A London acquaintance of mine, John Freeman, was on the Diane Rehm Show last month discussing his new book, The Tyranny of Email.  Some of what he talks about is obvious, and the discussion occasionally veers toward a radio call-in sentimentality, but there are some nice moments in the conversation about letter writing in particular.  It reminds me that just as important (and difficult) is taking the time to consider — really consider — the people and experiences one has in life.  I only met John once in person, over coffee at Paul near the Granta offices.  He seemed hurried (and was late), but I remember enjoying the book I was reading while sipping coffee on the sidewalk that morning as much as the brief chat we had about supporting Granta’s work.  It would have been nice to have had time for a longer discussion, but in many ways that’s the point.  We’ve emailed a few times since that meeting and gone about our working lives.  Good to see he’s doing well.

 

One of the better heartbreak albums of 2009 has to be Noah and the Whale’s The First Days of Spring.  If you can bear it, listen to it straight through — particular highlights are Our Window and Blue Skies.  And on iTunes you can download the accompanying 48 minute film, a beautifully shot homage to a break-up and life afterwards.  At least that’s what I think it’s about…I had to watch it twice. Other interpretations welcome.

There’s a scene in the movie that includes a telling of the scorpion and the frog story. Which I heard twice in one week in entirely different contexts.  Odd.

 

In Washington DC, Fall has arrived.

The seasons were more similar than different in London. With the more frequent, but not overwhelming, occurrence of rain there, I began thinking more about shoes (for some reason, I rarely notice dress shoes in the U.S.).  Specifically, I concerned myself with the likelihood of my shoes getting wet and perhaps damaged during my walks to and from work.  One pair of casual boots I’d purchased weathered the rain well, their surface dusking over time like an aging human being.

I don’t remember winter’s approach.  The temperatures cooled somewhat, but not intolerably so.  London sits at a favorable position in the jet stream current — the winds dip down from the north and west and across the city as they make their way towards the European continent.  As a result, the city is actually much warmer than you’d expect.

In late January, the city fell beneath the spell of a rare heavy snowfall.  I took off to Islington in the north of the city and met two friends at a wine shop called The Sampler.  We topped up a pre-paid card with about 15 quid each and set about the roomy shop sampling quarter and half glasses of wine.  Mostly whites.  Warmed significantly after 45 minutes, we walked to a nearby Italian restaurant and watched through the steam rising from our bowls of pasta as the snow begin to fall in cottony flakes.  I skated on streets near my home , knowing what the next day would look like. And I prayed that work would be closed as I turned on the television to watch the Super Bowl.

The connection of intertwined history, whether you accept it or not, does exist.  And so, it was oddly unsurprising that in my first month in London I was idling up the Marylebone High Street and recognized an Indian face.  Or rather, his white hair.  My encounters with Amitav Ghosh in person began in Kolkata, and have been brief and accidental.  First, it was outside the Bengal Club as we were waiting for our respective cars.  Then it was at a small party given for him by a friend of a friend, and then on the street in central London.  He was in town because his novel Sea of Poppies had been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.  It didn’t win.  This year, Hilary Mantel took home the 50,000 quid for Wolf Hall, a historical novel based on Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII.  I haven’t read her book, nor Ghosh’s latest (lingering distaste from The Hungry Tide), but I’m interested that such a novel won this year, and on what basis.

Chairman of judges James Naughtie said: “Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book. The boldness of its narrative, its scene setting.

Jabberwock has a nice review here.

It is difficult, in a year, to come anywhere close to comprehension of a city like London.  At best you perhaps start to understand why it has enthralled so many before you.  London is a city built on narrative and meta-narrative.  I suppose the same could be said about British society.  That narrative was the cornerstone of their colonialism, and if I can remove myself from the weight of that empire for a second, I have to say that they are pretty good at it.  So in that spirit, now ten days removed from the Big Smoke, I’ll be adding some thoughts on particular moments in London.

Sherman Alexie’s recent story in the New Yorker is worth a read.  His writing always manages to contain a sense of rage — at life, at being an Indian, at history, at white people, at other Indians –  often using deeply developed sarcasm and humor.  He’s not afraid, however, to let his fear show through.  Fear of the knowledge that life is often about the struggle to hold one’s rage at bay.

I woke up briefly this morning with the Railway Children’s A Pleasure in my head (this is what happens when you go to the Field Day festival the day before?).  And one Sunday morning pleasure — to fill the gap left by the unavailbility of CBS’ Sunday Morning here — is streaming NPR on the laptop and falling back to sleep.

(this is a cross posting)

The headline “we are all writers now” caught my eye this morning. Anne Trubek makes the case that blogging, twittering, and other forms of new media communication are not cheapening our writing skills and reducing our intelligence. Instead, she says that more people are reading and writing than ever.

Hmmm… the amount of reading and writing is not really the issue though. It’s the quality and the depth of modern day writing and thought that is diminishing. People talk about “mass intelligence” as if it’s improving, but this piece by George Balgobin makes some very good points about the commodification of art and artistic knowledge — what he calls gaining intelligence through acquisition rather than knowledge.

Hey, I’m guilty of being somewhat proud of the collection of books on my shelf, but it’s worth pondering: how much do we really understand about life? Have we glorified the purchase of our degrees and knowledge rather than true appreciation of the virtues within them?

This is a song for anyone with a broken heart.

If you don’t go back far enough you tend to think your ideas are somehow original.  I have to remind people, for instance, that history is longer than the past eight years of the Bush Administration, and that there was a time before September 11, 2001 when people did f***ed up things to the world.

Wow, it’s been a long, long time since posting anything.  A couple of reasons for this: first, I haven’t been home much.  Second, I’ve been slightly co-opted into writing another blog (more on that later) and even that one is suffering from the basic problem that third, there’s just no time to do everything.  Ok, fourth is that London is harder to write about because it’s just so massively huge and at the same time massively conventional (no, not boring, just orderly and you’ve got to search harder for things that pique your interest).  They’re there, it’s just…ah, you get it.  Anyway, I’ll try to reignite this thing.  And if it doesn’t succeed then we go the way of the dodo.  Would that be so bad?

In the wake of Slumdog Millionaire receiving no less than ten Oscar nominations arrived the inevitable hard-eyed scrutiny about what kind of film it is, and whether it deserves our support or disdain.  Let me be upfront and direct about my view: the film is entertaining, colorful, and loaded with enough “exotic” to satisfy Kipling.  It is, however, as some have appropriately labeled it, “tourist porn.”