I finally forced my way through Durrell's Avignon Quintet. It is his centenary this year, something I only realised when I was halfway through. Considering the fact that I think Justine is one of the three or four greatest novels of the 20th century, this later collection of short novels was a massive disappointment. First of all, the writing is bad. Not just overwritten, but technically very weak. There are sentences in here that repeat themselves in the clumsiest way imaginable:
Here they were to bury themselves in the three-cornered love which had once intrigued Blanford and caused him to try to forge a novel round the notion of this triune love.
My god that is an ugly sentence. There are terrible metaphors and similes which are striking for all the wrong reasons – I see flicking back through my copy that I have underlined in horror the phrase ‘the dry marsupial pocket of the rarely used vagina’ which, if you can believe it, is even worse in context than it is in isolation. In the last book, Quinx, which came out in 1985 but reads like an experimental failure from the late 60s, there are long passages of pseudo-profound philosophising which go on for pages and pages and seem to mean almost nothing:
The day when Aristotle decided (malgré lui) that the reign of the magician-shaman was over (Empedocles), was the soul's D-Day. The paths of the mind had become overgrown. From that moment the hunt for the measurable certainties was on. Death became a constant, the ego was born. Monsieur came down to preside over the human condition.
If you think any of this makes sense in context, I can assure you you're wrong.
And yet. That said, in a weird way I have a kind of grudging respect for the beast. There are some crazy things Durrell is trying out in these works – the five books intersect each other in bizarre ways, so that some characters are creations of other characters, or versions of the same person in a new life. Mostly it doesn't work at all, but I still think this is what good novelists should be trying to do. Basically, if it had been enlivened by the kinds of beautiful sentences that we got in the Alexandria Quartet I would have been happy, but without that, it's just very, very dull.
Work has been fun this week. Yesterday I went to the Crazy Horse to film their new show, which has been designed by Christian Louboutin. It was one of those surreal afternoons where my job seems amazing: drinking free champagne all afternoon and watching girls take their clothes off in elaborate ways. Now usually I hate these Parisian cabarets – Hannah and I went to the Moulin Rouge a few weeks ago and it was one of the worst nights out I can remember – and something about the obviousness of watching women undress on stage depresses me; but there's something about the Crazy Horse, they just seem to pull it off with so much wit and irony that it always wins me over. Christian Louboutin was a very rambling interviewee however, and expressed disapproval at the old pair of trainers I was wearing – which to be honest I thought was pretty rich coming from someone who expects women to pay thousands of pounds for shoes that only acrobats can walk in. (He was wearing a red pair of Roller-Boats, which cost €1000.)
- Location:paris
Having a baby is supposed to make you think about your own maturity. Many expectant parents of my acquaintance decided to put away childish things – they cut back on the drinking, cancelled their bimonthly order for a quarter of Moroccan, and started going to bed at nine thirty to examine the footnotes to What to Expect when You're Expecting. I was vaguely looking for a quicker, less strenuous way of growing up, and after considering lots of self-improving options it finally it hit me.... I would get a pipe.
What could be more grown-up than that? Right?
I said all this to my friends before Christmas, and one of them took the hint. He sent me one. It's shiny and wooden and you assemble it like the Man with the Golden Gun building his golden gun. I got incredibly excited by this and went round the corner to the Tabac du Dôme (where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to buy his tobacco) to Get Supplies. It's a whole new world. I came back with coconut tobacco, pipe cleaners, weird matches, and a retractable implement called a reamer. ‘What the fuck is that?’ Hannah asked me. ‘It's a reamer!’ I boomed, making a gesture. ‘For goodness sake, if you're going to smoke a pipe, you have to have a reamer!’
(While I was in the shop, incidentally, the guy behind me had come in to try on some pipes. They gave him this little plastic thing that goes over the mouthpiece, and he meditatively popped a series of briars between his teeth, nodding his head, and assaying their heft and balance. It was awesome.)
