This is Dolly. There are more pictures and videos of her here.

• Sad cat news
• Posy in the wastepaper basket
• New camera, same old clichés
• Napowrimo #9: The Ocelot
• Links

• Links
• Links
• Links of the year 2008
• Links of the year 2007
• Links

I’d never heard of this species before, but I saw one on Wandsworth Common yesterday and looked it up. Not quite as exciting as its friends the cockchafer and rose chafer, but still one of the more interesting beetles I’ve seen in the UK.

Incidentally, Wikipedia tells me that the cockchafer, quite an amusing name in itself, is ‘colloquially called may bug, billy witch, or spang beetle’. Spang beetle is particularly fine.

• Wildlife round-up
• Some local insects
• Modigliani at the RA
• Ladies, stags and owls
• Glow-worms

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links

Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language…. This is the ‘babu English,’ the semi-literate, half-learned English of the bazaars, transmuted by erudition, highbrow monkeying around, and the impish magic of Desani’s unique phrasing and rhythm into an entirely new kind of literary voice.

It would be interesting to read the whole article which that comes from, but it’s hidden behind the New Yorker’s pay wall.

The book is narrated by the H. Hatterr of the title, the son of a European merchant seaman and a woman from Burma, raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. It’s anecdotal and episodic in structure; there isn’t, at least for me at first reading, any kind of overarching plot. Picaresque might be a good word for it.

It is somewhat ‘difficult’ — it’s not for people who like their prose plain. But googling around while writing this post I’ve seen it compared to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and it’s certainly not that difficult. The prose is sometimes elaborate and colourful but otherwise fairly conventional: it’s not all stream-of-consciousnessy or anything. And there’s not a great deal of vocabulary from Indian languages. There’s more English public-school slang than there is Hindi.

PRESUMPTION: ‘Kismet’, i.e., fate — if at all anything, and as potent as suspected for centuries — is a dam’ baffling thing!
It defies a feller’s rational: his entire conception as to his soma, pneuma, and psyche!
Why did a feller like me commit matrimony with a femme fatale like Mrs H. Hatterr (née Rialto), the waxed Kiss-curl?
A personal query, but I don’t mind answering…
If only I could!
All I know is that I wanted to raise a family: add to the world’s vital statistics and legitimate: have a niche in the community, for my own kid, to hand out the wager till the end. And since you can’t achieve this without a wife — the neighbours wouldn’t let you! the police wouldn’t let you! — I equipped myself with the blarney-phrases, convinced this female that she was real jam, had me led to the middle aisle and gave the ready ‘I do’ to the amenwallah her brother had hired for the occasion.
This I did, knowing, hell, that between us was all the temperamental difference in the world!
Till death us do part! this museum-piece and I! And that promise — what a stingo! — after a conflict dating back to the donkey’s Sundays!
The female — contrast? — was poles apart: though, between the cur Jenkins, me and the Duke Humphrey, it did seem once that she was going to win my regards for good, by delivering me an heir-presumptive — my own piccolo le fils — to survive me (and be added to the looney-bin). But despite days and days of biological observation and anticipation — the wasted reference to the obstetric table and pre-occupation with the signs of labour — it didn’t come off. (Backed the wrong filly, or, maybe, something the matter with me as create-or!)

You probably have a pretty good idea whether that’s the kind of thing you like. Personally I enjoyed it, stylistically; occasionally there would be a particularly dense paragraph or two and I would glaze over a bit, but more often it was lively and funny.

My only reservation really is the one I have about a lot of these less traditional novels: I think perhaps the whole is less than the sum of its parts. I think people often overstate the importance of plots, but they are at least one way of holding a book together. Still, I’m glad I read it.

» The picture, ‘a Sadhu‘, is © Chris de Rham and used under a CC by-nc-nd licence. Sadhus feature quite heavily in the book.

• Cloud Atlas
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
• Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma
• Two Lives by Vikram Seth
• The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna

I’m grateful for the music. But it can rarely have been more fitting to say: rest in peace.

• Poet of the Year…
• music on the net
• YouTube Madness
• Yet again with the iTunes icons
• War—hunh—Good God, y’all

• Some local insects
• Flies, again.
• Wildlife round-up
• Well, it amused *me*.
• Wasp nest super close-up

Someone has finally invented a form of the game where every ball is interesting. Before it started, the assumption was that T20 would be all about sixes; but it’s equally true that it’s all about dot balls. I mean really, a form of cricket where a dot ball is an exciting event: it’s a fucking miracle.

