Monthly Archives: January 2014

A virtual dérive

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This will be a virtual derive:

Theory of the Dérive, by Guy Debord: Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956)
reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

Translated by Ken Knabb (link here)

ONE OF THE BASIC situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.

The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.

 

My drifting, however, was initiated this morning when I came across this link to the British Library’s blog, The Mechanical Curator: Randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour.   Rediscovered artwork from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th Century books.  I browsed the links and followed this one:

Exped cover pg online edExpedição portugueza ao Muatiânvua. Descripção da viagem á Mussumba do Muatiânvua … Edição illustrada por H. Casanova. [With plates, including portraits and maps.] vol. 1-3
Author: DIAS DE CARVALHO, Henrique Augusto (Lisboa, 1890)

The image which first caught my eye, from the hundreds of thumbnails on offer at this site, was this one of an egregiously sulky-looking bird:

Sulky bird(Helotarsus ecaudatus)

aka ‘jester’, or Gaukler in German; I found this out from this site, which has been translated with customary inattention to idiomatic English, by

Bing (which gave up, evidently, on many words, and left them untranslated):

‘A beautiful matte black, head, neck, back and the whole bottom engaging, stands by that, Graulich Brown on the internal flag is made white, decorated with a wide, black end edge last four hand – and the consummation scapulars lively off from the bright chestnut coat, the similarly-colored tail, slightly thinner lower back, as well as a broad wing bandage, in opposition to the deep black first flight. The deck spring of the primaries are black, the arm swings brown-black with Brown Endsaume, the other upper deck feather wings dark brown, lighter margins who know under deck spring wing. The eye is nice and Brown…’

The bird is also called Short-tailed eagle (or kite), Bataleur (or Bateleur) eagle (‘tumbler’, or ‘tightrope walker’ in French), the name given by the ornithologist François Le Vaillant.  Born in Surinam in 1753, he studied in Metz (where I once lived – a nice situationist coincidence).  I found this about him at Wikipedia:

As a traveller in Africa, Le Vaillant tended to describe the African people without prejudice. He shared Rousseau’s idea of the “Noble savage” and condemnation of civilization. He described the beauty of Narina, Khoekhoe woman in Gonaqua named after a flower in terms that were not to be found later in the colonial period.[3] He was infatuated with Narina, and she stopped painting her body with ochre and charcoal and lived with Le Vaillant for many days. When he left, he gave her many presents but she was said to have sunk into deep melancholia.

Le Vaillant parrot by Jacques BarrabandThere’s this lovely image on the same site of this parrot from Le Vaillant’s Histoire naturelle des perroquets, 2 vols, 1801-05, illustrated by Jacques Barraband.

I wondered how accurate an image of the Bateleur eagle the one above was, so did some online searching…Bateleur Eagle (NY Public Library, image ID: 820528)

Bateleur Eagle (NY Public Library, image ID: 820528): from Gustav Mützel (1839-93), ‘The Royal natural history’, Warne 1894-96.

This bookplate doesn’t look much like the Portuguese one: nobler, less grumpy.  Digging deeper I came upon this alternative name for the bird:

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, s.n. mountebank,  n. 3: The short-tailed African kite, Helotarsus ecaudatus: so called from its aërial tumbling. (via Finedictionary.com).

The online images at the NYPL led me on to this plate of a collection of Accipitres (diurnal birds of prey):

Bateleur eagle is no. 6

Bateleur eagle is no. 6

 

 

 

Next was a bird called ‘bucorax’ (or Cazovo, I think the text in the caption to Carvalho’s image reads; it’s not very clear.)

Here it is: Bucorax p384 online edn

 

 

 

 

 

This is from an online edition of the book found via Google booksearch.   Mützel has a clearer image (also at the NYPL site, Image ID: 820820) where it’s called Hornrabe, Bucorax Abyssincus Bodd. It’s also called the Ground Hornbill, I discovered.Bucorax Mutzel

And now I’ve run out of time.  I’ll continue this post next time, with more images of birds, animals, people, places.

 

What would Gerald of Wales make of Gamel Woolsey?

