FRANK HISTORY

Not so much lost in translation, as added to. Found in a historical brochure about Tihany, beautiful hilltop town overlooking Lake Balaton. "The name (Pale Hill)...goes back to the time when the soldiers of the fortress impaled the Turks who abducted Hungarian women and screwed the peasantry."

40
Happy Birthday Sgt Pepper. I remember buying it at 12 years old, and listening to it in some altered states a few years later. Possibly it doesn't deserve all the admiration heaped on it originally, I don't know. (It's so familiar now, it's hard to be objective.) Who cares? I say forget the "cultural turning point" stuff. Get a good (CD) version. Put it on - headphones. Turn the volume up. Listen to the actual band, especially the bass lines (Getting Better, Lucy in The Sky...) It's good. Oh, and it was made on a 4-track tape recorder too...

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1873290.ece

VICIOUS

It is inevitable that anyone in the political arena meets their nemesis, falters and ultimately fails - in my lifetime, I remember the fall of Gorbachev and Thatcher in particular. I'm not going to add to the commentary on Blair's legacy now; I still think broadly what I said on this blog in June 2006, that his career is tragic in some ways. (Though, of course, he's made a lot of money etc. Not the point!)

What has shocked me is the comments of members of the public on sites like BBC News and The Times Online. They are not just uncharitable, but full of a visceral hatred for Blair. "May he rot in Hell" etc. Of course he has made mistakes, perhaps based on serious character flaws - but would it be possible to hold power for a decade and get everything right? I really don't understand why he evinces such unrestrained vituperation from people who once (surely) cheered him on. It's an eerie, actually frightening, manifestation of the fickle mob in Julius Caesar.

I have less of a problem with people who have disliked Blair all along!

On a lighter note: evinces violent, vicious, venomous, vituperative, vengeful, visceral hatred. And V for Vendetta.

CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

World expenditure on military research and development in 2005: $1,118 BILLION

Source: Beyond Terror (Chris Abbott, Paul Rogers & John Sloboda, 2007) I recommend this book for anyone interested in the roots of current world crises. It describes very elegantly (100 pages) how competition for resources and the terrorist threat are inextricably linked, as well as providing an alternative blueprint for future development. The money is clearly available for alternative technologies (see above!) All that is lacking is the political will. Where are the politicians who are prepared to stick their necks out, and face up to the real threats?

EXULTESCENCE?

Tomorrow's my birthday, and I will be at the very extreme of being "thirty something". Life's good, but it's been missing certain things. In some cases, I have no idea whether these are good things or bad things to lack.

Broken River by Ruary Allan, Art Alchemist

1. I've never been engaged, married, or owned property.
2. I've never owned a car, or driven to work. In fact, I've never commuted to work in a commuter train either, in the sense of packing myself in, reading Metro and wishing it would all go away. I once did a reverse commute for a couple of years. When the weather's warm, I cycle to work now.
3. I've never been to Ikea, or bought furniture from Habitat. I once had a friend help me put up some shelves in the early 90s. It was good to see all my books (which are now lost to me - in eternal storage) but it didn't make me into a DIY enthusiast.
4. As an adult, I've never believed fully in any "ism"s. Buddhism has a strong appeal, but I'm not very good at it, and I stop short at myths of reincarnation, gods and demons.
5. I have never really had anyone to vote for in the sense that a radical green alternative has never been available. I remember shaking Blair's hand on that sunny morning in Downing Street (May 2 1997) but his record means that I will never again believe promises of change from young, gifted politicians.
6. Finally, although I appreciate clever art (most recently in some of the witty prose in Gormenghast) I'm still more into directness than sophistication, especially in real life.

Mandala by Olyfka Brabcova

I was sent this quotation today. It's Kenneth Graeme talking about children: "their simple acceptance of the mood of wonderment, their readiness to welcome a perfect miracle at any hour of the day or night, is a thing more precious than any of the laboured acquisition of adult mankind." Is this something you inevitably lose? It seems like a good way to live. Every time I leave my flat and the outside air hits my face, I exult in the sensation.

Weltschmerzen? Manchmal, aber:
"...it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday." Lester Burnham in American Beauty.

