David Bowie's "Must-Read" list

Most of us resist the idea of our own mortality but, come the sudden passing of younger people who had some significance in our lives, we develop an almost morbid fascination with the prospect……

We expect 98-year olds like Denis Healey, Helmut Schmidt and Albert Hirschman to pass away but the sudden deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman bring a powerful wake-up call to people of my age

I was, as it happens, in the middle of a large biography of Hirschman - Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (the link gives an excellent overview of both the man and the book) - who died 3 years ago and was one of the greatest exponents of the nature and importance of challenging the “conventional thinking” and of “intellectual trespassing”…This has inspired me to devote a post to him…,,

But bear with me for a day or so while I collect and edit the numerous other goodies which cyberspace offers about the various sides to his life which I think his biographer has caught well with the term “odyssey”.

In the meantime, Daniela and I were intrigued by the list of David Bowie’s 100 “Must-Read” books which is part of a current exhibition in Ontario. Daniela is Romanian and had access in the 70s and 80s to the Romanian translations of not only Western classics but contemporary American and European texts which (despite the repression) were available after Ceaucescu struck his maverick stance in the Eastern bloc (most Romanians are proud of their country’s refusal to join the 1968 repression of Czechoslovak liberties).

But she recognized only a few of the titles in Bowie’s list – and has raised the interesting question of the “East-West gap” in mutual understanding of one another’s literature (and cultures generally).

My Balkans residency of the past decade has made me more sensitive to the wonder that was 20^th century Central European literature (my five page recommended reading list for Romania can be accessed at section 4 of Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey – although I cheated by including some English novels with a Romanian theme!).

The reading public, it seems, are developing a new interest in translations of older writers such as Joseph Roth and Hans Fallada who, however well-known in their home country, made little or no impact in English-speaking countries. The New York Review of Books classic series started a few years back to repair this fault – and there are also some great titles of mid-century central european books at small publishers such as the Pushkin Press.

Most of the works offer much more powerful writing than that from contemporary writers of the English-speaking world – however hyped the latter is. So there is every incentive to start using these catalogues.

Five years ago, the Guardian actually ran a fascinating series on world literature, inviting readers to suggest books eg this was its Polish invitation and this a nice tabular presentation of the final results. Chinese and then Russian literature were also presented in the same way -

No fewer than 200 books get close analysis in these results of a reader’s survey about French literature – and more than 150 in this survey of German literature. Almost 100 novels get the treatment in this table about Indonesia

Indian literature is analysed here – and Columbia rounds up the survey with this table

Other countries were covered but without the tabulated results s but, with this link, you can hunt down the ones of interest...... 

But a few hundred responses don’t suggest English readers’ familiarity with foreign – let alone “Eastern” - literature. And of course most of this material covers novels – whereas Bowie’s list is more general. It also makes me realize that there at least three types of lists of what we might call “significant reads” 

- Those we once liked - which made an early personal impact eg early seminal reading – some examples of mine were captured in this 2009 post
- Those which matter - which made an impact on our collective social understanding (many of which we may not actually have read personally - let alone liked. (here's a short list I made for for the period from the 1970s)

- Those we like now - which might be recommended or bought for family and friends. I have apparently done one list of favourite book – but it was some time ago (December 2010)

Interestingly, central Europeans dominate that second list (although, thanks to Hitler, many of then wrote their most famous work in American English). And that's where perhaps a major shift has taken place.....in the 1930s European intellectual and literary writing was at the heart of the world's thinking - now it's at the periphery..... 

Five years on - and while the snow lies thick on the ground, it will be interesting to do an update of the last list

British Exit? Sleepwalking again???

The Introduction to my book In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year reviews its 130 plus posts and suggests that the” Elephant in the Room” (ie the big issue which failed to be mentioned in my late posts of 2014 or those of 2015) was……..Brexit - ie  the possibility of British exit from the European Union and the knock-on effects on Europe……

My blog may have a clear policy of ignoring the chatter which passes for political commentary but I do not avoid big issues eg the nature of contemporary capitalism; the health of our democratic institutions; or the swings of public opinion…I did, after all, devote a lot of posts last year to the question of Scotland leaving the “united kingdom”. 
My failure to devote even a single post to what is the increasing possibility of British withdrawal from the EU was not a deliberate decision; rather a reflection of the absence of any SERIOUS discussion in British journals or publications about the issue….

As long as the referendum which the British PM had promised on the question of continued British membership of the European Union seemed to be in 2017 - and we were sitting in 2014 (when a Scottish breakaway was the threat) or 2015 (when so many other issues jostled for our attention), 2017 seemed so far away.

