Category: Culture

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Samurai William by Giles Milton

William Adam was an English sailor working as a pilot on a Dutch expedition of five ships that set out in 1598 to make money in the Orient. In 1600, after a disastrous voyage during which just about everything went wrong, Adam was one of just 24 men surviving on one of the ships – the Liefde – when it reached Japan, the men too weak with starvation and disease to row ashore.

He rose to become the most influential westerner in Japan, with direct access to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the effective ruler, and was granted a court title normally given only to senior samurai. Samurai William: The Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan is his story, and the story of the early English attempts to set up a trade with Japan. It’s by the same chap as Big Chief Elizabeth, a book about the English settlement at Jamestown.

A Dutch man and a French woman

As with that book, the emphasis is on telling a good story rather than exploring the finer ethical and semiotic nuances of colonisation. Which isn’t to say that he glosses over the frequently bad behaviour of everyone involved; just that the book is pitched as entertainment.

And the stories from that period of European exploration are really extraordinary; the men in their tiny little ships sailing off optimistically into unknown waters, and ending up either fabulously wealthy or dead. Or enslaved. Or marooned. It’s like Star Trek, if instead of peaceful, multi-cultural, non-interventionist scientists and diplomats, the Enterprise had been crewed by greedy, heavy-drinking, violent, unwashed men who were only really interested in local cultures if they could make money from them or have sex with them.

» The picture is from over 200 years after the period dealt with in Samurai William, but it seemed too good not to use. It’s a detail from a Japanese woodcut of a Dutch man with a French woman, from an exhibition about the Dutch in Nagasaki on the website of the International Institute of Social History, where you can see a larger version as well as lots of other great pictures.

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Culture Other

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I bought The Satanic Verses in irritation at all the fuckwits who were complaining about Rushdie getting a knighthood. Not surprisingly perhaps, having bought it as a gesture rather than because of an urgent desire to read it, it ended up at the bottom of my to-read pile. It didn’t help that it has a bit of a reputation as being unreadable.

section of ‘Satan in His Original Glory’ by William Blake

You know what, though? It’s actually a really good novel.

It’s full of inventive ideas and images, playful use of language, barbed social comment and, you know, good novelly things generally. It’s magical realism – two men mysteriously survive falling from an exploding plane, only to find themselves transforming, one into the image of the archangel Gabriel and the other into Satan – but the realism part of the equation is strong enough to keep the book grounded in the real world of London and Bombay.

I can understand why quite a few people found it hard to finish, though. It has that rambling quality that quite a lot of Serious Literary Novels have had ever since modernism: lots of characters, lots of narrative threads which are only loosely connected, long digressions which seem a bit irrelevant. I have to admit it’s not a quality I find particularly attractive. It seems like an excellent recipe for a book which is less than the sum of its parts. And a great way of reducing the book’s forward momentum; I don’t demand that everything I read is an un-put-downable page-turner, but I do like to feel it’s going somewhere. There were times, reading The Satanic Verses, when it felt a bit becalmed.

On balance, though, I enjoyed it.

detail of a mosaic of the Archangel Gabriel from the dome of St Sophia Cathedral, Kiev

I suppose I can hardly review the most controversial novel since Lady Chatterley’s Lover without some comment on the controversy. Mohammed is a character in the book – or at least the Gabriel character has dream visions in which Mohammed appears – and he is presented as self-serving, opportunistic and not a real prophet. Which I can understand might irritate Muslims. But actually it wasn’t nearly as inflammatory as I thought it might be. Compared, for example, to the portrayal of Moses in Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted On The Voyage, it’s really very gentle. It just portrays Mohammed as human.

picture credits: the first is a detail from William Blake’s ‘Satan in His Original Glory’ from Tate Britain; the second is a detail of a mosaic of the Archangel Gabriel in the dome of St Sophia Cathedral in Kiev.