And I love the fact that it legitimises six-hitting. Even Test-cricket purists love to see big sixes. But really, in Test cricket, it’s a self-indulgent shot; the shot of a show-off. You can argue, perhaps, that it’s a valuable weapon in the psychological battle between bowler and batsman; and there are a few situations, like hastening a declaration or when a batsman is running out of partners, where it makes more sense; but the honest truth is that usually the extra two runs are just not worth the risk.*

In 20 over cricket, though, where run rates are so important, it is an entirely reasonable calculated risk. Even in Twenty20 there’s a risk of overvaluing sixes; it’s noticeable that the most successful batsman of the tournament, Tillekeratne Dilshan, is not a big six-hitter, and has racked up most of his runs as fours. But it is certainly a legitimate shot, and as a supporter you can just enjoy the spectacle, without that queasy sense that it’s all about to go pear-shaped.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the different pleasures of Test cricket. Admittedly, it can be the most tedious game in the world. But at its best, the slowness of Test cricket is its great strength. It’s the gradual ratcheting up of tension, the shifting balance of bat and ball, the psychological endurance needed for a long innings. At its best it doesn’t just produce exciting moments, it produces engrossing passages of play that develop over an hour or an afternoon — which is why it never works that well as highlights. It’s seeing the batsman playing and missing over and over, the ball whistling past off stump, that creates the atmosphere for the release of tension when the batsmen hits a beautiful straight drive for four — or the bowler sends the off stump cartwheeling.

But if we are going to have a short form of the game, then let’s get rid of the fifty over game, which is neither one thing or the other, and so often drifts towards a result which is entirely predictable with twenty overs to go.

And incidentally, if there were ever two countries who were in need of a bit of light relief to distract them from the more dismal realities of their domestic politics, it would be Pakistan and Sri Lanka. So let’s hope for a great final.

* Kevin Pietersen has played the same number of tests, 52, as Don Bradman; Bradman scored six sixes, KP has scored 48. Bradman converted 70% of his 50s into centuries and 29% into double or triple centuries. KP has converted 53% of his 50s into 100s, which is actually pretty good, but only scored one double hundred. Admittedly, comparing anyone to Bradman is a bit harsh. But still.

» The photo, Brooding sky @ the cricket, is © Mark Elkins and used under a CC by-nc licence. I suppose it’s a bit odd to illustrate the post with a shot of the groundstaff preparing the pitch instead of the actual play, but I liked the shot.

• You can tell I have something I should be doing
• Tweaking sports
• The sad decline of West Indies cricket
• The Golden Ticket
• the clean, dry corpse of a parrot

EDIT: they now have a much improved website up, so they obviously just hadn’t got their act together yet. Who knows, maybe they have some booklets ready as well.

The Futurists were the early Italian Modernists — most of the paintings were pre-First World War — who were keen to embrace modernity, speed, machines and suchlike. They’re probably most famous not for any of the paintings but for the Futurist Manifesto, written by Futurist poet Marinetti. And whatever its aesthetico-philosophical merits, it’s punchy stuff; this is point 4:

4.—We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

Admittedly some of it is a bit less appealing; this would be unpleasant anyway, but it’s even more so in the context of the upcoming war:

9.—We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10.—We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

Which segues neatly into the other thing that the futurists are famous for: Fascism. You can see how all the rhetoric about war and power and modernity might appeal to the same people who liked Fascism; and after the war, Marinetti founded a Futurist political party which ended up being absorbed into Mussolini’s Fascists. But the Tate makes a very reasonable case that it is unfair to tar all the Futurists with the same brush. So much happened between 1909 and the 1930s — the war, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, for a start — that you need to be very cautious in drawing any link between provocative aesthetic statements before the war and the politics of 25-30 years later.

And in fact many of the pre-War Futurists had left the movement by then, apparently. The reality of full-scale modern mechanised warfare left them less enthusiastic about the idea of machinery and war. And indeed some of them, like the Russian Futuro-Cubists, went in the other direction to produce Constructivist posters for collectivist farms.

One thing I rather enjoyed was one of the many manifestos: ‘Vital English Art’. This was published in the Observer in 1914:

VITAL ENGLISH ART.

FUTURIST MANIFESTO.

I am an Italian Futurist poet, and a passionate admirer of England. I wish, however, to cure English Art of that most grave of all maladies—passéism. I have the right to speak plainly and without compromise, and together with my friend Nevinson, an English Futurist painter, to give the signal for battle.

AGAINST :

1.—The worship of tradition and the conservatism of the Academies, the commercial acquiescence of English artists, the effeminacy of their art and their complete absorption towards a purely decorative sense.
2.—The pessimistic, sceptical and narrow views of the English public, who stupidly adore the pretty-pretty, the commonplace, the soft, the sweet, and mediocre, the sickly revivals of medievalism, the Garden Cities with their curfews and artificial battlements, the may-pole Morris dances, Æstheticism, Oscar Wilde, the Pre-Raphaelites, Neo-primitives and Paris.
3.—The perverted snob who ignores or despises all English daring, but welcomes eagerly all foreign originality and daring.

[...]

8.—The old grotesque idea of genius—drunken, filthy, ragged, outcast ; drunkenness the synonym of Art, Chelsea the Montmartre of London ; the Post-Rossettis with long hair under the sombrero, and other passéist filth.
9.—The sentimentality with which you load your pictures—to compensate, perhaps, for your praiseworthy utter lack of sentimentality in life.

