Wu Wei

Hearing Henry V in Tbilisi*

*with apologies to "Reading Lolita in Teheran"

We found there was a group from the OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society**) was visiting Tbilisi, playing Henry V for 3 nights so a party was organised.

The place was packed, not a mobile rang (very unusual), nearly everyone came back after the interval. Full marks to the audience because  conditions were not good.  There was no airconditioning so it was like a Turkish bath inside.  The acoustics were awful, the hall being rectangular (ie shaped for music not speech), and there seemed to be no programme. That made it really difficult to hear many of the actors, and unless you know a play really well, it helps to hear the words.

The Georgian audience had subtitles overhead (too far overhead to watch the stage and read) but there was a translation voiceover on earphones, which occasionally hissed and crackled so loud we could hear it too.

I realised I had never seen the Branagh film, or even seen the play, so I mugged up on the plot on the internet 5 minutes before I left.  That didn't help much, as it was rather a cut down play, with a cast of about 10, alternately playing English and French, which must have dictated a few limitations.

Still we all cheered (inwardly) when we heard

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more...

Cry "God for Harry! England and St George!"

Though perhaps it was a different St George for the audience, since St George is also the patron saint of Georgia and England and Georgia share the flag of red cross on white background.

By then it was clear that this was a play about war, about battles lost and won.  A clever choice to bring to Tbilisi.  But no parallels between Prince Hal and Saakashvili.

I was struck by the line 

"no King of England was not King of France", 

which carries no force today but at the time must have been a rousing cry in itself.

We all remarked that Putin should have been in the audience when King Harry gives no sympathy for Bardolph (an old friend) who is about to be executed for pillage, and  explains how to treat the citizens of France:

We would have all such offenders so cut off: and we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

But the end of the play showed the futility of war. Henry dies and his young wife is left with a baby. All lands in France are lost.  

A lesson for both Putin and Saakashvili.

** the OUDS was the starting point for the career of many famous British actors

The Year of No Money in Tokyo by Wayne Lionel Aponte

I got this book free as one of LibraryThing's early reviewer scheme.  They hold a monthly lottery of books given away by their publishers with the condition that you provide a review.

I imagined this book as a sort of modern day "Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell, or something like Patrick Leigh Fermor's books walking across Europe in the 30s to Istanbul.  Well, I couldn't have been more wrong.

First of all, there's not really no money, as when he loses his job, he bums the money for his rent off the Japanese girl he is sleeping with, finds another girl to sleep with in exchange for food....  You get the picture.

Then  it isn't really a year of no money, since the loss of old job (selling English language courses) and "finding himself" as an English language teacher are all done with in the period of a year.  

A better summary might be "black stud screws his way out of poverty and learns to live with himself afterwards".  It's not at first obvious that the American author is black, but eventually his attitude to women brings to mind obvious unpleasant stereotypes of black men.  

He considers his new profession as teacher (which he previously despised) as the best thing that happened to him, and provides us with a list of 11 key points which now guide his life including:

• the error of defining success by work and possessions
• the benefits of reinventing yourself
• the advantages of delayed gratification
• the disadvantages of unemotional and unintimate (sic) sex
• the value of monogamous relationships
• the power of pep talks.

There are some interesting views of Japanese life, but it's  hard to know how accurate or insightful they are when the rest is so crass.

I didn't like the book and I didn't like the author, even in his newly invented self.

New book widget

Finally got round to using LibraryThing's new feature of collections to divide the books I have tagged "to read" (some of which have been there for a couple of years, either not started or put down and never finished) from those I am carrying around at the moment and intending to read soon.

So you can see my new "currently reading" widget on the left.  Looks impressive for summer reading doesn't it?  But what do I find in my suitcase, but a book I have already read, a book I have read but need to review and the Ivan Bunin, which I am saving for Cyprus.  So will have to find a bookshop in Podgorica and search for something to read as even my sudoku book won't last that long.

Or perhaps I can order some more summer reading for Bee to bring to Cyprus along with the winter boots and manicure sets that I have ordered on instructions from friends.

Iceland amongst the happiest countries?

Isn't it terrible what a difference less than a year makes?

