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May 19th;
Sunday. Getting things done in the studio while Robin outside keeps telling his new sheep not to eat leaves off his fruit trees.
May 17th;
Bit of script-reading in the evening at Daniel's flat. For a possible staging of a fragment of this play. Here is a worrying article about Nigeria, Africa's biggest country. Their government plans to a) make biometrically-backed ID cards compulsory for all Nigeria's people, and b) to link these cards to financial accounts with Mastercard while removing all legal validity from any other kind of money. Governments hate non-electronic cash, of course. Citizens can hide old-fashioned cash from the state, spend it as they please, and live their lives largely unsupervised. No wonder the technology behind money so urgently needs to be "developed" and "improved".
May 15th;
Meant to see this film when it came out. Impressive yet understated trailer.
May 13th;
Quiet Monday. Finish a late-1980s book in Robin's library, 'Dictionary of the Khazars' by Milorad Pavic, translated from Serbo-Croat into English by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric. My God this is dreadful. Pavic, not his translator. A novel in the cunning post-modern guise of a dictionary in three parts (Christian, Muslim, and Jewish) about a Dark Ages nation, the Khazars, this is gimmicky enough to be published in two slightly different editions that only disagree by one paragraph (the male edition and the female edition). The feeling this gives is of reading an enormously tedious hoax. A big joke at their expense that most critics are simply too obtuse (or too estranged from the enjoyment of reading books) to see. Individual sentences are sometimes beautiful, even haunting, but even ten pages of this becomes hard work to read through. What readers who believe they enjoy this text really enjoy, as with so many other borderline-unreadable pieces of experimental 20th-century writing, is the idea of it, the sheer cleverness and oddness of it. The very format of the book, a set of made-up lexicon/encyclopaedia entries which loop in and out of common themes, is calculated to win over people who read a book to look interesting rather than because the book itself interests them. The book circles around the Khazar Polemic (a fabled debating contest at some point in the 9th or 10th century AD where a Central Asian khan invited three learned men, a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim, to try to convert him and his kingdom to one of their faiths). I recall my old teacher Len Rix mentioning another book about the Khazars (alleged in that account to be a Central Asian people who converted en masse to Judaism) by Arthur Koestler, and that book I'd still like to read, despite its detractors. Pavic's text drew me in because individual snatches of it are lovely prose and they baffle & challenge the reader, as they are meant to. But after a few pages the absence of any real pattern or set of characters making sense of the conceit becomes horribly clear. Stubbornly I waded on, hoping it would come right somehow, but it didn't. Trying to be part Eco / part Escher, the fake-poetic self-referential drivel just wibbles on and on. It's like listening to a chatbot locked in Borges parody mode, or eating entire boxes of dried dates at Christmas, each date promising much, only to feel ill. Phrases like "He wore a face as dark as bread" or "His teeth held a perfect picture of my bones" are slotted into every page, as if by algorithm. We have passages like "In that battle, in which he carried sand, feathers, and a bucket as his weapons, Brankovich was wounded in the leg; after that he took a black horse, the sultan of all horses, which neighed in its sleep and was also a warlock. The lame Brankovich would go off into heavenly battle riding the soul of his horse transformed into straw. They also say that in Constantinople he confessed and admitted to being a warlock, after which he ceased being one, and the cattle in Transylvania no longer walked backwards when he passed by the pens..." and hundreds of pages of them. Magical women whose breasts give black milk, people invading each other's dreams, someone with two thumbs on both hands, people eating the letters of their own names, a city where the shadows stay long after the buildings are razed, people exchanging weeks of their lives or ageing backwards, random odd things on every page, whatever blah blah blah, but none of it actually fitting together or building anything. Any child being read to would hear the false note in this straight away. Once you pick up Pavic's cynicism (check
some
of
his
photos if you don't believe me), what seems enchanting in very small bites in a bookshop becomes sick-making. Defenders will say the novel is about the act of reading, about forgetting and remembering, about the making of history from fragments, about magical thinking, about something or other very impressive and worthwhile-sounding. Perhaps it is all of those things. But since teaching literary appreciation became an industry at the end of the 19th century there have also been shrewd shysters who work out exactly how to outfox the critics. Writers who make a 'classic' text academics or conversationalists can advance their career or reputation by discussing, even if no-one else actually reads it. This is the trick Pavic has pulled off. Effectively this is a very upmarket version of a Dan Brown book, a novel where a clever plot or intriguing central concept hides the lack of either storytelling or writing talent. In Pavic's case storytelling is the gap: 'Dictionary of the Khazars' has individual sentences which are well-written, attractive prose. But although it proclaims itself a puzzle text, no normal reader will care enough about the puzzle to try to solve it, and they are quite right not to care. Real readers will sense the author's smug smirk behind every paragraph.