[...]

WE WANT:

[all the usual Futurist guff; I can't be bothered to type any of it out]

F. T. MARINETTI,
Italian Futurist Movement (Milan).
C. R. W. NEVINSON,
Art Rebel Centre (London).

Ah, what fun. You gotta love the ‘Art Rebel Centre’.

As a geeky aside, the multi-media guide (basically an audio guide with a few still photos) was excellent. Last time I got an audio guide at Tate Modern I said this:

The commentary has a kind of coy, knowing, vaguely patronising tone, as though the narrator was trying to seduce a slightly dim 12-year-old…. It was also short of insights that reached beyond the blindingly obvious. If I’m standing in front of a painting, I don’t need the guide to carefully tell me what the painting looks like; I want some kind of extra information that I can’t see for myself.

… instead of the standard audioguides with a big keypad, the Tate has got some little touchscreen devices. Which would be fine in principle, except that the touchscreen is erratically responsive, you have to carry around a stylus, and the user interface is badly designed…. I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure it out and nearly crumbled and went and asked for help. Even when it was working, some design decisions were just bad; for example, when you pressed the ‘Go’ button to start a recording, the screen changed and the play/pause appeared on exactly the same part of the screen, with the result that many times, I accidentally pressed the screen twice and found I had paused the audio by mistake. And just when I was coming to the end of the exhibition, it crashed and I lost the tour altogether.

Well, this time the guide was much better written; it actually added useful context and information I wouldn’t otherwise have. And they’ve sorted out the hardware by getting some iPod Touches. Admittedly since I have an iPhone it wasn’t a fair test of how intuitive it would be to just pick up and use, but it has to be better than the crap they were using before.

Personally I would like it even better if they would let me buy the guide through iTunes and use it on my own phone or iPod, with my own headphones: either as a stand-alone application or just as a set of audio or video files. Why not? That would save them worrying about people nicking their equipment — I had to leave some ID as a deposit — and it would mean I could listen to the introductory blurbs on the train on the way to the exhibition. Or refer to them at home later.

» Carlo Carrà’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli is currently in the Tate but normally lives at MoMA. Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is part of the Tate’s own collection.

• Visiting the crack
• Rousseau at the Tate
• Rothko at Tate Modern
• Kandinsky at the Tate
• Gilbert and George at Tate Modern

I found The Golden Boat: Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel while I was browsing through the Salt website, looking for something I could buy to support their ‘Just One Book’ campaign. I decided to kill two birds with one stone and buy it as my book from Slovenia for the Read The World challenge. As a point of geographical and historical pedantry, Kosovel wasn’t actually born in Slovenia. As far as I can gather from the Wikipedia article, Slovenia never existed as an independent nation before June 1991, so anyone born in Slovenia is still under 18 today. Kosovel was born in 1904 in Austria-Hungary and died in 1926 in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (which became Yugoslavia three years later).

Kosovel wrote in free verse from the start, and if I’ve understood the introduction correctly, he was the first person to do so in Slovenian. But in subject matter and language, as far as one can tell in translation, the early poems are fairly conventional: low-key, atmospheric lyrics which are rooted in the Slovenian landscape, and particularly the Karst,† a rugged limestone plateau where a wind called the burja blows down from the Alps. I rather liked this early work, but I can see that if he had died even younger and these were the only poems that survived, he might not seem to be a particularly significant poet.

On a Grey Morning

On a grey morning
I walk the streets downtown,
the fog cuts into my burning eyes,
it cuts into my throat,
and is cold around my heart.

Then, from the bakeries,
the smell of fresh rye bread,
but the bakeries are still dark,
the street silent, nobody yet around
and I feel tight in my soul.

It is the memory of the Karst:
a village strewn among the rocks
that this black bread reminds me of,
this healthy scent from the bakeries
that smells so much like a caress.

Later his poetry became more avant-garde. He called himself a Constructivist, although apparently the connection with Russian Constructivism is not especially close.‡ Whatever the terminology, he is certainly part of the broader movement of European modernism, of Dada and Surrealism and Futurism and God knows what else. The poems become more fragmented, more opaque, more aggressive, there are sprinklings of mathematical symbols and typographical experimentation with different sized text and vertical text. There is some continuity of theme; the night and moonlight which are such a feature of the Karst poems are still constantly present, the Karst landscape and the burja still appear from time to time. But the poems become wider-ranging, more political. The death of Europe becomes a recurring theme, no doubt a response to having lived through the First World War: Kosovel was too young to fight, but he didn’t have to go war because the war came to him, or the town where he lived as a teenager.

