After all the excitement of the Poetry Festival, am now off to a series of gatherings of a very different sort: a conference at the British Museum on Peruvian ushnus, the raised platform structures often found in the centre of Inca plazas or on hill tops.
This may seem a slightly esoteric subject, but the ushnus are both at the centre of the Inca world and yet surprisingly little understood. As one of the speakers plaintively noted, the Spanish chroniclers of the time did little to describe them.
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One thing is immediately apparent: Andeanists, like poets and indeed like Incas, tend to celebrate their gatherings with many libations – at a party held by the Peruvian ambassador, the pisco sours were flowing freely and only copious amounts of black coffee provided by the British Museum allowed attendees to focus on the complex astronomical siting of the ushnus, which at sites like Huánaco Pampa are aligned to solstice and equinox risings of the sun.
My own interest comes from work we have carried out at Llactapata, with on-site help from Tom Zuidema (the keynote speaker at this conference), which has buildings which are similarly aligned to the sunrises of both solstices – see The full report on the expedition. There is also a large ushnu-style raised platform structure measuring some 60 feet by 40 feet, enclosed by a five feet high retaining wall – which like almost everything else to do with ushnus needs more investigation, but is the only known ushnu from which Machu Picchu is clearly visible. With an alignment of 110 degrees, the platform is orientated almost dead on the December solstice line for the rising sun. …
I’m both exhausted and exhilarated by the end of proceedings. The final poets’ dinner on Sunday night ends at about two in the morning.
If there has been a noticeable intensity at Aldeburgh compared to other poetry festivals, it derives from one unusual component — no poet is ever invited back.
This isn’t because in some ways they might have failed a quality threshold. A strict policy is in place only to invite those who’ve never read there before. This lends the proceedings an intensity they would not otherwise have. Poets have one shot at getting an Aldeburgh Festival reading right.
The same goes for the organisers. Every year they have to start at the bottom of the mountain and select new participants.
I’m reminded of those Buddhist monks who spend months laboriously making sand mandalas from small grains and then blow them to the wind.
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Sunday 18.00 Don Paterson’s earlier lecture on Frost proves a terrific curtain raiser for the later reading by Marie Howe, as it is noticeable how many of her poems are framed as dialogues rather like Frost’s. The elegy for her missing brother is just one of many fine poems.
She makes a striking figure on stage with her Botticelli hair. Indeed this year’s ‘best poetic hair’ prize is awarded equally between her and the long-locked Matthew Caley. I’d love them to do a shampoo ad double-act together, swinging their impressive tresses as they duetted on a country and western song, or pastoral eclogue. Who says that all poets are bald and need to wear berets?
Bill Manhire is less hirsute but still very effective. He concentrates on those works of his that lend themselves to public performance, with strong rhythm and rhyme. You might think that most poets would follow this obviously sensible line. Or series of lines. But they don’t.
His elegy for Charles Causley is just the first of a string of emotionally intense poems, hypnotically delivered. His voice has an attractive incantatory quality, whether listing his possessions as a small boy on New Zealand’s South Island, or howling at the moon down a lift shaft in Copenhagen.
The perfect choice to close the festival, internationalist, accomplished and passionate as it has been.
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Sunday 14.00 I’ve had 2 cups of 152’s excellent cappuccino and so am ready for the highly caffeinated lecture on Robert Frost by Don Paterson. We are still at warp speed and every word is worth unravelling and playing back at 33 rpm.
The bulk of his lecture is on Frost’s poem ‘West-Running Brook’. While some critics have decried the rhetorical staging of this as a dialogue between husband and wife as clumsy, Don admires what he sees as the resulting subplot of ‘how people in love talk to one another’. Perhaps naturally, given that he has just published his account of Shakespeare’s sonnets, he finds Shakespearean echoes in some lines – like ‘And even substance lapsing unsubstantial’, while also being drawn to Frost’s nihilism and ‘the aphoristic, demotic and plain-speaking nature of his verse which omits the extraneous, leaving itself nowhere to hide’.
He sees Frost’s poetry as ‘an intellectual and emotional provocation to which we are challenged to respond in kind’. The same could be said of Don’s rigorous criticism.
