I think, at the beginning of my last week before returning to Melbourne, I have been overcome by a little homesickness. Beautiful as it is here in Hanoi, I can't help but think about the fact that I'll get home at the very end of Winter, after the summer I've encountered everywhere else. I was in Cologne at the beginning of the heat wave there, and it was sweltering. Arriving in Hanoi, it was a different kind of heat - but one that left me feeling just as tired. Having a nice lazy time here, wandering around and around in the old quarter, visiting museums and galleries, and sitting in cafes, reading. Great coffee here, I'm glad to say.
Don't quite know what to write - I feel like my trip has turned to list-making. What I want to read when I get home, things I want to buy for people, the things left that I still have to see before getting on that plane, the songs I want to listen to when I get back and don't have to rely on headphones anymore. Movies I want to see and conversations I want to have. All the places in Melbourne I'm longing to visit again.
Before I left Denmark I went to Skagen, and walked off the northern end of Denmark - I walked into the water at the point where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea crash together, so that the one broke over my left leg, and the other broke over my right leg. I felt, standing there, that I was witnessing some endless war between the two bodies of water to gain ground, and imagined somehow that the seas were like bickering gods, never really gaining ground, but never content to give up the argument.
I also went to Silkeborg to see the Tollund Man - the original of my interest in Denmark's bog people. It is only his head that is the original - the body is a replica, as it was never preserved properly. There is something strange in see a human body turned to leather, to still see the open pores in the faces.
I spent a night on another bus, getting from Denmark to Cologne, with a change of buses at Hamburg. Arrived in Cologne at about 2 in the afternoon, and after dropping off my bags immediately went to the Cathedral and to the Ludwis Museum, the reason I decided to spend a night in Cologne. Moved among many more pieces of art that I'd had a craving to see. Especially the Rauschenberg's and the photography collection. It has been strange, though, in all the galleries I've visited, to never see any Australian art. I remember taking an Art History subject in twentieth century art, there were a number of exchange students enrolled in the course. When we got to Sidney Nolan they were puzzled by his inclusion, having never heard of him. So strange finding myself everywhere, and being from a forgotten place. I'm looking forward to a trip out to Heide when I get back, and to wandering among the Joy Hester's and the Charles Blackman's (particular favourites) among others.
Hanoi is crazy beautiful. I've been riding around on the back of a lot of motorbikes, because it's the easiest way to get around when things are too far for walking. Of course, wears helmets and there are hardly any traffic lights around the place. Everyone turns in every direction at once - gorgeous chaos!
I have been spending a lot of time at the Temple of Literature - today I visited it for the third time, sitting there to finsih reading Dante's Inferno, the wonderful Hollander translation. I've been reading it in English first, and then in the Italian - trying to learn more about Italian. I read Mrs Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte a few days ago, and was struck by the way Emily and Charlotte learned French in Brussels - by how the Professor read them pieces of French prose so they could learn the style of good French, before they even had a good grounding in the grammar. Strange to think of them listening to the rhythms of this foreign tongue like that, Emily in her defiantly outmoded fashions. I also read Paradise Lost this last week - somehow a week for diving deep into the central texts of literature again. I don't know what will come next.
I'm hoping to make it out to the Museum of Ethnology tomorrow, and to see the water puppets another night this week. I've also made friends with a shop keeper here, and she has invited me to visit her home this week, and meet her family, which I am very much looking forward to. And in between - more reading and relaxing and thinking, before turning my footsteps home.
Hanoi
Sunday, August 03, 2003
I've had another week of adventuring since leaving Krakow - I stayed overnight on the Baltic coast in Poland and then took the ferry across to Copenhagen. Now I'm in Århus, and this afternoon I took the bus no. 6 out to the Moesgård Museum of Prehistory where a long awaited meeting with the Grauballe man took place. It makes me want to track down a copy of P.V. Glob's "The Bog People" even more.
Denmark is beautiful - everything is so clean, people so friendly, and I've waited a long time to see the prehistory artefacts both here in Århus and in Copenhagen. I managed to get to the museum in Copenhagen the same morning I arrived in Denmark, after an overnight ferry trip which found me sleeping in a chair and later on the floor because I didn't have the money to pay for a cabin, and didn't really need one anyway. Iøve found my ability to sleep almost anywhere is becoming more and more pronounced - others appear quite jealous when they emerge from a bad nights sleep due to the traffic noise and I ask, "Oh, were there cars?". I'd been a little sick leaving Poland - a boring cold, fever etc - and so my day of getting up to the coast, then not being able to find accommodation there and eventually staying in a small town 15km away (which was lovely) ended up being an adventure, followed the next day by the adventure of getting to the ferry terminal and then sleeping anywhere I could find space to spread out!
I went to Elsinore, to the art museum Louisiana and Karen Blixen's home, now a museum and national parkland for birds. I also ventured into Tivoli where I heard the Kronos quartet play. Before all the musicians start cursing my very name, I have to say the concert was a bit of a letdown (though I can't complain too much, as I'd managed to get a VERY cheap ticket). The program mostly consisted of arrangements of the work of Mexican - composers. Except there wasn't a lot to the music, or the arrangements. A lot of the pieces were accompanied by an electronic backing, that seemed to be there only because the logistics of transporting the live players was too difficult. The pieces themselves didn't make a very sophisticated use of Mexican or European musical materials, though they were referred to in cliched ways. I was sitting next to Chris, a boy I met at the concert who is currently studying composition as a postgrad student in the UK, and after the first half of the program was over, all I could do was turn to him and say "That was all a bit kitsch." And no, it wasn't kitsch in a good way. The second half of the program, a single piece by a Finnish composer, was much more interesting, and I don't have a bad thing to say about that. They also gave, for an encore, a tribute to Jimi Hendrix's rendering of the American anthem at woodstock. I won't say much about it but that it was kitsch - in a good way. At least, it made me smile and not cringe!
I've been reading Karen Blixen since getting here. (I also stayed up till 3am one night last week reading Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Like so many other books I've read while I've been away, I was so grateful so open this one up and find so much in it, that it's quality hadn't been exaggerated. I read "Out of Africa", mostly in a gorgeous park in Copenhagen near my hostel. Am now reading Judith Thurman's biography of her, "Isak Dinesen". Should last me most of the week, as, like her biography of Colette, it's a rather hefty volume!
Getting home is growing closer - possibly closer than previously planned, as I'm thinking of changing my flight to arrive home a week or two earlier, so I can start working and putting things together in earnest. I've got so much to go through, to think about, and Iøm very eager to start! But I've still got my trip to Hanoi, and tonight I've got to try to track down a few days accommodation in Cologne. We'll see how I manage.
Denmark is beautiful - everything is so clean, people so friendly, and I've waited a long time to see the prehistory artefacts both here in Århus and in Copenhagen. I managed to get to the museum in Copenhagen the same morning I arrived in Denmark, after an overnight ferry trip which found me sleeping in a chair and later on the floor because I didn't have the money to pay for a cabin, and didn't really need one anyway. Iøve found my ability to sleep almost anywhere is becoming more and more pronounced - others appear quite jealous when they emerge from a bad nights sleep due to the traffic noise and I ask, "Oh, were there cars?". I'd been a little sick leaving Poland - a boring cold, fever etc - and so my day of getting up to the coast, then not being able to find accommodation there and eventually staying in a small town 15km away (which was lovely) ended up being an adventure, followed the next day by the adventure of getting to the ferry terminal and then sleeping anywhere I could find space to spread out!
I went to Elsinore, to the art museum Louisiana and Karen Blixen's home, now a museum and national parkland for birds. I also ventured into Tivoli where I heard the Kronos quartet play. Before all the musicians start cursing my very name, I have to say the concert was a bit of a letdown (though I can't complain too much, as I'd managed to get a VERY cheap ticket). The program mostly consisted of arrangements of the work of Mexican - composers. Except there wasn't a lot to the music, or the arrangements. A lot of the pieces were accompanied by an electronic backing, that seemed to be there only because the logistics of transporting the live players was too difficult. The pieces themselves didn't make a very sophisticated use of Mexican or European musical materials, though they were referred to in cliched ways. I was sitting next to Chris, a boy I met at the concert who is currently studying composition as a postgrad student in the UK, and after the first half of the program was over, all I could do was turn to him and say "That was all a bit kitsch." And no, it wasn't kitsch in a good way. The second half of the program, a single piece by a Finnish composer, was much more interesting, and I don't have a bad thing to say about that. They also gave, for an encore, a tribute to Jimi Hendrix's rendering of the American anthem at woodstock. I won't say much about it but that it was kitsch - in a good way. At least, it made me smile and not cringe!
I've been reading Karen Blixen since getting here. (I also stayed up till 3am one night last week reading Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Like so many other books I've read while I've been away, I was so grateful so open this one up and find so much in it, that it's quality hadn't been exaggerated. I read "Out of Africa", mostly in a gorgeous park in Copenhagen near my hostel. Am now reading Judith Thurman's biography of her, "Isak Dinesen". Should last me most of the week, as, like her biography of Colette, it's a rather hefty volume!
Getting home is growing closer - possibly closer than previously planned, as I'm thinking of changing my flight to arrive home a week or two earlier, so I can start working and putting things together in earnest. I've got so much to go through, to think about, and Iøm very eager to start! But I've still got my trip to Hanoi, and tonight I've got to try to track down a few days accommodation in Cologne. We'll see how I manage.
Thursday, July 24, 2003
It's my last night in Krakow, and I'm sorry to be leaving - somehow a week and a half feels like it will be an eternity, and then it's vanished. Tomorrow I'm heading up the the Baltic, and then the day after I catch a ferry for Denmark, to Copenhagen. It's a strange feeling to be leaving Eastern Europe now - I think this has been the most interesting part of my trip, and I've met so many fascinating people while in the Czech Republic and in Poland.
A few days ago I visited the Museum of Pharmacy here - it was fascinating, though slightly unnerving to be shown into each room, and have the light turned off after I left. A Norweigan boy, Aron, was there at the same time as me, and we were shown from room to room, given explanations in English to read, had a few extra cupboards opened up for us, and then showed out again. Such a wonderfully strange mix! As well as all the glass bottles and porcelain containers and wooden chests of all dates and styles, there were also pharmaceutical curiosities: a stuffed alligator suspended from the ceiling, mandrake root donated by an institute in Kew, England, a container which once contained human fat... There was a room of instruments which had previously been used in alchemist's attempts to improve on their materials, and had later been employed in the pharmacists laboratory. The museum is housed in a gorgeous building in the middle of the old town, and goes from the cellars to the attic.
I've spent the past couple of days wandering around with Julia Ambrose, a sculptor from the US who currently has work showing in a show in Warsaw. A rapid conversation about everything: politics, Africa (the more Kapuscinski I've read, the more Africa has opened up for me into something that, though still wildly tangled, I can begin to make sense of - or rather, begin to approach) folktales, amber. She has been buying up pieces of amber, rough and polished, all different colours, and has an impressive collection. A day of wandering around today from the Massolit bookstore to Demmers Teehaus to the Cloth Hall market in the middle of town.
I'm glad I've come to Eastern Europe: I feel like I've learned a lot here. I suppose it is because Australia is so far away - to arrive in Europe, there are always the sights people feel obligated to see. If you're in Paris, you visit the Eiffel tower, you visit the Louvre. When in Firenze it's Michaelangelo's David, and so forth. But at the same time, so many countries to the East seem to have somehow been lost behind the silence of their post-war status as "communist." Arriving in Praha, I feel like I'd forgotten that there was a Praha beyond the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, until I can face to face with a sculpture celebrating Mozart's Don Giovanni. Wandering around Wawel castle, there's Tiepolo, not to mention the fact that one of Da Vinci's few oil paintings is a fixture of Krakow. I suppose I feel confused by the decision to privilege certain types of history: the raising of Brunelleschi's dome is an amazing feat - it's easy to be blinded by that. I suppose I feel that learning to think about different types of history, and to talk about those histories, discover their rhythms is the most important thing I've learned so far, though it is another obvious lesson...
I've laid down Kapuscinski for now (I've read nearly all his books - or rather devoured them) and am wading through Annie Dillard's quiet observations in her "An American Childhood". After a lull, a few days rest from words at the end of my time in Prague, it's suddenly exploded again, and my mind is racing with ideas from everywhere.
Sometimes the dull ache of homesickness grasps it's way through me, but I think September will be soon enough for coming home. I've always dreamed of going to Denmark, and I'm going - my mind is a collage of Bog people and viking ships and medieval towns, Hans Christian Anderson, Karen Blixen and the Danish resistance helping Jews escape across the narrow slither of water to safety in Sweden.
Krakow
A few days ago I visited the Museum of Pharmacy here - it was fascinating, though slightly unnerving to be shown into each room, and have the light turned off after I left. A Norweigan boy, Aron, was there at the same time as me, and we were shown from room to room, given explanations in English to read, had a few extra cupboards opened up for us, and then showed out again. Such a wonderfully strange mix! As well as all the glass bottles and porcelain containers and wooden chests of all dates and styles, there were also pharmaceutical curiosities: a stuffed alligator suspended from the ceiling, mandrake root donated by an institute in Kew, England, a container which once contained human fat... There was a room of instruments which had previously been used in alchemist's attempts to improve on their materials, and had later been employed in the pharmacists laboratory. The museum is housed in a gorgeous building in the middle of the old town, and goes from the cellars to the attic.
I've spent the past couple of days wandering around with Julia Ambrose, a sculptor from the US who currently has work showing in a show in Warsaw. A rapid conversation about everything: politics, Africa (the more Kapuscinski I've read, the more Africa has opened up for me into something that, though still wildly tangled, I can begin to make sense of - or rather, begin to approach) folktales, amber. She has been buying up pieces of amber, rough and polished, all different colours, and has an impressive collection. A day of wandering around today from the Massolit bookstore to Demmers Teehaus to the Cloth Hall market in the middle of town.
I'm glad I've come to Eastern Europe: I feel like I've learned a lot here. I suppose it is because Australia is so far away - to arrive in Europe, there are always the sights people feel obligated to see. If you're in Paris, you visit the Eiffel tower, you visit the Louvre. When in Firenze it's Michaelangelo's David, and so forth. But at the same time, so many countries to the East seem to have somehow been lost behind the silence of their post-war status as "communist." Arriving in Praha, I feel like I'd forgotten that there was a Praha beyond the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, until I can face to face with a sculpture celebrating Mozart's Don Giovanni. Wandering around Wawel castle, there's Tiepolo, not to mention the fact that one of Da Vinci's few oil paintings is a fixture of Krakow. I suppose I feel confused by the decision to privilege certain types of history: the raising of Brunelleschi's dome is an amazing feat - it's easy to be blinded by that. I suppose I feel that learning to think about different types of history, and to talk about those histories, discover their rhythms is the most important thing I've learned so far, though it is another obvious lesson...
I've laid down Kapuscinski for now (I've read nearly all his books - or rather devoured them) and am wading through Annie Dillard's quiet observations in her "An American Childhood". After a lull, a few days rest from words at the end of my time in Prague, it's suddenly exploded again, and my mind is racing with ideas from everywhere.
Sometimes the dull ache of homesickness grasps it's way through me, but I think September will be soon enough for coming home. I've always dreamed of going to Denmark, and I'm going - my mind is a collage of Bog people and viking ships and medieval towns, Hans Christian Anderson, Karen Blixen and the Danish resistance helping Jews escape across the narrow slither of water to safety in Sweden.
Krakow
Friday, July 18, 2003
Yesterday I went to Auschwitz, which, not surprisingly, ended up being quite an upsetting day - it was strange though. Not just upsetting because of the terrible history of the site, but also because of the tourism there. One of the first things you read upon entering the museum is that it is not recommended that children under 14 visit the site - but everywhere I went there were young children running around. These strange juxtapositions - the death wall, where so many people were executed became a place for children to place chasey. In the cellars downstairs in Block 11, where the nazis first used the poison they eventually used in the all their gas chambers, a man answered his mobile phone, and chatted away. I saw people getting their photographs taken beside signs, cell blocks and the railway line, as if to say "I was here" in the same manner they might take the same photographs in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. It was quite surreal - this lightness, as though "just another site of human atrocities" (and I'm quite aware the world isn't lacking in those) alongside a room filled with human hair that the nazis had not yet sold when the camp was liberated. The tins the poison came in, the tangled mess of spectacles culled from the Jews who died there. Such a strange place - and so green. I found it hard to understand that the landscape was so green. I felt that, by rights, it should be utterly barren - or at least that same burnt look of the Australian countryside in the summer. It's hard to even think what to write about Auschwitz - in one of the cell blocks the walls were covered by photographs taken of the prisoners upon arrival. (That is, the prisoners who weren't immediately taken to the gas chambers, which was the fate of the vast majority.) In some of these photographs there was still a kind of fighting hope in the eyes of the prisoners, though mostly just a blank look - the determination not to give anything away. There were even a few photographs of women smiling, as though they hadn't forgotten that that was somehow their function - to smile, to hold onto hope in the face of everything. I watched a film made up of images taken on the day of liberation - watched as the liberated children - under 700 of them - came out in pairs. Mostly in pairs because so many of the survivors were twins, kept alive for medical experiments. Being out in the field at Auschwitz-Birkenau especially it hit home how difficult it would be to work there - whether kept on starvation rations or not. Yesterday the sun was oppressive - just as in winter the extreme cold would equally be a barrier. Like so many other people who have been, I feel that it was important that I did go - but still can't quite fathom it.
I'm still reading Kapuscinski - over the past few days I've read The Soccer War and The Emperor. I'm going to start another one this evening, lie down by the river and read.
I'm still reading Kapuscinski - over the past few days I've read The Soccer War and The Emperor. I'm going to start another one this evening, lie down by the river and read.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
I arrived in Krakow yesterday after taking the night bus from Prague, and after a lovely day walking around and visiting the largest English language bookshop in Poland yesterday (am now close to finished the Kapuscinski classic "The Soccer War") today I', visitind Wawel castle - have already visited the Royal Apartments, and in another hour or so we're going for the tour of the Royal Private rooms. "We" is another Kate (from Wodonga) and Jenny, from Brighton, England, beginning study at Cambridge in October. In between our allotted visits around the castle we had lunch in the local bagel place. If you're beginning to think my blog sounds like a bagel tour of Europe you may be correct.
