JOST A MON

The idle ramblings of a Jack of some trades, Master of none

Jun 17, 2013

Neil Gaiman at the BBC World Book Club

When the BBC World Book Club polled its listeners for whom they'd most like to have at their monthly programme, Neil Gaiman was by some miles ahead of the runner-up. Today he was interviewed at BBC House in London, and I was there amidst the clamouring throng. 

The format is fairly standard. Gaiman is introduced briefly. He reads an excerpt from his novel American Gods. He takes a few questions. He reads a bit more. He takes a few more questions. He reads another excerpt. He is witty and urbane. He is kind and attentive. It is all excellent fun.

A brief intro to the book: a convict called Shadow is released from jail and finds his wife is dead. Not knowing what to do with himself, he is roped in as a flunky and bodyguard to a mysterious one-eyed gent called Wednesday, who, it turns out, is the Norse god Odin in a seriously diminished form. Odin wants to rouse the other old gods who were brought to America by their believers and then left high, dry, unworshipped and powerless as those believers died and they were forgotten. Arrayed against the old god are the new ones - all shiny, sparkling, the gods of media and technology and transport.

There are questions from the studio audience. There are questions posted on the programme's Facebook page. There are questions called in from Australia and Norway and California. There are questions from Twitter.

When was he inspired to write the book? Well, he says, it is something he can date very accurately because he was in Iceland one summer years ago, and he thought he would write till it turned dark, but the hours went by and at 3am he found it had merely dimmed outside ('yeah, you're ahead of me here') so he went for a walk and there was nobody around and everything was closed, except a tourist office which he entered to find a diorama of the explorations of Leif Ericsson, and the thought struck him - what if Leif and the Vikings took their gods with them to the new world, and over the years forgot them?

A fan-girl from London (via Mumbai) asks why he chose Kali as one of the dispossessed gods in his book. He loves Kali, replies Gaiman. She is fun. She is a goddess of destruction, but also of the wheel of life. How can you not love a goddess with a necklace of skulls? 

Did Gaiman not realise that Mamaji, as she is addressed in the novel, means 'uncle'? Yes, he says. He originally had her down as Mataji, but an Indian friend of his told him that he had read an American book in which Kali was addressed (wrongly, but so unabashedly Americanly) as Mamaji, and so Gaiman decides to use that epithet.

One of the things that interested him when he wrote the book, says Gaiman, is the exploration of gods who may be venerated in other countries but have been devalued or forgotten and replaced by other gods in America. Kali is one such, he says, and he can imagine how a manifestation of hers outside India can be reduced in power and glory.

There is a god in the book, says someone, who is forgotten by the hero as soon as he is seen. Could this be Agni? Gaiman declines to answer. It is a secret to be revealed in the next book of the sequence, he says.

Is Gaiman a believer? He is a 'possibilist', he says, quoting someone or the other. Although raised a Jew, he is not really a theist. He finds that he believes intensely in something only when he is writing about it. At this point he continues to be fascinated by the Norse gods, he says, and finds himself returning over and over again to the subject. They are the only pantheon he knows of whose destruction is written in the legends. These are tragic gods because they know they will die and yet have to continue to go about their mighty lives as though they are immortal. 

Anansi appears in American Gods, says someone. Is this the same Anansi as in the West African god of Anansi Boys? It is the same character, but the latter book is otherwise completely disjunct from the former, says Gaiman.

Speaking of gods, someone said, why were the main ones so conspicuous missing? Jehovah and Allah (and Buddha, adds Gaiman). He offers an analogy. If you are writing about the low-life and dregs of society, would you involve the President? 

HBO recently announced a forthcoming production of American Gods. Without getting into casting details, does Gaiman see any particular actor in any particular role? Gaiman is happy to reveal that the character of Odin was very much driven by the actor Rip Torn whom he met once. Rip, he says, had a wide smile that didn't quite appear genuine and an aggressively forthright manner, just the sort of frightening face a once proud and now diminished god on a crusade would have. Rip Torn was in Beastmaster, of course (not that I have seen either the man or the film), and it seems fitting that such a manifestly scary individual should inspire Gaiman.

Of course, the main character, Shadow, is the one everyone's interested in. Some people feel that he is really not a scary individual despite being depicted as a hulk with a commanding presence. Gaiman thinks Shadow is very closed and keeps a tight lid on his emotion because were he to lose control, the damage around him would be grave. Shadow is inspired by yet another pal of Gaiman's, a fellow who was tiny when young and often bullied, and then became massive in his teens, and the former bullies now could do nothing to him. He would stay quiet and observant, and people would think him stupid but as he was huge, nobody could actually say anything. Shadow, says Gaiman, is the same.

Gaiman has many friends. Tori Amos is one. He travelled with her to her farmstead where he saw an enormous tree, the biggest walnut tree ever, and he thought to himself that it would serve admirably as the equivalent of Yggdrasil. Shadow is tied up to one such tree for nine days and nights in one of the more harrowing portions of American Gods.

Speaking of Tori Amos, Gaiman was once pressured by his French publisher into attending a book signing in Alsace. When he arrived, nobody turned up to get their copies signed. The publisher shrugged Gallically and said something about Tori Amos. Everyone laughs. I should have listened more carefully.

What gods would he introduce in a sequel? He thinks he would do well to look into the gods of social networking, says Gaiman. They are gods for whom sacrifices are continuously being made. You could say the same about a god of television, he adds. After all what you sacrifice to that god is time.

Gaiman says that American Gods in many ways is a book of its era, which is 1999. There are references in it to things that no longer exist. Imagine the terror of the new gods, he says. They are powerful now and in the flower of their puissance, but their presence on the stage of worship is ephemeral. Fads that fuel them come and go. How jealous of the older dying gods would they be?  They had lasted so much longer.

I have not read the book. I might, one day. I would have liked to ask a question, though. But as I do not think of a single question while the programme records, I find I am keen to ask two when I'm on the train home.

Gaiman's book for him is more a road trip across America than an exploration of theological issues. But if he wants to explore the soul of such a deeply religious country surely the idea of gods diminishing is a contradiction?

And from my own experience of life in the US, it occurs to me that there is not one manifestation of any god. There is a free market in gods. For every interpretation of Jesus you can imagine, there's a church you can join. Did Gaiman think there was an equally interesting exploration of America to be had through the multiple avatars of the same god fighting it out for survival?

Unlike the Indian fan-girl who was rushing to yet another appearance of Neil Gaiman immediately after the BBC recording, I doubt I'll run into the author again. I daresay these questions will remain unanswered.