May 11th;
Saturday train into countryside. Zsuzsi & Juci kindly drive out to meet me at Lakitelek. Later on Zsuzsi brings Csenge back for dinner. The 3 of us read Tarot spreads, eat pasta, drink fizzy red wine.
May 9th;
Thursday. Finish an intriguing late-20th-century exhibition guide from Jarrow, South Shields, among Robin's books called 'The Art of the Invisible', probably another trace of the invisible Mike from that part of England. A worthwhile read, it is a bit more than a catalogue - just over fifty short pages of text and fifty pages of illustrations. The theme is carefully argued: that occultism (and specifically the occult revival of the late 19th century) were vital ingredients for the arrival of 20th-century abstract art and modernism in general. (I'd like to read more about the overnight conversion of Annie Besant from hostile rationalist sceptic to not only joining Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society but actually taking over its leadership in 1891: sounds like some sort of battle of charismas.) The text builds up carefully, from the Fox sisters and their creation of the table-tapping craze, the seance fad, Madame Blavatsky, the involvement of Yeats in ritual magic in London, and the slightly different path of Rudolf Steiner, all creating a crowded supernaturalist scene by the 1890s. There is no pushy rush forward to show all this becoming modern art, but rather Alf Corlett and Vince Rea detail a social milieu. By the time Kandinksky and Piet Mondrian are discussed, both deeply involved with occultist ideas and societies, the claim is convincing. The book's point is that 20th-century abstract art was, like abstract art in several other religious traditions, an explicitly transcendental effort to reach behind appearances to an underlying non-material reality. Modernist abstract painting started as freeform western mandalas, Corlett and Rea argue. The 1920s and 30s Bauhaus takeover of 20th-century modernism, and its embrace of the machine age, a mission to rediscover aesthetic beauty and social ideals in alliance with the factory era rather than against it, has hidden from us the roots of modern art in the anti-factory, anti-materialist movements of the 19th century. Although one or two later modernists also emerged from this largely forgotten tradition (abstract artist Brian Clarke's teenage training as a medium in the spiritualist churches of 1950s Lancashire leaps to mind), 19th-century occultism now looks as far from mainstream modernism as can be imagined. From where we sit now, the 1890s 'Occult Revival' appears to us in retrospect naive and distinctly batty.
May 7th;
Return to Budapest. Here is a slightly silly map. Nonetheless, quite striking. Most of the world's Buddhists, the world's Hindus, and the world's Muslims are inside that circle. And so is the world's most sparsely populated country - though a bit naughty to call Mongolia that just because Greenland's not a sovereign state.
May 5th; More sewing on Marika's electric machine. I am starting to get the knack of not letting the thread snap.
Finally get round to combing through a very short 50-page booklet I've had in my stuff for several years (since the late 1990s, in fact) The Energy Risk Management Glossary', copyright the slightly ominously-named 'Financial Engineering Ltd. London'. With handy little graphs, it breezes through the duller and more colourful energy derivative terms in a set of short alphabetically listed articles. Always good to revise which way round
contango and
backwardation work, for those of us woefully inclined to mix them up, and cheering little nuggets about
Henry Hub,
daisy chains, and
volatility smiles bring some relief. I know one isn't supposed to actually read glossaries, but sometimes it's a useful revision short cut. Both sour crude and sweet crude entries mention the presence of sulphur as below 1 per cent, which is a bit confusing, since going above 1/2 per cent is usually seen as the deciding point for crude oil sourness.
May 3rd;
Weather now hot. As a girl said to me in the lift last week, no chance of a spring now. Straight out of winter into summer. I meet Jacqueline at a delightful cafe in Buda, post a copy of the book to India, and have my first proper cold bath in months. Like an intravenous injection of caffeine.