But here we are in 2016 and there is suddenly talk that the government might put the issue to a vote in the summer of this year!! And I don’t see any serious discussion of what’s involved. Or rather, I see a lot of press coverage of the Prime Minister’s tactical discussions with European partners as he attempts to negotiate a new package which would satisfy the majority of his party (and citizens) - who profess increased distaste for the European project (see this European Council for Foreign Relations briefing for graphs on how the support for Europe has trended in recent years).

But I am aware of very little which would be of any help to the citizen who actually wants a reasoned assessment of what withdrawal would actually mean – in economic or political terms. A couple of Labour MPs have written about it – Pat McFadden in a pamphlet What would Out look like? and Dennis McShane in a book Brexit – how Britain will leave Europe whose argument is rather sullied by his recent conviction for over-zealous expenses claims….

The European Union is its own worst enemy. Reform of such a sclerotic system of policies, institutions and above all power does indeed seem to be almost impossible. Behind the rigid institutions and policies lies the apparently invincible power of the permanent technocrats with their inflated salaries and protected status (I know because for almost a year I worked there!!)

And yet the idea of the UK’s withdrawal fills me with deep unease. 
I’ll try to explain why in future posts – while still trying to retain the respect i always try to grant the specific arguments I encounter…..

Women in Romania

Yesterday’s visit to the “Equal - Art and Feminism” gave us access to some wonderful paintings from some 20 of Romania’s women artists of the early part of the past century,

1916 is selected as the starting point since that was the date of the formation of the first woman artists' association in Romania - instigated by Olga Grecianu on her return from Brussels. The paintings on display cover the free period until King Carol established  in 1938 what was to be the first of the dictatorships which so disfigured the country for the next 50 years ...
I was well aware of Elena Popa, Cecilia Cuţescu-Storck (see side pic) and Rodica Maniu – the last being a particular favourite. But I had not seen the works of artists such as Olga Grecianu, Nina Arbore, Nadia Bulighin, Maria Ciurdea Steurer, Irina Codreanu, Milita Petraşcu, Merica Râmniceanu, Magdalena Radulescu and Mina Byck Wepper.
I will now add some of these painters to my Introducing the Romanian Realists of the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries

I assume the exhibition's title is ironic since it would be difficult to argue that this 20 year period of this misogynist Latin country was characterised by respect for women's rights (however much Queen Marie may have made up for her husband's fickleness) A better title might have been that of an important essay of the 1970s - Why have there been no great women artists? 

Fascinating though the paintings were, they mostly displayed the society women or domestic scenes – hardly signs of liberation. Elena’s Popa’s market scenes were the only exception – with Rodica Maniu (who is reputed to have painted many of husband Sam Mutzner’s works) celebrating Breton peasants at work in the fields with somewhat romanticising colours..

The gallery's walls contain some extended text, presumably to explain the "thinking" behind the selection but it's only in Romanian. What does it take to produce one page in at least English for the foreign visitor? The failure to do that simple thing shows the sheer arrogance of this genre of people....

National galleries in this part of the world suffer from being part of the political spoils system. They are “managed” by their respective Ministries of Culture whose Ministers (having so little else to do) obviously take full advantage of the power of appointment (and sacking) which goes with the job.

I have to admit, however, that the National Gallery apparatniks here do occasionally mount an interesting exhibition – I remember one at the National Gallery a few years back which actually brought together Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian painters (sadly their website has no archives - although it now boasts a lovely virtual tour of each of its rooms) – but it missed the opportunity to challenge the indifference these nations now display to one another…..

I have two other complaints about the management of Bucharest's National Gallery -

- Although a catalogue (172pp) is available, it is entirely (as always) in Romanian  

- They also try to charge 30 euros for taking photographs 

Hardly surprising therefore that Romanian art remains unknown. I have referred before to the greater accessibility in Bulgaria to works of the early 20th century. Romanian "Collectors" - generally the dubious family members of old communists - have successfully squirrelled away most of the Romanian painting tradition in their large houses. 

Artmark is Romania's auction house has become almost the only way to see this work - as it is transferred from one rich owner to another (the prices are ten times more than in Bulgaria!). See for yourself in their glossy catalogues - which can be sent to you on request eg this one from September 

This, of course, makes the task of art curators all the more critical - and raises the larger question of how creatively art curators understand and practice their function – those at The Netherlands came in for some criticism recently for hiring philosophy-populising Alain de Boton to write some provocative tags/slogans….

ps interesting that the renaming of the title of this post seems to have attracted more viewers....I wonder why???? 

The book of the year!!

And here it is - the long-anticipated book - In Praise of Doubt!!

Weighing in at 250 pages – the book of last year’s posts…..
A trailer for its contents can be read here

Feast on it while you can…..