Not quite sure about his pronunciation of ‘contraries’ though. Surely to rhyme with ‘Compare-is’? Readers with New England accents are invited to write in……..
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Sunday am It’s nine o’clock in the morning and I’m trying to move at speed to the White Lion to give my own talk on poetry and travel writing, together with Harry Clifton. Unfortunately the wind is so strong that for every two steps I take, I’m one step back, and there isn’t any music playing.
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‘Fresh fish – anything fresher is still swimming,’ reads the logo on the side of the shack that sells them on the beach. I can’t quite say the same about myself, but at least I haven’t got a hangover, and Maggie at the Poets House has fed me plenty of black coffee and bacon sandwiches, so the brain has started to kick in.
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Have 250 people gathered to hear us? Well not quite. But for early Sunday morning it’s a brave turnout, as Harry says. We talk about how when travelling some experiences seem to lend themselves either to prose or poetry; of how Byron was in some ways an early travel writer, appealing to the stay-at-home British public ( who had to stay at home – it was the middle of the Napoleonic Wars) with his tales of Mediterranean pleasures; of ‘The Odyssey’ as the first travel poem; of the celebration and exhilaration of travel but also of its own concomitant hangover, jet lag:
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Jet Lag Blues
Two o’clock in the morning, punched inside out, jet-lagged from Los Angeles via London, face pressed against
the pillow with unnatural gravity, like a safe-breaker listening for the combination to give,
I feel the ground much closer, almost moving, and want to twist the world’s tectonic
spine, the way a chiropractor snaps a patient’s back, so I no longer lie divided on my own fault line.
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The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival blog is sponsored by Writers’ Centre Norwich,a literature development agency for the East of England running workshops, competitions, events and more. www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk
Saturday 23.30The evening closes in the way all Saturday evenings should close – with a drink and a stand-up comedian, in this case the brilliant Elvis McGonagall, whose tales of love, loss, and David Cameron are just the ticket. The man is a lyrical genius, managing to find not just one but two different rhymes for Oompa-Lumpa.
Outside they are still sending up fireworks for bonfire night. It’s been a long but satisfying day.
Saturday 18.00 By now I’m beginning to feel a bit like I’m travelling at warp-speed myself, bundling from talk to talk, with some blogging in between (Stardate 2011, Captain’s Diary… A strange poet with staring eyes has parked himself in orbit around me and is refusing to move….)
On to hear Marie Howe talk about one of her teachers and mentors, the late Stanley Kunitz. It’s a much warranted appreciation as he is less well-known in the UK than some of his American contemporaries such as Bishop, Lowell and Berryman. He died in 2006, age 101. He said of his later poems, “what is left to confront are the deep simplicities,’ and according to Marie he was working towards “an art so transparent you could look through it and see the world.”
She reads The Portrait, an extraordinary poem and very central to his work, which tells of the death by suicide of his father when Kunitz was very young, and quotes something that he told her when she was his student, that poetry should exploit “the lyric tension of the fact that we are both living and dying at the same time”.
It’s a good reminder of the Aldeburgh support for American poetry over the years, as Neil Ashley of Bloodaxe points out to me when I chat to him after one of the earlier readings. It was Aldeburgh who hosted Tony Hoagland a few years ago, who’s been emerging as one of the strongest American voices of recent years – certainly a favourite of mine – and whose most recent work, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Bloodaxe have just published.
This year as well as Marie, Dorianne Laux has come to Aldeburgh from the States and has not only given a much sought-after masterclass on ‘how to write an unforgettable poem’, but has read several of her own which are just that. ‘Enough Music’, for instance, is a fabulous short poem.
Saturday 17.00 Some speed writing with Michael Laskey and Jeni Smith at the James Cable Room — the format feels a bit like bingo. Everyone sits expectant at a table, eyes down to pen and paper. Michael or Jeni reads a poem and sets a five-minute poetic task (like ‘Think of a sport. Write out its keywords. Make a poem’).
It’s fun and fast and goes down well with the participants.
