be like.
October 30th;
Sara forgets my money again. Scott tells me about
Gloomy Sunday
and plays me the song.
October 29th;
A dynamic, coffee-fuelled day. Contact with
szitanyomas folk.
October 28th;
Passengers at the far end of the carriage bitterly nag when, down to my tee-shirt
sweltering on the heated
train,
I desperately open a window at my end by one third.
Self-righteous with rage, one marches up to shut the window completely, so as
to restore it from stuffy-kitchen temperature back to cheek-burning laundry
temperature. I drink in cool draught when the doors open at stations.
October 27th;
With Robin
discuss pop-up books and the
Moscow Project.
October 26th;
Finished
a
book about time and space from 1880 to 1918.
Clearly written for the interdisciplinary-studies market, because, to
my disappointment, it wasn't really about anything. At one vague level it is about how
inventions like telegraphs, telephones, railways, bicycles, cars and aeroplanes made
people feel different about time and space. In other words, less of both or more of both,
depending on how you look at it. A bold idea to write this, but I need more than the
revelation that
Cubists
felt vindicated by First-World-War camouflage paint and aerial
views of zigzaggy trenches, to pull all these interesting things together.
Einstein
and
Lorentz
make a brief appearance as the twin fathers of 'space-time', but one has the
feeling that
Kern
is skating on rather thin ice when writing about either special
or general relativity. How can we blame students for getting glib, when encouraged by
books like this to think they have understood
relativity,
post-impressionist art,
Proust,
and the build-up to the
Great War all at once?
October 25th;
After last night's final local train from Kecskemet to Lakitelek
[myself and a white-haired man so drunk he had forgotten his station
and would clearly sooner or later wet himself and not notice],
Robin picked me up in Jeremy's green car with the strange thumping
noise. Back in the studio they were building a trailer
for the boat they made last month,
again out of skilfully salvaged old wooden and metal bits. Today they
finished and drove off to drag boat out of river Tisza.
I add a link to an
Arabic-language online bookshop
in my
Arabic section.
October 24th;
Yesterday's holiday
keeps shops shut today as well. It's not as if most
Hungarians do any real work when they're actually working, so holidays
here always puzzle me. Like trying to tell the difference
between
crawl
gear
and out-of-gear when reversing a lorry.
October 23rd;
Agnes shows me what
concordances are.
October 22nd;
Get to speak to my mother on the phone in
hospital.
She's well. I reseal the water
inlet into the communist washing machine back in Budapest.
October 21st;
Robin
disassembles a complete fireplace brick by brick in his studio and pipes in
an old stove, which, like the piping, he found on the street. He's
particularly pleased with some local clay substance he seals the piping in with.
I finish someone's copy of David Lodge's
'Paradise News'.
Nice light read, back
on his pet plot of university academics comparing Britain and the USA. A
disenchanted theologian has to visit Hawaii for family reasons and the fun unfolds.
Was intriguing to compare with the one Mr Myers lent me before university entrance,
'Changing Places',
because the unctious Irish-in-England landlord of that 70s
novel reappears here as a major character (the narrator's father). The man who in
Changing Places has a daughter who furtively borrows Maurice Zapp's porn magazines,
and who Zapp knows will be masturbating over the adverts for hi-fi and
colour television sets in the magazines when he confiscates them, not the naked
girls, is recognisable
as the greedy, cantankarous old relative in Paradise News. Which makes it tempting
to see this as an autobiographical story by Lodge of a mildly-deprived Catholic
Irish upbringing in 50s England made good in redbrick academia.
October 20th;
Saw
'Samurai Jack'
again with an interestingly rapt Caspar & Bela.
October 19th;
Robin & I
uproot a dead
tree
and chop it into firewood.
October 18th;
I design a gameshow for
German TV.
October 17th;
Another slow, soothing train journey out into the
flat
country.
October 16th;
Complicated day. I talk Agnes through a paper she has to summarise about
SGML and
the
TEI,
then try to get Hussam enthusiastic about
sundials
(so why else do clocks go
clockwise, then?),
and finish off by hosting Writers' Group with Esther for Kalman,
Elysia and Jeff. I totally mishandle cooking
flapjacks. No-one in any Budapest
shops has a clue what
golden syrup is.
October 15th;
Jimmy the
philosopher
is in touch again.
October 14th;
Back in Budapest, after Caspar and Bela yesterday waved me off, gradually getting
quite interested in the train as we all waited for it to leave.
Gordon and Kirstin throw a dinner and ply me with lots of gin,
sloe
and fast.
October 13th;
I fiddle with the computer while Robin watches
BBC history on the telly. He passes
out on the sofa somewhere between
Canute and
Henry the Lawgiver, and sleeps
right through to
Magna Carta.
