Fertility = wisdom. Apparently

I'd assumed the only sensible reaction to the Jacqui Smith scandal was to point and laugh, but The Daily Mail is taking it very seriously indeed. So seriously that they've called in the big guns:

How very, very sad ... a mother-of-two's verdict on Mr Jacqui Smith's TV porn

Because, see, if she's a mother of two then she must have done it at least once,* and pornography is .... I mean, as a woman with currently or previously functioning ovaries, she would obviously be an expert on .... oh, never mind.

* She could've had twins.

Sexism, sanctioned without a handshake

My citizenship ceremony is booked for this Thursday (much sooner than I expected! I've got to hurry and get some shoes and a haircut before then). When I spoke to the council this morning, we went through a set of questions about my preferences. Did I want an individual or a group ceremony? How many guests did I want to invite? Did I want to take an oath (which mentions God) or an affirmation (which doesn't)? Then came a question that brought me up short:

"Are you happy to shake hands when you receive your certificate?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"

It seems that certain people object, for religious or cultural reasons, to touching someone of the opposite sex who isn't related to them, and the citizenship ceremony has been designed to accommodate them.

I was taken aback by this. The British government has recently been making a lot of noise about ensuring that immigrants embrace "British values". Indeed, the "Life in the UK" test that I had to take in order to apply for citizenship is designed to check people's understanding of these values. Although I was naturally suspicious about the motives behind the test, I found the study guide reassuring. It didn't insist on conformity in dress, diet or religion; in fact, it emphasised the UK's cultural diversity and history of immigration. Instead, the focus of the guide was on the UK's democratic system and respect for human rights.

The guide particularly stressed the status of women in the UK. It made clear that they participate fully in British life; that they are not merely considered as sexual objects; that they are not the property of their husbands or fathers; and that men and women can interact in everyday life without its being a clandestine sexual transaction, and without calling the woman's reputation into question.

But it seems that once prospective citizens have regurgitated all this on a test, they are free to continue behaving in ways that fly in the face of these values -- and the British government not only tolerates this, but even alters its official ceremonies to accommodate it.

I don't think the authorities should give people the option of refusing to shake hands during the ceremony. In fact, I'll go even further and say that someone with strong objections to shaking hands with someone of the opposite sex during a formal ceremony should not be taking British citizenship. I'm well aware that this could get me called a fascist in certain political circles, which leads me to one of the great puzzles of our time: the left, in the name of cultural sensitivity, are prepared to accept misogyny that they surely would not tolerate in any other context.

Japan Car

Those of you who know us in person will not be surprised to learn that it was Chris's idea to go to the Japan Car exhibition at the Science Museum. But even though I think cars are evil* and have made it a goal never to own one, I did enjoy some aspects of the exhibition. It was interesting to see some of the tiny cars that are being produced for the Japanese market and the tricks the designers have come up with to increase the space inside them (for example, eliminating the pillar between the driver's door and the passenger door, or making the dashboard shorter and putting the front passenger seat further up than the driver's seat). They'd also dismantled one of these small vehicles to show the hundreds of parts that went into it.

The part that naturally appealed to me most was the display of environmentally friendly cars, all of which are already on the road in at least some parts of the world. I had my doubts about the electric car and the plug-in hybrid, which from what I understand simply move the pollution elsewhere, but I was more impressed by Honda's hydrogen-powered car, the FCX Clarity. Of course, since the exhibition was sponsored by a group of car manufacturers, there was no suggestion that it might be a good idea to use cars less.

Actually, I lied: That wasn't quite the part that appealed to me most. The part that appealed to me most was the bonsai. Yes, the exhibition begins in a room full of bonsai trees. Why? Because bonsai and Japanese manufacturing share the same underlying principle, of course!

That will give you some idea of the unbelievably pretentious tone of the exhibition, as will the video that follows in the next room (we were amused by the comments on YouTube from people complaining that there weren't any actual cars in it). On the walls throughout the show were comments on how the design of the vehicles reflected ancient Japanese principles, and videos from experts (such as a "brain scientist") describing the more or less tenuous links between cars and their academic fields.

Meanwhile, the descriptions of the cars read like advertising copy; I was particularly disturbed by the blurb for the Toyota bB, which seemed obliquely to suggest that it was a good car to have sex in. Maybe all this sounded better in the original Japanese.

*Except the old Mini and maybe the Nissan Figaro. They're too cute to be evil.

There's either something wrong with me or with everyone else

Yesterday afternoon the sun broke through a heavy downpour.

Colleague in the middle of the office, to one by the window: "Can you see a rainbow?"

Colleague by the window: "Look for rainbows! How old do you think I am, 5?"

Shostakovich and orang utans: Together at last

Huge excitement this morning when a post by George Morison alerted me to the discovery of part of a previously unknown opera score by Shostakovich. It seems the only news coverage of this -- or the only coverage available online, anyway -- is an article in the Québécois newspaper Le Devoir. For those whose French is as rusty as mine, and who don't feel like digging out their dictionaries, I've done a rough translation:

Large fragments of a satirical opera, Orango, which Shostakovich composed in 1932 -- a project of which no one, or almost no one, had knowledge -- have been found in Moscow. The English musicologist Gerard McBurney is in the process of constructing a performable score of this fable.

One shudders to think what the project Orango could have led to for Shostakovich. What would have happened to him during the famous Stalinist purges of 1937? The world would without doubt have prematurely lost one of the major composers of the 20th century ....

For the subject of the project Orango -- a satirical opera in the form of a futurist fable, begun in 1932 -- is one of concentrated vitriol.

An ape as head of state

The libretto was written by the writer Alexei Tolstoy and the journalist Alexander Starchakov. Alexei Tolstoï (1883-1945),nicknamed "the Red Count", was a writer known for his works of science fiction. Anti-Bolshevik, taking refuge in Germany and then France, he returned to his country in 1923 and was converted to Stalinism, even becoming a deputy. Alexander Starchakov (1892-1938) was a journalist, literary critic, and victim, himself, of the purges.

Here is the story. Orango is a "biomorph", the most advanced product of Soviet science, half-man, half-ape (hence his name). In Act 1, that which is the object of the rediscovered scores, Orango is exhibited, provoking the dazzlement of the Soviet people and the stupefaction of the Westerners. In spite of his recent conception, Orango is already, in the midst of society, an influential journalist and an orator of the first order, even though his discourses are sometimes interrupted by primitive cries.