May 1st;
Finish a short text of Robin's, rich in images, A Concise History of Photography' by Helmut Gernsheim. This is a 1986 3rd edition, and not too much was added to the previous editions of 1965 and 1971. In feel it still reads very much as a book by the man the writer was in the mid-1960s. The early camera obscura devices are described well in a wonderful starting section, and the first half century from the 1830s to the 1880s is the most enjoyable part of the book. Gernsheim is very thorough throughout, crediting many photographic pioneers, being careful to cover as many countries, styles, and activities as he can (so not leaving out the early days of tourist photography, explaining how photographers earned their living, mentioning the slow uptake of photos by newspapers, many other interesting points). On page 75 he has a sudden outbreak of irritation while describing a late-19th-century fad for posed photographic montages of historic or mythical scenes. These, he writes, gave "results that are often comically suggestive of amateur theatricals."... "produced the worst kind of Victorian trash"... "their achievment hardly went beyond mediocre anecdotal pictures", were a "misguided effort to explore the realm of fancy..." and so on. Again and again he emphasises the importance of being true to photography, not trying to recreate some sort of painting. Those trashy Victorian montages (and silly efforts to create Impressionist-style blurred photoraphs on rough paper) failed to see what photography was, as a medium in itself. Yet soon, in the 20th-century section, we have abstract photography (looking a lot like recreations of abstract painting), surrealistic photography, in fact a host of oddly derivative-looking styles of art photography, written of with approval. Pierre Cordier's Chimigrammes (some of which do look like something original to photography) make an odd ending to this stimulating but surprisingly dated book.
Who can translate the next 300 words into
Korean or
Hindi?
Contact
me and there will be revelry.
We do - otherlanguages.org is gradually building a reference resource for over five thousand linguistic minorities and stateless languages worldwide.
Thousands of unique language communities are becoming extinct. Out of the world's five to six thousand languages, we hardly know what we're losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now.
The planet is increasingly dominated by a handful of major-language monocultures like Mandarin
Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese,
English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali - all
beautiful and fascinating
languages. But so are the 5,000 others.
Linguistic minorities are communities of ordinary people whose native tongue is not their country's main official language. Swedish
speakers in Finland, French speakers in
Canada, Hungarian speakers
in Slovakia - and hundreds more - are linguistic minorities.
And totally stateless languages are the native languages of some of the world's most intriguing, little-known, cultures. Like the Lapps inside the Arctic Circle, the Sards
in Sardinia, Ainus in Japan. Cherokee in the US, Scots
Gaelic in Britain, Friesian in the
Netherlands, Zulu in South Africa.
There are only a couple of hundred recognised sovereign states and
territories, so more than 5,000 languages are the native tongues of
linguistically stateless people. You don't need to learn an endangered
language - any more than go to live in the rainforest to help slow its
destruction.
A good start is to just tell friends
about websites like this.
Broader public interest makes it easier
for linguists to raise
funds and organise people to learn these
languages while there's
time. That's right. There
are people who love
languages and are happy to learn them on
behalf of the rest of us, but they need support,
just like zoologists, botanists, or historians.
A century ago - before we understood
ecology, and when we cared less about wilderness, most educated
people would have laughed at the idea of worrying about plants or
animals going extinct. Now we understand how important species diversity
is for our own futures, we are more humble, and more worried.
In the same way, linguistic triumphalism by English-speakers who hated studying foreign grammar at school is dangerously ignorant as well as arrogant. Few of us know what we are losing, week by week.
How many people realise these languages have scientific value?
But these five thousand languages may
also hold clues to the structure of the human mind. Subtle
differences and similarities
Study of the mind and study of language
go hand in hand these days. The world's most marginal languages
are actually precious jigsaw pieces from an overall picture of
who we are and how our species thinks and evolves. Every tiny
language adds another brightly-coloured clue to this academic
detective story.
Yet researchers have hardly started sifting through this
tantalising evidence, and language extinction is washing it away right in
front of us.
And worst of all, most people have no idea that there is this
fantastic profusion of cultures across our world, let alone that
they are in danger of extinction. Even just more people learning that
there are still five thousand living languages in the world today (most
of us would answer five hundred or fifty) is already a huge help.
We English-speakers hardly notice English - it's like air for us.
But every other language is also an atmosphere for an entire cultural world,
and each of these worlds
has people whose home it is. Each language
encapsulates a unique
way of talking and thinking about life.
Just try some time in a
foreign prison, being forced to cope in
another language, and you'll
realise how much your own language is your
identity. That's true for
everyone.
Dozens of millions of people worldwide
suffer persecution from
national governments for speaking their
mother tongue - in their own
motherland.
