Summer . . .

. . . 

is a place

where

the silence

allows you

to hear

the

swish

of

falling

stars.

~ Wallace Stegner

source

Even a casual glance at the news could make you think the empire is crumbling fast. If so, should I not urge you to undertake a cultural boot camp this summer that would prepare you for the moment when the walls collapse and -my worst fear -we’re on our own?  The books would all preach self-reliance; the music would be the soundtrack of aerobics. By September, you’d have the bodies of Marines and the mental toughness of Spartans.

Then I thought: Why? What have these people done to deserve to suffer more? They’re the smarties; they know all about the state of our little planet and the hacks in Congress and the garbage media. They can hard-body and tough-mind on their own. Cut them some slack. 

Well then, here’s a list of reads and views that might make you dream, give you comfort, put a smile on your face, or make you reflect and (gasp) think, should you be ‘forced’ to spend time away from it all, anywhere.

---

Books:

Mission to Paris (if you’re not going, here’s the next best thing. But if you have a deadline looming or even a busy week, the absolute last thing you want to do is crack open Mission to Paris and think you’re going to read just a chapter, because you’re not.)

Beautiful Ruins (it’s a stunner. Or, as they say at the library, awesome. Very unique. A real journey of a novel.)

The Queen’s Gambit (I dare you to start it and not finish. On a long plane trip, I started reading The Queen’s Gambit. The author was Walter Tevis, who had also written The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hustler-and who would later write The Color of Money. The woman sitting next to me tried to make conversation; I shushed her. A meal came; I pushed it aside. All I could do was read, straight to the end, weeping and cheering.)

A Field Guide to Getting Lost ("Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction." ~Rebecca Solnit )

Movies:

Paths of Glory

Lolita

Dr. Strangelove

2001: A Space Odyssey

A Clockwork Orange

Barry Lyndon

The Shining

Full Metal Jacket

Eyes Wide Shut

‘Cold. Satirical. Sardonic. Ironic. Godless.’- labels used to admonish Kubrick’s movies. 

But life isn't all beautifully arranged.  Spielberg shows us what we wish of ourselves; Kubrick shows us what we are.  We might yearn for Spielberg's human being – we might find it more palatable – but there's no greater truth in six hundred surviving Jews than there is in Kubrick's story of three executed soldiers. Ambiguity, uncertainty, awe, discomfort, excitement, boredom: I experience all of these things when watching Kubrick's films, but I've only inched closer to a logical explanation of my own experience, let alone that of any other.  A truly honest filmmaker, one who adheres to the traditions of this visual art form, holds a mirror up to the world to show us how it is; that is, how it appears through subjective eyes.

‘Parentless and bereft of moral guidance’-more labels.  It is not the purpose of art to provide this guidance, only to reflect upon its absence.

Alexander Walker writes: 'The humanist in Kubrick hopes that man will survive his own irrationality; the intellectual in him doubts it' ~Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick Directs. London: Sphere Books Ltd, 1973.

“. . . I have never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, "don't try to fly too high", or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings’.”

~Stanley Kubrick, 1999

---

Things come, things go.

Drink the wine; but not in excess.

Enjoy the world; in perspective.

And, above all, guard your mind and use it well.

I wish you all an uneventful summer.  Do spend some part of it revering this place we call home.

Ode to an Old Tart

It is a well know fact that tarts are easy; a sure thing and none so more than the Bakewell Tart.  The sugary little strumpet has been pleasuring palettes since 1820.  

My somewhat lurid treat is a tribute to The Crimson Petal and The White, Michael Faber's book which reveals the seamy underbelly of Victorian London. Add me to the list of people who appreciate Faber’s vividly-detailed writing! The setting of this story is so well-described that, for a few nights, I actually dreamt that I was in London’s streets in 1875. 

Enjoy but most of all be grateful that you weren't born a woman in Victorian London.

Serve with whatever delights take your fancy.

Recipe

“The life we live and the life we choose.”

“Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.” -Richard Niebuhr

The Way of Saint James — or, as it is called by the locals, El Camino de Santiago — is a roughly 800-km pilgrimage walk through northern Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela where, according to pious legend, lie the remains of St. James the Apostle. Pious legend is almost certainly faulty on this point, but nonetheless the Camino has been an important Catholic pilgrimage route for over 1000 years. I myself walked a portion of it — roughly the first 10% — in 2006, and I hope one day to return to complete what I have started.

On the way one finds people with every kind of intention. There are those who are on religious pilgrimage, of course, and in some sense they have pride of place, for they carry on the tradition that is the Camino’s raison d’etre. It is for them that the shrines, churches, prayers, and devotions associated with the Camino make sense. But naturally there are others too: people of other faiths, or none, walking the route for their own reasons.

