Oriente, Lisboa

The Museu d'Oriente has a rich, well organized, well-labeled collection; it's also at the end of the world across three wrong sets of tracks and therefore real hell to get to; and in a building which makes me sick (it's a converted factory, all reinforced concrete, sloping ramps and delivery size elevators).

It also has a gift shop which is not just ridiculously priced -- they buy for 3 euros and sell for 36 -- and full of utter and total junk -- not a single item of any value at all - but it is also all wrong: the Asian outfits are not Asian, Burmese "laquerware" is plastic, the cabinet with tea-pots, helpfully inscribed "China" -- has not a single Chinese item in it and the tea implements are worse than useless. The museum does a good job popularizing some aspects of Asia; but its gift shop completely undoes it all. I am entertained -- i can't help laughing outloud at some of the shop items -- but also shocked. Is the really allowed to do this? Is this not a violation of some kind of principle?

While waiting for my show I saw a documentary on Goa -- with three acquaintances in it. Mario looked younger and healthier than I remember him; perhaps it predated my stay, it was somehow cleaner than I remember it.

The shindig was Bharatnatyam by Saju George, the Dancing Jesuit; not the greatest BN I have seen, Saju also tired towards the end of the first half and began to lose balance; still, for a priest -- I mean, an amateur -- he was really remarkably good, even excellent. For a moment I had a spell of aesthetic delight.

*

Coming back by way of a fancy restaurant where overpriced vegetarian food is served in thalis, I noted that, it being Friday night, it was time for Oriental Dance; it wasn't Bharatnatyam, though, as the thali has always suggested to me, but North African belly dance; except it wasn't that either: it was a pretty lame ad lib by someone who has clearly not even taken lessons. That someone was pretty and was clearly having fun; she caught my glance through the window; she gave me was a pixish smirk; she was enjoying herself -- the fraud perhaps more than anything else. She was clearly English -- a tourist perhaps or a student -- it's such an English joke; and such a English smirk.

Monsieur Teste

Goethe, old soul, feels sorry to have no time for me. He shouldn't: he has a busy life and I don't really fit into it. Of course, this is how it is with all my would be friends: they have families and jobs and I do not; this means two things: first, they have a lot less time for me than I do for them. And, second, it also means that I have little to contribute to their lives: as a networking resource I am worse than useless: I can't ever help them find a nanny or introduce a client. So while a part of me wants to say that by not finding time for me they are missing something, the truth is -- they are not really missing anything important. What can possibly be important about discussing South Indian dance drama or the end of literature? The opposite is also true: my friends have little to say that I am interested in hearing. What interests me -- the end of literature, South Indian dance drama -- especially as they can be seen in each other's light -- well, my friends don't know the first thing about any of it, do they.

Enough of the wishy-washy peace-loving non-violent BS

Zobenigo does not normally comment on news but this time the news is such a heart-warming bit that he will make an exception.

Sikh Rivals Clash at Vienna Temple

Y-yes! Enough of the wishy-washy peace-loving non-violent BS!

1) Non-violent religions are for woosies. (One does not carry around swords -- one of the five precepts of Sikkhism -- for picking his teeth with them, eh?).

2) Clearly, as I argued here only 2 days ago, Indian immigrants revive the lost European custom of treating religion with the respect and commitment it deserves. Surely, Jean Raspail ought to approve.

3) The conflict is caste-based. Sikhism is of course famously caste-free (which had made it expand so rapidly in the first place: dalits were joining in droves to get rid of untouchability). Or is it? The preacher in question was low-caste and dissed the Holy Granth -- presumably by touching it, I assume. If you ever wondered whether high-sounding religious precepts could just possibly be bullsh*t, here's your proof.

(I am NOT dissing Sikkhism: the other non-caste religions -- Islam, Catholicism -- fare identically in India; they really are all the same).

4) Alas, even Sikhs are not spared globalization: Violent protests in Punjab after Vienna clash

Senstive days

Listening to music is not the same every day of life. Some days seem better for it than others.

Who can tell just why? The air-pressure or humidity affect the brain one way; alcohol and nicotine another. Just the right amount of sleep; just the right amount of stress (key: manageable); perhaps a little beet salad in the afternoon; a coffee intentionally not taken; some stroking of the skin, preferrably by a beautiful woman but a stiff breeze off the bay will do in a pinch. Who knows what else?

