Lost Parasol

Lost Parasol by Sandor Weores

You must read this.

Read Read Read Read Read, listen to this podcast first

Prof Goldberg on Conspiracy Theories

This podcast from the International Spy Museum makes for scary listening. Very interesting though.

San Martin - Super Saint

"The Dominican prior had to forbid Martin from continuing to miraclify (please excuse the verb). And to show the dutiful, obedient spirit of this servant of God, the biographer relates how, just as Martin was passing by a scaffolding, a bricklayer fell from thirty or forty feet above. Our lay brother stopped in his tracks and yelled - "Wait a second, brother!" And until Martin got back with permission from the prior, the bricklayer was suspended in mid-air."

Ricardo Palmer, 'Peruvian Traditions'.

Terra Sigillata

These few verses are from the above poem by Sandor Weores described as Epigrams of an Ancient poet. I find it difficult to understand these verses but perhaps they are something about being a poet:

"A red-fingered child pats grey cakes at the seaside,
I ask fo one, he says no, not even for a real cake, no.
Well now, old prophets, what do you want from me? the twenty four
sky-prisms, when I look blind into hearts and read them.

. . .

'You say you're God's offspring: why do you scrape along like paupers?'
'Even Zeus himself, when he takes human steps on earth,
begs bread and water, parched, starved as a tramp.

. . .

Crime has majesty, virtue is holy; but what is the troubled heart worth?
There, crime is raving drunk and virtue is a jailer."

The adventurers

W. H. Prescott's book ' The history of the conquest of Peru' is much maligned because Prescott was a blind scholar who never visited Peru. I found his book because the last time I was in Peru it was the only history *in english* that was available. He does a good job of bring together all the sources he has. To me, this is history writing, before modern academics made it objective - and boring. The passage represents the spirit of adventure:

"On crossing these woody eminences, the forlorn adventurers would plunge into ravines of frightful depth, where the exhalations of a humid soil steamed up amidst the incense of sweet-scented flowers, which shone through the deep gloom in every conceivable variety of colour. Birds, especially of the parrot tribe, mocked this fantastic variety of nature with tints as beautiful as those of the vegetable world. Monkeys chattered in crowds above their heads, and made grimaces like the fiendish spirits of these solitudes; while hideous reptiles, engendered in the slimy depths of the pools, gathered around the footsteps of the wanderers. Here was seen the gigantic boa, coiling his unweildly folds about the trees, so as hardly to be distinguished from their trunks, till he was ready to dart upon his prey; and alligators lay basking on the borders of the streams, or gliding under the waters, seized their incautious victim before he was aware of their approach. Many of the spaniards perished miserably in this way, and others were waylaid by the natives, who kept a jealous eye on their movements and availed themselves of every opportunity to take them at advantage. Fourteen of Pizarro's men were cut off at once in a canoe which had stranded on the bank of a stream."

Episode in a Library

A blonde girl is bent over a poem. With a pencil sharp as a lancet she transfers the words to a blank page and changes them into strokes, accents, caesuras. The lament of a fallen poet now looks like a salamander eaten away by ants.
When we carried him away under machine-gun fire, I believed that his still warm body would be resurrected in the word. Now as I watch the death of the words, I know there is no limit to decay. All that will be left after us in the black earth will be scattered syllables. Accents over nothingness and dust.

Zbigniew Herbert

[pronounced 'ezbegnief']

Los Angeles Essential Book List

Los Angeles Essential Book List

I have a new facebook group and anyone is invited to join and contribute their favourite books about Los Angeles.

8/2/2000

This entry features Lee - a girl I used to work with.

Yesterday Lee took great relish in explaining how her ex-husband was having a circumcision. At first he wouldn't tell her then she got Dean, her son, to call him up the stairs and then down again because he walked as if he had crapped in his pants. She also said he warned her 'if I get an 'you know' I will tear my stitches!'
This guy in front of me is wistfully looking up in the air listening to his walkman.
I'm sitting on the 8:02 58 Conway bus and town is very quiet. I've just realised green oranges aren't as nice as red.
There was a girl in town with a blue leather coat, grey hat, white gloves, eating a red apple, it was like watching a painting or listening to a new single she looked so cool.
I hate working alone all day.

Diary

I am going to start a new series for this blog. These are diary entries from an old notebook I found.

