Postwar Europe

Without such collective amnesia, Europe's astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible.

Tony Judt
Postwar

Paris: city of booksellers?

Those Left Bank book stalls in Paris [Bouquinistes] filled with First Editions and rare collections of poetry and are in trouble: books aren't selling so well, and plastic Eiffel towers are doing better. What happens next?

...Paris city hall, alarmed that the garish knick-knacks are damaging Paris's "cultural landscape", has launched a battle to protect the literary soul of the banks of the Seine. Bouquinistes have been invited to crisis talks at the city hall in an attempt to promote more intellectual merchandise. But some warn that if they cannot adapt to the changing market they will "die of hunger".

Imagine this in a market near you:

The trade is strictly regulated. Each bouquiniste is allowed four boxes painted dark green: three must contain books, the fourth can sell items such as prints, collectors' postcards, stamps and souvenirs.

From Le Guardian.

Founder of Technorati launches public beta of his customised print travel guides...

...here's why:

...what I learned is that there is really something special about holding a physical printed book in your hands. Especially when you are travelling. And you know, I travel with my Blackberry and my iPhone and my Laptop and all of that and if I am in the middle of a Siok in Jerusalem or I am lying on a beach in Phuket, Thailand I don’t really want to pull out my Blackberry or end up paying those enormous data rates via my iPhone just to be able to find a piece of information that I could easily find if it was sticking in my back pocket.

Lots more here in an interview with David Sifry.


Gosh: print is back? Just as the E-book gets exciting?

Tom would have loved this

Quicker than Tom

Mr. Rossy, a Swiss pilot, leapt from the plane about 8,200 feet over Calais, France, blasted across 22 miles of water and deployed his parachute, above, over the South Foreland Lighthouse in Dover. Onlookers who dotted the famous white cliffs cheered and waved as he came into view.

Even impressed the New York Times.

The ever generous Paul Theroux

Thinking about Tom and his amazing Jacobean times is actually easier when not in his exact footsteps. But I'm never far away, even back in London. Today I'm off to a conference on renaissance spies. And especially Sir Henry Wotton, who was "bureau chief" as it were, in Venice - during the early part of the reign of James I. And who certainly met Tom in 1608. (There's much more to Wotton, and maybe I will know after my conference). That's him above.


Meanwhile, back on the circle line...Paul Theroux tries to flog a new book in a free newspaper, and sounds as charmless as ever. Wasn't he rather keen on V.S. Naipaul's tracks once upon a time?

A lot of travel writing is a stunt – “Ooh, I’ll bounce a ball around Iceland, I’ll throw a Frisbee around Namibia” – and doesn’t amount to much except someone in need of a subject. The other type is people thinking: “I’ll follow the tracks of Graham Greene, that’ll be exciting!” So I thought, some gap year punk’s going to do that about me, and I don’t want that – it’s my life, my trip, I’ll do my own return journey.

Tom and Now

Thanks Google.


Makes it all much easier. Betwixt continues, and will be back regularly soon.


For now don't forget around robin.

Today is the 400th anniversary of Tom's Departure

A picture from Padua's railway station

Thanks Tom for inspiring my walk, changed my life - a little

And in other news: the Venice bottom snapper has finally been caught.

Normal walking service will shortly resume: I'm writing an academic paper on trust
and it's taking a little time.

Coming soon: The Rhine

A piece I wrote for The Times on Italian towns.

And Shakespeare might have made it to Venice as well as Tom. Read more here.

Another way to cross the Alps?

Happy thing

To 2008, Switzerland, Germany & Turner

For Tom and Everyone Else

Friendly Fires "Paris"

Best song of the Year 2007, and even Tom would have approved

As may be clear

The view from Bad Ragatz

I am writing. Betwixt's quest begins again soon, but for now the journey in between is one of words not footwork. I'm reading in preparation for Switzerland and Germany, and I'm in search of a Grail Sword to scythe the book text that grows daily: I''ve written seventy pages and haven't got anywhere near Paris yet.

Robin

Fire in the sky-ai-ai (part one)

Over the top of the pass and not so far away Wagner and his brand of booted thunder is waiting: this morning's storm is just a reminder of things to come. What is less predictable is that Cha Cha Cha Town will be offering up its own metallica within 12 hours. But then this is Lynchian Land, and already I am wondering if they put something in the water...