Krakow is gorgeous. I was chatting with Susan in Firenze, wondering where I'd go when I left Italy, and mentioned Warsaw - it was her suggestion that I go to Krakow instead, and I'm glad I took her up on it. Tomorrow we're planning a trip to Auschwitz, and the day after a journey to the salt mines, which were among the very first sites listed by UNESCO as World Heritage sites (in the same batch as the Taj Mahal). The pope spent his share of time in Krakow before being given the funny hat - he was a bishop here. (Wait, doesn't that entail another funny hat?) Best of all the history of the places founding: it was founded by Prince Krak, after her outwitted the local dragon. I wandered through the dragon's den this morning too - a lovely cave. I imagine the dragon would have been quite at home there.
I'm still trying to think ahead to what will come after Krakow - I've definitely decided to go to Denmark, but am also thinking of taking a bus up through the Baltic states - I don't need a visa to visit them, and ferries from Tallinn to Helsinki, and then to Copenhagen are cheap. Feel a bit like I'm making a sudden dash everywhere, which, after several months of travelling slowly, is a welcome surprise.
I went out in Prague last Thursday night with Anna and others for Anna's birthday. Petra, the girl who cut my hair, came ut with us yesterday and took us to a couple of bars. After a while I worked up the courage and she got me an absinthe. A "small" absinthe. I'd hate to see what they call a large absinthe! I didn't bother with the whole process of caramelising sugar in a spoon and dropping it in - just drank it straight. Well, three sips. Three was enough. Anyway, I've since been told that the Czech absinthe isn't the really serious stuff - the only place you can still buy absinthe with the wormwood extract is in Estonia. It's strange the way I'm chasing after this stuff, when I don't even like to drink! Oh well...
Krakow
Krakow is gorgeous. I was chatting with Susan in Firenze, wondering where I'd go when I left Italy, and mentioned Warsaw - it was her suggestion that I go to Krakow instead, and I'm glad I took her up on it. Tomorrow we're planning a trip to Auschwitz, and the day after a journey to the salt mines, which were among the very first sites listed by UNESCO as World Heritage sites (in the same batch as the Taj Mahal). The pope spent his share of time in Krakow before being given the funny hat - he was a bishop here. (Wait, doesn't that entail another funny hat?) Best of all the history of the places founding: it was founded by Prince Krak, after her outwitted the local dragon. I wandered through the dragon's den this morning too - a lovely cave. I imagine the dragon would have been quite at home there.
I'm still trying to think ahead to what will come after Krakow - I've definitely decided to go to Denmark, but am also thinking of taking a bus up through the Baltic states - I don't need a visa to visit them, and ferries from Tallinn to Helsinki, and then to Copenhagen are cheap. Feel a bit like I'm making a sudden dash everywhere, which, after several months of travelling slowly, is a welcome surprise.
I went out in Prague last Thursday night with Anna and others for Anna's birthday. Petra, the girl who cut my hair, came ut with us yesterday and took us to a couple of bars. After a while I worked up the courage and she got me an absinthe. A "small" absinthe. I'd hate to see what they call a large absinthe! I didn't bother with the whole process of caramelising sugar in a spoon and dropping it in - just drank it straight. Well, three sips. Three was enough. Anyway, I've since been told that the Czech absinthe isn't the really serious stuff - the only place you can still buy absinthe with the wormwood extract is in Estonia. It's strange the way I'm chasing after this stuff, when I don't even like to drink! Oh well...
Krakow
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
I'm sitting in the "Bohemian Bagel" in Prague tapping away, after a day visiting the house Kafka was born in, the Jewish quarter of Prague, the Polish consulate and getting a free haircut in the most prestigious salon in Prague. I'm not sure what it is about my hair that attracts the free cuts I've been getting the last few years, but I'm not going to complain.
I'm in love with Prague - have been spending days wandering around the streets, and I've got another three days of wandering to do before I head on to Poland, and Krakow. Have been hopping on and off trams around the city, which assuages my occasional homesickness. The girl who cut my hair today started to teach me some Czech phrases (only the very simple ones... and I've forgotten some of them already, because they're so foreign to me, I haven't quite grasped them yet) and she'll probably teach me some more tonight, because I'm meeting her for coffee too. Oh, and she cuts hair really well.
Oh, and I found my bottle of absinthe yesterday.
I got in on Saturday night, and had only been in a few minutes when the girls in my room suggested we all go out somewhere for dinner. Found a Czech restaurant near the centre, and got to drink some of the Czech beer-that-is-cheaper than Coke. Great beer, but the downside of all the British boys coming over for their weekend long stag parties. Lots of interesting contrasts. The Communist Museum next to the Casino is the one that springs to mind immediately. Very beautiful, old Eastern buildings, but also a Parisian feel to parts of the city (says she who hasn't been to Paris) because the star of art-nouveau design, Mucha, who designed all the famous theatre posters for Sarah Bernhart in Paris, is from the Czech Republic, and there are buildings in Prague that have very much embraced the art nouveau style. I went to the Mucha Gallery here, which was gorgeous. Though of course it led to yet another thing to be fascinated by. The list of things I need to read more about when I get home grows ever longer.
Am still going with Vasari's lives of the artists, and stuffing myself with a bagel and bottomless cup of coffee at the Bohemian Bagel each day. Oh, and their chocolate cake is also very good. That is, have been reading Vasari over bagels morning and evening, as the Bagelry has become my office for the week so to speak!
Went out to dinner last night with Charlotte, a girl staying in my room at the hostel who is from England (the Lakes district) and studying in Belfast, and who may or may not be offended by the fact that I told her she reminds me of the Cookie Monster. I have since explained further that this is a good thing. She made what might be considered by most the grave error of drinking two absinthes, straight, the night I first arrived! I haven't actually tried the stuff, and am not at all convinced that I will, but have been enjoying the sight of all those bottles of stuff that looks like Listerine in shop windows.
After Krakow I've decided I'm going to try to get to Denmark to see the Tolland man in Aarhus, track down a copy of Seamus Heaney's Tollund Man poem and stand in front of him and read the words "Someday I will go to Jutland / to see him peat brown head..."
Praha.
I'm in love with Prague - have been spending days wandering around the streets, and I've got another three days of wandering to do before I head on to Poland, and Krakow. Have been hopping on and off trams around the city, which assuages my occasional homesickness. The girl who cut my hair today started to teach me some Czech phrases (only the very simple ones... and I've forgotten some of them already, because they're so foreign to me, I haven't quite grasped them yet) and she'll probably teach me some more tonight, because I'm meeting her for coffee too. Oh, and she cuts hair really well.
Oh, and I found my bottle of absinthe yesterday.
I got in on Saturday night, and had only been in a few minutes when the girls in my room suggested we all go out somewhere for dinner. Found a Czech restaurant near the centre, and got to drink some of the Czech beer-that-is-cheaper than Coke. Great beer, but the downside of all the British boys coming over for their weekend long stag parties. Lots of interesting contrasts. The Communist Museum next to the Casino is the one that springs to mind immediately. Very beautiful, old Eastern buildings, but also a Parisian feel to parts of the city (says she who hasn't been to Paris) because the star of art-nouveau design, Mucha, who designed all the famous theatre posters for Sarah Bernhart in Paris, is from the Czech Republic, and there are buildings in Prague that have very much embraced the art nouveau style. I went to the Mucha Gallery here, which was gorgeous. Though of course it led to yet another thing to be fascinated by. The list of things I need to read more about when I get home grows ever longer.
Am still going with Vasari's lives of the artists, and stuffing myself with a bagel and bottomless cup of coffee at the Bohemian Bagel each day. Oh, and their chocolate cake is also very good. That is, have been reading Vasari over bagels morning and evening, as the Bagelry has become my office for the week so to speak!
Went out to dinner last night with Charlotte, a girl staying in my room at the hostel who is from England (the Lakes district) and studying in Belfast, and who may or may not be offended by the fact that I told her she reminds me of the Cookie Monster. I have since explained further that this is a good thing. She made what might be considered by most the grave error of drinking two absinthes, straight, the night I first arrived! I haven't actually tried the stuff, and am not at all convinced that I will, but have been enjoying the sight of all those bottles of stuff that looks like Listerine in shop windows.
After Krakow I've decided I'm going to try to get to Denmark to see the Tolland man in Aarhus, track down a copy of Seamus Heaney's Tollund Man poem and stand in front of him and read the words "Someday I will go to Jutland / to see him peat brown head..."
Praha.
Friday, July 04, 2003
It's my last night in Berlin, and I'm just hanging around, having packed up most of my stuff and listened to the Virgin Suicides soundtrack this afternoon. Will have dinner soon. Have been reading Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and am about to start another Henry James too - The Ambassadors. I think this will be the eighth for this trip. I was having trouble getting to sleep last night, and was thinking about the next extended piece of prose I want to write, in a year or two - thinking about how it is impossible to write the same way after reading Henry James. Not that I feel like I will try to emulate him - simply that his novels are a lesson, both in psychological development of a narrative, and in just what a sentence can do.
Today I wandered around - visited the Brandenburg Tor, the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz. Was hoping to visit the "Neue" National Gallery (there are three or four of them, starting with what one of the guides I was given described as "noseless naked guys" in the ancient collections) but when I got there I found out the permanent collection wasn't on show (the permanent collection includes among other things some abstract expressionist works of Newman that I particularly wanted to see) because the whole gallery had been taken over by an Armani exhibition. You can imagine my outrage, abstract expressionist ousted for fashion. Though I'd discovered a little fashion for myself earlier today. But we won't say anything more about that incident.
Oh what's the use of holding back -
MARK IS IN THE FINAL OF WIMBLEDON! Maybe Australia will learn to love him a little better now. I would just like to say I've liked him for years and years. Probably because I haven't followed the Davis Cup and always hated the adulation Pat Rafter receives. I mean, he's dating an underwear model. (I'll try to forget about newspaper reports a few years ago of a possible "flirtation" between Mark and Ms Kournikova. Anyway, I'll be in Prague this on Sunday, so I will have to try to find somewhere to watch the final there. I'm almost glad I haven't seen the last few matches. I just know I would have embarrassed myself squealing.
Just think, when all this is over, this will stop being Kate's tennis blog, and maybe I'll have some more insightful things to say about finding out I love Henry James.
I went to visit the Pergamon museum yesterday, which was quite amazing. I particularly loved the Islamic collection, and the eagle headed figures of the Babylonions. It was just a day of wandering along in a state of awe. Spent a long time lingering along Unter der Linden. My only disappointment with Berlin is that I didn't make it to see much contemporary art... I'm always running out of time.
Berlin
Today I wandered around - visited the Brandenburg Tor, the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz. Was hoping to visit the "Neue" National Gallery (there are three or four of them, starting with what one of the guides I was given described as "noseless naked guys" in the ancient collections) but when I got there I found out the permanent collection wasn't on show (the permanent collection includes among other things some abstract expressionist works of Newman that I particularly wanted to see) because the whole gallery had been taken over by an Armani exhibition. You can imagine my outrage, abstract expressionist ousted for fashion. Though I'd discovered a little fashion for myself earlier today. But we won't say anything more about that incident.
Oh what's the use of holding back -
MARK IS IN THE FINAL OF WIMBLEDON! Maybe Australia will learn to love him a little better now. I would just like to say I've liked him for years and years. Probably because I haven't followed the Davis Cup and always hated the adulation Pat Rafter receives. I mean, he's dating an underwear model. (I'll try to forget about newspaper reports a few years ago of a possible "flirtation" between Mark and Ms Kournikova. Anyway, I'll be in Prague this on Sunday, so I will have to try to find somewhere to watch the final there. I'm almost glad I haven't seen the last few matches. I just know I would have embarrassed myself squealing.
Just think, when all this is over, this will stop being Kate's tennis blog, and maybe I'll have some more insightful things to say about finding out I love Henry James.
I went to visit the Pergamon museum yesterday, which was quite amazing. I particularly loved the Islamic collection, and the eagle headed figures of the Babylonions. It was just a day of wandering along in a state of awe. Spent a long time lingering along Unter der Linden. My only disappointment with Berlin is that I didn't make it to see much contemporary art... I'm always running out of time.
Berlin
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Not much time, not much time, always the problem. I'm in Berlin, staying in a lovely hostel in the East side, very close to the longest remaining section of the wall. I had a bit of a nightmare day getting here on Saturday, train, plane, two buses and a taxi, but I made it, and the hostel, which has a restaurant and bar attached to it, made me a free "welcome drink" and a gorgeous salad with bulgar wheat and goat's cheese, so I've been settling in and celebrating Mark Philipoussis's victory at Wimbledon yesterday.
To give the extremely rushed version of events I went to a market selling lots of old school Berlin stuff and bought a funny little red velvet purse and an old spoon on Sunday, went to the Czech consulate yesterday to try to organise a visa to find, at midday, that they close every morning at 11 and don't reopen till the following day. Went to the Australian embassy to organise a statutory declaration stating that my signature has, miraculously, changed somewhat in the last 10 to 15 years. Went to the tiny Berlin Guggenheim museum, a very interesting solo exhibit, but, horror of horrors, I've forgotten the artists name. In the bookshop I succumbed to a red inflatable teddy bear. Need I say more? Bought my bus ticket for Prague, so will be spending this Saturday on a bus again. Last night I hit the halfway mark of Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", which I endlessly mispronounce.
Today I had more success at the Czech consulate and need to go back on Friday to collect it. Also ventured to the Egyptian museum and saw the famous bust of Nefertiti, and the all but demolished bust of Akhenaten - a fascinating thing to see. Got caught in the rain twice, and ate Kaffee und Kuchen at Zoo station. Am in heaven with all the sour cherry everything here! Am going to continue having a quiet night with Dostoyevsky. I have become very interested in reading more about the ethics he developed - am surprised by how much I'm enjoying the spirituality of his works. Gorgeous.
Oh, and after a promising start, Arnaud lost in the second round. If I'd found out about it sooner than three or four days after it happened, there probably would have been tears.
Berlin.
To give the extremely rushed version of events I went to a market selling lots of old school Berlin stuff and bought a funny little red velvet purse and an old spoon on Sunday, went to the Czech consulate yesterday to try to organise a visa to find, at midday, that they close every morning at 11 and don't reopen till the following day. Went to the Australian embassy to organise a statutory declaration stating that my signature has, miraculously, changed somewhat in the last 10 to 15 years. Went to the tiny Berlin Guggenheim museum, a very interesting solo exhibit, but, horror of horrors, I've forgotten the artists name. In the bookshop I succumbed to a red inflatable teddy bear. Need I say more? Bought my bus ticket for Prague, so will be spending this Saturday on a bus again. Last night I hit the halfway mark of Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", which I endlessly mispronounce.
Today I had more success at the Czech consulate and need to go back on Friday to collect it. Also ventured to the Egyptian museum and saw the famous bust of Nefertiti, and the all but demolished bust of Akhenaten - a fascinating thing to see. Got caught in the rain twice, and ate Kaffee und Kuchen at Zoo station. Am in heaven with all the sour cherry everything here! Am going to continue having a quiet night with Dostoyevsky. I have become very interested in reading more about the ethics he developed - am surprised by how much I'm enjoying the spirituality of his works. Gorgeous.
Oh, and after a promising start, Arnaud lost in the second round. If I'd found out about it sooner than three or four days after it happened, there probably would have been tears.
Berlin.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Have had so many days of running around, I was hoping to come back for a relaxing last few days in Firenze - but of course it wasn't to be. I fly out from Pisa Saturday morning for Germany, and so I've been packing up my room - a task I DON'T want to leave to the last minute, because there's an awful lot of stuff to pack up and a fair bit to send home. I went to the Post Office after class today and was successful in sending one item, but they rejected the packaging job I'd done on the second item. I'd read in Lonely Planet that Poste Italia could be a little picky! Anyway, they sent me away with this second box to try again! Just had a milkshake to give me strength to go on with it all this afternoon.
Wimbledon. Lleyton Hewitt lost? In the first round? I'm having a little trouble getting tennis news, as the Italian media is not terribly interested in the sport. Any and all updates would be greatly appreciated. Anyone paying close attention, please feel free to send messages regarding the progress of ARNAUD CLEMENT. If he lost in the first round too, and I just don't know it yet, I'll cry.
I went to Roma last weekend. Unfortunately, because I had to spend my time there organising my visa for Vietnam, and because the Vietnamese embassy was a long way from everything else (or it seemed that way in the heat) I didn't get to see as much as I would have liked. I should be honest and say that another contributing factor to my not being the most active tourist was the fact that the new Harry Potter was released on Saturday. I went to the Vatican on Saturday morning - found it astounding, but couldn't spend too much time in the Sistine Chapel because the crowds were so oppressive, but fell in love with the map rooms and the Egyptian collections - and after I left the Vaticano and San Pietro I went to Roma's Feltrinelli International and bought H. Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I spent two hours sitting in front of the Trevi Fountain reading. Then I spent some time in front of the Forum and the Colosseum reading. Then on Sunday morning I caught a train to Napoli, and two more hours flew by while I was reading. I took a break from Harry to climb Mt. Vesuvius and visit Herculaneum (I can't quite imagine how large Mt Vesuvius must have been before: it still dominates the skyline so much. Hard to picture it twice as large, or larger...). Finished the new Harry at Stazione Napoli Centrale waiting for the train back to Roma. Had to read my introduction to Fascism on the train home instead. At least I threw a coin in the Trevi Fountain, so I know I'll come back to Roma and see all the things I missed.
I know I'm not allowed to say anything about Harry Potter, but please feel free to email me if you've finished it too. I'm dying to talk about it! I've been developing theories for the last two books!
Yesterday was a public holiday in Firenze, the holiday for San Giovanni, the most important saint in Firenze. Last night at 9:30 we gathered along the Arno and watched a wonderful fireworks display. Made me want to learn more about the history of fireworks. I think designing fireworks would be a wonderful job.
I finished reading Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography too, as well as Harry Potter, and am now immersed in Greek Lyric poetry. I fell in love with Stesichorus, and am just beginning the work of Simonides. I have a feeling I'm going to grow addicted to classics over the next few months as well. Peggy stopped writing so much about her lovelife after she moved to Venezia, and wrote much more about art - very interesting, but of course very subjective. I've read a bit about her initial reaction to Pollock (she was unimpressed) and how it took the advice of art critics to support his work. In hindsight of course she always recognised he was a genius - though it doesn't quite explain why she gave away 18 paintings by Pollock that came to be worth so much. I'm interested in reading a bit more about some of her other main artists, to see if, from the other side, she was always as instrumental as she says... But maybe I'm just jealous that she owned a beautiful Brancusi Bird in Space.
The days are much too hot here. 40 degrees isn't unusual, and there's no sea breeze for relief. I'll be glad to head north where there'll be at least a little respite from the heat.