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Jun 5, 2013

Penne All’Arrabbiata Perfection

I think I noticed literary gastronomy for the first time in Tonino Benacquista's Holy Smoke (which I have reviewed here). Nipped over to the library to borrow it again, just so I could excerpt the following passage for the perfect penne arrabbiata.

Bianca waited for me before having supper. Without saying so, of course. 
"Penne all'arrabbiata?" 
Yes! I said, famished. Penne is like short macaroni, cut diagonally. And the sauce is 'rabid' because it is made at great speed and it's spicy. 
"When my mother makes a sauce it takes a good three hours," I say. 
"It should. A real tomato sauce takes either less than ten minutes or more than two hours, because in between you get all the acidity of the tomatoes. Tomorrow I'll make cannelloni, if you like, Antonio..." 
She blushes a little for saying that and I can't think where to put myself. On the table there's a huge bow of pistachios. I taste a couple of them. 
"Would you switch the TV on please, Antonio?" 
[...] 
"There's nothing good on at the moment, but it helps me with my cooking." 
"Sorry?" 
"Of course it does... Here, I'll teach you how to make arrabbiata sauce. It's quarter to eight. Put RAI on." 
A jingle introducing a sequence of advertisements. 
"Put the water on to boil and at the same time heat a whole clove of garlic in a really hot pan until the end of the ads." 
The smell of the simmering garlic wafts over to me. The ads come to an end. She asks me to zip onto the fifth channel where a boy standing in front of a map of Italy is predicting 95°F tomorrow. 
"As soon as he starts the weather you can take the garlic out of the oil. You don't need it any more, all the taste has gone into the oil. Put the peeled tomoatoes into the pan. When he's finished the weather, the water'll be boiling, tip the penne in. Switch to Channel Four." 
A gameshow presenter, an audience ,hostesses, giant dice, numbers lighting up, excited participants. 
"When they give the results of the draw, you can stir the sauce a bit, and add a little tin of tomato puree, just to give it a bit of colour, a couple of little chillies, no more, and leave it on a high heat, don't cover it, it'll spit all over the place but they say than arrabbiata sauce is only really good when the kitchen's splattered with it. Switch to channel two." 
A Brazilian soap opera filmed on video, two rather starchy lovers arguing in a living room.
"At the end of the episode it's the news and it'll be time to eat. The sauce and the pasta will be ready at exactly the same time. Fifteen minutes. Did you get that?" 
Without realizing it I had accumulated a little pile of pistachio shells in front of me. Nervously, I eat a couple more. The worst thing for dulling your appetite. 
[...] 
The steaming hot pasta arrived on my plate. A delicacy to set the palate on fire. I've always been wary of girls who know how to cook.

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Jun 1, 2013

Sakuntala

Sakuntala Tapestry, by Sándor Nagy.
Part of the rising nationalism in Europe comprised in the insistence on a glorious past, often identified with great historical civilisations. The Aryans, of course, were a prime candidate for any people seeking an illustrious antecedence. The Hungarians had several models, chief among them Attila the Hun; among the others were the ancient Hindus. And so we have the 1909 tapestry by Sándor Nagy titled Sakuntala, which symbolically combines the Magyar notion of the deer as a holy symbol with that of King Dushyant's chase of the animal that led him to Sakuntala. [1]
Hunting Gentry: Stained glass window - Veszprém Theatre. (1907).

Nagy was quite fixated on deer - he also depicted the beast in a frieze and on stained glass in the Veszprém Theatre, as well as a tapestry of the goddess Ildikó (1908).

Others have been fascinated with Kalidasa' tale of the unfortunate Sakuntala. Nikolai Karamzin, the great Russian historian, translated the tale into his language, claiming that it was a literature for the world. Here he was joining the likes of Goethe, Schelling, Herder, William Jones and de Chézy, in celebrating the great poem. Indeed, Abhijñānaśākuntalam was incredibly popular - nearly 10% of all works translated from Indian literature into Russian between 1792-1965 were of it! [2]

It's not just the Hungarians who were inspired by Sakuntala.  Camille Claudel sculpted the remarkable 'Çacountala' or 'L'Abandon ou Vertumne et Pomone' between 1886 and 1905. It received much attention, and was kept in storage for several years. Claudel, of course, was channelling her own passion for Auguste Rodin. From Çacountala, she made subsequent variations, one of which is this lovely Vertumnus and Pomona:

L'Abandon ou Vertumne et Pomone, by Camille Claudel.

Closer to India, a Nepali artist delicately painted scenes from the play onto a wooden manuscript cover. Below is a small scene from it. This appears to be the only surviving manuscript cover for a purely secular work, and although there were some reservations over the identification of this work with Kalidasa's Sakuntala, a discovery in the 1980s of a mate to this cover completed the identification. [3]

Ink and colour on wood, manuscript cover from Nepal.
In India, Raja Ravi Varma's Sakuntala cycle is well-known. Here is the lady with her friends:

Shakuntala looking back to glimpse Dushyanta, by Raja Ravi Varma.

Meanwhile, music and dance saw their own manifestations of the gorgeous Sakuntala. Below is an example of Indonesian wayang (shadow-theatre) which is usually set to music. While there is evidence of indigenous story-telling predating the arrival of Hindu traders in the first century AD, much of the wayang oeuvre consists of tales from the great Hindu epics. Kisah Sakuntala, Ibu Kandung Bharata (or, The Tale of Sakuntala, the mother of Bharata) is one in the repertoire.
Sakuntala (Indonesian wayang)

One of Franz Schubert's operas is Sakontala (1820), an unfinished sketch with libretto by his friend J. P. Neumann. As late as 2000, one writer had written, "[Sakuntala] remains to this day the one and only Schubert stage work of which not one note has been performed for the public, anywhere, ever."[4] (This is not quite correct: a German television programme featuring Mallika Sarabhai's dance company had this music, and there have been some productions as well in the 1970s.)