Come back an hour or so later for a workshop that Don Paterson gives. If the earlier class was like playing bingo, Don’s is more like playing Speed Go on the Internet: extremely fast, extremely furious and demanding mental dexterity. Don is packing the lecture he usually gives in two hours into a half-hour firework spectacular.
He boldly takes us into what he terms ‘deep trope’, at warp speed. Some fascinating vistas flash by as we hang onto the spacecraft, metonyms and metaphors pinging off the side like meteorites. The search is for autopoiesis, a sort of Gaia-style self –renewing poetical equilibrium where content and structure both balance and renew each other.
In Star Trek it would be found on those planets that have to teach Kirk and his men some simpler truths (and don’t you just know that Spock would be the one to have a problem with metaphor).
Don makes some good points about the process of composition being one in which you only find out what you think as you start to write, rather than simply printing a received opinion; and that a poem has to intrigue enough on the first reading to bring you back for subsequent deeper ones.
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Saturday 13.00
Some more fine readings this morning, this time from Harry Clifton and Imtiaz Dharker.
Harry talks about the way that for his generation Ireland was almost ‘painted too green’ by nationalists, from its letterboxes to its literature, in the decades after Independence and indeed for most of the 20th century. He himself has always taken a more internationalist approach, with much time spent abroad in places like Paris or Italy, producing an impressive body of verse. The Italian stay also gave rise to an excellent travel book, on the Abruzzi Mountains. We are giving a joint talk tomorrow morning on the connection between travel writing and poetry, but I’m not just being polite about his writing to ensure a smooth discourse: the qualities of elegant concision that go into his poetry lend themselves well to travel writing, which can sometimes be prolix.
There is an emotional undercurrent to the following reading by Imtiaz Dharker, who is replacing Selima Hill at short notice after Selima was taken ill. As the Festival announces,
We are hugely grateful to Imtiaz for stepping in at such short notice, and rather amazed at the extraordinary felicity of it all – given that Imtiaz herself had so sadly to withdraw from last year’s APF due to the untimely death of her husband Simon. We are all thrilled that she will, at last, get to enjoy the Aldeburgh experience.
Imtiaz gives a moving reading of “Honour Killing”, in which she takes off “the black coat of my country”, the veil, and the other garments that constrain the position of women in countries such as Pakistan. It’s a fitting rebuke to those Western intellectuals who have recently flirted with the idea that somehow the burka and its variants are in any way empowering, and that we just fail to understand it because of cultural difference. I made a film about the position of women in Afghanistan for Channel 4 a few years ago, so it’s a subject that I appreciate her strong feelings on.
And she makes the second good joke of the day: ‘ now that English is just one more Indian language….’
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Saturday 10.30
from the programme:
Jubilee Hall 9.00 – 10.00am : DISCUSSION: THE POET’S TOOLKIT .
A meticulous eye for detail with an awareness of the bigger picture. Relevant experience. Excellent communication skills, verbal and written. Capacity to think outside the box. Passion, drive and ambition. Ability and willingness to work long and flexible hours unsupervised. Lars Gustafsson, Marie Howe, Bill Manhire and Don Paterson finesse the person specification.
9.00 in the morning? what time is that to start a Poetry Festival. One thing that rarely is part of a poet’s toolkit is the ability to get up early in the morning. But Lars, Marie Howe, Bill and Don seem fresh as daisies.
Don kicks off by trailing the notion that poetry is a bit like dyslexia, a condition of the mind that favours certain abilities while hampering others: he points out that many of the male poets of his acquaintance can’t drive, swim or ride a bicycle safely, however impressive their scansion. So “poetry is less of a calling and more like a diagnosis.” As poets we have less dopamine receptors, so as more information is allowed to reach our cortex, we become over-wired (and, the hope is, inspired).
Bill reflects that poets should be obsessed with words themselves, building up what Maori poet Hone Tuwhare once described to him as a ‘word-store’; Marie quotes Virginia Woolf’s essay on ‘The Angel In The House’, and suggests that women poets need to lose the notion of themselves as the constant ‘giver’ in a household, to become instead more feral: “there are dogs out at the gate — throw them some meat.” And as Lars astutely notes, ‘it’s all very well to think out of the box, but first you must make your box.’
