literary detective

White frost on the grass and the study feels particularly cold after the heat of the marvellous stove in the bedroom. The bricks retain their heat for more than a day. Today I have to get new windows in the study here organised. The originals are still in – and one gets a bit drafty at this time of year. My old neighbour Viciu has cut me the new windows and frame – and I now have to persuade a local to fit the glass and find the appropriate hinges before they are fitted.
The Chinese detective book Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong is a really excellent read – a highly intelligent mix of narrative, of description of life in 1990 Shanghai with the new market system coexisting uneasily with the privileges of the communist elite – and of Chinese literary and cooking insights
The author has been an American academic for the past 15 years or so and this is one a series about Inspector Chen which knocks the Stieg Larsson Millennium series into a cocked hat. An excellent review - with excerpts - here

Village life

A lazy Sundayin the Bucharest flat – demonstrating the dangers of television. The saving grace was another sight of the amazing (Danish) Babette’s Feast with my favourite actress Stephane Audran in the unusual role of a destitute French émigrée in a remote Danish village at the beginning of the 20th century who served an old couple for years, won a small amount on the French Lottery and used it all to cook an incredible meal for the villagers.
I left the flat this morning while it was not still light – and enjoyed the start of a brilliant October day as I drove into the mountains. My reward was 20 books – for once an equal number of novels - and a large number of DVDs waiting for me in 5 Amazon packets. Difficult to know where to begin – but a Chinese detective book won the day (with Geert Mak’s An Island in Time also enticing). It's apparently the story of the author's Dutch village - to which he returned to chart its recent decline. So many Romanian villages like mine are also dying...

snow and gutters

For the first time in ten years snow prevented me yesterday from getting to the mountain house. My misfortune was to go into the mountains just as the weather was changing – and before the snowplows had a chance to get working. I was astonished to find the rain turn into flakes of snow as I hit Sinaia – the first resort from the plain (where the royal family had a great castle). As I turned off the main road at Predeal (some15 kilomtres short of Brasov) to take the serpentine road own to Rasnov, the police warned me that I needed winter wheeltracks – but I did not expect the conditions to deteriorate so quickly on the short incline! Discretion got the better part of valour – and I scuttled back to the comfort of the Bucharest flat. I couldn’t face the anonymity of a gueshouse in Brasov or Rasnov!
For the moment I have no thoughts to offer – just some visuals of older Romanian gutter ornaments
and the scenery around my old haunts on the River Clyde
The painting is a Dobre Dobrev one. Seems I have a (small) new project in Bulgaria - which pleases me very much!

Romanian art and the financial crisis

Bucharest is not conducive to thinking and blogging. Too many distractions (TV, Museums and bookshops) and too little space in the flat. Wednesday we visited the National Gallery – for about the third time – and it did this time open my eyes. Not only to the Grigorescu paintings which I had previously overlooked – but also other 19th century artists such as Theodor Aman and Ion Andreescu. Josef Iser and Sam Muetzner are also intersting examples of mid 20th century painters.
Another reason for my recent blog silence is that I have been trying to understand the latest financial catastrophe which has overtaken our economic system – realising that Marxism had much more offer to offer than I had thought. Let me qualify that – I always realised that Marxist analysis was superior to any other but could not go along with the simplistic prescriptions associated with that. Karl Popper was the guy who put me on the pluralist path. In the last few weeks I have rattled through David Harvey’s Enigma of Capitaland Robert Peston’s Who Runs Britain?Each complements the other. The first book supplies the long-term and more abtract perspective. Surplus capital always requires innovation to restore profits – whether from immigration, privatisation, out-sourcing etc. And Peston – as the BBC financial correspondent – shows us how it all works in practice (eg the story of Marks and Spencers)
And am looking forward to Arrighi’s theoretical tour de force Adam Smith in Beijing when I return shortly to cold Sirnea.
Yesterday I came across a very useful publication about the Future of bankingwhich offers an overdue consumer's view of the crisis and what should be done. Finally an article which exposes the corruption of the economics profession in the USA
The painting is a Grigorescu.

recent literary greats

Still in Bucharest – but an American article bemoaning the “fodder” (as the author put it) which the “urban middle class proletariat” there has been fed with over the past 20 years
encouraged me to review my list of literary greats drawn up in March.
I had noticed then that European writers constituted about half of the list and, on review today, I could add only Amos Oz and Andrew Greig from my recent reading – as well as the catalogue of travelogues. North American writers were represented by only Carol Shields (Canada) and Richard Yates (Saul Bellow should certainly be on the list but I would still resist John Updike). Some of the respondents failed to spot that the author was in fact focussing on the poverty of modern USA writing and suggested, sensibly, that he would be better off with a less parochial reading list which would include Latin American, European, Chinese and middle eastern literature. Their recommendations referred me to writers such as WG Sebald, John Banville and Qiu Xiaolong whose books I have not so far read – and which I have now ordered from Amazon.
On more critical matters, two articles about the difficult scenarios we now face – on such basic respources as waterand food