In the movie, The Way, Martin Sheen plays Tom Avery, an American called to a small town in the Pyrenees to identify the body of his son, Daniel (played by Sheen’s real-life son, Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed the film). Daniel had been killed in a sudden storm on (what must have been) the first day of his Camino trek. Tom has never heard of the Camino before, and suspects the walk of being another of his unfocused son’s fruitless enthusiasms, but once finding himself there he decides to walk the Camino himself, scattering his son’s ashes along the route, as a way of honoring his final wishes. Along the way he encounters a number of other pilgrims, has a variety of adventures, and eventually does find his way to the magnificent portals of the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago.  The last act of the film from the arrival in Santiago to the closing credits brings the emotional arc of the film to a satisfying conclusion.

The theme of pilgrimage is a rich one, ripe with possibility. A pilgrimage is, by its nature, a living metaphor for the journey of life itself, and there would seem to be no natural limit to the potential emotional and spiritual scope of a film of this sort.

The Way is content to limit itself to what it is, essentially if unconventionally, a domestic drama of the troubled relationship of a father and a son paired with beautiful scenery and a gallery of minor characters. It is a film of modest ambition, which is fine, and it succeeds, which is even better. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it.

---

I wish for you…

“…The Power of Concentration.” (and, the littlest bit of sparkle).

December, another month of bad news and darkness all around us. It feels like the song of the season.  Darkness is not just about light, it’s also about weight. And these are heavy days.

As I look back on a fraught year, I see that, more often than not, I’ve sided with the poet who wrote “How bright a light there must be to cast so dark a shadow.” Little domestic moments are my sun; I revolve around friends who see through me (“blogging is just your hobby, your job is being annoying”) and yet, in their tough love way, cherish me. I see the compromises so many people must make to hang on; I’ve been lucky enough to have quiet days and doing challenging, satisfying work. And, far from least, there are our blogs.  I loathe message boards they attract trolls and troublemakers but I love the exchanges I have with some of you. You encourage me, prod me, correct me and, when I'm most pressed, write posts for me. Thank you all. My cup runneth over.

So here, then, is my short, short, short reading list for the end of the year:

The Power of Concentration.

It starts with Sherlock Holmes smoking his pipe. “When a new case is presented, Holmes does nothing more than sit back in his leather chair, close his eyes and put together his long-fingered hands in an attitude that begs silence. He may be the most inactive active detective out there. His approach to thought captures the very thing that cognitive psychologists mean when they say mindfulness.” Defined thus: Mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way.

The implications are tantalizing. Mindfulness may have a prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to cognitive decline. When we learn to unitask, to think more in line with Holmes’s detached approach, we may be doing more than increasing our observational prowess. We may be investing in a sounder mental future — no matter how old we are.  The benefits-mental, physical, vocational - are huge. You want them.

Take good care. 

“Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes”, will be published by Viking in January 2013.

---

And...she'll do it again.

Full moon in Los Angeles, just the way I enjoy it, alas, I am in bed nursing a %&*+ relapse and plenty of time to read.

In an age of stupefying untruths and incredulous myths designed to fool, bedevil and deceive, it is beyond refreshing to discover an unrepentant figure in history who was not remotely cowered by her skirmishes with sin, shame, vice or deplorable conduct, but in fact, emboldened by her forcefulness to hold sway over the faint of heart.

Browsing, I came across this delightful read, what enlightenment it revealed!

Let’s take a moment to parse, shall we?

We all know that hard times can increase, and even accelerate, our own dismaying dreams of wealth, excess and the ridiculously obscene, particularly when it comes to those insufferable souls who flaunt it. Our fascination with, not only the identities, but the behind-the scenes lifestyles of the impossibly well heeled, can soothe our own troubled brows like no other induced stimulant — prescribed, casked, home-grown, Pyrex-baked or fermented — can.

Perhaps that explains why Norman Mailer’s long cherished Marilyn has been replaced atop the biography list with Aimée Crocker’s renowned tome And I’d Do It Again.

The skeptical might, legitimately, ask who is Aimée Crocker? And if we are to fawn over the lives of the inscrutably rich, why covet hers? Here is why, dear readers. She was a woman of means, not always a lady and never what you might call ‘proper,’ but she managed to acquire and surpass extravagance with flair, invincibility and unapologetic gusto. No shying, hypocritical, piously-pitied patsy she.

Aimée (formerly Amy) Crocker (1863-1941), was the daughter of Judge Edwin B. Crocker, legal counsel for the Central Pacific Railroad, Justice of the California Supreme Court and founder of the Crocker Art Museum. Her father was also brother to Charles Crocker, one of the “big four” California railroad barons. How blessedly lucky at birth can one be?