The archivist Olga Digonskaya, who discovered the fragments in Shostakovich's archives in 2006, has more recently found in the archives of the Tolstoy family the complete libretto of this political lampoon. O horrors: the project was an opera in three acts, in which Orango would have ended up becoming secretary general of the Communist Party! One can legitimately imagine that Shostakovich, unlike Starchakov, had a narrow escape. For it was truly not the hour or the place for political lampoons ...

One has, during the last 20 years, thanks to the notebooks of Lyubov Shaporina, the wife of the composer Yuri Shaporin, a clearer view of what one might call Shostakovich's "artistic dissidence in filigree", for example in his Fifth Symphony (1937). The abandonment of the project at great risk, according to Olga Digonskaya, was justified by the fact that the genetic biologist, object of the authors' sarcasm, had been arrested. Orango became "pointless", and the Bolshoi Theatre's commission, made in 1931, had been annulled.

Shostakovich and the 1930s

The 1930s were a fertile period in Shostakovich's career. From 1931 he composed his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk contemporaneously with his Fourth Symphony. At the beginning of the 1930s, Shostakovich was impatient to devote himself to the composition of a new stage project following the success of his first opera, The Nose (1928-29). Orango registered well in the satirical vein of The Nose. This era was also that of the music for cinema and theatre and of the ballet The Bolt.

The rediscovery of Orango was not anticipated, for the literature so far had not put forward anything but rumours of intentions surrounding such a project. Now the discovery of Olga Digonskaya is that of an unorchestrated score (the music is notated on the piano) of the first act in its entirety.

The novelty is therefore to learn that it became much more than a theoretical project: a composition well begun before being abandoned. One suspects also that Shostakovich was not ready, after having suffered the thunderbolts of the regime following the creation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, to bring Orango out of its boxes, or to show that he had worked with ardour on such a subject ....

According to our information, part of the music of Orango can be found in other works of the same period, with a relationship between its overture and that of The Bolt, and themes in common with the incidental music for Hamlet. On the other hand, the rediscovered score possesses a true originality in the crowd scenes -- notably a scene of a press conference -- and in all the musical treatment associated with simian heroes. Shostakovich inscribed the word "lampoon" on the first page, a term undoubtedly associated with sardonic and mordant music, with all the sense of absurdity that he knew was displayed during that era.

The first act of Orango contains 45 minutes of music. Gerard McBurney hopes to complete the orchestration by mid-2009. The date of an eventual premiere performance is not yet definite. McBurney is artistic consultant to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; perhaps a satirical score of Shostakovich will be created post-mortem ... in the U.S.!

Turns out I remember more French than I thought. And I'm impressed that Le Devoir chose to cover this story, seemingly alone among all the newspapers of the world. I may have to start reading it regularly.

Coloured hearing (and reading)

In his memoir Speak, Memory, Nabokov famously discusses his "coloured hearing":

Perhaps 'hearing' is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag bag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh,a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation) ....

The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are. To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colors were all wrong. We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes.

I was very excited when I first read this (15 years ago or so) because although my colours are completely different from Nabokov's, I too have always associated letters and their sounds with colours. Unlike Nabokov, I assign colours to diphthongs too, and even to entire words. Often a word will take its colour from its first letter, but that can be altered if there are other strong letters in the word. Thus, the word "too" is a pale yellow-orange, because of the t, but "trouble" is influenced by the dark tan b and becomes a kind of creamy beige. I only do this with the Roman alphabet, despite having studied Hebrew and Greek for several years, but I do assign colours to numbers as well.

Some people with synaesthesia (as this type of association is known) seem inordinately proud of it, forming societies, looking for evidence of famous synaesthetes in history, etc. I've never thought of it as more than a curiosity, but there are times when it intrudes into everyday life: like Nabokov, I know the discomfort of seeing the "wrong" colour assigned to a letter.

At work, at the end of each day (I hope I won't get into trouble for revealing fascinating trade secrets) we sort documents to be scanned into three plastic trays: green for single-page documents, red for multiple-page ones, and yellow for -- I can't remember exactly, I think for valuable items whose originals aren't to be shredded. This makes my head hurt every time. Everyone knows s is yellow and m is green, so shouldn't those colours be used for the single-page and multiple-page documents? I have to stop and think every time, and even so sometimes catch myself putting a letter in the wrong tray.

I guess if it gets worse, I could try and get myself signed off work with synaesthesia. This would no doubt cause Alice Thomson and her fellow hateful right-wing commentators to burst an aorta, so at least I would have done some service to Britain.

I'm a Brit! Well, almost ...

I didn't want to post anything about it until I knew the outcome, but about six weeks ago I sent off my application for British citizenship. Since the UK Border Agency's web site said that applications could take up to seven months to be decided, I settled back not expecting to hear anything till September or so.

On Friday I got a card through the door saying a courier had tried to deliver something. Assuming it was my new bank card or something equally dull, I rearranged delivery to my work address and forgot about it. But when the parcel arrived today, it turned out to contain my passport, marriage certificate and other documents I'd submitted ... and a letter saying my application had been approved!

Now I need to attend a ceremony (I should get an invitation in the post by the end of the month) where I will get my citizenship certificate and, I'm told, a medal. I'll post an account of that when it happens (along with pictures, assuming we're allowed to take them and they aren't too embarrassing), and also fill you in on the story of my citizenship test and application.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with the words of one of my co-workers upon hearing the news: "Well, at least now we know we won't see you on UK Border Force".

Cheryomushki

Our DVD drive did cooperate and we were able to watch Cheryomushki last night. There's no point in my spending much time on the plot, which is utter nonsense, albeit fairly likable nonsense. I'll just observe that the humour alluding to the housing shortage in Moscow (a young husband rejoices when the roof of his building collapses, because it means that he and his bride are now classified as "in urgent need" and will finally be given a flat together) is probably as close to biting satire as Soviet filmmakers of that era were allowed to get. (There are also corrupt bureaucrats in the film, but they are naturally punished as soon as the true Communists in the party become aware of their deeds.) Also, in one of the many dream sequences, it was bizarre to see dancers swooning over the seemingly unattainable object of their desire: a hideous Soviet apartment block.

Shostakovich was not happy with the music for Cheryomushki (which originally appeared as a stage operetta under the title Moscow, Cheryomushki), considering it and much of his other light music to be hackwork that he was forced to undertake through financial or political necessity. In 1958 he wrote to Isaak Glikman, who would later serve as consulting editor on the film:

I am behaving very properly and attending rehearsals of my operetta. I am burning with shame. If you have any thoughts of coming to the first night, I advise you to think again. It is not worth spending time to feast your eyes and ears on my disgrace. Boring, unimaginative, stupid.