Best joke of the morning comes from Marie Howe, who quotes what someone said about Rilke as he left a party: “does he have to be a poet all the time?”
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The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival blog is sponsored by Writers’ Centre Norwich,a literature development agency for the East of England running workshops, competitions, events and more. www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk
Friday late:It’s an attractive opening bill: the narrative directness of JO Morgan’s story about a wild boy on Skye; Matthew Caley’s louche rock ‘n’ roll take on Illinois, breast-feeding and Yeats (and claim that Ezra Pound used to lie at languorous angles on chaise longues so that his semen could seep down to his brain and improve his poetry); and then, to round it off, Don Paterson.
Writing one-line descriptions of poets for a programme is a bit like a wine critic’s job. Sooner or later you run out of adjectives. Once we’ve had thoughtful, acute, rigorous, playful, incisive and that old stand-by prize-winning, you have to start reaching for the unexpected.
Not quite redolent of hay on a mid-summer evening (though I can think of a few poets who would fit that bill) , but something ambitious.
Hats off then for the description of the wonderful Don Paterson who according to the programme shoulders the responsibility to live and write the fully-examined life with wit, courage and exemplary formal skill. That’s some day-job!
These days, Don hardly needs a strap-line under the billing, such is the impression that recent collections like Rain have made. He even has an ‘official website’.
If this were a rock gig it would be the Proclaimers, followed by the Dandy Warhols, followed by Tom Waits. Not a bad line up.
Indeed the night showcases all that is best about the Poetry Festival: poets reading well and with engagement to an audience excited to hear them. The Jubilee Hall as a space always has a sense of occasion. It’s big enough to make the performers onstage seem both vulnerable and intense; small enough for a sudden and surprising intimacy with them when the poems start.
It’s also a good moment to step back and appreciate what a formidable achievement the Poetry Festival is. Without now receiving a penny of Suffolk County Council money, it manages to keep an impressive wave of energy beating each year against Aldeburgh’s shingle shore.
But as Naomi Jaffa, the festival director, announces (“I’m going to do something very un-English: I’m going to talk about money”), with the current cuts on the horizon, it will need all its many supporters to rally round if it is to keep going.
All three poets read tremendously well. Don Paterson has learnt his by heart, and his reading brings out both the underlying emotion and rhyme in equal, carefully weighted measure. While apologising for the fact that he feels so much of his last collection dealt with ‘death and divorce’, he also reflects ruefully on the ageing process: ‘ one no longer appears in one’s own poems – one’s presence is more of a heraldic affair.’ And he now takes siestas, although as a longterm hispanophile, we would have expected nothing less of him anyway…..
He reads several more recent, unpublished poems, including some from a sonnet sequence that he is beginning (he is at number eight or nine out of a planned 48), He also reads ‘The Day’, inspired by the DVD box set of Battlestar Galactica, no less, with a conversation between two aliens who have just got married: it’s engaging, direct and funny, although the insistent little six-year-old boy inside me taps me on my shoulder at one point and asks, ‘ did that man just say the earth was a star?’
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Friday 19.00John Glenday gives a modest and intriguing Craft Talk, on the art of revising, for which he is well qualified, running often to 30, 40, 50 drafts of his own poems. It has taken him 15 years to fine-hone his most recent book, ‘filling the white grave of the page with words’. Over the years he has come to recognise which early drafts will never respond to treatment, remaining ‘ghost poems’ and those which it is worth pursuing down the corridor.
It’s a fine-honed talk as well, with not a word wasted and some fine aphorisms (some quoted from other poets): inspiration is an inclination to take notice; poetry is a river that widens into silence; the poem as a balance between craftsmanship and intuition.
One question though. Why is it always easier to sound modest if you have a Scottish or Celtic accent? Something to do with the dying fall at the end of each inflected sentence, of which the great and under-rated Glaswegian comedian Arnold Brown is a master.
