Pete Townshend's "Who I Am"" Audiobook Review

I heard this all the way through the acknowledgements, where Pete thanks his editors for assisting in cutting this down from 750 to 450 pages. As it is, it certainly abounds in tiny detail, drawn from Townshend's archives and journals kept for many years, as well as, I am sure, anecdotes with which he has regaled many fans for decades. I liked his genial presence, and listening to his London accent energizes what can be at times a slow narrative. He tends to chuckle or chortle a lot as he tells his tale. This can annoy sometimes, as when one sounds self-satisfied for being clever, but it also can be endearing. Over 17+ hours spent in Pete Townshend's company, not only The Who come alive, but his childhood, art school in Ealing, his schoolboy friendship with John Entwistle, and the hidden truths behind a troubled upbringing and his parents' own discontent. All this looms in his adulthood.

It's rousing to hear of Keith Moon's "liquid drumming" and John's "loquacious bass" driving the band in their Maximum R+B period, capped by Roger Daltrey's "howling like a black prisoner." Certainly, Pete loves his bandmates, and those who preceded The Who get their fair mention too. So do hundreds of others, as mentors, rivals, managers, staff, engineers, producers, friends, lovers, and fans, as Pete takes pains to credit many who made him and the band able to pursue "the best day job ever."

He shares the stories one expects. But some of the albums with the original lineup get but passing mention, such as "Sell Out" and "Who By Numbers;" much attention on the other hand is expended unsurprisingly on "Tommy" and "Quadrophrenia" in their best-known as well as subsequent iterations in concert, in film, and as musical theatre. In fact, I lost track of their variations, as on these and other solo and band projects, Townshend keeps returning to them as his skill and the technical equipment evolve, and he immerses himself perhaps like none of his peers into the possibilities of computing.

This leads him into one well-publicized run-in with the police, and he explains his side carefully. You will come away more clearly understanding what Pete set out to investigate, and the mistake he made. He also is forthright about his long addictions, his troubled marriage and affairs, family life,  and his determination to assist those less fortunate by charities and performances. This material again can weigh the telling down in its pace, but it's only fair to him that he balances his most famous period with his later life. Still, for all his enthusiasm about boats, he offers a lot of minute description.

All in all, I enjoyed hearing this, and I probably would not have if another reader recited this book. You get a truer sense of the intellectual, irascible, and introverted sides of this performer, who out of the limelight appears to have relished solitude (in his many homes), but who for the sake of his band mates and his fans (and perhaps The Who's accountants and labels), made the shows and tours go on. (Amazon US 4-21-15 and 6-26-15 to Audible.)

John Lydon's "Anger is an Energy": Book Review

"In fact, I changed music twice." So claims John Lydon early in these five-hundred-plus pages of recollections. He later boasts that "I changed history." At fifty-seven, living in Malibu, the punk provocateur enjoys sailing and loafing, far from the "dustbin" he came from in London, a son among many in an Irish immigrant family. As he explains the title of his second memoir, Anger is an Energy, Lydon reminds readers that he channels anger for neither hatred nor violence, but to motivate principled, sensible change.

As he covered his upbringing and his career with the Sex Pistols in Rotten: No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish (1994), Lydon may repeat tales of his formative years here. He attempts to get the record straight; he castigates Jon Savage's England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991) for its distortions. Lydon's reminiscences, which may provide less insight than expected to audiences who have scoured Savage's book and other chronicles of punk's heyday, nonetheless capture his playful, wry voice.

This book, set down by journalist Andrew Perry, does capture many moments when Lydon enriches our understanding. He speculates on what "a bitter, twisted fuck" he must have appeared at Malcolm McLaren and Vivianne Westwood's SEX boutique as the band was formed. He explains why safety pins were sported. "It was about fallout, having an instant repair kit for when Viv's goods fell apart."

Later, he judges that her "aesthetic counted more to her than the actual physicality of a human being." At ground zero for the punk boom, Lydon narrates McLaren's manipulation of him and his bandmates. He struggled against his wishes, and the other Pistols. He articulates that "my songs don't lecture, they give you freedom of thought, inside of the agenda I'm pushing." He makes enemies. But these are not people, but institutions. Placing no faith in political parties or armed resistance, he instead urges his audience to follow his lead. He forges, in his estimation, a daily struggle with "integrity" to banish a "witch-hunt" against dissenters, freaks, and those the system crushes or hates.

Lydon challenges "punk as a standardized uniform" worn by those with no insights into non-conformity. When it comes to punk, "there are no rules." His disgust with the "Boo Nazis" who replaced the movement's open-mindedness with "rules and regulations" led him to Public Image Ltd.

As for music and the message: "If you're not doing this for the poor old biddy that lives next door and can't afford the heating in the winter, then you don't count at all. Studded leather jackets for all is not a creed I can endorse." Here, you hear Lydon's humanism, the commonsense beneath his sly stance.

He also offers insights into fellow musicians and singers caught up in the spotlight. Not only towards his friends, humble or famous, and his rancorous bandmates, but to such figures as Joe Strummer. Lydon contrasts the isolation of the Clash, who sought fame and big-label success, with the purported socialism and sloganeering that, in his opinion, made them a caricature of the values they mouthed.

Breaking with such contradictions, PiL sought to reform the way bands made music. This is the second of the changes Lydon promoted. He attempted collaboration with Jah Wobble and Keith Levine, two strong-willed individuals. Drugs, egos, and drink worsened the communal situation soon. But the band's second album, Metal Box (1979), issued by musicians barely out of their teens, "is a stunningly beautiful tapestry of high anxiety." They never reached this peak again, and soon, despite what in Lydon's terms appears to be a misunderstanding of their mission, PiL soon became a series of musicians backing whatever the singer felt he wanted to do in the studio and live. Lydon worked with some stunning talent, such as guitarist John McGeoch, but the band never recaptured its first spark.

Like this autobiography and like some of PiL's eclectic earlier music, this narrative resists linear fluidity through italicized interspersions. These deal with his wife Nora (whose daughter, Ari Up, was a founding member of the Slits), Shakespeare, celebrity woes, and bad teeth among other topics. These short excursions lighten the weight of so much detail from Lydon, who appears to have kept journals and archives well in order to draw upon, decades later, in the preparation of this account.

As he admits halfway through: "But I digress here, Sorry, it's the way my brain works." By the mid-80s, Lydon warily suns himself in Venice Beach, determined to leave London for Los Angeles. Working with Ginger Baker, Steve Vai, Bill Laswell, and his band now consisting of Allan Dias, Lu Edmonds, Bruce Smith and McGeoch, Album (1986) defied its generic title and packaging. This line-up persisted until near the end of the decade, when again, PiL splintered and lost its direction.

While Lydon acknowledges the difficulties of funding and handling a fractious lot of musicians, he appears to judge PiL's later music as worthy of acclaim as its earlier recordings. To me, as a fan, I find Lydon faces a blind spot. The band's music after Wobble and Wardle fit more into eclectic rock, but it no longer felt as unclassifiable or as alien as Metal Box, despite that album's humble budget.