But there are days when one finds himself especially sensitive to music; then Ivo playing Chopin preludes, or Emerson playing Shostak No. 8, or Argerich the Prokof toccata work a specially intense magic and one is breathless, gasping, amazed, lost in the intense, confusing solid gold brocade of sound, writhing with strong intellectual pleasure. These recordings are always good, of course, but it is only at times like tonight that I get into this stuff this much. Luckily - or perhaps unluckily - these days do not happen too often: several times a year at most. Good sex -- for all I am inclined to say about the quality of commonly available sex -- seems easier to arrange.

Psst, don't tell the Poles

When I first heard Szymanowski's violin concerto No. 1 (1916) -- some 15 years ago -- I was delighted by it, though possibly less by the music itself (since it did not become part of my regular listening repertoire) but more by the strong sensation that one needed to listen to it differently, with a different part of the brain as it were, different from that part, that is, which one normally uses to listen to classical and romantic music. (Perhaps my discovery of Szymanowski was made possible by the fact that by then I had considerable experience listening with another part of the brain, so to speak, to Japanese classical music). Now, as I listen to Prokofiev's violin concerto No. 1 (1915), I realize how derivative Szymanowski's concerto really is -- 'directly inspired' - and how much less interesting. But don't tell the Poles.

The cognitive dissonance of Jean Raspail

The reasons for the popularity of Le Camp des saints are easy enough to decode. Here's the novel's synopsis from the usual place:

The story begins in Bombay, India, where the Dutch government has announced a policy that Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is reversed when the Dutch consulate is inundated with parents eager to give up their infant children as it would be one less mouth to feed. An Indian "wise man" then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.

In short, it's the OYPA -- the old yellow peril alarm -- all over again.

THE OYPA seems a weird beast to me since I have spent all my life being bored with the familiar and seeking out out the exotic as its antidote. I welcome Asian immigration on several grounds: first, the wonderfully zany Indians seem a million times more interesting to me than the predictable familiar boring French, whom I have no reason to love anyway; certainly, on average, Pakistani women are prettier than the English; the food they bring is more tasty; etc.

I therefore cannot fit into my head: why would not everyone else feel the same way?

Yet, years of interacting with human beings have taught me that most appear to have their heads screwed on the other way round which means that they ceaselessly seek the safety of the familiar, prefering boredom over excitement any time of day. I continue not to empathize with this odd mental condition, but have learned to accept for a fact that they do.

(But here is an interesting thought: how comes it that the Kaiser (the author of the OYPA) should function as a philosophical authority for the same Polish and French intellectuals whose sympathies are otherwise pro-Entente and anti-German? Hate the Germans, but love their xenophobia? How weird can you get?)

What is more interesting about Jean Raspail's brain is that it appears to be internally split: while writing his Dantean yellow perilist visions about foreigners flooding (and destroying) good old France, he simultaneously writes other books of scathing criticism of the very same modern France as a rotten perversion of its former self. He is a monarchist to the core and writes movingly about the spark of divinity which resides in the person of the king; his inviolability and irreplaceability; the dire consequences of regicide; the lack of proper legitimacy in the person of a merely elected President; lack of authority; lack of respect for authority; etc. This is not merely a political fantasy: Jean Raspail senses that there is something deeply and fundamentally rotten about modern French (and, more generally, European) culture (about which he is probably right) and seeks its causes in the abolition of the monarchy two hundred years ago (I withhold my opinion).

But then he defends that very same rotten France against subversion by foreigners. Why? If France is rotten, then, heck, why not let it sink?

This is known to psychologists as cognitive dissonance.

Let me take this argument further: had Jean Raspail bothered to read anything about Indians he would have discovered how attached they are to their ancient traditions; how underacined they therefore are; and how much more deserving of his love and admiration they are on these grounds than the modern-day French. Indians are a traditional, conservative, feudal people; they respect tradition, religion, authority, primogeniture, kingship, family values; Jean Raspail should pray that they take over France soonest so that he can finally live among his kind of people at last.

Her name is admirable

In one of those moments of retrospection which I have now had several times these past couple years (a clear sign that I am getting on and am no longer wasting time on imagining limitless possibilities of the future since I have learned to predict it and budget for it so very reliably) I was reflecting this morning on a person I once knew. I knew her for many years and quite intimately; yet it is only now that we have not seen each other for many years that I notice things about her which I now realize were quite ugly. To put it short, I suppose, I would have to say that my friend was greedy in the word's most ordinary, vulgar sense: she was consumed by an intense desire for money and property plain and simple.

