Inese intriguingly suggested two days
ago that Europe's Gypsies need a
'Hochdeutsch'-style
unified version of the
Roma language. Tonight Mystery Friend 2 flies into town in time for a late evening
drink, and expresses some ennui & tiredness. He mentions that some weeks ago a woman
in his building asked after his elderly frail neighbour Jeno. Had he seen Jeno
recently, she asked? No, he replied, but promised to tell her if he did.
Going abroad on business a fortnight ago he noticed an odd smell around
Jeno's door. By his return this odour has now, he says, become an overpowering stench.
April 25th;
Change a cupboard door round, make some clay stuff, and some new cufflinks,
and assemble the other few needed castor holders for the see-through bookcase.
This is again while listening to
Melvyn
Bragg's radio show picking out topics as diverse
as the 1429 Siege of Orleans, Anti-matter, Robin Hood, Roman Satire, and Socrates.
Oddly, just as the two-part discussion on the history of cities makes no mention
of Jane Jacobs' critique of town planning {and spends several minutes on Los Angeles
without mentioning the famous cartel of Firestone Tires, Standard Oil, and General
Motors that conspired to buy up and shut down the LA public-transport system}, so the
discussion on Socrates makes no mention of Izzy Stone's book on his trial. Bragg and
his guests vaguely discuss Socrates' anti-democratic teaching without adding that
several of his students took part in the two anti-democratic dictatorships that
seized power in Athens just a couple of years before the trial. As Stone plausibly
suggests, it's highly likely that this is what the charge of "corrupting
the youth" was really
about, not that this seems to occur to any of Bragg's specialist guests. Still,
they are interesting enough that I am frustrated when I cannot play many of the
podcasts from the archive, such as the one about the Siege of Munster.
April 24th;
In the morning
finish 'The
Book of J', an interesting book by American literary
critic Harold Bloom. It is about the author that scholars call 'J', believed to be
the writer of most of the first three books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus,
and Numbers. Along with Bloom's discussion, the book contains a new
translation into English from the Hebrew
by David Rosenberg of J's text - Rosenberg's prose is fresh and sharp. Bloom
says J is one of the great writers of world literature, and has an overlooked ironic
humour. He thinks J was an aristocratic woman in the late days of Solomon's
court just after 1,000 BC. Much of the oddness of the text Bloom takes as J
politically commenting on the weak state of Israel in her own time, 3,000 years
ago. Jahweh/Jehovah is, according to Bloom, a brilliantly idiosyncratic character,
all-too-human, painted with a wry woman's view of male unreasonableness. Changes
much of what I thought I knew about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As usual,
Bloom scatters wonderful provocations through the book, such as suggesting the
other writer from the intervening three millennia closest to J in style and mood
is ....Kafka. In the afternoon go with Inese down a cave system in the Buda hills
for three hours. Much wriggling on our tummies through worryingly small gaps,
and passages with oppressively low ceilings. One American in our group gets
stuck for 20 minutes in one tight passage but luckily no-one has a panic attack.
April 23rd;
British
election getting interesting.
April 22nd;
Lunch with Marguerite,
tea with Magdolna.
April 21st;
Castor holders sit around.
April 20th;
I phone the electoral people, and they kindly say if I fax them before 5pm then
they can register
me. Perhaps I'll be back for that.
April 19th;
Make eight holders with which to attach the castors to the underside of the
see-through
bookcase. As I do this, listen to
Melvyn
Bragg getting his guests to talk about, among other things, William
Hazlitt.
Hazlitt sounds like another gifted, persuasive apologist for violent dictatorships.
April 18th;
Find the 24-hour post office. Instead of the gloomy, high-ceilinged, overheated
socialist hall of old with its deep shadows, shabby modernist furniture, and dozing
groups of smelly people, it has moved. Now it is a small neat desk attached to an
inside wall of a warehouse-sized Tesco supermarket in a suburb, living inside the
belly of the retail beast like gut flora. All over town, warm
sunshine suddenly reappears. The totty wander about outdoors in ones and
twos, glaring suspiciously up at the clear blue sky in case it tricks them again.