It's true that most of the music is fairly forgettable, but there are a couple of charming pieces, such as Lidochka's song near the beginning (where she reflects that the many things she learned in school haven't taught her to love), and the humorous exchange between the tenants expecting their keys and the jobsworth bureaucrat who keeps them waiting.

Neighbours, avian and human

We went for a walk today to enjoy the spring weather and saw a robin singing in the same tree where we saw one before. This time his rival was audibly closer to him, and his singing was accordingly louder and more agitated. As I listened to the exchange, I realised that he kept repeating the last few phrases his rival had sung and then following them with his own song, almost as if he were mocking the other bird and adding a sarcastic rejoinder. As far as I could tell, his rival didn't seem to be doing the same to him. Has anyone else heard of this?

On to another topic altogether. As I may have mentioned, I usually exercise by skipping rope in the living room. It may not be glamorous, but it's cheap and effective, and I was happy with it until this weekend, when we had an embarrassing visit from our downstairs neighbour who said that our living room is directly over his young sons' bedroom (apparently their flat is back to front compared with ours, which I hadn't realised) and the noise was keeping them awake. It's awkward because there isn't really anywhere else in the flat where I could do it, and work and other tasks mean it's hard to find time for it except early in the mornings or relatively late in the evenings, when the children have already gone to bed.

So now I've bought the thickest exercise mat I could find and am just hoping that this solves the problem. As far as I can hear, it certainly seems to have greatly reduced the noise, but I won't know for sure unless the neighbours complain again. The joys of apartment life ....

Incapable

I'm used to newspaper columns that sound like someone rambling in the pub, but in her piece for yesterday's Times, Alice Thomson earns extra points by forgetting what she was talking about halfway through. Part of her column seems to have been written in happier economic times to make the (in itself admirable) point that immigration is not to blame for unemployment. Thomson observes that migrant workers do many unpleasant and low-paid jobs that natives are unwilling to do, while there are nearly 8 million British people who (in her view) cannot be bothered to work and choose to live off the taxpayer. But she then undermines her own argument by admitting that 1) such "economically inactive" Brits don't appear in the unemployment figures, and 2) since the downturn, plenty of willing workers have found themselves jobless too. (And at the same time, migrants have been going home as the work dries up, so it's hard to see how they're relevant to this at all.) In fact, the whole piece is an excuse for a Daily Mail-ish outpouring of resentment against the real or imagined "dole cheats" who rob the hardworking British public.

Thomson starts by citing "case histories" (of the type Private Eye likes to refer to as "Mr and Mrs Madeupname") of two recently-unemployed men who work hard at household tasks all day (including making a "three-course breakfast", whatever that is) despite not having jobs to go to. She then contrasts them with the Chawners, the family of a losing X-Factor contestant, who allegedly claim to be too obese to work (guess they've had their share of three-course breakfasts, too) and "watch television all day living off their £22,000 benefits". Since the Department of Work and Pensions does not release details of individuals' benefits, I assume Thomson got this information from one of the tabloids, the type that Times subscribers are too snobbish to read, but whose tawdry stories they will devour when they are repackaged for them by a "respectable" newspaper. Personally, I have my doubts: at work I frequently have to review the budgets of people who are living on benefits, and I think it would be very unusual for any of the various types of disability benefit to amount to £22000 per year, even for a household of four claimants.

It's true that the disability benefits system needs reforming. I see many people who, while they may no longer be able to do the work they did before becoming ill, would be able to do some type of work if they got help with the necessary training. There are others who might even have been able to continue in their former work if their employers had tried harder to accommodate their disabilities (as they are legally supposed to do). And yes, there are some who don't want to work and use their condition as an excuse. I have no idea how many of those there are, but then neither does Alice Thomson.

She goes on to say:

In fact, nearly eight million people of working age in Britain have been “economically inactive” for the past few years. More than 2.5 million of them are on incapacity benefit - of these 2,130 people are too “fat” to work; 1,100 can't work because they have trouble getting to sleep; 4,000 get headaches; 380 are confined to the sofa by haemorrhoids; 3,000 are kept at home by gout; and half a million are too depressed to get a job.

I am almost forced to admire this passage, which contains just enough specificity to give readers something to wrap their hate around, but is vague about factors that are important in interpreting the figures correctly. I can't find the statistics Thomson relied on, but I suspect the 1100 claimants who "have trouble getting to sleep" include those with any type of sleep disorder -- some of which, such as narcolepsy, could indeed render a person unemployable. Thomson also lets the reader assume that all 2.5 million of these people are spending decades in front of the television, when in fact Employment and Support Allowance (which replaced Incapacity Benefit last year) can also be paid during relatively short-term illnesses. A minute with Google would have taught her that haemorrhoids sometimes require surgery which takes several weeks to fully recover from. If a person is self-employed or works as a contractor, or if their employer has found some way to weasel out of sick pay, they might well need to claim benefits during that time.

I don't imagine that someone as self-satisfied as Thomson has been troubled much by melancholy, so let me enlighten her: It is possible to be "too depressed to get a job". It is possible to be too depressed to put out your hand and turn a light switch. She is correct in thinking that severely depressed people don't want to work. Many of them don't want to take their next breath. That's the nature of the disease, and Thomson wouldn't have had to look hard for evidence that it can be not only crippling, but fatal.

Those half a million depressed claimants do show up failings in the system. Many of them are kept on medications (which have been shown to be not much more effective than placebos) and benefits simply because these are relatively cheap and quick options. Thanks to the severe underfunding of mental health services, NHS patients can wait months for talking therapy or find that it isn't available at all. Overworked GPs don't have time to supervise lifestyle changes that might improve their condition. Kindness and emotional support from others can help, but as Thomson's remarks show, those can be in short supply. Something clearly needs to change, but telling people with depression to snap out of it and get to work accomplishes nothing except giving bitter people a way to vent their spite.

I suspect that if Thomson ever found herself to ill to do her job, her attitude toward "layabouts" on benefit would quickly change. But then, it's not like she works very hard anyway.

My life in disguise

Since I joined Facebook I've had lots of "friend" requests from people back in my hometown. I have to admit that I don't always remember precisely who these people are, but in a town as small as Philippi if someone says that they know me then they probably do, so I usually accept.

I'm not sure how much my "friends" actually get out of my presence on Facebook, since these days most of my activity there consists of the feeds from my Google Reader and last.fm accounts. But the latter recently led to an interesting exchange. After I'd added several more Shostakovich pieces to my loved tracks, someone from Philippi whose name I vaguely recognised popped up and said, "I can't believe you're the same girl who didn't like to listen to music!"

