It was very early in the morning. The eastern mountains were blue-black, but behind them the light stood up faintly colored at the mountain rims with It was very early in the morning. The eastern mountains were blue-black, but behind them the light stood up faintly colored at the mountain rims with a washed red, growing colder, grayer and darker as it went up and overhead until, at a place near the west, it was merged with pure night.
Early in the morning, a man walks by a camp where a young woman is nursing her child and preparing a meal for herself and two men. They are cotton workers who generously share their luck with the passer-by. Having been eating well for twelve days - apparently to their own surprise - they invite the man over to have some of their breakfast as well. As it is still cold, sitting down at the fire with a platter of bacon, bread, biscuits and gravy, the hot coffee and the welcome company, radiant sensations of well-being and warmth unite this small group of people.
[image] (Galina Sergeeva)
First appeared in 1936, set at the background of the Great Depression and likely situated in the San Joaquin or Sacramento valleys (according to Steinbeck’s biographer Richard S. Hughes), Breakfast was the second piece that I read from John Steinbeck’s collection The Long Valley(1938). It struck me as more elevating and hopeful in tone and mood than the rather bleak, bitter and barbed story which was the first that I read from that collection, The Chrysanthemums. Both stories almost come across as each other’s counterpart, contrasting in colour and in outcome of an encounter.
Breakfast echoes the feel of biblical parables, particularly those of the talents, the good Samaritan and of the prodigal son. Ending on a somewhat mysterious, suggestive note, the heartening, brief encounter leaves this reader wondering on the narrator’s a lasting, glowing memory of generosity, hospitality and warmth. It reminded me of the maybe naïve but necessary creed that also – and possibly even more so - in times of hardship solidarity is the only worthy choice. As Lea Ypi wrote in Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History: And yet despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.
I wouldn’t go back there because the objects that are linked in your memory with the familiar life of former times instantly lose their value when, seI wouldn’t go back there because the objects that are linked in your memory with the familiar life of former times instantly lose their value when, severed from them, you see them again in strange surroundings.
[image] (Cathleen Rehfeld - My Mother’s Silver )
Shortly after the second world war, a young Jewish woman travels to a house to recollect the belongings of her family that have been taken into custody there during the war by a neighbour. She isn’t welcome and finds out more than she wanted to know about human nature.
I read this powerful and perplexing short story because it came up as a source of inspiration for Yael van der Wouden’s recent novel The Safekeep. Like in Marga Minco’s Bitter Herbs, much is left unsaid. Minco’s writing is simple, sober and uncannily effectual- in her storytelling each word counts.
I am still on the fence about reading The Safekeep but these six pages were well-worth reading.
Vermoedelijk zou je menig rek kunnen vullen met reisgidsen die tips geven over het ‘andere’, het ‘ongekende’ of ‘ongewone’ Parijs. Sommigen aar[image]
Vermoedelijk zou je menig rek kunnen vullen met reisgidsen die tips geven over het ‘andere’, het ‘ongekende’ of ‘ongewone’ Parijs. Sommigen aarzelen niet hun allerindividueelste ‘mijn Parijs’ onder de aandacht te brengen – eigenzinnigheid verkoopt. Toch hebben de titels die blogger en fotograaf Ferry van der Vliet samenstelt de nieuwgierige Parijsganger best wel wat inspirerende tips te bieden. Hij mikt op lezers die de grote toeristische trekpleisters al grotendeels achter de kiezen hebben, de ‘kenners en liefhebbers van Parijs of zij die dat hopen te worden’ – en hij lijkt met glans te slagen in dit opzet. Laat de mogelijkheid verrast te worden door een stemmig park(je) hier of een charmant plein(tje)/straatje/hoekje daar nu net zijn wat mij telkens opnieuw weer naar de Lichtstad trekt (een slecht geheugen en een rampzalig gebrek aan oriënteringsvermogen zijn hierbij een grote hulp) – het is dus niet zo verwonderlijk dat zijn reisgidsen Ongewoon Parijs, Parijs anders bekeken en Rondom Parijs me veelbelovend in de oren klonken, en dus een goede keuze leken voor enkele dagen Parijs.
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Op stap in Parijs midden augustus met deze drie boeken op zak, kan ik zowat alle voor mij nieuwe plekken die we hebben verkend op het conto van Ferry van der Vliet schrijven: het kerkhof van Montmartre, de Grote Moskee, de Jardin des Plantes, Belleville, de buurt rond Oberkampf en het Canal Saint Martin, het Musée de la Vie romantique, het Musée Marmottan Monet, de mur des je t’aime, de Place de la Contrescarpe – plaatsen die ik vooral uit dit deel, Ongewoon Parijs, heb bijeengesprokkeld (omwille van tijdsgebrek ter plaatse, heb ik het pas bij thuiskomst helemaal uitgelezen).