Visibility and the art market

My first days in Romania were in the dark days (or rather nights – the lighting was appalling) of 1991. When I had a proper base (mid 1990s) I would buy the odd painting for decoration but was hardly a serious connaisseur let alone collector. Paintings only made an impact on me in May 2008 when I stumbled into the Phillippopolis Gallery in Plovdiv on the central plains of Bulgaria. I was bowled over and emerged, after my first visit, with 1940s seascapes by 2 renowned Bulgarian painters (Mario Zhekov and Alexandra Mechkuevska) neither of whom I had ever heard and with rustic scenes by 2 younger unknown painters. A later visit netted another famous seascape artist of the 1940s Alexander Moutafov – this time a river scene. Since then I have become friendly with the owners of several Sofia galleries and have almost 50 Bulgarian paintings – and still collecting. By the standards of the Bulgarian realist school, the Romanian paintings I could see here simply did not compare. And the small galleries in Bucharest are managed in a very different way from Bulgaria. There is little feel here of the passion and interest there – except that of money. And that goes for both the low and high end of the market. The low end clusters around the Matache market not far from the Gara de Nord – and are in fact antique shops with few paintings. Most are dark and primitive. I have not ventured into many of the up-market galleries – since they smack so much of bijou investments and big money. But a visit yesterday to the preliminary viewings for a major auction tomorrow (in the Opera House) by Artmark altered one of my attitudes and confirmed another. I realised first that Romanian painting of the first part of the 20th century (my favourite period) was in fact much better than I had thought – the catalogue which you can download will show you what I mean. It’s simply that it’s rarely on public display - whereas the numerous private galleries in Sofia and the municipal galleries throughout Bulgaria have lots of such work to see. There can be only 2 reasons for their invisibilty in Romania – either that state museums are hoarding them or they have been bought up by individuals and private companies. And my suspicion that art has become a commodity in Romania but not yet in Bulgaria was confirmed first by the prices expected at tomorrow’s auction – 150,000 euros minimum for a painting by Romania's most famous paineter - Grigurescu (In Bulgaria the country's favourites go for a maximum of 15,000 euros). One of Artmark’s Directors actually produced a book we could purchase which plotted the annual price changes of the Romanian imptressionist and post-impressionist painters on auction – and told us that the Raiffesen Bank had a special loan scheme for investing in paintings! He alos told us he expected 1,000 at Thursday's auction - whereas the Viktoria Gallery auctions in the Sheraton never attract more than 100.
All of this says a lot about the two societies.....Viktoria are actually auctioning tomorrow - and at Varna 4 hours' drive away - but it clashes with the Artmark one which is worth visiting as a bit of social observation.

Life again

The British Labour party has a new Leader again – after a 4 month campaign. I found it hard to work up any real enthusiasm for the candidates since all 4 males seemed to have had the same sort of ambitious, tribal, fast-track careers with no experience of real life before they became the Ministers they had all recently been. Andrew Rawnsley always hoovers up the details of political life – and today’s piece and the public comments which follow are a good summary of the challenge which Ed Miliband now faces.
The article looked back at lessons from others who faced such challenges eg Margaret Thatcher when she seemd to face electoral oblivion in 1983 – a commentator put the matter starkly

If this is 1983 again There will be no Faulklands this time to pull you out of the shit; No north sea oil; no public utilities to sell; no miners to blame; no SDP (you already have them); No council houses left to sell.

The Foley and Jones books I mentioned yesterday are both clever musings about the complexities and contradictions of life – and what people can do to make life bearable if not happy. Foley is a bit academic, amusing if not downright cynical; Jones warmer, more open to the experiences and thoughts of ordinary people while still calling to aid famous writers of the past. Neither, however, looks at the wider happiness industry which has been with us for the past hundred years or so – although Foley does have a good dig at the self-esteem bit of it. One of the books which await me on my shelves is one which apparently savages the positive thinking approach which has become so fashionable in America - Smile or Die.
Ealier this year I decided to see whether the new offerings of positive psychologists had any useful insights and bought Martin Seligman’s hyped Authentic Happinessand Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind.
Perhaps I wasn’t in the mood or just tried to read too quickly but I didn’t find either all that novel or convincing. Like most people, I am interested in these issues – although I find the historical and comparative approach the more acceptable eg the useful summary 50 Self-Help Classics or, much more critically, The Happiness Myth – why what we think is right is wrong by Jennifer Hecht.