Scrabble evening in Hungarian at Marguerite's, with Csilla & Kati. Quite testing
but enjoyable - first time I've ever played the game in Magyar. Still remember
how white-haired Marjorie Hall, along with her three-wheeler bubble car with
joystick, hundred-odd budgerigars in her small house somewhere in south Manchester,
startling knowledge of science-fiction for a lady of around 70 {at least startling
back then, or startling to the six-year-old me}... also had
four separate Scrabble sets. Each had different-valued tiles for the letters. One
set was for each of English, German, Polish, and French. She spoke all four well
enough to play and win in them. Playing the
game in
Hungarian, I come last out of four, but really not too bad. I get a renewed
respect for people who are good at Scrabble, and Marguerite is much encouraged
and enthused about the language.
April 17th;
Cloudy again. At the gym, one of the girls behind the counter is wearing a black
shirt with very big white writing on it, in English, each letter at least 3 or 4
inches high. It says LIFE IS FULL OF SWEET - the final word {probably THINGS} down
just above her crotch isn't visible. I ask what it is, and she gets embarrassed
and says I can't see it. Later then, I say. "Nor later", she snaps.
The mysterious Josh sends me another intriguing find - some quite extraordinary
Argentinian political
art. Still haven't followed up his suggestion to try out
chatroulette. Many claim
this is mainly random males showing off their todgers on camera, but your fearless
correspondent must see these things for himself, and not simply rely on rumour.
April 16th;
Buy more castors from the man at
SKF,
visit the steel rod warehouse, drop in on
Ilan.
We discuss his recent reunion with schoolfriends in Israel and walk down
to the river in bright sunshine.
April 15th;
Around 6am, read
'Dowsing'
by Hamish Miller. This is an extremely short book of fifty odd pages, half of which
are rather lovely line drawings by Jean Hands. Some of the drawings include a bearded
New Age Codger in a floppy hat, whom I take to be
Mr Miller. A simple, encouraging
how-to guide in learning to dowse, the illustrations, short sentences, and
small-page format give it the comforting feel of a prewar children's book. Since it
says little more than "Here's how to try it yourself, so get on with it", I can't
comment much unless I cut up a coat hanger and have a go.
Cloudy & rainy all day, probably down to those dashed cunning Icelanders and their
fiendish Magma
Weapon.
April 14th;
Buy large piece of white card from the craft shop. Solemnly make a half-month
calendar.
Draw a box for each of the next 17 days.
April 13th;
Finished a friend's copy of
'The
King of Oil', by Daniel Ammann, a biography of
Marc Rich. Rich is the commodities trader who invented the modern spot-oil market
while working at Philipp Brothers, and then branched out with his own firm.
Spanning his successes through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the book gave me
odd visions of chunky white telephones, telex machines, sideburns, big lapels, jumbo jets
in simpler days when you just walked across the tarmac to get on the aeroplane,
and business meetings where everyone smokes.
The
Swiss journalist who wrote the book keeps emphasising how Rich's life is the
"American Dream" probably because the book was aimed at US readers, and to put
into contrast how betrayed Rich feels by the USA,
but the most striking thing is how
unAmerican his life really was. After
his parents move from Poland to Belgium, Rich lives his first few years in Antwerp,
and from there they flee hurriedly to Morocco in the early
months of World War Two. Rich grows up speaking French with his mother and German
with his father. Arriving in the US from Morocco, he learns English,
and starts young in the 1950s at the New York branch of a
commodity trading firm entirely run by Jewish exiles from Europe, many of them
German-speakers. Rising fast as a young deal-maker, his firm sends him all over
the world, and he spends six-month stints in various South American countries
learning Spanish and arranging long-term metals contracts. He comes to love Spanish
culture, is sent when still young to manage the firm's Madrid office,
adores Spain and lives there for years with his wife, doing business with African,
Latin American, and Arab countries. To this day he has Spanish-speaking servants.
While living in Spain, Rich breaks with Philipp Brothers over his frustrated desire
to do bigger, riskier oil deals, sets up his own firm, headquarters it in Switzerland,
and divides his time between a Swiss village near Zug, his home in Spain, and New York.