Between 1913 and 1914, the sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927) visited Russia. He was received with much warmth in artistic circles, and he produced a ballet there titled 'Sakuntala'. The director Alexander Tairov had set up a new theatre; it was his hope to synthesise a multi genre spectacle. Inayat Khan's idea of a mystic balletic performance of Sakuntala appealed to Tairov. The music for the spectacle was arranged by Vladimir Pol. The New Theatre opened the production on 25 December 1914, with the title role played by Alisa Koonen. This wasn't a classical ballet but rather a dance interspersed with dramatic movements. Tairov wanted to present the production to the Czar, which sadly never happened. For a long time the music was thought to have been lost, but in 1991, it was found among various other documents at the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture. Three years later, a quartet of the Russian academy of music performed the piece. [5]


In 1889, Frederick Delius (1862-1935) set poetry by a Dane called Holger Henrik Herholdt Drachmann to music. A Dane! Who would have thunk it? Here's the first stanza of the poem:

Jeg kunde for Længsel ej sove,
En Blomstervind
Slog mig imod,
Strømmed herind ad mit Vindu
Som en vellugtaandende Flod;
Jeg hørte de høje Palmer
Suse svagt
Med sød Musik;
Det hvisked ihvor jeg stod og gik:
  Sakuntala, Sakuntala.

(I could not sleep for longing, a flower wind struck me ... )

It seems Drachmann had seen a staging of Kalidasa's play in Munich, and was struck by the parallels between his own ruined marriage and that of Sakuntala. [6]

Not to be left behind, the Italians got into the act as well. Here's Franco Alfano's 'La leggenda di Sakùntala', first act. He wrote it in 1921.


And that's it for now!

References

1. Jeremy Howard, Art Nouveau: International and National Styles in Europe, Manchester University Press, 1996.
2. Susmita Sundaram, 'Translating India, constructing self' in (ed.) Brian James, Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translations in Eastern Europe and Russia, John Benjamins Publishing, 2011.
3. (ed.) Martin Lerner, The Flame and the Lotus: Indian and Southeast Asian Art from the Kronos Collections (p. 90), Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984.
4. Uncle Dave Lewis, 'Franz Schubert: Sakontala', AllMusic.com
5. Cyclowiki, Shakuntala ballets (in Russian).
6. Hattie Anderson, 'Vilhelmine, the Muse of Sakuntala', The Delius Society Journal, Spring 2000, Number 127. (See here for PDF.)

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May 22, 2013

Exhaustion (or Under 200, Part I'm Hanged If I Know)

Wow, this is tiring work. I'm among the Ws and is there any end in sight? Yes, there is, but it appears as though the final push is beyond my puff. So it is with a glad cry that I pounce on two little books - non-fiction - on the London Underground. And another on black holes and the history of the Universe. Non-fiction after this serious overdose of fiction is so welcome.

*****

But I might as well do a brief round-up of some of the better books in this inside straight to the finish line. Véronique Tadjo, a writer from the Ivory Coast, has written As the Crow Flies, a series of impressionist passages. A woman has an affair with her friend's husband which is discovered only after she breaks it off with the man. A beggar attacks a child whom he suspects of malign influence in a fit far more violent than territoriality. An actress in a wandering troupe obsesses over the leader. The impressions are vivid and surreal as the narrative voice switches between persons. Tadjo said she could have written a story that had a beginning and an end, but life is filled with fleeting interactions.
*****

 If you've ever wondered what your fate might have been like had you been talented and imaginative and filled with a yen to improve yourself but you had been saddled with alcoholic and semi-criminal families, you can learn all about it from two books, one superb and the other less so: Dmitri Verhulst's The Misfortunates and Justin Torres' We the Animals. In short, you end up alienated from your families no matter how much you love each other. But the paths to this alienation are many: education, sexuality, misunderstanding. In Verhulst's case, a savvy social worker cut through the obfuscation of his family to separate him from their criminality. In Torres' book, the incendiary writings in his diary discovered by his family propel him out of their orbit. In both cases, the gap between them and their loved ones is of heartbreaking proportions, and only gets wider as the years go by.
*****

 Trust the nobility to come up with sexual deviance. de Sade gave his name to one kind, and Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch to another. See if you can guess what the latter is. His Venus in Furs is supposedly the first in Western literature (to go by the blurb, the only literature - as though the Japanese, to take another culture, hadn't come up with similar ideas aeons earlier) to portray this proclivity. It's a somewhat tedious read, seriously dated (written in the 1870s as one in a series). But it hasn't lost its grip on popular culture: Wikipedia avers that in the last three years alone it has been staged several times, in New York and London, and Roman Polanski's had a go at it as well.
*****

 It's a real pain that I couldn't find any authors with names starting with X or Y to add to my list. It's not that there aren't any, but they are verbose.

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May 18, 2013

In Training

In Katie Kitamura's The Longshot, Cal's deciding on his breakfast. Cal's a mixed-martial arts fighter, training to fight the biggest fight of his life. The waitress is rather keen on him.
"I'll have the breakfast platter." 
"One breakfast platter. You want your eggs scrambled, boiled or fried?" 
"Fried." 
"You want bacon, ham or sausage links?" 
"Sausage." 
"You want beans, hash browns or breakfast potatoes?" 
"Potatoes." 
"You want tortillas? Or you want toast, you want brown or white toast?" 
Cal hesitated. "Brown." 
She nodded as she wrote the order down. She smiled at Cal through her lipstick. 
"That was pretty good. I like a guy who knows what he wants."

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May 14, 2013

The Vampire Race

A couple of years ago, possibly even 2.5 years ago, the boy decided to combine his fascination for speed and creatures of the night. He dictated to his babysitter a story. It is called 'The Vampire Race' version 2=1. The first two chapters were written down by her, while the last one is in his own hand.

Year 628.
Chapter 1

Once upon a time, there were many races in those times.

The first time ever, there was a man called Francis.

Chapter 2

The man, Francis, said: "I want a racing track!"

So Francis built a robot.

There was a big disaster, a vampire came. Francis wanted to catch him, but he was made of cloth.

Chapter 3

So the vampire went somewhere. The race bigind.

The man seaid ready set GO!

Aand of they went.

Then the vampire came and sukt evewy uon.

The Eend.

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May 10, 2013

Some Indus Gossip

Psst, have you heard? The Indus Valley Civilisation, contrary to popular wisdom, may not have been quite the haven of nonviolence it is famed for. Other contemporary cultures were belligerent, went popular wisdom, but the Indus types were a calm, graceful lot, only interested in bearded men and sewage systems.

Well, it turns out that there may have been some amount of brutality in the Indus cities too. Skulls were caved in, noses were broken. One can't be entirely surprised - a purely non-violent society on such a large scale sounds like a pipe-dream. According to [1], out of eighteen skulls studied from the later Harappan period (1900-1700 BC), nearly half had suffered heavy trauma. More interestingly, they report that the prevalence and patterning of cranial injuries, combined with striking differences in mortuary treatment and demography among the three burial areas indicate interpersonal violence in Harappan society was structured along lines of gender and community membership. To wit, the farther you lived from the city centre (or, possibly if your remains were found outside the city sewers), the likelier you were to have had a more violent death. Furthermore, the Harappan culture appears to have become more violent over time, with women being more affected in the later periods.