But I have to confess that I still find the John Cleese and Robin SkynnerLife - and how to survive it published in 1994 the most useful. A therapist and leading British comic (!) have a Socratic dialogue about the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
• valuing and respecting others
• ability to communicate
• willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
• capacity to face reality squarely
• flexibility and willingness to change
• belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.
On the anniversary of my mother's birthday, I have attached a rare picture of my mum, sister and me - in 1948 or so!!!

depression and massacres

The glorious weather has broken – and mist is swirling around the hills. So my thick soup for breakfast. Yesterday the reading was a bit harrowing – picking up Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it hard to be happy from where I had left him (a week or so ago) bemoaning the misery which seems to the lot of a lot of Brits, moving on to Utopian Dreams whose author, Tobia Jones, takes the same starting point but then spends some time in some special communities in Italy and England to see if they have any answers to our existential Angst. I finish the day learning for the first time about the events from 1914 which left more than half of Smyrna (Izmir) on the Aegean coast being burned to the ground in September 1922 and unknown thousands of Greeks and Armenians slaughtered either on site or in later forced marches. I knew of the Armenian massacres during the First World War – and of the massive exchange of Greek and Turkish populations which took place after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire but nothing of this particular tragedy brought on by a combination of Lloyd George’s misjudgement and Greek political ambition.
In summer 2002 we saw several of the abandoned Greek villages as we drove around the Aegean and I have on my shelf here a terra cotta vase from the area where, I now learn, at least half a million people were trapped by flames, the sea and Turkish soldiers ninety years earlier. Strange how we are allowed to forget! One of the powerful aspects of the story is how a few individuals could make a difference – on the positive side a Turk,Rahmi Bey Governor of Smyrna from 1914 who protected the majority Christian population from the violence which was occurring elsewhere essentially by ignoring all orders which came from Constantinople. But he was eventually sacked in 1918 by the post-war Turkish government, wrongly imprisoned by the Brits in Malta with other members of the previous government and eventually released to spend his last days in Casablanca. When the Greeks were stupidly allowed (by Llloyd George) into Smyrna, several hundred innocent Turkish citizens were slaughtered by Greek soldiers – but their ringleaders were punished by the new Greek Governor, Aristeidis Stergiadis, who then set out to rule fairly for the various communities. The third person to demonstrate immense courage and convision and show what an individual can achieve when the world is collapsing was an American, Asa Jennings who set out single-handedly (and with no authority) to arrange the rescue of thousands of the trapped – mainly by bullying of 40 Greek captains whose empty ships were sitting useless at a nearby island while people burned.

In Utopian Dreams Jones undertakes a series of sojourns inside ‘modern, self contained communities’ in order to ‘cross-examine the values by which we, in the so-called “real world”, live’. Jones’s pilgrimage is a journey of existential exploration, a genuine attempt to discover a way of life that will answer a personal desire for something better – a desire sparked by a sense of dissatisfaction with several (apparently disparate but actually linked) aspects of contemporary life in the ‘real world’. Jones outlines the problem with modern life, explores a series of proposed solutions lived out in community and, to his evident surprise, discovers one such solution that he can embrace for himself.

More than half of my friends or relatives have been on anti-depressants. Me too. Many still have blips and have on-off relationships with their therapists years after the initial darkness descended . . . Everyone seems caught up in a vortex of debonair desperation. We’re all yearning for perfect relationships at the same time as insisting that rootedness and belonging are alien to our vaunted autonomy.

Jones diagnoses ‘the real world’ as suffering symptoms caused by a philosophical disease, a linked combination of ideas that underpin contemporary western culture but which have disastrous consequences. Principle among these disastrous ideas, for Jones, is the idea that freedom of choice is an unqualified and absolute good:

We’re miserable despite enjoying a freedom which is unprecedented in human history . . . it’s deeply unfashionable to offend those twin objects of modern desire, choice and rights. But they have become millstones around our neck, hindering our ability to raise our voices to other virtues. I want to get back on the road not to contradict rights and choice, but to find the complementary virtues they require to remain themselves virtuous.

Foley’s book balances the profound and the profane. Drawing on philosophy, religion, history, psychology and neuroscience, he explores the things that modern culture is either rejecting or driving us away from:

Responsibility – we are entitled to succeed and be happy, so someone/thing else must be to blame when we are not
• Difficulty – we believe we deserve an easy life, and worship the effortless and anything that avoids struggle (as Foley points out, this extends even to eating oranges: sales are falling as peeling them is now seen as too demanding and just so, you know, yesterday …)
• Understanding – a related point, as understanding requires effort, but where we once expected decision-making to involve rationality, we moved through emotion to intuition (usually reliable) and – more worryingly – impulse (usually unreliable), a tendency that Foley sees as explaining the appeal of fundamentalism (“which sheds the burden of freedom and eliminates the struggle to establish truth and meaning and all the anxiety of doubt. There is no solution as satisfactory and reassuring as God.”)
• Detachment – we benefit from concentration, autonomy and privacy, but life demands immersion, distraction, collaboration and company; by confusing self-esteem (essentially external and concerned with our image to others) with self-respect (essentially internal and concerned with our self-image), we further fuel our sense of entitlement – and our depression, frustration and rage when we don’t get what we ‘deserve’
• Experience – captivated by the heightened colour, speed, and drama of an edited on-screen life, our attention span is falling and ‘attention’ (at least in the West) is something we pay passively rather than actively and mindfully