Guillermo Martínez, The Oxford Murders (Abacus, 2005)

This novel is Martínez's first to be translated into English and is the winner of the Planeta Prize in Spain. Last year they filmed some of it here in Oxford and I thought I'd give it a read and see what the fuss was about. Only now I get around to it, having picked up a cheap copy at the Oxfam booksale on Saturday morning. The story revolves around an Argentinian post-doctoral student who arrives in Oxford to work with a famous maths don. He lodges with a little old lady who gets murdered and whose murder appears to be one in a series that follows a mathematical logic. Can they identify the series and predict the next murder or will the killer be too clever for them?

The maths is quite interesting, the plots has been competently sketched, apart from a clunky ending, but the characterization and writing is terrible. And I mean, really terrible. It might be a question of something being lost in translation, but the characters all lack any depth or interest. I know that often these kinds of books will rely on plot and conceit to carry them, so we're supposed to think that the maths makes up for the lack of characters. Oxford is supposed to be a wonderful setting, but unfortunately it's all a little heavy-handed, with lots of silly mistakes like porters emptying bins in dons' rooms in Merton. It felt far too like what Dan Brown did for Rome with Angels and Demons. And if the maths were done in a more clever way, he might have pulled it off. But unfortunately it is all pretty straightforward, and the maths doesn't come out of it in any mysterious way, as it should have. It seems liked a missed opportunity, and I'm afraid to say that I recommend that The Oxford Murders be your missed opportunity.

Garage, 2007; dir. Lenny Abrahamson, written by Mark O'Halloran

Last Thursday I got a chance to see Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O'Halloran's new film Garage. [Thank you Margaret!] Based on what I have already said about Adam and Paul and Prosperity, I suppose it is going to be pretty obvious that I am an admirer of the work this collaboration has been producing. With Garage I think we move into something rather more serious, not just in terms of subject-matter, but also in terms of art. There is a beautiful pace to the film, a rigorous slowness of the surrounding landscape that is part of the characters and their lives.

The story is simple. Josie works in a garage, looking after the few passing customers and waiting for business to pick up. He is treated like the village idiot, though often it is clear he is perfectly self-conscious. When his boss suggests that he work longer hours, he sends the son of his new girlfriend to work with Josie. The two strike up a friendship and Josie and the young man sit talking about nothing in particular, drinking cans and looking out at the closing evening. The rest of the film is tragic and heartbreaking, moving inexorably to a terrible end; I can't reveal more of the story without spoiling it.

There is a great great delicacy to the performances, and Pat Short is simply astonishing. His Josie is wonderfully played, physically vivid, and emotionally charged. It will be impossible to consider him 'just' a comic actor from now on. The filming is wonderful, mixing lush green countryside with harsh fluorescent internal lights. The desolation of the small town almost becomes a part of you at the end of the film. And its silence overcomes you. It is too desperate for expression, for tears.

It would be condescending to those involved to praise this film as a great new Irish film. This is a great and beautiful film. It was an enriching experience to see it.

Fifth International Dante Seminar

On Thursday and Friday I went to the Fifth International Dante Seminar entitled Dante Etico e lirico. There were some fascinating papers delivered, with highlights being a stunning contribution by Robin Kirkpatrick and George Corbett on the use of Dante in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, and another being the marvellously erudite and rich contribution of Claudia Villa on the eclogues, Par 22 and Giovanni del Virgilio. Lots of famous people there, the usual putting faces to names.

Very happy also to have learned about the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies, which looks very interesting and dynamic. There is also a podcast, the first of which deals with key moments in Inferno 1.1-3. It is very good and worth listening to.

100 Words and Pictures That Define Time

This is Jonathan Harris, a sickeningly talented young web artist who has developed all sorts of fascinating web-based concepts, seeking to explore and understand the human world through the artifacts people leave behind on the Web. It's nice kind of variation on the idea of found art.