Only three more days in Firenze, and I won't have seen everything - though it will give me more reason to return...
Firenze
Wimbledon. Lleyton Hewitt lost? In the first round? I'm having a little trouble getting tennis news, as the Italian media is not terribly interested in the sport. Any and all updates would be greatly appreciated. Anyone paying close attention, please feel free to send messages regarding the progress of ARNAUD CLEMENT. If he lost in the first round too, and I just don't know it yet, I'll cry.
I went to Roma last weekend. Unfortunately, because I had to spend my time there organising my visa for Vietnam, and because the Vietnamese embassy was a long way from everything else (or it seemed that way in the heat) I didn't get to see as much as I would have liked. I should be honest and say that another contributing factor to my not being the most active tourist was the fact that the new Harry Potter was released on Saturday. I went to the Vatican on Saturday morning - found it astounding, but couldn't spend too much time in the Sistine Chapel because the crowds were so oppressive, but fell in love with the map rooms and the Egyptian collections - and after I left the Vaticano and San Pietro I went to Roma's Feltrinelli International and bought H. Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I spent two hours sitting in front of the Trevi Fountain reading. Then I spent some time in front of the Forum and the Colosseum reading. Then on Sunday morning I caught a train to Napoli, and two more hours flew by while I was reading. I took a break from Harry to climb Mt. Vesuvius and visit Herculaneum (I can't quite imagine how large Mt Vesuvius must have been before: it still dominates the skyline so much. Hard to picture it twice as large, or larger...). Finished the new Harry at Stazione Napoli Centrale waiting for the train back to Roma. Had to read my introduction to Fascism on the train home instead. At least I threw a coin in the Trevi Fountain, so I know I'll come back to Roma and see all the things I missed.
I know I'm not allowed to say anything about Harry Potter, but please feel free to email me if you've finished it too. I'm dying to talk about it! I've been developing theories for the last two books!
Yesterday was a public holiday in Firenze, the holiday for San Giovanni, the most important saint in Firenze. Last night at 9:30 we gathered along the Arno and watched a wonderful fireworks display. Made me want to learn more about the history of fireworks. I think designing fireworks would be a wonderful job.
I finished reading Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography too, as well as Harry Potter, and am now immersed in Greek Lyric poetry. I fell in love with Stesichorus, and am just beginning the work of Simonides. I have a feeling I'm going to grow addicted to classics over the next few months as well. Peggy stopped writing so much about her lovelife after she moved to Venezia, and wrote much more about art - very interesting, but of course very subjective. I've read a bit about her initial reaction to Pollock (she was unimpressed) and how it took the advice of art critics to support his work. In hindsight of course she always recognised he was a genius - though it doesn't quite explain why she gave away 18 paintings by Pollock that came to be worth so much. I'm interested in reading a bit more about some of her other main artists, to see if, from the other side, she was always as instrumental as she says... But maybe I'm just jealous that she owned a beautiful Brancusi Bird in Space.
The days are much too hot here. 40 degrees isn't unusual, and there's no sea breeze for relief. I'll be glad to head north where there'll be at least a little respite from the heat.
Only three more days in Firenze, and I won't have seen everything - though it will give me more reason to return...
Firenze
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Some brief comments only.
It has been raining in Italy the last few days, heavily. Quite glorious. After months of weather being too much the same all the time my Melbourne-girl self was glad to get soaked to the skin walking home on Tuesday night. My sneakers are still drying.
I went to Assisi. It was beautiful. Yes, Pete, I said hello to St Francis for you.
I'm still reading Peggy's autobiography. She had a lot of love affairs. So far I'm most impressed by Samuel Beckett, because I adore him.
Moy is leaving early tomorrow, and I'll have a corner to myself for a week. Am still shopping this afternoon to try to find a present for Miss Moy to take home to Sacramento.
I seem to have bad luck with wines from San Gimagnano. I'm clearly not supposed to remember them.
I bought squid ink spaqhetti and strawberry and balsamic vinegar sauce. Apparently the sauce is good on meats, cheeses and ice-cream. I should sell tickets to the first Scoffers meeting on my return!
Apparently the Czech Republic is the only place in Europe you can legally buy absinthe. Duly noted. Will be in Prague in just over two weeks.
Will be in Roma tomorrow. Am assembling all my memories of the bits of Latin I translated so badly in high school. Trying to remember Ovid's advice for picking up girls at the theatre and such things.
Will also go to Pompeii. And next Tuesday is the day when the Fiorentine folks become a little less serious. There'll be fireworks on Piazzale Michaelangelo. Jealous yet?
Wimbledon begins next week. I am sorry to find Venus and Serena in different halves of the draw, glad Lleyton's likely second round opponent has withdrawn to let in a lucky loser, sad that my favourite player, the obscure Arnaud Clement still hasn't made it back into the top twenty players in the rankings. Am hoping that either Arnaud or Nicholas Lapentti (who signed me at the Australian Open) will make it through to the quarters. My wildly irrational prediction for the event is that Arnaud will win. Maybe Lleyton can be runner up or semifinalist so he doesn't cry too much.
When Peggy's done with all her love affairs am going to read a little history of fascism, and then start packing up all but a few of my books to send home. Our merry home is broken up.
Firenze
It has been raining in Italy the last few days, heavily. Quite glorious. After months of weather being too much the same all the time my Melbourne-girl self was glad to get soaked to the skin walking home on Tuesday night. My sneakers are still drying.
I went to Assisi. It was beautiful. Yes, Pete, I said hello to St Francis for you.
I'm still reading Peggy's autobiography. She had a lot of love affairs. So far I'm most impressed by Samuel Beckett, because I adore him.
Moy is leaving early tomorrow, and I'll have a corner to myself for a week. Am still shopping this afternoon to try to find a present for Miss Moy to take home to Sacramento.
I seem to have bad luck with wines from San Gimagnano. I'm clearly not supposed to remember them.
I bought squid ink spaqhetti and strawberry and balsamic vinegar sauce. Apparently the sauce is good on meats, cheeses and ice-cream. I should sell tickets to the first Scoffers meeting on my return!
Apparently the Czech Republic is the only place in Europe you can legally buy absinthe. Duly noted. Will be in Prague in just over two weeks.
Will be in Roma tomorrow. Am assembling all my memories of the bits of Latin I translated so badly in high school. Trying to remember Ovid's advice for picking up girls at the theatre and such things.
Will also go to Pompeii. And next Tuesday is the day when the Fiorentine folks become a little less serious. There'll be fireworks on Piazzale Michaelangelo. Jealous yet?
Wimbledon begins next week. I am sorry to find Venus and Serena in different halves of the draw, glad Lleyton's likely second round opponent has withdrawn to let in a lucky loser, sad that my favourite player, the obscure Arnaud Clement still hasn't made it back into the top twenty players in the rankings. Am hoping that either Arnaud or Nicholas Lapentti (who signed me at the Australian Open) will make it through to the quarters. My wildly irrational prediction for the event is that Arnaud will win. Maybe Lleyton can be runner up or semifinalist so he doesn't cry too much.
When Peggy's done with all her love affairs am going to read a little history of fascism, and then start packing up all but a few of my books to send home. Our merry home is broken up.
Firenze
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
After making my list in class last week of all the places left in Italy I want to visit before I dash off to Berlin at the end of next week (I still can't quite get my head around the fact that my time here in Firenze is nearly over...) I made another list of all the things left in Firenze that I still had to see - a shamefully long list, with some terribly important things on it. I seem to have made concentrated efforts in some areas, with multiple visits - for example the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Brancacci Chapel - and somehow missed out on other things altogether. So now I feel like I moving more into that touristing pace of doing and seeing things, instead of letting myself fall into too many long lazy Firenze days, which, aside from shopping for food and explaining to little old ladies at the supermercato that I buy Granny Smith apples both to eat and to cook with, seem to achieve very little. However, since last Thursday I have reformed, and have been dizzy with the history of Italy.
I forgot to do anything for the Wednesday lunchtime club last Wednesday, but I think I made up for it with my adventures on Thursday. Firstly I tried to visit the Medicee Library, but found that the library itself was closed - but I could still enter the foyer to see the Michaelangelo staircase. This was interesting, and I'm glad I saw it (and yes, it was of course a beautiful staircase) but I wish I could have walked up it, and see all those beautiful old books. After this I took myself to the Galleria d'Accamedia: this is the first of my shamefaced areas of neglect. I'd seen the two copies of Michaelangelo's David, outside Palazzo Vecchio, and in Piazzale Michaelangelo, but I hadn't quite got around to seeing the real thing. Strange the profound difference between seeing the copies and the real thing. I felt dizzy with it. Was talking to Moy after I came home and the way she put it was "I wish I had never used the word beautiful to describe a boy before. Because David is REALLY beautiful." No matter how many pictures, details, copies, etc I had see before, there was nothing to prepare me for the moment when, walking around the corner in the Accademia, I really saw HIM, along with several other of Michaelangelo's pieces, the others unfinished works. Another favourite from the Accademia was a piece painted by Masaccio's brother (I sheepishly can't remember the artist's name. I was so dazzled by the subject matter of the painting, and the fact that he was Masaccio's brother that somehow another piece of information was impossible to etch in my mind at the same time) supposedly depicting the wedding of Bocaccio, set in Fiesole... Fiesole, in the hills just outside of Firenze is still on my must visit list. I was considering a sunset visit tonight, but another thunderstorm has just begun, so I think I'll sit in my room with the balcony window open and watch the action... But it is my plan to visit Fiesole before I leave, and when I do I want to buy a copy of Bocaccio's Decameron while I'm there.
I also went to the Archaelogical museum in Firenze - something fatal, as now I find I want to see all the Etruscan archaelogical sites around Tuscany, as well as visiting Roma, and then Pompeii... The collection in Firenze contains the Medicee collection of archaelogical artifacts as well as later collections: housing both an extensive Egyptain collection, and an extensive Etruscan collection. I enjoyed the Etruscan piece more, because, I suppose, these were more of a revelation to me. A beautiful bronze statue of a chimera, a collection of ancient mirrors and the stray fact that mirrors are one of the most common items found at Etruscan sites. A multitude of tiny figures, strange and also seeming so very modern. I don't think I will have time this time, but I hope I'll have a chance to come back to Italy, and spend some time in the deep south of Toscana, in Volterra and the areas around, and on the road to Roma. Every place I visit simply reveals a new wishlist of places to visit. My lists are no use, because things never get ticked off, only added: one visit, or two, or ten - it's never enough for me to feel I actually know anything about a place. Looking at all those ancient tarnished mirrors I wondered what it was like to be vain two thousand year ago.
I spent the weekend with Moy and Adi on a bit of a whirlwind adventure: Moy and I were "cattive ragazze", and skipped school on Friday morning to hop on a train and head off to Verona. On Saturday we moved on to Padova, and Saturday night and Sunday we got lost over and over again in Venezia. I hardly know how to write about any of these adventures. It is easy enough, I suppose, to say that we visited the house of Juliet, and lay in a garden beside the stadium in Verona, that we visited the Duomo in Padova and the Church of Saint Anthony, an amazing spectacle: hero worship of a saint on a grand scale, unlike any of the churches I'd seen before, that we wandered around Venezia for hours, talking to mask-makers about the different characters of the traditional carnevale masks (I settled on a traditional Capitano, the curved beak mask was always my favourite...) - but somehow the weekend is still a jumbled series of impressions that will only begin to grow clear in a year or two. In between the house of Juliet and San Marco, between San Antonio and the Peggy Guggenheim collection there was a lot of walking and waiting and dragging our bags around too. Living in one place for the last seven weeks, I'd blissfully forgotten what it was like to move quickly!
My favourite thing in Venezia was visiting Peggy Guggenheim's home. Such a beautiful collection, and a beautiful house on the Grand Canal. After so much of the Renaissance here in Firenze, and after the Tiepolos and Tintorettos of the Accademia in Venezia, it was a relief to find myself surrounded by my more usual diet of modernist and contemporary work. While travelling around Veneto I finished reading both Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey (I can both see that Anne is a somewhat more consistent writer than both her sisters, but also in a way more tiresome as well: there is such an obviously moralistic aspect to her work, I read her and feel her objective in writing is to point how tiresome everyone is when they succumb to their vices... I can't help feeling there's a touch of the didactic in the clear superiority of her wholesome, brave, gentile, poor, sensible heroines) as well as the Oxford introduction to Globalisation, so I bought Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography, and have been reading it joyfully. There's something so eccentric and seemingly careless in the tone and the way the anecdotes are strung together: there's just so much colour in the whole thing, such offhandedness to the wonderfully strange things that seemed to happen to her her whole life.
Then returning home, I was confronted by my list of things to do in Firenze again... so I've resumed visiting museums and churches... visited San Lorenzo yesterday, then spent several hours in the Museo dell' Opera di Duomo, and this afternoon I spent several hours at Palazzo Pitti. I emerged from the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue in New York with a lot of new ideas on house we should be furnishing our house (for a start, where are all those Vermeers we should be splashing on the walls?) and after visiting the Galleria Palatina this afternoon I have a few more ideas, following the inspiration of the Medicees!
Tomorrow I'm going on a small adventure to Assisi, and then I'll spend Thursday in Firenze - it will be Moy's last night - before I dash down to Roma this weekend, and the Vatican. When I think of Vatican city I think of the History Channel's trivia question. What country has a population of 1000, the official language of Latin, and a birthrate of zero?
I forgot to do anything for the Wednesday lunchtime club last Wednesday, but I think I made up for it with my adventures on Thursday. Firstly I tried to visit the Medicee Library, but found that the library itself was closed - but I could still enter the foyer to see the Michaelangelo staircase. This was interesting, and I'm glad I saw it (and yes, it was of course a beautiful staircase) but I wish I could have walked up it, and see all those beautiful old books. After this I took myself to the Galleria d'Accamedia: this is the first of my shamefaced areas of neglect. I'd seen the two copies of Michaelangelo's David, outside Palazzo Vecchio, and in Piazzale Michaelangelo, but I hadn't quite got around to seeing the real thing. Strange the profound difference between seeing the copies and the real thing. I felt dizzy with it. Was talking to Moy after I came home and the way she put it was "I wish I had never used the word beautiful to describe a boy before. Because David is REALLY beautiful." No matter how many pictures, details, copies, etc I had see before, there was nothing to prepare me for the moment when, walking around the corner in the Accademia, I really saw HIM, along with several other of Michaelangelo's pieces, the others unfinished works. Another favourite from the Accademia was a piece painted by Masaccio's brother (I sheepishly can't remember the artist's name. I was so dazzled by the subject matter of the painting, and the fact that he was Masaccio's brother that somehow another piece of information was impossible to etch in my mind at the same time) supposedly depicting the wedding of Bocaccio, set in Fiesole... Fiesole, in the hills just outside of Firenze is still on my must visit list. I was considering a sunset visit tonight, but another thunderstorm has just begun, so I think I'll sit in my room with the balcony window open and watch the action... But it is my plan to visit Fiesole before I leave, and when I do I want to buy a copy of Bocaccio's Decameron while I'm there.
I also went to the Archaelogical museum in Firenze - something fatal, as now I find I want to see all the Etruscan archaelogical sites around Tuscany, as well as visiting Roma, and then Pompeii... The collection in Firenze contains the Medicee collection of archaelogical artifacts as well as later collections: housing both an extensive Egyptain collection, and an extensive Etruscan collection. I enjoyed the Etruscan piece more, because, I suppose, these were more of a revelation to me. A beautiful bronze statue of a chimera, a collection of ancient mirrors and the stray fact that mirrors are one of the most common items found at Etruscan sites. A multitude of tiny figures, strange and also seeming so very modern. I don't think I will have time this time, but I hope I'll have a chance to come back to Italy, and spend some time in the deep south of Toscana, in Volterra and the areas around, and on the road to Roma. Every place I visit simply reveals a new wishlist of places to visit. My lists are no use, because things never get ticked off, only added: one visit, or two, or ten - it's never enough for me to feel I actually know anything about a place. Looking at all those ancient tarnished mirrors I wondered what it was like to be vain two thousand year ago.
I spent the weekend with Moy and Adi on a bit of a whirlwind adventure: Moy and I were "cattive ragazze", and skipped school on Friday morning to hop on a train and head off to Verona. On Saturday we moved on to Padova, and Saturday night and Sunday we got lost over and over again in Venezia. I hardly know how to write about any of these adventures. It is easy enough, I suppose, to say that we visited the house of Juliet, and lay in a garden beside the stadium in Verona, that we visited the Duomo in Padova and the Church of Saint Anthony, an amazing spectacle: hero worship of a saint on a grand scale, unlike any of the churches I'd seen before, that we wandered around Venezia for hours, talking to mask-makers about the different characters of the traditional carnevale masks (I settled on a traditional Capitano, the curved beak mask was always my favourite...) - but somehow the weekend is still a jumbled series of impressions that will only begin to grow clear in a year or two. In between the house of Juliet and San Marco, between San Antonio and the Peggy Guggenheim collection there was a lot of walking and waiting and dragging our bags around too. Living in one place for the last seven weeks, I'd blissfully forgotten what it was like to move quickly!
My favourite thing in Venezia was visiting Peggy Guggenheim's home. Such a beautiful collection, and a beautiful house on the Grand Canal. After so much of the Renaissance here in Firenze, and after the Tiepolos and Tintorettos of the Accademia in Venezia, it was a relief to find myself surrounded by my more usual diet of modernist and contemporary work. While travelling around Veneto I finished reading both Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey (I can both see that Anne is a somewhat more consistent writer than both her sisters, but also in a way more tiresome as well: there is such an obviously moralistic aspect to her work, I read her and feel her objective in writing is to point how tiresome everyone is when they succumb to their vices... I can't help feeling there's a touch of the didactic in the clear superiority of her wholesome, brave, gentile, poor, sensible heroines) as well as the Oxford introduction to Globalisation, so I bought Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography, and have been reading it joyfully. There's something so eccentric and seemingly careless in the tone and the way the anecdotes are strung together: there's just so much colour in the whole thing, such offhandedness to the wonderfully strange things that seemed to happen to her her whole life.
Then returning home, I was confronted by my list of things to do in Firenze again... so I've resumed visiting museums and churches... visited San Lorenzo yesterday, then spent several hours in the Museo dell' Opera di Duomo, and this afternoon I spent several hours at Palazzo Pitti. I emerged from the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue in New York with a lot of new ideas on house we should be furnishing our house (for a start, where are all those Vermeers we should be splashing on the walls?) and after visiting the Galleria Palatina this afternoon I have a few more ideas, following the inspiration of the Medicees!
