On loving, & missing, London.

Unemployment has meant, for me at least, a sort of spatial limbo: I am at home, but I feel very much in-between places. This is partly because, after 4 years in England but very little of it in London (which is such a pity!), I thought I might like to get to know the grand old metropolis a bit better than I do. It’s also partly because I am willing to go anywhere at all in the world for adventure and novelty, but am not so keen to stay on at home (none of my friends are here, and living with parents does get a bit stifling now and then). My father has done his best to assiduously encourage me to head Stateside at some point (like many good middle-class Indians, I think he harbours the ‘American dream’ and doesn’t care much for the old world, which he sees as fading and increasingly irrelevant in career/financial terms; well, perhaps the newspapers would bear him out on this, partly). And to a large extent, as I learnt more and more about the bureaucratic strictures which try very hard to keep people from coming into countries, and as I read more and more about how sad an economic situation much of the world is in, I pretty much resigned myself to not going back to London or the UK anytime soon (save for holidays, ofc).

And I was pretty fine with that. For most entry-level jobs, going to the UK does not mean (as many with anti-immigration sentiments seem to think) a better quality of life/living: the tax-rates and costs of living are incredibly high, and logically the same amount of money earned in a place where housing is cheaper and the tax rates lower = better life. Materially speaking.

But when I rationalized so with myself I forgot one very important thing – I forgot that I didn’t love London for its promises of any glamorous life or great riches (for I’m no Dick Whittington), & that I loved it instead because it was the London of countless books & innumerable stories;  the London of Shakespeare and Austen and Woolf and even T. S. Eliot; the London of the history-books and nursery-rhymes. And this is after all something no other place in the world can (or even should, since every place has its own unique wealth of stories and histories!) ever replicate. It also probably only has such importance for me because I loved and then studied English Lit., which is enough to make an Anglophile of anyone, and for the noblest of reasons :P But remembering = nostalgia, and nostalgia = (in my world, at any rate) lots of wistful blog-whining & lots of photographs, so this post will groan under the burden of both. You have been warned!

My recent Fanny Burney binge has reminded me of why I love, and miss, London: Burney’s novels are all about innocent (but virtuous! NEVER forget!) and beautiful girls from little-ish country towns who find themselves in the great city for the first time. They are regaled, and often left not too impressed, with the dissipations of high society life in 18th c. London – they go to plays and to the Opera and to the Pantheon and to ‘assemblies’ – yes it is like a dream! It’s one of those delicious things to read, like a tabloid gossip column looking into the lifestyles of the rich & famous today, only Burney’s books of course have infinitely more wit, are quite censorious of all that is ‘dissipated’ and extravagantly wasteful, etc. Well, first I missed 18th century London with the worst kind of nostalgia one can have – nostalgia for times one has never known, will never know! And then I missed London as I know it, because London is so beautifully historic and so layered over with different eras, that I am quite sure that 18th century London has peeked out me from odd places during some walk or another.

A rather glorious monument, the Albert Memorial. And enhanced by Instagram! :P Probably what I dislike most about London is all the Victorian in it, which (to me) is just somewhat bleak. Like the Victorians themselves, and especially in winter. And add to that I have, like Terry Castle said, a sordid case of ROCOCOPHILIA, and so have always loved the prettiness of 18th cent. buildings (their white and bright airiness) a whole lot more. 

What I love most about London is the way different places have different associations – a sort of historical/literary burden these spaces are forced to carry, but maybe that’s no bad thing. I have very violent historical/literary fetishes, so a lot of what I remember from my London summer pertain to this! Getting breathless as I walked around Russell Sq. and Bloomsbury (because Woolf and Eliot must have walked there, and maybe I would stumble upon Woolf’s family home or something – !); waxing lyrical as I wandered around Hampstead & its Heath with my friend (because Keats probably roamed there too, and who knows but one of those ancient trees inspired some poem or another?); getting lost somewhere off Fleet Street, going down some small lane and actually finding myself in front of Samuel Johnson’s house; trying to figure out the exact spot on which The Globe must have stood (not quite where it is today, apparently, a few meters off – maybe it was where ‘EAT’ is?). Reading about Burney’s heroines going to Tottenham Court Road or Holborn (where the tradesmen in 18th c. London lived, apparently) or Sadler’s Wells (apparently, back then, not a ‘posh’ theatrical experience) – or even better, going to Haymarket (!!) to watch a play (!! I DONE THIS!) got me immeasurably excited and nostalgic. (Haymarket is my absolute favourite theatre, though, I have to confess, only one out of a shameful four I’ve been to: but it was the first, and it is so beautiful and palpably 18th c./rococo, that I have tried to go to almost every show they put on. Not succeeded, but meant to anyways….!)

