In Praise of older women

“Old men should be explorers”, runs a TS Eliot line – and Stanley Spencer has a painting “in praise of older men”. It is time, however, we celebrated older women. Koln’s bookshops were displaying some of their books – a biography of German diarist Luise Rinser; conversations with Loki Schmidt who, apart from her pioneering environmental work, was Gerhard Schmidt’s partner for 68 years; an autobiography by Inge Jens  partner of Germany’s recently-deceased man of letters Walter Jens. An article in Die Zeit brought 90 year-old Anglo-German author of 30 (mainly childrens’) books Judith Kerr to my attention.

Diane Athill is 96 and still going strong – with several volumes of powerful memoirs written over several decades which I’ve totally missed. This says a lot not only about me – but about UK literary circles. I’ve just started her Somewhere Toward the End which is one of the clearest and most honest reflections about living I’ve ever come across. The review article puts it nicely -

Her writing has wit, bite and honesty. Such qualities are rare enough in any memoir and so are especially worthwhile in one that deals with the lives of the elderly – people we often either patronise or ignore.

The opening chapters deal very poignantly with her recollections of love - and her discovery of a neglected female Expressionist painter. Ian Jack - editor of Granta - writes very eloquently of his experiences of editing her work -

As the editor of Granta I also became the editor of her three last books. Very little needs to be said about that. The typescript arrived, a few suggestions for changes were made, she absorbed them with her quick editorial brain, and a slightly amended typescript was soon in the post. Editing her was pure pleasure because I loved reading her; it was like having someone speak into your ear, someone humane and self-amused and wise that you wanted to hear. "Good writing" is difficult to define, and definitions differ according to taste, but you know it when you see it, which is rarer than publishing companies would have you suppose. I remember my excitement when I read the first few pages of the typescript that became Somewhere Towards the End (Athill's choice of title and a good one, as her titles always are). The book arose out of a brief conversation and the exchange of a postcard or two: it seemed to me that while the memoir genre abounded in accounts of youth – the "coming-of-age narrative" is a literary cliché of our times – very few books have let us know about life at the other end of the road. In fact, other than self-help guides (take a cod-liver oil capsule every day) and apart from the late novels of Kingsley Amis and Philip Roth, I could think of none. There are, of course, books about the process of dying by victims of cruel and slow terminal disease, but writers have been shy of the subject of just being old, as if shame and indignity had replaced wisdom and experience as the best-known qualities of great age. Our conversation hardly amounted to an editorial briefing and I had no word of progress for a couple of years. Then a few early pages arrived and with them the first vivid sense of what it is like to become old, like reports from another country that we shall all, if spared earlier elimination, shortly be moving to.
In different hands, the book could have been filled with a sentimental longing for the past, brittle cheer towards the present, or the religious consolation of the future. None of those things could ever have appealed to Athill. Instead, Somewhere Towards the End is a beautifully turned series of episodes, none of them sermonic, in which the author reveals how she has come to terms (or not) with what she calls "falling away" and the unavoidable fact of death. It was, wrote the late Simon Gray – no stranger himself to intimations of mortality – both "exhilarating and comforting" in its good sense, candour and lively spirit. Every passage is rooted in specifics. On the second page, she describes her new tree fern (£18 from the Thompson & Morgan plant catalogue) and her doubts that she will live long enough to see it reach mature height: a small thought, but it immediately takes us inside the mind of someone going on for 90. She has "got it right", and continues to get it right throughout the book, in the sense that we utterly believe that this is how life is and was for her. 

Jack's concluding section is an important comment on current writing -

 we should have more of them....more people who write only when they feel they have something to tell us; more writers driven by the scrupulous need to make us see clearly and exactly what they have witnessed and felt.

An ode to independent Bookshops

A couple of weeks ago I did something I haven’t been able to in 30 years – I ordered a batch of books from a bookshop! Sounds so simple – but my nomadic existence since 1990 has made it so difficult to be in the appropriate place when the books actually arrived. And there were so few bookshops in the countries I was working in which offered such a service. But the Anthony Frost English bookshop is something else– not for nothing called “arguably the best English-language bookshop in Eastern Europe” in this year’s Lonely Planet book on Bulgaria and Romania and voted this year Romania’s best bookshop by the Publishers’ Association of Romania.