It joins Bulgarian Realists – updated edition and another couple of E-books (which can be accessed at the top right corner of my blog).

Sunday saw the temperatures here drop by 30 degree - from plus 15 to minus 15!! The snow started slowly but soon had a grip....So my run down to Sofia is pushed back until Friday which looks a lovely day for the route from Bucharest through Russe and Pleven to Sofia......

The Collected Edition

Some bloggers take Montaigne as their patron saint but John Updike deserves a place in that Parthenon. Updike was such a prolific writer that he inspired envy – “a penis with a thesaurus” was one cruel comment. Not for nothing perhaps was the male hero in his long-running series of novels about small-town America named “Rabbit”!

Like a blogger, everything he did seemed to turn into published prose – or verse.

And, in a typical pre-emptive strike on biographers, he actually published an autobiography “Self-Consciousness” so frank about, for example, his ailments that, as he put it, “it was criticised as a parading of my wounds”. But, as the first of the book reviews which formed his 2007 collection “Due Considerations” puts it, “the wounds were mine to parade and not some callow inquisitor’s”.

I know all this because I have just brought home from Bucharest’s English bookshop a lovely hardback edition of that collection - coming in at 700 pages.  

My blog’s masthead has a ringing statement that a post of several years back is as good as yesterday’s. But the architecture of blogs honours only the most recent.

In a spirit of defiance I have therefore, in the past few months, been preparing a book version of the last year’s posts – with a preface and introduction which celebrate blogging as a modern version

It will be available here in a day or so…….I thought of calling it “Chairman Ron’s Collected Thoughts” (as my own preemptive strike on sarcastic friends) – but settled instead on “In Praise of Doubt”. Of course such an endeavour smacks of egocentricity – but bear in mind that one of the purposes of the blog is to give (posterity?) a sense of what it was like to be in the skin of an engaged man of second half of the 20^th century….. 

Rereading one’s posts of the past year or so is a salutary experience – the book’s Introduction gives an overview of the subjects treated over the period so I thought it would be useful here to identify the books which had engaged my interest sufficiently for me to devote a post to them during the year. I was fairly critical of five -

Why Nations Fail – by a couple of American academics 

Stand and Deliver – a rather superficial and angry analysis of how the British system of public management could be improved. In a long line of such critiques….

The Tyranny of Experts – by a World Banker who’s had enough…

Amateus Etzioni’s autobiography “My Brother’s Keeper”

How Good Can We Be? By a well-read British journalist - Will Hutton

But very positive about the others which, now that I see them listed, form a fairly formidable list -

The Capitalism Papers by Jerry Mander

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin

Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism; by Wolfgang Streeck

Death of a Nation; a new History of Germany

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux

The Puritan Gift – a lovely book by a couple of octogenarians about the fall of American capitalism

Cooperatives – a post about a couple of books

Our Carbon Democracy – a very thoughtful book by an anthropologist

The Confidence Trap by David Runciman

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything about how to avoid the doomsday scenario

Some light relief was brought by -

The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence Carol Craig

What you really need to know about the internet by John Naughton

Peeling the Onion Guenther Grass’ so poetic autobiography

Being Mortal – illness, medicine and what matters in the end

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

The Hidden Pleasures of Life by Theodor Zeldin

Key Books of the Century was an important series in which I tried to identify texts which had made an impact on our thinking – many of which have echoes today….

In Praise of Scepticism

The last week of the year is the time when we are reminded of the year’s key events and invited to think about how we might improve our behaviour….A regularly updated blog allows you to recall what was the focus of your attention at any given moment in time – in my case books, artefacts and places – with wars, refugees, election campaigns and results being noises off……  

The year began with an attempt to silence satire - so let us end it not merely with a celebration of satire but of the wider spirit of scepticism.

It’s a basic human foible to enjoy seeing the pretensions of the powerful being punctured – but the sad fact is that most of us fall prey to the illusions conjured up by rhetoricians and their masters. The agnosticism which got into my bloodstream in my teens seems to have inoculated me against all false gods…..and indeed against the “suspension of disbelief” to which drama and novels invite us…..That’s perhaps why only essays, satire and realistic art and poetry (eg Brecht, Bukowski, McCaig) have attracted me.   

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking. One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”  Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric stifle our thinking capacity – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work – but it did not amount to a coherent statement about power.

Twenty years I started to develop a glossary of some 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform. Its updated version - Just Words - offers some definitions which at least will get us thinking more critically about our vocabulary – if not actually taking political actions. While working on it I came across John Saul’s A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense issued in 1994 which talks of the 

“humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues and the pretensions of power”.

Saul contrasts this approach with that “of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”.

In 2008, I left behind a glossary in the Final Report of a project - Learning from experience; some reflections on how training can help develop administrative capacity which was fairly outrageous.