By the age of sixteen, the voluptuary vixen had already tumbled for a German prince “who had the most romantic saber scars,” and a Spanish toreador (“his touch left scars on my soul”).

To the great relief of San Francisco society columnists, Crocker’s wounds healed quickly and she went on to hula á deux with King Kalakaua of Hawaii, jitterbug through the jungles of Borneo with a bona fide head hunter, and hootchy-kootchy her way into the harem of the Rajah of Shikapur.

Following is the account of her memoir And I’d Do It Again as reviewed by Time magazine, September 28, 1936.

“The silliest of the new crop [is] a muddled concoction written with a lurid, Sunday-supplement archness, by a daughter of the wealthy and picturesque Crocker family of San Francisco, detailing her travels in the Far East, her love affairs with a Japanese baron, a Chinese tyrant, a Borneo chieftain and a four-yard boa constrictor named Kaa. Aimée Crocker first became aware of the lure of the Orient when, at the age of 10, she demanded that her mother buy her an elaborate Chinese bed that she saw in San Francisco. “Very young indeed was I.” she writes, “when the finger of the East reached out across the Pacific and touched me.” No sooner had the East put the finger on her than her mother sent her to Germany to be educated. There she fell in love with a German prince (un-named), and was taken to Madrid, where she fell in love with a bullfighter.

The impressionable young lady then returned to San Francisco, married, was almost killed in a train wreck on her honeymoon, got a divorce, hired a 70-ft. schooner and set out for the South Seas, scandalizing the missionaries in Hawaii on the way by taking part in an “orgy,” the precise details of which she does not disclose.”

Clearly, the adventurous Aimée, five times a bride, did not feel compelled to curtail her bed hopping during bouts of matrimony. Consequentially, her marriages tended toward the rather abbreviated variety. It is one thing, after all, for a sophisticated spouse to shut his eyes to a love triangle; another altogether to overlook a veritable polytetrahedron of passions. Even the most peripheral paramour, however, seldom proved completely problem-free–particularly the type who naively featured himself as leading man rather than best supporting actor. Ah well, that was simply the gaucheness of youth. “They all get over husbands, given half a chance,” giggled Crocker.

As to whether the quintet of unfortunate grooms (Including a Russian prince almost forty years her junior) who wed the wealthy wanderlust-victim ever got over her, Crocker wasn’t much concerned. “Husbands, at best, have little to do with ‘people,’” she sniffed. “I know, because I have had a certain number of them.”

Indeed, by the time she sat down to write her memoirs at the age of seventy-four, the cultured coquette had “had a certain number” of almost everything, including some truly bizarre bedfellows. Not that she deigned to bat an eye when a boa constrictor, the pet of a Hindu princess, slithered into her boudoir one night and proceeded to do as boas do, enveloping her body in a sun cross-species hug. In fact, it seems, Crocker found the reptilian rendezvous quite a turn-on: “He gave me a strange, tickling sensation that was, I confess, very enjoyable.”

Still, for the professional flirt, the conquest is vastly more compelling than its consequences. Another seduction successfully completed, Crocker was soon snoozing away as the smitten snake, still coiled about her, lay staring into the dark. “It was like being in the strong embrace of a man,” shrugged the world-weary party girl. “I was more than comfortable.”

While the beloved boa did not enter her life until she had returned to New York, its obsessiveness for her charms compelled it to remain “constrictively” close to her at all times. So entranced were the twosome, Miss Crocker was rumored to have thrown an elaborate dinner party in its honor. The dinner, according to all in attendance, was a great success, although an unidentified sleuthing snoop passed it to the newspapers, who quickly picked it up turning the story into, what else? That of an orgy. Characteristically, Miss Crocker tossed it off with a laugh, declaring “Things always happen to me.”

…utterly bloody terrifying.

I have prepared a plate of food, pot of coffee, and have locked the door because today I will wallow in the biting prose and meticulous observation of human foibles by Molly Keane.

Molly Keane was an Irish novelist and playwright. She loved booze, hunting and her dogs and a great chum of Elizabeth Bowen, her co-chronicler of the decline of the Anglo-Irish stately home and way of life.

Her work, in case this jewel of a writer has escaped your notice, falls pretty much into two separate time periods, separated by almost forty years. The first lot is pretty good if you fancy whiling away a few hours in a mannered pre-War drawing room from a time that died. The second lot are the real stunners.