Nine years on, in 1983, while at the top of the spot-oil market he has invented, he is
prosecuted in the US for illegal trades under a byzantine set of price-fixing laws Nixon
enacted during the early-70s oil crisis, involving three price bands for oil, all
identical in substance so tempting some sort of arbitrage abuse. Prosecutors widen
the scope of their investigation as they raid Rich's firm for documents. Rich flees to
Switzerland as the young prosecutor Rudy Giuliani turns his case into a cause celebre
possibly to promote his own political career, and deploys anti-gangster laws to seize
Rich's assets in the US. Rich becomes demonised in the US press as a billionaire
fugitive from justice who even traded with Iran during the hostage crisis {though
his Swiss firm can do so legally, just as it traded with the Shah of Iran before
the revolution, and Rich believes by 1979 he is Spanish, not American
- the New York prosecutors retort he renounced US citizenship invalidly}.
American prosecutors do all they can during a stubborn almost-20-year siege to
either recapture him from abroad {with an illegal kidnapping on Swiss soil one
attempt that fails} or at least damage his global network of trading contacts {One
US investigator approvingly quotes without irony a motto used by the Persian Shah's
secret police SAVAK "If you can't catch the fish, take
away the water."} After appeals from friends high up in
the Israeli government, Rich at last gets his case
looked at by Bill Clinton who issues a presidential pardon as he leaves office,
to a general reaction of fury in the American media. Even if Ammann has been
overly sympathetic and has left important episodes out of the book,
Giuliani's repeated refusal to be interviewed by the author about the subject
of his first big passionate prosecution makes it hard to take the original
tax-evasion case very seriously. Rich claimed, and continues to claim, that
every oil trade he did prompting the original prosecution was completely legal.
Of course he would. There was never a trial, either civil as would have been
normal, nor criminal as the prosecutors unusually made this case, so both sides'
allegations remain untested in court. However, you might expect Giuliani to want
to give his account of his pioneering use of RICO anti-racketeering
laws against a business he never alleged was organised crime,
the case that made the New York lawyer famous.
With a curious symmetry, Prosecutor Giuliani made extensive use of the
press at the start of the case, but now has no desire to talk about Rich's
case, while Rich spent years avoiding the press before finally
submitting to this biography. In fact it's not that easy to imagine what's
missing from the book since Ammann interviews several people who spent their
whole career pursuing Rich, like lawyer Sandy Weinberg. If they could
have mentioned anything other than 1) the original oil-trade offences under
Nixon's emergency laws, 2) non-US-citizen Rich's probably legal sanctions-busting
through his Swiss-based firm, and 3) his decision to flee the US because he knew
a show trial when he saw one - you'd expect them to cite some other crimes.
There's even a suggestion that Giuliani & Weinberg deliberately avoided
extraditing Rich from Switzerland in the early 80s when the Swiss
authorities were still co-operating, perhaps because the two prosecutors
knew the case was weak and served them better having Rich "on the run". At
the same time, it's easy to see how Rich fell into the trap. A cold fish, a
stickler for punctuality and hard work, naive with women, suspicious of
journalists {therefore "secretive"}, he seems to inspire great loyalty but to
be hard to actually like. The vast amounts of money arouse envy, and while
most US critics might not be explicitly antisemitic, Marc Rich does seem an
ideal model for the rootless cosmopolitan loyal to no nation that has always
been the caricature of the manipulative Jewish plutocrat. With his relentless
seven-day working week, Rich could easily be accused of greed. I wouldn't
underestimate how many Americans loathe him instinctively just for speaking
four languages and liking other parts of the world. His first wife Denise was
born in the US [though only just - her Mitteleuropan Jewish parents came
from near in Eastern Europe to where Rich's parents came from] but Rich
divorced the Brooklyn girl and married a European, so that's another strike against
him. In mid-marriage the billionaire's wife Denise became, slightly bizarrely,
a successful songwriter and wrote
one
tune sung by Sister Sledge - how could the stony-hearted
Rich turn his back on good homey American culture like that?
What conclusion can be drawn from this American Dream life? Well if a European Jew
who was born in Antwerp and will probably die in Switzerland, who has had his
daughter's grave moved to Israel so he doesn't have to ever enter the US again
to visit her graveside, speaks three European languages aside from English,
and has lived as much of his life in Europe as the US can be called "American",
the lesson seems clear. Don't go to the United States, and if you do, never
ever take citizenship there. Renouncing US citizenship seems to be rather like
trying to leave a cult. And if you get bad PR or make a blunder, you might just
be hounded across the world like chess-player Bobby Fisher, another global fugitive
from ambitious careerist prosecutors. This book confirms my growing hunch
that beneath its free-trading British-Dutch veneer, the US is really a Continental
European country like France or Spain or Russia; a monolith that thinks
inflexibly; government and legal system only
distantly linked to common sense. Already by Rich's time in the early postwar
boom, that veneer was rubbing thin to reveal the chipboard beneath.