So next time I had the flat to myself, I tamped in a bowlful of rough shag and fired her up. ‘Just firing up a bowlful of rough shag,’ I texted to about a dozen people. Wasn't it Schopenhauer, I reflected, who said that smoking a pipe dispenses with the need to think? Well maybe not exactly that, but he did say something remarkably similar in German, and his point was not lost. Puff puff puff. It went out pretty quickly, but I relit it. Puff puff. It went out again, and I relit it again. Then it went out, so I relit it. The pipe went out again; it was again relit by me. It went out. I relit. Out. Relit.
By now hyperventilating slightly, I leant on the kitchen work-surface and took stock of my supply of matches. It seemed to me that I would need approximately two boxes per pipeful. No wonder this is such an expensive habit.
Eventually, I got some kind of steady combustion going. I was standing in the window because I didn't want too much smoke in our flat, but I did get a few strange glances from people in the courtyard, squinting up at me, red-faced in my dressing-gown wreathed in coconut smoke. The flat smelled like an arson attempt on a Bounty factory, and I looked like Sherlock Holmes's idiot brother. I wondered if it was time to use the reamer.
When the smoke alarm went off, I decided to call it a day, feeling happy that I'd mastered the technique well enough to be able to pull it out on the next special occasion. The problem now with this habit is that, living in France, it's incredibly difficult to discuss it. Une pipe in French, as well as the obvious, is a slang word for a certain popular non-procreative sex act, and my language skills have so far been unable to get over this obstacle. Too few people talk about pipes, whereas popular non-procreative sex acts are the subject of most everyday conversations here in Paris, so that the slang meaning is basically now the primary meaning. For me to tell people at work that my best man got me a pipe for Christmas is to announce that I was festively sucked off by a sales manager from Maidstone, which, granted, may add a certain rakish charm to my otherwise bland persona, but isn't necessarily how I want to make smalltalk.
Basically, I'm starting to suspect this present is more trouble than it's worth.
- Location:paris
I am down in Provence with Hannah on what is apparently called, by certain subeditors and those who frequent certain prenatal messageboards, a babymoon. I was kind of worried that January would just be cold and wet down here, but actually, although we have to wrap up quite well, the skies are clear blue and the landscape is just as enticing as ever, with old walled towns everywhere you look surrounded by cute rocky hills, mediaeval forts, clumps of oliviers, and vineyards stretching off as far as the eye can see.
We did a few tastings yesterday, stopping at one or two of the some 300 wineries which surround the nearby village of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. For once we went on holiday with a car so we can actually buy plenty of it and take it back with us. Hannah, being pregnant, is demurely spitting out her mouthfuls as indeed you're supposed to do, whereas I am glugging them back contentedly so that by the third visit I was a little bit tipsy and not unreceptive to a delighted sales pitch from someone who wasn't expecting any visitors today. In summer this area is swarming with tourists, but we have it completely to ourselves: vineyard owners are unlocking the cellar doors when we ring the bell, and uncorking new bottles to show us what they make. Up the hill, the ruined castle itself looks amazing, and we drive up to clamber around it in peace and quiet. You know you're in an area with plenty of history when a 14th century ruin can be described as neuf.
I have been doing my reading on the 100 year period when the papacy was, bizarrely, based here in Avignon because of political instability in Rome. The papal palace in town is a massive, looming presence for such a small settlement, although despite what Durrell repeatedly says in the Avignon Quintet, I find its huge bulk rather beautiful, especially when it's being hit by the gold afternoon light. An intersection of two alleyways nearby marks the spot where Petrarch first saw Laura, thus beginning literature's most famous case of someone obsessing over a girl they've put on a pedestal without ever having properly met. I am reading his Canzoniere too. I am also reading something I picked up in town yesterday, a two-volume collection of the works of the troubadours in the original Old Provençal with French on facing pages, which I am somewhat unexpectedly enjoying very much indeed – I had not realised how deliciously secular and fun this tradition is. A lot of it goes back to very pagan fertility songs of the spring, and indeed the earliest lyric in the book is an anonymous song sung by all the married and unmarried women of a village who for one day could, symbolically or actually, it's unclear, hook up with any man they wanted. The chorus line is, A la ví’, a la vía, jelos! Roughly, ‘hit the road, jealous one!’ Even later stuff is not what you'd expect from courtly romances – one canso by Guilhèm de Peitieus includes the line
Enquer me lais Dieus viure tan
C’aja mas manz soz so mantel!
