Town & Country

I will get to the Fall concert, but anon. Earlier in the day I had a fabulous lunch with Hannah Priest who ran the Werewolf Women Conference last fall and will be part of the Gender and Punishment Medieval Conference in January (which I'll probably go to since I'll be near by). We had a great chat about academia—and how to survive it successfully—publishing and her new murder-mystery company. Always glad to get to know other dynamic women :-)

Saturday morning I caught the train to London, but once I got there, I hopped on the tube and headed out to Epping with the final destination Great Dunmow, land of bacon (at least since the Middle Ages). Jo and James took me for a ramble around the village. Last time I'd stayed with them it had been pouring so I only saw the view from a car. It's really a lovely place, although the drought has been so bad that there were huge cracks in ground at the cricket pitch and the river was just about down to a trickle.

It's an odd mix of quiet life and recent arrivals; the new local car dealership sells Rolls-Royces. It's Dick Turpin territory, too. Saturday night we went to a great old pub, The Three Horseshoes. The landlord was rumoured to have been an actor and you could certainly believe it. Small crowd, terrific atmosphere—the maypole was still up out in the back garden, too.

Some much-needed rain arrived overnight, so a relaxing morning reading the papers seemed in order. I had a nice chat with Jo's mum who had been evacuated to Ascot for six years during the war. She had been at a special school for kids at risk from tuberculosis because her father had died from it. We had a nice Sunday roast dinner and watched a couple of Ken Loach films, Looking for Eric and Route Irish: both great, both totally different.

Rain again as I headed back to the Big Smoke. Village life is lovely, but I miss the dirty old town.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Bend Sinister

It's a bit cheeky suggesting that a Nabokov book could be "forgotten" but I think I can make a case here. After all, Amazon lists the most recent edition as the one from 1990. But first let me mention this fabulous design by Carol Carson for the Nabokov Specimen Box Project, a fantastic design project: check out the slides.

I chose this of course because of the overlap with another obsession, The Fall, who have an album also called Bend Sinister. I haven't seen much to suggest any lyrical overlap with the novel, but since MES reads both Gogol and Dostoevsky, it's not much of a stretch to think he'd find Nabokov appealing -- though it may just be the heraldry term.

I was actually reading Pale Fire when I decided to switch to Bend Sinister, mostly because I decided I would probably have to buy my own copy of Pale Fire because I was making too many notes and it would be easier to just put them in the book and that wouldn't be good to do with the library's copy.

I learn all my new words from Nabokov.

I had already written down tons of new words from Pale Fire, but I found myself writing quotes from Bend Sinister instead. I alluded in my Hamlet review to Ember's theory about the play: fascinating and fun. The playfulness is what makes Nabokov's work attractive. Krug's observation of Ember's engravings sets the scene visually but also working toward the revelations. The legend on one: "Ink, a Drug." Followed by pencil marks which "numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means 'bacon' in several Slavic languages." Ham-let, as he points out.

Mmmm, bacon.

Bend Sinister focuses on the dislocation of grief; initially it's Krug's grief for his wife, observed by the self-conscious "I" of the author who soon disappears, though reappearing in time for the end. Nabokov uses structure and authorial voice to explore the limits of empathy: "The square root of I is I" (7). All writers know the observer within us: "In every mask I tried on, there were slits for his eyes."

I have a nub of an idea comparing Ekwilism (the philosophical movement of the new fascist regime in the book) and Vonnegut's world in "Harrison Bergeron" -- but that's too ambitious for here. You can read a summary anywhere. I'm going to give you some bon mots:

"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form" (46).

"Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds" (69) -- a key to phenomenal wealth if you know how to employ it, I suspect.

"We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds" (193).

"To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh" (48).

"I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder" (58).

Yeah.

See the round up of Friday's Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott's blog.

BitchBuzz: Sic Semper Baconis

Hola from New Orleans! Of course I need to let you all know that my latest piece for BitchBuzz is up and it's all bacony goodness.

Down here at PCA things are jumping. We had a long day getting here, but we had plenty of time to catch up with Miss Wendy and check into our room before the first set of panels. A little Abita and dinner at the Palace Cafe later, I think we're all ready to sack out due to the unaccustomed early start.

With luck, tomorrow brings Pat and Petunia's!