Delirium

A martyrdom of thoughts.
Blue sea.
Grey prison.
A soldier is impaling
hopeless thoughts
on his bayonet
in front of the window

Pardon me. ‘O, nothing.’
Sigaretta.
Eine Edison.
I hear the blue sea
butting monotonously
into my skull

And another example:

The Red Rocket

—–I am a red rocket, I ignite
myself and burn and fade out.
—–Yes, I in the red vestments!
—–I with the red heart!
—–I with the red blood!
—–I am escaping tirelessly, as if
I alone must reach fulfilment.
—–And the more I escape, the more I burn.
—–And the more I burn, the more I suffer.
—–And the more I suffer, the faster I fade out.
—–O, I, who want to live forever. And
I go, a red man, over a green field;
above me, over the azure lake of silence,
clouds of iron, o, but I go,
I go, a red man!
—–Everywhere is silence: in the fields, in the sky,
in the clouds, I’m the only one escaping, burning
with my scalding fire and
I can’t reach the silence.

I enjoyed the poems enough, and found them interesting enough, to be glad I bought the book, though I don’t know that many of them will really stay with me. As ever with poetry in translation, you never quite know what you’re missing, although at least with free verse you don’t have the added complication of the translator having to produce some kind of rhyme and metre in the English. Not that I have any reason to doubt the merits of this translation, by Bert Pribac and David Brooks ‘with the assistance of Teja Brooks Pribac’; I just have doubts about the whole exercise of translating poetry. But perhaps that’s a subject for another day.

*Not, as I keep hearing inside my head, the Slitheen Rambo. Though poetry written by the Slitheen Rambo might be quite interesting, as a piece of xenoanthropology if nothing else.

† Or indeed Kras. Rather like the book about Cyprus I was reading the other day, this is one of those regions where everywhere has several different names in different languages. The translators use Karst, the Germanised form of the name, perhaps for its associations with the kind of geological landscape that is named after it.

‡ I’m just repeating what it says in the introduction at this point. I don’t know enough about Constructivism or its relationship with the many other isms of the time to make that judgement.

» The photo is Škocjan, © inyucho and used under a CC attribution licence. inyucho says: ‘A large collapsed doline, typical for the Kras region from which the term “karst” is derived.’

• The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmoud Darwish
• How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić
• Black Stone by Grace Mera Molisa
• wikipoetry and the wikinovel
• Shellier than thou

Ondaatje is really a very good writer. His books seem to have a dream-like quality, not so much because of what happens but the way that it is presented to us. Part of it is the way that the focus shifts around, not just between the main characters but an assortment of others who are only loosely connected to the central plot; and shifting backwards and forwards in time as well.

Also, if you were someone who just read books for the plot you might feel that it had its priorities oddly skewed: an ‘important’ event will go past rather rapidly, and then the book will dwell lovingly on a scene which has no particular narrative importance, but is atmospheric or striking or thematically apt.* It’s a kind of structuring which would seem very natural in a long poem but is a bit less common in novels.

As much as I liked the book, it was somewhat depressing. Perhaps a novel about ethnic conflict and political atrocities should be depressing, but still. Obviously I knew there was a long-running conflict in Sri Lanka, and of course it has been in the news recently as the war (or that phase of the war) drew to a bloody end; but I was blissfully ignorant of any of the details, and for me, Sri Lanka was largely associated with cricket. And it’s much more pleasant to associate a country with flamboyant opening batsmen than with heads on spikes. The book doesn’t actually wallow in the atrocities as much as it could do — they are evoked sparingly rather than described at length — but they are quite disturbing enough without that kind of pornographic attention to detail.

I had already counted a different book by Ondaatje — In the Skin of a Lion — as my book from Sri Lanka for the Read The World challenge, but that book is all set in Canada, so it seemed appropriate to read a book with a bit more Sri Lanka in it.

* I would hate to have to justify that sentence with close reference to the text, but thankfully I’m a blogger not a scholar.

» The picture, ‘Old Buddha, Sri Lanka‘ is © Rahul Barraez D’Lucca and used under a CC attribution licence.

• Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma
• The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
• The President by Miguel Angel Asturias
• The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
• The Maias by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz

Anyway, I thought I’d do a little preliminary count of my own at lunchtime and just counted PLs in the half hour between 12.30 and 1.00. The result: 36. Slightly over one a minute.

What’s interesting is that on the one hand, that’s a staggering number, when you extrapolate out over the whole country: butterflies going past at the rate of one a minute for days at a time over the whole of England (the whole of Northern Europe, possibly). And yet if you weren’t paying attention, it would be possible to be out in the garden and not even notice that this huge natural phenomenon was going on.

• Ladies, stags and owls
• Some local insects
• Butterflies
• bird of the year: best performances in a supporting role
• Wildlife round-up

• Links
• Links of the year 2008
• Links of the year 2007
• Links
• Links

Then the next day there were a few in the garden, and mentions of them started popping up on the blogs and Twitter feeds of the handful of British natural history bloggers and twitterers I follow. And so I started thinking maybe this was going to be one of those years, when all the conditions come together and they are suddenly all over the place. Something that became very clear when I saw this tweet from @SallyCourt on Sunday:

An incredible sight at Strumpshaw Fen today with hundreds, probably thousands of Painted Ladies flying west. Also Swallowtails + H Dragonfly

In fact over the past week we’ve been in the middle of a massive movement of painted ladies across the whole country. Apparently it’s because they had good weather for thistles in Morocco over the winter. It probably isn’t a coincidence that I saw quite so many of them in Provence; I didn’t think that much of it at the time, since they’re a more common species in the Mediterranean, but there were an awful lot there. Maybe some of them were the same ones that are now fluttering across England.