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Culture Other

Elizabeth by David Starkey

I’ve just been reading Elizabeth by David Starkey, a book about the early life of Elizabeth I. It covers the very start of her reign, but most of it is about her relationships with Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary Tudor.

Eliziana

It raises the question: when little girls want to be princesses, what kind of princess are they thinking of? The modern princess, who gets to live under relentless, unforgiving media scrutiny and has no possibility of publicly expressing any opinions? Or the medieval type, with a bunch of scheming old men arranging her a dynastic marriage to a corrupt, inbred foreign prince – if she’s not imprisoned or disposed of by the monarch as a potential threat to the succession.

The book was also a fine example of how toxic the mixture of politics and religion is. That period of English history would have been messy anyway, because of the lack of a clear line of succession, but the switching back and forth between Catholic and Protestant certainly didn’t make it any easier for anyone.

It’s a good book – Starkey knows how to tell a story – and an interesting period of English history. I’m just glad I didn’t live through it.

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Culture

The Seventh Seal

Well, I went to see The Seventh Seal. It was unusually busy for a Tuesday afternoon showing of a 50-year-old Swedish art film; presumably the cinema was full of vultures like myself.

Hel – sweet seal, originally uploaded by ella19.

I was disappointed to discover there were no seals in it, although there was quite a cute squirrel.

Really though, it was, as promised, a very good film. Two fairly random thoughts: if you’re going to plunder Europe’s medieval past for material, it’s so much better to end up with The Seventh Seal than Lord of the Rings. And although it did live up to Bergman’s reputation for being a bit grim, it didn’t feel gratuitously or affectedly grim.

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Culture

The Elements of Typographic Style

I’ve been reading The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. When I ordered it, I noticed the mild coincidence that the author has the same name as the chap who translated the poetry of the Haida (the native inhabitants of the Queen Charlotte islands in the Pacific Northwest). As it turns out, though, it’s the same man. Which certainly explains why the books of Haida poetry are so attractively designed.

Haida mask

Alderwood mask of a woman of high rank, possibly Djiláquons. Haida, around 1830; in the British Museum.

It’s an impressive combination of talents, but there is a natural fit between poetry and typography. After spending all that time choosing and arranging words, what poet wouldn’t want them physically arranged on the page with equal care?

The parallel is marked: it’s all about the combined effect of a thousand tiny decisions. The poet and the typographer have to believe that every tiny tweak matters, that no detail is unimportant.

Now, with powerful computers at home, we all have the possibility of being our own typographers. But one thing that’s clear, reading the book, is that it’s not as simple as it sounds. There’s a lot more to it than choosing the least ugly font that came with your computer, picking a type size and a line height and letting the computer do the work. The point this was really brought home to me was where he argues convincingly that digital fonts often come from the foundries insufficiently precisely kerned, and that you will probably need to spend a couple of days with each new typeface manually adjusting the kerning so that even unusual letter pairs found in words like Ypres, Rwanda or Vázquez will be properly spaced.

section of William Caslon’s specimen sheet

A section of a specimen sheet printed by William Caslon; from Wikipedia.

Even so, there is a lot of information and advice in the book which can be used even for the normal user of Microsoft Word; about choosing the right type size and measure, arranging the text block on the page, and creating headers which are harmonious with the body type, for example.

This is one field where the internet lets us down, of course. I can specify a typeface – from a very limited range I can rely on the reader’s computer to have – a type size, a line height and a line length, but I can’t control the way your system and browser deal with the kerning, anti-aliasing or any of the other nuances that completely transform the appearance it will have on your screen. Still, even here, some knowledge of typography can only help, and the technology is moving fast.

It’s an interesting, readable and, as one would hope, very attractive book. The Haida poetry is fascinating as well, but that would need a post to itself, methinks.

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Culture Me

A moment of mild embarrassment

Ingmar Bergman has died. Really, it’s all over the blogs, so it must be true. But here’s the thing: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single Bergman film. Not one. Not even the really famous ones, like umm… you know the one… it has chess in it?