The titles on display are, for a man of my taste, mouth-watering and seem to get better on each visit. But that did not prevent me from handing Vlad, the highly knowledgeable and friendly manager, a list of eight books – six of which duly arrived in the flash of an eye within a week! Needless to say, other books also caught my eye – eg Romanian Writers on Writing which has an interesting short video clip here – or were recommended by Vlad, eg the stunning Forbidden Photos and Personal Images which has the following blurb on the great website

It was, indeed, necessary that 18 years pass for people to want to remember what communism meant. When they were ready, it was Andrei Pandele that gave them back their lost and forgotten memories, the one witness who breaks the silence and brings out prints of individual and public history. Maybe the young, tall, slender young man, with green eyes, that paid attention to everything, got an even bigger reward for his courage then he expected. People did want to know. At 63, he is still young and full of energy, currently working on a project on the House of the People.
He now lives in the house where during communism he snuck the films that were to become his testimony, his parents’ house, which he used to leave with a briefcase where he hid the prints that could have gotten him five years of imprisonment each, had he been discovered. The kind of pictures that were not part of family albums.
Pandele’s testimony is a silent, but vibrant one, and this is what he does best, takes pictures of real life, stills time with his camera, and keeps it aside for generations to come. People have a short memory when it comes to hard times and misfortunes. Photographs help them remember and new generations understand their present through their past.

There was also another powerful book with black and white photographs of the Odbor flea market which I found just a bit too lifelike to have in my library

I am therefore thoroughly sustained in my new boycott of the Amazon behemoth. Indeed I feel cleansed! The prices of my purchases in the Anthony Frost bookshop were no higher than the bills I had been getting for the packages delivered to the house. But the human experience was priceless. I googled “in praise of independent bookshops” and am delighted to share these glowing tributes from thepenguinblog; feminspire; booksellers; and - perhaps best of all - independent booksellers

Anthony Frost are also part of the Bookcrossing network with three baskets of free books also available for the taking (providing you leave an equivalent number!) - so another book was duly added ("The Spin Doctor's Diary") about which hopefully I will have something to say soon..... 

Forty Days and Nights in Sofia

One of my Bulgarian friends who has been involved in the protests in Sofia (40 days so far) sent me this morning Ivan Krastev’s brief (and disappointingly uninformative) article on the current situation  - one the few, however, which the British media have deemed worthy to print. Transitions Online has just published this brief note from Boyko Vassilev who is producer of the Panorama programme of Bulgarian Television and writes occasional pieces on Bulgaria such as this one about the self-immolations which were a feature of the earlier phase of the Bulgarian protests (in April)

Hardly surprising that the EC technocrats have been sending broadly supportive messages to the protestors – nor that old leftists have an ambivalent attitude to protests which have the overtones of the wider “Occupy” movement but without the critique of capitalism the leftists expect.

One Bulgarian Professor (in Germany) (who is a self-confessed member of the Mont Pelerin society) offers this perspective on the events in Sofia

The various conflicting attitudes to the protests are evident in the discussion thread to the earlier article by Mariya Ivancheva whose family was apparently part of the old Communist guard.

I'm sorry not to be present at the protests some images of which are here - and wish them well.

Campulung - one of many of Romania's small jewels

We drove yesterday over the spectacular passes from Fundata to Campulung and through the various fascinating settlements which line the road.

Campulung is a town of 40,000 people nestling in the Carpathian foothills and has a long and turbulent history, having been occupied (and frequently set alight) by Turks (in 1738 or so), Austrians, Germans (in The First World War) and even Russians (1828-32). The quieter times after Independence gave the town a chance to exploit its location, culture and climate and superb examples of classic Romanian houses are to be seen there – giving a sense of how the nouveaux riches besported themselves in its baths and streets in the years before the First World and in the 25 years before communism took hold.  

 Campulung was first documented in 1212, in a document by the Hungarian king to the Teutonic Knights. A Saxon community was living there, whose leader was Lawrence of Longocampo. 

Basarab I the Founder (1310-1352) established the capital in Campulung - the first of the Romanian Country. It was also deemed by some to be the cradle of the Romanian language - a letter written in 1521 by one of the stewards of the town to Hans Benkner of Brasov is apparently the first document written in Romanian and the country’s first printing presses started in 1635 here - after the mid-seventeenth century ruler Matei Basarab founded in Campulung the first paper mill in the country. 

One of the oldest schools in the Romanian Country was established in 1552 by Mrs. Chiajna, wife of Prince Mircea Ciobanu. The Roman conquerors have left traces in the area, the camp of Jidava (Jidova) located at the exit of Campulung towards Pitesti is a testimony to this.Heavy fighting took place in the cliffs around Rucăr-Bran in the autumn of 1916. 

You get a sense of the present-day town in this video. Sadly, it being Monday, the town's small private art gallery was closed - it not only has interesting exhibitions but stocks an excellent supply of booklets on the town's history.