It hasn’t been particularly obvious that they’ve been migrating in my garden; there are a few flowers they like and so I’ve been seeing them fluttering back and forth, in no apparent hurry to get anywhere. But while it might appear to be the same three butterflies going round and round in circles, I guess it has probably been a whole sequence of new ones.

Today, after a couple of days of rain when I guess all the butterflies have been sensibly laying low, I saw one fly past outside the window, so I went along to the local park. And sure enough, there they were. Not in their thousands, but a regular stream of them passing through, looking much more determined, flying more or less straight by, heading about NNW. One every few minutes rather than one every few seconds, but once you knew what you were looking for, it was still quite striking.

Here’s an intriguing snippet about painted ladies from my butterfly guide:

Reported occasionally from Iceland, which has no indigenous butterflies.

I bet a few will make it to Iceland this year.

So that was good. My other good local sighting was this (apologies for the rubbishy iPhone photo):

That’s a Stag Beetle. There are many species of stag beetle worldwide, so to be exact it’s Lucanus cervus, but in the UK it’s just Stag Beetle because we only have the one species with proper antlers. There is also, to be pedantic, the lesser stag beetle, but that’s much less interesting.

South London isn’t exactly a wildlife stronghold for many species, but stag beetles are increasingly rare nationally and doing pretty well around here, so it’s good to see one. It’s also good to see them because they are just fabulous little beasties.

While I’m on insects, a few things from Provence. We saw lots of butterflies, most of then just too hard (or too much work) to identify: blues, fritillaries, either Pale or Berger’s Clouded Yellow and so on. But also Swallowtail, Scarce Swallowtail, Red Admiral, Brimstone, Orange Tip. And this, the Southern White Admiral; another iPhone picture but it has come out looking surprisingly good. Most of the time they didn’t actually look that blue, but the light was obviously catching it just right.

As well as butterflies, there were a few other things; lots of burnet moths flying around, which are always nice, and the Narrow-bordered Bee Hawkmoth I mentioned earlier. Those big black ants which are one of my earliest memories of southern Europe. And one critter that was a real puzzle. Take a look at this:

Now maybe you know what that is, but it confused the hell out of me. It looks most like a dragonfly, sort of, and it flies rather like a dragonfly, but the head isn’t right and look at those antennae! They were almost enough to make me think it was some kind of weird clearwing moth or even weirder butterfly — but it just doesn’t look right for either.

Thankfully for the sake of my sanity, my mother’s superior Google skills came to the rescue when we got back: it is an owlfly. A what? I’d never heard of them. They are related, Wikipedia informs me, to the lacewings and antlions, something which is not at all apparent when you see them sitting with their wings spread like dragonflies, but which makes more sense when you occasionally see one with its wings folded.

» All the pictures except the last were taken by me. The last is Libelloides coccajus, uploaded to Flickr by and © Le pot-ager (Philippe Vannier).

• Some local insects
• Butterfly update
• Wildlife round-up
• Summer Chafer
• Modigliani at the RA

• Links
• Yay for Blasphemy!
• Those crazy Brits!
• Tender American sensibilities
• Ten books to explain America

Papadakis only managed to spend a month in the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and was accompanied by government minders the whole time, although as well as that he spent a few months in Turkey itself and a year in the village of Pyla/Pile which is within the UN-controlled ‘Dead Zone’.

I came to it vaguely expecting it to be a basically two-sided conflict, Greeks vs. Turks, but of course it’s much messier than that; there are tensions between the Greek Cypriots and Greeks from Greece, and between Turkish Cypriots and Turks from Turkey. There are tensions on both sides of the divide between those who see themselves as Cypriot first and Greek or Turkish second, and those who look to the motherland, who see themselves as Greeks or Turks who happen to live in Cyprus.

And the different groups have quite different views of history; not just the relevant modern history, the half-century or so that takes in Cyprus winning independence from the British, the Turkish invasion and so on, but also the longer history of classical Greece and Byzantium and the Ottoman empire.

I think it’s probably inevitable, as a British reader, that it reminded me above all of Northern Ireland; but I guess all these local religio-culturo-ethnic conflicts are fundamentally rather similar: deeply intractable and ultimately pointless.

Weather forecasts in Cyprus did not just tell the weather, I now noted. They expressed positions on the Cyprus Problem. ‘The Flag’, the Turkish Cypriot TV channel, broadcast a daily news bulletin in Greek for the enlightenment of Greek Cypriots. During the weather forecast, they gave temperatures only in towns in the north, where no Greek Cypriots lived. The towns were called by their Turkish names. On the Greek Cypriot side, RIK, the state TV station, used a map of Cyprus without a dividing line, but only mentioned the temperatures in the south. other Greek Cypriot channels, right-wing private ones, regarded this as unpatriotic. they also showed temperatures in the north to make the point that those areas too belonged to Greek Cypriots.