This impression was tempered by the generosity which she showed towards her children; but this, too -- and I did not realize it then -- was really a measure of her greed: she simply did not distinguish between her and her children. Acquiring on behalf of her children was therefore an extension of acquiring for herself. She seemed generous towards me, too, but that generosity was not really generous: my friend was not giving me gifts, she was buying something she wanted: my friendship.

Throughout our association I could see signs -- behaviors and reactions in my friend-- which disturbed me, yet I was somehow able to overlook them, disguise them from myself. (Sex is a great coloring agent). I liked her and for this reason blamed what I saw on my own misperception -- I must have misobserved, I thought -- or extenuating circumstances -- perhaps she was tired, etc. Overall, I suppose, I was less blind about my friend and for a shorter period of time than I was about my mother: perhaps life has taught me something then, perhaps I have made progress.

One hopes, of course, that one can be even more astute in one's social engagements in the future; but given the nature and quality of my experience with family and friends -- the statistics are not encouraging -- it would perhaps be wiser not to bother with further engagements in the first place.

Brief introspection regarding jazz

Jazz bores and irritates me and the aestheticist in me would like to know why. Alas, the following observations will have to remain superficial since, in order to understand the matter properly, I would have to hear a lot more Jazz than I possibly can manage to get through. I am not sufficiently dedicated to the question to put myself through the exercise. The following remarks are therefore trivial; you should probably skip this post.

The irritating bit has two prongs: the first is the matter of the building blocks of the music: like all improvised music it consists of standardized elements -- "lego blocks" -- which one shuffles around -- and I do not like them; this may be merely a matter of cultural association -- they seem perceptibly American to me; but it could perhaps be argued that they are in fact not as interesting as the lego blocks of its older improvised siblings, maquams and raagas. (Consider the rather narrow range of rhythmic options available to the Jazz base section and compare them to the immense variety of tals).

(Certainly the lego blocks out of which raaga's are built are more interesting to European ears on account of being "exotic" -- that is novel, or previously unheard; but, given the amount of time I have spent in India and the amount of exposure I have had to classical Indian music, novelty is clearly not the source of my pleasure in the Indian elements; something else must be; complexity, color and steepness and convolution of melodic line may be some of the answers).

The second bit is the snobbishness surrounding Jazz' status as an improvised art form. This notion is romantic -- "great art reveals something deep about us" -- and as such deeply ingrained in heavily schooled minds; but the truth is that most of us do not have an interior interesting enough to make for an interesting subject of artistic production. The truth about improvisation is that most of it is too dull to stand on its own legs; which is why fellows like Bach and Chopin -- well known in their days for their improvisatory skills -- insisted on composing.

And thus we arrive at the dull bit. There is no such thing as free improvisation: all improvisation follows some sort of rules; the rules observed in Indian classical music are very complex; this has many positive results, one of which is to impose a structure on the concert (basically, that of an accelerando); another is to make artists aware of the need to discuss and agree a plan ahead of time. Jazz performances appear to lack this kind of coherence. Perhaps there are not sufficient rules in jazz to require a structurally coherent work to emerge.

Which leaves me with the odd question why so many European practitioners of western classical music take an active interest in jazz. I suppose the answer to that must be that it feels nice to play jazz.

Surely, playing jazz must feel nicer than listening to it does.

Jazzed up Chopin

Asked one's opinion about this, what can one say but state the obvious: what was wrong with the original?

This of course is the problem with all classic-inspired jazz: it dumbs down. It is precisely the opposite of the old formula; under the old formula a Schubert might take a simple folk song and smart it up -- introduce variations, harmonic parts, etc. Under this formula one takes a perfectly good complex piece and dumbs it down by adding the base section. The result is intended perhaps to be more familiar, informal and approachable but can't help making the impression of Bo Derek commenting on The Magic Mountain ("Madame Chauchat seems like a nice person but she should exercise more care when closing doors.")

Why they seem so unlike me

Steiner quotes Racine writing about his art:

This is a tragic drama: it is purer and more significant than ordinary life; it is an image of what life might be like if it were lived at all times on a plane of high decorum and if it were at all instants fully responsive to the obligations of nobility.

Ought not all life be lived that way? Mine certainly is.

Are the dramatist's words to be taken as evidence that mine is a rare accomplishment?

