Harvest treasures

A day for sensations in the comfort of our cosy stone and wood house in the autumnal mountains – hunkered with a good book in a wicker chair in front of a wood fire in the brick stove; eating local vegetables magically concocted in soups and stews. Pity I can’t quite extend to the Tuscan way of treating beans – left overnight softly bubbling in an old Chianti bottle in the embers of the fire! But I'm just waiting to get hold of a pumpkin to make a soup with a drop of ginger!

And the mixture of grated red beetroot, chopped celery, apple, garlic, pumpkin oil, honey and apple vinegar and touch of lemon offers not only a tasty salad but is so beneficial to organs such as the prostate.

I used to swear by Shopska salad but it has paled by comparison with my current offering - which adds old crumbled toast, an egg, pumpkin oil and generous lashings of Telemen cheese to the usual mix of red onion, tomato, lettuce and garlic.

This encouraged me to look again at one of my favourite celebrations of the older (and better) ways of eating – Beaneaters and Bread Soup which focuses on various individuals in the Tuscan countryside who still stick with the simple and traditional methods – here’s one recipe for bread and beansoup, The bread in the picture, by the way, is the superb large potato one which lasts more than a week! If I can't have the Bulgarian black rye, I'll take this Romanian (actually Hungarian county!) white!   

By coincidence, one of my favourite bloggers’ most recent offering gives marvellous old illuminated treatments of harvest time which includes a medieval document called Tacuinum Sanitatis

And, while we’re celebrating the old ways, let’s raise a glass - or three- (of Murfatlar Feteasca white and Bulgarian red) to the superb photography of Robert Doisneau which usually lie on my desk and some of whose work can be seen here
The last website - online browsing - is a nice find which gives us glimpses of old photographs  and paintings from around the world

Back to the Habsburgs

"Our" cow was moved off the high ground last week down to the meadow around Viciu’s house; and this week saw the first snow on the Bucegi mountain range which the front of the house overlooks (the pic).
The quincy fruits are also large – always, according to grandmother wisdom here, a sign of a tough winter to come. Couldn’t get much tougher than the last one which saw our neighbour’s house snowed in during March – but we’re taking no chances and therefore padded today the central heating pipes with special care. Monday we will have the specialist up to do a bit of tweaking. Thus are the seasons marked on this southern border of Transylvania!

I’m stuck in a bit of a time warp at the moment – Chris Clark’s book on the origins of the First World War - TheSleepwalkers - made me realise how little I know about the world which created the killing fields of the 20^th Century. I therefore reread Simon Winder’s Germania which I had found a bit indigestible at the first read - but which makes a bit more sense this time around. And, coincidentally, Winder published last week Danubia – a personal history of Hapsburg Empire which has attracted this useful review -

Why do we know so little about the Habsburg empire, given that it is the prime formative influence on modern Europe? Its pomp gave us the art, music, literature and pageantry of our high culture; its relationship with the Ottoman East and burgeoning European protestantism drew our religious and our political maps; its collapse fomented the nationalisms that shaped the 20th century across Europe.
A popular abbreviation on the internet is ‘tl; dr’. It stands for ‘too long; didn’t read.’ There’s space for another one that would come in especially helpful for the Habsburg empire: ‘tc; du’ — ‘too complicated; didn’t understand’. It’s much easier to teach schoolchildren about Our Island Story, or the first world war, or the nastiness of Nazis, because at least superficially these are containable subjects. There are baddies (Nazis), there are decisive battles (Waterloo), there are comprehensible treaties (Versailles) and there are what look like reasons for things to happen (railway timetables).

The Habsburg empire, on the other hand, has none of these consolations. Most of the places involved are now called something else, and the empire was cobbled together out of any number of rebellious, feuding or indifferent duchies, grand-duchies, principalities, margravates, palatinates and what have you. ......
One of the main things the empire did was to prevent the Ottomans from overrunning Europe. Its ups and downs often have to do with whether the Ottomans were busy gnawing at its bum or had their attention distracted for a few decades elsewhere. Like most of the things the Habsburgs did — Winder gently but seriously emphasises that to think of the empire as a rational, centralising authority is completely to miss the point — these distractions were often subcontracted........