January 2000

Lost

While I was in London I decided to search out the places Newman might have gone to get some idea of how he might have experienced it.
He was born here and there is a plaque on the Bank of England saying this is where or nearabout where he was born. Once when I was sitting at home I saw an OU programme talk about the Oxford Movement and how its legacy was put into All Saints, the opposite of All Souls, an evangelical Anglican church and that it was located directly behind All Souls.
The only problem was which direction was it behind All Souls. And as you can imagine on Regent Street my pocket A to Z was quite crowded.
Amazingly stars on the map representing Post Offices are more visible than the small cross of a church.. It looks quite simple on the map to find the cross on Margaret Street but the streets behind Regent Street are a maze with at least five stories and even street names aren't much good because the streets aren't clearly marked and change abruptly.
I ended up walking for what seemed like hours. It was early on a Sunday morning, there was no one around apart from an old lady walking with a very large and fiersome looking dog.
I eventually found the street but still couldn't see a church. When suddenly, a man came up to me, 'Are you lost?' he said. I smiled and replied,
'I'm looking for a church.'
He was a very prim man, dressed in black he had a wide brimmed black hat and in his limp hand he was holding a long thin cigarette. He said he knew the church and pointed out it was beside two lamp posts. He said he would be going there himself in five minutes and he would meet me.
I went into the church, it was incredibly ornate and the smell of incense hit you as soon as you went in. I went to sit down, said a prayer and left. I put a note in the visitors book saying I apologised, I was the guy in the baseball cap.

All Saints, Margaret Street

What should I read next?

Good site. Clunky but in a good way. This is how I discovered Macdonald, I put in 'In dubious battle' and got Ross Macdonald. In essence very similar to Amazon but certainly worthwhile supporting and you should read about how you can create your own list

Ross Macdonald

Over the last week I have read 'The Barbarous Coast' by Ross Macdonald. An incredible read, I couldn't put it down honestly. I haven't been reading that much crime fiction lately but this guy just comes at you like a blast. Deeper and more psychological than the original hard boiled writers such as Chandler or Hammet - this is what I've been told because I was no expert but it didn't take me long to realise because along with the macho tough guy narratives you get dream sequences such as the following:

"Hollywood started as a meaningless dream, invented for money. But its colors ran, out through the holes in people's heads, spread across the landscape and solidified. North and south along the coast, east across the continent. Now we were stuck with the dream without a meaning. It had become the nightmare that we lived in. Deep thoughts."

All that whilst he had been knocked out by the bad guys and things were about the get worse on what started as a rollercoaster ride and ended up almost flying through space.

Archer the main character has a deeper side to him and in a later passage he gives the following pep talk, (trying to persuade the sister of a victim that she doesn't have to do all the things the bad guys tell her to do) which convinces me to take Las Vegas off my list of places to go:

[The girl says 'they made me feel like life was not worth living'] "That's the way the jerks want you to feel. If everybody felt like a zombie, we'd all be on the same level. And the jerks could get away with the things jerks want to get away with. They're not, though. Jerkiness isn't as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A.. Which is why they had to build Vegas."

This is one of the best maybe the best book I have read all year. This definitely deserves the title - book of note.

"

Maker's Mark

In Richard Sennett's 'The Craftsman' I am reading about the difference between theory and practice. A craftsman is trained to practice a process - such as making bricks. A theorist has a general level of education which makes him sufficient to study any theory. In the Roman world the lowly life of the slave brickmaker was an anonymous life but a highly significant life considering the majestic building that were built out of brick. When the slave dares to make a mark on his bricks to declare 'his presence' that is a rebellious act:

"The historian Moses Finlay wisely counsels against using a modern yardstick to read ancient maker's marks as sending signals of defiance; they declare, 'I exist' rather than 'I resist'. But 'I exist' is perhaps the most urgent signal a slave can send."


This is the mark of Domitii. The following is a short explanation:

Found in Mugnano in Teverina, a tiny village some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Rome, the furnaces belonged to Tullus and Lucanus, brothers of the Domitii family, as an inscription found on the road leading to the brickfield confirms: "iter privatum duorum Domitiorum" (private road of the two Domitii). The furnaces provided bricks for grandiose buildings such as the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Market of Trajan and the Diocletian and Caracalla Baths, said archaeologist Tiziano Gasperoni, who discovered the furnaces.