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My recent posts here have been mostly reviews or critiques of books.  I felt a change was needed today.  What else should I write about?  I’d begun drafting a piece about Rupert Thomson’s latest novel, Secrecy, that I’d heard discussed with the author on Eleanor Wachtel’s podcast for Canadian radio.  It sounded good, and I read it over Christmas.  As I drafted the post, though, I became disenchanted with the task: I hadn’t enjoyed the book much, and the piece tailed off.  Maybe I’ll incorporate the material in a roundup of 2014 reading later in the year.  (I meant to take a picture of the cover to include here, but have put the book away on some less-frequented bookshelf and can’t find it now.)

BL Royal MS 13.BVIII, f. 9v: a kingfisher and stork (from a 12C copy of Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae

BL Royal MS 13.BVIII, f. 9v: kingfishers watch fish in a river, and stork with a worm (or is it an eel?)(from a 12C copy of Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae)

This morning, having some time to devote to this post after a busy period at work, I sat at my desk waiting for inspiration.  My interest in medieval literature persists, even after spending years on postgraduate research into medieval hagiography.  I love clicking through the beautiful images of British Library digitised illuminated MSS, and found myself making notes on Gerald of Wales.  The project became too complicated for today’s post – it’s easy to see why it took so many years to finish my PhD, I’m so often side-tracked – so that piece is on ice.

Instead I thought I’d search for the Penguin Classics copy of his The History and Topography of Ireland that I thought I had on my shelves somewhere.  True to form I became distracted.  I couldn’t find the book, but what I did find is what I want to write about today. As I made these happy discoveries I started reshelving the books into themed clusters – a task I always find strangely (worryingly) satisfying.  Many of these books I’ve still to read, so I must stop buying new ones.

Celtic Misc 001I found my Penguin Classics copy of A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures (odd plural), edited by Kenneth Hurlstone (splendid name) Jackson.  A student of the legendary medievalist Chadwicks at Cambridge, he went on to teach at Harvard and Edinburgh.  This anthology was first published by RKP in 1951; a revised edition in Penguin was published in 1971; this is the reprint from 1976.  I must have bought this secondhand in Cambridge, for pencilled inside the front cover is the price paid: 40p.  The retail price printed on the back cover is 95p, so if I bought it in the early eighties that’s not exactly a great deal.  Among the sections in the anthology are ‘Hero Tales and Adventures’, ‘Love’ and ‘Religion’, which includes an extract (from the Cornish-language miracle play of about 1505) dramatising the arrival in Cornwall (where I live) of the sixth-century (?) Breton St Meriasek (or Meriadoc) and his miraculous creation of a spring of fresh water.  This spring, near his oratory outside Camborne, was reputed to have healing powers.  He later returned to Brittany, founded monasteries and became a bishop.  Can’t say I’ve ever seen this spring.  My wife once bought me a wonderful book about the sacred wells of Cornwall; I must look again to see if Meriasek’s spring is mentioned.

Some years ago I taught at a college some miles from where I now live.  Because of a change of site the old college library was culling much of its stock of books; staff were invited to salvage what they wanted, and I acquired a pile which I rediscovered while searching for Gerald of Wales:

Books 2014 jan 008Hardback: a Chatto and Windus copy of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, from the 1970 Collected Edition.  Had I known I possessed this I wouldn’t have used the tatty paperback Penguin for my blog piece on this superb novel a few months ago.

A Chapman and Hall (1965, rather battered) edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which I’d read in Books 2014 jan 013paperback a few years earlier, so I have still to re-read this early novel of his.

There’s a rather fine 3-volume edition of Coleridge’s extraordinary anthology of essays, Biographia Literaria; not surprisingly I could only find vols 1 and 2 for this picture (in which I’ve included the fine anthology of English Prose published in the now sadly defunct Pelican imprint – though I believe it’s about to be revived.)

Books 2014 jan 004Paperback: two rather interesting DH Lawrence volumes – Selected Literary Criticism (first published 1956; this is the 1969 reprint) edited by Anthony Beal; I have looked into this from time to time; and DH Lawrence: A Selection (also Heinemann, 1970), edited by R.H. Poole and P.J. Shepherd.  The title page tells us the disarming news that Poole was a Senior Lecturer at Wolverhampton Teachers’ College for Day Students, while Shepherd was SL at Eastbourne College of Education.  As a teacher in Further Education myself I’m intrigued, and wonder how many of my colleagues today would be commissioned to edit such prestigious academic tomes…

Books 2014 jan 005Two volumes of literary essays now sit together: Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow and the one that inspired one of my earliest blog posts, T.S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood .  I like the symmetry of their austere covers.  All of these books still have the old library shelf-mark taped to their spines.