Tomorrow I'm going on a small adventure to Assisi, and then I'll spend Thursday in Firenze - it will be Moy's last night - before I dash down to Roma this weekend, and the Vatican. When I think of Vatican city I think of the History Channel's trivia question. What country has a population of 1000, the official language of Latin, and a birthrate of zero?
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
After a long absense, I've finally forced myself to brave the heat outside, forgo museums and churches, and come here to update my much-neglected travel diary. In opening, I want to say a very big THANKYOU to Pete and Molly, who both sent me Mint Slice biscuits from Australia, now beckoning me from the freezer at home, as well as other goodies, and thanks also to my mother, Bernie, Anna and Felicity who've all got into the act of mailing me things. I was in danger of sinking into homesickness a week ago, but now I feel very much loved!
I suppose I've been enjoying Firenze too much to tear myself away from it long enough to reflect on it. Not just Firenze either - so far all my little trips have been around Toscana (unwisely, my roommate Moy and I have both left all the most expensive "must-see" locations until last!). Last week Felicity came to visit from Cambridge, and so I took the opportunity to show her around a few things, and to fail to show her around others - we went to Lucca, which was a first for me, but not for her. Felicity chose the saint Zita for her confirmation name (not having received a Catholic upbringing, I'm not quite sure how these things work). Saint Zita lived all of her eighty years in Lucca. On her previous visit there, Felicity wasn't able to find any real references to Zita: this wasn't the case this time. After stumbling upon a stand of funny old postcards, we wandering into the church San Frediano, and one of the chapels in the the church was a chapel to Santa Zita, and contained her unpreserved body in a glass case. Unfortunately we couldn't enter the chapel, as a mass was underway, but we wandered around the church for quite a while. I've been told that Zita is variously the saint of charity, flowers and lost keys, and that she never went anywhere in her life but Lucca, but have to admit that after these paltry facts, I really don't have a lot to offer. Lucca was, of course, beautiful - though not my favourite of the small towns in the region. My favourite would have to be San Gimignano, where we went on Saturday.
After an uninspiring wait to change buses at Poggibonsi, we arrived n San Gimagnano ready to eat the lunch we'd carefully packed, accompanied by some newly acquired Chianti wines. I suggested we head towards one of the main squares to sit down and eat our picnic, only to find that (of course) in the three weeks since I'd last visited the town they'd blocked everything off. If we'd walked a little further we could have found a lovely spot in the shade looking on the Duomo, but we sank to the ground and ate, looking instead at the blocked-off main square. After lunch we all split up for a while, and I visited the Duomo by myself - full of beautiful frescoes, which seems to be par for the course. The one that caught my attention was a image of San Sebastien, presiding over the rear, viewed when exiting the church. I've never seen a San Sebastien with so many arrows in him. Seeing all these images, I begin to realise how little I know about the lives of the saints - everything I see and do reminds me of half a dozen more things I know nothing of. They all end up on the growing list of things I want to read more about, to research when I return home.
Also on the itinerary was an aborted journey to Siena, which would have been my third time there. I spent a Saturday afternoon there a few weeks before, wandering about the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala: what was used as a hospital until quite recently and then converted into the museum space it is now. The hospital was begun about a thousand years ago, and the present structure is over 500 years old. In the same rooms which housed patients, there are gorgeous frescoes on the walls and ceilings, some dedicated to the legendary founder of the hospital. Like many other things in Siena it is dedicated to the Virgin Mary: the town itself is seen to have a special relationship with the Virgin, because the town has devoted itself to her for so much of it's history.
As well as the high-ceilinged rooms full of frescoes, there are also underground chapels and relics, and beneath it all, two floors underneath the hospital, they have recently installed the Museo Archaelogico. The collection itself probably wasn't very inspiring - I felt too much that I was walking through it without appreciating the differences between items. What made the Archaelogical museum so memorable for me was the fact that it is arranged in an underground labyrinth. Walking amongst that collection of ancient etruscan items, I felt like I'd stumbled into a different world.
As I was sitting in class today (after we'd learned "Pronome Indiretti", the important lesson of the day) I started to scribble down all the places left in Italy I still want to see, and have realised how many of them there are. I still have so many of the major museums and churches to see, not to mention the fact that I want to get to Bologna, Verona, Padova, Venezia and possibly Ravenna in the next few weeks.
In between my traipsing about Toscana, wandering the streets of Firenze, and doing my fair share of art-gazing (and learning to conjugate in the future tense too) I've been reading steadily. At times it feels like I've read a lot - like I've somehow "knocked over" a fair few new things. Then I gaze at lists in the back of my Penguin classics and realise how much more there is to read. But I've been reading a lovely mix of things - more Henry James (What Maisie Knew, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians and The Europeans) as well as reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in modern English - I'll struggle through the Riverside Chaucer in a few years time), and then romping through some Carson McCullers short stories and essays in The Mortgaged Heart. Have been reading Keats and Anne Bronte and Simonides of Keos. Somehow my reading is travelling all over the place, and every book I finish is suggesting another ten I must read. I feel almost that this reading I've doing must be in its way even more valuable than all the things I'm seeing. Or rather, since they can't be compared, somehow it all goes into this melting pot of sensation, experience, knowledge, wonder... It feels like the pot has never been so full. I find that I want to read so many more things - so much of the great, long, daunting poetic works - want to read Milton and Spenser and Christopher Marlow, and I want to read Pope and Shelley and as much ancient literature as I can manage.
At the same time as wanting to read all these works of literature, I find that I just wish I know more about how the world works - so I've begun to read some of the Oxford Very Short Introductions... already covering such a wide array of subjects, with more due for release in the near future. So I'm learning at the same time about the way the Bible was put together, and the different bibles in use, about Cultural and Social Anthropology, about the Cold War and Classics... these odd, important things side by side: the spectre of Greek Temples and the nine nuclear warheads on Cuba at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. I think it is that kind of juxtaposition which best explains the type of place Firenze has become for me.
I suppose I've been enjoying Firenze too much to tear myself away from it long enough to reflect on it. Not just Firenze either - so far all my little trips have been around Toscana (unwisely, my roommate Moy and I have both left all the most expensive "must-see" locations until last!). Last week Felicity came to visit from Cambridge, and so I took the opportunity to show her around a few things, and to fail to show her around others - we went to Lucca, which was a first for me, but not for her. Felicity chose the saint Zita for her confirmation name (not having received a Catholic upbringing, I'm not quite sure how these things work). Saint Zita lived all of her eighty years in Lucca. On her previous visit there, Felicity wasn't able to find any real references to Zita: this wasn't the case this time. After stumbling upon a stand of funny old postcards, we wandering into the church San Frediano, and one of the chapels in the the church was a chapel to Santa Zita, and contained her unpreserved body in a glass case. Unfortunately we couldn't enter the chapel, as a mass was underway, but we wandered around the church for quite a while. I've been told that Zita is variously the saint of charity, flowers and lost keys, and that she never went anywhere in her life but Lucca, but have to admit that after these paltry facts, I really don't have a lot to offer. Lucca was, of course, beautiful - though not my favourite of the small towns in the region. My favourite would have to be San Gimignano, where we went on Saturday.
After an uninspiring wait to change buses at Poggibonsi, we arrived n San Gimagnano ready to eat the lunch we'd carefully packed, accompanied by some newly acquired Chianti wines. I suggested we head towards one of the main squares to sit down and eat our picnic, only to find that (of course) in the three weeks since I'd last visited the town they'd blocked everything off. If we'd walked a little further we could have found a lovely spot in the shade looking on the Duomo, but we sank to the ground and ate, looking instead at the blocked-off main square. After lunch we all split up for a while, and I visited the Duomo by myself - full of beautiful frescoes, which seems to be par for the course. The one that caught my attention was a image of San Sebastien, presiding over the rear, viewed when exiting the church. I've never seen a San Sebastien with so many arrows in him. Seeing all these images, I begin to realise how little I know about the lives of the saints - everything I see and do reminds me of half a dozen more things I know nothing of. They all end up on the growing list of things I want to read more about, to research when I return home.
Also on the itinerary was an aborted journey to Siena, which would have been my third time there. I spent a Saturday afternoon there a few weeks before, wandering about the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala: what was used as a hospital until quite recently and then converted into the museum space it is now. The hospital was begun about a thousand years ago, and the present structure is over 500 years old. In the same rooms which housed patients, there are gorgeous frescoes on the walls and ceilings, some dedicated to the legendary founder of the hospital. Like many other things in Siena it is dedicated to the Virgin Mary: the town itself is seen to have a special relationship with the Virgin, because the town has devoted itself to her for so much of it's history.
As well as the high-ceilinged rooms full of frescoes, there are also underground chapels and relics, and beneath it all, two floors underneath the hospital, they have recently installed the Museo Archaelogico. The collection itself probably wasn't very inspiring - I felt too much that I was walking through it without appreciating the differences between items. What made the Archaelogical museum so memorable for me was the fact that it is arranged in an underground labyrinth. Walking amongst that collection of ancient etruscan items, I felt like I'd stumbled into a different world.
As I was sitting in class today (after we'd learned "Pronome Indiretti", the important lesson of the day) I started to scribble down all the places left in Italy I still want to see, and have realised how many of them there are. I still have so many of the major museums and churches to see, not to mention the fact that I want to get to Bologna, Verona, Padova, Venezia and possibly Ravenna in the next few weeks.
In between my traipsing about Toscana, wandering the streets of Firenze, and doing my fair share of art-gazing (and learning to conjugate in the future tense too) I've been reading steadily. At times it feels like I've read a lot - like I've somehow "knocked over" a fair few new things. Then I gaze at lists in the back of my Penguin classics and realise how much more there is to read. But I've been reading a lovely mix of things - more Henry James (What Maisie Knew, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians and The Europeans) as well as reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in modern English - I'll struggle through the Riverside Chaucer in a few years time), and then romping through some Carson McCullers short stories and essays in The Mortgaged Heart. Have been reading Keats and Anne Bronte and Simonides of Keos. Somehow my reading is travelling all over the place, and every book I finish is suggesting another ten I must read. I feel almost that this reading I've doing must be in its way even more valuable than all the things I'm seeing. Or rather, since they can't be compared, somehow it all goes into this melting pot of sensation, experience, knowledge, wonder... It feels like the pot has never been so full. I find that I want to read so many more things - so much of the great, long, daunting poetic works - want to read Milton and Spenser and Christopher Marlow, and I want to read Pope and Shelley and as much ancient literature as I can manage.
At the same time as wanting to read all these works of literature, I find that I just wish I know more about how the world works - so I've begun to read some of the Oxford Very Short Introductions... already covering such a wide array of subjects, with more due for release in the near future. So I'm learning at the same time about the way the Bible was put together, and the different bibles in use, about Cultural and Social Anthropology, about the Cold War and Classics... these odd, important things side by side: the spectre of Greek Temples and the nine nuclear warheads on Cuba at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. I think it is that kind of juxtaposition which best explains the type of place Firenze has become for me.
Thursday, May 15, 2003
The days keep running away from me. It's a small walk from school to here, and so many days I find that I want to go in a different direction, and my path doesn't wind back this way. Today, though, I had lunch in my little caffe (Caffe Sabatino) on via Faenza, so this is on my way home.
I went to Capella Brancacci today, to see the frescoes of Masaccio and Masolino, which I studied at university last year. We used the chapel to discuss ideas about restoration, and the presentation of works: the chapel was restored during the 1980s, and right until the end the work proceeded without controversy. Then, just before the chapel reopened, the Baroque altarpiece which had been in the chapel before its restoration was put back, and suddenly there was an uproar: because the altarpiece was considered only an "average" example of the Baroque style, while the earlier frescoes, especially the work of Masaccio, are considered incredibly important to the history of painting: the frescoes contain some of Masaccio's most important work (I believe he was one of these young chaps who died early), and Masaccio is considered the father of modern painting, because of his "discovery" of perspective. As with so many artists, before I came to Florence I had only seen reproductions of his work - of course the real life experience is so different. The reason there was the outcry over the altarpiece is that its restoration obscured parts of the frescoes. We discussed it at length in class last year. My tutor professed to continually wavering in her opinion about whether the right or wrong decision was made.
I suppose I wish the altarpiece hadn't been restored: while it is only a bottom corner of two of the frescoes that have been obscured, it becomes very awkward to get an overall sense of those pieces, because of the awkward angle you are forced to look at them from if you want to see the parts behind the altarpiece. My lecturer argued that as the chapel is an example of artwork in situ, and the context is religious, then the altarpiece should be there. But I disagree, because for well over a century the chapel existed without the altarpiece: so to restore it on that argument is simply to privelege one period of history over another period of history. Now the function of the chapel is essentially the same as a museum: visitors come to view the frescoes, and are bustled about so they don't have the chance to use the chapel for devotional purposes. Even if they did wish to pray, however, when it was possible for years before the altarpiece was installed to use the space for prayer, why is it impossible afterwards? I swayed my tutor a little with these arguments, but I think my lecturer was a little bit immoveable. Oh well.
I have been very excited about my Italian classes, because yesterday we began to learn the past tense. It will be a great help in translating my children's books. I'm thinking about making a start on Sylvia Plath's "Bed Book" tonight. I've read it, of course, in English, but not for a few years, and it's short enough that I think I'll be able to translate it more easily than the little Margaret Atwood book I'm VERY slowly making my way through. I also went looking for some Enid Blyton - I want to eventually be able to read The Famous Five (!) in Italian - but I guess she must be out of fashion, because I couldn't find any of her books anywhere here. I found Anne of Green Gables though - except here they call it Anne of the Red Hair.
Walked across Ponte Vecchio for the first time today. I was audacious and went into a few of the jewellery shops to look at their gold chains, as I bought a coral pendent on Corsica with a gold setting, but as I'm living very cheaply, a necklace from Ponte Vecchio will have to remain a dream, methinks.
I went to Capella Brancacci today, to see the frescoes of Masaccio and Masolino, which I studied at university last year. We used the chapel to discuss ideas about restoration, and the presentation of works: the chapel was restored during the 1980s, and right until the end the work proceeded without controversy. Then, just before the chapel reopened, the Baroque altarpiece which had been in the chapel before its restoration was put back, and suddenly there was an uproar: because the altarpiece was considered only an "average" example of the Baroque style, while the earlier frescoes, especially the work of Masaccio, are considered incredibly important to the history of painting: the frescoes contain some of Masaccio's most important work (I believe he was one of these young chaps who died early), and Masaccio is considered the father of modern painting, because of his "discovery" of perspective. As with so many artists, before I came to Florence I had only seen reproductions of his work - of course the real life experience is so different. The reason there was the outcry over the altarpiece is that its restoration obscured parts of the frescoes. We discussed it at length in class last year. My tutor professed to continually wavering in her opinion about whether the right or wrong decision was made.
I suppose I wish the altarpiece hadn't been restored: while it is only a bottom corner of two of the frescoes that have been obscured, it becomes very awkward to get an overall sense of those pieces, because of the awkward angle you are forced to look at them from if you want to see the parts behind the altarpiece. My lecturer argued that as the chapel is an example of artwork in situ, and the context is religious, then the altarpiece should be there. But I disagree, because for well over a century the chapel existed without the altarpiece: so to restore it on that argument is simply to privelege one period of history over another period of history. Now the function of the chapel is essentially the same as a museum: visitors come to view the frescoes, and are bustled about so they don't have the chance to use the chapel for devotional purposes. Even if they did wish to pray, however, when it was possible for years before the altarpiece was installed to use the space for prayer, why is it impossible afterwards? I swayed my tutor a little with these arguments, but I think my lecturer was a little bit immoveable. Oh well.
I have been very excited about my Italian classes, because yesterday we began to learn the past tense. It will be a great help in translating my children's books. I'm thinking about making a start on Sylvia Plath's "Bed Book" tonight. I've read it, of course, in English, but not for a few years, and it's short enough that I think I'll be able to translate it more easily than the little Margaret Atwood book I'm VERY slowly making my way through. I also went looking for some Enid Blyton - I want to eventually be able to read The Famous Five (!) in Italian - but I guess she must be out of fashion, because I couldn't find any of her books anywhere here. I found Anne of Green Gables though - except here they call it Anne of the Red Hair.
Walked across Ponte Vecchio for the first time today. I was audacious and went into a few of the jewellery shops to look at their gold chains, as I bought a coral pendent on Corsica with a gold setting, but as I'm living very cheaply, a necklace from Ponte Vecchio will have to remain a dream, methinks.
Saturday, May 10, 2003
I understand Stendhal's fainting fit after a week in Florence. I've been wandering without the map - there are parts of the city which are still a maze to me, because I've been stumbling on them completely by accident, while other parts of the city have become very familiar to me, especially the small via Faenza near Stazione Santa Maria Novella and the markets nearby. I walk through the markets most days, to see all the scarves and the leather bound notebooks and the cheap prints of works of art, and a thousand other things. My wishlist keeps growing, though I can't really afford to buy much. But it's nice to pick things up up and pretend I can afford them, imagine them back home in the lounge room.
Today I went to the Uffizi for the first time, an overwhelming experience, though not always the experience I was expecting. Where I was expecting to love the Caravaggio's, they weren't the ones I would have most liked to see. On the other hand, among the Caravaggisti works in the same room, there was one of my favourite Artemesia Gentileschi works - her second "Judith and Holofernes" - a particularly brutal portrayal of the beheading of Holofernes, much more convincing than other versions I've seen reproductions of (such as Caravaggio's) where Judith looks so young and delicate, and the way she holds the knife looks so uncertain, that you really wonder how she's going to get all the way through her bloody task. Artemesia's work, by contrast, is so visceral: you see the spurting of blood from the neck, and the bloody speckled on Judith's dress, and you see her working with her maid in great complicity: the maid holding Holofernes in place, while Judith grimly saws her way through. Seeing it in person, especially unexpectedly turning around, and finding it in front of me, was strange, and I ended up feeling a little light-headed. It was one of the paintings I've most wanted to see, but I think I forgot the Uffizi had it: because the first version she did of it (which, in reproduction, I have always liked better, though it's not quite as gory...) is in Naples, I think. So I didn't think to expect it. I looked and looked for a postcard of it afterwards, but there wasn't one, which was very frustrating. Maybe I'll find one some day, or maybe they'll produce one someday, but in the mean time I have no picture of it to stick to the wall and gaze at. (Admittedly it's not very calming subject matter - I just love how gutsy it is!)
