Books to read

Recently I’ve seen several newspaper articles with lists of books we are told we must read, sometimes fiction and sometimes non-fiction. Part of the vogue for lists. I find I’ve usually read about 50%, know that I should have read a further 25%, and have never heard of the other 25%. Personally, I find that my list would change nearly every year; certainly every decade.

For example, there are the big, exciting and erudite books of ideas that come along once in a while and change my way of thinking forever, such as :

1970s: The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner (Faber, 1972)

1970s: After Babel, George Steiner (Oxford, 1975)

1980s: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy (Random House, 1987)

1990s: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David S. Landes (Little, Brown, 1998)

2000s: The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt (Allen Lane, 2002).

Enthusiasm for each of these led me to new authors and books cited in the notes or bibliography.

This sounds a bit over-bearing. But as well as “Great Books” there are also moments of popular culture, like the week of intensive reading of the crime stories of Mickey Spillane that resulted in my article ‘Give the bad books their due; the good ones then seem better’, published in the Daily American newspaper (Rome, 31 March 1973), especially the wonderful Kiss Me Deadly (E.P. Dutton, 1952). Interestingly, the austere George Steiner chose Spillane as the opposite of Plato in his essay ‘After the Book?', observing that the two authors could easily be found on the same book rack in an airport bookshop: given his omnivorous reading, we may assume that he read Spillane before making the comparison (On Difficulty and Other Essays, OUP, 1978, p.190).

In the next few weeks I plan to consider other such moments.

Umberto Eco

Sad to hear while I was in Milan recently that Umberto Eco had died. He was most famous in the world for his medieval thriller The Name of the Rose, but revered in Italy for his philosophical and linguistic studies and as a man of immense erudition. His book called, in English, Theory of Semiotics is a basic international textbook in its field. He could elaborate complex theories but also wrote a guide to how to write a university thesis (tongue in cheek but full of good suggestions). Personally, I always enjoyed an early essay in which he provided an excellent explanation of why a popular TV presenter in Italy was successful because he not only understood popular taste but was an incarnation of the average man ('Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno', published in Diario minimo, 1963).

I was fortunate to meet him once at a dinner in Bologna, where he then taught at the university, and learned a huge amount in just three hours. After that evening I read his works on medieval aesthetics, which were very influential on my thinking.

He also helped me, unwittingly, with book sales. The Name of the Rose/Il nome della rosa was first published in Italy in 1980, but did not become a bestseller until it had incredible success in the USA. In 1989 it was republished as a cheap paperback in Italy - also following the Sean Connery film - but it was considered "difficult" because of all the medieval and scholarly elements. So the Italian weekly magazine Espresso ran an article on books which could help the reader to understand his novel. One of the books chosen was my then recent book on the Knights Templar (I Templari in Italian). It had a significant impact on sales...

Moka again

In Piemonte yesterday, I heard that Renato Bialetti, whose death was noted here two posts ago, was cremated after his funeral service and his ashes placed in a Moka which was then buried in the family tomb.

Very appropriate!

Literary serendipity

This week Kate McLoughlin writes in the Times Literary Supplement about what she calls “serendipitous sorties”, the way in which browsing was done before the Internet and books were discovered by strange chance in an inherited bookcase, or the fairly random selection in a library.

                  Title page of my 1615 edition.

My own most curious serendipitous sortie occurred in the Brotherton Library in Leeds. To get from the place where I usually sat to the lavatory I had to go downstairs and walk through the stacks. Since it was a circular building, the corridor between stacks narrowed towards the centre. Every time I had to duck at the centre to avoid banging my head on a large volume stacked sideways. Once, in curiosity, I took it down and found it to be a 17th century translation of Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso, ‘News From Parnassus’. The spine was broken, so I took it upstairs to the librarian. A few weeks later a message arrived to say the book I had “requested” was repaired and ready, and so I felt a duty to borrow it. That gave me unexpected fuel for a seminar about Aristotle, and led to a later purchase of the original edition (Impresso in Cormopoli [ie. Venice] per Ambros Teler, MDCXV [1615]) and a brief mention in the Acknowledgements of my book about Internet, Shift: The Infolding Internet, Hype, Hope and History (John Wiley, 2003).