However, Lydon understands the challenge. He muses: do people want the "scandal-mongering of a nineteen-year-old? Or do they want to go on a journey of self-discovery?" PiL contributes to the soundtrack of Point Break, Lydon tries out for the cast of the film adaptation of Quadrophenia, and he announces on the inevitable Filthy Lucre reunion tour of the Pistols: "I'm fat, forty and back."

He contributes ads for Schlitz, Mountain Dew and English butter. He appears on a brief-lived Rotten TV on MTV.  He also graces I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and Judge Judy. He likes making nature documentaries: Megabugs, Shark Attack and Goes Ape. He roams about, doing what he likes in and out of music. Unfortunately, the production of Jesus Christ Superstar with him as Herod is cancelled just before it opens. He displays a likeable wit, and learns to handle his fame with grace.

Lydon sums up his legacy. "My songs were echoes of revolution and empathy for people, and certainly not the work of some sneery, selfish little toad." He ends this genial, if garrulous, tale by praising his family, insisting on privacy and celebrating his "hobby" of PiL. In the end, he seeks "nothing but joy to the world." Happy on the beach, caring for Nora's grandchildren, John Lydon lives as he pleases, and as fifty-odd years ago in North London tenements, as he had dreamed. (In slightly altered form to Spectrum Culture 7-30-15; with one word censored, to Amazon US 8-1-15)

The British Library's "London: A Literary Anthology": Book Review

Although the handsome cover and many familiar authors may tempt browsers to judge this compilation as a pleasant holiday gift or congenial night-table companion, the contents reveal a complex presentation. Some treat London as did Daniel Defoe, as "the greatest, the finest, the richest city in the world" but as many talented writers and artists gathered within concur, this megapolis has long stood for poverty, congestion, pollution, and degradation. From medieval poets John Lydgate and William Dunbar to current observers Benjamin Zephaniah and Zadie Smith, Londoners whether native or newcomers regard its vast crowds and tall towers with dread, dreariness, and delight.

Arranged thematically by Richard Fairman, thirteen chapters begin at dawn, moving into the reactions of those entering its sprawl for the first time, then exploring its mews and squares. "In dim-lit streets, war-tired people moved slowly/ like dark-coated bears in a snowy region." So recalls James Berry, as he views"Beginning in a City, 1948" from a Caribbean immigrant's perspective.

Although the weather requires both rich and poor to bundle up, beneath this comparison, differences endure. Contrasts between the high and low life have long fascinated visitors. Consider Charlotte Brontë's protagonist from her novel Villette: "I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and forever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?" This lure draws millions, over centuries, from all over. Amazing diversity endures, noted by William Blake as by Hanif Kureishi. London's narrow streets never seem to empty.

The febrile tension from crowds connects Hugh Walpole's story set on The Strand, Katherine Mansfield's depiction of "The Tiredness of Rosabel" as she comes home from work to climb four flights up to a humdrum night out of the rain, and Doris Lessing's excerpt from The Four-Gated City. This finds Martha out after dark, fearing exposure she risks passing through a red-light district on her way from Oxford Street to Bayswater Road, along Queensway towards Notting Hill. The drama of a pedestrian's passage from one district to another, subtle or dramatic, and the warren of diversions or temptations in dim side streets, recur in many of these sixty-six entries from nearly as many writers.

On first perusal, the lack of an introduction or any editorial context for the selections or authors puzzled me. It seemed a shortcoming. A small flaw is the near-absence of those who live away from the historic core of The City or the few miles near the north side of the Thames. Only Angela Carter's Wise Children speaks up for those beyond the south bank. But, the presentation of period illustrations and literary reflections, if attentively read, invites audiences to study dozens of reactions in pen and pastel to the domination of The City over one's own mental landscape. For those who have visited or who live in London, it will remind them of why many want to return there, or why some never will.

As Evelyn Waugh's satire sums it up: "all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...Those vile bodies..." A bitterness clouds many sights seen by those who record them honestly. Charles Dickens' Bleak House dramatizes a tale from a mother so poor she wishes her son had never survived his birth. Virginia Woolf's far-better off Mrs. Ambrose, in The Voyage Out, observes from Waterloo Bridge: "When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath."

Clad in rags or cradled in finery, people never stop arriving. Jewish, Australian, Scots, and Pakistani immigrants all find their voices in these pages. Israel Zangwill and Zadie Smith may have lived a century apart. But they agree in their stories that chaotic city streets spark tension. Classes must mix, and their failure to cope with relentless demands strains relationships, in passing or permanently.

Overcrowding and inequality, worsened by the weather and the conditions which made this city for many centuries one of the world's largest also generate disease and decay. Juxtaposed chapters on disgust, plagues and fires, wartime devastation, and apocalyptic depictions of the city's downfall remind readers of the reactions writers amass to London's perpetual pride, and how it tempts fate.

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor brutally conveys how the plague dissolved family ties. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Poison Belt" and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, as to doom, join Richard Jeffries' stoic description in his suitably titled portion from After London. Even less cataclysmic scenarios in The City show its force exacted upon nature. Dickens' Dombey and Son charts the immense digs that built the railroads, and if the holdouts of Stagg's Garden defy the iron horse, they may not last long.

On a thoroughfare half a century or more later, Amy Lowell at two in the morning imagines the results of a transformed London. "I stand in the window and watch the moon./ She is thin and lustreless,/ But I love her./ I know the moon,/ And this is an alien city." What has changed is constant light. Juxtaposed memorably, in the last chapter documenting London after dark, the photos and illustrations, many chosen well from the British Library's holdings, suggest a nuanced reaction to the coming of electricity. This transformed London from a few candlelit circles within foggy shadows.

"Electric lighting in the City" from The Graphic, April 1881, may cause you to beg to differ with Lowell from 1914. It shows walkers halted by the wonder of seeing what had long evaded sight. Complementing these engravings, another from the same publication evokes a supremely detailed "Bird's-eye view from a balloon" in May 1884. The attention to precision, over Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament next to the sweep of the Thames, astonishes the careful eye. The people and cabs are so far away they appear as dots, and this elevation, after all, removes one from the jostle, the smells, the unpredictability of whatever the streets bring the rich and the poor. Above, one sees only a city made beautiful, from so high up that clouds float down below, over the serpentine river.

The fact that these clouds emanate from factories does not detract, somehow, from their wonder. That too, may be what makes London a place that impels immigrants to remain as residents, and which fills those same streets and attractions as it has for hundreds of years, as a destination that compels.
(PopMatters + Amazon US 12-19-14)

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas": Book Review

I'd been meaning to tackle this over the past decade; I wanted to see the adaptation by the Wachowski siblings released in late 2012. In of all places Park City, Utah (home of Sundance), in the off-season, Layne and I missed it and so opted for "Argo" (cheap ticket) in an exurb faux-Western mall. I tried that Christmas to rally my family after we bickered over Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained and I held down my paternal foot as I wasn't in the mood for either to celebrate the mythical birthdate of the purported Prince of Peace. We chose neither, settling on On the Road. Rarely do I venture into a theater these days, grousing as I do at people. prices, popcorn and promotion, but when I do, I want to see a spectacle enhanced by the big screen. I'd heard that ambitious adaptation of a sprawling narrative was met with bewilderment or annoyance; I'd reckoned the po-mo structure of the Booker Prize finalist (not for the first time for this 2004 entry) would baffle viewers as it did some readers. I left it unseen and still shelved.