London Recap, Part Three: Mmmm, Bacon

Sunday was Bacon day! Over to the Tate Britain in the cold cold drizzle (it always seems to rain when I go over Pimlico way). I had expected wonders from the Rothko exhibit, but I hadn't quite realised how much the Tate had gone all out for Franky Bacon, including a bunch of talks (none while I was there, alas!), study days, a symposium and family events (?!) including "Bend it Like Bacon" where you could try to recreate the figures in the paintings and "Bacon for Begninners" where young artists would look at Bacon's beasties and then create their own. How can you tell it's not an American museum? No, no, not because it's publicly funded. It's because that session was labeled "for under 5 years." Despite the recent panics over knives (admit it, it's a panic), there's still a willingness to let children do scary things WHICH THEY LOVE! I remember it well.

The exhibit is enormous! The layout is odd as you find yourself in cul-de-sacs wondering whether you've reached the end, only to peer around the corner of the room you already went through and find another you haven't seen on the other side. The rooms bear names like "Apprehension" and "Crisis" and "Epic," stark labels that the paintings match. If you only think of Bacon as gaping grimaces and tortured flesh, this exhibit serves as a reminder of all the variations through which Bacon passed and offers many surprises from the 1933 crucifixion which hints at all the early paintings destroyed to the surprising whimsicality of a sudden spray of water which seems to splash right out of the frame among his late work. There is a reel of BBC interviews that show Bacon murmuring with erudition in that silky voice so at odds with the frank violence of much of his work. Wonderful!

Monday I finally made it back to the National Gallery, snapping a bit of Les Grandes Baigneuses as wallpaper for my phone, visiting the Caravaggios and tracing the steps through a portion of the gallery I want to use in a story. A flimsy excuse for a trip to London, but there you are. I checked out the Sisley exhibit, too, which was like a lovely visit to Wales.

Then it was time to head out to Hanwell to visit that talk-of-the-town, London superstar Sophie Brooks and her "entourage" (or you might say, her mum and dad) where as usual I was treated to lots of good food (mmm, thanks Liz!), fun conversation and plenty of dancing by the superstar herself, although the highlight may have been Sophie and Brad's re-enactment of the classic "Duck season! Wabbit season!" dialogue. As always, I got to laze around and enjoy their hospitality and feel at home. Perfect way to end a trip (if it has to come to an end, sigh). Big thanks to my hosts in London for a lovely time -- and aren't they a handsome bunch?

Long day today -- somehow my colleagues and students were not the least bit sympathetic to my moaning about all the work that piled up while I was gone. Sigh.

London Recap, Part Two: Not dining with Mr Jones

Friday afternoon I hit the Andy Warhol, "Other Voices, Other Rooms" exhibit at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre. The guidebook lists its contents as "21 films, 1 clouds installation, 40 screen tests, 6 videos, 42 tv-episodes, 16 drawings..." and on and on. I'd never really thought about the direct link between Warhol and Capote, but it's impossible to miss here. That shared hunger for absorbing the rich and famous drove them both and, one might predictably say, cost them both a lot, but what's amazing to see in this jumble of time capsules and ephemera as well as the completed work is just how rich a vein they both mined. Rather than a shallow wallow in pursuit of acceptance (not that it wasn't that as well) there's an endless fascination for what fame is and what people will do to achieve it.

The hunger seems to be at an all time high at present, which amazes me. I'd love to be able to make loads of money with my writing, but I'd prefer that people express no interest in the person behind the words (besides, I am incredibly dull, always talking about the blackness of black pudding, for instance -- you would be bored). Warhol had a genius for touching that hunger in others and expressing it in often macabre and funny ways. I'm going to probably write about these exhibits elsewhere, so I won't go into deep detail here, but the surprising things were the tv soap project which was very funny for being little more than bickering, the fun snippets that filled the tv-scape and the simple delight of the Silver Clouds installation -- mostly because there was a window so you could watch other people go through the room. They tended to just push the mylar balloons out of the way and walk into the gift shop (the latter surely the capstone of the exhibit). Playing with the giant balloons was a delight, though.

Saturday was Rothko day at the lovely Tate Modern, my favorite museum. The turbine room was filled with bunk beds and monstrous thingees as part of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's TH 2058, but as many reviews had said, it was better in idea than execution. I liked the giant dino skeleton, the big spider, and immense apple core, but it wasn't quite enough. Scale alone isn't enough (big is big, though). I'm not sure what was missing, but it never really affected emotionally and that's a miss.

How was Rothko? Amazing, utterly amazing. Repetition and variation -- things that obsess me, too -- are keystones of his later work. Immenseness of scale and depth of color -- so many of his paintings had been brought together for the first time. I guess I'm still not ready to write coherently about these works. They're hypnotic. Rothko's paintings strike directly into my subconscious. I don't know many painters like that.