The Indus people were also remarkably mobile. Another examination of remains [2], this time of teeth, reveals that many of the men found buried with Harappan women were not locals. In other words, immigrant men were forming relationships with local women (quite different to much of South Asia today where a married woman leaves her native place to live with her husband), suggesting, perhaps, that women were powerful. Also, Harappans have been found in Mesopotamia, where before only Indus Valley products had been found. Clearly, they were a people with at least a bit of a travel-bug.


References
  1. G.R. Schug, K. Gray, V. Mushrif-Tripathy, A.R. Sankhyan, (2012). 'A peaceful realm? Trauma and social differentiation at Harappa', International Journal of Paleopathology (2), Issues 2-3.
  2. J.M. Kenoyer, T.D. Price, J.H. Burton, (2013). 'A new approach to tracking connections between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia: initial results of strontium isotope analyses from Harappa and Ur', Journal of Archaeological Science (40), Issue 5.

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May 6, 2013

Another Reason To Close The Toilet Lid Before Flushing

The other day, the wife wanted a frappuccino so we nipped into a Starbucks. While she bought the drink, I popped over to the loo. As is my custom, I lowered the lid before flushing, and what did I find? £160 in crisp twenties fallen behind the toilet lid.

I handed the cash over to the barista. He said, 'You found this in the toilet?' He laughed. A customer standing at the counter laughed. They both stared at me.

The manager saw the cash in the barista's hands. 'Where did that come from?' she said. The barista pointed at me. 'The gentleman found it in the toilet.'

Loudly, he said, 'I shall put it in the safe.' He looked around the cafe to see if everyone had heard him. He laughed again and shook his head.

'Maybe the loser will come back?' the barista said hopefully.

The manager and the barista muttered to each other. 

'Here you go, sir,' the barista said, offering me a coupon. 'You can have a free drink of your choice at any Starbucks.'

'Three!' said the manager from somewhere beneath the counter.

'Manager says "three"', said the barista, and offered me another two coupons. I thanked him and he laughed once more.

So there you go. Three coupons for free drinks. And all for lowering the toilet lid before flushing.

[You do close the lid, don't you? Before flushing? Think of that fine aerosol of disgusting matter that would otherwise spew all over your clothes and the toilet if you didn't.]

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May 2, 2013

Burning Pirciati

In The Scent of the Night, Andrea Camilleri’s upright Inspector Montalbano has heard of a little trattoria that has opened off the provincial road to Giardina, and betakes himself there. With some difficulty he finds the humble establishment and is not impressed with it at first. But when the heavenly smells waft towards him, he finds himself floating to a table. The service at Giugiu ’u Carritteri, in true Sicilian style, is laconic.

"If you feel up to it, I’ve got burning pirciati tonight," said the man with the moustache. 
Montalbano was familiar with pirciati, a kind of pasta, but wondered what the ’burning’ referred to. He didn’t want to give the man the satisfaction ofbeing asked how the pirciati were cooked, so he limited himself to a single question: 
"What do you mean, ‘If I feel up to it’?" 
"Exactly what I said: ‘If I feel up to it,’" was his reply. 
"Oh, I feel up to it, don’t you worry about that." 
[...] 
Finally, a woman’s voice called out from the kitchen. 
"Giugiu!" 
The pirciati arrived. They smelled like heaven on earth. The man with the moustache settled on the doorjamb as though settling in to witness a performance. 
Montalbano decided to let the aroma penetrate all the way to the bottom of his lungs. 
As he was greedily inhaling, the man spoke.  
"Want a bottle of wine within reach before you begin eating?" 
The inspector nodded yes; he didn’t feel like talking. 
A one-litre jug of very dense wine was set before him. Montalbano poured out a glass from it and put the first bite into his mouth. He choked, couged, and tears came to his eyes. He had the unmistakable impression that his taste buds had caught fire. In a single draught he emptied the glass of wine, which didn’t kid around as to its alcohol content. 
"Go at it nice and easy," the waiter-owner said. 
"But what’s in it?" asked Montalbano, still half choking. 
"Olive oil, half an onion, two cloves of garlic, two salted anchovies, a teaspoon of fine capers, black olives, tomatoes, basil, half a pimento, salt, Pecorino cheese, and black pepper," the man ran down the list with a hint of sadism in his voice. 
"Jesus," said Montalbano. "And who’s in the kitchen?" 
"My wife," said the man with the moustache, going to the door to greet three new customers. 
Punctuating his forkfuls with gulps of wine and alternating groans of extreme agony and unbearable pleasure (Is there such a thing as extreme cuisine, like extreme sex? he wondered at one point), Montalbano even had the courage to soak up the sauce left in the bottom of the bowl with his bread, periodically wiping away the beads of sweat that were forming on his brow. 
"And what would you like for a second course, sir?" 
The inspector understood that with that ‘sir’, the owner was paying him military honours. 
"Nothing." 
"You’re right. The problem with burning pirciati is that you don’t get your taste buds back till the next day."

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Apr 29, 2013

Shoreditch Walk

Going to the dentist is a famously hesitant and curiously unfulfilling venture (unless you have cavities, heh), so I figured I might as well take a nice walk around the East End once I was done. I meandered a roundabout course that finished up at Nicholas Hawksmoor's lovely Christchurch Spitalfields where I was waylaid by a buzzing crowd of young 'uns from a local primary school. I had been taking pictures all along but when I got home, I forgot to upload them onto my computer, and days later I formatted the flash card, and whoosh, they all disappeared. Tragic, I call it.

The walk began at Cheshire St., once a hub of the industrial East End, sadly reduced in the 1970s, and then rising phoenix-like to provide accommodations to a burgeoning service industry. Among the bigwigs of the older incarnation of the street was Lipton Tea.

Tea Building, Cheshire Street, 1973. (From here.)

One of the most famous landmarks of the East End and pride of Cheshire Street is the Repton Boxing Club, training ground for many indigent boys in the pugilistic arts. Repton is a public school in Derbyshire which started this club in 1884 to support the poorer members of society. [Since then it has become probably the top boxing club in the country, although when I walked by, there was not a boxer to be seen. The whole place, to wit, was empty of life.] The club only moved to these premises about forty years ago.

