On not getting under the skin

I find it odd that so few writers or academics seem to have asked the question which has been bothering me this last year – how does one get to know a country or get under its skin

I have fairly wide interests, skim the book reviews, follow the serendipidous leads while surfing the net – so might reasonably be regarded as well-read and not boxed in by over-specialisation. I am therefore reasonably confident when I say that I have not heard many people raising this question.

I can’t be the lack of writers with experience of living in several countries - look at the scale in the 1920s and 1930s of migration of the most talented Russian, central European and German writers – whether to other European countries or North America. If ever there was a period when you could expect interest in exploring the multiple dimensions of a nation’s soul, that was surely it. But how many real studies of this sort have been attempted? Of the depth, for example, of de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”?. And remember, of course, that that book was the result of a visit of only some 9 months – not the work of an émigré.

Writers like Joseph Roth, Arthur Koestler and Czeslaw Milosz had intensive experience of various countries in their adult life but I don’t know of any works from them which deal with this question.

Perhaps it requires a butterfly mind like mine to be interested…..in exploring, for example, the 16 or 17 different ways there seem to be of “getting to know a country”. Perhaps indeed only outsiders (such as ex-pats) who don’t get sucked into the life of a country have and retain the distance which is perhaps needed for the search? Recent times have seen the development of a large cadre of travel writers - but how many of them can seriously be said to have tried to get under the skin of a country?

And, of course, we often remark on the difficulty of knowing even our most intimate of friends – so how is it possible to do justice to the complexity of a country – with its variety of regions, classes, generations?

Clearly some have tried. – for example Germany; unravelling an enigma which is one of the Interact Series of books from Barnes and Noble devoted to cultural analysis.

But while I find the book interesting for its take on cultural patterns (eg communications) and how they underpin post-war German commercial practices, in no real sense does the book try to understand Germany and its cultural features. 

I thought Dinner with Persephone; travels in Greece by poet Patricia Storace was quite brilliant in capturing Greek mores and thought processes but – and here’s the rub – who am I to judge the veracity of the portrayal? If there are few who can do justice to a country, there are even fewer who can assess fairly how well it has been done. 

I have just received a copy of Jose Saramagos 1979 Journey to Portugal which, as you would expect from a Nobel [prize-winner, seem beautifully written. But it appears that most of the book focuses on churches! 

I am left with Theodor Zeldin's The French as the only book I can immediately think of which gets seriously under the skin of a nation.....

I will continue this search...... 

Maps as metaphors

Almost a decade ago I was asked, amongst other things, to design a Road Map for the development of municipalities in Kyrgyzstan. It was probably my best work (apart from getting a new Civil Service Agency off the ground in Azerbaijan – but that’s another story!).

The story of the Roadmap – and the lessons I learned is told here but the key part showed the usefulness of taking the metaphor embodied in the word apart -

 We did not initially understand the significance of the concept of a “Roadmap”– and it is one also which our beneficiaries also had some initial problems with. But, as I put it in the introduction to the readers of the document, “A road map does not suggest a route – YOU choose the route. A roadmap simply locates the key features (mountains, rivers and swamps) you need to be aware of when trying to travel from the A to the B of your choice. So this is not an attempt to force foreign models on the local situation. Another point about a road map is that it cannot cover every changing detail nor tell you how you should approach certain situations – sometimes a large bump in the road or impatience can have fatal consequences. So a road map is only a guide - local knowledge, judgment and skills are needed to get you to your destination! And, like a map, you don’t have to read it all – only the sections which are relevant for your journey!”

I actually developed a game during one Conference for the municipalities – putting up on the walls (a) the various elements critical to driving a car successfully from point A to B – the various parts of a car (engine; wheels; fuel, driving wheel; driver etc); the road network (structure and maintenance); licensing and control (eg police); garage network etc - then (b) listed the key actors in the municipal system (mayors, citizens, tax, Ministries, President, Parliament. Laws etc - and then invited the participants to link an actor with one of the road system’s elements (eg laws =wheels?)

What I was trying to do was to use the power of metaphor to get them to think creatively. It was fun anyway…..The results are at the end of this paper 

It’s the same with this question of exploring a country – I said there were at least 16 different ways of getting to know a country, depending on which sense you used. 
And also, I’ve realized, depending on what sort of map you use! 

Recently I bought two maps of this area for my daughter’s use – one the “panorama” of southern Transylvania which heads the recent post about Roadmaps; the other map is a walker’s map of the smaller are around our village which takes in the superb Piatra Craiului mountain range just behind the house.

