erhebung

A Beehive Around My Head

The Browser (one of the most useful sites on the internet) pointed me towards a fas­cin­ating inter­view with Michael Sil­verblatt, an inter­viewer (some­thing to look for later: inter­views of inter­viewers), over on The Believer. Here’s a chunky excerpt:

BLVR: So how do you read? Do you read as a writer, an academic, or a fan?

MS: No one ever gave me any flash­cards telling me the dif­fer­ence between those things. I read like someone who has been sub­jected at one point or another to vir­tu­ally every stimulus that is appro­priate to lit­er­ature. Let me give you some examples. When I was in junior high, Stephen Sondheim started pub­lishing what were called “Cryptic Cross­words” in New York magazine. They are aston­ishing, extraordinary cross­word puzzles, nothing like American cross­word puzzles in that they have puns and anagrams. Some­times they’re three-​dimensional. Some­times you enter the words as a knight would move across a chess­board. Some­times you take the cross­word and cut it up into pieces as indic­ated and reshape it so it forms a quo­ta­tion or a syl­lo­gism. A typical clue goes like this: “Broken har­mon­icas floating in Man­hattan, for example.” Now that is a very clear clue to someone who does this kind of puzzle. You take har­mon­icas and you break it, rearrange the letters, broken har­mon­icas, and if you have the patience you discover that har­mon­icas rearranges to Maras­chino and you would find a maras­chino floating in a Man­hattan, for example. This led me to read funny.

BLVR: Wow — and this trained you as a reader?

MS: It’s just the way I re-​punctuate things. I’m altern­at­ively shaping sen­tences as I’m reading coher­ently for sense. Words jump off the page, and I rearrange them in my head. I remember a poem by Edward Albee in the New Yorker. Albee didn’t write many poems, but there was one and it had the line “rain turns to snow and calls for a cigar­ette.” And I thought, Hey, snow! You have a cigar­ette? The rain is lit­er­ally speaking.

BLVR: Do you do this with everything you read?

MS: I have an exper­i­ence of the book, and it’s as if I have not a flat surface in front of me but rather a beehive around my head. It’s very strange.

BLVR: Who else taught you to do this?

MS: I’ve been taught by some of the most extraordinary writers and teachers who’ve ever walked the planet, so I have nothing but rev­er­ence for a good teacher, for a great teacher. Among my teachers and the people from whom I’ve taken example: Hugh Kenner, a sublime literary critic who had the best ear that I’ve ever encountered for poetry, prose, and nuances, for hidden tickles inside a sentence; John Barth; Donald Barthelme; the journ­alist and essayist Dwight Mac­donald. As a friend I’ve had Pauline Kael. I was priv­ileged to be able to sit in on classes taught by Michel Foucault the first time he taught in America. I’m leaving out many who might be offended by my neglect, but I had such remark­able teachers and there’s nothing like having a teacher that you adore and going home and reading their book and hearing how their casual speech mutates into their prose.

Hitchens Interviewed

I get the distinct feeling Decca Aitken­head doesn’t like Chris­topher Hitchens. Her inter­view with the writer is a won­derful read, though, and all down, amus­ingly, to Hitchens: Aitkenhead’s frequent attacks and blunt ques­tions might have seemed smart and pithy at the time, but they come over, on paper, as somewhat petty, not to mention com­pletely loaded with what seems to be a very personal agenda (i.e., bitch-​slap Hitchens in public). But def­in­itely worth a read.

Without Us

Last night I came upon The World Without Us, a book by Alan Weisman about what the world might be like if humanity suddenly ceased to exist (I think at the time I was showing a col­league the Wiki­pedia article about Puszcza Białow­ieska, a primeval forest on the border between Belarus and Poland). Weisman’s book looks fas­cin­ating, and hearing about it made me think of A Sci­entific Romance, a novel by Ronald Wright about a time trav­eller who journeys to a decayed and unpop­u­lated London of the future. Here is an extract:

The Dartford bridge holds awful proof of age: the concrete leprous, pitted, whittled by wind, warty with cysts of rusting steel. Pelicans line the rods and girders like sailors on the rigging of a shattered wind­jammer. Cables have snapped and frayed, the roadway seems to hang by magic, and the magic’s wearing thin. Whole sections have gone from the raised approaches, leaving piers in the water like rows of pre­his­toric megaliths.