Tony Burns, a boxing coach at Repton Boxing Club, said of his youth:
When I was a kid you either kicked a ball or you hit someone. So, when I was twelve, I became a boxer. My mum died when I was a kid and if you lived in a place like this years ago, you was very fortunate to have a loving family. We all lived in Bacon St and Charlie Burns was the eldest, and they was a pain in the arse that family, but when I boxed all the family and friends would come, so I used to have quite a following. [1]
Right next to the club - in fact, they're all in the same building - is the Bethnal Green Bath House. This was built in 1899 as a public bath and laundry. At the time, hardly any of the local houses had baths, so this was in the public interest. The building was part of a complex that included the Ramsay Street School. [2] Currently it's a block of apartments. I wonder if there are still smells from the chlorinated and sulphurated days of yore.

Bethnal Green Bath House
Cheshire Street Bath House
Walking a bit on, I came across a set of warehouses below railway tracks. One of them, Coppermill Ltd., has a Royal Warrant and deals with industrial cleaning cloths. It has been around for about a century. Victorian warehouses have a strange charm about them, especially those beneath tracks. Many of them in other parts of the city have been converted to art studios and cafes and restaurants, but this one retains its original function.
The best thing about this scruffy building is the Royal Warrant sign.
Coppermill Ltd., Shoreditch.

Cheshire Street was also the site of an installation art exhibition by Martin Creed (the chap who turned a light off and on and won a Turner Prize [3]) a few years ago. The Hauser & Wirth Coppermill was the venue; to be honest, I don't think I noticed the building as I walked by.

A little further on, on St Matthew's Row, is a pub: Carpenter's Arms. It is said that it was bought by the notorious gangsters, the Kray brothers, for their mother. Ostensibly the bar surface was a coffin lid - but who knows for sure?

Carpenter's Arms, Shoreditch.
Truman's Pubs owned this and several other pubs all around the East End. Some of the others have been demolished. [4]

The wonders of Cheshire street don't stop here - I came across the wonderfully monickered Duke of Uke. What do you think this is? A ukulele store, no less. Bertram Wooster would be so pleased. Till recently, this emporium used to be on Hanbury Street, a few blocks away; this latest venue should bring in the punters all agog with excitement.

Next, I saw a rather clever sign: The Devil Wears Prada but the People Wear £5 Plimsolls. There were boots and boots galore. This was the Blackman's store.

The Devil Wears Prada, But the People Wear Plimsoles

Then there's a fashion store by Dragana Perisic. I went in thinking I might grab a little something for the wife, and then I walked right out.

Dragana Perisic's fashion store on Cheshire St.
No, this woman was not there at the time.

A few minutes' walk away is Brick Lane, as grotty and edgy a street as you might want. It has some of the most disgusting curries in the world and fine beigels, but also a fascinating multicultural history going back centuries. Huguenots, Jews, cockneys, Bengalis, weavers, streetwalkers, murderers, noncorformists, anarchists, racists - there has been a constant turnover in the social mix here going back to the 1500s.
Brick Lane 1932 © Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

Just off Brick Lane is Pedley Street, on which I saw a graffito of the Queen reading. Drat, I can't find an image of this - it is a circular picture on the side of a building.

15 & 17 Fournier Street: Mission of Christianity to the Jews (1878-1947)


Next was Fournier Street, on which once Jack the Ripper romped. Today it is the site of the studio of the remarkable artists Gilbert and George, and the renovated 18th century building that once housed a joiner and then became a mission to convert Jews to Christianity at the end of the 19th century. [5] The most famous building here, of course, is the wonderful Hawksmoor Christ Church, which occupies the western end of the street.
Christ Church Spitalfields
Christ Church, Spitalfields, by Mr_Zephyr on Flickr.
References:
  1. "Tony Burns, Boxing Coach", in Spitalfields Life.
  2. Stephen Levrant, "Proposed internal alterations and change of use - Bath House Cheshire Street", Tower Hamlets council.
  3. Hazel, "Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill", Londonist, May 9, 2007.
  4. Duncan Richards, "Truman's East End Pub Archive", Design Department Store, Sep 5, 2011.
  5. "All Change at 15 & 17 Fournier St", in Spitalfields Life.

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Apr 25, 2013

Maneaters

In my hunt for the art of the erstwhile Russian imperium, I came across the Georgian artist Merab Abramishvili. A painter well-versed and steeped in Oriental mysticism, paganism and medieval Christianity, he created a wide range of works seeking to synthesise their varied wisdoms. One of his very best works is the 2005 canvas called the Maneater of Kumaon. Here it is:

Maneater of Kumaon, by Merab Abramishvili. (2005).
Maneater of Kumaon is an important example of Abramishvili’s preoccupation with mystical beasts. A tiger is set against a meticulous and elaborate exotic garden. Lace-like foliage is painstakingly painted in tempera, yet smudged over with a layer of almost transparent paint, in places creating the effect of a soiled antique mural. The tiger itself appears elongated and delicate like a sublime beast that might have stepped out of an Oriental miniature. Abramishvili’s thin, meticulous brushstrokes carefully outlining the figures turn into smudges and dribbles of paint to produce the overall impression of a mirage. Gazing out into the distance the heroic tiger is so other worldly that the victim at his feet can easily pass unnoticed. Covered with streaks of red, (s)he lies lifeless and forgotten. The subdued violence of this work exemplifies the concealed qualities of the artist’s utopian visions. [1]
The Maneaters of Kumaon, of course, is a well-known book by the big-game hunter turned conservationist Jim Corbett. In a career spanning thirty years he shot several great cats that had taken a taste to human flesh in the foothills of the Himalayas. This was not the only book out of India with 'Maneater' in its title - R. K. Narayanan wrote The Man-Eater of Malgudi in 1961.

This book, though, has little to do with cats; instead, it is a humorous tale of a printer's woes on account of his acquaintance with a veritable demon of a taxidermist. Demonic man-eaters are a dime a dozen in art, too, especially in the art of gaming fantasy, as for example here:
Who is this by?
A certain A. Hitler was depicted as a demonic maneater in wartime propaganda, as in this English poster (inspired by contemporary Soviet works).

MANEATER

The good thing about propaganda is that it can cut both ways. Here is a Japanese anti-Russian poster by  Hitokui Rokoku (1904), in which the Czar personifies the Russian man-eater with peoples of various nationalities swallowed and struggling in his stomach.

Russia: The Man-Eater, by Hitokui Rokoku. (1904).