This puzzled me, because although I've listened to different music at different times in my life, there's never been a time when I didn't listen to it at all. So I politely suggested to this "friend" that he might have the wrong person. But eventually we pieced things together. My correspondent had been the music appreciation teacher at my high school. On a day I'd forgotten until he mentioned it, he'd asked all of us what sort of music we listened to at home. I knew from experience the torment that awaited if the other kids heard I liked Chopin, Frank Zappa or Robert Johnson, but I could not convincingly lie and say I listened to the same music they did (I can't even remember what that was). So I said I listened to nothing at all, and the teacher believed it for 20 years.

Three things impressed me about this exchange. The first is how little teachers know of what goes on among their pupils and the way social pressure can affect how they answer a question. The second was how a lie I had thrown out as a temporary survival strategy had gone on to form someone's entire picture of me. I shouldn't really have been surprised that that could happen, but it was strange to see it play out in real life.

Thirdly, I was reminded how glad I am that those days are over. I no longer have to care if people think I'm strange for listening to Shostakovich, Souad Massi or Flanders & Swann. In fact, I've discovered a social advantage to having slightly unusual* musical tastes: When I meet someone who likes the same music I do, I feel a genuine connection to them, as if I'd discovered a kindred spirit. Of course, now I have to contend with music snobs and show-offs, but that's a topic for another post ....

* I know there are some circles where listening to Shostakovich isn't unusual at all, and of course everyone in Algeria has heard of Souad Massi -- but among the people I normally associate with, it's not common to like them. Flanders & Swann fans are undeniably an eccentric bunch, though. I've spent time hanging out with a crowd of them and I know.

Reports of my death have been greatly profitable

Just when I thought the Jade Goody affair couldn't get any more tasteless, the celebrity magazine OK! has come out with a special memorial issue devoted to "Jade Goody 1981-2009." I wonder if she has to return the money if she doesn't die while it's on the newsstands.

Meanwhile, the front page of yesterday's Evening Standard had a paparazzi shot of one of the actress Natasha Richardson's relatives going to visit her in hospital, with the caption "Farewell to Natasha." Richardson, though gravely injured, was still alive when the paper came out and would live for about eight hours afterward. To stake out someone's hospital room at such a time is despicable enough. But predicting their imminent death as fact, when their family have said nothing to support such a prediction, is low even for the tabloids. At the very least, the Standard could have taken the "Brave [though comatose] Natasha fights for life" line.

Stranded in Cairo

I've finished Palace Walk and started Palace of Desire, and am starting to feel let down. So far the second book of the trilogy seems very much like more of the same, with the characters placed in new situations but with no real development. I'm beginning to see why Steve at Language Hat was disappointed in the Cairo Trilogy, describing it as "run-of-the-mill family saga, without anything much in the way of insight into humanity."

Then there's Mahfouz's style. I thought I noticed it becoming gradually more mannered over the course of Palace Walk (though I wasn't sure whether to blame him or the translator), and now it's even more so. Kamal's florid six-page soliloquy on "my hope and my despair ... my destiny and my doom" (in other words, his crush) was painful to get through. Even given that Kamal is clearly meant to be Mahfouz's alter ego, it seems excessive to spend that much space and metaphor on the unexceptional feelings of a teenage boy in love.

There have been two passages in the second book that have caught my interest, though. Amina's meditation on her grief for her dead son was genuinely moving. And I was intrigued by a throwaway line from a conversation between the grandchildren:

Abd al-Muni'm: "I'm going to religious kindergarten. What about all of you?"

Ridwan: "I've memorized 'Praise to God ...'"

Abd al-Muni'm: "Praise to God for lamps and meatballs."

Ridwan: "For shame! You're a heathen."

Abd al-Muni'm: "That's what the teacher's assistant chants when he's walking in the street."

Na'ima: "We've told you a thousand times not to repeat it."

This, I assume, would be the Arabic equivalent of "On top of spaghetti" or "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school." It would be interesting to know how the original pun works.

I'm nearly halfway through the single-volume trilogy, so I'll probably finish it. But I still have over 700 pages to go, and some of the other books on my shelves are calling to me. A few weeks ago I bought a copy of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, prompted by my enjoyment of The Emigrants and by a special all-Sebald issue (in PDF format) of Five Dials that George Morison kindly linked to. Then there are all the books I got for Christmas, and some others I've picked up here and there -- after a long period of refusing to buy new books while I had unread ones at home, my resolve seems to have weakened.

I usually make myself read at least a tenth of a book before giving up on it -- more if it's an author I've liked in the past, or if it's something I feel I ought to have read for some reason. But as I get older I find I have less patience with books I don't enjoy.

Former poet

The Economist's review of Iain Sinclair's new book about Hackney contains a phrase I'd never heard before:

Iain Sinclair, a former poet, has gained a reputation as the country’s leading proponent of “psychogeography” ...

Someone who used to work for a bank, and no longer does, is a former banker. But what makes someone a "former poet"? Even if they've written no poetry for a long time, when do they cross the line between "dormant" and "former"? Has Sinclair used this term to describe himself, or is this just the reviewer's way of saying that he hasn't published any poetry for a while? Whatever reasoning lies behind the phrase, the issues it opens up seem a lot more interesting to me than Sinclair's book.

And if it's no good, they can say, "The Nose blows"

It may be the opera that launched a thousand stupid headlines, but I'm pleased to see that Shostakovich's Nose is getting some outings on the American stage. First there was Opera Boston's production earlier this month, and now it seems the Metropolitan Opera will be performing it in New York in 2010; The New York Times recently had an interesting article about the South African artist William Kentridge's set designs for that production. Perhaps we can arrange a Stateside trip next year to coincide with the Met's performance -- or maybe this is a sign that London is due for its own Nose.

Back in December I raved about Gennady Rozhdestvensky's recording of The Nose, and if anything I've only come to like it better since then. I also said I hoped it would help me to appreciate Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and I think it has done that -- I've been listening to some parts of Lady Macbeth over the past few days and have been enjoying it a lot more than I did on previous listens. Being musically illiterate, I cannot explain why this has happened, but I would advise anyone else who's struggled with Lady Macbeth to give The Nose a try before returning to it.

Two dreams

I.

Feeling ill and anxious, I left work and took the first Tube train to a stop I'd never heard of. This proved to be a large piece of waste ground surrounded by abandoned buildings. I lay down in exhaustion, but after a few minutes became aware of movement around me. I looked up and saw hundreds of baby birds running about, some colourful, some striped, some with the beginnings of crests on their heads. Some I could identify, others I had never seen before.