Which means, ‘May God let me live long enough to get my hands under her robe.’ You have to be kind of impressed.
The sun is out and I'm off to hunt out a breakfast.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.
- Location:avignon
Driss Chraïbi, Une enquête au pays
I try, in an increasingly desultory fashion, to keep up with Moroccan literature just because I used to live there and people assume I Know Things about it. This one is pretty great, a kind of police procedural reimagined as a piece of political philosophy. No wait that makes it sounds terrible. Anyway, I reviewed it on LibraryThing here.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
I bought this when I was working in South Africa but couldn't be arsed to read it till earlier this year. It's really very good, he's particularly strong on the ways in which apartheid made even black people think of themselves as second-class human beings. At one point Mandela is taking a flight in Ethiopia and he nearly gets off the aircraft when he sees the black pilot: ‘How can a black man fly a plane?’ What's also very striking is that Mandela was no Gandhi – he supported violent action against the regime, and in this book he defends civilian deaths caused by the ANC's militant wing (which he helped to set up). Very moving, very revealing. (Proper review here.)
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia
A science fiction award-winner about Stalin's Russia which succeeds brilliantly in its plan to use comedy and humour as vehicles for huge ideas about society and repression. Loved this.
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
I finished this this year, having spent the last 18 months or so reading it on and off. A lot of my interest was linguistic – I love this stage of English, on the cusp between Middle and Modern. The prose is full of magic and craziness and conflicted knights and lubricious harlots and lots of confusing battles where people voyde their saddles and pull truncheons from their wounds. And so much beauty in the language. ‘In the grekynge of the daye Sir Tristram hente his hors wonders for to seke.’ Fuck yes.
Ovid, The Art of Love
Refreshingly even-handed in its treatment of sex. There is a certain amount of sniggering, but considering the state of European society for the subsequent two thousand years I thought his view of women and relationships was conspicuously modern and conspicuously pre-Christian, or, as Rebecca West would probably specify, pre-Augustinian. Famously, Ovid is pretty hot on the importance of making sure everyone involved gets their rocks off: ‘Sentiat ex imis venerem resoluta medullis / Femina, et ex aequo res iuvet illa duos.’ Which my existing 1929 translation renders cautiously as: ‘Let the woman feel love's act, unstrung to the very depths of her frame, and let that act delight both alike.’ My new James Michie translation is a bit more robust: ‘A fucked woman should melt to her core, and the pleasure / Be felt by both in equal measure.’
Fouad Laroui, La Femme la plus riche du Yorkshire
There are lots of good Moroccan authors, and lots of good books about Yorkshire. As far as I know this is the only intersection of the two sets.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien
Amazing, amazing prose. My French is (still) not fluent, but even I was riveted by the perfection of some of the paragraphs. It's sad and beautiful and very wise, I want to read a lot more by Yourcenar.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
It's what you expect from Nabokov: amazing writing, ludicrously convoluted vocabulary, and gratuitous paedophilia which he somehow, much to my annoyance, makes rather sexy. He just has a way of describing things in a totally new way – an erection, for instance: ‘The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter, and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch, and ponderous upswing of virile revival.’ Well I mean you have to love that, don't you. I wrote a lot more about this one here.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
I find Freud is one of those thinkers whose ideas you dismiss when you first hear them – and then, two or three years later, you suddenly realise the bastard was probably right. There is something weirdly unscientific about this book, something a bit pre-modern in the dodgy methodology, but it's all very fascinating. I guess that's why Freud's remained crucial for modern writers and artists, whereas modern psychologists pretty much ignore him.
Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman
Fucking amazing. I read this in a oner on the TGV back to Paris after covering the royal wedding in Monaco and although I was sleep-deprived I couldn't put it down, I just laughed continually for about four hours. And also, just finally someone is actually taking feminism seriously and not being po-faced about it. Caitlin is also the funniest person on Twitter, where in the space of twenty minutes she'll throw away a dozen lines which most writers would be proud to have saved up for a novel.
James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy
I thought this was outstanding. A child's rambling narrative of growing up in Glasgow, I can't help comparing it favourably with the clasics of the genre like Catcher in the Rye or the early chapters of Portrait of the Artist.
Christopher Hitchens, Arguably
Hitchens was almost unique in having so many fans who disagreed with him so often. We didn't love him for his opinons but for how he expressed them. He didn't create a huge number of new ideas or arguments, but he was undoubtedly a genius when it came to rhetoric, and his phrases have a cumulative power that makes them hit home like no one else's. Plus, watching religious apologists getting Hitchslapped is a massive YouTube pleasure of mine.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity
Like a lot of atheists, I am kind of obsessed with religious history and have been since I was tiny. I've read a lot of books like this, but none which do it so well.
Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope: A Trilogy
Wow, what a writer this is. Where did he come from? These books stand in a very Waugh-like English tradition of social commentary and sparkling witticisms, but it's all overlying some pretty dark stuff on child rape and addiction. The middle book, about heroin dependency, was so realistic I kept having to put the book down because I was breaking into cold sweats, and yet it was also somehow very funny.
- Location:paris
Things have been busy in real life over here. Some people reading this will already know that I'm having a baby in the spring. A baby! A human one. I mean Hannah's doing most of the work, but I certainly contributed in the early stages. There is a lot of excitement and also a shitload of Stuff To Be Done that has kept me pretty busy and a bit frazzled. And because this is France, the whole thing is enveloped in a mountain of administrative challenges requiring a continual supply of paperwork – an attestation de grossesse, registration with some shadowy body called the CAF (something something familiales), and pre-booking a hospital for the actual birth which needs to be done practically as soon as you know you're up the duff.
Despite the fact that we live literally opposite one of Paris's most famous maternity hospitals, Hannah has decided to book us into a ‘more forward-thinking’ clinic on the other side of the city, where we recently sat through a long ‘acclimatisation’ meeting about what our ‘birth plan’ is. We didn't have a birth plan, beyond walking away with a healthy baby, so we just made up some stuff about having a supportive atmosphere which seemed to satisfy them. Hannah is assiduously studying vocab lists of daunting terms like par le siège, amniocentèse, and the ever-essential péridurale. Here she is with her bump, although I should note that some of this is due to third helpings of gluten-free Christmas pudding:
Feeling the little critter kick around inside her is just as astonishing as you'd expect, but also considerably weirder and more...nuanced than I was led to believe. There is a living thing inside her! It still freaks us out quite a lot – as well as providing several intervals of wide-eyed awestruck joy.
The rest of our life is fairly stable and viewed by us with cautious approval, if rarely outright excitement. Work is bubbling along and in the current climate we're happy to have plenty of it. We are trying while we can to enjoy all our quiet evenings in playing Scrabble and watching, on
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herself_nyc's recommendation, Friday Night Lights which is amazing. Eating out is still a big pleasure for us, but now H is pregnant there's a whole load more stuff she can't eat along with the gluten, meaning the set of edible dishes on the average menu has now shrunk to include little more than an orange juice and the charred, coal-like, bacteria-free remains of what might once have been a steak. The worst thing is that she can't even drink her way through it and has to watch me knocking back vodka martinis every night (we keep getting asked if she has any cravings; I used to say no, but now, more honestly, I say ‘Sancerre’). And France being France, with its 1950s views on gender relations, everyone is suddenly being incredibly nice to her but also irritatingly protective – when she allowed herself to order a small undecaffeinated coffee the other day the waiter refused to serve her. ‘It's all right, we're giving it up for adoption,’ I yelled, in a fury.It's New Year, so I'm worrying even more than usual about my lack of creativity, and trying to work out how, given my current feeble levels of productivity, I'm ever going to get anything accomplished again in my private life after April when I'll be pretty much flat-out. But hopefully then, I'll have more exciting things to worry about.