At the time it was put down by Japan, Russia, like a devilish man-eater, abused severely people of all countries it had swallowed: [the devil] eats some tendon and starts sneezing, he bites some meat, but starts coughing, he pinches something and becomes itchy, he thrusts somewhere and farts. But in the end he throws up everything he has eaten. [2]

And, speaking again of Japan, Hall and Oates visited in 1982, where they performed their famous song, titled - you guessed it - 'Maneater'. Here they are:




References

  1. 'At the Crossroads: Contemporary Art from the Caucasus & Central Asia', Sotheby's exhibition catalogue notes, March 2013.
  2. Yulia Mikhailova, 'Japan and Russia: Mutual Images, 1904-39'.

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Apr 21, 2013

Food of Forensics

In Ernesto Mallo's Needle in a Haystack, a forensic pathologist tries to console an inspector who mourns his dead wife.
You're still suffering from Marisa's death. Pain has the virtue of making people deeper beings. Suffering makes the good guys more compassionate, more noble; it makes the bad guys worse, more perverse, more wicked. So what can I do about it? Just stay calm. Trying to resist will only make it worse. In time it will pass. Right now I've got a lovely bottle of red waiting to be drunk and a pork loin stuffed with pineapple cooking in the oven, which it would be plain stupid to eat on my own. You fancy tackling it with me? Did you wash your hands after work? Are you crazy? That's where the extra flavour comes from.

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Apr 17, 2013

Fabulism (or Under 200, Part 12)

Quick round-up of fables, the fabulous, and general folderol.

I zipped at high speed through Anna Maria Ortese's The Iguana till about the half-way mark after which my attention flagged. A rich Milanese nobleman in search of some property to acquire lands on a mysterious island ostensibly part of the Portuguese empire where he encounters a bunch of decadently poor aristocrats and their magical maid - the sentient iguana of the title. The book is meant to be a series of allegorical chapters that meander between the fantastic and an exploration of an effete man's psyche as it flips between pity and macabre paranoia. I was unable to finish it, but it is considered one of the best post-war Italian works, so let not my impatience stop you.

Knud Romer's Nothing But Fear is a thinly-veiled fictionalised autobiography. His mother is German and reviled for that fact in the little Danish village he lives. The hatred of the locals extends to his entire family. His relatives will have no truck with his father or mother. His schoolmates torture him. His mother, a generally sunny personality, has a darker emotional side. His father, a simple, methodical and socially awkward man, isolates himself in response to the antipathy of the villagers. The book describes Knud's parents' lives before and during the Second World War, and his own life from his childhood. It was received with acclaim for its harsh beauty of recollection, and criticised as essentially a false memory. It appears that in reality Knud Romer or his family wasn't quite as badly treated as he portrayed it. Another fable, then.

I'm pummelling in fits and starts through Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever, a collection of several hundred little chapters, each one of which propels the narrator's catastrophe of a life. Her son appears to have been raped; her daughter is a drug-addict; she has had several collapsed marriages; she loves her children to distraction; she is suspicious and somewhat supercilious about her younger lover; she goes on long pointless drives across the southern states of the US; her scriptwriter job is going nowhere. It is a cleverly written book with a wonderful gift of language, but I am as yet unable to decide if all that the narrator describes is real or entirely in her head.

Fritz Leiber is one of the greats of the fantasy tradition, and his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series is among his best-loved. I picked up Book 6: Swords and Ice Magic at the book exchange on a platform of my local railway station, which, of the 4 volumes lying there, was the only one fewer than 200 pages long. The first few chapters are monotonous - random villains are despatched by Death to assassinate the two heroes and are promptly despatched by them; beautiful women, most younger than 18, cavort with them; they speak to each other in a quaint tongue (very in cheek); and sundry gods vie for supremacy. If you were to sit and read a sequence of these Lankhmar tales, you'd very quickly tire of them. They're not much different from, say, the Adventures of Amir Hamza, where Hamza's tricksters see through the villainous tricks of Afrosiyab's minions, use magic to extricate themselves from any trap, seduce sedulous women and convert them to the true faith, and, in general, prove completely immune from harm. But the last few chapters of Swords and Ice Magic try to add a bit more meat to the tale of the heroes by introducing a longer story arc: a massive fleet of Mingols try to despoil and pillage their way through Newhon, and the heroes have to try to stop them. Unlike other stories in the fantasy genre, the Mingols are not a faceless horde that can be exterminated, and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser do try to come up with a way to prevent senseless slaughter. That - and Leiber's sense of humour - however, were probably the only saving grace in this book.

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Apr 13, 2013

Overheard XXI

10 am. 
Southwest train to Reading. 
A young blonde with oversized black glasses, a muddy skirt, a backpack, a mobile phone and a seriously posh accent.

'Oh, Catherine, I am so hungover. We had about ten bottles of wine and several shots, and I feel like shit.'

'Yes, he was! I don't know if he said it because he was wasted, but he said that he has been in love with me for two years.'

'Oh no, I'm like, you can't be serious, really? ... Yeah. Yeah. Besotted with me.'

'Well, no, I had no idea, and I'm not even sure if it's 'cos he was so drunk. But then he said, "Why else would I take you to a Michelin-star restaurant?"'

'Yeah, he did, we went to a Michelin-star restaurant. But I'm like, "It's because you lost the bet." He bet me I wouldn't get a First, but I did, so he took me to the restaurant. That's what I said, and he's like, "No, that's not why I took you there."

'Yeah, that's what he said... "You're so pretty and so smart. I mean, you're so intelligent," he said.'

'That other girl was there. You know, the one I hate. One of the guys went over to chat to her, but she was really grim. I was like, "God, I kissed him a year ago, get over it."'

'Oh, and his senior officer came over, and he was so hot. He was flirting with me, and I was so wasted I couldn't even flirt back, but I really wanted to, 'cos he was so hot.'

'Like a major or something.'

'Yeah, they start as second lieutenant, and then I think they become captain, then major.'

'No, there are private ranks and officer ranks.'

'You have to do 14 weeks' basic training to be a private.'

'Yeah, I stayed over in Sandhurst in the junior officers' dorms. I'm on my way back home now. The bugle went off like at 7 in the morning, and I was wrecked, and then the soldiers, like, set off the fire alarm, and we had to leave the building.'

'Oh God, Catherine, I am so muddy, I didn't even shower, and I smoked so much last night. Yeah, and when my hair falls over my face, all that stale smoke smell... God, it's grim. Oh God, Catherine, I'm so hungover, I just want to get to bed and die.'