We made it our business to know what the cen­turies could do to corbel vaults and marble arches, to the grainite slabs of pharaohs’ tombs, to Roman concrete and Akkadian zig­gurats. We knew the work of seepage on mud-​brick, of termites on ironwood lintels, of acid rain on marble cary­atids. But how much time would it take to make a modern struc­ture look like this?

Time and heat. Your rat is gnawing. What happened here?

Warming, obvi­ously, as many foresaw. But for the reasons they foresaw? Or some­thing else, some­thing for which we can’t be blamed: an asteroid smaking the planet in the chops; or the world relapsing like a malaria patient into its old sweats and chills?

I remember Skef saying — as an aside in his pre­his­tory lectures — that the ice would rumble south again one day grind the spires of Cam­bridge into sand. But not to worry; we’d had a good long run since the glaciers stalled — a hundred cen­turies in which to tame our food, and tame ourselves, and invent civil­iz­a­tion in half a dozen fertile spots from China to Peru — and he saw no reason why the fair weather shouldn’t last. […]

You can read parts of the novel on Google Books, here.

Thinking about things like this brought to mind various other things: The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (and also his Collapse, nat­ur­ally), and The Road to Corlay, the first book in Richard Cowper’s White Bird of Kinship series. The rising and falling of civil­isa­tion has my brain abuzz.

Beijing Night Transit

The taxi journey to Beijing Airport was very Chinese: a minibus crammed to burst with pas­sen­gers and luggage pelting down a poorly-​lit motorway at 120 kilo­metres an hour in the small hours of the morning, the only traffic on the road some lorries and a few other passenger-​packed “bread van”-style taxis pelting towards their respective des­tin­a­tions. I was in the front, right next to the driver, oscil­lating my legs to the right whenever he needed to change gear. It was a blast.

I spent half the journey sleeping (he wasn’t changing gears much, once we gained speed), the other half listening to audiobooks (the first few chapters of Pre­his­tory by Colin Renfrew, which was full of inter­esting things I didn’t know, such as the Scand­inavian origins of the terms “Stone Age”, “Bronze Age”, etc., and a little of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel very well-​suited to being heard as a spoken story because it is, like all of Ishiguro’s novels, far more con­cerned with the teller of the tale than with the tale itself) and occa­sion­ally glancing at the driver and the his dash­board (for time check, as I was cramped and thus mildly impa­tient, and for speed checks, as I’m always curious about how fast I’m trav­el­ling through space at any given moment). A good journey, overall, and the two hours flew by (or we flew through the two hours, depending on how you look at things).

I’m now in a cafe in Seoul, drinking coffee (a reasonably-​priced Amer­icano — had to point at the menu, gallingly), enjoying duty-​free Gauloises (the reds, a rarity, for me: have only ever seen them in London, in a small corner shop in a Moscow suburb, and in airports) eating a sandwich (wanted a bagel, but the waitress waved her hands, so I had “white bread” instead), and listening to Korean break­fast radio (random South Korean pop, Taylor Swift, and, a few minutes ago, ‘Unchained Melody’). More on South Korea later; but in short, it feels the same as I remember, only weirder, and more alien (well, I feel very foreign, here, anyway: can’t say much beyond “hello” and “thanks”, and I can’t pro­nounce those very com­pet­ently; and I feel self-​consious as everyone here is so incred­ibly smart-​looking, and I am, cur­rently, the anti­thesis of “smart”).

Beijing Airport (Terminal 3), 2010.

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.

Passages #2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)

There are several books in my bag at the moment, but the one I’m dipping into the most is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a novel by John le Carré. Reading it reminds me that I should read more, as I immensely enjoy good fiction, but over the last few months I haven’t read enough. Here is a snippet:

It was almost four o’clock on the after­noon of the same day. Safe houses I have known, thought Guillam, looking around the gloomy flat. He could write of them the way a com­mer­cial trav­eller could write about hotels: from your five-​star hall of mirrors in Bel­gravia with Wedgwood pilasters and gilded oak leaves, to this two-​room scalp-​hunters’ shake­down in Lexham Gardens, smelling of dustand drains, with a three-​foot fire extin­guisher in the pitch-​dark hall. Over the fire­place, cava­liers drinking out of pewter. On the nest of tables, sea-​shells for ashtrays; and in the grey kitchen, anonymous instruc­tions to “Be Sure and Turn Off the Gas Both Cocks.” He was crossing the hall when the bell rang, exactly on time. He lifted the phone and heard Toby’s dis­torted voice howling in the earpiece. He pressed the button and heard the clunk of the electric lock echoing in the stair­well. He opened the front door but left it on the chain till he was sure Toby was alone.