- Location:paris
Lawrence Durrell, Livia
Edwin Mullins, The Popes of Avignon
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw, The Quantum Universe
Lawrence Durrell, Constance
Lawrence Durrell, Sebastian
Lawrence Durrell, Quinx
Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Khéops
Matt Ridley, Genome
Nicholson Baker, House of Holes
Lucian Randall, Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris
Victor Hugo, Le dernier jour d'un condamné
Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game
The front line is weird. Soldiers here spend most of the day sleeping or firing their guns in the air to raise morale. I was there for three days outside Bani Walid and mostly it was pretty boring – just waiting around for the NTC deadline to expire. However, I was probably lucky. The day I didn't go, my colleague came under direct fire and had to shelter under a van with Jonathan Miller from Channel 4 News. He said it was the most terrifying 10 minutes of his life, although he didn't specify if this was because of the bullets or Jonathan Miller.
The whole area is incredibly hot with very little shade. The second day I was there, we were allowed a little further forward to where there was a small mosque and a little shop. I drank two litres of water, a cold coffee drink, two cans of 7-Up, a Schweppes Lemon, an almond tea, an alcohol-free beer, and a can of grape juice AND DIDN'T WEE ONCE. Sat in an old deserted schoolhouse on the top of a rise and edited my pictures there before sending them back with my tiny BGAN – it takes about an hour to send back two minutes of compressed footage.
Even in the capital, gunfire is everywhere. It doesn't sound like fireworks or cars backfiring. It just sounds like guns. I hate guns. Yesterday, coming out of the medina, a rebel at a checkpoint fired a round of warning shots to get the traffic's attention, just a few yards from me. Very unpleasant feeling. Today, walking through the suqs, a kid came walking towards us carrying a sawn-off shotgun. He pointed it at a cat lounging in a pile of refuse and grinned. Later, a man walking in front of us was swaggering through town carrying a pistol, finger on the trigger. Last night, a terrific round of anti-aircraft fire went off just outside the hotel. There are guns everywhere, and they terrify me. They are too easy to use. No training is required to point and kill, and aiming is not as sophisticated a procedure as you might hope.
The medina: rubbish-strewn wynds, a ground of earth and sand, black bulbs of women walking with plastic bags of shopping, cats playing in litter, a smell of stale water and faeces, cross-streets glimpsed at the far ends of alleyways, light filtered by overhanging matting, a chiaroscuro peek at a tailor bent over an ancient Singer. The Libyan tricolor daubed on a corner, with a finger of green running down the uneven stone.
Graffiti is everywhere. GO WAY GADAFI LIBIA FRE. February 17. ليبيا حرة (Free Libya). THANK YOU NATO. There are Amazigh yaz symbols all over the place, apparently a sign of Berber identity which was illegal under Kadhafi. The old leader himself appears in a thousand caricatures on every available surface, sketched with sunglasses and crazy frizzed hair, usually labelled, derisively, as شفشوفة shufshuufa, the curly-haired one. One of the big chants in the new Libya is معليشي شفشوفة (ma‘layshi, shufshuufa!), which is a very dialectal way of saying something like "excuse me, frizz-head!". You can hear people shouting it in this video at 0:12 and again at 2:00. There's more here at 0:44, which looks like it was filmed the night I was out recording (and frankly, internet, my pictures are better). The song they're all singing there is the new Libyan anthem, which I think you'll agree is stirring stuff.