What bit of the country we see depends on which map we choose……

Desperado

I have been reading “The Long Shadows” (1997) which is almost a book within several books as it alternates between three if not four narratives – that of the English biographer of a writer whose last work was a novel about a young Romanian woman who visits England in the 1980s. Her character is clearly that of the young translator who was assigned to the writer when he visited Romania in the 1980s on a British Council scheme. A good atmosphere of the place and period is established.

After completing I googled author Alan Brownjohn’s name since this is the first thing I have read of his  - and discover that the most substantial material on him has been written – at book length - by ……….a Romanian Professor of English whose elegant, downloadable and highly readable book has the marvelous title - Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age. Her commentary on The Long Shadows is at pp67-88

And the book is only part of a much wider “British Desperado” project which has yielded two other titles from the Contemporary Literature Press of the University of Bucharest - first The Desperado Age – British literature at the start of the new millenium - another downloadable book (with more than 300 pages) which explains her term “desperado”, locates it in the literary constellation and then assesses the work of 15 writers

and then, the third title, Desperado Interviews is 400 pages long and consists of interviews with about 50 writers from different countries. Highly appropriate given the focus of the previous post!!

A real treasure trove of reading! Just the thing as the carpathian mist continues to envelope the house.......

Good questions.

Good questions get brownie points. from me....I always appreciate good questions.....they are a spur to creative thinking....they take us out of the groove.....In fact I got into the habit latterly, when taking classes of central Asian civil servants, of starting each session by inviting the participants to pose questions about the subject of the "lecture" to which I then responded ex tempore. I then wrote the lecture up afterwards in the light of what followed....I learned a lot!!!

This post starts with the questions an Englishwoman called Lynn Barber has apparently been asking of famous people in British newspapers for more than thirty years - and then moves on to compare with other good interviewers I've noted in my life. The best, for me, has to be the psychiatrist Anthony Clare whose famous interviews of the 80s and 90s on BBC are, I have just discovered, now being rerun

“What do you spend your money on? Do you like buying stuff for others, or yourself? Do you resent paying income tax? What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a dress?

Who were you closest to as a child? 
How often do you phone your mum? 
What would you normally be doing at this moment, if you weren’t doing this? 
What do you do on your own in a hotel room? Why?”

Questions like this are what Lynn Barber uses to open up her celebrity interviews, and I think you can see why. They’re simple, direct, upfront and conversational, but also come at you from an angle. The article which drew my attention is a review of the book Barber has written but is unfortunately behind behind a pay-wall at the London Review of Books

Her questions are inquisitive and extrovert, bold and clever. The ensuing write-ups are stylish and often surprising, gossipy on the surface, precise and controlled underneath. Precise, controlled, and of course ‘unsparing’ – her own word:
‘If anyone else tells me what a lovely lad Rafa Nadal is I shall scream.’
‘Don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating Hilary Mantel.’ ‘I don’t want to give a cool appraisal of Jeremy Irons … I just want to boil him in oil.’
Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket billiards’ through his tracksuit bottoms.
Rafael Nadal in Rome in 2011, ‘lying on a massage table with his flies undone, affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many sponsors, natch.’

If this is what good interviewing is now about, beam me up Scottie! I want the 70s back – give me Oriana Fallaci any day. Chris Hitchens bade Fallaci a fond and eloquent farewell in 2006

With Oriana Fallaci's demise at 77 from a host of cancers, in September, in her beloved Florence, there also died something of the art of the interview. Her absolutely heroic period was that of the 1970s, probably the last chance we had of staving off the complete triumph of celebrity culture. Throughout that decade, she scoured the globe, badgering the famous and the powerful and the self-important until they agreed to talk with her, and then reducing them to human scale. Facing Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, she bluntly asked him, "Do you know you are so unloved and unliked?" And she didn't spare figures who enjoyed more general approval, either.

As a warm-up with Lech Walesa, she put Poland's leading anti-Communist at his ease by inquiring, "Has anyone ever told you that you resemble Stalin? I mean physically. Yes, same nose, same profile, same features, same moustache. And same height, I believe, same size."

People began to sneer and gossip, saying that Oriana was just a confrontational bitch who used her femininity to get results, and who goaded men into saying incriminating things. I remember having it whispered to me that she would leave the transcript of the answers untouched but rephrase her original questions so that they seemed more penetrating than they had really been. As it happens, I found an opportunity to check that last rumour. During her interview with President Makarios, of Cyprus, who was also a Greek Orthodox patriarch, she had asked him straight-out if he was over-fond of women, and more or less got him to admit that his silence in response to her direct questioning was a confession. 

Many Greek Cypriots of my acquaintance were scandalized, and quite certain that their beloved leader would never have spoken that way. I knew the old boy slightly, and took the chance to ask him if he had read the relevant chapter. "Oh yes," he said, with perfect gravity. "It is just as I remember it."