Then, investigating "Buddhist Fiction," I found UU World nominated it for its shortlist. Dozens of copies (credit post-Matrix buzz!) were checked out of all L.A. and Pasadena libraries, but South Pasadena had it. I grabbed it. I took it along on too-brief an out-of-town trip, and I enjoyed it. Not sure if I loved it. The uphill climb for its first half is more rewarding: the challenge invigorates you to keep going. It accelerates into the curve, and through its central section. Out of that turn, it's downhill. The novel's easier to read, moves rapidly, but there's a sense of anti-climactic ennui. That may fit well the nature of David Mitchell's investigation of repetition and reincarnation, all the same.

This entry covers the passages explicating the themes I found most intriguing. It doesn't delve into the "Russian doll"-structure inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (as I suspected long before learning Mitchell in 2010 via The Paris Review credited that novel I loved thirty years ago) for the 1-2-3-4-5-6 then reversed arrangement--as this is now common knowledge. 

"The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" features a Melville tone: Typee is mentioned later on. South Seas are visited by an American notary from the new city of San Francisco as the Gold Rush erupts. Afflicted by a worm entering his brain carrying a mysterious malady, Adam falls into the care of one Dr. Henry Goose on the voyage on the Prophetess. The style flows easier than much of (the later) Melville: "As Henry & I ate supper, a blizzard of purplish moths seemed to issue from the cracks in the moon, smothering lanterns, faces, food & every surface in a twitching sheet of wings." (39) We later find a typically casual recurrence of an image in the central story on the Big Island of Hawai'i: "Papery moths blowed thru her shimm'rin' eyes'n'mouth too, to'n'fro, yay, to'n'fro." (264)

"Letters from Zehelgem" might have been penned by John Banville or Julian Barnes. It's the type of contemporary novel that's shortlisted for a Booker Prize--as Mitchell a two-time nominee may know well. In the early 1930s, composer Robert Frobisher flees Cambridge, debtors, and justice by presenting himself in Belgium as an amanuensis to his elderly counterpart, and soon rival of sorts, Vyvyan Ayrs. Frobisher's flight from apprehension to Calais sums up his spirit: "Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue." (46) 

The tattered book he finds in Ayrs' manse, or half of it, is Ewing's journal, published by his son. In turn, "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" continues the saga as the recipient of Frobisher's letters back to England, Rufus Sixsmith, returns at the age of 66. He's a successful nuclear physicist in the late 1970s in California. But he's restless in Buenas Yerbas (a reversal of an early placename for S.F., by the way.) "West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, beserking American continent." (89) His career and his stance on this energy does not please a sinister (naturally) Seabrook corporation. Out of this, one "Hilary V. Hush" generates a pulp thriller, full of chases and conspiracies.

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" takes us to that middle-aged, put-upon middle man, in contemporary England, who runs a feeble "author partnership" press: in its slush pile lands the first Luisa Rey mystery. He deals with the aftermath of a cause celebre where the writer of Knuckle Sandwich meets sudden notoriety, and the attention generates fame and profits for Cavendish. Flush with the proceeds, all seems it will go well, until it doesn't.  Kingsley or Martin Amis might be at home here. Consider this look as Timothy must flee from London: "you sly toupeed quizmaster, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blackened bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen, et al.; hot glass buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother." (161) 

On his journey north, Cavendish raises a theme common to Mitchell's characters: "we cross, criscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters." (163) His story stops suddenly (as do others), and we leap into an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future where a Korean superstate dominates a blighted planet. "An Orison of Sonmi-451" in the fashion of Haruki Murakami or Philip K. Dick follows an engineered fabricant's entry into sentience. Escorted out of her climate controlled confines, she confides to her listener the strangeness of a natural reality: "Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me." (202) In such phrasing, the beauty of Mitchell's observations freshen the familiar. 

"Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" occupies the core around which the other stories are mirrored in two, or tucked into. Zachry's telling recalls the altered language of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, as well as the dialect and the quest of Huck Finn as one society's fragility is shattered by the arrival of tension, disruption, and unsettling values and ideas. These, filtered via Meronym from an enclave beyond the insular Valleymen, force Zachry to come of age in a brutal clash of cultures and enemies. The Valleymen are visited by Meronym, and Zachry learns why they have ventured so far across the ocean. What has happened after the demise of Nea So Corpros as the Korean hegemony is little understood; Meronym and a few Prescients guard a few factual or mythic gleanings against predators and plague that roil the globe and the miniscule remnants who've survived Earth's collapse.

The Old 'Uns have died off, and ignorance is their legacy to the stragglers who struggle after the meltdown. "Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’humans, yay, a hunger for more.” (272) Civilization vs. savagery tears apart the survivors: it's as if delayed gratification eliminated the consumers and capitalists, the warlords and the masses unable to wait and think before rushing to buy, spend, fight, grab, grasp. "Old 'Uns got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall." (303)

The novel then proceeds to wrap up Zachry's chronicle and propel us back the same way we came in. Although Cavendish sniffs: "As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.'s in postmodernism and chaos theory." (150) Of course, such devices long predate what was my own long slog through this at just this time in grad school and my own collegiate reading in and out of class. Mitchell applies these through such images as the moths cited earlier. It's not that difficult a novel to follow as some grousing readers and critics lamented; anyone who can read Calvino's tale can handle this. The second half, however, moves rapidly and feels often somewhat less engaging as the puzzle-pieces neatly snap together in turn. 

One device that audiences apparently needed a visual guide and a screenplay reboot for in the (unseen as yet by me) film version was the comet-shaped birthmark used by Mitchell to suggest reincarnations or rebirths of protagonists.  On pg. 85, Frobisher introduces his; Luisa finds this
and matches it to her own despite "I just don't believe in this crap" (120) and she tries to talk herself out of it as a coincidence. (122)  Zachry sees on Meronym her "whoahsome wyrd" one just below her shoulder blade in the light of Lady Moon (303); Cavendish reasons such an image "will have to go" if the Luisa Rey "young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption-thriller" will succeed on its potential. "Far too hippie-druggy-New Age"--a sentiment I've found echoed by some resenting the storyline as a novel or a film. (357)

Given as the UU World site and its counterpart study include this on a list of "Buddhist fiction," and granted the Cambridge-trained, now County Cork resident writer married to a Japanese woman and immersed via his fiction in Asian settings, there's no escaping placement of this novel into this niche. Yet, it rests there lightly. 