I am sitting with the Moleskine around 8.30 pm writing a movie, as you do, with the ole boys talking Nesta, Carnivarro and Adriano over coffee. From downwind comes a punk thrash of Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World...only a bit of it, this is a rehearsal, so there is a lot more une-due and drum rolls. I ask the elderly couple next to me what gives. Rock concert says Mrs Football-widow.

Opposite the Municipal offices four young men have set up in the parking space of the Orlandini ice cream and booze-u-like (beer)cafe. Yup: in the spa town of the Brambana valley there are Marshall amps, turquoise Stratocaster guitars, singing drummers and wi-fi connections. Rock and Roll is here to Spray.

"We're abusive," the lead singer shouts to me. "Abusivi."

The crowd is not particularly expectant, the youngest streches out in his pram, whilst his mother orders a Machiatto coffee. The band warm up by sitting down to strudel, followed by beer, and then ham and cheese plates. They don't look phased. Mrs Machiatto rather likes the pre-show music, jiving away like it is Prince on New Year's Eve 1999 to a reggae version of "Everything that I Own." After this Steve Tyler sings that apocalyptic one about saving the world and his daughter, Liv: and I don't want to miss a thing. Abusivi seem to like this one, they sway as they snuffle, until the CD jumps and we move onto Italian chick-skiffle, KT Tunstall meets Carla Bruni - but not in a good way.

Abusivi's lead singer gives punk baby a big grin, but the young lad seems more interested in the lights of the pharamacy opposite. Some late arrivals have monkish bald pates and nice pale blue cardigans.

The lead guitarist can riff, play chords, and smoke. But never all three at the same time. The first song is named Spirato.

Song two has a bit that goes: cook cook caroo, ay ay Cadaver. It ends with the half-line, "like a lonely song." Next up "Speedy Gonzalez" as a Green Day purgation. But half way through the heavens open and that's it. Bar staff rush out and help to get everything inside. Three songs: over. Suddenly reading the Corriella del Sporto is the New Rock and Roll. I head for bed, wave at the old football men, and turn on one of those terrible buddy-buddy, black-white, cop films that lose something in translation in any language.

Cha Cha Cha...changes

The hills are alive with the sound of thunder, lightning, not very frightening - but a few of the "Freddy" moustaches are. (They are Swiss or German - sure aren't Italian this year).

San Pellegrino makes a sparkling debut after the smaller towns of the Brembana valley. The local bus from Bergamo costs about £1.20 and after 35 minutes climbing and falling through winding roads and towns of no obvious glory drops off passengers (me) betwixt a three hundred metre long Grand Hotel (closed: dangerous), a casino (closed, now a conference centre) and a Thermal Spa Hotel (closed: renovation). The two complexes: the hotel and casino-thermal are divided by a gushing river which plunges off to the Pellegrino factory down the road. Not everything is branded with the drink's red star here, but it feels like the drinks corporation owns quite a lot. Say: Lombardy.

If the Hollywood product placers were looking for sponsors to finance its high-tech remake of Last Year in Marienbad (perhaps with Nick Cage and Keira Knightly) then here with the art nouveau mittel-europa fin de etc. vibe would be a greta place to start the pitch. "We see this movie as being about bringing the sparkle, and bubble, back to life..."

You can't miss the factory - refinery, distillery, whatever - and other SP buildings fleck the town, but this isn't a Woolfsburg (Volkswagen home) because it feels like the setting for a De Maupassant novel. Even a tiny touch of Proust.

After the "old city" high on a hill in Bergamo and the "learning the robes" somewhat confused cultural tourism of Brescia, San Pellegrino is both a step forward and back. It has long been known for its spa water, but only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did it become an upmarket destination. So, whilst there are no Renaissance masterpieces, or Venetian tropes, it somehow feels easier to imagine than some of the more famous Italian towns. Even if its brief emminence was Belle Epoque this doesn't diminish the faded ravishing-ness, and makes the vauguely grouchy mood understandable. The setting is amazing.