The doorway into Keats’ house at Wentworth Place. Unfortunately we went too late to get in, but an extremely kind man in the adjacent library let us walk around the grounds and it was beautiful. I could not identify the famous ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ tree though :(

There is a respect for history in Europe generally which I admire so much – the preservation of old buildings and façades, the blue plaques in the UK which dot the place to remember everybody and anybody of historical note (from seamstresses to the celebrity heavyweights!) – these are all things I am sort of unused to, but which I adore, admire, and respect vastly. Till this day I am astonished at the large, amazing, beautiful and 100% Tudor building that’s opposite one of the Chancery Lane Tube station entrances. It houses everything from Pret to Starbucks or Costa or whatnot, and there’s an interesting clash of visage & interior for you (even one of the nicest old buildings in Oxford, at the end of Ship Street, houses a Pret) – I never quite get over the juxtaposition – but it is there. Which is amazing.  There’s also the amazing arts scene (and this is not to say that other places don’t have theirs: THEY DO; only I understand the British one best because that’s what I’m familiar with, as myopic of me as this may be) – I love that all the art galleries are free and so open to all; I love that there’s a bajillion theatres with wonderful shows on. Waking up on a Saturday morning & wondering what to do is always so easily resolved when there are a thousand and one exhibitions or plays to be attending! The National Gallery alone could keep me occupied for days on end, and ‘groundling’ spaces at The Globe are so cheap (five quid!) that I am always tempted to watch more plays there than my legs have energy for (or, to be truthful, than my wallet has notes enough for).

Found this in a little lane off St. Martins Lane (I think), where my friend works in a wonderful coffee-shop. This little lane is full of a second-hand bookstores, which are amazingly fun to leaf through in themselves, & this plaque makes it all so much more amazing! MOZART!

So this is why I love, and miss, London. :( Its historicity, its literarineeesss, its galleries and its theatres. So many things I have never done (like visiting the oldest theatre, or the recently-uncovered site of Shakespeare’s first theatre, or Woolf’s house, or famous authors’ graves, or seeing a show at the Royal Opera House) and that I have to lament! I talk a whole lot more about these associations than I have done, unfortunately, because whenever I’m in a place I call ‘home’ (however temporarily), I failed to do enough of the visitory/touristy things I love the places for. I have not been the best literary/historical pilgrim, but since I am going there for a visit in two weeks, I hope to remedy this. I am going to chart out a Fanny Burney/Jane Austen trail, which will take me through 18th century London (or what vestiges of it still remain) and to Bath. FINGERS CROSSED. But most of all, I am just going to walk and walk and walk and walk and walk, anywhere and everywhere, and drink in the streets and the sights and the aura of the past. Kuala Lumpur is not a very pedestrian city, and a car is as essential to life here as breathing, so I really miss walking.

(Also: carrying on from the last post where I mentioned the mysterious ‘Pantheon’ — I have solved the mystery! It was on Oxford Street, and in its place now stands —— wait for it —— a Marks & Spencer’s. -_- Grotesque, is it not? But to their credit, this branch is called M&S ‘Pantheon Branch’, which is a sweet homage to the past.)

Watching the sun set over some lake in Hampstead Heath. I could go on at length about missing (and loving) the parks and gardens of London too, but I may never stop then so have wisely decided to let a picture speak for me.

In adoration of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. And Jane Austen.

A cover image for Oxford World Classic’s edition of ‘Evelina’, I think, by Frances Burney (a chastising feminist critic has informed me that it is belittling and demeaning and sexist to call her ‘Fanny Burney’ :( which is unfortunate, because it’s SUCH a catchy name.)

When I find myself in times of trouble (or general bleakness, as it has been with incessant thunderstorms, grey skies, and flooding here in KL), I always turn to the same person for comforting/soothing: Jane Austen.

For reasons I can’t quite figure out (because this really surpasses being just an ‘enjoyable read’), she makes me incredibly happy. It could be the happy endings her books more or less always have – and who can’t love that? (Especially after the despair and hopelessness I’m left with in a lot of modernist/contemporary works!) Some people probably accuse Austen of some sort of saccharine falsity in these perfect endings, but I’m not so sure — after all, life is plenty happy. So why shouldn’t books be, too? Why should there always be tragedy, or if not, some irrevocable strain of regret that taints anything remotely good?