This is almost an anti-history. Winder approaches his dementingly enormous subject more in the spirit of an amused and irreverent tourist, as his subtitle suggests: as much travel writer as historian. ‘The more we read about the past,’ he marvels at one point, ‘the more completely odd it appears.’
Danubia is framed by the author’s peregrinations around the Mitteleuropean sprawl of the vanished empire — from the dismal flatlands bordering the Danube to tiny towns in Transylvania. He visits dusty old museums (in one he finds a flap of human skin) and decaying fortresses. He observes endless suits of armour, eats stomach-churning omelettes, stumbles on a children’s rock festival in a town in Serbia and sighs frequently for love of the town of Brno.Yet one of the sly contradictions here is that an exceptional amount of reading and travel lies behind the showily teen-agerish dismissal of this monarch or that treaty. Winder plainly knows his way around the empire: he’s not only more knowledgeable than he makes out about military history; he’s also well-read and clever about art and music. Sometimes the winsomeness is trying. A down side of approaching history as a tourist is that, by definition, you never quite inhabit the period. There’s a sort of chronological orientalism to all this pointing and laughing. But at the same time it is very funny.

Danubia promises to be a very useful complement to the doorstopper of a book about the Habsburg Empire which arrived for me yesterday CA Macartney’s 1968 The Habsburg Empire 1790-1918. This promises to be a real resource to help deal with my ignorance of this part of the world.

Abolish the news!

News is a commodity sold on a mass market which despises in-depth assessments but goes for stock clichés and instant opinion. 

Where does one go when one wants, instead, good and thoughtful writing about issues, culture or history? The answer seems to be bi-weekly, monthly or bi-monthly journals of a general nature. 

Avoid journalists – the modern harlot – like the plague and find instead real writers who demonstrate (a) clear and original writing, (b) familiarity with the subject matter and (c) courage in challenging the conventional wisdom. 

This is what the fortnightly London Review of Books (to which I’ve been subscribing for the past year) is now giving me – take John Lanchester's two long articles on the British banking scandal here and also here; novellist James Meek's stark analysis of electricity privatisation; and this piece reviewing various European texts on the crisis as typical examples.

The New York Review of Books – of which I used to be an aficionado – no longer speaks to me…..it somehow seems to have become incestuous….

I would, of course, like to recommend a French or German journal – but cannot find one with the same scope and clarity as LRB. Le Monde and Die Zeit are both great heavyweight journals – one a daily, the other weekly – but are still newspapers with all the pressures that entail. A monthly (German) journal such as Cicero is too narrowly political – others too business. NachDenkSeiten is a website I've come across which has a nice focus. But don't get me started on the tens of thousands of specialised academic titles which waste our valuable time and warp our minds!!

The various monthly European literary reviews (such as Magazine Litteraire) just don’t seem to have mastered the more discursive tone (and editorial genius) of the London, Dublin and New York Review of Books which are patently reaching out to a broader audience than that for simple book reviews (with the strange mixture of internecine and marketing processes that can involve!). These three Reviews prefer to use a recently published book (or better a bunch) as a peg on which to hang a more general discourse. 

I always enjoy glancing at the Romanian version of Lettre Internationale even although its sponsor, The Cultural Institute of Romania now has dubious leadership. Its woodcuts are marvellous and the copious footnotes take me back to the good old days of Le Monde!

I also very much appreciate what Eurozine trying to do - with its collecting in one website the key articles from Europe’s 70 odd cultural magazines – even if most of that content is too highbrow! But at least it does try to give us a sense of what is happening in Europe outside the superficial treatment we get of the eurocrisis and how it is impacting on people. I have remarked several times in this blog about the scandalously uninformed coverage there is of the social context in which the majority of Europeans live their lives.

In desperation I have now added New Left Review and a new-look New Statesman to the list of journals which now wend their way to my mountain retreat. Already I feel a difference!!
But perhaps its time to ask a simple question - there are tens of thousands of journalists and academics churning out articles in (hundreds of) thousands of journals in the general field of politics and social policy. Can we not think of a way of making the better of these pieces more accessible - in various European languages?? That's the Eurozine idea - but they're selecting from a rather precious bunch!
Of course what gets in the way of this simple idea is the specialisation of political, professional and academic silos - there are a few journals who are trying this idea - eg Project Syndicate but from a rather narrow ideological base.
Time for more experimentation!

the poetry of tartan noir

I keep wanting to like poetry – but generally failing. Bert Brecht, Norman MacCaig and Marin Sorescu are the main poets who have ever really got through to me - the first for his political anger; the other two for their wry humour. TS Eliot and Adrian Mitchell also appeal. But I do enjoy and appreciate the poetic style which you can find in good novels and essays.

