Two mouthfuls and I was there,

back in my brother’s flat in Moscow in June 1996, after 6 weeks in Kazan. The taste was Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice-cream, which could be found in his freezer, along with frozen plastic cartons of milk. Finding it in Tesco’s last night was another serendipitious experience - I had bought it to stuff myself, in the vain hope that too much food would assuage my insomniac tendencies. It did.Moreover, the taste also led to a wave of Russophile nostalgia, aided and abetted by Andy Home’s “Siberian Dreams“; his reaction(s) to the Russian suburbs of both Moscow and Norilsk capture beautifully the disorientation experienced by the first time visitor to the Russia beyond Red Square, the Kremlin and Piter.

This week

Scientist & Prince Jammy - Dub Landing
Dub Specialist - Studio One Dub 2
Michael Garrick - Moonscape
Peter Gyorgy & Hedvig Turai - Art and Society in the Age of Stalin
Doctor Who - Genesis of the Daleks 

Travelling

is the name of a rather wonderful late-70’s track by Burning Spear, but I am not here to dicuss the finer points of his musical style. I am, rather pondering the delight I take in reading travel books. At present, one of the five books I have on the go is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a huge, sprawling travelogue-history lesson-ethnographic expedition-just about everything else, based around the author’s three trips to the new Yugoslav state in the 1930’s. The book is a delight in so many ways, and provides just as much insight into British social mores of the time as it does those of the Balkans, but it is, essentially, a travelogue. And I have just passed on the other most enjoyable book I have read in the last year, From the Holy Mountain, again a socio-historical travelogue.

Now, I have to admit to be struggling with fiction as a whole these days. Most of what I read is either academically related to my interests, or collections of essays - most of my reading is done ont he Tube, and I find it almost impossible to immerse myself in a longer work. The critical and destructive nature of my personality also precludes me from engaging with a great deal of fiction, as I tend to analyse as I read, and this gets in the way of enjoyment on the whole.

So travel literature appeals to me. Being appallingly British and having a fear of travelling anywhere more exotic than Bognor Regis means that there are a wealth of countries I can explore in this manner as I pass through East Acton. I always remember being most taken with Palin’s journeys and the rash of ‘Great Railway Journeys’ and so on that followed - both Whicker and Michelmore left me cold as a child, but the new, budget travellers who sought to get away from the crowds (Ian Wright - not the footballer was one of them, and the late Pete McCarthy as well). It was so much easier to see the sights of Gambia or somewhere else I would need inoculations to visit at 8.30 on a Thursday night than to actually have to travel there. A sanitised, but grubby, nonetheless, picture of more unusual destinations has always appealed.

Having pondered this more over the last few days, particularly because I am not entirely happy with what I have written, there are further parts to my interest in this kind of literature. Firstly, the notion of someone who is intrinsically an ‘outsider’, linguistically, politically, ethnically, especially if they are British (and so are not an outsider to my cultural poles), yet not a complete innocent abroad, is central to my appreciation.

Writers on their native countries never seem to do it for me - maybe there are too many preconceptions confirmed - the exception(s) to this in my experience have been the English-speaking Irish writers of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, especially Synge, although, once again, the wild west of Ireland in those days was a world away, lingusitically, socially, religiously, and so on from his middle-class Protestant County Dublin upbringing. The other issue is tht writers on their own countries tend to have an agenda, as Radischev, or are simply caught up in their own passion for the area - Wainwright’s guides to the Lake District, etc, I’m sure are perfectly usuable, but the BBC has recently remade them for television and added a wealth of new information about both the local areas and about the genesis of the guides themselves.

So, anyway, to use Russian Formalist terminology, there is a need for ‘ostranenie‘, or defamiliarisation - it gives a far greater insight into both the country and the writer themself - Dostoevskii’s ‘Winter Notes on Summer Impressions’ works on so many levels, and the descriptions of London are frequently as apt today as they were 150 or so years ago, but the very nature of these descriptions, the aspects of life in the modern centre of the Great British Empire at the time, the parallels he sees with Russia, are all echoed throughout his later writings, and few writers have laid bare every aspect of their personality as freely as dear old F.M.D.

St Petersburg

is not a place I have spent a great deal of time, physically at least, ten days altogether at most. It does, however, loom large over my Russophilia, the city central to both Dostoevskii and Gogol’s major works, and the Bronze Horseman lent his name to that long poem by that other fellow. Now, you may ask, why on earth am I posting about a city I know very little about - I have read the histories, have read the fiction, and now I am reading a rather wonderful books called ‘Mapping St Petersburg‘ by a North American academic named Julie Buckler - this book, or at least the parts I have read so far seeks to locate those parts of Petersburg that have dropped between the cracks, neither the grand historical scheme, nor the festering slums of Fedor Mikhailovich, but the literature, lore and urban legends that were built up by the residents of the city themselves, both second (third and fourth) rate writers, and by the ordinary inhabitants. This passage, I think gives a flavour:

‘A round black hat was seen floating on the Fontanka near Ismailovskii Bridge on another occasion. A crowd of idlers gather to watch the “inexpensive entertainment,” and Fontanka residents sent their servants out to find out what was happening. The Guards officers took full advantage of the occasion, and Pylaiev records the different story-versions that sprang up along the Petersburg waterways. By the Panteleimonskii Bridge, it was said that the hat belonged to “a clerk, who drowned himself from grief because he was given no recompense when those lower than he in rank and position each received a Stanislav order.” By the Simeonovskii Bridge, the drowned clerk became “a young Kolomna poet, who threw himself into the Fontanka because the publisher of a particular journal did not want to print his verses.”‘

And so the variations continue…

[...]In vain the frightened Tamoszius

would attempt to speak, to plead the limitations of the flesh; in vain would the puffing and breathless ponas Jokubas insist, in vain would Teta Elzbieta implore. ‘Szalin!‘ Marija would scream. ‘Palauk! isz kelio! What are you paid for, children of hell?’ And so, in sheer terror, the orchestra would strike up again, and Marija would return to her place and take up her task.[...]

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

This week’s musical adventure

Little Brother - The Minstrel Show
Ben Westbeech - Welcome to the Best Years of Your Life
Black Dog - Book of Dogma
TTC - 3615TTC
Quasimoto - The Unseen

And on the book front: Bo Burlingham - Small Giants: Companies that choose to be great instead of big.

Not much to write about

apart from expressing my admiration for Tim Robinson’s Connemara - up for numerous Irish literary prizes, this book manages to combine history, geology, biology, folklore, literature in a beautifully evocative picture of this small part of the west of Ireland - the author has lived and worked mapping this part of the world for the last couple of decades, and the depth of understanding of the various processes (historical, meteorological, geological and so on) that go to shape this most peripheral part of Europe combined with his eye for small cultural details (he frequently deviates from the grand narrative to engage the reader in some village gossip, or in an old folk story) ensure that the area truly comes alive.

Copts and robbers

In a startling piece of serendipity, The Art of Eternity began last week on that most wonderful of channels, BBC4 - this meant that I have seen on full colour many of the treasures of Eastern Christianity mentioned in Dalrymple’s book (you must all read this immediately if you have not yet done so). This is not one of the pieces of art that has been shown, but it is part of the Egyptian-Netherlands Cooperation for Coptic Art Preservation (ENCCAP)- dedicated to saving the masses of old Christian artefacts in some of the oldest monasteries in the world - under threat from declining numbers of monks, the environment, Islamic fundamentalism and simple theft - as with all works of art, these change hands for a great deal of money, and most of the older monasteries in Dalrymple’s journey have suffered repeated thefts, both in the distant past, and in the last couple of decades - the monks he visits on Mount Athos, for example, have had to deal with armed raiders attacking them by boat to seize manuscripts, icons and relics.

Wow, all of that work just to use a dreadful pun as a title.

Mortality

So my bank think it is necessary for me to take out life insurance before my 30th birthday. They have never contacted me about this before. Do they know something I don’t? Especially as is there is no lump sum at the end of the policy, and they frequently refer to the fact that my dependents will receive a payout if I should die within the first 15 years of the policy.

Is another 15 years really the best I can hope for? If so, that is two thirds of my life over with already. And it means that I was middle-aged at 22 - something that probably won’t come as a surprise to most of you. And I certainly feel it. My back has been bad this week - it went whilst cleaning the kitchen floor. It is almost back to normal now - after 2 days and repeated hot baths it seems to have clicked back.

It caused enormous hilarity for the other residents of Ealing as I hobbled down to the Tube station on Wednesday morning - even the mentally ill Irish woman I pass at precisely 9.52 looked at me with pity, rather than screaming obscenities at me as usual - this was, of course, compounded by the ’snowstorm’ that hit Britain and brought London to a halt once again. I no longer have either the energy or the inclination to rant once again about lack of preparation/Tubes/trains, etc. And it makes no difference - an inch (2.5cm for the European readers) of snow. I will point you back to my Grossman/TFL post, as this explains it all.

Vasilii Grossman versus TFL

“…After Unecha, we travelled in a freight car. The weather was wonderful, but my travel companions said this was bad, and I realised this myself. There were black holes and craters from bombs everywhere along the railway. One could see trees broken by explosions. In the fields there were thousands of peasants, men and women, digging anti-tank ditches.

We watch the sky nervously and decided to jump off the train if the worst came to the worst. It was moving quite slowly. The moment we arrived in Novozybkov there was an air raid. A bomb fell in the station forecourt. This train wasn’t going any further…”

Vasilii Grossman, A Writer At War

“Throughout the day, fallen trees and other debris have caused disruption to most open sections of the Tube network.

Speed restrictions have also been introduced on some open sections of the Tube network for safety reasons.

LU is working with infrastructure companies Tube Lines and Metronet to remove debris from tracks as quickly as possible but inevitably this will result in disruption to services.”

TFL