They have afternoon tea dances for the old ladies, in the evening cha cha cha lessons for the young (women) led by a Dirty Dancer in tight red trounsers with tassels. Music via a Korg synth is riffed out by Belmondo's long lost cheeky younger brother, whilst Swayse 2 shouts "uno due trei quattorse" and limbs flail around.

I should be higher now but the weather wiped the ATMs for a while this morning, so I am thinking about a belle epoque day of baths and lunches, aperitifs and assignations and chest complaints. Faro and whist and chess for the older men and younger boys learning the arts of war and whatever. This may not be "Como" but it wouldn't take so many Clooneys to re-invent San Pellegrino (should it wish so to change). Oh yes, there's is a red double decker 159 Bus that wanders around the town, amazing vistas from the bridges, clouds, hills, blue remembered or not, impossibly high villas in the distance (there was a funicular here once), and from time to time a HGV with that water passes down, as if chased away by the falling clouds, to take a tiny part of the valley to Rio or Reading, Naples or New York.

I lost this post first time around because of the storms. Outside the library linen-sodden for the first time since Padua all thoughts of mountain passes go awol and I settle down to write a screenplay. And the echo in the valley, a growling bark of displeasure for all that summer sun on Como late last week, perhaps, is enough to persuade even a two-time believer in Dawkins and his Delusion that somewhere above the clouds the God's are waiting. Maybe it is the Swiss.

Across Italy The Venice Film festival is previewing Atonement. The novel by Ian McEwan that isn't quite as bad as Saturday, but it is a close run thing...Here the only book in English in the stationary store (closed) is a hard back copy of a book called "Blog"...Really: life is strange. Even without the divine apple. My writing bump grows: soon it will be a conker.

Re Boot - now just for walking

Up into the hill villages on the way to the Splunga pass, Switzerland and beyond. I am at last Tom, because the Apple is not booting up, and Genius Bars are few and far between. In fact the closest one is in England. So like an older generation of travellers I am now down to pen and paper: if there is an internet cafe up high I will post. There is a ton of back material too. And photographs. The lump on my writing finger grows daily. Travel 3.0 seems a way off right now.

Apple and Moleskine not Compatible

The laptop is very poorly, and that makes posting a little difficult. It's all going down on paper: pencil and the Moleskine, the red hot blogging tools. Hope to find computer doctor shortly.

Irene Grandi - Bruci La Città

This song is everywhere in Italy...

Tommy in Venice (I)

"…The first place of Venice that was inhabited, is that which now they call the Rialto, which word is derived from rivus altus, that is, a deep river, because the water is deeper there then about other Islands. And the first that dwelt in the same Rialto was a poore man called Joannes Bonus, who got his living there by fishing….

The Citie is divided in the middest by a goodly faire channel, which they call Canal il grande. The same is crooked, and made in the form of a Roman S….also both sides of this channel are adorned with many sumptuous and magnificent palaces that stand very neare to the water, and mae a very glorious and beautifull shew. For many of them are of a great height three or four stories high, most being built with bricke, and some few with faire free stone. Besides they are adorned with a great multitude of stately pillers made partly of white stone, and partly of Istrian marble. Their roofes doe much differ from those of our English buildings. For they are all flat and built in the manner as men may walk upon them, as I have often observed. What forme of roofing is generally used in all those Italian cities that I saw, and in some places of France, especially in Lyons, where I could not see as much as one house but had a flat roofe….



…Every Palace of any principall note hath a prety walke or open gallery betwixt the wall of the house and the bricke of the rivers banke, the edge or extremity whereof is garnished with faire pillers that are finely arched at the top. This walke serveth for men to stand in without their houses, and behold things…Somewhat above the middle of the front of the building, or, (as I have observed in many of their Palaces) a little beneathe the toppe of the front they right opposite unto their windows, a very pleasant little terrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the main building: the edge wherof is decked with many prety little turned pillers, either of marble or free stone to leane over. These kinde of tarrasses or little galleries of pleasure Suetonius calleth Meniana. They give great grace to the whole edifice, and serve only for this purpose, that people may from that place as from a most delectable prospect contemplate and view the parts of the City around them in the coole evening. Withall I perceived another thing in their buildings…The foundations of their houses are made after a very strange manner. For whereas many of them are situate in the water, whensoever they lay the foundation of any house they remove the water by certaine devices from the place where they lay the first fundamentall matter. Most commonly they drive long stakes into the ground, without the which they doe aggerere molem, that is raise certaine heapes of sand, mudde, clay, or some other such matter to repell the water. Then they ramme in great piles of wooded which they lay very deepe, upon the which they place their bricke or stone, and so frame the other parts of the building. These foundations are made so exceeding deep, and contrived with so great labour, that I have heard they cost them very neare the third part of the charge of the whole edifice….