On the importance of good promotion

Many have puzzled why French classical tragedy (Corneille and Racine) has not traveled abroad as well as the English Shakespeare has. Various fanciful explanations have been proposed for this problem¹ – such as that French tragedy is cut off from archaic or vernacular roots (French poetry being “inward looking”), that it is too rhetorical (all talk and no action), too grandiloquent (pompous), too set in the political realities of the moment, and so forth.

These are classic historicist explanations (in the Karl Popper sense): they cannot be tested. (Indeed, some can't even be understood).

But they have something else in common: they use the seed-and-soil model of culture – make a seed appropriate to the soil, then throw it and it will grow into a tree.

It's wrong.

The authors forget the parable of the seed -- the essential third element of agriculture -- agriculture itself: domesticated plants don’t grow unless someone tills, rakes and waters the ground. (The seed of wheat is not robust enough to break dry ground unaided). Similarly, culture does not succeed on its own: it requires cultivation. And it seems just possible that French drama has never had in England the sort of enthusiastic and influential promoters that Shakespeare has had in France.

The promotion, or its success, need not have much to do with the quality of the art itself.

Consider that perhaps the most enthusiastic and influential promoter of Shakespeare in France was Voltaire who was, he reported, just amazed by what he saw in London. But Voltaire hardly spoke any English, so it isn’t clear that he knew what he was talking about; and in any case in his Letters From England were chiefly written for the purpose of knocking things French. Voltaire needed things foreign to praise -- with which to knock the French. For what he wanted to accomplish, he could as easily have written Letters From Peking. Indeed, practically every sentence he wrote about Shakespeare and his superiority over French drama is so abstract, vague and -- well, historicist -- that he might as well have written it about Kungqu.

Similarly, those who seek causes for the success of even mediocre American film in its qualities may also be mistaken: they simply do not realize the power of the distribution machinery or the mammoth size of the promotional budget with which American films go out into the world. Typically, a film's promotional budget is greater than its production budget, and usually is increased if the initial sales are promising.

Human beings being essentially mimicking machines, in order to make its mark, a work of art needs good promotion far more than it needs quality of design -- as the latterly success of ugly fixtures and uncomfortable furniture clearly shows.

(I'd say the analytical value of Steiner's Death of Tragedy has been about zero, so far).

----

¹It is a pseudo problem anyway: English tragedy has not traveled; Shakespeare has.

Wanting to be elsewhere

On PR2, snippets from a conference on the history of Polish intelligentsia, most of it Marxist (they still take class seriously as an analytical concept there). (45 years of Marxist education has achieved a weird trick, produced a strange animal -- the Polish anticommunist Marxist).

(Verily, we shall not enter the promised land until the generation born in slavery has died).

It's very emotionally charged because the participants are theorizing about themselves: they are the intelligentsia -- lower middle to lower class in origin, urban, though not necessarily in origin, hard-working, upwardly mobile, on the make.

Their claim to be the continuation of Stanislaw Kostka seems strained to me. Marxistly speaking, they are not the same animal at all.

Problems of the 19th century are rehashed. What would have happened if the November Uprising had never taken place? National survival and independence are the main topic. Culture is a political tool.

My mind wonders off to another world, that of the paintings of Sakaki Hyakusen. This Japanese fellow was born in Nagoya and died in Kyoto, but his mind lived on the shores of the West Lake, which he repeatedly painted, taking his ideas from Chinese prints, poetry, and his own, fertile imagination.

Some notes on Definitions of Culture

1

Steiner's Bluebeard's Castle isn't much better, alas: his argument that the world changed with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars because now everyone became involved in the great events of history (because war became omnipresent, there was general mobilization, troops marched outside Hegel's window while he wrote Phenomenology, etc.), "whereas in times previous war swept over human beings with tidal mystery" would surprise anyone who has lived through the total horror of the Thirty Years War (Germany lost half its population); or the French civil wars; or the English civil war; or the Khmelnitsky or Pugachev uprisings.

Besides -- excuse me -- what is "tidal mystery"?

2

Is there perhaps something lacking in the education of fellows like Geo. Steiner? Do they not get enough maths and logic? Would a course in chemistry perhaps teach them to write sentences that mean something? Should their teachers not have insisted that a sentence's best business is demonstrable truth?

Several in-depth courses on individual historical periods might have been useful, too, to teach these guys how difficult it is to make generalizations about an age (what is an "age", anyway?); and to deconstruct the trifling "grand-sweep of history" view which one acquires by reading only introductory textbooks.