'So how is your family?'

'Really, she's totally, like, your Cordelia.'

'Yeah, but just because she's dead doesn't mean her ideas are. To say that the ideas died with her is just so ... so fallacious. I didn't really like her.'

Impressive, eh? Oxford-type, I think. Posh. Hot soldiers besotted with her. Shakespeare. Dislike of Maggie Thatcher. A First. Yup, pretty and smart.

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Apr 3, 2013

Oulipo Grub

Christian Bök spent seven years of his life producing the minor tour-de-force he called Eunoia, in which, corresponding to the letter U, he has a page depicting the foodiness of someone called Ubu. An alter ego, perhaps?

Ubu gulps up brunch: duck, hummus, nuts, fugu,
bulgur, buns (crusts plus crumbs), blutwurst, bruh-
wurst, spuds, curds, plums: munch, munch. Ubu sups.
Ubu slurps rum punch. Ubu chugs full cups (plus
mugs), full tubs (plus tuns): glug, glug. Ubu gluts
up grub; thus Ubu's plump gut hurts. Ubu grunts:
ugh, ugh. Ubu burps up mucus sputum. Ubu up-
chucks lunch. Ubu slumps. Ubu sulks. Ubu shrugs.
Ubu slurs drunk chums. Ubu snubs such drunks; thus
curt churls cuss: 'shut up, Ubu, shut up'. Gruff punks
club Ubu. Butch thugs drub Ubu. Ku-klux cults
kung-fu punch Ubu. Rumdum bums bust up pubs.

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Mar 29, 2013

Under 200, Part 11

Do you think I may have been judging Lilian Jackson Braun a bit harshly? I was just thinking that the unfortunate book in her Cat series was probably so bad because she'd already written very many over the preceding fifty years and had pretty much exhausted any plot or characterisation in that time. When you're 80 years old and have come across hundreds of personality types and encountered every imaginable twist in your life, your attitude on people and events hardens into a kind of monochrome melange, with little interest in nuance or distinction, and everything you hear is old hat and boring. Ha.

It's silly on my part to be judging octogenarian writers from such a small sample. I've come across this colourlessness only twice so far. Braun was one, and the now nearly nonagenarian Scottish writer Gerald Hammond is another. I read his With My Little Eye yesterday, and it is filled - once again - with characters who are identical in speech, thought, pedantry, sense of humour, motivation, with only names to differentiate them. Check out how one of the main character talks (he's 31 years old, by the way):
There are no buts. There seems to be a high probability that ...'s death may have involved what they call foul play and what you've just told me could be relevant. I am not going to be responsible for withholding evidence in a murder case. If you don't tell them I shall have to rescind my promise and tell them as much as I know.
Here's how a police sergeant speaks:
Everybody dies of heart failure. It just means dying. If you mean heart disease or a heart attack then say so. But there were no signs of that nature. To the initiated - that means me - he seems to have dropped dead for no particular reason, but no doubt the pathologists will find something to explain it. You knew him in life and saw his body.
Here's a 19 year-old woman speaking:
And I thought you're about the nicest man I know and, if you don't mind my saying so, you're an attractive man in the prime of life. You'd know how it really should be and I know you're not the sort who would talk about it afterwards. And I also know you've had lady friends but you don't seem to be attached at the moment.
And this is a 2011 book. Who talks like this?

****

In my very early teens I used to nip into the British Council every so often to borrow books. Most of the time it was some pulp like Alistair Maclean or Wilbur Smith, but occasionally I'd look at the more serious fiction shelves and ponder over the names. A. J. Cronin and Beryl Bainbridge and Muriel Spark and so on. There were also a bunch of Deightons and MacInnes and Allbeurys and - does anyone read him anymore? - John Creasey. I never read any of those then (except Deighton, whose SS-GB I really loved), so I figured I should remedy the defect when I came across Ted Allbeury's Dangerous Arrivals - less than 200 pages, to boot.

I think we can easily stick this book with the likes of Jack Higgins. You know, airport reading for the 1970s. This has a typical plot - an ex-special services fellow minding his own business has his life threatened, and of course he has to investigate, bonk several willing women, kill a few toughs and recruit some cheerfully shady fellows who owe him their lives from the war. It would be your typical white man solving a problem in some corrupt hellhole, except the corrupt hellhole here is Italy and the special services guy is British. There's a suitable amount of manly pain interspersed with food, and the Brit walks off at the end unbowed but sadder.





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Mar 24, 2013

Under 200, Part 10

Disappointments continue apace. Francis Durbridge's Curzon Case stars his long-time detective Paul Temple and his lovely wife Steve who - despite the police's best efforts - investigate some missing boys in Steve's hometown. Once again we have a pompous protagonist (how that Steve tolerates Paul I cannot comprehend), class warfare, a motley plot involving smugglers, fine art, drugs, and the restaurant scene. Or am I thinking of the meals consumed in various picnics and parties? Durbridge's style is canonically Golden Age, although somewhat racier and in a possibly more modern setting. In classic style, the detective brings everyone into a room for his final revelation. I'm not convinced, however, that he is even in the class just below that of Christie or Allingham.

*****
In the non-genre fiction category, I read Sándor Márai's Esther's Inheritance. The return of her lifelong love Lajos after decades has Esther aquiver with anticipation and flushed with foreboding. Lajos had dumped her for her sister and absconded shortly after his wife's death, leaving his children in Esther's temporary care. Lajos - as seen through Esther's eyes - is a charmer, a chameleon, an inconstant fellow whom everyone loves, a slippery and subconscious con-man. To me at this point he appeared monochromatic, a cipher, a nonentity. Esther knows that Lajos is returning only to break her heart again, but still she is unable to deny him. As the moment of his arrival draws near, her excitement is febrile. He comes in bearing gifts (but she knows they're worthless); his children accompany him (and they recognise their father's all-consuming weaknesses, but they hold Esther responsible); there is a malevolent woman in tow too (what is her role in the story?). Lajos' defence of himself is the first time I saw intelligence and agency in the man. For all that, he remains deeply flawed and destructive to those in his midst.

All the action of the book is concentrated among a handful of characters, all of whom have known Lajos in their youth and have experienced his charm and his betrayals. Esther, therefore, is not alone.  She has all the support she could have wanted and a searching introspective mind. And yet she manages to chuck it all away, in a resolution of the standoff that I found ultimately unconvincing.