The Moka

I read that yesterday Renato Bialetti died at the age of 93. He is the man that made the stove-top coffee machine known as the “Moka" famous, although it had been invented by his father in 1933, and thus created an essential kitchen gadget which could be found in just about every Italian home. It has been imitated, re-designed by others in luxury and coloured versions - even by the Bialetti company itself after the family sold it in 1993 - but the original Bialettis in all their sizes are still sold everywhere, including China.

He became famous as a character in advertisements on television, with enormous moustaches and his slogan “Sembra facile…”, or “it looks easy…" to make a good coffee. The owner as a brand. Renato Bialetti can be seen here caricatured on the smallest model in the range, with his black moustaches visible high on his extended neck beneath massive cheeks.

The Moka turned me on to coffee when I went to live in Italy, and I have used one nearly every day since. Nowadays expensive electric and automatic coffee-makers are common-place, and expert “baristas” pontificate about good coffee, but I still prefer the result with the Moka unless I can get to a real Italian bar. 

The key is in the quality of the beans, always arabica, freshly ground, with good quality water and the correct heating time.

Billy Connolly

I just read the “joke of the week” in The Independent. It probably won’t be very funny to most readers, but it made me want to watch some vintage Connolly - which thanks to YouTube is now easy. The trouble is that none of the Chinese friends who I’ve tried to initiate into Connolly with careful explanations have even begun to understand. Language is obviously part of the problem, but I find that the best part as a half-Glaswegian. The culture is tougher to “get”, when he drops Celtic/Rangers matches in the old days into a rant about terrorism, for example. Do they think they can frighten Glaswegians?

The weather is less problematic, and he’s completely right. There’s no place in the world for me lovelier than Skye in June…

“There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter.”

— Billy Connolly, Gullible’s Travels (1982)

Chinese New Year

This will be my second Year of the Monkey. In ancient China there were many ways of counting the years. From 365 BC the names of the 12 annual stations of Jupiter were used, but they were replaced by the the stations of Taisui, the God of Time, which was an invisible counter-orbital correlate of Jupiter.

The present method dates from the Qin dynasty, ie. around 200 BC, and uses the 12 animals, shengxiao, to create an association with the 12 Taisui and one of the 12 earthly branches, or dizhi. In 1912, the provisional president Sun Yat-sen decreed that from January 1st the new Republic would adopt the Gregorian calendar and the solar year.

But the old habits persist for the major traditional festivals such as the lunar New Year. 

Bertrand Russell

Just watched on YouTube a 1959 interview by John Freeman with Bertrand Russell. It ends with Freeman asking what would be his two pieces of advice to people in the distant future, one intellectual and one moral. His reply:

Intellectual: “When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have benevolent social effects if it were believed. But only and solely at what are the facts.” 

Moral: “Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Let us tolerate and live together, not die together.”

Nothing surprising from such a great man, especially since I studied some of his books as an undergraduate. But what is worth noting is the phenomenal lucidity with which he speaks, not a single grunt or slip or affectation. Clear, simple, perfectly formed sentences. And he was 87!

There used to be a copy of one of his books on display in the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge; once again, the lucidity was stunning. Hand-written in beautiful style and perfect lines without a single crossing-out (and yes, it was the first and only draft).

“The time has come to review my life as a whole, and to ask whether it has served any useful purpose or has been wholly concerned in futility.
”

— Russell, Last Essay, 1967

The View From Space

This striking photo of central and northern Italy, taken by the British astronaut Tim Peake from the International Space Station, appeared in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica this morning.

It provides a fascinating reminder of population distribution. The main urban centres of Rome, at the bottom right, and Milan, just left of centre, are to be expected. On the left from Milan just before the snow-covered mountains is Turin, and at the top of the Adriatic Sea on the right is the Venice/Padova/Treviso conurbation. But the most striking features are the two lines of prosperity running across the Po Valley: the strongest one east through Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vicenza to Venice; the second one running south-east where Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, Parma and Bologna are clearly discernible, as are Imola, Forlì and Cesena beyond Bologna. All Roman cities, with the single exception of Venice, and all prosperous today.