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Friday 17.00 I enjoy giving a class on the crossover between poetry and travel writing, using Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Questions Of Travel’ as a central text, from her book of the same name. Writers in both prose and poetry when they travel can constantly criss-cross the borderline between detachment and engagement, observing the strange phenomena of a new country and taking part in them if they so choose. It’s a process we all do in our daily lives anyway, but somehow heightened in a foreign country, and fertile territory, with its own tensions and ambivalence:
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
(Elizabeth Bishop ‘Questions Of Travel’)
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Friday 11.30my own turn to get locked away comes around. The festival has the use of an old lookout tower on the beach, and poets are encouraged to go up there for some silent meditation or even (and the organisers phrase this delicately) “possible writing”.
Writers can be both fussy and stringent about the conditions for perfect writing – not least because it is the perfect displacement activity for actually doing any. Finding it hard to face that blank sheet of paper? It’s all the fault of background noise, or stains on the wallpaper, or those bills elsewhere on the desk that need attending to. No wonder writers need their sheds.
I’d noticed this just earlier in the morning when I realised that my small back bedroom in the eaves of the Poets House was, while perfectly clean and adequate, impossible to write in — all bed and no table. In short, the perfect excuse.
But the lookout tower offers no such escape. There are nine biros beside a block of paper. The view is magnificent. The waves break with a soft insistency. The bleached wood is restrained and tactful. Even the temperature is ambient.
I’m reminded of the problems I experienced at a Buddhist retreat last winter:
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Bad Pupil
When I went to the Buddhist Centre retreat I found myself being continually distracted
by the soft, smoky runs of the boiler igniting its regular puffs of disbelief
and by the distant catcalls of children
playing in the garden, while we sat inside,
in postures of graduated discomfort and in complete silence.
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The practice of mindfulness is not one that comes easily to me.
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There is a ticking clock in my head, counting down the days, the hours, the minutes
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and never quite reaching the present tense.
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But then the Zen Master explains that it is like being at a drinks party
and only talking to the one person, yourself, rather than being distracted
by others. ‘Make eye contact with yourself,’ he suggests. Or ‘I contact’,
as I understand him to say in a moment of rare connection
that blows away when someone else speaks.
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Friday 08.30 Can’t quite believe I’m blogging before breakfast but clearly a stream of consciousness blog will demand a dedicated approach. Let alone all that stuff about Trollope knocking off a few thousand words before even having a cup of tea, and then doing a full 9 to 5 as a postie.
Now ensconced in the Poets House on the seafront where poets were gathering last night for a bit of pre-match banter and limbering up (over several bottles of excellent Chilean red) – The first person I see when I walk off the street is J O Morgan at the kitchen table talking enthusiastically about Ted Hughes. But then the man’s been locked up in solitary confinement for a week in Thorpeness as part of his winnings for last year’s Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (‘a week of writing space’), which would make anyone want to hold forth a bit. Wonder what they do to you if you lose? (Joe is reading this evening with Matthew Caley and Don Paterson.)
Topics on the agenda over dinner are: whatever happened to (‘For Lizzie and’) Harriet Lowell after all those poems about her; was Lowell patrician and snobbish about his Irish servants; what mobile signal works here? And a brief foray on Iraq, but as everyone was in complete agreement, we moved on…….
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(c) Peter Everard Smith
Thursday 15.00 Just off to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival – sadly not in the Oldsmobile on the right, as suggested in the festival e-letter, but a more sedate beemer – so watch this space as the Festival begins on Friday for posts, musings and comments over what promises to be a long and intriguing weekend: as well as giving a talk and class on the relationship between travel writing and poetry, I’m to be their official blogger….
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The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival blog is sponsored by Writers’ Centre Norwich, a literature development agency for the East of England running workshops, competitions, events and more. www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk
It’s a perfect recipe for a communal village activity: bring your ripe and surplus apples to the green, have them pulped and pressed to juice, play various arcane games with apples (‘apple bowls’ – quite a few inswingers – , an ‘apple-shy’ with prizes if you can knock them off their perch), eat local pork with apple sauce. And of course drink copious quantities of the actual juice, which constantly changes flavour during the day as different types of apple are added to the mix.
In this small Oxfordshire village by the Chilterns, almost every garden has an apple tree and few can be bothered to store the fruit over winter in newspaper and sheds, let alone juice them, so much would just rot on the bough. The big communal apple press on the green is satisfying in its simplicity, with layers of pulp in crates, separated by sheets of coarse muslin and with a long lever that everyone from kids to adults can take turns in wheeling around to extract the frothing liquid.