A Gesture of Humility

Allan Massie’s review of John Carey’s new bio­graphy of William Golding is worth a read. This bit amused me:

Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize of 1980, which many thought should have gone to Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. Burgess, who had announced that he would attend the Booker Prize dinner only if he had won, shared that opinion. He took his revenge in an appar­ently generous review of Golding’s 1984 novel The Paper Men (in which a famous novelist is pursued by a tiresome bio­grapher). The dust jacket for the novel declared that the Nobel Prize had been “the final recog­ni­tion of Golding’s genius” (“come; how about the OM?”, Burgess asked) and con­firm­a­tion of his unique great­ness. “It would seem to me”, Burgess wrote, inserting his stiletto, “that, with right British modesty, Golding has delib­er­ately produced a post-​award novel that gives the lie to the great claim. He is a humble man, and The Paper Men is a gesture of humility.”

A stiletto, indeed.

MCMP Redux #3

Lanzhou is usually quite cold in January and February, but in the January and February of 2008 it was par­tic­u­larly cold. My strongest memories are of walks while wearing layers of thermals (one thin and one thick, at least — mobility was limited), sudden retreats into warm res­taur­ants (my glasses would always steam up), and feet-​stomps at the entrances of shops (sticky snow and ice would cake itself to everything). In the evenings, Liu Bing and I played Company of Heroes (LAN battles, one-​on-​one — immense fun) in a small and smoky net bar (our tem­porary accom­mod­a­tion was warmer but lacked internet), fuelling ourselves with one kuai cups of coffee. In the days, we would go on excur­sions, tramping down icy streets in search of elusive targets we’d marked on our map, rarely finding what we’d set out to find, but usually finding some­thing. It was during one such excur­sion that I found a bookshop full of yellowed foreign classics, buying (or rescuing) a col­lec­tion of Joseph Conrad’s sea stories (this one — I recom­mend it very highly), some Sherlock Holmes (beau­tiful and inex­pensive Chinese editions), and some­thing else — possibly another Conrad, maybe Nostromo; or possibly Bleak House.

And there were pho­to­graphs, too. I took the pho­to­graph below (the third install­ment of MCMP Redux) on the way home one night. Liu Bing and I were waiting for some street food (Lanzhou had some very good street food, but it wasn’t always easy to find) and I was circling around the stall trying to keep warm. The lit curving struc­tures (the example in the pho­to­graph is but one: there were others dotted all over the city) fas­cin­ated me, and after I read Typhoon or The Shadow Line I may have fancied them to be the broken ribs of some ancient sunken wreck; or maybe that is just how I see them now.

Lanzhou, 2008.

Passages #1: The Last Man (1822)

I’m going to kick off Passages, a new ongoing series, with the opening para­graph of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man:

I am the native of a sea-​surrounded nook, a cloud-​enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shore­less ocean and track­less con­tin­ents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an incon­sid­er­able speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far out­weighed coun­tries of larger extent and more numerous pop­u­la­tion. So true it is, that man’s mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister. England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semb­lance of a vast and well-​manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwell­ings of my coun­trymen, and subdued to fer­tility by their labours, the earth’s very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have for­gotten which would have cost neither my ima­gin­a­tion nor under­standing an effort.

As descrip­tions of the British Isles go, “a sea-​surrounded nook, a cloud-​enshadowed land” is about as evoc­ative and true as anyone could possibly want. More passages from Mary Shelley’s writings will follow, I’m certain.

A very good hyper­text edition of The Last Man pub­lished by Romantic Circles can be found here; and the novel can be down­loaded in a variety of elec­tronic formats from its page on ManyBooks.net.