Another painting which was an unexpected favourite was a Bronzino portrait - a portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, but I just can't think of it like that. It's the painting that is used on the cover of my copy of The Wings of the Dove, and so to me it will always be a portrait of Milly. I found a cheap print of it on the market as I was wandering back, and bought it, to remember the adventure of reading so much Henry James.
I've been spending a lot of time in the Duomo, in front of the painting of Dante, or standing under Bruneschelli's dome - mainly because it's free, and when the heat is stifling outside, it's lovely and cool inside. I haven't climbed the stairs up to the dome yet (this does cost money), and I haven't been down underneath it either. At the moment it's enough to wander round it and wonder at the intricacy of its exterior, and then to go inside and wonder at the immensity of its interior. I wandered into the bookshop attached to the Duomo's museum (which I also haven't been to yet) and bought a large, leather bound notebook, which I've begun to use as my "Florence diary".
I feel like I've learned a huge amount in a week - I can understand a lot more Italian than I can speak at this stage, but I've learned to say a lot of things within the last week. I bought a children's book (by Margaret Atwood, translated into Italian!) and I've been slowly reading it and translating it back, and learning. The main flaw in this is that, as any good "once upon a time" type story, it's written in the past tense, and we haven't learned that yet! Oh well, I'm getting a head start! I bought a little dictionary last week, but think I'm going to upgrade to a larger Oxford English-Italian dictionary, which will serve me well when I get home as well, and want to keep on learning.
I've begun to read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury the last few days, a somewhat overwhelming experience. I always feel strange approaching a new author: to know that I've never yet read any of their work, and that I'm going to be plunged into a new vision of the world - it takes me a little time to prepare. I finished the first section of it this morning, and have been enjoying the slow, lyrical rhythm of it and its speech. I feel like I'm going to spend most of the rest of my trip flitting between Henry James (I've wholly converted!), Dostoevsky and Faulkner... I'm also planning to read Hemingway for the first time. To finally read Hemingway - there are a number of authors it always feels like the worst kind of oversight never to have read, and I always feel guilty over Hemingway. Perhaps it's because I've read Joan Didion's gorgeous essay on the first hundred words of one of his novels. I remember a few years ago I was reading some Foucault, and when I told my friend Elizabeth I was reading it, she said with distaste "Foucault... oh, he's just so... seminal." That's a little how I feel about everything I've been reading! However, I do subtract the distaste from that. I'm also reading other bits and pieces - some poetry - a little collection of Keats, some which I've read before and some which I haven't - and also a book by Peter Singer - and introduction to Marx, from Oxford University Press. I've found a few more of these introductions I want to read, to get my head a little straighter about certain things: all my dates and chronologies tend to be all over the place, because I pick things up in such a strange way!
I've also been reading the International Herald Tribune every few days - this is somehow thrilling in a daggy way, because of Godard's Breathless, and the opening scenes with the heroine out on the street selling copies. Nice to be catching up a little with whats happening elsewhere while I feel like I'm in some place in another time, wandering around among the old churches and sculptures.
Florence
Today I went to the Uffizi for the first time, an overwhelming experience, though not always the experience I was expecting. Where I was expecting to love the Caravaggio's, they weren't the ones I would have most liked to see. On the other hand, among the Caravaggisti works in the same room, there was one of my favourite Artemesia Gentileschi works - her second "Judith and Holofernes" - a particularly brutal portrayal of the beheading of Holofernes, much more convincing than other versions I've seen reproductions of (such as Caravaggio's) where Judith looks so young and delicate, and the way she holds the knife looks so uncertain, that you really wonder how she's going to get all the way through her bloody task. Artemesia's work, by contrast, is so visceral: you see the spurting of blood from the neck, and the bloody speckled on Judith's dress, and you see her working with her maid in great complicity: the maid holding Holofernes in place, while Judith grimly saws her way through. Seeing it in person, especially unexpectedly turning around, and finding it in front of me, was strange, and I ended up feeling a little light-headed. It was one of the paintings I've most wanted to see, but I think I forgot the Uffizi had it: because the first version she did of it (which, in reproduction, I have always liked better, though it's not quite as gory...) is in Naples, I think. So I didn't think to expect it. I looked and looked for a postcard of it afterwards, but there wasn't one, which was very frustrating. Maybe I'll find one some day, or maybe they'll produce one someday, but in the mean time I have no picture of it to stick to the wall and gaze at. (Admittedly it's not very calming subject matter - I just love how gutsy it is!)
Another painting which was an unexpected favourite was a Bronzino portrait - a portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, but I just can't think of it like that. It's the painting that is used on the cover of my copy of The Wings of the Dove, and so to me it will always be a portrait of Milly. I found a cheap print of it on the market as I was wandering back, and bought it, to remember the adventure of reading so much Henry James.
I've been spending a lot of time in the Duomo, in front of the painting of Dante, or standing under Bruneschelli's dome - mainly because it's free, and when the heat is stifling outside, it's lovely and cool inside. I haven't climbed the stairs up to the dome yet (this does cost money), and I haven't been down underneath it either. At the moment it's enough to wander round it and wonder at the intricacy of its exterior, and then to go inside and wonder at the immensity of its interior. I wandered into the bookshop attached to the Duomo's museum (which I also haven't been to yet) and bought a large, leather bound notebook, which I've begun to use as my "Florence diary".
I feel like I've learned a huge amount in a week - I can understand a lot more Italian than I can speak at this stage, but I've learned to say a lot of things within the last week. I bought a children's book (by Margaret Atwood, translated into Italian!) and I've been slowly reading it and translating it back, and learning. The main flaw in this is that, as any good "once upon a time" type story, it's written in the past tense, and we haven't learned that yet! Oh well, I'm getting a head start! I bought a little dictionary last week, but think I'm going to upgrade to a larger Oxford English-Italian dictionary, which will serve me well when I get home as well, and want to keep on learning.
I've begun to read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury the last few days, a somewhat overwhelming experience. I always feel strange approaching a new author: to know that I've never yet read any of their work, and that I'm going to be plunged into a new vision of the world - it takes me a little time to prepare. I finished the first section of it this morning, and have been enjoying the slow, lyrical rhythm of it and its speech. I feel like I'm going to spend most of the rest of my trip flitting between Henry James (I've wholly converted!), Dostoevsky and Faulkner... I'm also planning to read Hemingway for the first time. To finally read Hemingway - there are a number of authors it always feels like the worst kind of oversight never to have read, and I always feel guilty over Hemingway. Perhaps it's because I've read Joan Didion's gorgeous essay on the first hundred words of one of his novels. I remember a few years ago I was reading some Foucault, and when I told my friend Elizabeth I was reading it, she said with distaste "Foucault... oh, he's just so... seminal." That's a little how I feel about everything I've been reading! However, I do subtract the distaste from that. I'm also reading other bits and pieces - some poetry - a little collection of Keats, some which I've read before and some which I haven't - and also a book by Peter Singer - and introduction to Marx, from Oxford University Press. I've found a few more of these introductions I want to read, to get my head a little straighter about certain things: all my dates and chronologies tend to be all over the place, because I pick things up in such a strange way!
I've also been reading the International Herald Tribune every few days - this is somehow thrilling in a daggy way, because of Godard's Breathless, and the opening scenes with the heroine out on the street selling copies. Nice to be catching up a little with whats happening elsewhere while I feel like I'm in some place in another time, wandering around among the old churches and sculptures.
Florence
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
I feel sure everyone will have abandoned reading my poor meagre writings after my more-than-two week vacation, but nonetheless I better get myself into gear, and make some explanations for my neglect.
I've been on Corsica, where internet access is hard to find and frightfully expensive. Enough explanation? Also, their keyboards are funny, and whatever I wrote would have looked a little like a foreign language.
I've been asked by a few people, "Why Corsica?" Having been there, I have to admit that my initial reasons don't really stand up - but that's okay, because I found a myriad of other reasons along the way as to why it'ssuch a beautiful place. But I admit that the only reason I thought of it originally was as a result of having read too much Dumas over the past few years - after all, the fabulous Count of Monte Cristo is originally a poor jilted Corsican boy, who takes rather spectacular revenge. As someone who chose to read Washington Square in Washington Square is it so surprising that it was a book that led me there? Anyway, I thought, not knowing Dumas's biography that perhaps he had had something to do with Corsica - sadly mistaken. It was simply fashionable to write about the place amongst nineteenth century French writers, and Dumas wasn't the only one who jumped on board. Must now chase up whatever Balzac had to say about the place.
We ended up seeing quite a bit of the island - but not enough! The guide books say that in two weeks you should be able to see almost everything, but I don't think people are actually looking if they see "everything" in so short a time. We caught the ferry from Italy (Livorno) to Bastia, and stayed in Calvi, Bonifacio, Ajaccio and Corte - the most visited places. But there is so much we didn't see - not just in the towns we didn't get a chance to visit, but in the places we stayed for a few days.
My favourite fact about Corsica came from Felicity (she got it from a guidebook): apparently at some point the French government tried to cut down all the chestnut trees on Corsica because it was thought the trees encouraged laziness. A whole family could live on one tree, so no-one was particularly keen on knuckling down to hard work. The plan didn't succeed, and even though I wouldn't venture to call them lazy, I could see the Corsicans were pretty laid back. Especially over lunch. A lot of shops close for three hours over lunchtime - not because they take a siesta, but because Corsicans "believe it is their God-given right to eat a proper lunch." And good for them.
It didn't feel at all French: people spoke French, but somehow the place is simply its own. No-one looked down on our attempts to communicate in French - as they didn't understand English they simply waited to see what we'd come out with, and somehow we made ourselves understood.
It's also a bit of a Napolean-fest, because he was born there, and all the souvenirs are delightfully kitsch - a lot of them in the shape of the island, and endless Napolean statuettes and busts and playing cards to be had. We walked past the house he was born in a number of times in Ajaccio. Calvi has its own share in military history - Horatio Nelson lost his right eye there in battle. Felicity and I stormed the citadel with our baguettes in remembrance of this event.
When we got into Ajaccio, on going out for a large dinner, we stumbled across a poster advertising "Tempus Fugit", a concert of polyphonic Corsican chant taking place the following night at the Cathedral. Best of all it was free: and it was one of those extraordinary musical experiences that come unexpectedly. It was an a capella concert, five male voices. The music, I have to say, was not polyphonic in texture - it was a definite homophony - but harmonically it was fascinating. Many of the pieces were structured around a single ascent or descent, and the melodic shifts were very chromatic, very intricate. A sense of a home key was often in flux, and then every so often a very western, very classical, scalic passages would emerge. I couldn't tell with most pieces whether they were sacred or not - every so often there would be a recognisable angus dei - and I wish I'd understoof more. But the music was compelling - sometimes so close to something familiar: and in those similarities somehow more strange: as if music history broke off at some point, and departed down a different fork in the road, occasionally hearing gossip from the main road and passing it on, a little bit garbled.
We had our share of mishaps too. In the first week, in Calvi, we went swimming - it was my first time in the Mediterranean, and something to remember. We swan off the rocks below the citadel, and even though we only lasted a few minutes (I can't tell you how icy that water was in April) Felicity cut her foot. Our first injury! In Bonifacio, wandering out of the Marine Cemetary and into a Potter's shop I had a disagreement with a dog almost as big as me. The pocket on my pants was a sad victim, as were both knees, which a few later turned black. In Corte I got very ill, and spent a day lying in bed, napping and reading Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment), and feeling very sorry for myself. In a feverish state I think I got overly involved in poor Rodya's thoughts and fears, so I found it a peculiarly intense experience!
I've also been reading more Henry James - finished The Wings of the Dove my first few days on Corsica, and continue to apologise for all the bad things I said about him. I've figured out what makes his sentences so complicated: it's his peculiar devotion to inserting as many commas as is humanly possible into them. For a few days it felt slow, and like work - then the last 150 pages seemed like some kind of dream, some immense recapitulation bringing the themes of Kate & Merton and Molly together in the home key. Or as though these themes were laid one over the other, perhaps, and played some entirely new, and transcendental music. The perfect coming together, like the momentum of placing the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was another extraordinary experience, being so engrossed in this book where the shifts and drama are so internal, so psychological.
I also read Madame Bovary - I understand why Flaubert is so revered now, though twitty Emma and I didn't get along I'm afraid. When I ran out of reading on Corsica I bought Stevenson's Kidnapped. I have to admit that I'm finding it singularly tiresome, and have begun reading a biography of Carson McCullers to avoid having to finish it - though I know I will finish it, eventually. Then I can rid myself of it most gratefully. The McCullers biography hailed as the "first truly popular biography" - interesting to find out all the facts of her life, but written in a frustrating style. The author is always having arguments with the previous biographers: now I know this is the nature of biography, and the reason why more than one biography is often written about the subject, but she writes these arguments so defensively, and is constantly upset by suggestions that there may have been some ambiguity in McCullers sexuality: in making such a defense against her lesbianism/bisexuality she is simply making even more of the notion than previous biographers, and writes as though these suggestions somehow muddy the achievement made by McCullers. But it's all there in the sentences of her books, which unfold like music. So while she's busy arguing with her predecessors, I'm busy arguing with her, and it occasionally makes for some very noisy reading.
Now I have arrived in Florence - but that's another story...
Florence
I've been on Corsica, where internet access is hard to find and frightfully expensive. Enough explanation? Also, their keyboards are funny, and whatever I wrote would have looked a little like a foreign language.
I've been asked by a few people, "Why Corsica?" Having been there, I have to admit that my initial reasons don't really stand up - but that's okay, because I found a myriad of other reasons along the way as to why it'ssuch a beautiful place. But I admit that the only reason I thought of it originally was as a result of having read too much Dumas over the past few years - after all, the fabulous Count of Monte Cristo is originally a poor jilted Corsican boy, who takes rather spectacular revenge. As someone who chose to read Washington Square in Washington Square is it so surprising that it was a book that led me there? Anyway, I thought, not knowing Dumas's biography that perhaps he had had something to do with Corsica - sadly mistaken. It was simply fashionable to write about the place amongst nineteenth century French writers, and Dumas wasn't the only one who jumped on board. Must now chase up whatever Balzac had to say about the place.
We ended up seeing quite a bit of the island - but not enough! The guide books say that in two weeks you should be able to see almost everything, but I don't think people are actually looking if they see "everything" in so short a time. We caught the ferry from Italy (Livorno) to Bastia, and stayed in Calvi, Bonifacio, Ajaccio and Corte - the most visited places. But there is so much we didn't see - not just in the towns we didn't get a chance to visit, but in the places we stayed for a few days.
My favourite fact about Corsica came from Felicity (she got it from a guidebook): apparently at some point the French government tried to cut down all the chestnut trees on Corsica because it was thought the trees encouraged laziness. A whole family could live on one tree, so no-one was particularly keen on knuckling down to hard work. The plan didn't succeed, and even though I wouldn't venture to call them lazy, I could see the Corsicans were pretty laid back. Especially over lunch. A lot of shops close for three hours over lunchtime - not because they take a siesta, but because Corsicans "believe it is their God-given right to eat a proper lunch." And good for them.
It didn't feel at all French: people spoke French, but somehow the place is simply its own. No-one looked down on our attempts to communicate in French - as they didn't understand English they simply waited to see what we'd come out with, and somehow we made ourselves understood.
It's also a bit of a Napolean-fest, because he was born there, and all the souvenirs are delightfully kitsch - a lot of them in the shape of the island, and endless Napolean statuettes and busts and playing cards to be had. We walked past the house he was born in a number of times in Ajaccio. Calvi has its own share in military history - Horatio Nelson lost his right eye there in battle. Felicity and I stormed the citadel with our baguettes in remembrance of this event.
When we got into Ajaccio, on going out for a large dinner, we stumbled across a poster advertising "Tempus Fugit", a concert of polyphonic Corsican chant taking place the following night at the Cathedral. Best of all it was free: and it was one of those extraordinary musical experiences that come unexpectedly. It was an a capella concert, five male voices. The music, I have to say, was not polyphonic in texture - it was a definite homophony - but harmonically it was fascinating. Many of the pieces were structured around a single ascent or descent, and the melodic shifts were very chromatic, very intricate. A sense of a home key was often in flux, and then every so often a very western, very classical, scalic passages would emerge. I couldn't tell with most pieces whether they were sacred or not - every so often there would be a recognisable angus dei - and I wish I'd understoof more. But the music was compelling - sometimes so close to something familiar: and in those similarities somehow more strange: as if music history broke off at some point, and departed down a different fork in the road, occasionally hearing gossip from the main road and passing it on, a little bit garbled.
We had our share of mishaps too. In the first week, in Calvi, we went swimming - it was my first time in the Mediterranean, and something to remember. We swan off the rocks below the citadel, and even though we only lasted a few minutes (I can't tell you how icy that water was in April) Felicity cut her foot. Our first injury! In Bonifacio, wandering out of the Marine Cemetary and into a Potter's shop I had a disagreement with a dog almost as big as me. The pocket on my pants was a sad victim, as were both knees, which a few later turned black. In Corte I got very ill, and spent a day lying in bed, napping and reading Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment), and feeling very sorry for myself. In a feverish state I think I got overly involved in poor Rodya's thoughts and fears, so I found it a peculiarly intense experience!
I've also been reading more Henry James - finished The Wings of the Dove my first few days on Corsica, and continue to apologise for all the bad things I said about him. I've figured out what makes his sentences so complicated: it's his peculiar devotion to inserting as many commas as is humanly possible into them. For a few days it felt slow, and like work - then the last 150 pages seemed like some kind of dream, some immense recapitulation bringing the themes of Kate & Merton and Molly together in the home key. Or as though these themes were laid one over the other, perhaps, and played some entirely new, and transcendental music. The perfect coming together, like the momentum of placing the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was another extraordinary experience, being so engrossed in this book where the shifts and drama are so internal, so psychological.
I also read Madame Bovary - I understand why Flaubert is so revered now, though twitty Emma and I didn't get along I'm afraid. When I ran out of reading on Corsica I bought Stevenson's Kidnapped. I have to admit that I'm finding it singularly tiresome, and have begun reading a biography of Carson McCullers to avoid having to finish it - though I know I will finish it, eventually. Then I can rid myself of it most gratefully. The McCullers biography hailed as the "first truly popular biography" - interesting to find out all the facts of her life, but written in a frustrating style. The author is always having arguments with the previous biographers: now I know this is the nature of biography, and the reason why more than one biography is often written about the subject, but she writes these arguments so defensively, and is constantly upset by suggestions that there may have been some ambiguity in McCullers sexuality: in making such a defense against her lesbianism/bisexuality she is simply making even more of the notion than previous biographers, and writes as though these suggestions somehow muddy the achievement made by McCullers. But it's all there in the sentences of her books, which unfold like music. So while she's busy arguing with her predecessors, I'm busy arguing with her, and it occasionally makes for some very noisy reading.