In "Orison," Sonmi hears from an Abbess (this rank continues among the Valleyman's cult of ancestor worship by icons in barrows on the Big Island) from the ranks of "recidivists" in a cave hidden as a safe house for her and other "tapeworms" who huddle off the corporacratic grid. For "fifteen centuries," nuns have persisted there. A stone figure (resembling of all people Cavendish) named Siddhartha "is a dead man a living ideal." (330) Little is known of the man; his "names" tellingly as well as his doctrine have been forgotten, after the Abbess's elder mentors had been eliminated when "non-consumer religions were criminalized." (The prediction made by the Buddha that after 2500 years his own message would gradually fade comes to mind; the rule of the Corporation-State forming around us may presage "Maitreya" ending the next span of five thousand years as the Buddha's successor. But such speculation lies outside the margins of Mitchell's ambitious narrative.) Sonmi manages to wish for reincarnation in the "colony" and on departure, the Abbess promises to relay her wish to Siddhartha. Later, Zachry will unlock an orison brought by Meronym that reveals Sonmi, whose cult will spread until she has been elevated to a goddess status by the Valleymen.

Progress, these shifts in belief and power, and earthly fate concern others in this novel. Earlier, Frobisher remarks on an aquatint of a Siamese temple. He compares its lore as it's relentlessly ornamented and improved: it will one day be equal to "its counterpart in the Pure Land" (81). Then, humanity's purpose fulfilled, Time will conclude. Frobisher offers an alternative analogy. Like Ayrs, the edifice rises upon the backs of ignorant and anonymous labor, and civilization claims its resplendence through those statesmen and artists who take the credit for themselves, as "architects, masons, and priests."

In the fittingly titled "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" Isaac Sachs contemplates the actual vs. a virtual past. The Nietzschean will-to-power enters Vyvyan and Robert's verbal sparring, and by this later section, the Sixsmith Report of Frobisher's correspondent stands for the threat to this humanist resistance against the machine men and women build (like that Siamese temple?). Sachs proposes a virtual past (as in the legacy in story of the Titanic outlasting the memories of its "real-time" survivors) and wonders how corporations and governments will co-opt this. 

Sachs continues to sum up the greater novel he's part of unwittingly. "One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual future." (393) Naturally, comparison of this structure to a Buddhist (or post-modern) conception of impermanence and instability within the stories we tell and which we tell of ourselves opens this up to a neat critique***.

A few pages later, Luisa and a boy, Javier, discuss what if one could see the future. Javier asks: would you want to? Luisa hesitates, wanting to know if the future so seen could be changed or not. (401) She ruminates that acting now in the expectation of what the future holds may trigger that future scenario. "What happens in a minute's time is made by what you do." She leaves the conversation wondering inside her head about this "great imponderable." "Maybe the answer is not one of metaphysics but one, simply, of power."

Necessarily inconclusive, this novel of ideas in its last segment, a reprise of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" deals with civilized incursions across the globe, and how power forces change and alters presents and futures. "Ships bring disease dust here," Mr. Wagstaff observes to Ewing as they land at a Christian settlement on Rataoia in the newly named Society Islands. The natives die off, slaves are imported from other islands, and the natives decline in fertility as religious fervor does not inspire fecundity. "To kill what you cherish & cure," Wagstaff smiles, "that seems to be the way of things." (486)

Countering the missionary endeavor and its social Darwinism with humanist reasoning, Adam denies any rules in history. He affirms only outcomes. "Vicious acts and virtuous acts" spur results. (507) These acts emerge from belief. To fight "the 'natural' order of things," confidence in human qualities beyond selfishness impel idealists such as Ewing. He vows to become an Abolitionist (we glimpse this cadre in Sonmi's fearful realm), and he vows to become a force for change, even if but "one drop in a limitless ocean." (509) With that promise, we place back the novel's last nestled doll, or its first. 

(Amazon US 3-5-13 in shorter, depersonalized, slightly rewritten version. ***I've expanded the Buddhist and post-Buddhist, Marxian and anarchistic associations spun out of the encounter between Sonmi and the Abbess about Siddhartha in comment #2 replying to "A Spectre Is Haunting Buddhism: Give Marx Some Credit," by Glenn Wallis at Speculative Non-Buddhism on 3-7-13. I extended that into more countercultural contexts on 3-9-13 in comment #11 and virtual realm applications on 3-8-13 in comment #6,)

Judith Flanders' "The Victorian City": Book Review

London epitomizes the Victorian city. It doubled in population between 1800 and 1850, and this growth spurt was witnessed by its most famous author, who moved there at the age of ten, in 1821. Gleaning the most informative or entertaining evidence from the author's many books, Judith Flanders combines Dickens' life and works with archives as a "perfect optic through which to see the city's transformation" during the reign of Queen Victoria and Dickens' life span. While these do not align perfectly, as the queen reigned between 1837 and 1901 while Dickens died in 1870, the general fit proves neat enough here.

This is thick, and therefore a congenial match for Dickens' own sometimes voluble texts. Well illustrated with period lithographs and engravings, prefaced by helpful maps reminding us how much that capital does and does not match the layout of the ever-congested megapolis today, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London keeps to the streets themselves rather than the interiors and domestic duty. These streets prove noisy, as horses clopped and cabs rattled. Sellers shouted, carts crashed, horses neighed and cattle bellowed, from what seems before dawn until midnight, daily.

Flanders opens with a look at how early many had to wake up. By two or three in the morning, some had left home miles away, even in the countryside, to hike in to the markets and to set up stalls in near-blackness. Many returned home in the same lack of light, through dim, dangerous, and unpaved streets, after twelve- or fourteen hour days. Saturdays some might leave work at ten p.m. They were condemned by Sabbatarians who chided those who dared to shop in turn on Sundays for their scanty provisions. Lives lived in the open meant that few of the poorer classes kept food at home, where storage was lacking and vermin abounded. Instead, people ate on the go, many trudging everywhere.

The ratio of black cabs today to people in London is over 1:400. 160 years ago, there was about one horse-drawn cab for every person. The traffic had to, at Temple Bar which divided the City from the West End, narrow to a space twenty yards wide, and coaches and livery jammed into what was likely a perpetual bottleneck. Such situations multiplied over the city, as the poor had to live near their jobs and the rich sought to travel if possible by more amenable transport than on foot. But these rides could be harrowing, and the mud, rain, smoke, fog, and excrement that abounded meant whatever one's rank, the weather and the smells took their toll on one's health, one's clothing, and one's nerves.

Some sights jolt us by familiarity. Traffic clogged, even as a lunchroom promised free delivery within a ten-mile radius. Grand illuminations lit up London with huge displays, even if this same city could be so dark before streetlights that firemen tried to put out a blaze they kept glimpsing beyond, which turned out to be the Northern Lights. Other features remind us of distinctions. Waiters had to pay for their laundry, supplies, and a place at the chophouses where they then had to count on tips for their wage. Oysters were craved as then as now, but back then, were a cheap source of food for the poor.

What differs is the diminution of animals from these dense streets today. The horrors of Smithfield Market with its braying of terrified livestock sent to slaughter, the din of those goading them with whips, the escape of maddened bulls, the press of cattle and sheep in the small pens, the stench: this created a scene that as the animals were herded through the streets few could fully escape, or forget.

However narrow, streets certainly have widened in the never-ending construction which marks London for two centuries and more now. This also led to slum clearances, as either well-intended or speculative interests sought to raze medieval warrens and tiny alleys where filth emanated, among humans and beasts and factories. Yet, this pushed the poor, who still had to walk to their work--often on the streets themselves--into nearby neighborhoods, accelerating their decline even as the inner city (then as now) soared in desirability. Even the Tube followed this pattern; Flanders reminds us that unlike Paris, London's planners kept many underground lines out of the innermost ring of London (or at least diverted from regal proximity). The Underground in turn sparked more sprawl, more crowds.