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Ongewoon Parijs is een knap en sfeervol fotoboek voor wie geen diepgaande informatieve of historische duiding of heldere beschrijvingen van mogelijke wandelroutes verwacht (een kaart en plaatsregister ontbreken), boordevol tips waarmee je heel wat dagen in Parijs zou kunnen vullen, zelfs als je alle - wellicht nogal prijzige – culinaire pleisterplaatsen die worden vermeld, overslaat. Hopelijk komen er in de toekomst nog volgende gelegenheden voorbij, om op zoek te gaan naar de Promenade Dora-Bruder, het parc de Bagatelle, het Musée Nissim de Camondo, meer van de 19de-eeuwse overdekte winkelpassages en galerijen, of verleidelijke plekken rondom Parijs, zoals de Japanse tuin bij het Musée Albert-Kahn.
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De blog van Ferry van der Vliet, met talrijke foto’s, kan je hier vinden. Een vierde deel in de reeks, Parijs budgetvriendelijk beleven verschijnt 15 oktober 2024.
(disclaimer: amateurfoto’s hierboven eigen maaksel)...more
I have always thought that writing was close to music, only much less pure, and I have always envied musicians who to my mind practised an art which iI have always thought that writing was close to music, only much less pure, and I have always envied musicians who to my mind practised an art which is higher than the novel. Poets, too, who are closer to musicians than novelists. I began writing poems as a child, and that is surely why a remark I read somewhere struck such a chord with me: 'prose writers are made from bad poets'. For a novelist, in terms of music, it is often a matter of coaxing all the people, the landscapes, the streets he has been able to observe into a musical score which contains the same melodic fragments from one book to another, but which will seem to him to be imperfect. The novelist will then regret not having been a pure musician and not having composed Chopin's Nocturnes.
Patrick Modiano's 2014 Nobel lecture is a very moving, lucid, poetic and enlightening essay on writing, memory, Paris during the Occupation in the second world war, his use of telephone directories in the creative process, Proust, the importance of childhood experiences on writing, his views on his own writing and vocation as a novelist, the harmony which develops between the reader and the author. He finely brushes his themes ("Themes of disappearance, identity and the passing of time are closely bound up with the topography of cities"), touches on the writer as as seismograph who reveals the depths and reality hidden behind appearances and his literary influences - particularly other writers who - like Modiano is to Paris - are strongly linked to a single city (Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Söderberg).
With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.
I returned to my city familiar to tears, To my vessels and tonsils of childhood years, Petersburg, […] While you're keeping my telephone numbers alive. Petersburg, I still have the addresses at hand That I’ll use to recover the voice of the dead.
I was moved to tears by the stanza's of this poem of Osip Mandelstam that Modiano quoted - it reminded me of the moment I found the telephone guide 1997-1998 from Leuven that the French artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021) used in his work of art "Les abonnés du téléphone, 2000" that one can see - and touch - in the basement of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and looked up the telephone number of the place where I had been living at that time with the one who I loved and who took me to Paris, and is no more.
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Sometimes human existence is simply signified by lists of names, as in Abonnées du téléphone (‘Telephone Subscribers’), which was designed for the exhibition “Voilà” in 2000, where telephone directories from all over the world were displayed on shelves and could be consulted. Human presence here was reduced to its simplest expression: a surname.
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Thank you very much Helga, for bringing this lecture of this author that I adore to my attention.
Modiano, toujours Modiano.
To me, Monsieur Modiano, your novels mean as much as the nocturnes, and preludes, and other pieces of Chopin - an almost daily necessity, a balm -thank you ♥.
The Nobel lecture of Patrick Modiano can be found here (in French, English and Swedish)....more
This photograph book put a smile on my face, reminding me of the episode in the Irish TV series Father Ted in which Ted utilises toy cows trying to exThis photograph book put a smile on my face, reminding me of the episode in the Irish TV series Father Ted in which Ted utilises toy cows trying to explain to Father Dougal how to get a grip on perspective (these cows are small, the ones out there are far away). Shrinking giant things into tiny somethings has a comical and endearing effect, infusing images with a certain droll playfulness, innocence and ingenuity.
Antwerp resized is a photo project in which pictures of Antwerp, taken with a Tilt-Shift lens from heights (rooftops, lifting platforms, cranes) give the impression of looking at a miniature world – presenting a look at the big city from a bird’s eye view. The on-looker sees a circus tent as if it is a Playmobil prop, the perspective renders roads, buildings, traffic and people unreal, also because familiar objects and sights lose their sharpness, being blurred.
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As a person living in a small provincial town near to Antwerp (likely the proverbial carpark (=everyone not living in Antwerp?), I was slightly amused by the irony in this peculiar view on the city, seeing this town with its – not entirely undeserved - reputation of a certain sense of superiority and big-headedness reduced to this small size - even smaller than Mini-Europe, literally putting it into perspective in a playful way. It’s easy to sympathize with the photographer's view, acknowledging the relative importance of any human endeavour. I can imagine the photographer’s excitement and fun in the process of covering his hometown from above and the daredevil feats he probably needed to perform to obtain his photographs (he also covered Belgium, New York and Amsterdam in the similar format). Nonetheless, while I was looking at some work of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson – also taken from cranes – last week, it struck me that Jasper Léonard's resized Antwerp does not really transcend the gimmick, missing the enigmatic and mysterious touch that intrigued me in Crewdson’s storytelling photography. The rather chauvinist commentary texts (on the zoo, the Antwerp station, the City Hall) struck me as rather banal and superfluous....more