Russell Davies

Imagined design

There are elevated pipe systems all over Berlin. The pipes run alongside the streets and over the roads and look very industrial. For some reason, something half-remembered or half- read, I became convinced that the pipes marked the position of the old Berlin wall and were there as a
sort of memorial.

I told Anne this and we spent a long time discussing what a genius intervention this was. Really smart repurposing of existing materials, somehow low key and yet also really present. It dramatically changes your sense of the city and its psychogeography. We talked like that for quite a while. 'Wow' we said, as we walked around another bit of the city. 'I didn't realise the wall came out here'.

And then eventually we googled it and realised that none of that is true. It's just a way of getting overflow rain water to the rivers. Which is probably a parable somehow about the power of narrative around design but which is also a story about how I'm an idiot.

...introduced sandals to England

This is one of the fragments I highlighted in Olivia Lang's The Garden Against Time:

"the gay utopian socialist Edward Carpenter, who established a cross-class vegetative Eden in a smallholding in Derbyshire."

It cropped up in my readwise today so I thought I'd do some quick googling. Turns out Carpenter is a tremendously interesting character who did all sorts of fantastic things. Obviously, being of a trivial turn, I couldn't help but notice that he also "...introduced sandals to England."

Cafe Museum

The other thing I like about Vienna cafe culture is that there's a little exhibit in a top museum devoted to Adolf Loos' designs for, confusingly, Cafe Museum.

Cafe ramblings

We've just been on holiday on trains across Europe. Paris. Berlin. Prague. Vienna. Anne is on a lifetime quest to see all the the extant Caravaggios and I thought I'd like to visit cafes. Observe some non-EBCB cafe culture. It was excellent fun.

My two favourite places were Le Sancerre in Paris and Cafe Sperl in Vienna. Things about them:

Le Sancerre

We spent several happy hours sitting with coffees at the Sancerre watching the world go by. It is in fashion-y area so we were delighted by the enormous number of very tall, very thin people striding past in splendidly deliberate fashions. Tiny waists, massive boots, lots of black, neck tattoos, mullets, scarves, leather. It was so nice to see real effort being made.

The Sartorialist has been hanging out in the same neck of the woods.

It brought to mind a bit of Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century about the duty of historians to write well.

"That not only should we write well because that means that people buy our books and not only should we write well because that is what history is, but also because there aren’t that many crafts anymore that have a responsibility to the language. Whatever sort of responsible craftsmanship remains, we’re right in the middle of it."

We have a responsibility to clothes. We're wearing clothes we might as well get good at it. It made me want to up my game a bit. Maybe I should talk to Wardrobe Strategy.

But the thing we realised about the Sancerre and other typically French cafe configurations is that you're not sitting opposite each other, parallel to the street. (We're talking about outside seating here. We were on holiday). You're sitting alongside each other, facing the street. This has a number of advantages for a couple engaged in people watching and chatting.

1. There's that well observed effect where you have better conversations if you're not looking each other in the eye. Driving. Walking. Walking meetings. Watching telly on the sofa.

2. And, for people watching it's best if you're on the same plane. Clearly you lose the 360 awareness of looking other each others shoulders but you gain a common gaze. You can see what you're both seeing and you can see that you're seeing it. So the context is instantly understood if you raise an eyebrow or say, as we often did, 'excellent hat'.

Cafe Sperl

While I was away I got an email from a journalist writing another 'why are all the greasy spoons closing down' article. I made the same point I often do. There are people who love the faded, melancholic atmosphere of a place gone to seed. Writers, photographers, cafe bloggers, people doing album covers. There's an attention for ancient formica and 'patina'. But, obviously, these places also tend to be short of attention and energy. And often, the reason for the melancholy and emptiness is that they're about to go out of business. So they do. What people actually, mostly, want is somewhere that feels lively and cared for and clean. They don't want ancient patina, they want something clean.

Many of the great old cafes in Paris and Vienna have dealt with this by becoming hermetically preserved for tourists. They market the old stories but everywhere's had many licks paints. And there are queuing systems and adjacent pop-ups to deal with the overflow. You're not sitting next to the ghost of Hemingway. Though soon you might be sitting next to his hologram. It's like what the PE money did to Patisserie Valerie or is doing to Lina. Taking something quirky, odd and interesting and franchising the life out of it. It's not wrong. These are, fundamentally, businesses, but it has to be done very carefully or you kill the thing you paid for.

Anyway, Café Sperl is not like that. It's appealingly shabby. A bit like Calke Abbey. You do feel like there might be a painter or novelist in the loo. But it's still attentive and bustling and energetic. The service and the food and the coffee is great. They care. And they still have a selection of newspapers you can read. That means something, they're not going to hurry you out if they've offering you a newspaper. 