SECOND-HAND BOOK SHOPPING

Every Saturday morning, almost without fail, I go to the market to buy food for the week. Yesterday when a friend texted me about meeting up instead, it felt great to break with routine and swap the usual vegetable run for a bit of book browsing and a pub lunch. It was the first time I'd been to Red Bus Books, Budapest's biggest second-hand shop for books in English. The place has the unmistakable smell you always get in second-hand bookshops, and a tangible sense of unhurriedness. As well as Gormenghast, the second of the Mervyn Peake trilogy, I picked up Bobby Kennedy's memoirs of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a 1969 edition of The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois, a seminal text of what was to become the civil rights movement, about the experience of Afro-Americans at the turn of the 20th Century. In a new bookshop I'd never have looked for these. It's this prospect of stumbling across something unexpectedly that is the point of second-hand shops, and also of routine-breaking.

PRUNESQUALLOR

In Titus Groan, Dr Prunesquallor is a perceptive character, one with which the reader eventually identifies as he is the only one with a true sense of perspective on his world, something he is careful to mask with florid but empty pronouncements. In this scene, he encounters the scheming and Machiavellian Steerpike, a former kitchen servent who has recently absconded.

"Am I mistaken, dear boy, or is that a kitchen jacket you're wearing?"

"Not only is this a kitchen jacket, but these are kitchen trousers and kitchen socks and kitchen shoes and everything is kitchen about me, sir, except myself, if you don't mind me saying so, Doctor."

"And what," said Prunesquallor, placing the tips of his fingers together, "are you? Beneath your foetid jacket, which I must say looks amazingly unhygienic even for Swelter's kitchen. What are you? Are you a problem case, my dear boy, or are you a clear-cut young gentleman with no ideas at all, ha, ha, ha?"

"With your permission, Doctor, I am neither. I have plenty of ideas, though at the moment plenty of problems, too."

"Is that so?" said the Doctor. "Is that so? How very unique! Have your brandy first and perhaps some of them will fade gently away upon the fumes of that very excellent narcotic. Ha, ha, ha! Fade gently and imperceptibly away..." And he fluttered his long fingers in the air.

...

"Steerpike," said the youth. "My name is Steerpike, sir."

"Steerpike of the Many Problems," said the Doctor. "What did you say they were? My memory is so very untrustworthy. It's as fickle as a fox. Ask me to name the third lateral blood vessel from the extremity of my index finger that runs east to west when I lie on my face at sundown, or the percentage of chalk to be found in the knuckes of an average spinster in her fifty-seventh year, ha, ha, ha! - Or even ask me, my dear boy, to give details of the pulse rate of frogs two minutes before they die of scabies - these things are no tax upon my memory, ha, ha, ha! but ask me to remember exactly what you said your problems were a minute ago, and you will find that my memory has forsaken me utterly. Now, why is that, my dear Master Steerpike, why is that?"

"Because I never mentioned them," said Steerpike.

"That accounts for it," said Prunesquallor. "That, no doubt, accounts for it."

DICKENS IN A CASTLE


I have just finished reading Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. It’s been a great read, and I wonder why it took me so many years to get round to it. I saw an excellent stage adaptation in the mid-90s and that was enough gothic fantasy at the time, but of course I reckoned without Peake’s beautiful, elaborate – occasionally overwrought – prose style, in which words like “adumbrate” and “umbrageous” sit comfortably, and which is perfectly suited to describing the world of Gormenghast.

Pre-dating the first of the Lord Of The Rings books by two years, Titus Groan introduces the reader to a world as perfectly realised as Tolkien’s, full of colour and populated by unforgettably spiky characters, but thankfully free of elves and magic. The castle itself looms over its world, its occupants with their internal monologues and power struggles being the focus of the action. It is a place bound by calcified ritual and forms the backdrop to all the important scenes. Peake himself seems to be held in its spell; when his narrative occasionally wanders away from Gormenghast, it becomes far less compelling and much more the stuff of a more ordinary fantasy.

The best part of the book is the animation of the characters. A vein of dark humour permeates the pages as the author hones their idiosyncracies, like one of his own “Bright Carvers” - every twitch, stride and thought process is catalogued in detail. Their names are equally evocative: Sepulchrave, Dr Prunesquallor, Fuchsia, Swelter, Flay. Imagine Dickens set in a castle.

Like Dickens, Peake experiments with a variety of prose and narrative style. For example, when he portrays the same event from the point of view of all the characters present, or the half page devoted to the description of a raindrop trickling down a leaf. There are so many passages I could quote. The teenager Fuchsia’s love for her attic space (with echoes of Yeats’s Long-Legged Fly, perhaps) is beautifully captured here.

“As Fuchsia climbed into the winding darkness her body was impregnated and made faint by a qualm as of green April. Her heart beat painfully.

There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inward as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.

The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast… The love of a painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes’ handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love.”

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