April 12th;
Still need to test the light-fitting in my
bathroom.
April 11th;
Meet Mystery Friend 2 and 3-Girlfriend Tamas for drinks.
Hungarians go to vote. Exit polls show the main
right-wing party and the red-neck anti-Gypsy far-right party do
very well. Their vote was probably slightly assisted by the plane crash of a
Russian aeroplane in Russia yesterday killing around 90 senior people from an
anti-Russian political party in Poland, including that country's president.
The Poles, pointedly not invited, were on their way to an event commemorating
a massacre of some Poles in Russia in World War Two.
April 10th;
Kind Alvi helps me through a mammoth session actually sending in the e-text to
The
Mighty Apple for approval. Simply the process of steering through the
application process for an iPhone app takes us five hours in a cafe, and Alvi
says it took him days to send in his first app from his software firm. Good to
see how the firm famous for usability in the country famous for being
clear, simple, and customer-centred handles people as soon as it can
deal with them on its own terms.
April 9th;
Rather wonderful how empty the floor of my main room is now that
the books
are on a bookcase. Of course, books will come off for a day or two
next week while I fit the castors. Drop by
SKF
ball-bearing showroom to order six more
castors from the man and check their name. They're 5/8ths he says, not
saying the inch, since it's a standard size I suppose. During day, edit
the XHTML in the
iPhone app
which, as Alvi warned, is like HTML but "less forgiving".
April 8th;
Bookcase now semi-finished, hurrah!
Only the casters need to go on, and
I think I see a way to do this. Yesterday made a pivot for the
kitchen scales, so can declare them finished. Lunch with Alvi, who is extremely
helpful about what is going wrong with the e-text for iPhone. By night, attend the
opening of Robin's
impressive joint show
with Hans & Fukui. Robin leads with his recent cracked-earth pieces.
Later go
with Terri to
quickly look at another opening. This is a
set of cookbook-style pictures of magic spells
by Hungarian photographer
Luca
Gobolyos. These are for a woman to bewitch a
man, including scones with fingernails baked in them, some recipes with knicker-boiling,
and pudding or wine containing drops of the girl's menstrual blood. Presumably ironic.
Perhaps.
April 7th;
Two differently amusing talks about architecture from that TED website, both by
Americans. The first is unintentionally funny. A man in a fabulously clashing
shirt and tie enthuses about his firm's visionary aesthetics, designing
buildings with rounded bits. This is Greg Lynn, who smugly uses the revealing
metaphor that "turns out it's not rocket science to design
a sacred space." He says "organic" a lot. Many of his
structures do look organic, often resembling
fungal growths: distended, bulging, eerie, globular forms, sometimes in vile
colours. Wait for the eye-wateringly ugly tea set he proudly shows towards
the end of the talk. He presents this as a great leap forward beyond the
boxy paradigm of 20th-century modernist rectangles, but of course it is the
exact same thing in its new curvy, bulbous disguise. These are people unaesthetic to
the point of mental handicap getting dizzily intoxicated over new materials and
techniques: just as the Bauhausers were drunk with excitement over their thrilling
steel girders, sheet glass, and moulded concrete 90 years ago. At one puzzling
point he shows a slide of a tropical frog's coloured markings and claims that "a
change in the form indicates a change in the colour pattern", when it clearly
does nothing of the kind. Despite invoking all the modernist buzzwords, 'utility',
'form' and 'function', it's easy to see these buildings
are functionally poor and will be very costly
to maintain and mend. The talk begins with a crass overview of architectural history.
This is where he starts by saying that classicism is based on fractions {fair enough},
that gothic architecture was invented after the invention of calculus
{what?}, and that his design work fully brings differential calculus into
buildings. Apart from misplacing the gothic by six
centuries he shows a slide of what looks to me a lot like the ceiling of King's
College Chapel, attributes it to Christopher Wren {born about a century after the
chapel gets finished} and refers to it as "King's Cross". I'm not making this up.
