Brutalissima

It's unfashionable, I know, but I'm going to miss the St. James Centre when it's gone. Demolition preparation has begun, and it is closing for good next month, when the long process of dismantling it will begin.  

In (soon-to-be-only-a) memory of it, and of Edinburgh's postwar utopian concrete dream, I have been looking through some of my brutalist/modernist photo frenzies of the past few years (random selections on a crappy phone camera). Apart from the sheer orgiastic authenticity of these concrete monoliths, I don't know quite why I love it all so much - perhaps because I think of postwar concrete buildings as a kind of marker for what was lost in the war (often literally, as replacements for bombed buildings - hence London being uglier than Paris, etc.) and for the egalitarian, civic-minded hopes of those postwar decades. Glassy, sandstone, privatised cubes (or spirals) don't really cut it as markers of either memory or hope; the best that can be said of the replacement is that it will no doubt be replaced itself within a decade or two (such is the cynical, short-termist modus operandi of investment groups behind developments like this) - hopefully by that point, it will be a case of "come back state/council-led concrete building projects, all is forgiven".

Devilled Dogs at the Traverse

Is this the cutest Traverse news ever?

I absolutely can't wait for Iain Finlay Macleod's The Devil Masters - it sounds like just the kind of dark insight into the city's middle classes which Edinburgh specialises in (think Shallow Grave, Filth, etc.), and the perfect antidote to sentimental Yuletime slodge - but am slightly concerned about the super-cute casting call recently issued by the Traverse. Less than a month to train a terrier?? They'll be lucky! - though perhaps the chance to see badly behaved canine thesps is just another reason that this is a must see....

Opinions in the bookshop

Agree:

 

 - with the right garden and the right library I could be blissfully content for ever more.

Couldn't agree less:

SACRILEGE!!! - have these people READ (the sublime, hilarious, utterly perfect and different in every way to the twee dirge-secreter "Sandy" McCall Smith) Maupin??? - or perhaps every city gets the chronicler it deserves.... poor Edinburgh.

In praise of paper, and in memory of Lionel Cuffie

Having listened with half an ear this morning to Richard Coles, JP Devlin, et al. discuss the superiority of paper books with Margaret Mountford (of Apprentice fame) on Saturday Live, perhaps I was extra alert today for some love token to mark my long histoire d'amour with the book.

Margaret Mountford, as you may have been able to guess, is also a fan of the book - and made an interesting observation about not being able to remember so much when she reads text on a screen; her brain is trained to remember that something is at the top of the left-hand page, etc. - and I think mine is too. It transpires that Margaret gave up the glamours of meting out judgement to Bright Young Tycoons to complete a PhD in Papyrology - she had been doing it part-time and wanted to complete it within the allotted time without having to request an extension (these rather mundane details fascinate me - I do wonder how many other successful corporate lawyers would display her genteel attitude to education).

Well, the books decided to remind me why I love them this evening, with the above epistle from an old copy of Santayana...

Just as I love reading "Acknowledgements" sections, I also find inscriptions and bookplates fascinating; I never erase or cross out the names of those who have previously owned my books - instead I add my own - and I hate being given a book with a blank front page (the legacy of a family who would scrawl and draw long dedicatory inscriptions on every book we gave) -- and to the man who once RIPPED OUT the front pages of all of the books I had left in his house, because my name was written on them: there is a particularly unpleasant corner of purgatory reserved especially for you.

One of my favourites is a copy of Isadora Duncan's autobiography which was once owned by Corin Redgrave, and I found out about a whole set of mid-century Cambridge feminists all because one of them had once owned my Edna St. Vincent Millay "Conversation at Midnight. Tonight, however, I was re-reading Santayana's "Genteel Tradition" and - procrastinating but also interested - decided to look up the "Lionel Cuffie" of Harvard who had previously owned my copy. Was he now a writer himself? - or an academic, or lawyer, or politician? - for a man who had been at Harvard forty years ago, the possibilities seemed endless.

The answer, unfortunately, was none of these: Lionel Cuffie died in 1985, from AIDS. He did, however, do remarkable things: in 1969 he founded the "Rutgers Student Homophile League" (only the second student organisation for gay men and women in the US): "I founded the league on impulse from my conscience, I thought it was my moral duty to bring other people to the same realizations that I had come to over the summer -- that we, as homosexuals, are an oppressed minority." 

 

"Tramway to Hell" Extreme Crocheting - Only in Edinburgh...

Well - the tram fiasco has given us one thing to be grateful for: militant knitting has hit Edinburgh. This "Tramway to Hell" crochet spent a few days adorning the roadwork barriers near the Scott monument before being removed by contractors (sparking the parochial-even-for-Edinburgh headline, "Tram Protest Crochet Taken Down").

Slow Club's Charles Watson - My New Crush

The photo says it all - all I need to add is that his band is f-ing brilliant too, and that one of the most heavenly moments of my summer was falling in and out of a happy sleep on a train coming down the sublime Scottish west coast, while gazing at this man doing the same - and realising how cool his hair was under his baseball cap and how beautiful his eyes were when he finally opened them.

I think, as crushes go, this one's OK.

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

This made me smile today. I have always had a penchant for pseudo-deep 1970s schmaltz (I could rave on for hours about Peter Sarstedt: I am a Cathedral in My Mind; My Father is the Pope you Know; etc) and can't believe I hadn't heard about Clifford T. Ward before.

He was a British singer-songwriter, big in the sixties and seventies (and onetime teacher of Trudie Styler - a lot to answer for). One of his most successful albums was Home Thoughts, with Home Thoughts from Abroad its title track. You can listen to it here (and I would suggest you do).

The lyrics alone make the song seem saccharine, and don't bear much interpretation (see below), but the song itself is sweet and heartfelt, catchy without being cheesy - and, above all, very very earnest. It equates lovesickness with homesickness, in a way we can all recognise, and the mention of Browning, Keats and Shelley lends it a very English charm (though perhaps not gravitas):

I could be a millionaire if I had the money

I could own a mansion, no I don't think I'd like that
But I might write a song that makes you laugh, now that would be funny
And you could tell your friends in England you'd like that
But now I've chosen aeroplanes and boats to come between us
And a line or two on paper wouldn't go amiss
How is Worcestershire? Is it still the same between us?
Do you still use television to send you fast asleep?
Can you last another week? Does the cistern still leak?
Or have you found a man to mend it?
Oh, and by the way, how's your broken heart?
Is that mended too? I miss you
I miss you, I really do.

I've been reading Browning, Keats and William Wordsworth
And they all seem to be saying the same thing for me
Well I like the words they use, and I like the way they use them
You know, Home Thoughts From Abroad is such a beautiful poem
And I know how Robert Browning must have felt
'Cause I'm feeling the same way about you
Wondering what you're doing and if you need some help
Do I still occupy your mind? Am I being so unkind?
Do you find it very lonely, or have you found someone to laugh with?
Oh, and by the way, are you laughing now?
'Cause I'm not, I miss you
I miss you, I really do.

I fell for it the first time I heard it and I knew I really loved it when I heard the catch in Ward's throat at the thought of "aeroplanes and boats" coming "between us"... For some reason the mention of Worcestershire, and the general theme, make me think of Armistead Maupin's character from Tales of the City, Mona Ramsey - after the first few books doesn't she end up as a San Francsico émigré, somewhere in deepest, darkest Englandshire, probably with a faulty cistern, and with many aeroplanes and boats between her and Barbary Lane?