Maps in Cyprus, as elsewhere, were a political instrument. I remembered the map of Greece — not of Cyprus — at school. In order for Cyprus to appear in the map of Greece, it was cut and placed in a box next to Crete. I only became aware of this when I first saw Turkish Cypriot maps. No need to cut and paste to include Cyprus in the map of Turkey. Greek Cypriot maps showing Cyprus in the world at large always extended westwards, positioning Cyprus in a European context. The never showed Cyprus in the Middle East or Africa. The problem with the ‘Cyprus in Europe’ maps was that bits of Africa, the Middle East, and — sadly — Turkey were visible. One such map by the Greek Cypriot Public Information Office presented such undesirable bits as blank. The biggest challenge was to make a map of Cyprus that included Greece but not Turkey. The map shown as background during the news on The Word, the Church channel, managed best, with Turkey obscured by mist, as if weather conditions had rendered it invisible.

Echoes from the Dead Zone is my book from Cyprus for the Read The World challenge.

» The photo, crossing the “green line”, is © danceinthesky and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

• An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
• Yay for Salman
• scribble scribble
• Reading is a way round the world
• Read the world: a map

It takes the form of the notebook jottings of the customer at a bar called Credit Gone West. Perhaps rather than try to explain:

let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I – Broken Glass – can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish, and had to be picked up off the the street when he got drunk, which shows you should never joke with the boss, he takes everything literally, when he gave me this notebook he said from the start it was only for him, no one else would read it, and when I asked why he was so set on this notebook, he said he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory, that the days when grandmothers reminisced from their  deathbeds was gone now, this is the age of the written word, that’s all that’s left, the spoken word’s just black smoke, wild cat’s piss, the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like ‘in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns‘, every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say ‘depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down‘, so I thought I’d jot a few things down here from time to time, just to make him happy, though I’m not sure what I’m saying, I admit I’ve begun to quite enjoy it, I won’t tell him that, though, he’ll get ideas and start to push me to do more and more, and I want to be free to write when I want, when I can, there’s nothing worse than forced labour, I’m not his ghost, I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else, by the time he reads this, though, I’ll no longer be one of his customers, I’ll be dragging my bag of bones about some other place, just slip him the document quietly before I go saying ‘mission accomplished’

That’s the whole of the first chapter; the entire book is written without full stops in this way as long, run-on sentences. Generally it’s a pretty effective device, though at times it can be a bit tiring to read.

The first few chapters tell the stories of other customers at the bar, and then the second half of the book concentrates on Broken Glass’s own life, and how he went from being a school teacher to a drunkard. As the material becomes more personal the tone shifts from comic to melancholy, and the book ended up being more moving than I would have expected after the first couple of chapters.

I heard Mabanckou interviewed on the radio (or a podcast?) and one thing he said was that he didn’t particularly want to write about politics. Well, that’s fine by me. Over the course of reading books from every African country I can see that I’m likely to read an awful lot about civil war and dictatorship, both because that’s a real part of the African experience and because it is the kind of thing that is likely to attract Western publishers; so it’s good to read more personal narratives as well.

Broken Glass is my book from Congo for the Read The World challenge.

» the photo is 032_BIERE NGOK, uploaded to Flickr by & © jmlaurent.

• Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma
• Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa
• A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o
• We killed Mangy-Dog by Luis Bernardo Honwana
• Told by Starlight in Chad by Joseph Brahim Seid

• Links
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
• Top ten animals I’d most like to see
• Top ten animals – #9, Chimpanzee
• Top ten animals – #8, Narwhal

One of the blurbs on the back compares him to Flaubert — ‘Eça de Queiroz rivals Flaubert in his suavely satiric pictures of provincial torpor and metropolitan glitter’ — which is another plausible choice.

Among the themes running through the book, the one I found most interesting was the question of Portugal’s place in the world, which is seen in terms of tradition vs. modernity but also Portugal’s cultural relationship with other European powers: there’s a real sense of a smallish country on the edge of Europe looking towards London and Paris with a hint of an inferiority complex. So the characters swing between claiming unique virtues for Portugal and admiring, for example, a dress that could only have come from Paris. Every discussion, of literature or an event or whatever, turns to comparisons with other countries; the yardstick for quality is an external one. It’s oddly like reading post-colonial fiction, even though Portugal was in fact colonist rather than colonised.

I think what I liked most about the book was the leisurely pace of it. Events at which nothing much happens — or at least nothing which is essential to advancing the plot —are allowed to spread over five or ten pages. There’s a 30-page description of them going to the races which is a big set piece within the book, full of social observation, incident and humour, but none of it is actually crucial to the plot. On another occasion, in another mood, I might have just been bored by it; but this time I enjoyed that expansiveness.