Or it could be that she still teaches me so much, immeasurable amounts and with each time I re-read her works, about patience and virtue. It could be her characters: the ones we like, like Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot  – Emma is the sole exception here! – are always somewhat poorer, or less glamourous, or less fortunate, in their initial lot in life than the grand old ladies we often dislike. But they bear their crosses with ‘Patience’ and ‘Virtue’ (18th/19th century buzzwords), and that’s sort of inspiring. In a very saccharine way, I know. I almost feel lame for admitting it. But whatever. IT’S TRUE.  (It’s important though to note that they’re ‘good’ without necessarily being boring or flawless, which would be something of a boring lecture from Austen indeed. I think this is why she goes far beyond Richardson, whose two-dimensional view of women as ‘paragons of Virtue’ is really insufferable sometimes, in both its depiction and in the length of that depiction — WE GET IT. PAMELA’S SO VIRTUOUS WE COULD DIE WALLOWING IN THE DEEP POOLS OF HER VIRTUE. PLEASE CUT SHORT YOUR NOVEL BY APPROX. 200 PAGES, PLEASE.) 

But she inspires not just through her characters, but in and of herself (and here I taint my readings with biographical knowledge somewhat); I can never pick up an Austen novel and read it without thinking, once twice or thrice, about how she wrote them. And then I always return to these words in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own:

…the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them…If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, – “women never have half an hour…that they can call their own” – she was always interrupted. … Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. ‘How she was able to effect all this,’ her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, & most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party.’ Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. … To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if J. A. had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. … If J. A. suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not.

This is at the heart of Woolf’s point in the essay, but nothing about that here – I can’t get over those words. “But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not.” Probably it was, and it is immeasurably chastising to me to be reminded of this, because I am always wanting what I have not. And then I consider how much harder life has been for others worse hemmed in than me; and how much better they have borne it. (That is a very pretentious sentence, but I am reading so much Austen & co. right now that I have basically started addressing thoughts to a “Gentle Reader!”, so this is hardly the worst it can be…). It is a miracle that anyone was able to write such brilliant novels in conditions such as those. I’ve made a couple of pilgrimages to the British Library’s permanent exhibition room, and they have Jane Austen’s writing desk on display there: I always scrutinize it worshipfully, and (like Austen herself, I always think) it’s an unassuming and plain object. I always have to stifle squeals when I remember this passage from Woolf, because I can just picture this desk – it’s so small! – being pushed aside hastily, hidden under cushions maybe? –  when visitors come in.

So um. Yeah. J. A. is pretty inspiring in herself, & I have firmly determined to stop listening to Harper Simon & feeling blue about stuff that isn’t worth being blue about, stuff that I wouldn’t feel blue about if I wasn’t such a mass of bored self-pity and inactivity right now.

I cannot worship Jane Austen enough – although, funnily, I was never ever able to write an essay on her novels whilst at uni. I just couldn’t think of what to say. There’s a sneaky simplicity to her style that belies any easy understanding of what exactly she does and how. I could never figure it out, and perhaps I didn’t really want to – regardless of what others may say, there are books that’re work, and there’s books that’re pleasure, and Jane Austen will never ever become a chore to me.

I am not reading Austen right now – I am reading Fanny Burney instead, and in her I have found someone almost like Austen, almost as lovely & nice and interesting, and I am very much in love with her too. She is also sharply incisive and critical of social foibles; she displays the same incredible powers of observation that Austen does. She seems vastly underrated in comparison to Austen, which is a pity because she is really very good. The brevity of her Wikipedia pages do not do her justice; the scarcity of period dramas made in her name is offensive. Her novel Cecilia is apparently what inspired Pride and Prejudice (this was confirmed to me when I saw the words “PRIDE and PREJUDICE” splayed across some page). Not many authors make me laugh, but Fanny Burney has kept me in fits all night (until 4 am, too). Definitely something people must check out, if they like long 18th/19th century romance novels at all. And OH it makes me miss London so much: so much of Burney’s work is concerned with depicting women from the country coming to the grand metropolis for the first time, and the walks they take (in the Mall and in gardens), or the places they go (to the Opera & the Pantheon & Haymarket – where I watched my first play in London!) all just serve to remind me how much I miss London, and how much more exploring there is to be done there. (I’m not sure what the modern equivalent, or where the site of the Pantheon lies today, but I intend to look it up.)