One of his websites is the beautiful 10X10, which takes the top 100 words being used in cyberspace during any one hour. It creates its own kind of narrative, at once isolated and beautiful, yet completely fleeting and plugged in to what we're hearing. It generates its own logic of strangeness while remaining oddly familiar. I think it's a brilliant idea; it makes you look at the world differently. It's marvellous.

Prosperity, dir. Lenny Abrahamson, written by Mark O'Halloran (RTE Television, 2007)

The past two weeks have seen the first two episodes of RTE's new drama Prosperity, directed and written by the highly talented Abrahamson and O'Halloran and being aired on Monday nights at 21.30 BST on RTE Network 2. They have also been made available by RTE online, along with lots of other info on the series as well as the scripts. Those without access to Network 2 are strongly urged to watch it online. The quality of this drama is uncharacteristic of RTE and it surely represents a high-water mark for the season, and for future Irish-made drama. The series explores they way that the new-found prosperity experienced in Ireland has not brought everyone with it. Many of the scenes serve to reinforce this: the boys walk across their crumbling estate with the skyline crowded with cranes, testifying to the building boom that has not reached their own high-rise flats. Stacey hangs around a shopping centre full of people buying things she cannot afford.

Each episode is someone's story: the first, Stacey's Story; the second, Gavin's. Stories are the heart of this drama, not plots. Stacey is beautifully rendered as a young mother passing each day with her baby wandering the streets and hanging around the Jervis St shopping centre, dealing with problems that might not even occur to some: finding a place to change the baby; finding a way to charge her mobile telephone after losing her charger; trying to be alone with her on-off boyfriend and father of the child.

Gavin is a young boy who wants a new toy and cannot afford it. He and his friend Conor play truant from school and spend the day trying to find a few euro to make up what he has saved and buy the toy. The boys meet a young mother and try to sell her the beer they have stolen. Instead they barter a can for three cigarettes and sit looking at the rabbit that Gavin has stolen from a neighbour's back yard. The story follows the boys as they make their way through the day, a day that culminates with a confrontation with the friend of one of Gavin's neighbours and an absolutely stunning and shocking final scene.

The stories run in parallel, and in each episode you will see a reprise from an earlier episode, so they weave in and out of each other, a bit like the dynamic of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Trois Couleurs. There are some stunning shots, like the beautiful portrait of Gavin looking at his father with a strong sunlight behind his face. Anyone familiar with Abrahamson and O'Halloran's Adam and Paul will recognize many echoes in this episode and there's much more to say about the way that O'Halloran has chosen to explore the themes of innocence and child-like language in both of these works.

Something very very special is happening in Prosperity.

Ian Sansom, The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books (Harper, 2005)

The Mobile Library is the first in a series featuring “one of literature’s most unlikely detectives”, Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian sensitive type who arrives in a small Northern Irish village to take up a position that just might make his CV look passable. Everything that can go wrong does to wrong in his first twenty-four hours. Not least of his problems is that the books have gone missing, and in order to get out of his contract, he must find them.

Sansom is a very smart writer and there are many laugh-out-loud moments in the book. I like the twist of a Jew trying to navigate all the religious and political sensitivities in the North. I like the way this detective is an outsider. I like some of the characters in the book.

But I’m not sure that it is a sincere book. And sure, perhaps it is not meant to be. (I can just hear the cavils now about sincerity...but not to sound too much like one of Sansom's characters, you'll know it when you see it). It is a book that just screams something like “Postmodernity can be fun kids”, and I have at least three problems with such a statement. There are some genuine moments, certainly, but my overall impression was an unsettling sense of being manipulated by cleverness rather than invited to share in the playfulness.

Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (Verso, 2002)

In these nine reflections on the idea of distance and historical inquiry, Carlo Ginzburg, the noted historian and intellectual makes his way through a variety of fascinating topics from diverse fields with great ease and coolness. The concept of distance is examined from several perspectives. In in the first essay, entitled 'Making It Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device', he opens by discussing Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose and his definition of art as a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant. From here he takes us on a wonderful journey from Proust, Marcus Aurelius, Antonio de Guevara (who?), Montaigne, La Bruyère, Tolstoy and many more as he examines the idea of ostranienie or de-familiarization. This gives some idea of the range that Ginzburg provides in his meditations. This only works when the author has complete control over his argument and over his material, and both happily coincide in this book.