Another great post from Tourist in my Country - this time about one of he many derelict palaces one can find tragically scattered around the countryside

Two years ago today, I was blogging about Bulgarian Realist painting

post-industrial dereliction

Detroit (briefly) hit the news recently as the first US city to declare bankruptcy. The statistics are horrific – In half a century, this blogpost tells us Detroit has gone from having the highest per capita income in the US to the lowest.

in 1950 the city had more than 1.8 million inhabitants; this year the population will probably slip below 700,000. Just since 2000, the city has lost 26% of its people. In 1950, Detroit was 82% white – it's now 82% black. 76,000 homes and buildings in once-prosperous neighbourhoods have been abandoned, with many houses on offer for 1,000 dollars
250,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Detroit in the past 50 years. 47% of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate. Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point. 60 per cent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty. The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

And these images of the decay and dereliction are nothing short of apocalyptic 

For many of us, this is a sign of things to come – a vision of the future. Civilisations come and go – and it is fairly obvious now (apart from the millions of climate deniers) that the Western model has passed its “sell by” date. If it’s not ecological limits, it will be increasing social unrest (from wealth disparities, food prices, immigration).

For another, powerful school of thought, however, this is not just overblown but misses the point about capitalist creativity or, as Schumpeter put it, creative destruction – technology will come to the rescue; more supply will be brought forward to reduce prices. Crises create opportunities.

Two articles exemplify this way of thinking – one in The Guardian and the other, less surprisingly, in the Harvard Business Review.
However my friend The Slogger typically seesit all very differently

going out in style

OK removing myself from the Amazon tentacles in true masochistic style – with 24 books waiting for me in about 8 separate packages and delivered to my long-suffering neighbours in the past week.
Among them the fascinating biography Worldly Philosopher – the odyssey of Albert O Hirschmann one of my intellectual heroes -

  Hirschman was a schoolboy in Berlin but forced to leave (for Paris) in April 1933 by the Nazi threat. He spent his career in constant motion. After studies in Paris and doing graduate training in London and Italy, fighting in Spain, and spending the first part of the war in France, he left for the United States, by which point he had begun to lose track of his own movements. “This makes my fourth—or is it fifth?—emigration,” he wrote to his mother. He accepted a fellowship at Berkeley (where he met the woman he would marry, Sarah Chapiro, another émigré), did a tour of duty for the O.S.S. in North Africa and Europe, and, with the war concluded, served a stint at the Federal Reserve Board, where he grew so unhappy that he would return home to his wife and two daughters in Chevy Chase, shut the door to his study, and bury himself in Kafka. He worked for the Marshall Plan in Washington, providing, Adelman says, “the thinking behind the thinking,” only to be turned down for a transfer to Paris because of a failed national-security review. He was in his mid-thirties. On a whim, he packed up the family and moved to Bogotá, Colombia, where he worked on a project for the World Bank. He crisscrossed the country with, Adelman writes, “pen in hand and paper handy, examining irrigation projects, talking to local bankers about their farm loans, and scribbling calculations about the costs of road building.”
Writing to her parents about the family’s decision to move to Colombia, which was then in the midst of a civil war, Sarah explained, “We both realize that you should think of the future—make plans for the children etc. But I think we both somehow feel that it is impossible to know what is best and that the present is so much more important—because if the present is solid and good it will be a surer basis for a good future than any plans that you can make.” Most people would not have left a home in Chevy Chase and the security of a job in Washington to go to a Third World country where armed gangsters roamed the streets, because they would feel certain that Colombia was a mistake. Hirschman believed, as a matter of principle, that it was impossible to know whether Colombia would be a mistake. As it happened, the four years the family spent in Bogotá were among its happiest. Hirschman returned to Latin America again and again during his career, and what he learned there provided the raw material for his most brilliant work. His doubt was a gift, not a curse.

 Tony Judt's "Thinking the 20th Century" makes a marvellous copunterpoint to the Hirschmann biography.

Also in the packages was the massive art tome on Stanley Spencer by Keith Bell. ; and Edward Thomas's "Annotated Collected Poems"

Romanian art slowly emerges from the shadows

Bucharest’s newly-opened Museum of Art Collections is stunning – well worth the 20 year wait for its opening. 

Housed in a huge, refurbished palace on Calea Victoriei, it hosts in about 60 rooms private collections of art (in suites of rooms) which had been built up by individuals and families and then taken by the state during mainly the communist period: thus Elena and Anastase Simu Collection, the Iosif Iser Collection, the Elizabeth and Moses Weinberg Collection, the Ulmeanu Elena Collection, the Alexandru Phoebus Collection, the Hrandt Avachian collection. 

The museum boasts over 12,000 works including all artistic genres: painting, drawing, sculpture, decorative arts – most of it Romanian art and represented by artists like Nicolae Grigorescu, Stefan Luchian, Ioan Andreescu, Jean Al. Steriadi, Nicolae Tonitza Nicholas, Nicholae Darascu, Theodor Pallady, Iosif Iser and, my favourite, Stefan Popescu - shown here – 

as well as valuable pieces of folk art (icons on glass and wood, ceramics, furniture, fabrics XVIII - XIX). 