Roger Deakin would have loved it. The Common Ground group he helped found were some of the first to celebrate the variety of the English apple, so that we did not succumb to a Golden Delicious monoculture (what Roger called ‘Tesco’s Delight’). He died four years ago, just after completing his wonderful Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, and is much missed by his friends. I wrote this in his memory:
As a lover of small but perfectly formed festivals, I’m drawn to the current Oxford Lieder Festival and some concerts at the Holywell Music Room. There is a numinous performance of Schumann songs by the young and very talented Stuart Jackson who is built like a prop forward and sings with the delicacy and adroitness of a winger; he also endearingly has his shirt hanging out from his suit at the back. The songs of love, loss and Lorelei are terrific, with Jackson’s tenor accompanied by the equally talented and young Welsh pianist Jocelyn Freeman.
But there’s one problem. Songs such as these should be enjoyed, as at a true Oktoberfest, in the autumn sun with a large cold stein of lager to hand. Not in a hushed auditorium. It’s like listening to salsa and not being allowed to dance……
The unconfined joy rightly generated by the rescue of the Chilean miners focuses attention on one of the less heralded aspects of Latin America. Europeans sometimes make tedious jokes about a ‘mañana culture’, usually when they have forgotten quite how inefficient European services can be. In fact for me the people of that continent are often distinguished by what can best be described by that wonderful Spanish word ‘hábil’, a word that means ‘clever, skilful, adroit, expert, handy, deft, accomplished’ and the ability to make the best of slender resources.
From Cuba to Chile I have always been impressed by the ability of mechanics, muleteers, stall-holders and just about anyone you meet to make things work if they possibly can. Nowhere is this more evident than Chile [see my earlier post when I went there just after the earthquake] , and the patience with which they have managed to get the miners to the surface – and with which the miners have endured unbearable conditions – puts most other countries to shame. Which is not to say that the collapse in the mine was not due to casual safety standards in the first place, as Mario Sepulveda, one of their leaders and a union activist, had pointed out before the disaster occurred. As the struggle for the earth’s resources intensifies, mines and oil rigs will have to dig deeper, with all the attendant risks and necessary vigilance that brings.
But in a crisis situation, when what is needed is both pragmatic ‘habilidad’ and faith, then give me the South Americans every time. Not least because they also manage to keep a sense both of humour and the surreal: one of the miners, Edison Pena, apparently ‘kept up the spirits of the other miners by singing Elvis songs underground’. He has now received an invitation to Graceland. You couldn’t make it up, boyo.
So Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. To be honest, I’d half assumed he’d already won it years ago, so major a figure has he been for so long.
I’m sorry not to have been in Peru for this as sure that while he remains a controversial figure there – more for his exile in Europe than for his political views – they would be celebrating.
I remember being in a small town in Ecuador in 1982 when Gabriel García Márquez won his Nobel (he has apparently just twittered Llosa to say that they are ‘now even’). Although it was only eleven in the morning, the bar filled up with excited revellers ordering brandies; he might have been Colombian, but the town was treating Márquez as if he were a local boy.
He was writing of their world, with its perpetual llovizna, that wonderful word for a soft drizzle of rain playing over the dampness of the platanales, the banana-plantations, while the oceano nítido, the bright ocean, stood off in the distance. The predominant mood in his books was one of nostalgia, ‘tratando de recomponer con tantas astillas dispersas el espejo roto de la memoria, trying to reconstitute so many scattered shards of the broken mirror of the memory,’ a nostalgia weighed down with decay.
Llosa plays a different game. His books are often at the sharp end – the brutality of life in Death in the Andes, or under the dictator Trujillo (in one of his finest late books, The Feast of the Goat) – laced with surreal or erotic moments. With Márquez and other South American contemporaries, he shares a fascination with the brothel as a sentimental education. In his memoirs, A Fish in the Water, he writes that ‘my generation lived the swansong of the brothel’, a place where one could live ‘a life apart’, and laments ‘the banalisation of sex’ that accompanied its disappearance as changing social mores allowed for sex outside marriage. He wrote about the one he frequented near Castilla in a novel that like much of his early work was autobiographical, The Green House.