Saturday night I had been invited along to the BFI by my pal Hamilton, where Terry Jones was holding a Q&A after a screening of Holy Grail as part of the Time Out 40th anniversary. While waiting for the film to start we saw Anita Pallenberg and James Fox come out of the screening of Performance that preceded it. Waiting in line for Jonesy was Richard "Moss" Ayoade, who is much taller than I imagined and was sheepishly surrounded swooning girls. We were supposed to be joined by John "No Knuckles" Hind (left in photo), but since he is apparently notorious for always being late, we left his ticket at the box office and found our seats.

It was a delight to see MP&tHG on the big screen and with such an enthusiastic crowd. Peter Greenaway's Dear Phone preceded it and seemed an odd match, but there was a humorous post-modern angle to it, so that's some kind of link, I suppose. Jones complained that there were too few laughs at the end of the film, but the crowd clearly disagreed and enjoyed quizzing him about the film-making process (surprise, Terry Gilliam was a perfectionist even then) and his thoughts about current comedy (he likes Eddie Izzard). We finally caught up with Hind in the cafe afterward, where he told us regretfully that we had missed the chance to tag along to dinner with T Jones (Hind knows him and has a brief cameo in Meaning of Life). Ah, well -- so it goes. Messrs Hind and Hamilton nonetheless made sure that I was adequately entertained until closing time.

Next up: Bacon and Brookses (and back to the National Gallery)...

London Recap, Part One

Now that we're back from Robert's where he treated us in the usual style, i.e. stuffing us silly with good food and drink, I'm finally facing the horror of catching up with all I've neglected while swanning off to London. Is writing it up just another way to avoid work? Oh, let's not think about that.

Despite the new camera, your correspondent is as crap as ever at taking pictures, now complicating this with the additional factor of crap video ('auto-focus' my Aunt Fanny) -- when, of course, she occasionally remembers that she has a camera with her.

Well, let's see -- I took off a week ago Wednesday after teaching my classes and attending a fairly painless faculty meeting. May dropped me off at the airport (thanks!) and there was really no line at all for security, naturally, because I had left plenty of time. Go figure. Once through security I fell into that zen state that airports always invoke: the knowledge that what happens is completely out of your hands until you get to your destination, so why worry. I suppose it applies to the rest of life as well, but I haven't been able to invoke that view consistently -- something to aim for.

Short hop to Philadelphia, leisurely wait there and then a mostly empty flight which featured the worst meal I have ever been served on an airplane. Beet salad -- what possessed them to think a beet salad would appeal to the broad spectrum of coincidental travelers? I can only imagine a very persuasive salesperson in the market that day ("oh, try this recipe, it never fails!"). I was grateful I'd decided to have a turkey wrap a couple of hours before that. I had a whole row to myself and stretched out to get some sleep. Before I knew it, they were bringing breakfast around.

The first day, inevitably, was the struggle to keep jet lag at bay. Walking around just to keep awake, indulging in a beer and a light meal and eventually collapsing at a reasonably late hour. Friday was the day in which things did not go as planned. While I had mostly planned for arty things this time around, I had hoped to catch one play. Top of the list was Ivanov, but the half price ticket booth had nothing but the usual Broadway transfers and the box office's long line was met with the announcement that there was standing room only. At 2 hours and 40 minutes (and after one day of walking around on that ankle) I decided that maybe I didn't really need to see a play that night. There were a couple of other plays I might have considered, but weren't on that night. While having a think, I wandered and decided to drop by the Portrait Gallery since I don't tend to go there as much. I walked in to find that most of the lights had gone out and people were standing around in knots waiting to see if they would come back, while docents were trying to keep kids from retiring to darkened corners. It was kind of interesting to see the gallery plunged into darkness.

I went around the corner to the National Gallery, only to find it surrounded by crowds of people all staring with the aimlessness of the unexpectedly idle. So, no good there either. I sat on the steps of Trafalgar Square for a bit, writing in my travel journal, then took a leisurely walk in the direction of the British Museum, stopping at Quinto and a few other places to browse, but buying nothing (longtime readers will tremble with shock to hear that I purchased only one book the entire week). There was an exhibit on at the BM, 'Statuephilia' which inserted modern sculpture amongst the artifacts. While it gave me a grin to see Damien Hirst's skulls in the old oak cases around the corner from Doctor Dee's scrying mirror, the exhibit also discarded the artificial division between art and artifact. Antony Gormley, whose 'Case for an Angel I' fills the entrance (making me imagine little kids who assume it to be an artifact and so conceive all manner of strange alternative realities) writes that the BM "is a laboratory of possibility for any creative mind." Indeed!

To be continued...