Molly's adolescence was marked and profoundly affected by the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent Black and Tan war, spelling the end of the iron ruling by the Anglo-Irish upper classes and the final death throes of that way of life. Her mother was remote and her father was weak - her unhappy childhood is revisited over and over again in both her early and later novels, which are peopled with wonderful characters that will stay with you.  She takes no prisoners - if you can't hunt and don't love horses, you have no place in her world. Tough, unsentimental and absolutely certain that drinkies and a dog to hand cure most ills. In this world of victims and blame culture, she renders me nostalgic for a period I never knew.

Her early career, in the 1930s and 40s was written under the pseudonym MJ Farrell, a name she spied on a pub hacking home from a hunt one afternoon. To her sort, writing was hideously déclassé, so her books and plays were kept a secret from the huntin' shootin' and fishin' types she lived among. Her plays even ran in the West End. She suddenly stopped writing in 1946 - partly because her husband, Bobby, the love of her life and father of her two young daughters, died suddenly and tragically at the age of 37; and partly because the crisis in the economy caused the sources of income from the Empire to dry up to almost nothing, spelling the end of that peculiarly upper class way of life. The huge houses fell into ruin over the ensuing decades, wardrobes and stables grew empty and the lower orders no longer knew their places.

For almost forty years, she kept her head down and her nose clean, then, suddenly, dripping wickedness and a rapier wit, Good Behaviour appeared in 1981. There are many of us who think she deserved the Booker prize for it. This was followed by Time After Time (1983) and Loving and Giving (1988).  These books are, bluntly, bleeding brilliant. The characters are observed with a heady cocktail of spite and intelligence. They are dark, often hopeless, always amusing. This is what happened to those glamorous people after the war. Lack of money, crippling snobbery, equestrian obsession and huge albatrosses of house around their increasingly wrinkly necks. Uppity servants, clouds of dogs to feed, tarnishing silver and fading albums. Beautifully observed and possibly the best accompaniment to a crackling fire on an autumn day. 

My abiding regret is that I never got to meet her. When I made a visit to Ireland, after her death, I mentioned this regret to my host a seriously tough old boy. He said, 'Ah, you are keen on her books?  I'm glad we never had to invite her over to meet you. She was utterly bloody terrifying.'

Never underestimate Dahling Alice

 

'Dahling Alice, this is all very well my deah, but is this really the right time to swan about, seducing all the neighbours, banging away at your ukulele, swathed in jewels and keeping a pet lion?'

'Yup.'

Anja and Clive know the obsession I have with the mystery surrounding the murder of Lord Erroll and how unspeakably dull and hectoring I can become when the subject is mentioned.

Well, I just finished another set of books and in one titled The Temptress by Paul Spicer it would appear that dahling Alice (de Trafford, de Janzé, née Silverthorne a.k.a. the fastest gun in Gare du North) was the one who done did it (are you paying attention Sherlock?) - portrayed with glazed and dirty elegance by Sarah Mills in White Mischief.  

In the past week I have been dissecting the book. She was riddled with madness and style, abandoned her children, adopted a baby lion, etc., etc., etc. . . . as the King of Siam was wont to say.  The writing is diligent, but dull, and its accuracy I am unable to vouch for, but The Temptress made for interesting and entertaining reading.  Let’s call it Kenyan Rashomon.

I think that in his book Vertical Land, Frédéric de Janzé painted the most intimate portrait of Alice.

Alas, the telling of her fascinating story was long overdue.  Perhaps a more intuitive author will write another someday. 

Ah well, while residing in my happy valley the urban hipsters in our reading circle, blood sugar low because they've just had double maths, have worked themselves into an indignant lather because they weren't born in Kenya – “It’s were all the action is!”

In the meantime I’m putting on Alice’s hat; park my derriere on a veranda, minus the lion cub, and shout at the houseboy to bring me Sundowners.

Thank you Anja.

A year for dragons

It is an auspicious year.  Dragons partake of the five elements: water, earth, metal, fire, and wood.   Like poet Walt Whitman, they are vast, they contain multitudes. After a Green Dragon or two, you too will be able to breathe fire.

The Green Dragon Cocktail is a simple, sweet drink whose most unusual ingredient is kummel liquor (a blend of caraway and other spices).  While its origins are unclear, the classic version appeared in The Savoy Cocktail Book by Harry Craddock in 1930.  The following recipe makes one Green Dragon cocktail.

Ingredients:

1/2 oz. kummel, 1/2 oz. green creme de menthe, 1 & 1/2 oz. gin, juice of half a lemon, 4 dashes of orange bitters.

Method:

Fill a cocktail shaker half full with shaved ice.

Add the other ingredients and shake gently for 10-15 seconds, being careful not the bruise the gin (!)

Strain the liquid into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon. Drink!