A long chapter on 'Myth: Distance and Deceit' takes us from Plato to the Nazis without time for breath in between; another on 'Representation: The Word, The Idea, The Thing' opens with a fascinating discussion of funerary practices in the late middle ages and the use of effigies of the dead and examines the idea of an oscillation between representation as substitute and as mimetic evocation. One of the most facscinating meditations, Chapter 4, 'Ecce: On the Scriptural Roots of Christian Devoational Imagery' opens with a marvellously stimulating discussion of the role of Old Testament (and prophetic) citations in the Gospels, and wonders if it is useful to use the term testimonia to describe these citation strings. His conclusion is that it is the citations that generate the narrative and not the other way around.

Further chapters are: 'Idols and Likenesses: A Passage in Origen and its Vicissitudes'; 'Style: Inclusion and Exclusion'; 'Distance and Perspective: Two Metaphors'; 'To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance'; 'Pope Wojtyla's Slip'.

I look forward to keeping this book closeby and returning to it and ruminating further on the many fascinating things Ginzburg has to say. I recommend it.

The Francis Bacon Studio, The Hugh Lane, Dublin

After Bacon's death in 1992, his heir, John Edwards, wanted to donate his studio and papers to a gallery where it the studio might be re-housed and studied. Edwards approached the Tate, who apparently dithered for several years. Edwards turned around and offered it to the Hugh Lane. They did not dither. The studio was dismantled and rebuilt in Dublin with forensic precision, every item catalogued and meticulously photographed. The result is a huge digital archive of everything, books and pictures, thousands of objects that have made their way into his work in one way or another. Being an Irishman, it is very appropriate that the Studio return to the city of his birth. And going to a gallery that houses a collection bequeathed by Sir Hugh Lane that itself had some trouble finding a home seems oddly poignant and appropriate. Dublin did not make the same mistake twice, it would seem.

The Studio, at number 7 Reese Mews in South Kensington, was not just his studio but also where he lived. Perry Ogden was asked to photograph the studio before it was to be moved to Dublin. These are now on display and comprise shots not just of the studio but also of his kitchen and his bedroom and living space. I found these images very affecting I must say. There was a stunning simplicity about the space, and just a few photographs dotted around of those most important to him. There were many photographs too of his own work, and it is clear that in his living space he meditated often on his own iconic work. In his later years he became very wealthy and owned various other properties, but this was where he lived and worked for thirty years. And despite the money to complicate his life with beautiful objects and posh fixtures, he has a tiny studio with his bath in the kitchen and his bed in his living room.

There is something extremely interesting about seeing an artist's workspace. Over the past few months The Guardian have been doing a Writer's Room series in which a writer will talk a little bit about their own workspace. Bacon does refer to the mess he works in and how important that mess is. The studio has been rebuilt so that you take one step inside it, with a perspex glass door keeping you out. A couple of other peep-holes allow views of other parts of the studio. It is disconcerting too to watch the empty studio, with ripped canvases and torn bits of paper all over the floor. Like seeing a room full of potential creativity rather than seeing something Bacon meant us to see.

There are several paintings on display, a highlight being the work you can see in the photograph above, a figure that appears to be Bacon himself. It is a typical work but clearly quite unfinished. And that was one of the most moving points of the Bacon Studio. He was still working, and had more work to do.