Márquez too has written a great deal about brothels – Love in the Time of Cholera is full of them, for instance – but it was his last novella that really upset critics, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, in which a man in his nineties sleeps with an underage girl, an uncomfortable and problematic book that showed that whatever else he was doing, Márquez was not ageing gracefully. One wonders if the situations had been reversed, and it was Llosa who won it 30 years ago and Márquez in contention now, how comfortable the Swedish judges would have been with that.
Postscript: in a later interview, Vargas Llosa described how he had been rung with news of the Nobel at 5 in the morning when he usually rises (one reason perhaps for his prodigious output); he had been reading Carpentier’s El Reino de Este Mundo, which he commended as ‘mystical, fantastical but also profoundly realistic’; they seem to me to be the qualities which distinguish his own work.
Reading Howard Marks’s extraordinary Nr Nice about his life and high times as a drug dealer I slowly begin to realise that it is among many other things a travel book, albeit a very unorthodox one.
. Marks loves to travel. He also needs to. And given that he is usually carrying something that could get him into trouble, whether dope, cash or a false passport, his arrival at each airport carries an edge of excitement – what he describes as ‘an asexual orgasm of crossing a border illicitly’. Then he wanders, often stoned, through the foreign bright lights of a city, taking it all in, befriending taxi-drivers and ending up in a luxury penthouse suite – or meeting some Pushtan suppliers in their fortress on the North West Frontier.
A lot of his business takes him to Thailand and Hong Kong, so there’s a fair amount of nostalgia about the 70s and 80s pleasures of first class Asian airlines and their beautiful hostesses, an age of opulent air travel that may have passed forever, the glamour of which was celebrated in Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can film.
Certainly travelling Ryanair, as I did last week just after buying Marks’s book at the airport, is enough to make you feel that these days every passenger might as well be suspected of being a drug-dealer. The level of cross-checking and intimidation is intense. The slightest deviation of hand baggage allowance will be punished with the full weight of the Michael O’Leary Law (will his autobiography be titled Mr Nasty?). Need to change a date or a name on a ticket? Or add a bag? More often than not it will cost you as much as the original ticket.
The yellow plastic fittings and lack of an adjustable seat make you feel you’re on a banana boat ride at a fairground attraction. Fine for a few minutes but not for a few hours. And for some strange reason they seem to have a policy of keeping the ‘safety belt sign’ on for as long as possible during the flight, causing some distress to the pregnant lady next to me who needed to use the facilities.
So on arrival in Morocco, far from causing me the excitement felt by Marks, I felt a bit drained – as if I had managed to get through a tedious bureaucratic experience like an American visa. They wear you down, do Ryanair. And they really don’t need to. Given a choice between Marks and O’Leary as to who I’d rather have sitting beside me on a flight, I know who I’d go for.
Note – anyone doubting Howard’s abilities as a travel writer should check out his account of Colombia
After Chatwin, a book that in some ways could not be more different – Will Self’s new Walking to Hollywood, which I’m also reviewing. Compared to Chatwin’s self-consciously lean prose, Self is baroque, fecund and profuse – in fact, rather like that, always using three adjectives when one could do. But both share a common interest in travel writing as essentially fictive.
Walking to Hollywood is heady stuff and the book has some brilliant flashes of genius as well as of over-indulgence. One shadow looms large over it – that of WG Sebald, the German writer who lived for many years in England and died in 2001.
Reading it, I was reminded that earlier this year I went to hear Self give an intriguing lecture on Sebald – whom with the intimacy of a familiar he called Max; he also pronounced his name to rhyme with ‘pay-cult’ (rather than ‘see-bald’), thereby elevating him to the pantheon of those writers like Borges whose name can only be pronounced properly by initiates … …
After all the excitement of the Poetry Festival, am now off to a series of gatherings of a very different sort: a conference at the British Museum on Peruvian ushnus, the raised platform structures often found in the centre of Inca plazas or on hill tops.
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After Chatwin, a book that in some ways could not be more different – Will Self’s new Walking to Hollywood,