On my last night in Tripoli I walked round Martyrs' Square again to soak up the atmosphere. Flags flying, people cheering, bands playing, horns honking, popcorn popping, girls ululating, and kids running around with smiles and candy-floss all over their faces. No special occasion, it's been like this every night since I got here. They love it. I love it. When my camera and my professional disinterest have been switched off, I can't help feeling that Libya is just the most fantastic country. I'm already planning to come back with Hannah.
I didn't have a chance to get many souvenirs, but there is one thing stuffed in the bottom of my bag. When I was interviewing the new Minister for Education a few days ago, he wouldn't let me film in his office because the walls are still lined with Kadhafi-era books. "What are you going to do with them all?" I asked. He shrugged: "Throw them away." Could I, I wondered, help take a couple off his hands...? He grinned at me and handed down a three-volume set from behind his desk. Checking it out in the hallway, I eventually deciphered that it was a copy of Kadhafi's famous الكتاب الأخضر – the Green Book itself. Not something that's easy to get hold of anymore in Libya, though god knows I was hoping no one checked my bag too thoroughly at any of the checkpoints.
- Location:djerba
It was strange coming back through Ben Guerdane, but this time just en route. I waited to recognize that dusty curve of main road, the central town mosque, the little pizzeria. But our driver must have bypassed the centre of town because I didn't recognize anything, and soon we were on that long stretch of highway leading up to the border. On the right, where the thousands and thousands of refugee tents had been, was now just scrubland and desert, with the odd patch of scuffed earth all, apparently, that was left of 30,000 stranded Bangladeshis. We stopped once to let a camelherd nudge his bony troupe of dromedaries across the road.
Our driver couldn't get out of there fast enough. As soon as he saw that passport control would agree to deal with us, he sprinted back to his car and sped off, leaving me and a Portuguese-Chinese photographer (one word: Macau) standing guard over our voluminous collection of bags, photographic equipment, and bottled water. Bird shit all over the floor, half a dozen prefab booths, some snarls of barbed wire, and a brace of uncooperative customs officials – this was what we meditated on over the next two and a half hours of administrative motionlessness. Our driver had in fact scarpered too soon. Tunisian passport control were not so sure we should be allowed into Libya. Phone calls were made; central offices in Djerba and Tunis were lackadaisically contacted.
In the meantime, we found, among the queue of Libyan cars heading back home, one which contained two brothers called Noulat and Umar, young friendly types who said they would take us all the way to Tripoli for…they exchanged a muttered conversation on this point…300 – no, 320 US dollars. I agreed on the spot, having long ago decided that it's quicker and easier to just trust the first person who seems reasonably unthreatening.
It worked out well. The two guys, favorable to the idea of being paid off by foreigners for a journey they were making anyway, became keenly involved in our battle of wits with passport officials, who had taken our documents and told us they were waiting for word from head office, an event they looked forward to with something of the dutiful patience of a Peruvian vice-regent awaiting further orders from King Phillip II of Spain. I have a feeling I have stolen that simile from someone, but I can't remember who. We watched the sun set slowly behind Tunisia. Some warbling and beautiful Classical Arabic emerged from overhead speakers, and everyone broke open bottles of water and packets of biscuits to break the fast. The officials visibly decided they just couldn't be arsed hanging on to us anymore, and our passports were stamped and returned.
The Libyan part of the border was less organized. Instead of uniformed officials there were 15-year-olds with Kalashnikovs, and instead of showing your passport you poked the new Libyan flag out of the passenger window and waved it with as much enthusiasm as you could muster after three hours of sitting on a camera-bag. The rebels all fired their rifles excitedly, one of them amicably passed us a four-pack of vanilla yoghurt as a little breakfast gift, and we all yelled 'Allahu akbar!', which I have to admit always cheers me up enormously.