In Lisbon, from the Grémio to the Casa Havanesa, there was already talk of ‘Ega’s mistress’. He, for his part, was trying very hard to keep his happiness safe from prying eyes. While perfectly serious about the complicated precautions this entailed, he also took a romantic delight in mystery, and so always chose the most out-of-the-way places, n the outskirts of the city, in the area near the slaughterhouse, for his furtive meetings with the maid who brought him Raquel’s letters. But his every gesture (event he affected way he had of pretending not to look at the clock) revealed the enormous pride he felt in that elegant adultery. He was perfectly aware that his friends knew all about this glorious adventure of his, and were au fait with the whole drama, and this was perhaps why, when in the company of Carlos or the others, he never even mentioned her name or betrayed the slightest flicker of emotion.

One night, however, a night lit by a calm white moon, as he and Carlos were walking along together in silence on their way to Ramalhete, Ega, doubtless filled by a sudden inrush of passion, uttered a heartfelt sigh, reached out his arms and declared to the moon in a tremulous voice:

Oh, laisse-toi donc aimer, oh, l’amour c’est la vie!

This escaped his lips like the beginning of a confession. Carlos, at his side, said nothing, and simply blew his cigar smoke out into the air.

Ega clearly felt somewhat ridiculous, because he immediately recovered himself and pretended a mere literary interest.

‘They can say what they want, but there’s no one like old Hugo.’

Carlos still said nothing, but he recalled Ega’s Naturalist outbursts, in which he had inveighed against Victor Hugo, calling him a ’spiritualist blabbermouth’, ‘an imitative yokel’, ‘a lyrical old fool’ and worse.

But that night, Ega, the great phrase-maker, went on:

‘Ah yes, old Hugo, the heroic champion of the eternal truths. We need a bit of idealism, damn it, because the ideal might one day become reality.’

And with this formal recantation he shattered the silence of the streets.

It’s good stuff. Another of the blurbs says ‘Eça ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century’, and without deciding at this moment exactly where I think he ought to come in the leaderboard for C19th novelists, I would say this: The Maias is undoubtedly a substantial, high quality and important novel, and at the very least deserves to be better known. I certainly hadn’t even heard of it before I noticed it in a bookshop.

A quick name-check for Margaret Jull Costa, who translated this edition, and has done a good job of it, as far as I can tell without knowing any Portuguese.

The Maias is my book from Portugal for the Read The World challenge. I realised after making up my original list that I had actually read a book from Portugal already: The Lusiads by Luís de Camões, which I read in a second hand copy of a 1950s Penguin Classic edition which I seem to have lost. But I was happy to read another.

» The photo, which comes from Wikipedia, is of Eça de Queiroz.

• Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma
• The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
• The President by Miguel Angel Asturias
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• The Hostage by Zayd Mutee‘ Dammaj

• Some local insects
• Napowrimo #2: Aeolian Squid
• Links of the year 2008
• Links of the year 2007
• Links

Then today we went for a walk somewhere picked for no other reason than there was a big lake on the map, and again it was a lovely landscape with masses of flowers. Nightingales singing beautifully, and this time I managed to see subalpine warbler. And even better, red-backed shrike, which is a bird I’ve only seen once before, many years ago, and then I saw a juvenile or a female, so it was a boring mottled brown instead of the attractive male I saw today with a pink tummy, a rufous back, grey head and a rakish highwayman’s mask.

Then just to top it off, a family of crested tits turned up at the villa during lunch. So that was nice.

• Exciting wildlife update
• Wales photos
• I’m in Wales
• Holiday update
• Whales watched.

And the treecreepers nesting in the roof, which I think I mentioned on Twitter but not here, turned out to be Short-toed Treecreeper. I thought initially it was a new bird for my life list, but I realised I saw them in Spain a couple of years ago. Still, it was a challenge to identify them, so I’m glad I managed.

And most exciting, what initially looked like a big fat bumblebee but turned out to be a bee mimic: the Narrow-bordered Bee Hawkmoth. I’d post a link but I’m blogging from the iPhone and it’s a PITA. I’ve wanted to see one of these little clear winged hawkmoths for years and years and years, though, so that was very pleasing.

• Good bird days
• Wales photos
• Rainforest
• I’m in Wales
• Holiday update

Some kind of lizard orchid. Not the prettiest orchid I’ve found, but maybe the coolest.

There’s a gecko behind the sofa on the other side of the room.

• Good bird days
• Exciting wildlife update
• Wales photos
• Rain, rain go away
• I’m in Wales

I’ll post some pics tomorrow. If I feel like it.

• Holiday update
• Good bird days
• Exciting wildlife update
• Whales watched.
• whale-watching

So: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo (translated from the Portuguese by Sheila Faria Glaser) is my book from Cape Verde for the Read The World challenge. For those who don’t know, Cape Verde is an island nation, an archipelago off the coast of Africa at about the point where the continent projects furthest into the Atlantic. It was uninhabited until the Portuguese started using it as a trading port, I learn from Wikipedia, and the population is largely of mixed European and African origin.