*****
Atiq Rahimi's Earth and Ashes was published in Dari, then in French - to wide acclaim - and then in English. Since then he's switched to writing in French (I blogged about him and other non-native French writers here) and has won the Goncourt. This was his first book and it treats with poetic voice the tragedy of Afghanistan. Years of history are compressed into a few days experienced by an old man and his grandson as they wait at a quarry to break ill tidings to the boy's father. The book, narrated by the old man in second person, alludes to ancient myth and epic poetry. Those of us who know these myths will feel their resonance; to those that don't, Rahimi's language will appear obfuscatory. The story, however, is timeless and without borders - in times of war, depredations and horrors are common, and the people that live through it are sorely damaged; family ties are often impotent before social strictures; and there is little healing to be had from death and heartbreak.


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Mar 21, 2013

Under 200, Part 9

If you want to read claustrophobic, cloying, simpering novels about little towns where everyone is sugary and cat-loving and laugh delightedly and discuss Shakespeare and Byron and behave with a courtly mien, you can do no worse than to check out Lilian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Went Bananas. I do not encourage you, mind. A misplaced sense of charity on my part forces me to admit that this may be among the weaker books in her long series. I have read it in a rage. The language is awful, the conversations are filled with exclamations, there are cats at every turn, and the main character Qwilleran (Qwilleran! That name alone should have been kicked out of him in his youth) would take a minor prize for mansplaining. The women love him! How could they not? He is supposed to be well-read, well-spoken affectionate, empathetic and rich, and I wouldn't mind chucking the pompous ass into a nearby lake. 

This is the kind of writing that permeates the book:
'They called me a half hour ago. It was inevitable. But now that it's happened, I'm in shock! I don't know how to deal with it. We were like sisters.'
'Just cry, Maggie. Tears are a great healer, so don't be afraid to cry your eyes out. When you can cry no more, you'll feel a great calm, and then you'll think of a way to honour [...]' memory.'
'You're right, Qwill. That's exactly what Jeremy would have said.' Her voice trailed off, and he thought he heard a heartrending wail before she hung up.
His advice was based on experience, and he knew it would work.
I'm in tears.

*****

I'm a bit unlucky again in my choices of genre fiction in my alphabetical razzle-dazzle tour of the shelves. Another painful book I had to contend with is Judith Cutler's Silver Guilt. This stars a young antique dealer-in-training, Lina Townend, an illegitimate child of a Lord Elham fostered by a gay man who calls her 'my sweet one' and 'light of my life'. Although the novel (again, one in a series) is set in the current century, the attitudes of hoi polloi are positively medieval. There is much tugging of forelocks and curtseying before said Lord (as effete and ineffectual as you might want, although an expert forger), and considerable snobbery and class division, and there are men, both young and middle-aged, who have the hots for our impetuous Lina. Lina, once upon a time a feral child, has not had much schooling but we are assured by various characters who appear in the book that she is very smart and bright. She narrates the story in a strange mixture of knowingness and ignorance and lack of vocabulary. Perhaps the traumas she faced as a child affected her brain? I'm no expert. The plot, such as it is, is secondary in this book - it reads more like an extended narrative piece on the antiquities business and associated fraud. A rather tediously written journalistic piece, with some unreal conversations and stiff descriptions. Cutler is (was?) a secretary of the Crime Writers' Association and has published several other crime series, but as to how popular they are, I do not vouchsafe an opinion. On the merits of this book, I will not revisit this writer.

*****

To cheer myself up, I looked at Mervyn Peake's whimsy-filled travelogue titled Letters From A Lost Uncle. The illustrations (by Peake himself) are worth the price of the book. An Uncle, a long-term explorer and unsuccessful adventurer (if lack of success is determined by his lack of fame), is somewhere near the North Pole in search of the mystical White Lion. He is accompanied by an assistant-cum-porter, Jackson, who is a melange of a tortoise and a man. He decides to write letters to a nephew he has never seen, hoping to explain his lifelong travel-bug and fascination for distant lands. In his pithy and humorous writings he reveals the quiet desperation with which he seeks his greatest prize. If only he were able to discover the White Lion and take pictures of it, his fame would be eternal. And so he staggers through blizzards and blunders across bleak landscapes and he writes his letters. 

I think I'll show my boy this one.




 
 
 

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Mar 18, 2013

The Pleasures of English Tavern Eating

Zoë Heller's Everything You Know has a misanthropic protagonist. Willy grew up in England, left it as soon as he could, and now he's back on family business. He hates every minute of it. He takes his girlfriend to a restaurant recommended by his concierge. He hates every minute of it, too.
The food at Smithie's was shockingly nasty. We weren't allowed to choose our own dishes - we had to take what the kitchen had prepared that night. This, according to the waitress, was part of the restaurant's bid to revive the pleasures of authentic English tavern eating. By the words 'authentic' and 'English' and 'pleasures', I took her to mean roast beef, roast potatoes and so forth But this was not the case. For hors d'oeuvres, Penny and I were presented with a plate of tripe and onions to share. After we had sent that away untouched, Penny received a dish of pig's trotters and lentils and I got an arrangement of parsnips and swedes entitled 'Old English Vegetable Plate'. We didn't stay for dessert (suet pudding and custard) and we only had two glasses of wine, but the bill, including service, came to £130.63.

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Mar 15, 2013

Violin


The boy's been practising a little tune on the violin for the past few days. It is called 'Little Playmates.' The screeches have been frightening the mice and the neighbours. He plays the tune, three D's followed by a flourish and then three A's. He does this three times, gets bored, and then improvises his own tunes for the next quarter of an hour. He urges us to listen and applaud. 

A concert was organised by the director of music the other day. That's why the boy was practising. Parents attended in force.

Unlike the flute, for which the imp takes separate lessons (and is actually doing quite well at), the violin is taught to all the boys in his year. These lessons will continue for two more years, following which those with aptitude or interest will be encouraged to continue privately. The violin is a truly tricky instrument to play, as we learned during the concert. The director said that the boys had spent a term learning to hold it properly, followed by a few weeks learning to wield the bow. They will learn fingering only next year. 

After the class performed, we were told we were in for a treat. One of the imp's classmates is a prodigy. Where the rest of the class had played little kiddie tunes, this chap turned out in style and presented the first movement of a Handel sonata. The director of music accompanied him on piano, got a bit lost when turning a page of the music sheet, and was awarded a look from him. 

Following the prodigy, we listened to more kiddie tunes, this time performed by the older boys. 'A' for effort, as the saying goes, but the prodigy was indeed a very hard act to follow.

Good fun all around.


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