…it is said there are in the City of Venice at the least a hundred and twenty goodly Palaces, the greatest part whereof is built upon the sides of this great Channel.

…There is only one bridge to go over the great channel, which is the same that leadeth from St. Marks to the Rialto, and joyneth together both the banks of the channel. This bridge is commonly called Ponte di Rialto, and is the fairest bridge by many degrees for one arch that ever I saw, read, or heard of. For it is reported that it cost about fourscore thousand crownes, which doe make four and twenty thousand pounds sterling." [2.789 million now – a decent sized house in Hampstead]…

Is the Earth More Free?

“…Watch the manoeuvres of the week-end hikers
Massed on parade with Kodaks or with Leicas…”
Letter to Lord Byron

At the beginning of this trip I wrote of W.H. Auden’s poem, “Dover” which caught so well the essential nature of Kent’s port town - and gateway to Europe – seventy years ago. Shortly before the poet’s stay there with Isherwood in 1937, Auden visited Iceland. Which produced the long state of the nation (seen from away, home thoughts and all that) poem: “Letter to Lord Byron.” It is a (highly sophisticated) kind of blogging in transit, and conversation across time.

“For since the British Isles went Protestant
A church confession is too high for most.
But still confession is a human want,
So Englishmen must makes theirs now by post
And authors hear them over breakfast toast.
For, failing them, there’s nothing but the wall
Of public lavatories on which to scrawl.

…I have, at the age of twenty-nine
Just read Don Juan and I found it fine.

I want a form that’s large enough to swim in,
And talk on any subject that I choose,
From natural scenery to men and women,
Myself, the arts, the European news:
And since she’s on a holiday, my muse
Is out to please, find everything delightful
And only now and then be mildly spiteful."

Auden celebrates in imitation (though not content) a man, a style, and an approach that doesn’t appear to resonate so well with our times. He echoes both Byron’s “Don Juan” and “Child Harold”.

Lord Byron, mad, bad and dangerous to know, represents the spirit of a different age, and though his “idea” has had many revivals since the early part of the nineteenth century, I reckon his stock is low at the moment. Or as Auden wrote of his own time in the mid 1930s:

“The vogue for Black Mass and the cult of devils
Has sunk. The Good, the Beautiful, the True
Still fluctuate about the lower levels
Joyces are firm and there there’s nothing new
Eliots have hardened just a point or two.
Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts
There’s been some further weakening in Prousts”

At my school in the 1970s Byron’s fellow “Romantic poets” Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge got a better press; Byron was always thought a little “light”. Reading Byron later in life his poetry comes across as remarkably modern: worldly, serious and yet effortless. His life – and certainly his loves – speaks to that rock and roll lifestyle that might have happened in the sixties and seventies, whilst his work reflects a high and subtle intelligence utterly lacking the ponderous emphasis of a Wordsworth; these days a McEwan. “Child Harold” gives us the fully rounded, fatally flawed “Byronic” hero, filled with ennui, in search of something.

Child Harold is a long verse drama; its protagonist is an English nobleman making a Tom-style grand tour of Europe, albeit with a little more action with the ladies. More than this the places he visits give up a little of their stories as he wanders, post the Napoleonic wars…

“…Gaul may champ the bit
And foam in fetters; - but is the Earth more free?”

…in search of an elusive way to be. One academic writes that these places are “a sequence of geo-historical spots with pre-existent narratives, spots that in some sense speak for themselves. Looking at it this way round Byron might be seen as a brilliantly individual amanuensis to whom the European landscape is dictating its histories, while his psychological interiority is an effect that the poem’s places produce as their histories are articulated.”