Then suddenly I saw a cat a few feet away from me, choosing which bird to pounce on. A tiny pink chick ran toward me as if for shelter, but when I put out a hand to shield it it panicked and ran straight toward the cat. I jumped up to chase the cat away, then realised that there were dozens more all over the field. I ran around trying to scare off each one, aware all the time that while I was getting rid of one, the rest would be busy devouring birds.

II.

I came home and found a silvery marmoset in the kitchen cupboard. Unsure what else to do, I gave it some food, then gently bathed it in the sink to get the dust off its fur. I was wondering where it had escaped from and whom I should call to report it when it reached out a tiny paw towards me. I took its hand in mine and we just sat there looking each other in the face.

More information on Holocaust-denying bishops can be found on the Internet

In his sort-of apology for reinstating the Holocaust denier Richard Williamson to the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI claims once again that he didn't know of Williamson's views before lifting the excommunication, and that "I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on." (He also complains, "I was saddened by the fact that even Catholics who, after all, might have had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack me with open hostility." It's crazy how people get it into their heads to do that kind of thing for no reason, isn't it?)

I'm afraid this explanation doesn't reassure me. Surely it's the Pope's job to know about the views and activities of his bishops, particularly those he's considering restoring to the Church after a period of disgrace. It's true that Williamson's excommunication in 1988 was not the result of his anti-Semitism, but of his association with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X; he apparently didn't publicly deny the Holocaust until some time later. (Although I can't imagine Pope John Paul II would have tolerated that either, having devoted so much of his papacy to improving the relationship between Catholics and Jews.) But shouldn't Pope Benedict and his assistants have thoroughly scrutinised all his public actions and statements before deciding to welcome him back? Excommunication is meant to be lifted only if the excommunicated person shows signs of repentance and a change of heart; did no one look for evidence of this?

As for the Internet, it may well be that the Pope doesn't know how to use it (though he's only about a decade older than Chris's granny who does her grocery shopping online every week). But the Vatican has had a web site for ages, complete with online radio broadcasts. Surely there was someone in the vicinity who might have thought to Google Williamson's name.

Pope Benedict asks of the SSPX: "Can we be totally indifferent about a community which has 491 priests, 215 seminarians, 6 seminaries, 88 schools, 2 university-level institutes, 117 religious brothers, 164 religious sisters and thousands of lay faithful? Should we casually let them drift farther from the Church?" My instinctive answer is, "If they're all like Williamson, yes, and good riddance," but I can understand why the Pope, who is charged with being the Church's earthly shepherd, might not see it that way.

But should we casually welcome the SSPX back in if this means infecting the Church with evil concepts like Holocaust denial and embroiling it in international scandal? Just why was Pope Benedict in such a rush? I have a feeling the answer to that question might be very revealing.

(A side note: The New York Times report on the Pope's letter annoyingly but predictably calls it "unprecedented in its ... acknowledgment of papal fallibility." Note to lazy journalists everywhere: "Papal infallibility" doesn't mean what you think it means.)

Mind you, I think the musical died along with Cole Porter

A while ago I saw an ad online for an Broadway musical called Spring Awakening.

"Ha!" I thought, "Those fools have unknowingly given their musical the same title as Frank Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen, the 19th-century German drama about the devastating consequences of teenage sexual repression and ignorance. Won't they be embarrassed when they find out!"

Guess what ...

Yesterday I saw a poster for the new London production. It reminded me that Chris starred in a German-language production of Frühlings Erwachen at university, playing Moritz, who, impressively, delivers a long speech after having shot himself.

Meanwhile, No Rock informs me that, as part of the ongoing campaign to ensure that no nostalgia remains unexploited, plans for a stage musical of Heathers are now under way. All of this leads me to wonder when there was last a West End musical that 1) was based on an original idea, 2) had original music, 3) was not by Andrew Lloyd Webber and 4) was actually any good. Does anyone know?

Cookbook design

When we saw Chris's mum for his birthday, she passed on the presents my brother-in-law had got us for Christmas and for my birthday in December. (This is far from the latest time that Chris has exchanged Christmas presents with his relatives: once his dad's family didn't get round to it for so long that they held a second Christmas dinner in June.)

But these gifts were worth waiting for. One was a DVD of Cheryomushki (Cherry Town), the Soviet musical comedy about (of course) a glorious new housing development, for which Shostakovich composed the music. If we can get our computer's temperamental DVD drive to cooperate, I'll post a review of this soon; if not, then I'll do it when we get a new computer, which hopefully will also be fairly soon.

The other gift was a copy of Arto Der Haroutunian's Vegetarian Dishes from the Middle East. I can't wait to try the fantastic-looking recipes in this book -- maybe I'll start with the Syrian walnut kibbeh or the Israeli avocados in wine.

Der Hartounian himself had a brief but fascinating life, working as a painter, architect and translator as well as a restaurateur and cookbook writer. (So many of the best cookbooks seem to have been produced by men as an offshoot from whatever else they were doing -- Michael Saso's Taoist cookbook is another example. This seems to be less often the case with cookbooks written by women, perhaps because women are more likely to go straight into cookery writing as a career.) His recipes are interspersed with his observations on Middle Eastern cuisine, as well as with proverbs, jokes and literary quotations (I certainly never expected to see Mahmoud Darwish quoted in a cookbook).

My copy of Vegetarian Dishes from the Middle East is a reprint of the 1983 original and is published by Grub Street. I've been very impressed with this publisher's cookbooks, not only because they have a good selection of vegetarian books (including the oft-cited Vegan with a Vengeance), but also because of their design. I have to confess that I have a deep prejudice against cookbooks that look too good -- the huge hardback ones crammed with glossy photographs, often produced by celebrity chefs in time for Christmas. They look like you'd be afraid to spill sauce on them, and there's a reason for that: the designers know that most of these books will be given as gifts and leafed through admiringly, but never used. I'm afraid my attempts to actually cook from some of these books have borne out this theory.

But Grub Street's books are different. They have no photographs -- in fact, no pictures at all except the occasional diagram showing you how to slice tofu or fold phyllo pastry. But the publishers use other elements of design to create a truly beautiful book. The layout, the background and font colours, the typefaces, even the alignment of the ingredients lists produce an effect that is simple and harmonious, but still visually interesting. I find it a pleasure just to sit and look at one of their cookbooks, but the design also works very well for the books' intended purpose. It makes me wonder: Why can't all books look this good?

