml of extra virgin olive oil, and, tasting as we went, added lemon juice until it seemed just about right. And after that, we rustled up a bowl of hummus, too.

A different holiday memory was evoked by the arrival of a parcel of booze we’d ordered from vinosencasa.com in Spain. This contained a couple of bottles of the Torres white wines my wife had enjoyed during our stay in Catalonia two years ago, and should have contained two bottles of the Yllera red that I’d developed a taste for during our week in Andalucía the year before that - alas, one of the two broke in transit. I opened the surviving bottle and savoured a couple of glasses before going to bed. Also in the parcel, but not yet uncorked, a bottle of Conde de Osborne Spanish solera brandy, the one in the Salvador Dalí-designed bottle…

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