Many 'ethnic' feuds puzzling to
outsiders had as their basis an attempt to destroy a linguistic community.
Would the Northern Ireland dispute be quite so bitter if we
English had not so nearly stamped out the Irish Gaelic language, for
example? Almost nowhere in the world does a language community as
small as the few thousand Rheto-Romanic speakers - the fourth
official language of Switzerland - get the protection of a national
government. Next time you see some Swiss Francs, check both sides of the
banknote.
But outside exceptional countries like
Switzerland or the Netherlands, speakers of non-official
languages have a much less protected experience.
Speakers of minority languages are
often seen as a threat by both
the governments and the other residents of
the countries where they
were born, grew up, and try to live
ordinary lives®
They experience discrimination in the
job and education markets
of their homelands, often having no choice
but to pursue education
in the major language of the host state
a deliberate government
policy usually aimed at gradually
absorbing them into the majority
culture of that country.
Most governments are privately gleeful
each time another small
separate culture within their borders is
snuffed out by a dwindling
population or a deliberately centralising
education system.
The United Nations is no help. It is an
association of a couple
of hundred sovereign states based on
exclusive control of territory,
almost all of them anxious to smother any
distinct group or
tradition that in any way might blur or
smudge the hard-won borders
around those pieces of territory.
The usual approach by sovereign states
is to deny their
linguistic minorities even exist.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
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............................................................................................................................................................... April 30th; Finish reading a much-recommended book, 'Weapons of Mass Instruction' by John Taylor Gatto. This is a crie de coeur by a New York teacher of several decades' experience who not only argues (like many other educational reformers) that schools are harmful institutions, but that they are intended to be that way. He claims to uncover evidence in late-19th-century and early-20th-century educational and psychology proposals and manifestos that the American government-funded school system was designed from the outset to stultify and pacify successive generations of Americans. The perpetrators were a kind of corporate elite (partly connected to the Rockefellers and other magnates of the 1890s) concerned to instil nationwide consumption and passive thinking. Ex-students would lap up fashions and trends created by their large firms. This was to take the place of the self-taught, self-reliant, small-town spirit Gatto identifies with the 19th-century US. Gatto is an English teacher, not a historian by training, and it shows - but this is nonetheless a startling and vigorously argued thesis. Sad to say, he (or editors wishing to make his book sell more copies) cannot celebrate American ingenuity without constantly attacking Britain and Germany. Gatto seems unaware that 19th-century America was not some astonishing paradise of inventive ingenuity, but a developing industrial economy falling some way behind Britain and other European countries although doing respectably well. Edison did not invent the lightbulb - several inventors in several countries did - Edison just used lawyers to put the other inventors out of business ...an example Gatto might want to reflect on. Photography, to take another area of invention, developed in several countries, notably France and England, not the miraculous back country of ingenious, self-organising, small-town Americans Gatto keeps referring to. Even by 1900 the US (with twice Britain's population) had 99 photographic societies against over 260 in just Britain. Likewise, the pneumatic tyre was developed in 5 or 6 countries (equally heavier-than-air flight, motor cars, radio, moving pictures). Rather than the wonder of industrial creativity it saw itself as in retrospect by 1950, the US was a respectable competitor drawing level with France or Germany by World War One, only with a bigger population and far more natural resources within its borders. This matters because Gatto is rather obsessed with the successes of a handful of early Americans (like the British-descended Americans Franklin and Washington) achieving many things as young teenagers, seemingly unaware that every European country was also like this in the 18th and 19th centuries, full of inspiring people doing remarkable things aged 12, 13, 14, 15. Compulsory state schooling supplanting self-reliant, self-educating characters of the centuries before the 20th is an international story, not some special European blight imported to stifle the great self-awakening of Gatto's vigorous young New Worlders. This crudely nationalistic image Gatto has of the British enemy (always such an important foil to the American myth of self-creation) extends to contrasting Alfred Russell Wallace (a Briton of humble origins, Gatto emphasises, almost a social rebel) with the other British discoverer of evolution, Darwin - for Gatto an oppressive Establishment figure. Gatto describes Darwin as firstly a theologian, unaware that he was studying botany already at university, even if he chose to graduate in theology so as to have a church living to pay for his life as a natural historian. Gatto is also unaware that Wallace was a good friend of Darwin, that Darwin financially helped Wallace to recover from his business misfortunes, and that despite his poor origins Wallace was still able to travel widely across the world trading in plant and animal samples. The two men were much less different in social background and politics than Gatto imagines, and in fact it was the nobly-born anarchist Prince Kropotkin of Russia who wrote even more passionately and at most length of the role of co-operation and symbiosis in evolution of species ...a figure Gatto might be uncomfortable including in his republic of business-driven self-made lads. This is sad because the book's central idea - that mass IQ-style testing and American syllabus design were deliberately designed to create a passive and pliant public - is a very striking claim, and he produces some evidence to make this believable. Gatto is brave and clear in asserting that truants who skip school are often the most dynamic people, and that television, and after it the internet, has been enormously harmful to children's ability to discover the real world. He is obviously a lively and stimulating teacher, and his core claim deserves close attention.