It can surprise us how frequently Queen Victoria survived no less than seven assassination attempts, given the proximity of herself to these very crowds. She, perhaps appropriately, rarely appears in these pages, although other royals do, often at clubs separated from the pubs where lowlier folks flock. While Flanders' survey suffers from a shortcoming of not entering as many interiors, beyond the public gaze, as a reader eager to discover Victorian minutiae might anticipate, she examines in a frisky chapter the veracity of claims for prostitution by a considerable number of women on London's streets. She avers that although such a profession was attributed to milliners, that occupation's required hours of fourteen or sixteen hour shifts meant that even if  those women still had the energy after work to pursue liaisons for profit or pleasure (the two could blur), they likely had not the time.

The challenge no matter the labor most Londoners had to eke out was how to stay healthy, dry, shod, and fed. Until nearly 1850, Westminster and surrounding areas were supplied with drinking water from sewers. Dregs from the glasses rinsed in a pub were sold again to the poor. Scraps similarly were fed to the same. Cholera spread, and infection grew. The conditions under which Londoners breathed, dined,a and drank prove the dismal nature of the fog-bound and soot-showered streets. On these, everyone appears to have plied a trade, licit or otherwise. Watercress-girls, cats' meat vendors with horse chunks on skewers cut to order, dog-carts (alas no canine-power), touts for dolly shops (unlicensed pawnbrokers), crossing-sweepers, costermongers with strawberries sold in paper cones, match-sellers, hot-potato vendors, chum-masters in charge of who was jailed with whom for debt or for crime, and pimps consorted in the mews or shoved each other at Covent Garden or on the Strand.

The circle of who sold what comprised its tidy if ironically drawn economy. Tea leaves after stewing were rinsed, dried, and sprinkled on carpets to draw up dust before sweeping. "Once this had been done, some charwomen sold the leaves to unscrupulous dealers who mixed them with new tea leaves, selling the tea at bargain prices. It was these very women and their kind who were most likely to purchase the lowest-priced tea, and who were drinking what they had lately swept up." (148)

Flanders sprinkles such observations throughout. She sets up one theme per chapter and moves within from topic to topic carefully. Occupations or their lack, health or its lack, entertainment for all, and nighttime temptations and dangers create the four foundations upon which her solid scholarship rests, in brisk, clear prose. She opens each chapter with a dramatic vignette from an elaborate hoax, a fire on the Thames, a skating disaster at Regents Park, and the funeral of the Duke of Wellington to conjure a fitting mood.

I did close this still pondering a few questions I had expected to be answered by the conclusion, as so much detail fills this book. What about the cultural impact of the Great Exhibition, and of the museums and galleries which already had begun to be built?  What did the fabled Leadenhall Market look like? In an era torn between reason and faith, surely these debates of the Victorian era must have generated friction on the street among preachers and debaters, and left their mark on passersby.

While some of the amassed data may overwhelm a casual reader, Judith Flanders admirably avoids jargon and keeps this always pitched at a general reader. A hundred of the just over five hundred pages are notes, a bibliography, and an index, assuring its value as a reference as well as a narrative. (PopMatters 7-22-14

Travis Elborough + Nick Rennison's "A London Year": Book Review

This clever book celebrates diarists, letter-writers, and journal-keepers who, day by day as chronicled here, add over two hundred of their famous and humble voices to the eight million who currently crowd this city. (Not counting the tourists.) Fittingly, where Samuel Pepys pioneered the diary as a record of an individual's reactions to the collective crush. the variety of stimulation, irritation, and celebration comprises a novel way to roam London. Editors Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison also work as booksellers, and the handsome presentation (graced by a pale blue ribbon sewn into the hardcover binding as a marker) enhances this big volume.

The opening endpaper maps London from 1574 as drawn by a Flemish cartographer. The closing endpaper charts Twitter and Flickr feeds from the sprawl that extends ten-fold, centuries later from the core glowing with electronic transmission. What in Shakespeare's times comprised the City of London and a less congested stretch down along the Thames to Westminster's royal enclave spreads today into distant suburbs. But the ancient turns of the serpentine city's northern course, considerably larger but still identifiable as a concentration along the north shore of the river, twists on, near giant blocks discernible as parks that have been plotted out.

This combination of streets and space, planned after the Great Fire which Pepys described so well, allowed his successors to note their ability, frustrated or eased, to escape the loos for the lawns. One will benefit from a map of one's own to plot one's route for instruction or orientation, or an A-Z guidebook. The intricacy of networks and referents becomes to those acquainted with the labyrinth at the city's heart somewhat more familiar, but as any visitor or native agrees, its name-maze endures.

The editors note how certain tropes repeat down the decades: "The impossibility of getting around the place. The dirtiness of London's streets. The unpredictability of the weather. The expensiveness of food and lodgings. The snootiness of shopkeepers, restauranteurs and/or publicans." Consistently, complaints repeat, notably the "difficulty of finding somewhere decent to live and, interrelatedly, the worry about whether the price of X and Y neighborhood will go up or go down." Finally, as Charles Lamb summed up in 1829, the old place isn't what it once was.

In a short review, five-hundred pages of extracted narratives defy summation. Yet, patterns emerge. They share often the nostalgia of Lamb (not included), but they reveal many emotions. I opened the book at random, as many readers may (once they check their birthday or today's date to see how the mood or the clime correspond or not to their own wherever they peruse this, in whichever borough or suburb wherever), at 28 May. "A Man Vomiting Blood" in St. James's Street, observed by William Windham and his colleague, detains them from their entrance into the House. Parliamentary affairs, it transpires, can wait, as the two statesmen repaired to a club instead in 1760, according to his diary.

Mary Berry's journal commemorates that same date the visit of the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands to the capital. "Her savage majesty appeared much more occupied by the red-plumed hats of the musicians than the music." Berry notes how the Hawaiian ladies, encumbered by the folds of their voluminous "European dress", walked awkwardly; "there was nothing of the free step of the savage".

"All are caged birds; the only difference is the size of the cage." So muses Thomas Hardy, in characteristically epigrammatic style, after waiting that day in 1885 at the Marble Arch to watch the people pass in their finery. "Hurry, speech, laughter, moans, cries of little children" enliven for Hardy the human "tragedy" along this "hum of the wheel -- the roar of London!"