Now I have arrived in Florence - but that's another story...
Florence
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Have had a nice few days swanning about in Cambridge - my planned day trip to London keeps being postponed, so I find that tomorrow's the last day I can take it! But I won't put it off again, because I'm quite determined to see the Rothko room at the Tate Modern, and wander a little in Bloomsbury, see what else I can fit in on these adventures.
We spent Sunday studying for our trip this weekend, eventually tossing a coin to determine who got to buy the Lonely Planet guide when we realised we might as well spend the £9.99 to buy it and study up all week. Felicity won the toss with heads. It was a Canadian coin, and my backing the Maple Leaf did me no good at all. Disappointed, I decided to buy the Lonely Planet Tuscany, so I could figure out where all my little weekend adventures away from Florence would take me - I especially wanted to read a little more about Siena after meeting Claudia, and about Lucca, after we were nearly going to stop there on Saturday night, on the way to our mysterious final destination. Felicity told me after she'd won the coin toss that if she'd lost, she would've bought the Lonely Planet guide anyway, and then I probably would've felt that that was silly and pointless and bought Tuscany anyway.
I really had a very lazy weekend - spent a lot of time reading. Finished The Portrait of a Lady and now find I want to read more Henry James - a state of affairs that has come about rather suddenly and surprised me considerably! I've also been reading a little more Carson McCullers - couldn't find The Member of the Wedding here, so I read Clock Without Hands. Was taken by the fact that at the same time as being somewhat horrified by a character such as the Judge, I couldn't help but feel a great deal of sympathy towards him and his little delusions. I'm glad my attention is sharp - I feel like I'm drinking in every sentence that I'm reading, like I just can't take in enough. It's lead to a few nights reading till after midnight, and a few mornings spent in bed, just wanting to finish a few more chapters before I start the day.
Yesterday was my "Sylvia Plath day". I wanted to see a few of the things I'd read about in her journals, and Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters while I was here. We rode our bicycles, and, as I was wearing a skirt, I think I may have flashed my knickers a few times around Cambridge - but I'm sure this is something Sylvia wouldn't have been above herself! We had a look at Newnham College, and wandered around the gardens, then rode our bikes down across the Mill Lane Bridge, stopped along Eltisley ave to take a look at no. 55 where they first lived when they were married and then walked through Grantchester Meadows to The Orchard at Grantchester where we had a very civilised lunch. I finally had my scone with jam and cream in England, and drank Peach Iced Tea, and wandered through the Rupert Brooke museum they had there, and wondered at the fact that not only Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had been there regularly, but that before then Brooke, and Russell, Wittgenstein, Keynes and Virginia Woolf had all been among the regular roll-call. I spent the evening walking around Cambridge, and then walking through Jesus meadow we settled to eat an ice-cream on the banks of the Cam. Acquiring some bread from a nice couple nearby, we started feeding the swans, barracking especially for the black swans, nicknamed en masse "Perthy". I found out that it is not true that all the swans in England belong to the Queen - in fact, half belong to the Queen, and the other half belong to the people. Apparently each year when the signets are born people can volunteer, and they tag all the signets accordingly, allocating half for the Queen and half for the people. I was thinking about this in terms of an asset. I had to fill out those horrible forms at the bank before leaving, estimating what my assets were worth. If I were English I should definitely list in all such reckonings of assets, "Part share in Half the Swans of England." I don't know how their value would be measured. Felicity told me I couldn't claim any ownership, because I'm Australian, but then she decided that I should be able to claim my part share in half the black swans of England, which I think is most appropriate.
Am about to embark on reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary for the first time - I hope this will be followed by some more Henry James and then I'll see where I go from there. I keep on picking up books to read, and wondering that I never read them before.
I may go quiet for a few days - the Easter weekend coming up. We're hoping to make it to a Good Friday service at King's College - I'd love to hear the choir sing. Saturday morning we leave for our two week adventure. I hope I can find somewhere to access the internet at the other end - have to see how it goes.
Cambridge
Cambridge
We spent Sunday studying for our trip this weekend, eventually tossing a coin to determine who got to buy the Lonely Planet guide when we realised we might as well spend the £9.99 to buy it and study up all week. Felicity won the toss with heads. It was a Canadian coin, and my backing the Maple Leaf did me no good at all. Disappointed, I decided to buy the Lonely Planet Tuscany, so I could figure out where all my little weekend adventures away from Florence would take me - I especially wanted to read a little more about Siena after meeting Claudia, and about Lucca, after we were nearly going to stop there on Saturday night, on the way to our mysterious final destination. Felicity told me after she'd won the coin toss that if she'd lost, she would've bought the Lonely Planet guide anyway, and then I probably would've felt that that was silly and pointless and bought Tuscany anyway.
I really had a very lazy weekend - spent a lot of time reading. Finished The Portrait of a Lady and now find I want to read more Henry James - a state of affairs that has come about rather suddenly and surprised me considerably! I've also been reading a little more Carson McCullers - couldn't find The Member of the Wedding here, so I read Clock Without Hands. Was taken by the fact that at the same time as being somewhat horrified by a character such as the Judge, I couldn't help but feel a great deal of sympathy towards him and his little delusions. I'm glad my attention is sharp - I feel like I'm drinking in every sentence that I'm reading, like I just can't take in enough. It's lead to a few nights reading till after midnight, and a few mornings spent in bed, just wanting to finish a few more chapters before I start the day.
Yesterday was my "Sylvia Plath day". I wanted to see a few of the things I'd read about in her journals, and Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters while I was here. We rode our bicycles, and, as I was wearing a skirt, I think I may have flashed my knickers a few times around Cambridge - but I'm sure this is something Sylvia wouldn't have been above herself! We had a look at Newnham College, and wandered around the gardens, then rode our bikes down across the Mill Lane Bridge, stopped along Eltisley ave to take a look at no. 55 where they first lived when they were married and then walked through Grantchester Meadows to The Orchard at Grantchester where we had a very civilised lunch. I finally had my scone with jam and cream in England, and drank Peach Iced Tea, and wandered through the Rupert Brooke museum they had there, and wondered at the fact that not only Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had been there regularly, but that before then Brooke, and Russell, Wittgenstein, Keynes and Virginia Woolf had all been among the regular roll-call. I spent the evening walking around Cambridge, and then walking through Jesus meadow we settled to eat an ice-cream on the banks of the Cam. Acquiring some bread from a nice couple nearby, we started feeding the swans, barracking especially for the black swans, nicknamed en masse "Perthy". I found out that it is not true that all the swans in England belong to the Queen - in fact, half belong to the Queen, and the other half belong to the people. Apparently each year when the signets are born people can volunteer, and they tag all the signets accordingly, allocating half for the Queen and half for the people. I was thinking about this in terms of an asset. I had to fill out those horrible forms at the bank before leaving, estimating what my assets were worth. If I were English I should definitely list in all such reckonings of assets, "Part share in Half the Swans of England." I don't know how their value would be measured. Felicity told me I couldn't claim any ownership, because I'm Australian, but then she decided that I should be able to claim my part share in half the black swans of England, which I think is most appropriate.
Am about to embark on reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary for the first time - I hope this will be followed by some more Henry James and then I'll see where I go from there. I keep on picking up books to read, and wondering that I never read them before.
I may go quiet for a few days - the Easter weekend coming up. We're hoping to make it to a Good Friday service at King's College - I'd love to hear the choir sing. Saturday morning we leave for our two week adventure. I hope I can find somewhere to access the internet at the other end - have to see how it goes.
Cambridge
Cambridge
Saturday, April 12, 2003
I arrived in London around 8am yesterday morning after a sleepless flight. Organisation at the Montreal end was a little bit haphazard at best, but in the end the flight was only delayed by 55 minutes, and walking straight through customs, and straight onto the Piccadilly line underground to King's Cross I suppose I didn't really understand what all the fuss made over the difficulty of finding your way around Heathrow was referring to. Got to King's Cross, had a Harry Potter moment at Platform 9 and 3/4 and got onto the train to Cambridge, where I was met by the intrepid Felicity. We walked back to her apartment and jettisoned all my stuff, ate some fresh focaccia she'd made and then went for a walk.
Okay, people who have spoken to me in the last few weeks will know I wasn't sounding too keen about England, though I knew I didn't have any rational or justifiable excuse for not being "in the mood" for a place I'd never been. As it is, we're still going on a little adventure for a fortnight, but I'll get a week kicking around in Cambridge, with a day trip into London to see the Tate Modern and one or two other things, and the rest of the time watching people punting of the river and making my way through all the bookshops, of which there are many. My two favourites of the many we have already visited are as follows (though not in order of preference, because they're too different from each other for that):
The Haunted Bookshop, which is in a narrow little laneway, and has an enormous selection of Boarding School fiction upstairs. Heaven. Anna bought me a nice little stash of Chalet schoolbooks recently, and one of them was the first half of a two volume story - A Genius at the Chalet school ended, and I was left hanging! I finally bought the next book, The Chalet School Fete at the Haunted bookshop, and have been busying myself finding out the fate of Nina Rutherford, the aforementioned genius. (Temperamental pianist, always worried about practising at least four hours a day, and quite grumpy about participating in games which may injure her.) Quite smashing.
The other shop is G. David - Bookseller. Oh my, the room out the back has the most amazing old volumes and bits and pieces. For £2 I got a page of a bible (from Judith) printed in Venice in 1519. I went back today and bought something I knew I'd always think about if I didn't - a single leaf from an illuminated manuscript, from France, 1500. It's beautiful, and such an amazing thing to now own. I think I need to keep pinching myself. I'll definitely need to get it framed when I get back.
I've also chosen my next book - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady. I take back every since bad thing I've ever said about Henry James. I find Isabel Archer the most compelling figure, because her quest is for knowledge, and the right to choose for herself what she will make of her life. The book is also moving in the same direction as me - Isabel going from America to England, and later to Florence. She has just been put in the way of Gilbert Osmond. My prejudice against Henry James, for what it's worth, derives from the fact that when I was 13 (in year eight) we studied The Turn of the Screw, which at that stage seemed rather dull. We didn't really understand the layers of a psychological reading of the story, and as a ghost story - nothing happens. So I'd always thought he was a bit overrated. I know his sentences can get very long and involved, and that Portrait of a Lady comes comparatively early in his career. I'll be interested to see how I like the later book, which I've now quite decided I will read.
Cambridge
Okay, people who have spoken to me in the last few weeks will know I wasn't sounding too keen about England, though I knew I didn't have any rational or justifiable excuse for not being "in the mood" for a place I'd never been. As it is, we're still going on a little adventure for a fortnight, but I'll get a week kicking around in Cambridge, with a day trip into London to see the Tate Modern and one or two other things, and the rest of the time watching people punting of the river and making my way through all the bookshops, of which there are many. My two favourites of the many we have already visited are as follows (though not in order of preference, because they're too different from each other for that):
The Haunted Bookshop, which is in a narrow little laneway, and has an enormous selection of Boarding School fiction upstairs. Heaven. Anna bought me a nice little stash of Chalet schoolbooks recently, and one of them was the first half of a two volume story - A Genius at the Chalet school ended, and I was left hanging! I finally bought the next book, The Chalet School Fete at the Haunted bookshop, and have been busying myself finding out the fate of Nina Rutherford, the aforementioned genius. (Temperamental pianist, always worried about practising at least four hours a day, and quite grumpy about participating in games which may injure her.) Quite smashing.
The other shop is G. David - Bookseller. Oh my, the room out the back has the most amazing old volumes and bits and pieces. For £2 I got a page of a bible (from Judith) printed in Venice in 1519. I went back today and bought something I knew I'd always think about if I didn't - a single leaf from an illuminated manuscript, from France, 1500. It's beautiful, and such an amazing thing to now own. I think I need to keep pinching myself. I'll definitely need to get it framed when I get back.
I've also chosen my next book - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady. I take back every since bad thing I've ever said about Henry James. I find Isabel Archer the most compelling figure, because her quest is for knowledge, and the right to choose for herself what she will make of her life. The book is also moving in the same direction as me - Isabel going from America to England, and later to Florence. She has just been put in the way of Gilbert Osmond. My prejudice against Henry James, for what it's worth, derives from the fact that when I was 13 (in year eight) we studied The Turn of the Screw, which at that stage seemed rather dull. We didn't really understand the layers of a psychological reading of the story, and as a ghost story - nothing happens. So I'd always thought he was a bit overrated. I know his sentences can get very long and involved, and that Portrait of a Lady comes comparatively early in his career. I'll be interested to see how I like the later book, which I've now quite decided I will read.
Cambridge
Thursday, April 10, 2003
First of all, a LOST AND FOUND message. I don't know if you're reading this, but Alice I've lost your address in Maryland, and I've written you a postcard I want to send! So, if you happen across this, please send me your address! I haven't forgotten my promise.
Now that my scatterbrained nature is dealt with, I can move on.
My last day in Montreal, and it will be a quiet one. Over the past few days I've become well-acquainted with the man at the postoffice, and I have to visit him one more time to mail one last thing home. I feel like I've jettisoned much that I've acquired over the last month, so I'm almost beginning again - except my scrapbook is bulging. Other than a visit to the post office (and the weather is beautiful today - sunny and mild after the weekend snow) I'm just going to be milling around, packing, knitting, reading. A gentle day before I traipse off to London. (And yes, is the answer to my mother's question. I AM going to London to visit the Queen.)
Yesterday I went to the Museum of Fine Arts. They have a major exhibition on, but I decided instead of seeing that I'd make my way around the permanent collection. I'm very glad I did this - spent a lot of time looking at the pre-Columbian, Asian, Oceanic and African art, and making little notes on things. I was especially taken with an African idiophone - the "Disaster Bird" idiophone. One day a bird warned the Obo (king) against a battle. The king ignored his advice, and won the battle. Since this time, the Obo has been considered the person who can determine fate, and there is an annual celebration of this victory.
I also spent quite a long time among the contemporary art. A beautiful Hans Hoffman - I've begun to realise that I love Hoffman's work: the same extremely bold juxtapositions of colour as there are in the work of Howard Hodgkin, another of my favourite painters. Against the scale of many Abstract Expressionist canvases, Hoffman's works are quite small (though large enough that they would dominate an ordinary room without hesitation) - but they're colour seems much more demanding than the colour of a Pollock, or a Rothko, or a Newman... His use of complimentary colours - in this case a canvas dominated by luminous, orangey red, with attacks of a bright green. Something both violent, but also joyful in this onslaught of colour. A very thick texture to the paint, not the drip texture of a Pollock, but most probably the thick application of the palette knife.
There were two rooms dedicated to the two major Canadian artists - whose works I also saw at the Contemporary Art Museum - Riopelle and Borduas. I think after seeing 30 or 40 of each of their works I can tell their styles quite well now. I admire Riopelle - think his "mosaic" period of abstraction particularly interesting - but don't find the works as engaging as the work of Borduas. Borduas moved slowly away from figurative painting, into his "automatiste" style, comparable to the practice of automatic writing, and not dissimilar to the aims of American abstract expressionism. The landscape is still obvious as the subject of his middle-period abstraction, but toward the end of his life he began to abandon colour, and these last canvases are dominated by white: somehow giving the viewer a feeling of both despair and a strange kind of warmth in their solitary vision. There are still occasional bold slashes of colour - "Composition 59" is dominated by a wide, vertical olive green streak across it - but for the most part he is heading toward monochrome. One of his late Compositions is wholly white, all texture. There seems some kind of striving towards a pure vision in the passage of these paintings.
The other interesting thing I found was that the gallery had on display two pieces on 1986 by Gerhard Richter - one of his photographic paintings, and one of his abstractions. They displayed these pieces in two different galleries. I love that split in Richter's oeuvre.
Montreal
Now that my scatterbrained nature is dealt with, I can move on.
My last day in Montreal, and it will be a quiet one. Over the past few days I've become well-acquainted with the man at the postoffice, and I have to visit him one more time to mail one last thing home. I feel like I've jettisoned much that I've acquired over the last month, so I'm almost beginning again - except my scrapbook is bulging. Other than a visit to the post office (and the weather is beautiful today - sunny and mild after the weekend snow) I'm just going to be milling around, packing, knitting, reading. A gentle day before I traipse off to London. (And yes, is the answer to my mother's question. I AM going to London to visit the Queen.)
Yesterday I went to the Museum of Fine Arts. They have a major exhibition on, but I decided instead of seeing that I'd make my way around the permanent collection. I'm very glad I did this - spent a lot of time looking at the pre-Columbian, Asian, Oceanic and African art, and making little notes on things. I was especially taken with an African idiophone - the "Disaster Bird" idiophone. One day a bird warned the Obo (king) against a battle. The king ignored his advice, and won the battle. Since this time, the Obo has been considered the person who can determine fate, and there is an annual celebration of this victory.
I also spent quite a long time among the contemporary art. A beautiful Hans Hoffman - I've begun to realise that I love Hoffman's work: the same extremely bold juxtapositions of colour as there are in the work of Howard Hodgkin, another of my favourite painters. Against the scale of many Abstract Expressionist canvases, Hoffman's works are quite small (though large enough that they would dominate an ordinary room without hesitation) - but they're colour seems much more demanding than the colour of a Pollock, or a Rothko, or a Newman... His use of complimentary colours - in this case a canvas dominated by luminous, orangey red, with attacks of a bright green. Something both violent, but also joyful in this onslaught of colour. A very thick texture to the paint, not the drip texture of a Pollock, but most probably the thick application of the palette knife.
There were two rooms dedicated to the two major Canadian artists - whose works I also saw at the Contemporary Art Museum - Riopelle and Borduas. I think after seeing 30 or 40 of each of their works I can tell their styles quite well now. I admire Riopelle - think his "mosaic" period of abstraction particularly interesting - but don't find the works as engaging as the work of Borduas. Borduas moved slowly away from figurative painting, into his "automatiste" style, comparable to the practice of automatic writing, and not dissimilar to the aims of American abstract expressionism. The landscape is still obvious as the subject of his middle-period abstraction, but toward the end of his life he began to abandon colour, and these last canvases are dominated by white: somehow giving the viewer a feeling of both despair and a strange kind of warmth in their solitary vision. There are still occasional bold slashes of colour - "Composition 59" is dominated by a wide, vertical olive green streak across it - but for the most part he is heading toward monochrome. One of his late Compositions is wholly white, all texture. There seems some kind of striving towards a pure vision in the passage of these paintings.