April 29th;
By day Robin is making good progress with a painting for Ab. I manage to restitch my striped secondhand shirt once Marika shows me how to use her cantankerous sewing machine. Unlike mother's, which was mechanical, this is electric but still a tad temperamental. Robin and I are crowded into her small bedroom in Marika's house next to Robin's. As I struggle with practice-stitching some scraps of cloth first, Robin is finding his body is covered with ticks from our walk in his forest and has his shirt off, picking them out of his back. Meanwhile, surrounded by dogs (the huge new Komondor bitch Do:mo:r takes up almost the whole available floor) Marika reclines on her bed smoking, watching an Italian film about the French musketeers for some reason dubbed into German on her computer. During pauses rethreading the sewing machine when the cotton keeps breaking, I have an eye on the Musketeers film, and Robin's memory of it involving Zeppelin airships turns out to be a slightly overblown scene with a large Montgolfier-style balloon, so not out of period after all.
April 27th;
Abstract Expressionism was secretly funded & promoted by the CIA? (Might explain how it rose to not-really-deserved prominence so quickly.) Real purpose of Iraq War came to be cutting down oil supplies? An American living abroad tries to tell his countrymen that they are not really as special as they are told.
April 25th;
Going through some business-studies material with one 18-year-old student today at a sunny cafe, she laughs while telling me how a male biology teacher yesterday made a joke in front of a couple of them in school. Two female students had just rushed out of the class shrieking and laughing, and there is a Hungarian saying about it being spring and the blossoms are opening. He casually remarked that it was spring so girls' thighs were opening. Chuckles all round - this being Continental Europe, it was taken offhandedly as a down-to-earth joke about those two girls. I shudder to think what would happen to a male teacher in any English-speaking or Nordic country who was rash enough to make a remark like that in front of (or about) students. Immediate end of teaching career at the very least, perhaps something worse. Meanwhile, here is a map of how many times French people kiss each other when greeting. 5 kisses in Corsica (left right left right left?) sounds slightly gangstery, if they don't mind me saying that. They probably do mind.
April 23rd;
On the train back to Budapest - more precisely on a tram in Budapest afterwards - I finish a 1989 book of Robin's, or maybe his long-vanished Berlin friend Mike - about German architecture in the 1920s and 30s. 'Architects of Fortune' (subtitled 'Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich') by Elaine Hochman, is a closely told history of a fascinating aesthetic power struggle. She finally gives us the punchline as the first sentence of the Afterword on page 311: "But for Hitler's interest in architecture, Albert Speer believed, modernism .... would have developed as the 'official' style of National Socialism." This astonishing thought takes some getting used to. Had the International Style been officially endorsed as the Nazi Party's own architecture, the modernism of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright would have had a much greater struggle to become the official building style of our time. Pretty much anything liked by Nazism (with the possible exception of motorways) became utterly taboo for half a century afterwards. Yet because Mies loathed the idea of going into exile he and others tried hard to marry their belief in modernism with the arrival of Nazi government. Hochman's carefully researched history of the personal struggles of Mies van der Rohe to keep designing and working in Germany shows just how close the Nazis came to adopting architectural functionalism, the glamorous new 'rationalist' style of plate glass, steel girder, and cement slab, as their own house architecture. This would have been much less surprising than it might seem now. Mussolini for example immediately saw the link between his own movement and avant-garde art, and gave Fascist government support in the 1920s to the Italian Futurists. Weidemann and the Nazi students' association contained many fervent supporters of the architecture of the flat roof and the see-through wall. Even Joseph Goebbels sometimes gave support to Mies, although Goebbels was much too shrewd a politician to put his personal taste before that of Hitler for long. Under his directorship, Mies allowed the Bauhaus to become increasingly dominated by nationalistic, pro-Nazi students in his strenuous efforts to keep the design school open. Although the easy-going aristocratic Walter Gropius founded it, he had handed over leadership to the stubborn, steely Mies so as