That’s the hope for all writing which encompasses the idea of travel and the individual consciousness: Tom Coryat being the “first”, and – in the end – not prepared to reveal the personal side of this journeys, preferring the studied and the observed, is rarely, save for Venice, possessed by place enough to let it dictate to him. To free his mind.

“What exile from himself can flee?
To zones though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where’er I be,
The blight of life – the demon Thought.”

Only when this “possession” takes place; is the starting point of observation and then communication, can what I think of as a “lost” Europeanism be grasped. It is not just the churches, (I have seen a lot in Venice, without joy, they are backdrops to photo-shoots and audio guides), the art (collected at auction, or on memory card for one-day download to I-Photo), can any description be meaningful. Or rather, can be helpful.



And all this is done in “Child Harold” without seeming effort: neither this quality, nor the light and the subtle that are Byron’s stock in trade are not high-priority in our zeitgeist now: we prefer more stolidly laboured prose; something tied far more closely to either complete fantasy or the grimly suffered; or linked with celebrity for its own sake, rather than artistic excellence. I am sure Byron would have enjoyed Richard Dawkins crusade for atheism. Would have enjoyed his celebrity though, no doubt of that.

As he claimed to have slept with 200 women in 200 days in Venice (and Italian critics still often refer to him as a homosexual: an interesting definition) what is, perhaps, most surprising is the final impact of Venice on Europe’s leading Romantic ‘trouser snake”. Venice tamed even Byron

“But midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,
And roam along, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endured,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less,
Of all that flatter’d, follow’d. sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!”

Instead of the wild, womanising figure we know Venice turned Byron into a somewhat formal character; he takes up an almost “courtly” role as a “cavalier servente.” This was a very Italian institution in form, convention, pragmatism and infidelity. He became the approved “partner” of a married woman, Theresa, with the utter acceptance of her husband: his duties included carrying her bag, standing behind her at the Opera. Whilst he could write of marriage: “That moral centaur, man and wife…” he became part of the bureaucracy. Yes, Venice neutered even Byron.

It is no surprise that today Venice neuters pretty much everyone and everything.
More on that tomorrow.

Venice: Had 'em all

“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices…”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile


If you type “Venice, Loneliness” into the database at the British Library there is one result: Leo Damrosch’s fantastic biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If you type in “Venice, Love”, there are many more options, many of them Mills & Boon fictions.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived in Venice for over a year between 1743-4. He worked as Secretary to the French Ambassador, a man named Montaigu. “I made my duties my sole pleasures,” Rousseau writes in “The Confessions”.

We are the stories we live in, as well as the ones we tell. And discovering that the Rousseau I imagined, or ignorantly created, in Chambery, a picture of a man communing with nature and his lover at “les Charmettes”, is as close to a “story” as it is a truth, isn’t a shock, but it is a reminder of how easy it can be to believe the propaganda: in this case the local tourist literature in France.

Rousseau stands to some as a romantic hero of the individual trying to find a route into “honesty”: to find him living in the Querini palace, in the Canareggio district of Venice, busily and rather badly drawing up official letters, and making the diplomatic gestures required of the de facto head of the French Embassy is strange. Strange and for me somehow rather human, proving that almost nothing is as black and white as it might seem.




Venice had lost much of its status by this time, was not the powerful trader nation of the fifteenth or even sixteenth century, nevertheless it must have fascinated Rousseau. Venetians refused to meet foreigners, its nobles were forbidden to speak outside the Republic. His employer, the Ambassador Montaigu, “wrote ineptly and spoke no Italian,” so Rousseau had a free run at many things. For six months in 1744 he ran the Embassy, whilst Montaigu was in a country house on the Brenta. His greatest pleasure here was to listen to music: perhaps it is not well known that Rousseau was an acclaimed musician, and lyricist, as well as everything else: one of this operas was played at the wedding festivals for Louis XV and Marie Antoinette. How many “revolutionaries” can claim that, I wonder?

A while ago I decided that it is the “Betwixt” that must be central to the remainder of this journey, and so I return to Rousseau here in Venice because the creation I found in Chambery is less than half the story, in fact is almost an irrelevance, however easy it is to be beguiled by the idyllic location, and the perfect house with its glorious Alpine views. Here too are such things.