Most dates offer an equivalent sampling of entries, from as diverse a cast. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, but also Nils Stevenson from the punk era in 1977 and Aaron Burr from 1808. Lord Byron and Lindsay Anderson; Michael Palin and Keshub Chandra Sen, a Bengali philosopher in 1870; emancipated slave Ignatius Sancho from the Georgian period and Emily Shore, who after her visits in 1830 as a girl would die of consumption a few years later. These are the people through which we see London, those often who have come to stay for a short time or a lifetime after being born elsewhere. Along with natives (ranking far fewer, as in many cosmopolitan cities, it seems) such as Charlton F.C. fan Russ Wilkins, nearly unknown Victorian clerk Rafe Neville Leychester, or late nineteenth-century minister's daughter Helen G. McKenny, we see from the recognizable names and the obscure bylines the range of perspectives and persuasions drawn by tellers who put down on paper their reactions to the London they occupy, for a surprise or a memory, as a souvenir of their passing moment day by day and year by year. (2-24-14 to Amazon US and 2-20-14 to PopMatters)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid a cúig

Bhí Dé Luain go raibh ár lá deireadh íomlán i Londain. Chuaigh muid go Gailearaí Marlborough i tStraid Albermarle in aice leis Piccadilly. Ní raibh muid ábalta a fheiceáil ealaine le Sarah Raphael, ach bhí maith linn líníochtaí le Henri Matisse.

Shiúil muid triu Piccadilly agus Holborn go Músaem le Sir John Soane, ach bhí sé dúnadh ann. Chuaigh triu Garraí Lincoln's Inn agus An Scoil an Eacnamaíocht i Londain. Tá mac léinn go leor ag timpeall, ag fanacht a ith lón ina tstraideannaí cam agus sean ann. 

Thóg muid leis cuairt ag Na Institiúide Courtauld. Is gailearaí níos iontach. Tá beag ach go raibh den scoth. Fhill muid a fheiceáil Teach Somerset aríst béal dorais ar ais leis taispeantas le Stanley Spencer.

Tá Músaem na Iompair Londain ro-dheor, ach bhí maith taispeantas speisialta póstaeir ar an Tube. Ith dinnéar ag Union Jacks i Garraí na Covent. Cheannaigh Léna milséain de Hardys agus ansin chuaigh muid ar ais go dtí dtaibhléirithe amharclann, ag Apollo ina Deireadh Thiar (sular thit sé i deich óiche ina dhiadh sin!) ag freastail an dráma uaillmhianach, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. 

Bhuel, caith muid a fhágáil. Bhí ceo i Londain, ag deireanach ann. Thóg amach muid an dara Dé Máirt sin go Aerfort Heathrow is gnóthach leis an grian ag ardú.

Going to London, part five.

Bhí Dé Luain go raibh ár lá deireadh íomlán i Londain. Monday was our last whole day in London. We went to Marlborough Gallery on Albermarle Street near Piccadilly. We were unable to view the art of Sarah Raphael, but we liked the drawings of Henri Matisse.

We walked down Piccadilly to Holborn to the Museum of Sir John Soane, but it was closed there. We went through Lincoln's Inn Fields to the London School of Economics. Lots of students were around, waiting to eat lunch in the crooked and old streets.

We paid a visit to the Courtauld Institute. It's such a wonderful gallery. It's small but it's excellent. We returned to see at Somerset House next door again the exhibition of Stanley Spencer.

The London Museum of Transport is too expensive, but we liked the special exhibit of Tube posters. We ate dinner at Union Jacks in Covent Garden. Layne bought candy at Hardy's and then we returned to the theatre, a show at the Apollo in the West End (before it fell in ten nights later!) to attend an ambitious drama, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

Well, we had to depart. Fog was in London, at last, there. We took off that second Tuesday from very busy Heathrow Airport with the sun rising. (Píctúir le Paul Mitchell: "London Fog"/Ceo Londain)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid de cheithre

Dhuísigh muid Dé Domhnaigh ach bhí beagán tuirseach riamh ár turas go Cookham an lá riomh. Mar sin, theastaigh Léna a shúil ag timpeall an comharsanachta. Thosaigh muid leis spaisteoireacht go taispeántas de liníochtaí na Breataine ina Músaem na Victoria + Albert.

Chónaic muid líníocht béag le Stanley Spencer nuair a bhí mac léinn ansin, agus líníochtaí go leor Bhreataine. Bhí Nollaig, ach go raibh plódaithe suas i an músaem is h-iontach. Mar sin féin sna galearaithe na Breataine, bhí daoine níos lú ann.

Nuair a thug mé cuairt na Músaem na Londain na nDugaí, ghlac mé faoi deara de chreidmheasa a Músaem na Brandaí, Pacáistiú, agus Foghlaíocht. Bhí óiche nach beag, ach go raibh am beag a fheicéail sé ansin in aice leis Bóthar Portobello i gCnóc Notting. Tá sé lán lena mílte na rúdaí ó 1837 go inniu. 

Caith muid shiúil fada ar ais dinnéar in aice leis ár óstan. Chuala cloiginí ag Eaglais Naomh Mhuire  Abaí ag imeall Gairdíní Kensington. Ith muid bia Bhreataine leis leann agus leann úll maith le grúdlann Shepherds Neame ag Bumpkin i gKensington Theas.

Ar deireadh, chuaigh go Chelsea leis cuimhneacháin na Thomas More agus Úllord na Roper air. Shiúil muid ag dul na tithe go leor ealaíontóirí agus scríbhneoirí ar fud timpeall Cheyne Walk. Bhí ciúin ag deireanach ag timpeall an Thames, ach ní raibh ar an chláifort glórach i Londain anois.

Going to London, part four.

We woke up on Sunday but we were a bit tired after our journey to Cookham the day before. Therefore, Layne wanted to walk around the neighborhood. We began with a stroll to the exhibition of British drawings at the Museum of Victoria + Albert.

We saw a small drawing by Stanley Spencer when he was a student, and many British drawings. It was December, but there was a crowd below in the wonderful museum. Nevertheless in the British galleries, there were fewer people there.

When I paid a visit to the Museum of Londain at the Docklands, I took note of a credit to the Museum of Branding, Packaging, and Advertising. It was almost night, but we had a short time to see it there near Portobello Road in Notting Hill.  There's thousands of items from 1837 to today.

We spent a long walk before dinner near our hotel. We heard bells at the Church of St. Mary Abbots around Kensington Gardens. We ate a British meal with good ale and cider from the Shepherds Neame brewery in London at Bumpkin in South Kensington.

Finally, we went to Chelsea with a memorial to Thomas More and his Roper's Orchard. We walked past the houses of many artists and painters around Cheyne Walk. It was quiet at last around the Thames, but not on the noisy embankment in London now. (Grianghraf/Photo: Executed Today)

Ag cur cuairt Cookham

Chuaigh Léna agus mé ar an traein go Paddington i Londain go dtí an baile Cookham ag imeall an abhainn Thames Dé Sathairn. Iarr muid a fheiceáil an áit a raibh cónái Stanley Spencer ar feadh ar shaol (1891-1959). Ar ndóigh, d'imigh sé go An Domhan Mór, cosúil le fír eile an oiread sin ansin.

Chónaic muid múrmhaisithe móra ag Teach Somerset an lá roimh inné. Mar sin, tá na pictiúr agus líníochtaí ina Dánlann Stanley Spencer níos mó faoi shaol laethúil. Ach, scrúdaigh Spencer an radharc Críostaí triu amharc mistiúl agus umhal, ina tstraide na Cookham féin leis a comharsanaí.

Is féidir leat a fheicéail go leor faoi Cookham ar líne. D'fhoglaim mé go raibh áit an-sean agus ro-stairiúl. Ciallaíon an t-ainm ar siúl "cwch-ium," mar sé "áit báid" i Chéilteach arsa.