Finally I was through into Libya, having spent two weeks earlier in the year waiting in vain to be allowed to cross. It was dark by now, so there wasn't a huge amount to see. It was obvious that the country was richer than Tunisia though: suddenly we were on a proper big dual carriageway. There was a fair bit of traffic on the roads. We would have made good progress, except for the checkpoints every couple of miles. They built a sort of ridge of sand across the road so that you had to slow down to pass through. Our headlights had to be turned off, and several rebels would peer in the car and ask about the two foreigners. We waved the flag and shouted Allahu akbar as loud as we could. Usually they just grinned and said "Welcome!" and waved us past, but couple of times we had to pull over and open the boot or explain a bit about who we worked for.
We got to Tripoli around 11pm and rolled up to the Hotel Corinthia, which in less unstable times would have been one of the city's most prominent luxury hotels. On a little rocky outcrop into the Mediterranean, its two towers loom over the north of the city. Its five-star status is now militated against somewhat by a lack of running water, cleaning services, or food, but the electricity still seems pretty good. A bar on the second floor has been taken over by the world's media, and the balcony just outside is where your friendly neighborhood foreign correspondent does his or her lives from.
It's here that I sit every night, wrapped in my Moroccan headscarf, typing emails to my wife beside my little satellite transmitter while gunfire echoes out around town. Most of it is just celebratory, but the bullets still come down again. It's very hot but there is a breeze coming in off the sea most nights. The town itself is strange and interesting and to me at least feels perfectly safe. A couple of days ago I walked up to Martyrs' Square (formerly Green Square) to see the Eid celebrations at midnight. The atmosphere was just incredible. Thousands of people singing their new anthem (i.e. the old pre-Kadhafi one) at the tops of their voices, waving flags, standing on the branches of trees, old men crying with happiness, girls with heart-shaped flags painted on their cheeks. The anthem is amazing, and when they belt out the chorus – Libya, Libya? Libya! – it's hard not to get a bit emotional. Everyone wanted to shake my hand and welcome me to the country. The atmosphere is utterly different from, say, Egypt, where foreign journalists were deeply mistrusted by the locals – here, everyone in rebel territory loves us. Don't know how long that will last, mind.
- Location:tripoli
I'm in Bruges. I am hungover.
Last night ended a few hours ago with some kind of magnolia-coloured vanilla spirit which according to two girls I was out with had the ‘look and consistency but sadly not the taste’ of semen (whether that means semen should taste more vanilla-y or spirits should taste more seminal I'm not quite sure, well no, I am), and it began, the evening that is, several hours previously with a round of beers whose Brobdingnagian proportions meant that, apart from any alcoholic effects, just lifting them to your mouth provided a considerable triceps workout. They really were massive. I think my LJ membership may have lapsed so I can't add a picture, but here's a link to an illustrative tweet.
When I am drunk I never sleep well, so for the last few hours, instead of recuperating, I have for some reason been tossing and turning in bed while my mind obsesses over the fact that this hotel has extended the usual hotel towel code system to three options, and wondering how this could be elaborated further:
Towels hung up: I will re-use my towels;
Towels on the floor: please replace my towels;
Towels in the bath: please replace my towels and toiletries;
One towel in the bath, one in the shower: I am shocked at the excessive prices of your minibar;
Both towels plaited together: I seem to have lost one of my cufflinks, it might be under the bed, or, failing that, in one of the drawers by the Gideon Bible, so if you could have a good look round that would be helpful;
One towel folded into an origami swan, the other facing Mecca: given the wider progress of society, I'd say that the quality of hotel pornography has not significantly improved since the early 1980s;
Towels unused: beware, I am the director-general of the International Monetary Fund
And so on. If enough of us adopt this, hotel chains will have to start recognising it.