The other interesting thing I found was that the gallery had on display two pieces on 1986 by Gerhard Richter - one of his photographic paintings, and one of his abstractions. They displayed these pieces in two different galleries. I love that split in Richter's oeuvre.
Montreal
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
I wrote a long explanation of my existence this morning, only to find I'd lost the lot when I tried to post it. I'm hoping I'll have better luck this time.
I think it's something in my blood - I seem to attract, or at the very least find myself attracted to - writers festivals. Went to "Metropolis Bleu" on Saturday night to see and hear Kathryn Harrison speak, which was fascinating - also nice that she was in conversation with Ramona Koval, who I said a brief hello to after the session. (Which apparently be heard on Radio National sometime later this year). I've only read one of Kathryn Harrison's book - I somehow didn't hear about it when there was all the controversy when it was first published, but I picked up The Kiss after reading Jill Ker Conway's book on autobiography. She's written many other books - essays and novels, but it is always The Kiss people seem to remember. It is her memoir, the story of a four year "affair" she had with her father beginning at the age of twenty.
I reread the book after the session, because I was interested - I remembered it being beautifully written, and wanted to see if that was the case. Besides, I only borrowed it from the library last time, and it was cheap to buy - and now I have a signed copy! On rereading, it was still beautiful: the prose has both a real crispness and an underlying stillness - as though she has written straight through the subject matter, looking beyond it. Like Annie Dillard's anecdote about learning to chop wood - you only learn when you are no longer aiming for the block, but through it. As well as being very well written, I liked it because she had the courage to write a very grey book - nothing was simplified, and she refused the easy position of the "victim", because, no matter how appalling the situation was, things were of course more complicated than simple black and white. She gave an account of some of the reactions at the time of its publication - some very vitriolic attacks, not only in the book review pages, but also often straying to the opinion pages. A strange storm to be at the centre of. She said part of the reason she wrote the book was almost political - the notion that this was still something so unspeakable, that people wouldn't acknowledge it unless forced to. And then to be attacked - have her morals questioned because she dared to publish this book when she had children of her own to "protect" - she was even criticised as a bad mother in the pages of major newspapers. And now, several years later, the book is still beautiful, still disturbing.
On Sunday I went to St Joseph's Oratory - which turned out to be a two hour walk, with snow underfoot, nearly all uphill. When I finally reached the Oratory I was exhausted, and entertained vague notions that as it was a place of piety and charity, I'd find some nice person to drive me back downtown - no such luck, unfortunately. But before I had to walk all the way back to the hostel I looked around the Oratory a little.
The main reason I decided to go was because they have in the museum the heart of Brother Andre, the founder of the Oratory, on permanent display - something I thought was quite strange. He died in 1937, and after many cures etc have been attributed to him, he was beatified in 1982. Now there's an ongoing campaign for his canonisation, with invitations throughout the oratory to sign one of the books they have dedicated to this campaign. There were Brother Andre medallions for sale in the gift shop for 0.35 cents, so I thought I bought one - I felt I should do something after I'd looked at the man's heart.
There was another display - another campaign they have going for the canonisation of a Frenchman, Moreau. They had little cards there, with his portrait on one side, and then, pasted on the other side, pieces of cloth that had touched his bones. Such a weird system of external objects of worship, so fascinating. I think I found the whole experience a little overwhelming - after I got back I fell asleep for 17 hours. I must admit that I think this had more to do with a headcold than a religious experience.
I finished reading Vanity Fair last night, which, after 800 pages of following the fortunes of Becky, Amelia, and the lovely Dobbin (I have to admit his honesty and upstandingness won me over very early) feels worthy of mention. I feel that I have vanquished Thackeray. Well, that's an exaggeration - but I'm very glad to have read it. I'm left with poetry and essay for the next few days - am still trying to decide what I'll buy to read next when I get to the UK. I'm considering more Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding is a must, I think) and perhaps more Henry James, or else something swashbuckling by Dumas, or perhaps plunge into the Russians, who I've been waiting to have time for since I was sixteen.
I also finished reading Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God. In his introduction to it, Guy Davenport stated that Carson is "a fancier of volcanoes" - a description I love. Her essay on the gender of sound, jumping all over the place, from Ancient Greece to the 20th century,and Hemingway's dislike of Gertrude Stein's voice was strange, leading me in new directions - as her work always does.
I still haven't written any of my own poetry - although I've written a small mountain of postcards today - but I've been slowly, gently taking notes, and am sure the poems will follow later, when I have time to spread out and think slowly. My "gentle, slow-paced" stay in Montreal is already close to finished. I'm hoping to go to McGill tomorrow and find Anne Carson's office - even just to see the door! Also, to the art gallery, to look at their permanent collection, as well as to the post office! The next day I fly out to the UK, where I'll meet up with Felicity in Cambridge.
Montreal
I think it's something in my blood - I seem to attract, or at the very least find myself attracted to - writers festivals. Went to "Metropolis Bleu" on Saturday night to see and hear Kathryn Harrison speak, which was fascinating - also nice that she was in conversation with Ramona Koval, who I said a brief hello to after the session. (Which apparently be heard on Radio National sometime later this year). I've only read one of Kathryn Harrison's book - I somehow didn't hear about it when there was all the controversy when it was first published, but I picked up The Kiss after reading Jill Ker Conway's book on autobiography. She's written many other books - essays and novels, but it is always The Kiss people seem to remember. It is her memoir, the story of a four year "affair" she had with her father beginning at the age of twenty.
I reread the book after the session, because I was interested - I remembered it being beautifully written, and wanted to see if that was the case. Besides, I only borrowed it from the library last time, and it was cheap to buy - and now I have a signed copy! On rereading, it was still beautiful: the prose has both a real crispness and an underlying stillness - as though she has written straight through the subject matter, looking beyond it. Like Annie Dillard's anecdote about learning to chop wood - you only learn when you are no longer aiming for the block, but through it. As well as being very well written, I liked it because she had the courage to write a very grey book - nothing was simplified, and she refused the easy position of the "victim", because, no matter how appalling the situation was, things were of course more complicated than simple black and white. She gave an account of some of the reactions at the time of its publication - some very vitriolic attacks, not only in the book review pages, but also often straying to the opinion pages. A strange storm to be at the centre of. She said part of the reason she wrote the book was almost political - the notion that this was still something so unspeakable, that people wouldn't acknowledge it unless forced to. And then to be attacked - have her morals questioned because she dared to publish this book when she had children of her own to "protect" - she was even criticised as a bad mother in the pages of major newspapers. And now, several years later, the book is still beautiful, still disturbing.
On Sunday I went to St Joseph's Oratory - which turned out to be a two hour walk, with snow underfoot, nearly all uphill. When I finally reached the Oratory I was exhausted, and entertained vague notions that as it was a place of piety and charity, I'd find some nice person to drive me back downtown - no such luck, unfortunately. But before I had to walk all the way back to the hostel I looked around the Oratory a little.
The main reason I decided to go was because they have in the museum the heart of Brother Andre, the founder of the Oratory, on permanent display - something I thought was quite strange. He died in 1937, and after many cures etc have been attributed to him, he was beatified in 1982. Now there's an ongoing campaign for his canonisation, with invitations throughout the oratory to sign one of the books they have dedicated to this campaign. There were Brother Andre medallions for sale in the gift shop for 0.35 cents, so I thought I bought one - I felt I should do something after I'd looked at the man's heart.
There was another display - another campaign they have going for the canonisation of a Frenchman, Moreau. They had little cards there, with his portrait on one side, and then, pasted on the other side, pieces of cloth that had touched his bones. Such a weird system of external objects of worship, so fascinating. I think I found the whole experience a little overwhelming - after I got back I fell asleep for 17 hours. I must admit that I think this had more to do with a headcold than a religious experience.
I finished reading Vanity Fair last night, which, after 800 pages of following the fortunes of Becky, Amelia, and the lovely Dobbin (I have to admit his honesty and upstandingness won me over very early) feels worthy of mention. I feel that I have vanquished Thackeray. Well, that's an exaggeration - but I'm very glad to have read it. I'm left with poetry and essay for the next few days - am still trying to decide what I'll buy to read next when I get to the UK. I'm considering more Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding is a must, I think) and perhaps more Henry James, or else something swashbuckling by Dumas, or perhaps plunge into the Russians, who I've been waiting to have time for since I was sixteen.
I also finished reading Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God. In his introduction to it, Guy Davenport stated that Carson is "a fancier of volcanoes" - a description I love. Her essay on the gender of sound, jumping all over the place, from Ancient Greece to the 20th century,and Hemingway's dislike of Gertrude Stein's voice was strange, leading me in new directions - as her work always does.
I still haven't written any of my own poetry - although I've written a small mountain of postcards today - but I've been slowly, gently taking notes, and am sure the poems will follow later, when I have time to spread out and think slowly. My "gentle, slow-paced" stay in Montreal is already close to finished. I'm hoping to go to McGill tomorrow and find Anne Carson's office - even just to see the door! Also, to the art gallery, to look at their permanent collection, as well as to the post office! The next day I fly out to the UK, where I'll meet up with Felicity in Cambridge.
Montreal
Friday, April 04, 2003
A long slow week of meandering around the city, occasionally stopping to see a museum or gallery, but mostly just walking.
When I went to the Atwater market last weekend, I arrived to find someone talking, surrounded by cameras and journalists. There's an election here soon, and so I figured it was a politician, though as they were chatting away in French I didn't have much of an idea. But I hung around on the edge of the crowd in case something spectacular happened, and when he finished talking he started to shake hands with people. He took a look at me, walked straight up, said "Bonjour" and shook my hand. I've been wondering all week who he was.
I went to the Museum of Contemporary art on Tuesday and spent a quiet afternoon watching the video work of Gillian Wearing, as well as exploring the work of some Canadian and Quebecoise artists. There's currently an exhibition of major Quebecoise art from the 40s, 50s and 60s - it was interesting to see that work after studying American art of the same period, and seeing the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Op and the beginnings of Pop art. Some reminded me strongly of the work of Joan Mitchell - a predominance of white, and obvious allusion to landscape as the major subject.
I went to the cinema on Wednesday at the forum - bought a ticket for Auberge L'Espagnole, and then, when that finished, snuck in to see About Schmidt. My Wednesday lunchtime club meeting found me munching on a fresh baguette with brie in a darkened cinema. It felt like a nice civilised way to spend the afternoon.
I spent the day yesterday with Claudia, a girl from Rome, who's been living in the US for the past four years. She's currently doing her PhD in Italian Literature at Yale, looking at the theatre of Siena. Had some long talks about her thesis, and my own poetry, and history, religion, the US, among other things. Went to the Notre Dame Basilica. "I like the objects can tell the story of a place" she said. The cathedrale is beautiful, but the stonework is quite simple:it is the woodwork inside that makes it so unusual, so beautiful. Spent a while exploring. Some beautiful stained glass windows with depictions of very Canadian landscapes, which was particularly interesting.
I also purchased something I've been looking for for a long time: a 1966 issue of Playboy. Now, I'm sure this takes some explaining... Or else everyone will just think that studying Art/Pornography/Blasphemy/Propaganda last year went to my head! About 4 or 5 years ago I watched some of the documentary series SBS ran on the 1950s in America, and one of the episodes talked about the launch of Playboy magazine. Flipping through it, it's not terribly full of girly pictures (and the Miss April centrefold is done very tastefully - and accompanied by a story, and snapshots of her surfing! Gidget as centrefold!) but it was a magazine young men could read to find out how they were meant to behave in certain social situations. I've always found this a bit bizarre - Playboy as guide to etiquette - hence the fact that I've always wanted a chance to look at it. Scanning it I found phrases such as "Brechtian song" and "Camp, camp, camp, the Baroque Beatles Madrigals..." as well as the conclusion of the Ian Fleming serial Octopussy , and writing by Nabakov. So strange! It was quite an object of fascination in the common room last night- everyone took a chance to flip through it. Particular special is the fact that is contains a story about several previous Playboy covers! All in all - a worthwhile purchase. I'm just worried that Playboy poems will follow Gidget poems...
Last night Claudia and I walked up Saint Laurent and around the Latin Quarter for a while - wish I'd made my way up there a little earlier. Paused in a shop full of posters and prints and postcards - took a while to decide which Tintin postcard to purchase in French! We ended up in an Indian restaurant for dinner - for $9 I felt like I'd eaten quite a feast! And I realised how much I miss curry - am heading out to the supermarket today to get some groceries to catch up on my curry consumption!
Have been reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair for the past week, and reading other bits and pieces in between - rereading Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God at the moment, and still astounded by the suddenness of her sentences, the way they immediately cut to the point. There's a sentence in one of her Short Talks that somehow sums up her writing for me - in her short talk "On Sylvia Plath". Writing about seeing Plath's mother on the television, she observes that Aurelia "said plain, burned things." Rereading "The Glass Essay" is like a series of shocks, all the while coaxing me towards writing my own pieces. Sometime in the next few days I'm going to head to either the library or one of the bookshops with big armchairs (that might as well be libraries) to do a little research on Robert Smithson for a piece I've begun thinking through.
I'm also hoping to make it to the Quebec literary festival - Kathryn Harrison is a guest, and I'd like to see her speak. Got to try to book tickets today.
Montreal.
When I went to the Atwater market last weekend, I arrived to find someone talking, surrounded by cameras and journalists. There's an election here soon, and so I figured it was a politician, though as they were chatting away in French I didn't have much of an idea. But I hung around on the edge of the crowd in case something spectacular happened, and when he finished talking he started to shake hands with people. He took a look at me, walked straight up, said "Bonjour" and shook my hand. I've been wondering all week who he was.
I went to the Museum of Contemporary art on Tuesday and spent a quiet afternoon watching the video work of Gillian Wearing, as well as exploring the work of some Canadian and Quebecoise artists. There's currently an exhibition of major Quebecoise art from the 40s, 50s and 60s - it was interesting to see that work after studying American art of the same period, and seeing the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Op and the beginnings of Pop art. Some reminded me strongly of the work of Joan Mitchell - a predominance of white, and obvious allusion to landscape as the major subject.
I went to the cinema on Wednesday at the forum - bought a ticket for Auberge L'Espagnole, and then, when that finished, snuck in to see About Schmidt. My Wednesday lunchtime club meeting found me munching on a fresh baguette with brie in a darkened cinema. It felt like a nice civilised way to spend the afternoon.
I spent the day yesterday with Claudia, a girl from Rome, who's been living in the US for the past four years. She's currently doing her PhD in Italian Literature at Yale, looking at the theatre of Siena. Had some long talks about her thesis, and my own poetry, and history, religion, the US, among other things. Went to the Notre Dame Basilica. "I like the objects can tell the story of a place" she said. The cathedrale is beautiful, but the stonework is quite simple:it is the woodwork inside that makes it so unusual, so beautiful. Spent a while exploring. Some beautiful stained glass windows with depictions of very Canadian landscapes, which was particularly interesting.
I also purchased something I've been looking for for a long time: a 1966 issue of Playboy. Now, I'm sure this takes some explaining... Or else everyone will just think that studying Art/Pornography/Blasphemy/Propaganda last year went to my head! About 4 or 5 years ago I watched some of the documentary series SBS ran on the 1950s in America, and one of the episodes talked about the launch of Playboy magazine. Flipping through it, it's not terribly full of girly pictures (and the Miss April centrefold is done very tastefully - and accompanied by a story, and snapshots of her surfing! Gidget as centrefold!) but it was a magazine young men could read to find out how they were meant to behave in certain social situations. I've always found this a bit bizarre - Playboy as guide to etiquette - hence the fact that I've always wanted a chance to look at it. Scanning it I found phrases such as "Brechtian song" and "Camp, camp, camp, the Baroque Beatles Madrigals..." as well as the conclusion of the Ian Fleming serial Octopussy , and writing by Nabakov. So strange! It was quite an object of fascination in the common room last night- everyone took a chance to flip through it. Particular special is the fact that is contains a story about several previous Playboy covers! All in all - a worthwhile purchase. I'm just worried that Playboy poems will follow Gidget poems...
Last night Claudia and I walked up Saint Laurent and around the Latin Quarter for a while - wish I'd made my way up there a little earlier. Paused in a shop full of posters and prints and postcards - took a while to decide which Tintin postcard to purchase in French! We ended up in an Indian restaurant for dinner - for $9 I felt like I'd eaten quite a feast! And I realised how much I miss curry - am heading out to the supermarket today to get some groceries to catch up on my curry consumption!
Have been reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair for the past week, and reading other bits and pieces in between - rereading Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God at the moment, and still astounded by the suddenness of her sentences, the way they immediately cut to the point. There's a sentence in one of her Short Talks that somehow sums up her writing for me - in her short talk "On Sylvia Plath". Writing about seeing Plath's mother on the television, she observes that Aurelia "said plain, burned things." Rereading "The Glass Essay" is like a series of shocks, all the while coaxing me towards writing my own pieces. Sometime in the next few days I'm going to head to either the library or one of the bookshops with big armchairs (that might as well be libraries) to do a little research on Robert Smithson for a piece I've begun thinking through.
I'm also hoping to make it to the Quebec literary festival - Kathryn Harrison is a guest, and I'd like to see her speak. Got to try to book tickets today.
Montreal.
Sunday, March 30, 2003
I've been having a fairly quiet time in Montreal - hopping around Old Montreal, sitting in cafes, feeling relieved that they serve good coffee! It's snowing here this morning (only lightly) and my plan is to find another cafe, and hole up there for the afternoon. I should listen to The Tragically Hip. "It's pretty snowy in Montreal. Snow is so merciless." More to the point, I should listen to some Leonard Cohen and Julie Doiron, wrap myself in a scarf and read and write over a good cafe au lait.
I went to the Atwater markets here yesterday - quite a long walk down Rue Notre Dame in the rain. Just grocery shopping really - but some fancy groceries! Also bought one of the best chocolates I've ever eaten - it cost $1.50 for a tiny piece, but it was worth it. One of those extravagant treats that I can always remember...