Shiúl muid ag timpeall: go siopa tae, go Cora Olney, an eaglais meánaioseach, go bhruach na habainn Thames, An Póna agus móinteach, agus an stáisiún traenach. Thóg Spencer an traen laethúil ag a hocht go Londain a fhreastail An Scoil Slade agus d'fhill sé in am don tae. Bhí mac léinn gan íoc ansin, gan amhras.

Chaill muid an traen, ach bhí maith linn an baile. Gan fírinne, ba mhaith liom a fanacht ansin ar feadh tréimhse níos faide. Mar sin féin, bíonn straidbhaile dara is saibhre sa Bhreatain.

Visiting Cookham. 

Layne and I went by train from Paddington in London to the town of Cookham along the river Thames on Saturday. We wanted to see the place Stanley Spencer lived during his life (1891-1959). However, he went off to the Great War, as so many men of his time then.

We saw the great murals at Somerset House the day before yesterday. Therefore, the paintings and drawings in the Stanley Spencer Gallery are more about daily life. But, Spencer perceived a Christian view through a mystical and humble perspective, in the streets of Cookham itself with his neighbors.

You can see more about Cookham on line. I learned that it is a very old and quite historical place. The place name means "cwch-ium," that is "place of boats" in ancient Celtic.

We walked around: to the tea-shop, to Olney Weir, the medieval church, the banks of the river Thames, The Pound and moor, and the train station. Spencer took the train daily at eight to London to attend the Slade School and he returned in time for tea. He was an outstanding student there, without a doubt.

We missed the train, but we liked the town. Truly, I would like to stay there for a longer time. All the same, it's the second richest village in Britain.

(Píctiúr: Móintéan na Cookham/Cookham Moor, 1937)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid a trí

Chuaigh muid trí músaeim Dé hAoine. Is maith Léna agus mé ealaine Breataine. Mar sin, iarr muid ag dul beirt is fearr i Londain.

Measaim go bhfuil an Tate Bhreatain is é mó fearr liom. D'fhóghlaim go raibh na deilbh le Jacob Epstein ar am seo. Chónaic mé "Tír gan fír" an deilbh cuimhneachain brúidiúl ó An Cogadh Mór le Charles Sargeant Jagger.

Sheoladh muid suas an Thames ar an bhád farontóireachta chuig Tate Nua-Aoiseach drámatúil. Nílím ábalta fháil ach seomra amháin a cur cuairt, faoi póstaeir propaganda Sóivéadach, áfach ann. Bhí suim agam níos mo i Músaem na Londain na nDugaí.

Tá Na Dugthailte áit plódaithe anois, an-iomhlán leis saibhreas óga agus trádála airgeadais. Ach, ní raibh siad mar mealltach nuair d'oibre na daoine bochta ann ar feadh na gcéadta ann.  B'fhéidir, tháinig mo shinste a obair i bPoplar ansin nó a fanacht anseo.

Thúg muid an traein go Canary Wharf go dtí dinnéar Indiach Theas ag Quilon in aice leis na Chlos na hAlba agus Pálás Buckingham. Ní raibh easca a fháil an bialann ann. Mar sin féin, bhí bia an-blasta againn ansin.

To London again, part three.

We went to three museums on Friday. Layne and I like British art. Therefore, we went to a pair of the best in London.

I think that the Tate Britain is the best. I learned this time about sculptures by Jacob Epstein. I saw "No Man's Land", a brutal memorial plaque of the Great War by Charles Sargeant Jagger.

We sailed up the Thames on a ferry boat to the dramatic Tate Modern. I was not able to find but a single room to visit, about Soviet propaganda posters. I had more interest in the London Museum of the Docklands.

The Docklands is a crowded place now, very full of young wealth and financial trade. But, it was not so glamorous when the poor worked there for many centuries. Perhaps, my ancestors came to work in Poplar there or to leave from here.

We took the train from Canary Wharf to a South Indian dinner at Quilon near Scotland Yard and Buckingham Palace. It was not easy to find the restaurant there. All the same it was a very tasty meal for us there. (Grianghraf/Photo: Thames)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid a dó

Dhúisigh muid suas go déanach le "scaird mhoill." Thosaigh muid Dé Déardaoin ag dul go Cearnach Trafalgar. Ith Léna lón lena chara Rosemary agus chuir mé suas go seirbhís na hAidbhinte ina hEaglais na Naomh Máirtín ina Garraí. 

Ansin, chuaigh Léna agus mé go ár n-chúis go príomha. Chónaic muid taispéaint ealaine ó An Cogadh Mór le Stanley Spencer i dTeach Somerset.  Go nádúrtha, bhí sé cumhtachach ann; nuair chonáic mé an múrmhaisiú, mo shúile thaisrítear mar a shuigh mé os a comhair ar feadh i bhfad ann.

Titeann óiche tapa in aice an gheimridh thuas. Líonraidh scátálaithe rinc. Caith uair leis ealaine Ollainis agus Pléimennaí ina Gailearai Náisiúnta sula ndúntar.

Bhí an t-ádh orainn, mar sin féin. Bhí ag oscailte luath an Gailearaí Portráid Náisiúnta béal dorais. Tá sé lán de aghaideannaí gcuimhne, ó Risteard II go dtí Seámus Ó hEanai.

Ar deireadh, ith muid dinnéar pizza simplí ach blásta ag caifé in aice leis Stáisiún Bóthar Gloucester. Bhí sé in aice leis ár óstan. Bhí óicheannaí fuacht leis fuarach ó artach, deirtear go raibh sé.

To London again, part two. 

We woke up late with jet lag. We started Wednesday going to Trafalgar Square. Layne ate lunch with her friend Rosemary and I went up to an Advent service at The Church of St. Martin in the Fields. 

Then, Layne and I went for our primary reason. We saw the WWI art exhibition by Stanley Spencer in Somerset House. Naturally, it was powerful; when I saw this mural there, my eyes moistened as I sat before it a long time.

Night falls rapidly near a northern winter. Skaters filled a rink. We spent an hour with Dutch and Flemish art in the National Gallery before closing.

We were in luck, all the same. The National Portrait Gallery next door was open late. It's full of memorable faces, from Richard II to Seamus Heaney.

Finally, we ate a simple but tasty pizza dinner at a cafe near Gloucester Road Station. It was near our hotel. Nights were cold and chilly from the Arctic, it was said. (Pictiúr le Spencer: An Aiséiri na Saighdiúrí i tSéipéal Chuimhneacháin i tSandham/Resurrection of the Soldiers in the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere; cuireadh seo réamh-mheasta i Londain/ this was projected in London)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid amháin

D'imigh muid go Cathair na hÁingeal go dtí Londain an chéad Dé Máirt i mí na Nollaig luath. Fhág Léna agus mé le linn na h-óiche. Bhí Léna ansuid le linn samhraidh seo caite, ach ní raibh mé ansin ach uair amháin (nó níos lú!) sa deich mbliana chomh fásta: beagán i Meitheamh-Iúil 1979, 1989 agus 2003 mar i gcéanna.