I was about to go on to briefly outline my responses to the whole DSK affair, but now I come to it I really don't want to. There are less depressing and more interesting things I could be thinking about, like what I am going to do and see today in Bruges, or Brugge if you prefer, and whether any midgets will be shot while I'm here. That was a reference to the film In Bruges starring Colin Farrell, by the way, and not a sign of burgeoning psychosis on my part. All right, perhaps a little of both.
I'll tell you what, LJ, it feels nice to be writing sentences again after a very long, stressful period of thinking about little other than work issues. That is why I haven't updated in ages, by the way. I was at Cannes for the film festival where I was working 19-hour days, and then I got called in every day during what should have been a week off to recover thanks to Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged priapic misdemeanours, and then this week there was the G8 in Normandy, so what with one thing and another I've really been looking forward to this weekend in Bruges (French) / Brugge (Flemish). Sadly, alcohol-induced sleeplessness now means I will probably be pretty wiped out today, but fuck it, at least I'm here in the beautiful fairytale city of Bruges, which looks like the city from a Disneyworld, and where so far in my stay no one has plumetted to a gory death from the bell-tower. That was another reference to the film In Bruges starring Colin Farrell, by the way, and not a further sign of burgeoning psychosis on my part.
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I have been making a concerted effort to finish off some of the books I was reading, before starting any new ones. It's working! I've finished four books in the last five days - pretty impressive, I think you'll agree. Even more so considering that one of them was Le Morte Darthur, which I have been reading on and off for about 18 months. Admittedly for me the interest was mainly linguistic - picking up such beautiful words as greking, or finding out what truncheon meant in those days - but the story is fun too, especially in the earlier books. I am now all buzzing with chivalry and full of wild Arthurian theories, but sadly I don't know anyone else who's read Malory so I can't really talk to anyone about it. Oh well, that's what the internet's for.
My next long-term reading project is Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's Essays. Montaigne was a brilliant thinker and Florio was a brilliant writer so you can't go wrong really. I do have - somewhere - Montaigne in the original Middle French, but I think it must be in one of the boxes under the stairs because when I went to check one of the quotes this morning I couldn't find it anywhere. Here is an example of random awesomeness, where he is building an argument that people's fear of death sometimes seems to be superseded by other concerns:
One who was led to the gallowes, desired it might not be thorow such a street, for feare a Merchant should set a Serjant on his backe, for an old debt. Another wished the hang-man not to touch his throat, lest hee should make him swowne with laughing, because he was so ticklish. [...] Everie man hath heard the tale of the Piccard, who being upon the ladder ready to be throwen downe, there was a wench presented unto him, with this offer (as in some cases our law doth sometimes tolerate) that if hee would marrie her, his life should be saved, who after he had a while beheld her, and perceiving that she halted, said hastily, Away, away, good hang-man, make an end of thy business, she limps.
Not much else to report. I caved and joined Twitter. Got a new pair of glasses. Bought an iPhone. Hannah made cakes, a lot. At work, I interviewed our global news director about two staff missing in Libya and asked him what kind of training journalists were given before they were sent on such missions, knowing full well I'd just been sent to Libya with no training at all. He dealt with the question fairly well on camera, but amazingly the very next day I was told by my boss that I'm being sent on a hazardous environments course with the French special forces in June. Awesome!
The weather in Paris is hot and gorgeous, everyone along Boulevard Montmartre is sitting out at pavement cafes drinking fizzy cocktails. On the way back from picking my new glasses up we stopped in at La Marquise and had a couple of coupes of champagne and watched the joggers and passers-by, whom I could now see in slightly higher definition than before. In honour of the season I translated a Nerval poem I like, so here's that.
Warm days already. Dust in flight.
The skies are all of blue, and light.
Long evenings. Walls by fire aroused—
And nothing green. A reddish glimmer
Hardly manages to shimmer
On the great trees’ darkened boughs.
Good weather bores me, dulls my brain,
Coming after days of rain
Which all at once should soon have brought to
Life the Spring in pink and green—
Like some young nymph, all fresh and clean,
Stepping, smiling, from the water.
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