* * * *

But what sort of paean to Jane Austen would be complete without a mention of innumerable glorious period dramas/films? Because I have been watching them at a furious rate, and unfortunately neither Hollywood nor the BBC have made enough to satiate me. (I have been avoiding a lot of the Andrew Davies stuff, but might have to succumb soon….)

The best Emma hands-down I’ve seen now is… (and I can’t actually quite believe this) — Gwyneth Paltrow. I’ve seen Kate Beckinsale be Emma too, but Gwynnie plays her with an awesome wickedness and vivacity which is – I think – just right. Because Emma is wicked and misguided and snobbish, even if her intentions are all good and we still like her despite the dumb stuff she does (and this sounds to me like a really hard balance for an actress to keep, but Paltrow does it!). (Ewan McGregor features in this 1996 Emma too, and I couldn’t believe it either, and didn’t know it till I saw the credits! — it came out the same year as Trainspotting, so I guess he wasn’t quite so famous when he made Emma; he has a surprisingly small role, even for Frank Churchill.)

Before she’s mean to Miss Bates :(

Then I swallowed up Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), which was interesting (it’s interesting too that Ang Lee started directing it without even reading/knowing about Austen when he got into it; I recently started thinking that actually, some of the social conventions depicted in these old novels aren’t dead – I feel them quite heavily existent in certain aspects of Asian life, my own included!). It’s got a really famous cast (Kate Winslet! Emma Thompson! Hugh Grant! Alan Rickman! Hugh Laurie! Phewwwf), and I haven’t really seen Emma Thompson (shamefully!) in anything but Love Actually which I hate, so it was quite nice to see her actin’. Apparently she wrote the script, too, which was well done indeed – like a steak – (though not quite as cinematically innovative as Emma up above). Also — it has Hugh Grant! Who, whatever else you may (and probably should) impute to him, is incredibly hot and visually perfect for a Jane Austen period-piece. Well, so I thought – and he didn’t disappoint, visually, but I thought it was a shame he was a bit boring as Edward Ferrars. I don’t really know if he’s a great actor or not, but it would have been nice to see him in a role with a bit more spice. But the problem with Sense and Sensibility is, I think, that not many of the ‘good’ characters do have much ‘spice’, except for Marianne who has too much. O well. Eye-candy anyways.

I’m afraid I have watched every Pride and Prejudice TV, film, etc. adaptation that exists, and so haven’t approached that one yet – but maybe the most recent Keira Knightley adaptation deserves a re-watch, inferior though it can only be, to the great BBC mini-series.

I would love to go on about how I would make sweet (but ardent and genteel) love to Jane Austen were she alive now, but – I will resist. I’ll content myself with despising the callous people who, in online forums, casually dismiss these film adaptations as “SO boring I could DIE”. Fools. FOOLS. (I don’t think they’re being dismissive of the adaptation but the original itself, which is so affronting!). I stumbled upon this article in the HuffPost a few days ago, on the experience of editing Emma, and it points out that “Henry James once tartly noted, [that] Austen often inspires her champions to defend her as if she were a personal acquaintance” which struck me immediately as being – weirdly and oddly true. I always feel so offended if someone has the insensitivity to be mean about Austen. It’s like demons picking on an angel. Maybe my defensiveness stems from what I’ve constructed of her mentally (what with the Woolf and all), but – it’s there nonetheless. Insulting Jane Austen hurts me. People shouldn’t do it.

I remember ending the Bach post with that quote from a novel, which says (approx.) that we ought to be grateful for life, because on the day we’re born we get the music of Bach as a free gift, unasked for. Well, I would say the same of Jane Austen – a gift all the more astonishing, because not only was it unasked for, but history tells us that it was actually discouraged; it was a gift that grew in times hostile to it. It makes me all the more grateful.

Belated paean to the Olympics.

Tower Bridge proclaiming London’s Olympic-ness, loud & proud!

This summer I had the pleasure of being in London during the 2012 Olympic period. It wasn’t something I had initially given much thought to – I’m not a sporting enthusiast (or sporty in any sense of the word); I was too busy with work at Oxford most of the time to pay attention to what was happening on the Olympic organisation front; and I wasn’t even expecting to be in London during the Olympics. But as it turned out, I was, for almost the whole two weeks in which they took place. And it was, all of a sudden and unexpectedly, exhilarating!