to have the Bauhaus led by someone who could fight its corner against the dozens of bureaucrats who kept attacking it for over a decade. Mies resisted until 1937 demands he resign his membership of the Prussian Academy of Arts, one of the honours he valued most. He refused several offers of jobs in the United States before finally accepting and emigrating to the US at the last minute. There he stayed, helping in the 1940s and 50s to make his brand of clinically minimalist modernism into the aesthetic ideal for all American office blocks. Hochman (a striking and cheerful-looking woman in her author photo) says she was indebted to conversations with both Albert Speer and Philip Johnson. I didn't remember Mies's trade fair exhibit made up of two walls built out of polished coal bricks plus a third wall made of rock salt. Nor had I realised quite how involved Johnson was in the 1930s. He seems one of the few architects not weighed down by the mood of intense seriousness & dark passion that surrounded Mies and Germany between the wars: '"Nazis, schmazis," said Philip Johnson, "Mies would have built for anyone."' Or "the first rule of architecture is to get the job!" In all the sympathetic understanding of Mies and his high ideals about architectural transformation of society, it is easy to overlook just how dictatorial, even totalitarian, modernist architecture was and still is. Much of this is underlined by just how personally authoritarian and uncompromising Mies van der Rohe was in his (frankly speaking fanatical) architectural beliefs. Even Hochman, appreciating his chilly aesthetic perfectionism, is slightly stunned by the coldness of Mies towards his wife and daughters, not estranged from him but still left behind in wartime Germany. When they were finally able to join him in the US after World War II and turned up at his architectural office, no-one there knew who they were because the great man had never mentioned that he had a family. Flat-roofed petrol stations still look the way Mies designed his first few, their jutting horizontal planes slicing across landscapes, literally undercutting or amputating the pitched roofs of any vernacular buildings they squat near. The insistence on erasing all links to the past, removing all signs of recognisable human-scale craftsmanship, the fetish of factory-style materials looking as undecorated as possible ...all these qualities chime perfectly with the messianic claims of early-20th-century police states like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany to be remaking society in a dazzlingly new scientific/industrial mould.
April 21st;
Warm and dry on the Great Plain. I remember an extraordinary white cloud hanging in a hot blue sky over Kecskemet railway station on my way out to see Robin last weekend. The cloud was alone, perfectly painted in full, crisp fluffiness, and utterly motionless. Was oddly reminded of the hyper-Constable cloudscapes that often decorated covers of 1960s science-fiction paperbacks almost like this one. The sky might have been an unusual colour, there might have been three moons or two suns, the vegetation eccentric-looking, the mountains strangely pointy, and the distant city crystalline and toy-like. The sky might even have contained a sort of hovering mass of ironmongery, not quite spaceship, not quite floating city. But the clouds would be exemplary and completely classical, doubtless to pull the whole picture into the realm of the imaginable.
April 19th;
Proper warm weather now. Sunshine every day for over a week now. Here is a disappointing, overrated article on experiments in inducing religious feelings in psychology subjects by artful use of electromagnetic fields. You know a journalist is struggling when he starts describing the furniture.
April 17th;
Calderdale Council's works department confirms today by e-mail (my first from them) it is threatening an auction sale of my house because I haven't paid for their work removing a supposedly dangerous coping stone they didn't contact me to say they were doing in December. Something odd about the whole thing. * thinks... *
April 15th;
Monday. Either Anti-Garden-Market Mark or Zdravko finds this set of pictures:
Life on the Moon as Imagined in the 1830s. The full set of lithographs is here. The pictures are wonderfully Italian & Victorian. In one, exploring
earthlings in top hats bespy with gallant interest how lepido-ladies slumber in giant lunar blossoms.
April 13th;
Saturday. Take train to the countryside for more tutoring of young master Sperling. The last part of the journey in warm sun has my third train turn into one of those relaxed little buses pretending to be a train. Its yellow curtains are drawn to keep the half-empty interior shaded.
April 11th;
So caught up in breaking news of spring, forgot about the fashion designer's murder.