William McIlvanney has always been an admired writer in Scotland though his renown hasn't spread beyond the borders in quite the way some of us think it should have. 

McIlvanney isn't a crime writer per se; he's also written literary novels, short stories, essays and poetry since the 60s. But he did happen to write three crime novels, starting with Laidlaw  in 1977, that acted as a hard-bitten blueprint for all Scottish crime fiction to come, inspiring a generation of writers to take on the genre in his wake.
Laidlaw's eponymous detective is an existentially troubled individual with a strong moral compass and a stronger sense of socialist justice.

The Glasgow he stalks is a brutal place, rife with deprivation and poverty, yet depicted with dark humour and perceptive, poetic prose. The plot reads like a cliche today, but that's because McIlvanney was first to do it. The murderer of a teenager has to be found and, well, that's it. But McIlvanney subverts expectations, and gives away whodunit early on, focusing instead on the psyches of characters that represent different facets of Glasgow, and by extension Scotland. In a time when English crime writers were still copying Agatha Christie, McIlvanney took the hardboiled ethos of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and applied it to the working classes of the city around him. It was a revelation.

I was spellbound by which I've just read after its recent republication – the toughness of its taut text. Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw left university after one year. He had not failed -"University failed me ... I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened".

"Panda (one of the characters) was like a banana republic threatened by two contending major powers who don’t want direct conflict". (ch.11 p.75)

Laidlaw takes as much pleasure in the ordinary street life of Glasgow and of the dignity of its people. This indomitable spirit is captured in the last action of the book where Laidlaw after an evening’s drinking, dances outside Central Station with an old woman who had been standing in a queue. ‘Son,’ she said, ‘This is the best queue I’ve ever been in in my life.’ (p.298)

McIlvanney’s shorter pieces are marvellous examples of expressive writing and can be accessed on his website. 

Reviews of his work are available on a Glasgow University site about Scottish literature here and here

In researching for this post, I came across a very interesting website about lifesaving poems  one of whose posts was about Marin Sorescu  Perhaps the site can help me with my blind spot for most poetry. I know I need to focus more!

To end - not with a poem but with a symphony of wood! The spoons which head this post are the creation of this artist MANU whose studio in Tirgovishte we visited recently and two of whose beautifully-crafted dressers now have pride of place in our mountain kitchen.  

The politics of painting

Bucharest is a city I would normally avoid in high summer like the plague – but dental issues have forced me to divide what summer I’ve had since my return from Germany in early July between the place and my mountain retreat. And the cooler summer weather has actually made the city much more bearable.

Having bemoaned what I saw as the lugubrious state of Romanian painting with which I was being served up in Bucharest galleries and museums in the past decade, my eyes have been opened in the past 12 months.

The new Museum of (22 separate!) art collections; a website; various finds in antiquarian bookshops; and a small new private gallery have helped me at last to appreciate the beauty of Romanian realist painting of the past century!

New names for me are Bassarab Louis/Ludovic (1866-1933) whose reputation seems to have been unfairly eclipsed by Grigorescu and Andreescu; the exquisite works of Grant Nicolae 1868-1950; Artachino Constantin (1870-1954); Strambu Hippolytus (1871-1934); Baesu Aurel (1896-1928); Leon Bijou (1880-1970); Georgescu Marian (1892-1932); and Aurel Popp 

It is Grant and Popp who intrigue me the most – for the neglect each has suffered – for very different political reasons.
Grant (as his name would suggest) was of Scottish (and high bourgeois) origin – his father was UK consul in Romania and Nicolae came of age when Romanian impressionist painting was at its height  - being part of the great generation of Artachino, Baltazar, Biju, Bunescu, Dimitrescu, Darescu, Eder, Muntzner, Pallady, Popescu, Popea, Ressu, Schweitzer-Cumpana, Steriadi, Theodresci-Scion, Tonitza, Vermont and Verona – all, amazingly, born within ten years of one another!
Nicolae Grant, however, seems to have been air-brushed out of history – his name does not appear in the key 1971 text by Dragut et al of the Meridian publisher’s Romanian Painting in 1111 pictures whose German version I was lucky enough to find this week (for 5 euros!). And, at the moment, I can find no site with which to illustrate his work - but one example is at the side here.