After that I walked up Greene ave - again quite a long way - to a bookshop specialising in Canadian authors. Heaven - all the books of Margaret Atwood's poetry I've never been able to get in Australia, the Brick books edition of Anne Carson's Short Talks, Jane Urquharts poetry... Got talking to the lovely people who ran the place, and they made me a cup of tea, and gave me information about all the literary events happening while I'm here - just in time for the Quebec literary festival. Looks like some interesting writers on the program. As I was leaving, it was still raining, and they felt bad about seeing me wander out into the wet again, and so they gave me a free umbrella.
Walked down Rue St Catherine until I reached the Forum, which is their major cinema complex - both blockbusters and arthouse. Went to see "Far From Heaven", which I loved. Hoping to go back sometime during the week and see a few other films I've been meaning to see. When I got out I was very glad of the umbrella as I trudged home. Getting bck to the Auberge Alternative I put on a load of washing and made a simple risotto, settled down with a glass of white wine and ate a lovely meal. Stayed up reading, and talking to two girls from Munich, before finally collapsing into bed after my long day of walking.
I think Vanity Fair is going to take me a while to get through, but I am loving it - oh, how much I've always wished for a Becky Sharp to whirl through the pages of a Jane Austen novel, and show them all how it's done! She's at Queen's Crawley at the moment, negotiating the awful Sir Pitt.
Montreal
I went to the Atwater markets here yesterday - quite a long walk down Rue Notre Dame in the rain. Just grocery shopping really - but some fancy groceries! Also bought one of the best chocolates I've ever eaten - it cost $1.50 for a tiny piece, but it was worth it. One of those extravagant treats that I can always remember...
After that I walked up Greene ave - again quite a long way - to a bookshop specialising in Canadian authors. Heaven - all the books of Margaret Atwood's poetry I've never been able to get in Australia, the Brick books edition of Anne Carson's Short Talks, Jane Urquharts poetry... Got talking to the lovely people who ran the place, and they made me a cup of tea, and gave me information about all the literary events happening while I'm here - just in time for the Quebec literary festival. Looks like some interesting writers on the program. As I was leaving, it was still raining, and they felt bad about seeing me wander out into the wet again, and so they gave me a free umbrella.
Walked down Rue St Catherine until I reached the Forum, which is their major cinema complex - both blockbusters and arthouse. Went to see "Far From Heaven", which I loved. Hoping to go back sometime during the week and see a few other films I've been meaning to see. When I got out I was very glad of the umbrella as I trudged home. Getting bck to the Auberge Alternative I put on a load of washing and made a simple risotto, settled down with a glass of white wine and ate a lovely meal. Stayed up reading, and talking to two girls from Munich, before finally collapsing into bed after my long day of walking.
I think Vanity Fair is going to take me a while to get through, but I am loving it - oh, how much I've always wished for a Becky Sharp to whirl through the pages of a Jane Austen novel, and show them all how it's done! She's at Queen's Crawley at the moment, negotiating the awful Sir Pitt.
Montreal
Friday, March 28, 2003
Montreal, and it's not as cold as I'd anticipated. Got in after a ten hour train trip yesterday - absolutely beautiful. If I come back to the US I'd like a chance to explore upstate New York a lot more. The light was beautiful the entire way, and the frame of the window made the journey a moving postcard. Got to the hostel at about 7pm, tired and very hungry. Forgot to buy a couple of bagels at Penn Station yesterday to eat on the train - the US $2.50 I had left amounted to a muffin, which I'd eaten by 10am. So arriving 9 hours later I was ready to eat.
Went wandering down Rue St-Pierre, into another street, and found a restaurant called "Gibby's". I'd passed one or two others, and rejected them as looking too expensive - unwittingingly managed to pick the most expensive of the lot. Laughed a little at myself, and then decided that I'd sit down and enjoy it, then explore the local bakeries for a day or two. It was a good decision - the house red was wonderful, I ate the best salad I've ever eaten, and the pasta was delicious. Had a talk to the waitress, who, upon hearing I was from Australia, started talking excitedly about "Kangaroo country". Managed to get out of there for what I'd expect was about half what you'd usually pay, and felt "fat and happy" enough to just tumble into bed.
My last few days in New York were great, although somewhat overwhelming. After meeting Paul, Tina and Les for lunch, we wandered around the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while - every room we walked through a complete overload. Tina showed us the tapestry she's been restoring - working on it for several years. Something to do with "Phillip the Handsome and Joanna the Mad". Now there's a marriage that sounds doomed if ever there was one. I was in the middle of walking down a set of stairs when Paul mentioned that it was a Frank Lloyd Wright staircase...
Les invited me to join them going to Queens College, where he was given a reading, so at 4:45pm a driver came and whisked us away. The reading left me a little out of sorts - terribly homesick. A great reading, just the result of such an amazing day, and such a strange situation, and the reminder of home.
After the dinner we went to Mandicati's - described as "the most authentic Italian restaurant in New York." Apparently it was relatively unknown until an episode of "The Soprano's" was filmed there. After an evening out with everyone, another driver drove me back to the hostel. Arrived not long after midnight, and fell into bed.
Annabel and I went have "Breakfast atTiffany's" the next morning. Got our coffees and wandered around outside until they let us in. It was just like in the movie - and everyone was lovely to us, even though I must have looked like a little street urchin in my outfit and wild little pigtails! After wandering around for ages, I eventually decided I had to buy something from Tiffany's - settled on a beautiful keyring, with a little dogtag requesting "if found, please return to Tiffany's". Also has a serial number, so I can register it with Tiffany's, and they can return my keys if they ever get them.
Largely a day of wandering around and resting after that - ending the day with a bag of Cracker Jacks. And yes, they DO still have prizes in Cracker Jacks.
Don't know that I'm going to have any great adventures in Montreal today - more likely to just rest and figure out where things are. Maybe even take a "wild, [girlish] fling at writing".
Montreal
Went wandering down Rue St-Pierre, into another street, and found a restaurant called "Gibby's". I'd passed one or two others, and rejected them as looking too expensive - unwittingingly managed to pick the most expensive of the lot. Laughed a little at myself, and then decided that I'd sit down and enjoy it, then explore the local bakeries for a day or two. It was a good decision - the house red was wonderful, I ate the best salad I've ever eaten, and the pasta was delicious. Had a talk to the waitress, who, upon hearing I was from Australia, started talking excitedly about "Kangaroo country". Managed to get out of there for what I'd expect was about half what you'd usually pay, and felt "fat and happy" enough to just tumble into bed.
My last few days in New York were great, although somewhat overwhelming. After meeting Paul, Tina and Les for lunch, we wandered around the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while - every room we walked through a complete overload. Tina showed us the tapestry she's been restoring - working on it for several years. Something to do with "Phillip the Handsome and Joanna the Mad". Now there's a marriage that sounds doomed if ever there was one. I was in the middle of walking down a set of stairs when Paul mentioned that it was a Frank Lloyd Wright staircase...
Les invited me to join them going to Queens College, where he was given a reading, so at 4:45pm a driver came and whisked us away. The reading left me a little out of sorts - terribly homesick. A great reading, just the result of such an amazing day, and such a strange situation, and the reminder of home.
After the dinner we went to Mandicati's - described as "the most authentic Italian restaurant in New York." Apparently it was relatively unknown until an episode of "The Soprano's" was filmed there. After an evening out with everyone, another driver drove me back to the hostel. Arrived not long after midnight, and fell into bed.
Annabel and I went have "Breakfast atTiffany's" the next morning. Got our coffees and wandered around outside until they let us in. It was just like in the movie - and everyone was lovely to us, even though I must have looked like a little street urchin in my outfit and wild little pigtails! After wandering around for ages, I eventually decided I had to buy something from Tiffany's - settled on a beautiful keyring, with a little dogtag requesting "if found, please return to Tiffany's". Also has a serial number, so I can register it with Tiffany's, and they can return my keys if they ever get them.
Largely a day of wandering around and resting after that - ending the day with a bag of Cracker Jacks. And yes, they DO still have prizes in Cracker Jacks.
Don't know that I'm going to have any great adventures in Montreal today - more likely to just rest and figure out where things are. Maybe even take a "wild, [girlish] fling at writing".
Montreal
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
This time it's the East 96th St Branch of the library. Two blocks from the hostel, three blocks to Central Park. This afternoon am going to the Met to meet with Paul for lunch, and then I think I might go to the Empire State Building. I've been tossing up since I arrived whether I would bother, and now I think the answer is "Yes."
I went to the Museum of Modern Art yesterday, which is temporarily in Queens, and saw the rather amazing Picasso and Matisse exhibition - placing their works side by side, to see the development of the two painters over time. Looking at so many pieces it really began to hit home how much I've had enough of Picasso for the time being. I feel like that's not the sort of thing I should be saying - like the man I heard at the Frick on Sunday, commenting "Rembrandt is really not one of my favourite painters." When I turned to see who had spoken, he looked at me and laughed and said, "You're really not meant to let anyone hear you say that." Well, Picasso isn't one of my favourites. Looking at so many of his paintings I realised how much more I enjoy his prints and drawings - alongside the Matisse pieces the colours just looked overdone and wrong. It was beautiful to see so many paintings by Matisse together though. I liked the story of the initial pair of paintings in the exhibition: in 1907 Picasso and Matisse exchanged paintings. Gertrude Stein suggests that they each chose a rather bad painting by the other - perhaps to gloat. Picasso chose a portrait Matisse had painted of his daughter, Marguerite. Apparently there is evidence that Picasso's friends made fun of the Matisse portrait, and threw fake darts at it, though Picasso was later to regret this disrespect and label the piece a "key" work of Matisse's.
I finished reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and then read two books of poetry by Carolyn Forche - The Angel of History and Blue Hour, both wonderful. I read the first in Central Park, then went to Barnes and Noble one night to read the other there, since I couldn't afford to buy it. I feel like I'm going to start writing again soon - I feel like it's been so long since I haven't written that this feeling is a real relief. Now I'm reading Washington Square . I went to Washington Square and read 100 pages of it there. Lovely. Got stopped by a guy who was advertising a hiphop theatre show based on the Book of Job, and he said. "You're reading Washington Square in Washington Sqaure? Cool. How self-referential."
New York
I went to the Museum of Modern Art yesterday, which is temporarily in Queens, and saw the rather amazing Picasso and Matisse exhibition - placing their works side by side, to see the development of the two painters over time. Looking at so many pieces it really began to hit home how much I've had enough of Picasso for the time being. I feel like that's not the sort of thing I should be saying - like the man I heard at the Frick on Sunday, commenting "Rembrandt is really not one of my favourite painters." When I turned to see who had spoken, he looked at me and laughed and said, "You're really not meant to let anyone hear you say that." Well, Picasso isn't one of my favourites. Looking at so many of his paintings I realised how much more I enjoy his prints and drawings - alongside the Matisse pieces the colours just looked overdone and wrong. It was beautiful to see so many paintings by Matisse together though. I liked the story of the initial pair of paintings in the exhibition: in 1907 Picasso and Matisse exchanged paintings. Gertrude Stein suggests that they each chose a rather bad painting by the other - perhaps to gloat. Picasso chose a portrait Matisse had painted of his daughter, Marguerite. Apparently there is evidence that Picasso's friends made fun of the Matisse portrait, and threw fake darts at it, though Picasso was later to regret this disrespect and label the piece a "key" work of Matisse's.
I finished reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and then read two books of poetry by Carolyn Forche - The Angel of History and Blue Hour, both wonderful. I read the first in Central Park, then went to Barnes and Noble one night to read the other there, since I couldn't afford to buy it. I feel like I'm going to start writing again soon - I feel like it's been so long since I haven't written that this feeling is a real relief. Now I'm reading Washington Square . I went to Washington Square and read 100 pages of it there. Lovely. Got stopped by a guy who was advertising a hiphop theatre show based on the Book of Job, and he said. "You're reading Washington Square in Washington Sqaure? Cool. How self-referential."
New York
Monday, March 24, 2003
Another branch of the New York public libraries (Midtown) and I've still go the problem of only half an hour to try and get things together in a vaguely coherent fashion. We'll see what happens.
Ok, I've been wearing a little hair clip since I was about six, acquired from I don't know where, that says "I love NY". It's true, though I was skeptical, after hearing P complain about the city. But what can I say - everyone's been quite lovely to me, they have cherry strudel and cherry pie everywhere, and the bagels are really cheap, and really good. Of course, the galleries are expensive, and I've been pushed a little over budget - so that I'm relieved tomorrow will bring me lunch with poets, to help me slow down after a rather frenetic experience. Another of those serendipities, Les Murray is in town, and meeting with Paul Kane for lunch tomorrow. I was meant to be meeting Paul on Wednesday, but just got the email asking to reschedule. I wonder if the reschedule qualifies as a one-day-off Wednesday lunchtime club meeting? (Though after meeting Michael Ondaatje I'm thinking of forming a "Thursday Coffee Club" - I think I'll just wait until after I've left the US. The coffee here is pretty ordinary - my only real disappointment.)
Saturday I went to the International Centre for Photography - got me a little inspired to take some pictures, as visiting galleries and museums always seems to. After browsing there, and finally buying a book of Nan Goldin's photography I've been looking for for 18 months (her series of photographs of empty interiors - beautiful) I hopped on the subway down to Bleeker St and had a good old wander in Greenwich Village.
Walked into the Old Village Gourmet, and "Brand New Key" by Melanie was playing. Fabulous. They have amazing looking cherry pies - I'm having one with my lunch today. I wanted to have it with "black coffee - and HOT" to make it a real Twin Peaks kind of thing, but have already expressed my views about the coffee so will move on.
I ate the most amazing icecream of my life, from a shop called "Cones" on Bleeker. "Artisans of fine icecream". Their dark chocolate icecream is like my amazing chocolate mousse, only icecream-ier.
Went up to Chelsea to hear Maxine Kumin read at the Dia Centre - another wonderful place. I found the reading almost by accident when flicking idly through the "Village Voice." Wouldn't have stumbled on the Dia Centre otherwise, but instantly fell in love. A bookshop and a gallery. Also wandered into a number of private galleries to see the most recent in the New York art scene - new work by Nan Goldin! Enormous prints, and a slide show in a little theatre out the back, with music by John Taverner and Bjork. It was surreal, just wandering in to find so many things I love just coming together.
Late that night I wandered across the Brooklyn Bridge - gorgeous. Annabel, a girl from Spain via New Orleans who's staying in my room at the hostel - and I are going to see a Billy Wilder film in Brooklyn tonight, so I might get to wander across the bridge again...
Yesterday spent the day frollicking in Central Park - listening to Beatles in Strawberry Fields - and at the Frick. My first real encounter with Vermeer's work "live" if you will. Had an interesting time looking at the disputed "Polish Rider" of maybe-maybe-not Rembrandt. Very much liked a series of portraits by Whistler. Ended up talking to one of the security guards about what he liked best - for him it was simply "the place." Like a museum of opulence, a nineteenth century 5th avenue lifestyle. I think I should get some blueprints and send them home, so we can start fixing up our place a little! After the Frick I returned to Central Park and played with a bunch of kids on the Alice in Wonderland sculpture. I was concerned that the March Hare seemed to be missing. Maybe he fell in the butter. (It was the best butter.)
And with that attempt to catch up, my time runs out. Remember:
"Speak roughly to your little boy
And beat him when he sneezes.
He only does it to annoy
Because he knows it teases."
New York.
Ok, I've been wearing a little hair clip since I was about six, acquired from I don't know where, that says "I love NY". It's true, though I was skeptical, after hearing P complain about the city. But what can I say - everyone's been quite lovely to me, they have cherry strudel and cherry pie everywhere, and the bagels are really cheap, and really good. Of course, the galleries are expensive, and I've been pushed a little over budget - so that I'm relieved tomorrow will bring me lunch with poets, to help me slow down after a rather frenetic experience. Another of those serendipities, Les Murray is in town, and meeting with Paul Kane for lunch tomorrow. I was meant to be meeting Paul on Wednesday, but just got the email asking to reschedule. I wonder if the reschedule qualifies as a one-day-off Wednesday lunchtime club meeting? (Though after meeting Michael Ondaatje I'm thinking of forming a "Thursday Coffee Club" - I think I'll just wait until after I've left the US. The coffee here is pretty ordinary - my only real disappointment.)
Saturday I went to the International Centre for Photography - got me a little inspired to take some pictures, as visiting galleries and museums always seems to. After browsing there, and finally buying a book of Nan Goldin's photography I've been looking for for 18 months (her series of photographs of empty interiors - beautiful) I hopped on the subway down to Bleeker St and had a good old wander in Greenwich Village.
Walked into the Old Village Gourmet, and "Brand New Key" by Melanie was playing. Fabulous. They have amazing looking cherry pies - I'm having one with my lunch today. I wanted to have it with "black coffee - and HOT" to make it a real Twin Peaks kind of thing, but have already expressed my views about the coffee so will move on.
I ate the most amazing icecream of my life, from a shop called "Cones" on Bleeker. "Artisans of fine icecream". Their dark chocolate icecream is like my amazing chocolate mousse, only icecream-ier.
Went up to Chelsea to hear Maxine Kumin read at the Dia Centre - another wonderful place. I found the reading almost by accident when flicking idly through the "Village Voice." Wouldn't have stumbled on the Dia Centre otherwise, but instantly fell in love. A bookshop and a gallery. Also wandered into a number of private galleries to see the most recent in the New York art scene - new work by Nan Goldin! Enormous prints, and a slide show in a little theatre out the back, with music by John Taverner and Bjork. It was surreal, just wandering in to find so many things I love just coming together.
Late that night I wandered across the Brooklyn Bridge - gorgeous. Annabel, a girl from Spain via New Orleans who's staying in my room at the hostel - and I are going to see a Billy Wilder film in Brooklyn tonight, so I might get to wander across the bridge again...
Yesterday spent the day frollicking in Central Park - listening to Beatles in Strawberry Fields - and at the Frick. My first real encounter with Vermeer's work "live" if you will. Had an interesting time looking at the disputed "Polish Rider" of maybe-maybe-not Rembrandt. Very much liked a series of portraits by Whistler. Ended up talking to one of the security guards about what he liked best - for him it was simply "the place." Like a museum of opulence, a nineteenth century 5th avenue lifestyle. I think I should get some blueprints and send them home, so we can start fixing up our place a little! After the Frick I returned to Central Park and played with a bunch of kids on the Alice in Wonderland sculpture. I was concerned that the March Hare seemed to be missing. Maybe he fell in the butter. (It was the best butter.)
And with that attempt to catch up, my time runs out. Remember:
"Speak roughly to your little boy
And beat him when he sneezes.
He only does it to annoy
Because he knows it teases."
New York.
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