October 12th;
I doze off after a
long day
on the computer.
October 11th;
We drive out into the country and have an excellent coffee & pudding
at a sort of butterscotch/gingerbread motel outside
Kecskemet.
October 10th;
Robin, Balint & I pop in on Lilla and her bubbly friends just by
Margit Bridge,
for strawberry tea.
October 9th;
A show at the Ludwig about wishes coming true. Back at Gogol street,
Istvan cooks
Robin and
me a fine chicken curry with refreshing
Dreher beer.
October 8th;
Chris
gets cross when Marion demands he program a new noise into his phone to
represent her ringing him.
Rob
cooks lovely duck, olives and goat's cheese, plays me the soaring 50s
Betty
Carter and
Ray Charles
jazz duet he rightly thinks would make a wonderful theme tune for the
Airport animation series, and suggests forming a commune.
October 7th;
Journey back in, and an
Il Treno
pizza with Gabriella, Paula, and now also Cheryl,
of, yes,
The Family. Robin drives fast to
catch up with the last
HEV
so the girls can get back to their house on Csepel Island.
October 6th;
We visit an extremely gloomy scrap-metal merchant in
Kunszentmarton. Later, Robin and I set up a
blackboard
for the kitchen and I gouge a chalk groove
with a chisel, sawing off the wrong width of course.
October 5th;
Get to the end of the peculiar 1917 novel
'Moonchild' by
Aleister Crowley
while trying to melt some plastic spectacle
frames with a candle in Robin's garage around dusk. As I
reach the concluding page a bizarre sunset ends outside
in which a massive tilted slab of blue-grey cloud slowly
positions itself over the whole sky like an ocean liner
the size of London. Some excellent thunder and lightning
follow later.
Crowley, self-styled magician, prewar English
eccentric and 'Great Beast', is not a very good
novelist judging from 'Moonchild'.
But it manages to be an interesting read due to the
sheer oddness of Crowley and the flowery manifestos he
puts on every page. This Edwardian
[the self-satisfied writing in
Wilde's
'Picture of Dorian Gray' leaps to mind]
follows the precious aestheticism of the
1890s. Like the tiresome
Wilde,
Crowley's novel is encrusted with paradoxes
which are supposed to have us gasping with admiration.
A cosmic battle between good and evil takes place. We can
spot the magicians of the White Lodge are the goodies
because they spell magick with a k, and strut around a
world of invisible servants, joke Americans, and pointlessly
precise Parisian apartment addresses familiar
to
Sherlock Holmes and early
Agatha Christie readers.
The strutting around involves connoisseurship in foreign
cigarettes and punchlines like
'"My dear man," said
Lord Anthony, "prawns are much better at the end of a
dinner - as you'd know if you had been to Armenia lately."'
Ha! Answer that one!
The magickal guardians of the cosmos sound like a
cross between
Lord Peter Wimsey and
Bulldog
Drummond.
Given the woodenness of the characters
[the black magicians are particularly tedious], it is a
miracle, or perhaps a successful spell, that anyone can
finish the book at all, but I did. Its schoolboyish
earnestness, alternately 'humorous' or
lyrical, has the same
pre-World-War-I innocence as the
'39 Steps'.
Pompous digressions on science
and spirit are hard to bear when Crowley
drops clangers like saying spiders have six legs, not eight.
Yet the clever clever people with their wearily superior
cynicism and cod antinomies [Women have no minds, only
their sex, so they and only they should vote! is one
thigh-slapping cracker] are quaint too. And certain scenes are
memorable: the
Abbotesque
explanation of the
then-fashionable fourth dimension, the necromancy with
the tortured cats, the peculiar occult honeymoon in Italy
attempting to draw the spirit of the moon into an unborn
foetus, the clearly sincere if overlong lectures on
Taoist
white magic and twisted, self-damaging black magic.
The conclusion in the early months of the First World War,
and the idea that magic[k] and espionage are in
businesslike harmony is quite interesting. The
book somehow gets itself from the fin-de-siecle smart
naughtiness of the
Yellow
Book
all the way to the
fresh-faced-yet-nasty optimism of the 1920s.
Like the Great Experiment itself, reading
Crowley trying to write is not something to undertake
lightly, but there are moments of relief.
October 4th;
Enlarge
website.
Late-night television
programme about part of brain’s frontal lobe responsible
for spiritual experiences.
October 3rd;
Travel out of town. Robin and I find that Cserkeszolo restaurant
where gorgeous waitress with
coconut-cream tan works is closed for winter. We eat elsewhere.
October 2nd;
Having yesterday thrown essay at
Hussam,
today all is calm.
October 1st;
Esther
mentions occult black-cloud presence in flat. Apparently it hovers near the
ceiling during the night.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
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