Aurel Popp was born in Satu Mare in 1879 and was (not unlike many painters of the time) a passionate Socialist - which landed him in deep trouble with the Hungarian authorities of the time. Not least because, in 1918, he was elected to the Budapest Soviet. For that heinous offence he was imprisoned, escaped and was hounded in post-war Transylvania. Last week I was delighted to pick up a copy of the 1968 Meridian series (German version) on his work.
And it is one of his paintings which tops this post

Romanian secrets

For several years I have been very puzzled by the apparent banality of Romanian paintings - at least those available in private galleries and most museums in Bucharest. This year I have discovered the secret – the real glories have all been hiding somewhere else. 

I got a hint of this a few weeks back when I first ventured into the newly-opened Museum of Art Collections (housing what were - until the Communists got to them - more than 20 private collections); then when I came across a massive volume which brazenly showed off one modern collector’s prizes.

On Friday after the visit to the Aman Museum, we also happened to wander by accident into a small gallery across from the Athenium (Rotenburg and Uzunov) open only 6 months apparently – which displays Romanian aesthetic gems of the early part of the last century. This painting by Marius Bunescu (1881-1971) is one of their current exhibits

And today I really struck gold when I came across a mysterious site which gives about 70 key Romanian painters and many of their paintings. Its My heart to your heart and is the best site on Romanian painting I have so far come across - although the artindex site has been very useful to me as I have slowly accumulated what is now a very fat file of 350 pages on the Romanian painters who appeal to me.

And, to complete a full August, have a look at these etchings/paintings by Vladimir Kus which are on every page of a literary journal funded by the municipality of Iasi. Iasi is well known as Romania's intellectual capital - but it is quite something for a municipality to be editing such a 100 page cultural journal in these days!! It's been produced every 2 months since 2010 and the website gives us access to every copy - past copies have included great reproductions of Georg Grosz (black and white) and Rene Magritte (colour)
I take my hat off to the editors - pity I don't understand the contents but the quality of this production really deserves greater recognition.
By the way, the old shop which sells these (and about a hundred other literary journals) is an amazing sight - with tall bundles of the papers and journals piled high all around the hapless seller. Living proof of how intellectual Romania has been. You can find it on Bvd Dacia beside the House of Romanian Writers (with an exhibition of Nichita Stanescu's poetry) which itself has a nice garden pub at its back. This takes you into a charming area of old Bucharest houses

A new and hidden gem in Bucharest - the Theodor Aman Museum

For several years we have been leaving nasty notes on the gates of the small Aman museum in Rosetti street asking when the “renovations” would ever end and the public be admitted. 
And lo – ever so quietly – the gates seem to have creaked open 3 months ago! 
Only yesterday did we venture in – and what gems were waiting!

Theodor Aman (1831-1891) was the father of Romanian painting - whose works blend Romanticism and Academicism, as well as bearing characteristics of early/Pre-Impressionism. He took drawing lessons in Craiova and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris from 1850 under the supervision of Michel Martin Drolling and François Edouard Picot. 

He returned to Romania in 1857, already established as a painter. His workshop was one of the most popular meeting places of high society. 

He established the first Fine Arts School in Bucharest (1864), where he was both the first teacher and the director. 
The museum is in that original building whose original features - not least doors and windows but also carved desk and other items of furniture - have all been lovingly restored. 

Many of the paintings are so small, they are impossible to capture on my camera.

The themes used by Theodor Aman in his works - historical painting, Oriental scenes, scenery, still nature - are all distinctly represented in the exhibition. The techniques he employed range from easel painting to engraving and drawing. Moreover, his works range from large scale painting (particularly heroic representations of the past and historical portraits) to small scale works (contemporary or daily life projects).

Entry was free - so was use of the camera (very rare!) and the generous time which the guide gave us. A real find - to return to........

The origins of the First World War - the how rather than why

Coincidentally, the historian who has written the new, detailed study of the origins of the First World War which I mentioned yesterday (Christopher Clark) has just reviewed a couple of other books on the same subject. It starts the same way as the book itself (which kept me captivated for five full days).  Its appeal lies, for me, in showing how a few players seem to have tipped the balance in the declaration of war - particularly Poincare. In the opening pages we learn of the scale and significance of French loans to Serbia in the period preceding and during the 2 Balkan wars; and, later, how Poincare buttered up the Russians and helped push them to full and final mobilisation. 

The book suggests (rightly or not I can't say) that the Balkans itself has tended to be relegated in most serious accounts of the causes of the war and his book certainly puts it back in central place. It also has an interesting section emphasising that his account is more concerned with the "how" of events, rather than the "why"......      