That history may explain why it feels more like a book from Latin America than from Africa. I would be hard-pressed to explain exactly what I mean by that: a sense that the European cultural influence is more deeply embedded is part of it, although I can’t immediately articulate what makes me say that. It may be no more than the fact that the book is full of names like Senhor da Silva Araújo, of course.

The book tells the story of a self-made local businessman; it starts with the reading of his will, which reveals unexpected news, and moves back and forward through his life, building up into complex portrait. It’s short — 151 pages — but nicely written, wryly humorous and open to the absurdities as well as the tragedies of the human condition.

» The picture, Ribeira Grande, Santo Antão, is © Cabo Verde 2008 and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

• Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma
• Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
• Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa
• A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o
• We killed Mangy-Dog by Luis Bernardo Honwana

My favourite picture was actually one by Robert Peake the Elder, included to show what English court portraiture was like before Van Dyck, which normally lives in the Met in New York.

Gorgeous, innit. I’m not suggesting, btw, that this painting offers any more psychological insight than van Dyck does, just that I prefer it stylistically. I also preferred some of the later picture influenced by van Dyck, including some by Joshua Reynolds and Peter Lely. Most of van Dyck’s own work left me cold, although his self-portrait and his portrait of his wife have a bit more spark to them.

• Peter Doig & the Camden Town Group at the Tate
• Millais at the Tate
• Francis Bacon at Tate Britain
• Constable at the Tate
• British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain

And the thing is, they were using the terminology correctly. It was a very serious crisis of the financial system — that is, a banking crisis. And it was the worst one since the Depression. But it was not then and is still not (yet) the worst economic crisis since the Depression. So, assuming I was not the only one who misunderstood, there was a disconnect between what they were saying and what their audience were hearing.

I think the same thing is going on with the swine flu. The WHO have just raised the alert level to five on their scaring-the-shit-out-of-everyone scale, meaning that they fear a pandemic is ‘imminent’. The trouble is that when I hear the word ‘pandemic’ I think ‘Spanish Flu!’ or indeed ‘Black Death!!’. Death and devastation on a vast scale. Tens of millions dead.

Whereas what the WHO means by pandemic is something like ‘international outbreak of serious infectious disease’. A major public health event, but not necessarily with quite the overtones of The End Of Days. For example, I was surprised to learn that there have been two serious flu pandemics since 1918 — the Asian flu in 1957-8 and the Hong Kong flu in 1968-9. They both killed about a million people, so I don’t want to downplay them too much, but it’s not exactly the Black Death. Apparently something like 34,000 die from flu in the US in a normal year, and the Hong Kong flu killed about 34,000, so it was effectively an extra flu season.

• Wolf flu
• You said what now?
• Yorkshire suicide bombers
• Why Obama won the nomination
• Vatican Starman Slams ID!

• Links of the year 2008
• Links of the year 2007
• Links
• Links
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So for example, he traces the evolution of fin into hand over evolutionary history, but also examines how the growing embryo creates a hand (or a fin) from a blob of undifferentiated cells. He uses the evolutionary relationship between the structure of the human head and the gill arches of a shark to explain why the nerves of the head have such a peculiar relationship, how hiccuping is related to our amphibian ancestry, and so on.

Most of this material is rather technical and many of the examples were somewhat familiar to me, so the book could easily have been either impenetrable or just dull. In fact I found it worked very well; even when I had encountered some of the examples before, having them all put together into one book was very helpful. I really did feel after reading it that I was more in touch with my inner fish (and inner wormy thing, for that matter).

And it’s well written, as well. There was a rather clumsy bit in one the first chapter where he attempts to explain cladistics via a visit to the zoo, which had me worried that the book was going to be aimed at eleven-year-olds, but fortunately it turned out to be a blip. Generally the book seems well-pitched for intelligent adults who are curious about biology.

• The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner
• Monkey Girl by Edward Humes
• Bones, Rocks and Stars by Chris Turney
• ‘The Mating Mind’ by Geoffrey Miller
• ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ by Richard Dawkins

But of course it means the authorities are open to accusations of needless alarmism and crying wolf. This is the third ‘pandemic’ this decade, after SARS and bird flu; how many times can we have these alerts before people stop taking them seriously?

Although as long as governments keep taking them seriously, perhaps it would be no bad thing if the media treated them more as routine news stories and less like the first horseman of the apocalypse had just appeared.

I’m assuming, btw, that the swine flu is not going to be the pandemic that kills us all. I hope I’m not tempting fate.

» The photo is ‘Padrecito Posero’, © Eneas De Troya and used under a CC attribution licence.

• Kidneys! Kidneys! Get your kidneys here!
• Financial pandemic
• You said what now?
• Yorkshire suicide bombers
• Why Obama won the nomination