D'fhán muid i gKensington Thios ina h-Óstán de Blacam. Is áit iontach, agus fuair muid úasghrádú chun seomra mór i stíl na Fraince. Bhí maith linn a léamh dhá nó trí nuachtán (íomlán ar an bháis na Mandela agus an triail na Nigella Lawson) áitiuilaí go brea gach maidin le bricfeasta ann, fós.

Thosaigh muid ár tseachtaine seisean féin Dé Ceadaoin leis cuairt go Músaem na Londain ag an balla Rómhánach. Tá sé ag dul chun cinn ó amannaí neoiliteach go Céilteach go Rómánach go meanaoiseach go nAthbheochana. Ansin, théann tú go síos go dtí an t-úrlar thíos a fheiceáil an ré nua-aimseartha dtí an lá inniu.

Chónaic mé ar léarscáil na Músaem na Ord Naomh Eoin. D'fhóglaim muid faoi na Ord i gclós an-stairiúl air i gClerkenwell ó meanaoiseach go anois mar sheirbhis otharchairr. Ith muid dinnéar Mharocó blasta i tStráide Grégis, Soho, ag Maison Touareg.

Ar deireadh, bhreatnaigh muid drámaíocht "Mojo" ag Amharclann Harold Pinter in aice leis Cearnach Leicester, iomlán de carnabhail geal. Bhí an-tuirseach, ar ndóigh. Ní raibh mé a thuiscint go leor de.

Going to London again, part one.

We went from Los Angeles to London early in December. Layne and I left during the night. Layne had been over there during this past summer, but I had not been there but once (or less!) decade as an adult: a bit in June-July 1979, the same 1989 and 2003.

We stayed in South Kensington at Blake's Hotel. It's a wonderful place, and we got an upgrade to a big room in French style. We liked reading two or three fine local newspapers at breakfast there, too.

We started our week itself on Wednesday with a visit to the London Museum at the Roman Wall. It goes from neolithic times to Celtic to Roman to medieval to the Renaissance. Then, you go down to the first floor to see the early modern times to the present.

I saw on a map The Museum of the Order of St. John. We learned about the Order in its very historic courtyard in Clerkenwell from medieval times to now as an ambulance service. We ate a tasty Moroccan dinner in Greek Street, Soho, at Maison Touareg.

Finally, we saw the drama "Mojo" at the Harold Pinter Theatre near Leicester Square, full of a bright carnival. I was very tired, however. I didn't understand much of it. (Grianghraf/Photo: St John's Gate at night/Geata Naomh Eoin i n-óiche)

Roy Porter's "London: A Social History": Book Review

Although this appeared a few years before Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, medical historian Roy Porter's social history possesses its own many merits, even if Ackroyd's book appears to have benefited more from promotion and sales. Like Ackroyd, Porter looks at the broad evolution; less so than Ackroyd, Porter concentrates on the emergence of The City in the Renaissance, as before that, the enclave remained small and separated for many centuries from its royal neighbor and purported ruler, Westminster, two miles away. Purported because Porter argues for Whitehall vs. Guildhall.

That is, the independence shown early by London for much of its dominance enabled its vibrancy, confidence, and diversity. The gravel banks under the Thames, forty miles from the sea, assured a calm waterway for trade. While the Church ruled, with a hundred parishes starting under Norman rule, one every three acres, the mercantile class settled and attracted migrants from the rest of the island and abroad. The Corporation that ran the city began to emerged by Tudor times. "London was on the road to becoming a small, highly regulated corporate city lapped by a turbulent metropolitan sea."

The distance between Westminster and the City persisted; during the Great Fire, the King and his brother did not know of the blaze until they were informed. Porter, given his expertise, provides vivid descriptions of the plague that preceded the conflagration, and the Civil War that pitted royalists against Parliament there. After the fire, guided by Christopher Wren, London began to stretch out, and by 1800 a "hierarchy of ranks was stamped upon the topography of the town." The bulk of this book takes place since that period, for after all, more London and more residents means more data and more detail as the city, already the world's largest at a million, kept booming. "Addresses assumed weight." We begin to see the separation of East from West End, and the class connotations that still mark the property of the latter expanse today. 90% already lived two centuries ago outside the City, and by 1911 seven million called Greater London home, but the ancient Corporation tended to resist reform, as the medieval guilds which had allowed so many ancestors of the London establishment to gain a steady job and a respected livelihood, turned into gentleman's clubs and privileged livery.

The tension never exploded into unrest as it did elsewhere under radicalism in modern times, but the necessity for London to adapt to its own generated, centripetal and centrifugal energy led to rail and then the Tube as methods to balance, to a degree, the influx of the masses with work demands and settlement. While London grew in population 1921-31 by 9%, the land it took up as the megapolis leaped into the outer stretches of Metroland doubled its size, Attempts for Garden Cities and a greenbelt later helped, but this type of planning led to much destruction, of nature and farms for the worse, of slums for the better. Still, London could thrive, for a good long while as the imperial center.

Do-gooders of Victorian times might be mocked, but Porter refuses easy stereotypes. He shows how Henry Mayhew's depictions of the poor and of laborers memorably evoke the East End, and he realizes that reformers helped engage all Londoners in creating out of so many peoples from so wide a series of places a common civic identity. The deprivations of the Blitz and the displacement of 40% of Londoners during WWII show how post-war London had to adapt, and how its manufacturing and docking bases soon felt the tug of outer borough relocation and foreign competition.

As Porter writes this in the aftermath of Thatcher, and the abolition of the Labour-led GLC, he castigates her and the determined greed that fueled so much of what London looks like now. (I'd like to hear from Porter if the later 90s on have improved this or not...)  "The balkanization of the metropolis encouraged rotten boroughs, political localism and extremism of all stripes."

Many workers fled for cheaper and healthier suburbs, and he shows how transport allowed this. Congestion, all the same, grew worse, and pollution persisted. Crime was on the upswing, and decay and unrest followed. Immigration altered large parts of the inner ring and older neighborhoods, while others turned gentrified. Porter does not place his hopes for recovery in luring visitors; "tourists are vultures" and the low-wage, often immigrant workers are exploited.

Rebuilding in the post-Blitz, capitalist-frenzied contemporary decades, 400 of Richard Seifert's high-rise blocks of "conveyor-belt modernism" failed to beautify the London panorama as had Wren's designs. Traffic, noise, crime, high rents, low quality of life: the new Brutalism left heavy marks. Speculation, it seems, has poisoned London since John Stow lamented it in Elizabeth's era--the first Queen, that is.

It can be challenging for a non-resident to follow, but Porter doggedly shows how the urban patterns proliferated. This may be of more use to a specialist or insider or a local, but it's valuable information. Reading lists append this and a good index, but there are no endnotes so his wonderful quotes cannot be traced. The lack of good maps with enough detail to chart the intricate sprawl, moreover, precludes a one-volume understanding of its later growth as told here.

He concludes with praising his city as "a muddle that worked." But he is guarded. He doubts "that this good fortune will continue"; again, nearly two decades after this book first appeared, it's intriguing to test his case against what's transpired. (11-20-13: Amazon US 2000 paperback and 1995 cloth)