Reading his works, and academic texts about him, what is striking is how much he achieved, given a late start: Rousseau’s artistic life doesn’t begin until he’s around 32, 33. Since strong claims can be made that Rousseau: developed a political theory which deeply influenced the founding fathers and the French revolutionaries; that he helped to invent modern anthropology; that he wrote highly influential theories of education; that “The Confessions” virtually created what we know as “autobiography”; and that modern psychology owes him an immense debt, then half pictures won’t suffice. And this entry is just a start.

Who would have thought of Rousseau and Venice; even more, who would have thought of Rousseau, like Tom Coryat, meeting with beautiful courtesans – and failing miserably. With one named Zulietta, he gets to her bedroom, where she shows him two pistols…”I endure their caresses, but I don’t intend to endure their insults, and I won’t miss the first one who behaves like that,” she warned him. Unsurprisingly given Rousseau’s complex sexual landscape – he enjoyed being beaten, and being “submissive” – things didn’t work with Zulieta, despite her charms, she told him: “Little John, leave the ladies alone, and study mathematics…” the thing is: Rousseau writes this in his Autobiography (the word Autobiography was not invented until the C19th) : a confession so honest as to be painful.

What sets Rousseau apart from his Enlightenment contemporaries – he was friends with Diderot, Hume and Voltaire later in life, though would fall out with each – is his social Betwixt-ness. His humble, poverty-wracked nomadic wanderings through France from an early age – which brought him twice to ChambÈry - his jobs working on a Land Registry, for a Police chief in Lyon, copying music; his being sent by his eventual lover, Madame de Warens, to a hospice in Turin (which means he made the same journey as Tom and I, over the Mont Cenis pass and down through the Susa valley) where he was probably abused, all add to the texture of a man who became a major European literary celebrity, and then a political refugee. And now – I think - something of a forgotten man. A restoration of this very “European” sensibility is required, I feel.

“Mobile and rootless, cut loose from the ties of kinship and locality, he was very much a modern, and a fundamental aspect of his modernity is that he relied on friendship to create a personal equivalent of community. But though he yearned for intimacy in friendship, he was never much good at it.” Leo Damrosch writes.

“Rousseau was unhappy all his life because he sought the kind of friend of which ten or so, perhaps, have existed from Homer’s time until our.” Stendhal said.

Casanova remembers him differently, as: “equally undistinguished either in his person or his wit…the eloquent Rousseau had neither the temperament to laugh nor the divine talent of calling forth laughter…”




One of the things this trip teaches is that everywhere has somebody, or something, they can commemorate. From the fallen Australian soldiers whose graves fleck northern France, to the mystic Hildegarde of Bingen in Germany (to come). On the other hand Venice, like Casanova - one of its more colourful sons - appears to have had them all. Not only this but Venice’s stories encompass, (or are on my mind this morning) law, race, art, sex, travel itself, music, trade, and Islam (there’s a show on now at the Duke’s Palace about the relationship Venice has enjoyed with Islam). It can throw up a Guggenheim birthday celebration (later this month) and Bob Sinclair, a famous dance DJ, doing something on the Lido.

So too the lives of the great: they are full of stories that pull interpretation one way or another. I often feel this tacking sensation when trying to appreciate Tom Coryat, who is a minor player in all this, but was the first English tourist – and that is important as I face the Venetian Tourist “experience”.




Rousseau believed that paradoxes were puzzles that exposed contradictions at the heart of experience. Much more than this, he gave us at the end of this life a stunning psychological last act, an autobiography that defines a new moment in literary honesty.

In his biography of Rousseau, Damrosch argues that: “Contemporary America talks the Rousseau line but lives the Franklin life.” By which he means that Benjamin Franklin’s famous autobiography “encourages readers to construct a public life, while Rousseau’s confessions challenges them to make a journey into the self.” And “These are the fundamental tensions in modern life, and their first great analyst was Jean-Jacques Rousseau”.

The relation of the public and the journey into the self is one of the major paradoxes of Venice too. Perhaps even of blogging itself.

Guess Where