I am also struck by a slight synchronicity here between the mark on a brick of a worker and the workers strike of 'In Dubious Battle' both are the attempts by the worker to let their voice be heard. To proclaim their existence and possibly, their defiance of the big bosses.

Nakedness

I have been reading John Updike's 'The Early Stories' again and have decided to follow the stories 'Too Far To Go' (TFTG). I have reached 'Nakedness'. It covers the realisation of a husband of the 'first' time he really sees his wife naked. There is both the acceptance that we are mere physical bodies but also he draws attention to the story of Adam and Eve and how when they discovered their sinfulness they also discovered the shame of nudity.

It also features this episode when they stray on to a nudist beach and watch what happens when a policeman decides to walk in and have a look:

"The nudists, paradoxically, brought more clothing to the beach than the bourgeoisie; they distinguished themselves, walking up the beach to the point, by being dressed head to toe, in denim and felt, as if they had strolled straight from the urban core of the counterculture. Now as the young cop moved among them like a sorrowing angel, they bent and huddled in the obsequious poses of redressing.
'My God,' Joan said, 'it's Massacio's Expulsion from Paradise.' And Richard felt her heart in the fatty casing of her body plump up, pleased with this link, satisfied to have demonstrated once again to herself the relevance of a humanistic education to modern experience."


Massacio - Expulsion from Paradise

A life of labour

Good review

Following on from the last post - this book reviewed above looks good.

In Dubious Battle

I continue to read 'In Dubious Battle' and almost every page is delightful. Steinbeck has captured the spirit of the worker perfectly. The struggle between the worker and the bosses is the struggle of this book. The bosses need their apples picked and they only have a certain number of weeks the bosses have reduced the wages and the workers have gone on strike.

Almost every page has something to quote. The plight of the worker, the plight of those who try to help, to improve things is captured in this small quote at the end of ch 8. The person talking here is mac, the hardened communist, down to cause trouble, he is talking to Jim, his newest recruit. Makes you wonder why we do anything:

"Everybody hates us; our own side and the enemy. And if we won, Jim, if we put it over, our own side would kill us. I wonder why we do it. Oh, go to sleep!"

Even now, after 50 years we still have traveling workers, workers who get paid the lowest wages, Mexicans for examplewho travel into US to do the agricultural work.

Physical influence

Along with the power of resources - money, personality, expertise Charles Handy lists physical power, the power of 'might' in the life of an organisation. To be honest I never expected but can understand the last paragraph:

"Whilst physical power is less respectable in our society than all other power sources there are signs that it is increasingly becoming the power of last resort when the other sources appear ineffective, or too closely balanced against opposing sources. Ulster, lock-outs, mass demonstrations are all examples of this phenomenon."

Fragility and the evolution of our humanity

Ecce Homo

There is something about Xavier Le Pichon that reminds me of Teilhard. As one of the pioneers of plate tectonics he discovered that the behaviour of the earth can tell us something about human communities. I would encourage everyone to read this essay and listen to the podcast,

Not that I would boast but my daughter - Isabella, 15 months old is an excellent writer. She can write her own name!

The truth about Globalisation

More agony for steel workers

I recently bought the above book by Philippe Legrain. Legrain seeks to point out that the anti-globalisation protestors have to a certain extent misunderstood globalisation. Globalisation is blamed for all our troubles too easily.

Even though this book was written in 2003 on Thursday I heard the above news about the loss of steel workers jobs and even though the recession is blamed there does seem to be a trend for a loss of unskilled jobs and in general these job losses were blamed on other countries doing the same job for lower wages - globalisation.

Legrain points out that in the USA the amount of imported steel is extremely limited and controlled. You can't really blame cheap labour for the massive job losses that have been experienced. In developed countries it is more likely to be the increase in technology that causes job losses. At Sparrows Point Steel plant in Baltimore 3500 workers produce as much steel today as 30,000 workers did in the past. It is important that if we decide to protest that we know what the problem is first. Perhaps we need to be honest and admit to ourselves that technology is our invention and it does cause job losses. Once we know the problem - we can work on the solution and the devastation facing those steel workers in NE England would suggest that we still have not worked this problem out.

Islington

Islington

This is wonderful - just came across it.