Kishkish Bey

In Palace Walk, a son scandalises his family by taking his bride to a comedy performance featuring Kishkish Bey:

They were not unfamiliar with that name, which had taken the world by storm. Everyone and his brother were singing the songs about this vaudeville character created by al-Rihani, but all the same he seemed as distant as a legendary hero or the zeppelin, that Satan of the skies. For Yasin to take his wife to see him was an extremely different matter. They might as well have been hauled into court ....

Only Kamal [the youngest son] followed the heated discussion with alert silence. He could not grasp the secret that had turned Kishkish Bey into a reprehensible crime meriting all this discussion and distress. Was not Kishkish the model for the little doll sold in the markets with a body that jumped around playfully, a laughing face with a thick beard, a loose gown, and a conical turban? Was he not the figure to whom those jolly songs were ascribed? He had memorized some of them to sing with his friend Fuad, who was the son of Jamil al-Hamzawi, the assistant to Kamal's father. Why were they attacking this pleasant character who was linked in Kamal's imagination with fun and mirth?

I wondered if Kishkish Bey had really existed or was Mahfouz's invention, so I Googled the name and found out he was real -- or rather, a real fictional character, created by "the father of Egyptian comedy", Naguib el-Rihani. Kishkish was the mayor of a provincial village, transplanted to Cairo and overwhelmed by city life. Through characters like him, el-Rihani led a shift in Egyptian stage comedy from nonsense and wordplay to more satirical humour. His popularity in Cairo was pretty much as Mahfouz describes; except that he was working only on the stage at this point, I suppose it would have been like going to see Charlie Chaplin.

After World War I, el-Rihani began a successful film career that lasted until his death in 1949. Although unknown in the English-speaking world, he apparently achieved some fame in Latin America. He remains one of the best-known entertainers in Egyptian history, despite the claim of some nationalists that his Christian upbringing and Kurdish blood made him not Egyptian enough.

I found a collection of clips from his films on YouTube (oddly, although the clips are interspersed with English captions, none of the dialogue is subtitled):



It occurs to me that before the Internet, I could quite possibly have had to wait for someone to bring out an annotated edition of The Cairo Trilogy before learning that the Kishkish Bey episode was based on real life.

Now if only it were powdered and sold in a green can

When I became a vegetarian, I didn't have any trouble cutting out meat. The difficulty came in trying to avoid other foods made with slaughter byproducts. Many cheeses are made with animal rennet (from the lining of a calf's stomach), and so are some brands of milk chocolate. Meanwhile, alcoholic drinks are frequently clarified with isinglass (from the swim bladders of fish) or gelatin.

Fortunately, pure dark chocolate and real champagne are always veggie-friendly, which is proof God likes vegetarians best. Most other products can be found in both vegetarian and non-vegetarian forms; in Britain, products suitable for vegetarians are usually labelled as such, so one just needs to take extra care when shopping.

The one stumbling block has been Parmesan cheese. In Europe, this cheese is never, ever vegetarian. The names "Parmesan" and "Parmigiano-Reggiano" are Protected Designations of Origin under EU law, meaning that any cheese sold under either of these names must be made within a certain region and by a certain process. And that process includes a dead baby cow. There's no way around it.

Annoyingly, few non-vegetarians seem to be aware of this, and you frequently see dishes laden with Parmesan being served by well-meaning restaurants whose chefs don't realise there's more to vegetarian cooking than leaving out the meat. Parmesan is called for as an ingredient in "vegetarian" cookbooks so often that I've begun subjecting such books to the "Parmesan cheese test" in the shop: I flick through the pages, and if the P-word jumps out at me, I put the book back on the shelf.

We do have a few favourite recipes calling for Parmesan that we'd like to continue making, but finding substitutes has been a problem. We used to be able to get a vegetarian equivalent of Parmesan called Vegetalia, but that's disappeared from shelves recently. So I've taken to ordering any type of vegetarian cheese I haven't tried before, hoping to find something that will work. I found some very nice cheeses that way, but nothing that was comparable in taste or texture.

Until last week, when I bought a new cheese called Cornish Quartz. This is actually a very mature Cheddar, but it has a sharp, salty taste quite similar to Parmesan and grates in much the same way. The real test will come when Chris uses it to make pesto, but I put it in the cheese pasta I made for his birthday yesterday and it worked extremely well.

Closer investigation reveals that Cornish Quartz is a new cheese being sold exclusively by Waitrose. Perhaps I'll write them a fan letter before this product, too, vanishes from the market ...

Happy birthday, Chris

Today is Chris's birthday, and as I won't have time to post anything detailed, I'll refer you to a couple of excellent reviews he's put on his own blogs recently: one from Now That's What I Call a Challenge and one from The Hit Parade. It's a lot harder to write an interesting positive review than an interesting negative one, and I think he's done very well in both cases.

And in the best British anorak tradition, here's the video to the song that was No. 1 when he was born. He was just a couple of days away from being born while Abba were at the top of the charts -- those of you who know him can guess that that would have affected him more than any star sign.

Shah 'Abbas

When I went to the British Museum's new exhibition about 16th-17th century Iran, I didn't expect to spend a large chunk of the time looking at Chinese porcelain. But Chinese ware was extremely popular in Persia during the reign of Shah 'Abbas I, and the shah donated much of his personal collection to shrines; a room of the exhibition is filled with representative objects. Even more interesting were the pieces made by Iranian potters that combined Chinese techniques with native motifs (an example can be seen here). While simpler than their Chinese counterparts (which, as I've said before, always seem to be inhabited), these dishes were austerely beautiful.

The unspoken theme of the exhibition, in fact, was the connection of different cultures. Many of the objects on display owed their existence to Persia's trade and diplomatic links with Asia and Europe. In addition to the ceramics, there were the beautiful silks and carpets made by Iranian craftsmen for export; Mughal miniatures showing a meeting between Shah 'Abbas and the Indian ambassador Khan Alam; and the belongings of Sir Robert Sherley, an Englishman who went to Persia in 1598 and became the Shah's ambassador to several European courts.

What the exhibition doesn't contain much of is Shah 'Abbas himself -- which perhaps is just as well, since he seems to have been a terrible person, who massacred subjects he suspected of sympathising with the Turks and killed many potential rivals, including his own son. However, unlike previous exhibition subjects like Hadrian and Qin Shi Huang, he didn't promote a cult of personality: there were no public portraits or statues of him, and his image didn't appear on coins. His story is therefore mainly told through the products of his empire.

My main criticism of the exhibition is the way it addressed 'Abbas's brutal imposition of his preferred version of Shi'ism on Iran. We were told that by "suppressing extreme elements of Sufism", he had brought "unity", "order" and even "justice" to his country. I found it chilling to see the violent restriction of religious freedom described this way by a mainstream institution in a Western democracy. Did the British Museum have to take this line in order to get rare artifacts from Iran?