(Too little education can be more dangerous than not enough of it).

3

I am not sure that Steiner is right in suggesting that ennui was more common in the nineteenth century than it was, say, in the eighteenth or seventeeth; but he is right in observing that many writers did express it. Perhaps boredom was merely generized, which is to say "made into an acceptable genre", that is, it was discovered that it's OK to write about it (i.e., if you do, someone will actually read it). But personally, I would not be surprised if the nineteenth century were in fact shown to be more bored than the eighteenth: unlike Steiner I have never thought the nineteenth century my Paradise Lost; its culture, for the most part, bores me. Why should it not have bored its own people?

I mean, come on, Donizetti?

4

But perhaps the nineteenth century did represent a kind of departure from the past: an informatics departure, if you pardon the jargon. The rise of the newspaper, the telegraph, and cheap mass-printed book meant, I am guessing, that cultural figures were now spending a far greater amount of their time chasing mundane news -- from the political (man bites dog in Bakhchisarai!) to the cultural (a new book of poetry by minor heath poets); leading to a low quality information overload. The truth is that the flood of low quality information must be interrupted (the newspaper subscription canceled, the tube turned off, the comments ignored, the minor heath poets not read); or else we become stuffed up with their mediocrity; our lives, full of it, acquire its tastelessness; and our own brains begin to bore us.

A lisboan discovery

While visiting one of those boarded up buildings in Chiado (the owner -- an offshore corporation owned by a major Portuguese bank -- want 1.5 million for what is 1,500 square meters in pretty bad shape), I discovered hiding within it -- in the midst of a scene of destruction and desolation -- chained doors, walled up windows and doorways, a dim, half-collapsed staircase lit by a chain of Christmas lights running along the floor -- a hortus conclusus, a walled-in paradise, an island of piece and prosperity: 250 meters of airy, sunlit space at its top, the only apartment occupied in the building, dwelt in by three kings -- an American and two Canadians, all of them illegal. The discovery was delightful: high ceilings and two panel doors, loggias in all directions, views of the bay and the São Carlos, sun rays, breezes; it was like stepping into a vampire novel: this could have been Cathrine Deneuve's hide out in the middle of the city.

And somewhere in that apartment, holding up a short table-leg there was an old book. Wishing to keep it, I stole it. (I didn't think any of the occupants of the apartment would miss it).

Its title page read:

Leite Bastos

As Tragedias de Lisboa

Ediçao Illustrada

VOLUME IV

Lisboa 1879

I have been reading it-- breathlessly -- ever since.

Now, don't go rushing out to get your own copy.

The book is by one Francisco Leite Bastos, whom research shows to have been a Portuguese journalist and crime-writer, 1846-1881. Leite Bastos is not sufficiently highly regarded to earn a mention in the Portuguese wikipedia. Nor can I say that he deserves it. For all I know, it's just pretty standard Conan Doyle knock off -- cool furniture (colonial gentlemen, purloined letters, rabid dogs); odd puzzles(usually with rather disappointing solutions); a mild thrill of danger. Millions -- quite literally -- like it.

The truth is that the book's main attraction to me lies in the fact that... I do not read Portuguese -- only French and Italian (and neither all too well). I am therefore unable to follow all of the book's inanities. I cannot be disappointed by the solution to its puzzles, for example, since I do not quite grasp the puzzles in the first place.

I understand a little, enough to enjoy the odd furtniture: for example, that O Club Dos Gravatas Lavadas -- the club of the laundered ties -- is a crime organization based on the masonic model; that viscount of Saint Crispin is a ruined Bohemian nobleman who nevertheless manages to keep a balcão in São Carlos, a horse, and a pack of hounds, and to socialize with everybody who is anybody; that in the course of the action a corpse is dug up; and that some of the action takes place among the Africans of the city, an off-limits, forbidden ground. (1)

All of these are excellent building blocks with which to toy; to imagine what the book could possibly be about. But what it is about, I do not know -- and that is just great. Having read dozens of similar books before, I positively know I do not want to know.

Unable to know it, I am free to believe it mysterious; and to fool myself into thinking that there is more to it than there is likely to be.

But I am repeating myself.

***

(1) I find no mention of the Rua do Poço dos Negros, named after an unholy burial ground for the unbaptised blacks which had once existed here -- "Poço" is the Venetian pozzo, well, here meaning a hole in the ground where the dead were buried).