I can’t decide what I liked best about it: was it the generally happy and enthusiastic vibe throughout London, as people strutted onto Tube trains draped in various flags or wearing their Olympic ‘Games Maker’ uniforms (the London games had about 70,000 of them)? Was it the fact that as I stood drinking outside of bars in little Soho alleyways, little contingents of Americans (still wearing their passes or cards or whatever it was around their neck with the recognisable purple Olympic strap) would run down the streets, asking for directions or wondering which bar to enter? Perhaps it was the fun and joy of live screenings in places like Hyde Park and Potters Field(s?), where people adorned the lawns in great crowds with pints of beer and rolled-up cigarettes regardless of the time of day or day of week, to cheer at (and for) random sports. Or maybe it was the fact that everyone (myself included!) was really, really interested in the games and the events, and that for a while the news decided to highlight something that was happy and exciting and inspirational, as opposed to depressing and saddening (economic troubles; massacres; etc).

There’s also the fact that the Olympics, and the Commonwealth Games to a lesser extent, actually get people interested in things they wouldn’t normally pay attention to – I found myself watching things like boxing, gymnastics, swimming, athletic events (from shot put to pole vaulting), beach volleyball, badminton…. Sports I barely knew anything about, and yet about which I learnt, and which I enjoyed, during this time. I learnt about people who had worked immensely hard to be there, about people who had had to overcome great obstacles to reach the Olympics at all (like Gemma Gibbons, a British judoka, or Gabby Douglas the gymnastics AA individual women’s gold medallist, or Mary Kom, an Indian female boxer who got her first Olympic medal – a bronze – this time), and about the sacrifices they made (training hours and hours a day; no alcohol for 4 years…madness!). It was exciting to see greatness (like a Phelps or a Bolt), and it was exciting to see the underdogs or the unknown win (like Katie Ledecky or Ruta Meilutyte, a Lithuanian 15 year old who won a gold in swimming and shocked everyone – she could barely talk in her post-swim BBC interview, which was incredibly amusing, but also really touching, to watch!). And it was especially amazing to see the kindness and respect with which athletes often treated one another; one of the moments which stood out for me, in particular, was Kirani James’ victory in the Men’s 400m track event: not many people seem to do this, in athletics, but the first thing James did after winning was turn around, and shake hands with every single one of his competitors. He didn’t go straight into the victory run like so many do (hee hee – sorry Bolt!); and I knew I was watching a really nice – indeed, even noble – man, and a great sportsperson.

Celebrity culture is all well and good (sometimes), but as many people have pointed out – the Olympics have been inspirational, particularly for me and particularly this one, for many people in a really different and valuable way. I’m not sure why it was these Olympics more than any other (I watched Beijing 2008 & Athens 2004 with the same avidity); but Michael Johnson’s commentary for the BBC gives a little clue, perhaps – he said that these Olympics were the first to focus on the idea of ‘legacy’, leaving something behind once they were done (besides a big debt and world class stadiums to fall into disuse). The slogan for the Olympics was, among other things, “inspire a generation”, and it sort of showed in everything about these games. And the planners have thought long and hard about what would happen after the Games finished – their Aquatic Centre is architecturally designed to have removable wings, and many of the venues were constructed on a similar temporary basis, with parts to be dismantled etc. So there will be few, if any, ‘white elephants’. Even things like the doping test facilities will be re-used, as a disease research centre (a phenomenal and economic way of re-using something, in my humble opinion!).

‘Inspire a generation’, as seen through a hipster’s phone.

It’s nice to admire people for the hard work they’ve put, or their sheer brilliance and skill at certain things. And the atmosphere in London really redounded with this positivity: there was such a cosmopolitan (yes, even moreso than usual, and perhaps more needed than ever in these economically-troubled times) energy and friendly vibrance throughout the city! The UK did such an amazing job organising it; the Tube wasn’t manic (at least, not moreso than usual, as far as I saw!), and there were so many exciting Olympic-inspired arts events everywhere (one of my friends was performing in such a piece at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and this is still up – people should go see it!). I went to see the Canoe Sprinting at Eton Dorney, which isn’t the easiest place to get to (it seems), but I was so impressed at how quickly, efficiently, smoothly, seamlessly I was taken from Slough to my seat in the stands – within half an hour, without any trouble!

 

Tino Sehgal’s piece at the Tate Modern.

Canoe Sprint finals, at Eton Dorney (11th August 2012). Team GB did its fans proud with Ed McKeever’s gold!

I was really sad when they ended, perhaps in part because I was leaving two days later too (Heathrow was also full of Olympic residues, people and signs both!). But  hey — looking forward to Rio 2016! (And missing London, very much, already.)

(Everyone was fearing the ‘English weather’, but even the weather behaved itself beautifully.)