Pausing, then Effecting

A quick visit to my local secondhand bookshop ended up a bit of a crisis of hyperventilation and overspending. The usual story. One of the retiring dons has off-loaded some of his books, and he had a research interest in good stuff, like Chaucer. This means that there were many things I wanted. I had to make three piles in the end. The stuff I couldn't live without. The stuff I could live without for today (but no guarantees about tomorrow). And the stuff I know I'll regret not buying. (That's usually as good as it gets, I'm afraid). In the end I think that I was exemplary in my restraint and good judgment. First to call out to me was M.B. Parkes' Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992). A hard to find book, very competitively priced (£20). That was the little gem. Something I've used, and coveted, and wanted to own for a long time. The rest was all criticism I don't own but have read (with varying degrees of attentiveness). Owning them now and having them on my shelf obviously means I can return to them in my own time and ruminate. (That's the justification). Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (CUP, 1973); David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (RKP, 1980), and very serendipitously Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 1992). Super stuff. A very happy bunny.

Bookbinders Bite Back

Those who have ever worked in an Irish library may have seen a little sticker in the bottom corner of the hardback library binding marked O'Reilly's. Well, it seems that globalization is now hitting the bookbinders and they are relocating to Eastern Europe where labour is cheaper. But the binders are having a sit-in, so well-done them. Sigh. I'm not optimistic.

The first John McGahern International Summer School was held over the past couple of days in Co. Leitrim. The programme looks interesting. I hope this Summer School establishes itself.

PhinisheD

Islamic and Christian Medieval Astronomy: A Shared Heritage

These past three evenings there have been three public lectures held at the Dept. of Physics. Tonight's was on the Astrolabe, and it was given by Dr Stephen Johnston, from the Museum of the History of Science. In it he discussed the history of the astrolabe, how it works, and gave a really interesting demonstration of a little java applet of an astrolabe in action. He went through some interesting astrolabes, both Arabic and Western, as well as many others. I began to see how one might work, and how versatile as instruments they actually are. You can measure not just time, but you can also plot the planets and thus, someone's horoscope. It is so easy to forget that Chaucer actually wrote a manual on how to use the astrolabe, ostensibly at the request of his son Lewis. There are many interesting aspects to this work, not least the prologue, where he talks very directly about the nature and role of translation (for which see the very interesting article by Andrew Cole, 'Chaucer's English Lesson', Speculum 77 [2002], 1128-1167). It also occurred to me that this was a very anthropocentric way of thinking about time, at once very local (you have to use a plate with your latitude on it), and also universal, transnational. You could use an Arabic astrolabe for example in Europe with the right latitude plate and a bit of thinking.
Below is a wristwatch astrolabe, made by Dr Ludwig Oechslin at the Swiss watchmakers Ulysse Nardin. I can just imagine Lewis looking for one for his birthday! (Chaucer would have been writing a longer complaint to his purse then I rather think).

Dorothy L. Sayers, Nine Tailors (Gollancz, 1934)

It is with a little embarrassment that I admit to reading only now the crime fiction of Dorothy Sayers. It was with her work on Dante that I was first acquainted, and only later saw that she was a such an accomplished crime novelist. The novel I started with is a late one in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, and it is a very enjoyable read. The prose is getting a little creaky, and Wimsey himself is a funny character and not entirely one that you can believe or sympathize with. However, the story is marvellous, and its dénouement reminds me a lot of Murder on the Orient Express, only a little better because it's more shocking in many ways. Having spend a very short time ringing bells once in Dublin I was totally absorbed in all the bell stuff, and you've got to be to enjoy the book. The story is also very complicated, which requires immense skill to keep control of, to prevent it from dissolving. I shall certainly read soon Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy Night. And it was with delight and shock with equal measure that I read about her work as a copywriter on the Toucan Guinness adverts. I'll never drink a pint the same way again.