Here is Lotus Reads quoting The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, four months ago in her  review here:

And then, there's Iceland where darkness reigns supreme for 6 months of the year and yet its people are supposed to be some of the happiest in the world. Weiner visited the country in winter and concluded that any or all of the following contribute to the Icelanders being so happy: A)Creativity : Everyone's a poet in Iceland, everyone's a dreamer and if you believe that dreams are the laboratories of reality then the Icelanders must have the ability to dream (thus creating) happy things for themselves. B) Great sense of community: The Icelandic people truly enjoy helping each other to do well or to be successful. All knowledge is shared and there is no envy, just a collective joy in seeing other Icelanders doing well. C) Failure is not looked down upon. As a result you will find a lot more people trying their hand at something because they don't fear failure. D) Icelanders wear many hats. In other words, unlike in North America, they do not restrict themselves to specializing in just one particular field. This means they are able to switch career paths as often as they desire. E) Icelanders are fiercely patriotic (they do not indulge in jingoism however) about their country and extremely proud of their language .

Too many dreamers, perhaps.  Not so sure that "failure is not looked down upon now". 

On the BBC News recently an interviewee claimed that there had been a revolution in thinking.  Not a happy one, clearly.

East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet?

This month's Hidden Europe's Newsletter (travel writing on obscure parts of Europe) starts:

In Dostoevsky's last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, one of the characters declares "I want to go to Europe," going on to say "I do know that I'm going to a graveyard, but it's a precious graveyard." It's an interesting formulation, somehow suggesting that Russia is not quite Europe. More than a century earlier Catherine the Great had observed that "Russia is a European power," but obviously Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov never quite took the point on board (or faith in its veracity had been shaken by Russia's unhappy defeat in the Crimea War). Anyway, Karamazov speaks of Europe as somewhere beyond Russia, just like generations of Russians since. We have Russian friends who still talk of "going to Europe" when they hop on the train in their home town for the overnight journey to Berlin. It is as if there are seven continents plus Russia.

This Russian perception of global affairs is of course nicely mirrored in British discourse where popular parlance refers to Europe as if the British Isles were somehow a place apart. A government poster campaign in Britain used the banner "Going to Europe?" as the prelude to reminding citizens of the importance of securing health cover prior to crossing the English Channel.

Russian perceptions of Europe are much in the news this month in the wake of Moscow's response to the Tbilisi government's ill-considered adventure in South Ossetia. And yet Russian popular perceptions are shaped not merely by Kremlin dictates but by several centuries of Russian writing about western Europe. A contemporary of Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, wrote wittily of his stays at decadent German spa towns in Across the Border, while Dostoevsky himself, in his Winter Notes, offered a polemic on France and Britain that powerfully shaped Russian understanding of its western neighbours. Winter Notes is a plea for Russia to affirm its distinctive position and a warning of the dangers of being seduced by too cosy a relationship with western Europe.

Russia has had phases of looking West for ideas and solutions (Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, various Tsars) alternating with finding its own distinctive destiny often labelled with some eastern characteristic.

I decided I didn't like the anti-Russian state of mind I had got into, thinking Russia just had to be like the West. This is one of the problems with the EU at the moment, since the EU 15 allowed the rest in on the assumption that they were just the same, only to find out that they weren't and came with their own ideas, culture and historical baggage. Very inconvenient of them.

So I have been busy choosing books to take back to Georgia to read to reorientate myself a bit and do some critical thinking.

This discussion of Russia linked or separate from Europe must have links to Edward Said's "Orientalism", and the definition of the Orient as the "Other". Said uses the term to describe a tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views of the East by the West, shaped by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. He claims that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts, but through imagined constructs that see all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar, all sharing crucial characteristics unlike those of "Western" societies, thus, this 'a priori' knowledge established the East as antithetical to the West. Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.

The book has sparked a great deal of critical debate, even with Said's own arguments being turned on him, that he has set up the West as a stereotypical creation whereas it exists in several forms, just as the Orient does.

Orientalism was one book I had been meaning to read for a long time, from references picked up from Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova. It seems interesting to explore to what extent the Cold War made Russia the "Other". Of course criticisms of Said have pointed out the existence of "nested orientalisms" a term coined by Milica Bakic-Hayden, especially with regard to the former Yugoslavia, where chaos and the east starts on the eastern border of whatever country you are considering at the moment, but not in that country.

So also on my reading list are:

Tolstoy The Cossacks/Happy Ever After/The Death of Ivan Ilich (read a long time ago)
Lermontov A Hero of our Time (new)
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (new)
Kurban Said Ali and Nino (well referenced in Stories I stole by Wendell Steavenson, which I enjoyed rereading recently in Tbilisi)

I also got Ken Loach's film "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" to remind me that the British approach to separatism and independence has also been brutal.