Writing in books

Because I buy many of my books secondhand, I sometimes find marginal notes in them from the previous owners. Writing in books is a contentious topic, with some people finding it almost sacrilegious and others unable to imagine reading properly without it. For me, it depends very much on the book. There are some it would never occur to me to annotate and others that seem to cry out for it.

I can usually ignore other people's notes, but there have been occasions when they have added a whole new dimension to my reading. I remember buying a volume of Keats's complete poems in a charity shop a few years ago. Whoever had owned it before me had spent a long time with it: it was hard to find a page without annotations. The reader was mainly concerned with figuring out what made the poems work. "V. economical, vivid and practical," they had written in "The Eve of St Agnes", next to the phrase "Buttressed from moonlight." A few stanzas on, "Physical description with nothing behind it becomes cloying -- this is different." By one passage from "Endymion" was the simple word "lovely"; by another, a reminder to self -- "Buy classical dictionary".

But it was a different type of note that interested me most. "A BAD ONE", my predecessor had written firmly next to "On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour". By a reference to Elysium in "Endymion" was the note "All balls, Elysium being only for warriors." The lines "And let his spirit, like a demon-mole/Work through the clayey soil" (in "Isabella: or the Pot of Basil") prompted a pencilled "Oh dear!" And on the next page, when Keats describes a woman's breasts as "Those dainties made to still an infant's cries", was the comment "O GOD." (That last one made me think the previous owner may have been female.)

I had been taught to read the great authors in an attitude of reverence. Here was something entirely different: the Great Poet brought to the level of an old friend or little brother -- loved but not immune from teasing, wrestling, having his hair tousled. I realised that this way of engaging with an author was not only more honest (if you've ever struggled with writing poetry yourself, it can be comforting to read the complete works of your favourite poet: even the greatest can produce very bad stuff at times), but fuller and more meaningful.

When I became seriously interested in Hopkins I knew what I needed to do. My first copy of the Complete Poems is as full of marginalia as the Keats. I wasn't afraid to admit it when I disliked a poem or line, and I think as a result I appreciate the ones I do like far more. Later on, I decided I also wanted a clean copy of Hopkins' works and sought out a new copy of the OUP collection -- the only book I own more than one of.

"Spring and Fall" line by line

I mentioned yesterday how Hopkins' "Spring and Fall" came back to me years after I had first memorised it. I realised shortly afterwards that despite being able to recite it, I'd never thoroughly explored its meaning. Hopkins, even more than other poets, particularly rewards close reading: lines which at first seemed very simple turn out to be anything but, while phrases that initially seemed barely comprehensible yield up their meaning and delight me with their use of language.

I thought I'd take another look at "Spring and Fall" and share with you some of the thoughts that have occurred to me. I know that to more educated readers than I much of my interpretation will seem painfully obvious, but I hope I may at least introduce some new readers to this wonderful poem.

Let's start with the title. To an American reader, there's nothing particularly remarkable about it: the names of two seasons, with a fairly obvious pun on their other meanings as verbs. In Hopkins' own country, though, it's a little more complicated. The word "fall" isn't used to mean "autumn" in British English, or at least it hasn't been in recent memory. While Hopkins was obviously conscious of this meaning, he must have learned it as an archaism or a regional term (he had a keen interest in dialects), or possibly he heard about the American usage. This is characteristic of Hopkins' language: rarely does he intend a word to convey only one meaning -- all possible senses, however obscure, must be taken into account.

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Both "Margaret" (the "young child" mentioned in the subtitle) and "Goldengrove" are completely fictional, apparently.

Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

The punctuation in Hopkins' poetry can vary from edition to edition. Because almost none of his poetry was published in his lifetime, editors have had to work with his handwritten manuscripts and sometimes make their own judgements about how to punctuate it. Some editions omit the comma right after "leaves," so that the line reads, "Leaves like the things of man, you ..."

The question is whether "like the things of man" describes the leaves or the way in which the girl cares for them. The first fits our expectations better, because it's a conventional image -- human endeavours as ephemeral as the leaves that die in autumn -- but for that very reason it seems trite and therefore unHopkinsian.

With the second interpretation, the question takes on a sarcastic tinge: "Are you still so young and naive as to care about nature? Don't you know your head is supposed to be full of man-made concerns?" The "can you?" at the end of the couplet reinforces this sense for me. There's probably a technical term for it that I don't know, but this type of question -- a declarative sentence followed by "do you?"/"have you?"/etc. -- is often used to convey sarcasm in British English. ("I'm going to drive to the shops on Thursday." "Got a crystal ball, have you? How do you know you'll pass your driving test on Wednesday?")

Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder

"Ah" might seem like a mere space-filler, but if one assumes that the preceding lines were said in a slightly mocking spirit, it might signal a softening of the narrator's tone.

This is probably a result of my being thick, rather than of any inherent difficulty with the line, but for a long time I read "It will come to such sights colder" without really comprehending it. I can see now that it means "Your heart will no longer be affected by sights like this."

By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

According to one of Hopkins' letters, "wanwood" is meant to be a noun and "leafmeal" an adjective. "Wanwood" is the pale detritus on the forest floor; "leafmeal" (a coinage based on "piecemeal") refers to the way the leaves lie in a pattern, overlapping one another.

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Some editions italicise "will" in this line. I'm not sure whether I like that or not.

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

"Springs", of course, has a double meaning here: the season, and the sources of sorrow. Whether the girl weeps over the leaves falling in autumn or over more grown-up concerns (perhaps the pangs of love traditionally associated with spring), her pain will have the same ultimate cause.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

The line "Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed" is another I initially read without understanding, partly because Hopkins unconventionally writes "nor ... nor" rather than "neither ... nor", and partly because he splits up the verb"had expressed". The meaning seems to be, "No one has explained, nor has any mind been able to comprehend, what the heart senses instinctively."

I don't think the last couplet needs further comment:

It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Books that found me

There was an unabridged Webster's dictionary at the back of my fifth-grade classroom. It was the largest book any of us had ever seen, and children used to approach it with a certain awe -- either (depending on the child and the day) to look for words to impress the teacher with, or to look up obscenities (which the publishers had demurely refused to include) or any vaguely sexual terms we could think of.

For me it also served a different purpose. I would spend my spare moments browsing through it, marvelling at its sheer wealth of words and the glimpses into many different worlds that they provided. I was at the age when children are obsessed with knights and castles, and I remember being particularly impressed by the heraldic terms.