More sprinting, canoe-style. This was one of those sports I knew nothing about (i.e., even of its existence!), and learnt a lot about thanks to the Olympics (it’s basically like sprinting on track, except it’s done on water and in a boat).

 

Sylvian Plathitudes

‘Love is a Parallax’, Sylvia Plath

My London adventures last week found me (some would say un-excitingly) — in a bookstore. Of course. But anyways; I had time to kill, and so I sat down in a lovely armchair at Foyles (I love that bookstores in London provide this comfortable feature!), and decided to remedy my lack of knowledge about Sylvia Plath. 

I picked up a lovely, thick Faber & Faber copy of her works (edited by the great evil that is Ted Hughes; but who better, really?) and began to read. It’s difficult to know where to start with these things, but after a few page skimmings I found myself on this beautiful poem, ‘Love is a Parallax’ — weirdly enough, it was in the Appendix (does this mean that it wasn’t actually published until this edition? Or that it was published posthumously? If someone knows, please let me know!). 

I am not an avid reader of poetry: I prefer novels and narrative, the lull of a story that moves (or at least, wanders circumlocutorily) towards something that can be conventionally, or at a stretch, be understood as ‘an ending’. I cannot sink into poems at will before bed, and I cannot be kept up late into the night with a collection of them. This is somewhat weird and uncomfortable for me, as a Lit. student, but this is genuinely how it is. How I do enjoy and understand poetry, however, is when it comes to me in bits and pieces at random moments or in strange places – it’s more of a fragmentary enjoyment than anything sustained. And maybe, since poems are written that way (excepting epic length stuff like Paradise Lost), maybe that’s not a bad way to enjoy them.

These lines from the Plath poem came to me precisely so: uncalled, unexpected, and in the middle of a busy bookstore in the heart of London (near Trafalgar Square and Soho or somewhere thereabouts, if I remember correctly). And they are beautiful. My favourite bit is “the drunks upon the curbs and dames / in dubious doorways forget their monday names / and caper with candles in their heads;” (I like the idea of a ‘monday name’ – is that the name one puts on after the weekend and when, with typical monday morning blues, one returns to whatever professional strand of life one is involved in, whether in the office or at university or school?). I like the idea of capering with candles in my head – I like the idea of capering period, but candles make it even better. 

And what does it mean for love to be a parallax anyways? What is a parallax? I didn’t know at the time of reading the poem (though I could guess it was something mathematical/geometrical). 

Parallax, n. The effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions. 

Love is probably a parallax. 

Turner & Claude at the National Gallery

The other day I found myself in London, which was (as usual) manic, stressful, crowded, and very beautiful. It helped immensely that the sun was shining, too, as it always does! One of the nicest things about being in the UK is the fact that it’s teeming with life and (that ambiguous word!) ‘culture’, of the sort to keep you busy when you’re bored/down/stumped for things to do. So I thought I’d take advantage of the numerous shows/exhibitions/shops/historical sites in some small way, and went to the National Gallery to look at their exhibition on Turner, and learn more about him (though I knew I liked him — he is one of my favourite painters).

It was a very beautiful exhibition, but it wasn’t all about Turner — it was specifically about Turner and his relationship with another painter, Claude Lorrain (whom I had never heard of). Claude painted numerous pastoral scenes, of figures from Greek and Roman myth set in idyllic landscapes, or figures from classical works (such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses), which is always quite comforting to see; I guess because it lets you feel like a little kid getting transported to an Enid Blyton-esque fairyland or the world of the Care Bears or something. I absolutely fell in love with this one painting, called Seaport with the embarkation of the Queen of Sheba:

This painting is huge, and housed within an equally ornate and massive frame (one thing I never realised, but which interested me greatly, is how personal frames could be — I had never ever seen frames with the artist’s name or the date painted on it in beautiful italic hand before!). I don’t quite know what about this painting fascinates me (it is certainly not the Queen of Sheba, who is most unimpressive and rather disappointingly unhaughty — my favourite sarcastic query is, ‘Do you think you’re the Queen of Sheba???????’). Maybe it is the sea or the ships, possibly both, because they are amazing. This picture should definitely be seen in the canvassy flesh, because a small image on the screen does not do it justice. I love pictures where the colours pop out at you (my rudimentary and sensual pleasures!!! I would have made a terrible art historian probably!).

I liked this picture so much, I think it quite overshadowed poor Turner for me, and I also spent more money-I-do-not-have on buying a little print of it for my room. Unfortunately I cannot seem to be able to hang it up. :-(