It’s a pity Major Peake didn’t catch the south of the country as well.

The Camera

What does the camera see? How can we trust a selfie? Photography is about light and depth of field, and poses. An object can become more beautiful or uglier: a matter of cropping, modifying, trying to make the viewer see what the photographer wanted to depict.  A new-born baby in his mother’s arms amidst a cluster of manned battle-tanks in Afghanistan can make war tender; a revolver caught as a gust of wind lifts the jacket of a bodyguard at a wedding can make a happy event sinister.

Words are important too when a photo is published in a newspaper, or magazine, offline or online; a caption can alter the perception. There is no truth.

“The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter.”

— Bertolt Brecht

Burn's Night

There's no Burn’s night in Beijing, and no haggis. But we have whisky. 

Oddly enough, many Chinese seem to believe that ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is a traditional Chinese song (they have no new year’s songs of their own, in spite of the importance of the event). Odd that they should accept a song from a man of Ayrshire who wrote it just a few years before another man whose family originally came from Ayrshire, Lord McCartney, initiated the “century of humiliation” with his notorious visit to the imperial court. Scots were always in the forefront of imperialism. 

My mother was Glaswegian by birth, and like many Scottish families we had a plate hanging on the kitchen wall with the Selkirk Grace, adapted and improved on an old Galloway grace which he recited at a dinner with the 4th Earl of Selkirk:

Some hae meat and canna eat,

And some wad eat that want it,

But we hae meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

The plate was kitsch, the words perhaps corny, but compared to many others it is a sincere grace.

It makes me think of the wonderful eighteenth century poet Christopher Smart, confined to a lunatic asylum, who always wanted people to pray with him. The great critic and his friend Samuel Johnson asserted that "I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else." That's my feeling about the Selkirk Grace. If I have to say grace, that's the one.

So no haggis tonight. Just a glass of Ardbeg and a silent grace.

President Xi in Tehran

Interesting to note that President Xi of China is the first important political figure to have made an official visit to Tehran after the lifting of sanctions. Almost immediately, as huge deals are signed and oil and gas begin to flow again. When I published the book China and Iran: Parallel History, Future Threat? in 2009 several Chinese friends derided it. Yet the two countries have much in common, and would make powerful allies. 

Only seven hundred miles separate them, and they are in fact profoundly similar, each with a long and fascinating imperial past (in the case of Iran, often overlooked nowadays), and in the way in which the forces that shaped their present forms were driven by a potent blend of admiration for and resentment against Western imperialism. For each has been conditioned over the past 150 years by an on-off love-hate relationship with Western political ideologies, and in each case development and modernisation have been characterised by spurts of economic and political reform based on European and American ideas alternating with outbursts of anti-colonial and, later, anti-American sentiment. 

In fact two questions recur frequently in strategic thinking about the world in the twenty-first century: first, what will be China’s role as it reassumes its traditional importance in world affairs; and, second, what will be the role of Iran? Yet these questions are rarely considered in tandem.

SALT

I've just finished Mark Kurlansky's fascinating book on salt (Salt: A World History). Since my days of curing ham in Italy - about which more in a forthcoming book - the importance of salt has been obvious. I knew about the Via Salaria, since I used to live on it, but even I was surprised by the number of words deriving from the Latin for salt, from the rather obvious "salami","salary" and "salad" to the less obvious "soldier" (more evident in the modern Italian "soldato"). But most interesting was the link between the two oldest food cultures in the world, which have both been an important part of my life, and how historians debate whether the use of salt for preserving fish and meat was first used in Italy or in China. But it might just have been Egypt.

Another interesting fact emerges from pages on the salt trade in the Baltic Sea and North Sea, dominated at one time by the Hanseatic League which evolved from an alliance between the ports of Lübeck and Hamburg in the thirteenth century (a coinage which gives us the “hansa" in Lutfhansa).

“For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word sterling, which meant “of assured value.””

— Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History