Poem for the hard of sleeping

Things by Fleur Adcock

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/things/

Vague

https://stoppingoffplace.blogspot.com/2010/10/ben-terrain-vague.html

Attentional scaffolding

Transmission

Performance

“Jim didn’t read his lectures, he performed them. He was teased by more than one of his hosts for being a prima donna and needing everything just so. His talks weren’t slide lectures, but magic lantern shows. He loved the tricks of light: the tiny details vastly enlarged, the glow of the backlit pictures. He was transfixed by the effect of seeing one of David Jones’s small engravings made enormous on screen, yet with each whisker-thin line still distinct. Jim had often talked about the lantern’s ‘enhancement–and enchantment!’ But David never understood it, until, in the summer of 1943, he went to a lantern lecture on William Blake. ‘I’ve always reckoned I “liked” Blake,’ 3 David wrote to Jim. ‘But my God!–that size & with the luminosity they fair bowl you over.’ Jim dwelt on the line from St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’ 4 A speaker could get across what a writer could not, convert a listener to his cause. Jim was always early. He made time to arrange every seat. He sat in one chair after another, all over the hall. He wanted to be sure that everyone would be comfortable and that everyone could see. More than anything, he wanted the audience to fall ‘under the spell of his enthusiasm’. 5 When it went well, the silence at the end was so long that Jim had to tell them the lecture was over. Don’t take Jim’s word for it. Jim collected testimonials which he had printed in a smartly professional pamphlet. He offered a series of possible lectures, each an hour long, with forty to fifty slides, at $ 100 a go.”

— Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists by Laura Freeman

https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/kshare?asin=B0BB5WNBBJ&id=zgahldx5tzh6vi75c335eqcbcy

Tumbling around in the back seat

Related and unrelated, as is the way of blogging.

I've been sitting on the harbour beach in Portree, reading this piece in the New Yorker about Judith Butler.

It starts like this:

"In January, the American philosopher Judith Butler and the South African artist William Kentridge took part in a public conversation in Paris about atrocity and its representations. Before an audience at the École Normale Supérieure, they spoke for nearly two hours, in lulling abstraction and murmured mutual regard: Can we give the image the benefit of the doubt? What is the role of the object in thinking? After the event, a woman—a philosopher herself—approached Butler. Tight with tension, she gripped Butler by the arm.

“Vous menacez mes enfants,” she said, in Butler’s recounting. “You are threatening my children.”"

 

And then, later...

 

"Still, that evening in Paris, Butler did not flinch or pull away. They responded, in French, “How am I threatening your children?”

“You speak in this way,” the woman replied. “They listen to you. And, if they listen to you, they will stop defending Israel. You’re not a European, you don’t know this, but the Holocaust can come again.”

 

“I grew up with that fear of it happening again,” Butler said. Most of their maternal line, Hungarian Jews, had been killed in the Holocaust. Butler proposed a conversation “about whether this current state is actually protecting the Jews from harm or exposing the Jews to harm.” The woman refused. Butler persisted—a coffee perhaps? “I’d like to understand more about your fear,” Butler said. “You and I both want to live without fear of violence. We’re just trying to arrive at it in a different way.” The woman started to cry. “We’ll meet, we’ll meet,” she said. Butler asked for permission to embrace her.

 

“I recognized her,” Butler told me later. “She could have been my aunt. Her fear had been my own. Sometimes it is still my own.”"

 

 

I would not have reacted like that. I'm often too angry. I admire that curiosity and empathy.

 

At the same time I noticed that I was surrounded by bits of glass and pottery that had been tumbled smooth by the sea.

 

And, earlier in the day, I'd been thinking about a phrase of Danny Meyer's: "Constant, gentle pressure". It's about something else, but it seems to fit, somehow.

 

And this, even more unrelated, is just a magnificent bit of writing:

 

"Butler apologized for the mess in their car, an old BMW, when we went for a drive one day—this amounted to a few books by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, strewn around the back seat. Butler’s marginalia in those books are in a precise, hunched hand. Merleau-Ponty propounded the idea that the body, not consciousness, is our primary instrument for understanding the world. To be in a body is not to be contained but to be exposed to the world; from our first breath, we are in need of care from other people. Merleau-Ponty is a deep influence; one can feel him tumbling around in the back seat of much of Butler’s thinking. “I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control,” they have said.

 

And Merleau-Ponty’s style—“so adjectival!” Butler marvelled. Their hands made a quick movement, flowers bursting into bloom. “Subordinate clause upon subordinate clause.”

 

Butler slid on wire-rimmed sunglasses and began reversing. “The problem is that he loses the verb, and he just keeps proliferating and twisting. You just have to go with it, without any expectation that the verb will take you somewhere. What’s left is a kind of experience, a kind of ride—all right, all right, I see you, go ahead, go ahead.” Butler squinted into the rearview mirror; another driver tried squeezing past. “He’s willing to work several metaphors in the same long sentence.” The driver leaned on his horn.

 

“My proprioceptive body” is how Butler refers to their car. “I’m surrounded by this clunky thing, and I feel protected,” they’d explained. “I expand. I have this carapace.” They laughed. “But it’s, um, prosthetic.”