Romanian sculpture is illustrated by Oscar Han, Corneliu Medrea Milita Patrascu and Celine Emilian. European and oriental (Turkish, Persian, Japanese, Chinese) art can be seen - as well as icons, folk art, rugs (XVI - XIX), silver, porcelain and glass, furniture, miniatures. The Museum of Art Collections is a division of the National Art Museum.

It seems to take some time for the great Romanian paintings to see the light of day - unlike Bulgaria where I have found it so easy to view (and purchase) old masters in the various Sofia galleries and where I was, from the beginning, treated in a courteous and friendly way.
Not so in Bucharest whose gallery-owners for the most part are offhand if not aggressive.

It is only in recent months that I have revised my opinion of Romanian art which I had seen until now as dark and brooding if not downright ugly (eg Gheorge Petrascu). Jean Steriaid is one of my favourites - shown here.....
I owe this revision to books produced by the painter and art collector Vasile Parizescu the latest of which is a huge volume - with the great title Life as Passion - which details, with splendid pictures  the various art collections which have been developed privately in 20th Century Romania. Earlier this week, in the small antique shop in the arches of Ion Ghica street near the City Museum (you can get a great birds' eye view of the city centre by clicking on the appropriate button here), I chanced upon a large and weighty 380 page volume which itemises the incredible collection of business-man Tiberiu Postelnica (coincidentally the grandson of Ceaucescu's last Minister of the Interior and Head of the Securitate. You can imagine the process by which he came to accumulate the collection he now has and so shamelessly boasts about in this 380 page volume!!!)

A recent magazine article hints at how big money (and connections) have cornered the art market in Romania. 

But truly important collections, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous, belong to someone very discrete: for instance, the businessman Tiberiu Postelnicu owner Total Distribution & Logistics Group has a substantial art collection, with hundreds of pieces. Retired General Marius Opran, former adviser to Ion Iliescu, is known to have an important collection of art in his possession - worth 50 million euros (one of the pieces was a painting by Pissarro, "Carpenter"). Another important collector Adrian Zdrobiş businessman with a substantial collection of Romanian masters, family heritage, with dozens of pieces of Pallady Andreescu or Grigorescu.

Tonitsa is generally not a favourite of mine - but I make an exception for this nude - .
And a couple of the Grigorescus in the collection are shown below - the last being a self-portrait.

Confessions of an Amazon addict – breaking the habit

Over the past decade I must have bought at least 500 books from Amazon – my nomadic existence made this highly convenient. I could have the books delivered in places which had no real English bookshops (such as Tashkent, Baku or Bishkek) where I was working – or pick them up later in Bucharest or my mountain house in Transylvania. My old neighbours in the village have been very good at ensuring that the post office (and UPS) delivered them securely.

It’s actually been too convenient a service – for which, of course, I have paid a reasonable amount (delivery costs on my Amazon packages amount now to 50% of the face value of the books.

But my recent visits to the fabulous Anthony Frost English bookshop in Bucharest have now persuaded me to try to kick the habit. The statistic which their manager Vlad gave me – of 2000 independent booksellers left in the UK compared with France’s 5,000 – is a powerful one. Unlike Britain, tax legislation in France (and Germany?) helps independent booksellers. And nothing beats the chats about books in such a bookshop - and the customised recommendations!  

Amazon is a robber baron whose tactics are detailed in a very long entry in Wikipedia - driving out competition by extensive loss-leading; tax-avoidance; bullying of suppliers; slave-labour conditions in their huge warehouses.

Their failure to pay corporate taxes has attracted wide criticism for some time and seems to have led to political consensus for action amongst European leaders. The Seattle Times had a recent four-part expose 

The company's hardball efforts to fend off collecting sales taxes — a key advantage over brick-and-mortar stores — has ignited a backlash in several states (of the USA). In the publishing world, smaller companies have begun to publicly criticize Amazon's bullying tactics. In some of its warehouses around the country, Amazon is drawing fire for harsh conditions endured by workers. And the company contributes to charities a tiny fraction of what other big corporations give.

To this list I would add the charge of false pricing – the initial price which attracts you does not include VAT or delivery charges (outside the UK)

I’m therefore glad to see that a boycott-Amazon campaign started recently - with one reader giving a useful rundown on why he has chosen to stop using Amazon and use alternatives and Ethical Consumer offering the facility of us mailing Amazon to inform them of our reasons.

At least one independent book publisher in the UK has joined the campaign and a website gives info of various other actions being taken by companies.

What is amazing is how global investors have allowed the bubble in Amazon stocks to continue. These times could soon end -  but in the meantime the damage has probably been done.