Incidentally, Hidden Europe has recent articles on Abkhazia and South Ossetia from the travel point of view.

JK Rowling speaks at Harvard graduation ceremony

Read it here. She describes how actual failure can galvanise you into action much better than fear of failure, which is just a brake on action or an excuse.

Plus a plug for Amnesty International where she used to work, and a criticism which goes right to the heart of US isolationism: lack of imagination about the lives of the rest of the world. In Britain it used be "I'm all right, Jack" with the implication that the rest of you don't matter.

And perhaps an inadvertent recommendation for not doing something too "useful" at university: she did classics.

More books

Haven't had much time for book cataloguing recently. My books are in Oxford, I'm in Tbilisi. Too much of a backlog to allow for buying new books. Not much time even to read them.

But today I managed to add a few to my list on Librarything, which is a wonderful online cataloguing system for books. I first found it on Stepping Stones blog (though it's gone now) and I quickly became addicted as it is so easy, and you can even get an ISBN scanner. What's more it has just got a lot better and easier. They are busy adding library catalogues from across the world, as well as linking to Amazon etc. That means that most of your books are already on there complete with the covers, so all you have to do is type in the title and author (or scan the ISBN) and there is your book, complete with links to reviews by other Librarythingers.

There are 25 million books in the catalogue with coming up to half a million members. Plus there is all the social networking stuff and opportunities to look at other people's libraries, including famous (live and dead) people.

The largest private library to date is 40,000 books. In my humble way I was pleased to see that our family total (around 1750) makes me number 1765 in size of library. There's a widget on the side of my blog showing a random selection of the books. It constantly surprises me about books I have forgotten I have got.

It also comes in several languages, encouraging people to add books from several national libraries in Europe.



Technorati Tags: Librarything, books, online library, online catalogue

New country problems

I wonder how long it takes to get new countries into the dropdown box for countries on websites.

Librarything has this new feature Librarything Local where you can put your favourite bookshop, and local book events. I was trying to add the Dukagjini bookshop in Pristina as one of my favourites, (review here) and so of course I wanted to add the country Kosova. In some boxes, like those in Outlook, you can just write in, in the field, so it was never a problem for addresses when I was working there, or for Montenegro, come to think of it.

But in Librarything, there is no way to enter the country Kosova.

So apologies to Kosova and Dukgjini Bookshop.

James Attlee's Isolarion

This book is a (literary) pilgrimage down the Cowley Road in Oxford.  Cowley Road is a scruffy rundown main road of local shops and restaurants in a multi-ethnic part of Oxford, beloved of the more bohemian students and middle classes who like to live in multicultural districts in cities. During the last two and a half years we have lived in three locations near Cowley Road and got to know it well. 

Cowley Road is already an institution having a group on Facebook defending it against encroaching chain stores and restaurants. I have written about it several times (here and here ) on the blog, including about the mysterious metal castings which appeared in the pavement, whose story is explained in the book. 

The book itself might be quite hard to find, since Bee remarked that Blackwell's (where she works on Saturdays) had sold out before Christmas.

It's a pilgrimage over several years, since I don't recognise all of the sights he describes, though he updates himself, pointing out for example that the Russian food shop has become a Baltic Food Shop. As for the justification for making a pilgrimage down the street round the corner from your home, as he says:

Why make a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, when the world has come to you?

listing the locals: Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Indian, Polish, Kurdish, Chinese, French, Italian, Thai, Japanese, and African, (and that's only the restaurants).

And then there is the question whether travel broadens the mind, and whether a pilgrimage produces an achievement with lessons for the rest of life.

If we go off into the forest to learn lessons, are the things we learn there applicable to the city, or are they just forest lessons.

The book interweaves the history of the district (as it develops in the 1860s from a swamp outside the city eventually to house workers for the Cowley car plant built in the 1920s); the history of the immigrants coming to live there since the Second World War; the constant friction between "town and gown"(the ordinary people and the university which is a large landowner and employer and thus exerts an enormous influence); the variety of the shops, restaurants and services offered there recently; together  with the lives and troubles of the author's neighbours and his involvement in the local planning committee's attempts to "improve" the road by restricting the traffic and "rebranding" the neighbourhood (he becomes well-known locally for opposing this).

In some ways it is a similar pilgrimage (without the murky black and white photos) to WG Sebald's wanderings in East Anglia described in Rings of Saturn, but the author engages much less with memory and his internal world than with the external world and its inhabitants.