I knew I wouldn't be in that classroom forever (I was acutely conscious at this time of my childhood passing away), so I asked my parents for my own copy of the dictionary. And it duly appeared on my 11th birthday, a parcel almost too big to fit in my lap. From then on I could continue my browsing at home. Even after I'd realised that there is no such thing as an "unabridged" dictionary, and that mine was in many ways priggish and out of date, I still spent many spare hours looking through it, both for the knowledge and for the memories it contained.

When I emigrated to Britain, I had to leave the dictionary behind -- it was far too bulky to take across the Atlantic. For some reason, this bothered me more than any of the other possessions I'd abandoned. A few months after I moved, I was trudging down a street in Harrow, feeling empty and displaced, and decided to pop into a charity shop to distract myself. And there it was: with a red cover instead of blue, and with additional sections of colour plates ("Coelentrates of the World"; "The Automobile Through History", concluding with a streamlined "Car of the Future"), but otherwise the same dictionary I had had for all those years. I don't know how an American school dictionary came to be in a charity shop in a North London suburb, but I lugged it home with a joyful fervour, and afterwards began to feel that I had a place here.

That isn't the only time I've made an unexpected find in a charity shop. 99% of the time they have the same selection of creased mystery novels and faded cookbooks, but every now and then a book has appeared that was exactly what I needed at that particular moment. One of the most significant occasions was when I found the OUP edition of Hopkins' complete poems. A couple of days beforehand, his poem "Spring and Fall: to a Young Child" had popped into my head for some reason, and to my surprise I'd realised that I could recite it by heart. In my late teens I'd had bad insomnia and used to pass the time by memorising poetry -- mainly Keats, but apparently this one had slipped in somehow. I hadn't read much else by Hopkins, but suddenly felt a powerful need to do so. I didn't appreciate just how lucky I was when the Complete Poems turned up -- it's a bit elusive, with most stores stocking only unsatisfactory "selections." It turned out to be one of those books that opened a window I hadn't even known existed.

(Speaking of Keats, another book that I found, just a few days after first hearing about it and forming a desire to read it, was Christopher Ricks' Keats and Embarrassment. While I can't say it had a profound effect on me, it did help me recognise the importance of embarrassment to human psychology, something I hadn't properly thought about before.)

Nomenclature

Chris and I both read a lot of blogs, and (though I have no idea how common this is among couples) we also tend to discuss the blogs we read with each other. When doing so, our long-established habit is to refer to individual bloggers (at least, those we haven't met personally) by the same name as their blogs. "Sweeping the Nation wants guests to write about albums from this decade," one of us might say, or "Italian Trivia had another run-in with her crazy neighbours." I can't remember when or why we started doing it, but it's a convenient shorthand.

It does have two major drawbacks, though. The first is the risk that a stranger will overhear me saying something like, "The Left-Handed Rabbit can tolerate only plain bagels," and call MI5. The second is that when someone changes the name of their blog -- as George Morison recently did, from Walls of Byzantium to Electric Chair Blues* -- I no longer know how to refer to them. If this becomes a trend I may have to adopt drastic measures, such as calling people by their actual names, or finding a normal topic of conversation.

*Update: George has now changed his blog's name again, to High Windows, and moved to a new address here. Fortunately, he's taken the content from the old blog to his new site.

Mahfouz and music

In Palace Walk, the first book of the Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz describes a performance by a mediocre singer:

... al-Sayyid Ahmad expected to hear some instrumental solos and vocal improvisations as usual, but Zubayda capped the ending with one of her resounding laughs to demonstrate her pleasure and amazement. She began to congratulate the new members of the troupe jokingly and asked them what they would like to hear. Al-Sayyid Ahmad was secretly distressed and momentarily depressed, since his passion for singing was intense. Few of those around him noticed anything. Then he realized that Zubayda, like most others of her profession, including the famous Bamba Kashar herself, was not capable of doing solo improvisations. He hoped she would pick a light ditty of the kind sung to the ladies at a wedding party. He would prefer that to having her attempt a virtuoso piece and fail to get it right.

One thing I like about this novel is the incidental glimpses it gives into Egyptian culture in the early 20th century. I find the passages about music particularly interesting because, while I enjoy listening to Arabic music (and most "Eastern" music, in fact), I really have no idea how to judge or interpret it.

In the scene I quoted, Zubayda the singer is having a party in honour of al-Sayyid Ahmad, the trilogy's patriarch, to celebrate their new relationship -- the latest of many affairs al-Sayyid Ahmad has had with female entertainers. A few chapters on, al-Sayyid Ahmad orders his wife to leave his household for having gone outdoors without his permission.

Zubayda's main desirable characteristic, by the way, is that she's enormously fat. Mahfouz describes her rolls of flesh, her laboured movements, and the way she overflows her chair in a way clearly intended to convey her allure to his male readers. It lends support to the idea that people desire what they've been taught they should desire.

I was a stranger and you made me welcome

This Easter will mark the eighth anniversary of my baptism in the Catholic Church. Although my journey there lasted until I was 26, I suppose it began when I was around 9. That summer there was a Catholic version of Vacation Bible School in the community centre. I don't recall how this came to be held in our aggressively Protestant town, or what led to my attending. Although my father was raised a Catholic, neither of my parents practiced any religion during most of my childhood, and they certainly showed little interest in indoctrinating me. Perhaps they just wanted me to have something to do during the school holidays.

The classes were run by nuns, the old-fashioned kind in black habits -- the villains of many a bleak convent-school story, but my memories of them are different. When I came through the door on the first day, one of the sisters (whom I believe may have met me before) cried out in joy and swooped down to enfold me in a vast black embrace.

I was bewildered. Small, shy and bookish, I was a universal target of bullies and spent much of my life engaged in defensive manoeuvres, trying to ward off the next burst of ridicule. This woman was new to town, I thought, and must not know how preposterous it was to greet me in this way. But my heart was nonetheless infected by her warmth.

I didn't learn a great deal of theology at the school -- the main thing I remember the nuns teaching us was to always colour in the same direction to make our crayoned Gospel scenes look neater -- but much later, I thought of that nun when I read the stories of Jesus welcoming the most despised members of society.

Later on, of course, I also learned that not everyone in the Catholic Church was like that nun. I learned that the Church has its share of cold and judgmental people, and I learned about the often objectionable politics practised by the men who have led it through the centuries. But I suppose that for me, the sister's welcome has in some way continued to symbolise the heart of Christianity. It may explain why, at times when my faith has been difficult, a single phrase from Paul's letters has kept me going: "Love is the fulfilment of the law."