I still haven’t read the Penguin MC edition of e.e. cummings, The Enormous Room, or Edward Upward’s  The Railway Accident and Books 2014 jan 010other stories.  An anti-fascist in the thirties and member of the Isherwood, Auden and Spender set, he’s now largely derided or forgotten.  Must get round to reading this book.  I like the surrealist cover.

Also rather obscure now is Gamel Woolsey’s Death’s Other Kingdom, in the distinctive green covers of the early Virago Travellers series (this one dates from 1988).  An American by birth, and perhaps better known as a poet, she moved to the UK to be near her lover Llewellyn Powys, and later (1930) married the writer and Spanish scholar Gerald Brenan; Bertrand Russell had also wanted to marry her.  This book is an account of her experience, with Books 2014 jan 006Brenan, of living through the Spanish Civil War; it was first published in 1939.

There are two fine hardback Everyman novels: Moby-Dick, and the now neglected Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey (he featured recently in Robert McCrum’s weekly list of great novels in the Observer Books 2014 jan 007newspaper).

There are several elderly Penguin Classics editions, in the distinctive black livery with fine colour pictures on the front cover, of Balzac’s novels, including The Chouans and The Black Sheep.  I’ve read neither, but have fond memories of Goriot – a set text for A Level French.

Books 2014 jan 003Let me finish with some happily random rediscoveries – all from the one bookcase in my front porch (I didn’t get as far as the living room, or the boxes relegated to the cellar by my spring-cleaning wife, who found the double-stacked cases, with the inner layers hidden from view by the horizontal second layer, just too untidy to countenance; no doubt I’ll have more serendipitous discoveries when I look properly at these).

There’s one of the first books I recall owning: a purloined library copy of Scholes and Kellogg’s The Nature of Narrative (OUP, 1966; this is the paperback reprint of 1971).  I was an A Level student (English, French and Spanish; today my students are required to study four subjects, poor things), and this was one of the first works of lit crit I ever encountered; I was mesmerised by the authors’ erudition and by their fascinating thesis; I still look into this book occasionally, and always find gems in there.

Finally, also as yet unread, is a paperback copy of a novel by M.J. Hyland, Carry Me Down.  It’s a nice clean copy with an attractive cover.  Somebody left it on a train a few years ago, and as I’m a bibliophile magpie I rescued it and brought it home.

Maybe on my next free day I’ll go to the cellar and search the boxes for Gerald of Wales.  The nearest I’ve come up with from the one bookshelf so far is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of the kings of Britain…

Heimat and Exile: WG Sebald, A Place in the Country

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My first post of 2014 is a critique of this intriguing work, which I read back in the autumn, but have just got round to writing about.

WG Sebald, A Place in the Country  (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin 2013)

I have learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author  [Walser]who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from the window of the Herisau asylum [where Walser spent his final years], Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile.  On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion…the unmistakeable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings.

In these words from his essay on the Swiss writer Robert Walser, the most engaging to my mind of the essays in A Place in the Country, most of W.G. Sebald’s motifs in this collection and in his other prose writings appear: a preoccupation with place and scenery, especially the rural, littoral and insular, and how history leaches into the landscape (‘everything is connected across space and time’);  with being estranged or exiled from home; and with the tendency for things to be contradictory (witness all those balanced, opposed clauses in the quotation above).

 

Photo: The Guardian newspaper

Photo: The Guardian newspaper

This collection of five essays on writers (and one about an artist, Sebald’s contemporary from the Allgau, Jan Peter Tripp) was originally published in German in 1998; it has been deftly translated into English by Sebald’s former colleague at the University of East Anglia, Jo Catling.  They are not dry academic studies: they are meditations full of understated wit and artistic sympathy with the subjects – but Sebald unobtrusively provides as much insight into himself as he does the subjects.

 

In the foreword Sebald sets forth his other central theme: he writes of ‘the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing’, of ‘hapless writers trapped in their web of words’:

 

Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible.