Some of the road's less obvious offerings are explained and experienced: the Eau-de-Vie Flotation Centre; the Blue Door (private shop), the graveyard, the robemaker, the Ultimate Picture Palace, a Mikvah.  The chapel just behind my house, I only discovered one Saturday before Christmas when a craft sale was announced.  Walking down a road I had never noticed before, within 10 yards it seemed I was already in the country with woods and a field in which there appeared a farmhouse and a small chapel labelled St Bartlemas.  The book reveals that this was the site of a leper colony.  The author records the stories of many  immigrants (even about a Georgian and the  news about the liberation Georgian region of Adzharia) who are making a success of life in the UK  but also those who struggle to obtain asylum. He records the sad story of one Albanian with mixed Serb/Albanian parents, who, despite being ready and qualified to go to university, is being sent back to  Serbia although his parents are dead, to  a very uncertain future and certainly no university education and a way out of poverty.  As he says:

Asylum seekers are just like other people. We are just less lucky.

There are many little anecdotes and descriptions of places I have never noticed although I walk along the street nearly every day when I am in Oxford. But most of all it is an affirmation of a UK which is multicultural, as well as appreciative of diversity.  As a character in the book puts it:

Although East Oxford is very multicultural, it has a very English character of its own; very tolerant, easy going. ... The other side [of town] is more snobbish, more boring. I lived in Summertown, and on Saturdays sometimes you didn't see a single black person on the street.

The Brits are never happier than to be able to point out difference, despite their reputed tolerance :).

Britishness is somehow under attack, by terrorists.  Yet the victims  of the recent London bombing on the underground

comprised only 12 Brits, the rest being 3 Poles, and one each of French, New Zealander, Turkish, Iranian, Afghani, Romanian, Vietnamese and Mauretanian.

Atlee writes:

For me the  (carriage and those) occupants represent the country I am proud to belong to.  Despite the appalling failures of our system - still marred as it is by inequality, racism and violent crime - urban Britain represents one of the best examples in a history of a tolerant, pluralistic society, albeit one based on the  Briton's famous characteristic of reserve, of keeping himself to himself and minding his own business. At certain moments, Cowley Road can seem to represent this untrumpeted success, one that appears under attack from all sides.

But the end of the book ("Things fall apart") records that Cowley Road is losing the struggle against gentrification.  In the last year, Costa Coffee has arrived, the Zodiac is now Carling Academy. 

And here in Tbilisi, the locals point proudly to Sharden St, a row of upmarket shops and restaurants, which could be in any big city in the west, frequented mainly by those expats and Georgians who need to be seen and be seen in smart places. 

Whereas I am looking for the equivalent of Cowley Road.

Technorati tags: Cowley Rd, pilgrimage, Multiculturalism, diversity, books

Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader

This I bought for someone for Christmas and then kept it myself. In it, the Queen (the one with corgis) suddenly discovers reading and begins to enjoy it.  From not knowing where to start, she is advised by a member of the kitchen staff (they met in the travelling library in the grounds of the Palace) whom she promotes to her amanuensis, and they recommend each other books as they discover them.  Time for reading plays havoc with her official duties, and is heartily disliked by her staff and the corgis, not to mention the Prime Minister.  Of course, the book is really about the pleasures of reading:

'I don't see', said the Queen, '... Why should the public care what I am reading?  The Queen reads. That is all they need to know. "So what?" I should imagine is the general response.'

'To read is to to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it' said Sir Kevin,' if the pursuit were less ... selfish.'

'Selfish?'

'Perhaps I should say solipsistic.'

'Perhaps you should.'

Sir Kevin plunged on.'Were we able to harness your reading to some larger purpose - the literacy of the nation as a whole, for instance, the improvement of reading standards of the young...'

'One reads for pleasure,' said the Queen. 'It is not a public duty.'

'Perhaps', said Sir Kevin, 'it should be.'

'Bloody cheek,' said the Duke, when she told him that night.

It's a small book, an easy read, gently poking fun at the monarchy as an institution, especially the officials who surround and restrict her, at the Queen and her aloofness and lack of emotion, while attempting to show a potential for humour and understanding of human life which she does not show through her official life, (or how her character might have developed if she was more of a reader). 

While the end (I won't spoil it) comes with both a surprise and a threat from the Queen, as written by Bennett, it also comes with an (unanticipated but gentle) warning to the Queen.