I should emphasise that Just Words is not a Cynic’s Dictionary – although I readily confess to the occasional lapse into self-indulgent delight in shocking eg my definition of “consultant” as “a con artist who behaves like a Sultan”. But the topic of politics, power and government reform is too important for cynicism. It does, however, require a strong dose of scepticism.  

Memory's Palace

A rolling stone, we are told, gathers no moss – but give a nomad a base and it is amazing what artefacts he’s able to produce from the folds of his traveller’s cloak to domesticate the place…It was 15 years ago, just after starting my years in central Asia, that I acquired the Carpathian mountain house now home to so many books, paintings and small objects (the rugs not so small). The tiny Bucharest flat had already taken the Uzbek painted lacquered cases, silk scarves and terra cotta figurines……but it took only a few months last year for the patina of the fading 1930s villa flat in Sofia to be complemented by paintings for its expansive walls, books for the bookcases which lined two walls - even sculptures and ceramics for its piano  

A few summers ago I looked round at the various artefacts in my mountain house and realized how many beautiful objects I seem to have collected – pottery, miniatures, carpets, Uzbek wall-hangings, Kyrgyz and Iranian table coverings, glassware, plates, Chinese screens, wooden carvings et al. Of very little - except sentimental - value I hasten to add!

Bookmarks – paper and silk - pens, pencils (they have to be soft!!) occupy pride of place on the desks.

At the time I had been musing about the various roles I had played in my life - Lecturer, politician, networker, maverick, leader, writer, explorer, consultant, resource person – and suddenly a new label came to me – “collector”!

All of this is by way of preface to a lovely book The memory Palace – a book of lost interiors which I came across this week at Bucharest’s superb English Bookshop – 

Taking his title from the Ciceronian rhetorical technique of memorising long speeches by means of an imaginary stroll through a series of grandiose palaces, and moving towards a depiction of the internet as a vast and ever-expanding memory palace, many of Hollis's potted histories establish a convincing relationship between the frailties of memory and the unavoidable solidity of material objects. As his grandmother’s mobility has declined, so the interior of the house has become a world in miniature…..

Another review gives a sense of the subjects covered - 

The book is organised around vignettes of his ailing grandmother, confined to her sitting room: her fireplace like an altar, her trinkets a cabinet of curiosities. The fireplace leads him back to the Roman hearth and myths about the origins of Rome: from the “Purple Room”, in which the Byzantine emperors were born, to the cave in which a she-wolf was purported to have suckled Romulus and Remus.Tea breaks with his granny aside,

Hollis proceeds chronologically, taking in the relationship between medieval furniture and British statecraft; the collector’s impulse; the commodity culture of Victorian England; and the screens and virtual rooms of the digital age.

It’s a vast span, which Hollis looks to condense thematically by dwelling on palaces. He yokes together actual historical palaces with the classical concept of memory as a type of palatial enfilade in which everything has its recorded place. It’s a tidy idea that feels tenuous by the time we enter the Big Brother house in the final section.

I love such types of books - which defy categorisation, A Scotsman review puts it nicely - 

All books have brief indicators of subject matter on the back. Hollis’s reads “History/Architecture”, to which could be added classical culture, popular culture, monarchy, politics, consumerism, memoir, art collecting and more. This is the kind of non-fiction – like the work of WG Sebald or Paul Collins or Rebecca Solnit – that makes fiction seem predictable, thin and uncurious.

The Independent also catches the atmosphere

Edward Hollis's The Memory Palace is ostensibly a selective and often forensic history of interiors. But it is, more tellingly, a kind of instruction manual about ways of thinking about these histories. It's less a descriptive route-march through physical interiors, more a treatise about the mysteries of time and place."The mind wanders from room to room," he writes, "from the cave in which we began to the [data] cloud we inherit today, each one of which represents a different mode of memory."

As I survey my various collections, it is inevitable that I wonder about its eventual break-up…..occasionally I come across a book which records the paintings collected by one person – a lovely idea which gave me the idea of adding the pics to the volume of 2015 posts. But more often artefacts are found in antique shops with no provenance….One has simply to fantasise about where they rested before – and with whom…. 

Some 30 years ago, when I was going through some difficult times, my sister-in-law tried to help me by encouraging me to explore the various roles I had – father, son, husband, politician, writer, activist etc. At the time I didn’t understand what she was driving at. Now I do! Makes me wonder what tombstone I should have carved for myself in the marvellous Sapanta cemetery in Maramures where people are remembered humourously in verse and pictures for their work or for the way they died!!

It was TS Eliot who wrote that “old men ought to be explorers” – perhaps the reason why my visiting card now says – “explorer and aesthete”!