The debate over the origins of the First World War is older than the war itself. Even before the first shots were fired, Europe’s statesmen constructed narratives depicting themselves as innocents and their opponents as predators and breachers of the peace. Since then, the debate has spawned a historical literature of unrivalled size, sophistication and moral intensity. In 1991, a survey by the American historian John Langdon counted 25,000 relevant books and articles in English alone.
The debate is still going strong today, for several reasons. First, the war unleashed the demons of political disorder, extremism and cruelty that disfigured the 20th century. It destroyed four multiethnic empires (the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman). It killed at least ten million young men and wounded at least twenty million more. It disorganised the international system in immensely destructive ways. Without this conflict it is difficult to imagine the October Revolution of 1917, the rise of Stalinism, the ascendancy of Italian Fascism, the Nazi seizure of power or the Holocaust. It was, as the historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. It is hard to imagine a worse initial condition for the modern era of which we are the inheritors.
A second reason is the exceptionally intricate character of the crisis that brought war to Europe in 1914. The Cuban Missile Crisis was complex enough, yet it involved just two principal protagonists plus a range of proxies and subordinate players. By contrast, the story of how the First World War came about must make sense of the multilateral interactions among five autonomous players of equal importance – Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia and Britain – or six if we add Italy, plus various other strategically significant autonomous sovereign actors, such as the Ottoman Empire and the states of the Balkan peninsula, a region of high political tension and instability in the years before the outbreak of war.
To make matters worse, the executives of these states were anything but unified. There was uncertainty (and has been ever since among historians) about where exactly the power to shape policy was located within the respective governments. The chaos of competing voices is crucial to understanding the periodic agitations of the European system during the years leading up to the war. It also helps explain why the July Crisis of 1914 became the most opaque political crisis of modern times. There is virtually no viewpoint on its origins that can’t be supported by selecting among the available sources. Some accounts have focused on the culpability of one bad-apple state (Germany has been most popular, but none of the great powers has escaped the ascription of chief responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for faults in ‘the system’. There has always been enough complexity to keep the argument going.
The debate is old, but the issues it raises are still fresh. One might even say that the political crisis of July 1914 seems less remote – less illegible – now than it did thirty or forty years ago……………. What must strike any 21st-century reader who follows the course of the crisis is its raw modernity. It began with a cavalcade of automobiles and a squad of suicide bombers: the young men who gathered in Sarajevo with bombs on 28 June 1914 had been told by their handlers to take their own lives after carrying out their mission, and received phials of potassium cyanide to do it with. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge: extra-territorial, secretive, scattered in cells across political borders, its links to any sovereign government were oblique.
Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has given way to a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.
It is less clear now that we should dismiss the assassination at Sarajevo as a mishap incapable of carrying real causal weight. The attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 is an example of the way in which a single symbolic event – however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes – can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s reminded us of the potentially lethal nature of Balkan nationalism. These shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe in 1914. This doesn’t mean embracing a vulgar presentism that remakes the past to meet the needs of the present. Rather, it means acknowledging those features of the past where our changed vantage point can afford us a clearer view.
The impact of these changes can be discerned in recent writing on the origins of the war. There has been a globalisation of the field of vision. The prewar polarisation of Europe into opposed alliance blocs now looks less like a purely continental European story and more like the European consequence of world-historical realignments driven by conflicts along a range of imperial peripheries in China, Africa and Central Asia. Rather than searching for the antecedents of the actual war that broke out in 1914, recent studies have tended to stress the open-endedness of international relations in a world in which nearly all the key players had more than one potential enemy. The European alliances, it has been argued, didn’t necessarily make war more likely: they could have the opposite effect if one ally refused to back the adventurism of another, as happened on several occasions in the decade before the war. Anglo-German naval rivalry may not have predestined an armed conflict between Britain and Germany: a number of recent monographs have shown how decisively Britain saw off the German naval challenge and have questioned how much impact the matter had on British geopolitical thinking. Periods of détente before 1914 were not deceptive moments of respite from mutual hostility but represented a genuine potentiality of the international system. On the eve of the July Crisis, as a recent article by T.G. Otte has shown, the British Foreign Office was on the verge of dropping the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and seeking a rapprochement with Germany. Far from being inevitable, in other words, this war may actually have been improbable. On this reading, it was not the consequence of long-run historical ‘forces’, but of short-term realignments and shocks to the international system.

The Financial Times has another excellent review of some books on the causes of the First World War - as does the excellent Dublin Review of Books

The painting is a Popescu - but a Constantin Isache (1888-1967) not Stefan (1872-1948)