A fac­simile of the title page of the pirated edition of The Last Man that was pub­lished in America in 1833, seven years after the novel’s author­ised pub­lic­a­tion in both London and Paris. (Source)

The Red Book of Jung

The opening lines of Sara Corbett’s article ‘The Holy Grail of the Uncon­scious’ read like some­thing out of a sus­penseful Vic­torian mystery novel:

This is a story about a nearly 100-​year-​old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzer­land. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus”, which is Latin for “New Book”. Its pages are made from thick cream-​colored parch­ment and filled with paint­ings of oth­er­worldly creatures and hand­written dia­logues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

Corbett goes on to explain that the book in question was written by Carl Jung. This is what Wiki­pedia has to say about it:

The Red Book is the name given to a 600-​page manu­script written and illus­trated by Carl Jung. He began work on it in 1914 during a dif­fi­cult period of “creative illness” or con­front­a­tion with the uncon­scious, and it is said to contain some of his most personal material. Until 2001, Jung’s heirs refused to permit pub­lic­a­tion of the book and did not allow scholars access to it. His­torian Sonu Sham­dasani, an employee of the Jung heirs and their advisor in the handling of unpub­lished material, created the Philemon Found­a­tion in order to facil­itate pub­lic­a­tion of Jung’s works. The found­a­tion is pre­paring an edition of the Red Book, with English trans­la­tion. It is expected to be avail­able in 2009.

Aniela Jaffe (quoted here) writes that after resigning his post as a lecturer at the Uni­ver­sity of Zurich,

Jung began a “self-​experiment”, trying to under­stand the fantasies and other contents that surfaced from his uncon­scious and to come to terms with them. This involved a sort of med­it­a­tion, often accom­panied by strong emotion. Contrary to his expect­a­tions, it turned out that no fantasy, none of the numerous images, no figure, could be traced back to personal, bio­graph­ical events. The contents were mythic, ori­gin­ating in the imper­sonal psychic realm, the “col­lective uncon­scious”. Not until six years later did Jung end the exper­i­ment. He tran­scribed his inner exper­i­ences in the Red Book, a folio volume bound in red leather, which he richly illus­trated. He painstak­ingly painted in the art nouveau style of the time, but he never regarded the paint­ings as art, only as an expres­sion of what he was experiencing.

I’m really, really inter­ested in seeing inside that book.

A pho­to­graph of Carl Jung, circa 1966.

Source Material

One sign that I’m begin­ning to get to know a city is managing to find good sources of books and DVDs. When I was in Xi’an, neither books nor DVDs were ever in short supply: the city has several book­shops that carry Western titles, or Chinese editions of Western classics, or even, some­times, pirated copies of recent Western releases; and there is an area — an entire building, prac­tic­ally — well known for its range of DVDs (the portrait at the bottom of this post is of one of my two all-​time favourite DVD sellers, a guy in Xi’an who recom­mends all sorts of good cinema to me each and every time I visit). But this is not Xi’an, and those depend­able loc­a­tions and helpful people need to be found all over again.

The books I sorted out a week or so ago when I found two very well-​stocked book­shops, both of which are quite near where I live (pur­chases so far: The Ruin of J. Robert Oppen­heimer, All the President’s Men, Franken­stein, The Last Man, and The Moon­stone, the five of them together costing about 110 RMB, or 16 USD, which I think is pretty good). The DVDs took a little longer to track down, but I the day before yes­terday I was given detailed dir­ec­tions by another for­eigner and ended in up at Disc Loft, a fant­astic little store selling DVDs on the first floor, books on the second (pur­chases here, thus far, include Brief Encounter, I am Waiting, and the Disney adapt­a­tion of Peter Pan). I have a feeling it will become a regular haunt.

The next step in acquainting myself with this place is finding a street food market that sells good, cheap barbecue. Once I’ve done that, I’ll know I’ve made port.

This is a portrait I made of my favourite Xi’an DVD seller.

Explorer, Translator, Soldier, Hypnotist

If it were possible to go back in time and meet the people of the past, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton would be on my list of people to meet:

[Burton] was an English explorer, trans­lator, writer, soldier, ori­ent­alist, eth­no­lo­gist, linguist, poet, hyp­notist, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explor­a­tions within Asia and Africa as well as his extraordinary know­ledge of lan­guages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian, and African languages.

That inform­a­tion forms the first para­graph of the Wiki­pedia article about Burton. The first sentence of the second para­graph is equally thrilling:

Burton’s best-​known achieve­ments include trav­eling in disguise to Mecca, making an unex­pur­gated trans­la­tion of The Book of One Thousand Nights and A Night (the col­lec­tion is more commonly called The Arabian Nights in English because of Andrew Lang’s abridge­ment) and the Kama Sutra and jour­neying with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans led by the Africa’s greatest explorer guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, util­izing route inform­a­tion by Indian and Omani mer­chants who traded in the region, to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile.

Things were dif­ferent back then.