Also just read another of the Jonathan Argyll series by Iain Pears, Giotto's Hand (HarperCollins, 1994). I find these very enjoyable, though they are very light and frothy things. Great for a lazy Sunday when you're not in the mood for the papers and you've had a late night. Next on my list is Dibdin's last, and that will get a review certainly.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Harper 2005)

In this beautiful book Joan Didion relentlessly explores her grief after the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. Her eye is unflinching, and at times you feel almost invasive reading it. The publicity has been huge, the praise deservedly lavish. A quick Google search will find all you need.
What I found very interesting about the book was they way that she researched grief. She was very practical about it, wanted to know what people's experiences have been, and read some very interesting material. For example she makes frequent reference to the great Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death From the Middle Ages to the Present Day, trans. Patricia Ranum (Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), and comes back to the medieval idea that the dying knew more about their own death than others. She cites the example of Gawain, in the Chanson de Roland, who responds to an incredulous question about the proximity of his death by saying: 'I tell you that I shall not live two days'. She repeats this like a mantra, reflecting on what Ariès says about this passage: 'Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left'. This leads her to look with what I can only describe as a searing set memories of his last hours, looking for any sign that John knew his end was near.

It's a beautiful book, and it's well worth reading. John Leonard, in his review in the NYRB (Vol. 52, No. 16, 20 Oct. 2005) ends aptly: 'I can't imagine dying without this book'. Didion's book is a modern answer to a medieval Ars moriendi, the survivor's guide.

Italy's Three Crowns, Bodleian Library

An exhibition to celebrate an International Dante seminar, to be held in September, has opened at the Bodleian Library, and runs from 19 June to 31 October 2007. It is a must see for anyone in the area. The exhibition celebrates all three fourteenth-century masters, but the balance of material is slightly weighted towards Dante, mainly because of its attention to the nineteenth century, and some fascinating material from the Tom Phillips archive. A beautiful and scholarly catalogue accompanies the exhibition, edited by the inestimable Martin McLoughlin and Zygmunt Baranski.

Highlights include the wonderful Holk. misc. 48 (left), Dante's Comedia, as well as Petrarch's own copy of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars and Ambrose's Letters, with his marginalia. There are many other beautiful manuscripts in the exhibition and I am looking forward to popping in regularly over the summer.

Go.

Paul Strohm (ed), Middle English (Oxford, 2007)

This volume appears as the first in a series called 'Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature'. As its editor explains in the introduction, it is not really designed to be a companion to anything. There are no 'major author' chapters for example. Instead, the chapter titles seeks to 'violate customary categorizations' (p. 2): 'Vision, Image, Text'; 'Symbolic Economies'; Episodes'; 'Feeling'; 'Learning to Live', for example. So it's not Middle English Literature or Middle English Culture or Textualities, or any such. No; we're past that very Twentieth Century approach. The result is a jumble, but very curiously pleasing. And how could a medievalist complain about such miscellaneous varietas? The book is valuable, interesting and full of gems.
There isn't the space to review every essay, though do have a look at the table of contents. The following are random thoughts and impressions. The book is divided into four parts, 'Conditions and Context', 'Vantage Points', 'Textual Kinds and Categories', and 'Writing and the World'.
Part one is very stimulating. The opening chapter, by Carol Symes, looks at the idea of the 'manuscript matrix', the complex interaction of canonical texts and canonical manuscripts. 'Nearly everything that we take for granted about the identification, classification, and evaluation of texts must therefore be subjected to rigorous scrutiny in the twenty-first century, so that we gain a new appreciation of the very different conditions in which all medieval writings came into being, while acknowledging that many of the texts that make up the medieval segment of the modern canon were elevated to that status based on a variety of criteria which does not account for the aesthetic, cultural, or social values of medieval people, nor the media through which these values were conveyed' (p. 21). [I'd have loved a bit more on Dante, especially since she cites Sanguineti's edition of the Commedia, p. 14 n18, unfortunately without comment on how this edition might have relevance to her argument]. Robert M. Stein's article, immediately following, similarly urges for a return to the manuscripts and a consideration of the codicological context of these texts in a multi-lingual environment. This issue is addressed, again, by Christopher Baswell's essay 'Multilingualism on the Page' (pp. 38-50). And later, Alexandra Gillespie in 'Books' urges a dynamic approach, implicating the likes of Foucault, MacKenzie and Adam Pynkhurst: 'If my first point is that there are lots of different ways of thinking about books, my second is that no one way of thinking about a book is secure in itself. A book is something that must be worked on and made sense of. It is discursively formed - and discursive formations, the forms of human knowledge, are partial and unstable' (p. 90). Some welcome essays surely include Bruce Holsinger's contribution entitled 'Liturgy', proceeding along a 'detheologizing' line of analysis [an approach familiar to all who've read Barolini].
And it would be remiss of me to ignore the remarkable essay entitled 'Vernacular Theology' by Vincent Gillespie (pp. 401-420), where he argues succinctly and elegantly [he rarely argues any other way] that 'vernacular theology' might now be better understood working 'with the assumption that each subperiod in medieval England produced multiple, interlocking, and overlapping vernacular theologies, each with complex intertextual and interlingual obligations and affiliations' (p. 406). His pages on Ullerston as a key figure in the Oxford translation debate will leave you hungry for more. It is hoped that this 'twenty-first century approach' will soon get another outing providing Gillespie with more space to explore and elucidate this fascinating figure.

Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2007)

The Lives of Others is the feature film debut of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, and it is can only be described as a stunning achievement. It tells the story of a playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend, a renowned actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), living in East Germany and trying to make art and toe the party line. They eventually come under the scrutiny of the secret police and it is then that Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) begins to observe them. His credentials are impeccable, as the chilling opening scenes testify. But he was not expecting to find himself emotionally involved in the lives of these two subjects, and especially Christa-Maria, and his navigation of these feelings - weaving perilously between the expectations of the State (itself a complex of vested interests and ideals) and his personal involvement. When Dreyman writes an inflammatory article dealing with the subject of suicide, in response to the death of a black-listed director friend, and publishes it anonymously in Der Spiegel, the pressure mounts and the State apparatus closes in.

The film deals beautifully with the personal and the political, the microcosm and macrocosm of our lives and how we reconstruct lived experience. The Stasi relentlessly records every (seemingly absurd) detail building up an enormous archive. Dreyman, years later, returns to the Stasi offices to read his own files and only then makes sense of what happened. It is a remarkable and moving scene, and results in him writing a novel, Sonata for a Good Man (a piece of music given him by the director who committed suicide). The archive had been a menacing and threatening instrument used against the country's residents, but now becomes a heuristic source for rebuilding their lives.

I highly recommend this stimulating, moving and affecting film. You won't be disappointed.

Kalamazoo

It would appear that the Babel sessions at Kalamazoo went fantastically well, and the wonderful Eileen Joy is the talk of the town. This was so obviously going to happen sooner or later. I was supposed to give a paper on that session and part of me is upset I could not go - hugely upset really. But I'm also relieved that I didn't get to go because I think my paper would have been easily the most boring in the session, from the sounds of things. Anyways, the papers are going to be posted, so keep an eye out. A highlight is Timothy Spence's paper on Books of Hours and iPods.

Posting is down to a minimum on Miglior acque these days as the workload has increased, but I'll get down to a couple of posts soon on the wonderful film The Lives of Others, and Paul Strohm's edited collection Middle English which I am greatly enjoying. Do read, in the meantime, Estelle Stubbs' very interesting article in the latest Review of English Studies on Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 (a ms of the Canterbury Tales). Super stuff. And tonight Guglielmo Gorni is coming to talk about Dante, which I'll hopefully blog.

Live from The Bayeux Tapestry

Chaucer Revealed, sort of...

The wonderful collaborative medieval blog In The Middle has recently had the Chaucer blogger contribute. This had been promised and was eagerly anticipated. But what a surprise to find that it was written in the blogger's own voice. It was full of colloquial and informal American speak such as dang and like and stuff, and it all sounded so much less knowing that the Chaucer voice he uses. Some of those who left comments seemed to betray a little of this disappointment, with one even comparing the voice to that of Holden Caulfield. And now Stephanie Trigg has posted on the whole question of voice and identity and anonymity etc, and wonders about the disappointment at the confessional aspect to the Chaucer blogger's post. All very interesting stuff.

PS: apologies for the lungo silenzio. Will post soon with the usual psychotic book rants.