Favourite Views

Some of my favourite views are closer to home. This is of Koko waiting for her breakfast

New York Waterfalls

Photo by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times
What a great idea! Full marks to Bloomberg for giving Olafur Eliasson his head!

Favourite Books

I'm not that keen on Camus, still less on Sartre, but this is a marvellous piece of biography / literary criticism and makes me want to read Camus again with fresh eyes - particularly 'The Rebel' - the book in which he argued for a moderate humanistic stance against Sartre's 'absolutist' view of Marxism

Notebooks, 1951-1959 By Albert Camus (reviewed by Richard Eder in the IHT)

Albert Camus was one of the two pillars of postwar French literature. The other was Jean-Paul Sartre, his comrade in letters if not quite in arms (during the Resistance, Camus dangerously put out a clandestine newspaper, while Sartre stayed safely studying and writing). Then in the early 1950s, they bitterly split.

Camus's pillar stood in Paris, but in a sense it belonged elsewhere: perhaps among the Corinthian columns in North Africa's Hellenistic ruins. He was a French Algerian, of course, but the point isn't his provenance but his temperament. He was Mediterranean, a creature of sun and water, fierceness and the senses.

In Paris, with its cool symmetries, he was, to adapt a French saying, uncomfortable in his skin - the constricting ideological precision that Sartre and his fellow intellectuals fitted on him. They treated him as a marvel, and then when he rebelled against their leftist rigor, they condemned him.

This odd unsuitability, both of emotions and the mind, comes to life in the third and last volume of Camus's notebooks, appearing in an English translation (by Ryan Bloom) 19 years after they came out in French.

The split took place when Camus took issue with the absolutism of revolutions. Seeking to realize their ideals, he argued, they end up using violence and tyranny. It was an attack on Soviet Communism at a time when Sartre and his followers were becoming its increasingly rigid supporters.

They insisted that overt repression, however repellent, was the only way to fight the insidious structural tyranny of colonialist capitalism. One must choose, painfully. No we mustn't, Camus rejoined: neither be killers nor victims.

In his notebooks Camus excoriates "the newly achieved revolutionary spirit, nouveau riche, and Pharisees of justice." He names Sartre and his followers, "who seem to make the taste for servitude a sort of ingredient of virtue."

He mocks their conformism: cowardly, besides, he implies, citing the story of a child who announced her plan to join "the cruelest party." Because: "If my party is in power, I'll have nothing to fear, and if it is the other, I'll suffer less since the party which will persecute me will be the less cruel one."

Camus writes more generally: "Excess in love, indeed the only desirable, belongs to saints. Societies, they exude excess only in hatred. This is why one must preach to them an intransigent moderation."

A convenient refusal to take sides, as Sartre and his circle insisted? There was nothing convenient in Camus. He was closer to Milovan Djilas, once a hard-line Communist, then jailed by Tito, and in the end proclaiming his battle-won political credo: "the unperfect society."

The most interesting aspect of the "Notebooks" is not politics but its personal substratum. Beneath Camus's ideological quarrels is a deeper unhappiness with the critical bent of the Paris intelligentsia.

"Curious milieu," he writes of La Nouvelle Revue Française, "whose function it is to create writers, and where, however, they lose the joy of writing and creating."

It is, in part, the Southerner's discomfort with the North, with the centralization dating back to the Capet dynasties that drew France's energies up to Paris. On a trip to Italy, Camus writes: "Already the Italians on the train, and soon those of the hotel as well, have warmed my heart. People whom I have always liked and who make me feel my exile in the French people's perpetual bad mood."

He writes of his mix of happiness and depression after winning the Nobel Prize - "frightened by what happens to me, what I have not asked for" - and the angry attacks it provoked from the Paris left. He writes of his wife's depression and his lovers (many). "I don't seduce, I surrender." Later he varies this to fit Don Juan, who, not surprisingly, fascinates him: "I don't seduce, I adapt."

He travels to his birthplace. "Honeysuckle - for me, its scent is tied to Algiers. It floated in the streets that led toward the high gardens where the girls awaited us. Vines, youth." It was a memory that fought against politics. Camus could not put aside the reality of the French settlers. The vicious war between French forces and the National Liberation Front - the Algerian nationalists - was his own civil war.

Modern Logistics

Modern logistics never cease to amaze me. There has been quite a bit of eBay shopping going on in this house recently, and the results march in through the front gate only a couple of days later. But the big brands, especially those bought through Amazon, are even quicker. I finally succumbed to buying a digital SLR one afternoon this week, and it was delivered the next morning at 9am! The iPhone was the same; ordered on line from my Spanish hotel when my N95 packed up and delivered the morning after arriving home. And that's not to mention the music heard on iTunes one moment and bought and downloaded the next.

Favourite Gardens - the Orangery

All gardens betray their owners' quirks. That low brick wall is supposed to slow a flood after heavy rain so that the drains can cope! And the patch of grass in the flower bed is left for the dog to lie on (it has another patch under a fuschia bush should the sun be too strong)

It's a pity that Pont didn't spend any time on gardens and their owners.

The Incrdedible Art of HR Geiger

My daughter has introduced me the the incredible art of HR Geiger, who among other things, was the designer for Alien.
Click the heading for some more examples of his work

Watching the English

Pont - The Importance of Tea

'Watching the English" analyses the characteristics of the English through the eyes of an anthropologist, Kate Fox. It's a marvellously amusing and perceptive read. Particularly accurately, she finds the English 'the most socially inept race on earth', covering up their permanenent state of embarassment with attempted humour and mock-ironic observations.

"She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and Byzantine codes of behaviour. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue – and moan about it all – exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey.

The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex-apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class-anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English 'social dis-ease'.

Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments, using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig, Kate Fox discovers what these unwritten behaviour codes tell us about Englishness".

I have a feeling that Kate Fox would appreciate the accuracy of Pont's observations

Favourite Cartoons

My favourite cartoons are those of a gentle British cartoonist who called himself 'Pont' and who drew for Punch in the 1930s.
This is one is from a series called 'The British Character" and is typical.

Pont would no doubt have enjoyed Kate Fox's 'Watching the English"


Cartoons - particuarly Oliphant's cartoons in the New York Times - put current affairs marvellously into perspective and elegantly skewer some disseembling politico at the same time.

Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

"You're going to meet a good many stray fools in the course of business every day without going out to hunt up the main herd after dark".

"You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost."

One of my favourite books: Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son Being the Letters written by John Graham, Head of the House of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago, to his Son, Pierrepont

See also, Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son on Becoming a Gentleman

Favourite Bedtime Books

A few favourite bedtime books for children - The Dog That Dug, Where the Wild things Are and The Hairy Book