On Monday morning read with Robin and his two sons that Tamas Kiraly ('Thomas King') was found beaten to death on Sunday in his Budapest flat. Robin muttered something about Kiraly being a nasty piece of work quite good at making enemies. I only recall going to one of his fashion shows, several years ago. I'd misremembered that Kiraly had put Robin into a magazine spread, but rather it was Hungarian fashion photographer Peter Richweisz who had Robin model as the young Aleister Crowley in a style shoot. Typical image in that magazine editorial was Robin slouched into a wheelchair in an Englishly tweedy trance, flanked by a pair of nubile topless girls with oil lamps, presumably pagan priestesses in some rite of The Old Religion. Whereas it was Kiraly who took Robin to the nightclub where he met his future wife of many years Georgina, suddenly dead 3 months ago. Kiraly liked to shock, perhaps seeing himself as an East European Jean-Paul Gaultier. It was in the company of one of Kiraly's mannequins that I first met Scott the Filmmaker at a party.
April 9th;
Franc whisks me out for an evening of revelry at a corner bar where both
Anti-Market-Garden Mark and Krisztina from behind the bar feel in need of
suggestions from the Tarot pack. Franc's spreads and the single spread Krisztina
draws are all extraordinary.
April 7th;
Still in the countryside. Sunday. Getting to the bottom of some of young Bela's
uncertainties about arithmetic, which is quite satisfying. One evening last
week, Wednesday or Thursday, had the odd experience of bumping into
Peter The Filmmaker in the
shopping centre. What made it odd was that around 9pm-ish, I suddenly felt I was about to bump into someone. So deliberately loitered to make this possible, doing a U-turn to walk past a cafe (empty) in case the person I was to meet was in there. It was around 3 minutes between the feeling I was going to chance on an acquaintance and therefore ought to hang around - and the arrival of Peter. He had to rush and we chatted while walking back down the mall.
April 5th;
Oddly restful three-train trip down to the village of Tiszaug as the day fades, to
stay with Robin again and remeet young Bela. Passing Nyarlo:rinc, I notice for the
first time that the stationmaster there keeps both geese and chickens in a small
fenced garden next to the station. The 'fencing' is made of those strange panels
of concrete moulded with vertical slots in them, so it is not really a fence, and
not really a wall. On the last train, I say hello to the
former Tiszaug stationmistress lady from a decade ago,
who since the sad closing of the little local station now commutes each day
to Kecskemet to do her replacement job for the railways. She and I get off the
last train at the now-locked-up Tiszaug mini-station. It's surrounded by a flat
area of mud, wet scrubby grass, some potholed asphalt and a bunch of
unambitious-looking trees. Elegant and outdoorsy young Zsuzsi plus her friend
Csenge are waiting with Robin in his car.
It takes Robin about two solid minutes of driving slowly along the lane through
puddles to avoid two barky black dogs which keep running in front of the car wheels
every time he tries to speed up. Finally he can pull clear of them
without squashing one.
April 3rd;
Aggressively relaxed Wednesday. Pleasant train ride yesterday
back to Budapest sitting opposite a girl in stripy top, earphone-secured
personal-space
bubble, leggings with horizontal slits cut in them, a big bushy tail hanging from
her belt (with giant metal star as buckle), plus tons of rings and bangles. The
highlight was her sitting cross-legged and leaning forward yogafically so as to
dangle her head and striking red hair into the gap between our knees. Spring must
have arrived then. Returning to today, This Fine Day Of Pause, read another book of
Robin's. 'Moon
Signs' by Sasha Fenton is a late-1980s
text about astrology, explaining to me something I had not really grasped before,
that the moon sign is claimed to govern the innermost level of personality.
A book of its time, adults of four signs at least are congratulated for allowing
children their dignity, and adults of five signs are warned that women of that house
might need to express themselves through a career rather than "conventional"
marriages. That aside, interesting stuff, quite well outlined, although
the moon
phase diagram on page 185 gets the phases (or the arrows) wrong. Here they are
the right way round. To be fair to
some of the bits seeming thin on helpful detail or slightly confusing, the
book is meant to be read in a trilogy with her other two books, one on sun signs
and one on rising signs.
April 1st;
Easter Monday. Quiet day on the Great Plain with Robin & children. Decades ago a
cat burglar wrote from prison to The Daily Telegraph praising their coverage of
crime and expressing the rather touching hope that they might print an obituary for him one day. Courteously, they remembered and a week or so ago did exactly that: Peter Scott, thief. As he said later with some regret, "I gave all my money to head waiters and tarts." In the sense it was his money.
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