If he meant the railway station, of course, that isn't even neo-gothic so he's
wrong there too. Watch
Lynn's
video
yourself if you don't believe me. We're obviously not safe from innovator-genius
architects yet. The second talk is intentionally funny as well as irate.
{"It's a despotic building. It wants us to feel like
termites."} by an entertainingly angry man
diagnosing bad cityscapes and sterile suburbia acoss the US. His criticism is
sharp and
important. James Kunstler, perhaps shrewdly, stops just short
of taking on modernism in architecture per se, but when he speaks in the modernist
argot of "vocabularies" and
"syntaxes" of town spaces that
"work", notice that most of his
exemplar slides are pictures of cities made before 1900. I listen to all this while
staying up most of the night putting more holes and rods into my perhaps rather
foolishly modernist bookcase. I suspect I too have created a pseudo-functional
object that pretends to be practical, but really shows off its austere,
faux-industrial look for shallow reasons of fashion.
April 6th;
Wake late, feeling sluggish & a little confused. Finish novel lent to me by
Mystery Friend 2,
'The
Fascination of Evil' by Florian Zeller, translated from
the French by Sue Dyson into a smooth, lucid English often described with words
like 'lean' and 'spare'. About a troubled visit to Cairo by two French novelists,
this book has a curious effect on me.
For most of the evening I have trouble shaking off its strangely thin yet
compelling mood, even with the empty-after-the-Chinese-takeaway feeling. Long ago I
used to like the way English translations of books from other languages read,
and even try to write that prose. Clear, simple sentences, with slightly plain
choices of wording - that curious, flat, sometimes pleasantly hollow feel
writing has once all native-tongue nuance has been rinsed out. No new slang can
really replace the old {or at least publishers frown on translators trying} and
you're left with something like a business-English summary of the text. This
translation, despite thie inevitable flatness, still gripped me to the end. The
themes of the book are The West versus Islam, men's attitudes to women, and why
people write novels. The mood of the novel might also match how I feel today.
April 5th;
Dinner with Mystery Friend 2, where we discuss
Anthony
Robbins, the Burmese campaign, and whether strong spice can slow the growth
of tumours. After that, along with 3-Girlfriend Tamas, we watch the original
'Italian
Job' on DVD, which is a lot funnier than
I remember, but has some strange omissions. I feel sure there was a section now
missing where Benny Hill has to introduce the naughty computer tape into the
traffic-control headquarters building. I now see better the symbolic power of
the closing scene where they balance over the abyss, the gold bullion slowly
sliding down the bus. A dramatic image for irony, frustration, and paradox
worthy of Greek myth.
April 4th;
Finish a book by Michael Frayn,
'The
Human Touch'. Frayn is unusual,
being someone with an analytical philosophy degree who then became a successful
novelist and playwright. His grounding in logic and philosophy of mind - subjects
this book muse over - might explain his fiction being quite intellectual. That's
a fair description of his stage play about quantum physicists, 'Copenhagen', or his
novel about computer engineers, 'Tin Men'. This book is like a rambling review of
philosophy from a charming dinner guest. In parts it goes on a bit, in other places
captures the topic well. Intriguingly, he saunters round by page 290-odd to a
leisurely but very polite destruction of Chomsky's Deep Grammar dogma, followed
by a concise attack on 'mentalese' {which he seems to know of only from Pinker,
not its originator Jerry Fodor}. Then something which looks like
a more shy or sly undermining of Wittgenstein's social-rule-following
fundamentalism, without him actually saying it, and a mildly convincing critique
of artificial intelligence which drifts alongside the salient points. Some of his
thoughts I disagreed with, but might be a good introduction to philosophy for a
reader who likes his novels & plays.
April 3rd;
New Facebook page about
biotech ivory.
April 2nd;
Buy a couple of darling little
ball-bearing
units from nearby SKF
showroom. It has the poignantly faded window display of all Eastern-Bloc
industrial-parts suppliers. Different bearings are arranged among 5-inch-wide
yellow-sprayed European-Union stars cut out of 2-inch-thick polystyrene visibly
coated with dust.
April 1st;
Sunny streets. Get to Rob's for a late breakfast. He plays and explains
some Mozart.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
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