 

All six of his subjects have intertwining connections with each other and with Sebald himself: they mostly spoke a language from the ‘Alemannic’ group, which originated in parts of southern Germany, where Sebald himself grew up, Alsace, Austria and Switzerland.  Most of these artists, like Sebald, were exiles from their homelands, either through their own choice, or involuntarily (in Walser’s case, it took the form of alienation from himself and the world, as he drifted into insanity); they tended to have unhappy love lives and a habit of solitary introspection, from which arose haunting works of literary or artistic beauty.  It is the aesthetic  and moral quality of these artists’ works on which Sebald focuses his attention, but not with soft-focus nostalgia or gloomy introspection: he unobtrusively brings his subjects to life, and illuminates what they mean to him.

 

Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826, born in Basel), subject of the first essay, was an obscure eighteenth-century author of popular almanacs, folktales and nature writings.  The poet Eduard Mörike (1804-1875) lived a sequestered life in and around Stuttgart in Swabia (Württemburg).  The other three writers here are Swiss; Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) came from francophone Geneva; Gottfried Keller (1819-90) and Walser (1878-1956) both wrote in German.  Sebald is interested in artists associated with borders, boundaries and divides, their similarities and struggles.

 

In 1965 Sebald first saw Lac de Bienne (close to Walser’s birthplace – another of these frequent connections) with its island of Saint-Pierre in the middle.  Years later he visited Rousseau’s insular retreat; Rousseau had been hounded out of pre-revolutionary France, and took refuge there in 1765.  It must have seemed, Sebald writes, a paradise – though Rousseau’s peace was sometimes shattered by unwanted visitors, from whom he hid in an under-floor space covered by a concealed trapdoor.  He spent two months on this island, a sojourn which prompts Sebald to another rueful reflection on the lot of the writer:

 

One could see writing as a continually self-perpetuating, compulsive act, evidence that, of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.

 

In this haven, Rousseau could study nature and get on with ‘the self-destructive business of writing to which he usually submitted himself’.   Another motif in the collection emerges here on this tiny island:

 

I don’t like large-scale things, not in architecture or evolutionary leaps.  I think it’s an aberration.  This notion of something that is small and self-contained is for me a moral and aesthetic ideal.

 

From Sebald’s painstaking evocation of the ‘abstruse details’ of the world Walser inhabited, ‘devoid of material possessions’ (he alludes to the ‘pencil method’ or ‘microscripts’ of Walser’s later years, described as an ‘inner emigration’) to the other writers discussed here with their preoccupation with the minutiae of their craft, this statement resonates throughout the collection.

 

Walser as a young man in the 1890s

Walser (1878-1956) as a young man in the 1890s

The essay on the isolated ‘outsider’ Walser is a poignant mini-masterpiece.  This ‘most unattached of all solitary poets’ is portrayed with delicate, loving sensitivity; we see the ‘precariousness’ of Walser’s existence, his loneliness and ‘virginal innocence’.  At the core of this ‘ragged soul’ was an ‘absence’ that was the source of his ‘unique strangeness’.   Although he was always ‘beset by shadows’, his writings are ‘illumined…with the most genial light’, striving towards ‘weightless[ness]’ in an attempt to ‘obliterate himself’.  He ‘almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself’, he was ‘a clairvoyant of the small’, his thoughts were ‘honed on the tiniest details’ but they became increasingly incomprehensible as his sanity faded, and he tended to ‘get lost in the clouds’ and dissolve into the ‘ephemeral’, into ‘thin air’, heading for the darkness of insanity and a solitary death in the snow one Christmas Day.

 

In this essay appears the largest selection in the book of Sebald’s trademark blurred, monochrome photographs; one of them represents his grandfather, who is forever associated in Sebald’s mind’s eye with Walser – the resemblance not just physical but almost mystical; they died in the same year, another of those eerie connections or coincidences which Sebald is so inclined to draw attention to, these ‘rebuses of memory’.   Are they, he wonders, ‘delusions of the self and of the senses’, or

 

the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which lies beyond our comprehension?

 

I recommend this volume to anyone interested in the craft of writing (and painting) and the nature of creative artists, with their mysterious capacity for conveying the healing power that comes from exploring the minute details of mundane existence in an increasingly expansionist, chaotic world.  It also provides heart-warming insight into the mind of Sebald.  When I peruse these essays I feel I’m in the presence of a kindly, modest but supremely intelligent artist and thinker, and his prose is a delight to read.  There are really seven subjects: the six I’ve mentioned, and Sebald himself.