Occasionally, Oriana's interviews actually influenced history, or at the least the pace and rhythm of events. Interviewing Pakistan's leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto just after the war with India over Bangladesh, she induced him to say what he really thought of his opposite number in India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi ("a diligent drudge of a schoolgirl, a woman devoid of initiative and imagination.… She should have half her father's talent!"). Demanding a full copy of the text, Mrs. Gandhi thereupon declined to attend the proposed signing of a peace agreement with Pakistan.
Bhutto had to pursue Oriana, through a diplomatic envoy, all the way to Addis Ababa, to which she had journeyed to interview Emperor Haile Selassie. Bhutto's ambassador begged her to disown the Gandhi parts, and hysterically claimed that the lives of 600 million people were at stake if she did not. One of the hardest things to resist, for reporters and journalists, is the appeal to the world-shaking importance of their work and the need for them to be "responsible." Oriana declined to oblige, and Mr. Bhutto duly had to eat his plate of crow. Future "access" to the powerful meant absolutely nothing to her: she acted as if she had one chance to make the record and so did they.

Perhaps only one Western journalist ever managed to interview Ayatollah Khomeini twice. And from those long discussions we learned an enormous amount about the nature of the adamant theocracy that he was bent upon instituting. The second session was an achievement in itself, since Oriana had terminated the first one by wrenching off the all-enveloping chador she had been compelled to wear and calling it a "stupid, medieval rag."

She told me that after this moment of drama she had been taken aside by Khomeini's son, who confided in her that it had been the only time in his life that he had seen his father laugh. 

Do you really remember any recent interview with a major politician? Usually, the only thing that stands out in the mind is some stupid gaffe or piece of rambling incoherence. And if you go and check the original, it generally turns out that this was prompted by a dull or rambling question. Try reading the next transcript of a presidential "news conference," and see which makes you whimper more: the chief executive's train-wreck syntax or the lame and contrived promptings from the press.
 Oriana's questions were tautly phrased and persistent. She researched her subjects minutely before going to see them, and each one of her published transcripts was preceded by an essay of several pages in length concerning the politics and the mentality of the interviewee. She proceeded, as Jeeves used to phrase it, from an appreciation of "the psychology of the individual."

Thus, a provocative or impudent question from her would not be a vulgar attempt to shock but a well-timed challenge, usually after a lot of listening, and often taking the form of a statement. (To Yasser Arafat: "Conclusion: you don't at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.") The commonest and easiest way of explaining the decay of interviewing is to attribute it to the short-term and showbiz values of TV. But there's no innate reason why this should be true.

At the dawn of the television age, John Freeman—a former cabinet minister and diplomat, and editor of the New Statesman—established an inquisitorial style probably borrowed in part from Ed Murrow, and provided astonishing glimpses of hitherto reclusive public figures like Evelyn Waugh.

Television allows points to be pressed and repeated: the BBC's Jeremy Paxman once put the same question a dozen times to a Tory politician who was being evasive. It also brought us the huge advantage of the close-up, which did immense damage to shifty types like Richard Nixon.

Roadmaps

These weeks I should have been working on my “Scottish home thoughts from abroad” – clearing my mind, with the help of the dozen or so new books I’ve acquired, on the Scottish independence issue.

But, as usual, I have been distracted - this time by the work I have been doing on my little Romanian Guide/anthology  - sparked off by the pending visit of one of my daughters and building on the series of ten or so posts I did at the turn of the year..

I’ve reached the final haul – my compendium stretches now to 125 pages and about 400 hyperlinks. It’s been quite an intensive effort and I’m now trying to draw my thoughts together for the final, summary section.

I have tried to act as a modest guide – identifying what’s available and giving hyperlinks to other people’s text (in some cases entire books), images and music.

Even if I say so myself, I don’t know of any other such effort – in the depth and breadth of the references and pointers given. I’ve found a lot of misuse of the concept of a “Roadmap” in political circles in the past couple of decades but I think I can say that this is the best “Roadmap of Romania” I’ve seen!!

Even if I wanted to, I could not really sum this country up. I have known it for 23 years; it has become my home-base – at least, in the past five years, for half of the time.

When you read the older material which can be accessed – text and photographs – you do get a profound sense of the richness of Romanian society between 1880 and 1940 – rich in both possessions and characters. The architecture gives a clear sense of it – grand in the cities and individualistic if not eccentric in the towns and villages. 

Romania has lost a lot since – so many of its writers lost to either persecution or migration; so many of the more recent younger generation seeking their professional rewards abroad….

Despite the almost American nature of the spirit which is evident in the Bucharest streets, on commercial television and in the fixation with flashy cars and speed, the past is still clearly evident – in both good and bad forms.

All countries which were in the area of Soviet influence experienced suffered deprivations and repression – in one degree or another. It would be a bit invidious to encourage a league table of suffering although Ceaucescu’s invasion of women’s intimacy and the scale of (illegal) abortions that led to must rank as one of the worst measures in post-war Europe – along with the digging of the Danube canal and wanton destruction of villages in the 1980s.

Equally, however, more of us who were lucky enough not to experience the post-war communist repression should have the honesty to recognize the undoubted improvements to social life which such regimes generally brought to the life of peasants and workers and, in particular, their children - the parents of the present generation.

I have learned a lot about the richness of Romanian culture in the few weeks I have been drafting what was originally about 10 pages of blogposts. 
In a future post I will give some recommendations for best “freebie” reads and other goodies.

The map which heads the post is a marvellous panorama  of Southern Transylvania issued by a German company - it superbly shows my range from the northern angle. Most original!
I'm up in the  verytop left

A window to Romania's past

I’m at the fine-tuning stage of the guide – giving me the freedom to surf some of the links I had added to the text which lead to others I had not had the chance to explore. For example some of the book references in a discussion thread about Romanian literature .

But it was the back issues of the francophone bimonthly Regard which led me via an interview to what seems (probably wrongly) to be a typically surreal bit of recent writing by a young historian Choosing your Ancestors - an imaginary genealogical journey to Romanian Boyars.(2013) If you scroll further down the link(and have automatic translate) you will see that the launch (last August) was kicked off by Romania’s two greatest historians - Lucian Boia (whose family name google automatic magnificently and variously translates as “pulveriser” or “paprika”!) and Neagu Djuvara

It was author Filip Lucian-Iorga’s well-connected website which led to me the tremendous photo archives Costica Acsinte Archive celebrating the work of a man born in 1897 who was a war photographer in the First World War and then set up shop in the town of Slobozia about 70 kms east of Bucharest.

The site is a unique record of life in those times – and encourages readers to write stories around particular photos!!

Mutuality

Amazing how silent it is when the mist is shrouding the valley….neither birds, cars, planes nor cicadas make any noise in this damp, dreich weather. Even the dog barks are faint!

My neighbour’s new pig is ailing – so had the vet on Saturday. His 2 new lambs are already attached to him and squawk at the gate for attention.

Maritsa has once again to go to hospital on Wednesday – a 100 km round trip – for some more checks. She has not been sleeping or eating well this past couple of years. She will be 81 in a month. Viciu is hale and hearty  and will be 88 on 22 June.

Apart from Daniela - and Vlad in Bucharest’s English bookshop -  they are my only link with Romania. Little wonder that some people wonder why I am here…..Not easy to explain what meaning a special house and special valley can give a life!

Here I am totally myself – devoting almost every minute to contemplation. 

I don’t want to sound religious  - but the books, music  and views do invite deep thought - and the scribbles which, for me, go with that. 

I generally walk into my neighbours’ uninvited and sometimes catch them reading the bible….. Earlier today my old next-door neighbor came with a couple of eggs for me – in return I give her coffee and the mobile to talk to Daniela with.  She then selects whatever delicacies appeal to her – today it was a couple of kiwis. But I had a surprise package of small ocean fish for her – which is her favourite.

Of such is mutuality made

Fantasy

If I were asked about an unfulfilled dream – it would probably be a radio station on which I could play my choice of music (a specific blend of mid-East and classic); read from texts which have caught my eye; pay tribute to those who in different ways have inspired me; have conversations…. A much more modest version of Clive James’ famous site

Only trouble is that I would have to erect a radio mast – my Vodafone internet stick hardly allows me enough capacity for routine uploading and downloading….

I loved the measured tones in which Alistair Cooke delivered his Letter from America (I always used to scurry to the radio when I heard his piece begin); the maverick selections of John Peel's midnight jazz; and the global reach and elegance of BBC From Our Own Correspondents… 

A radio station, of course, does not allow images – perhaps just as well given how we are swamped by visuals in our everyday lives….But it means that I couldn’t really share my love of Bulgarian paintings or the caricatures I’m so fond of

For the past 24 hours the house has been fog-bound – remember I’m 1,400 metres up! And it’s only 4 degrees out on the verandah!

It’s been a dreich May and I’ve just been consulting the local records – they seem to confirm my feeling with temperature yesterday being just half that of 31 May 2011. But then I look at rainfall and am amazed at what I see. Contrary to what I had imagined, the wettest month for this part of the Carpathian mountains is apparently……July! ( 68mm); then June with 54; May and October tie for 3^rd wettest (43). The driest months are actually November and February (13) and January (17)!!