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." 

 

Here be dragons: in celebration of illustrated maps

Do you ever wish you hadn't googled something (apart, of course, from anything medical)? - Well, I wish I hadn't googled the phrase "here be dragons"... I have been thinking a lot about maps, illustrated and otherwise, recently - and started thinking about all those maps bearing this phrase. I used to love the image that it conjured up, of medieval cartographers (in my mind they are illuminating - and illuminated - monks, with a proper sense of the absurd), diligently delineating the known world, and then reaching the end of their knowledge and inserting a jaunty dragon. Imagine being so bound up in accurately recording something for posterity and then being forced to go no further. "Here be dragons" in my mind became a symbol for the terror, and the rich mytholgical possibilities, of the unknown: just as the pillars of Hercules at the gates of the Mediterranean bore the injunction non plus ultra, to warn adventurous sailors to go no further - a literal warning that beyond the plillars lay "nothing" itself - so hic sunt dracones served as an exhortation to cast one's mind no further beyond the limits of knowledge.

To me, they made maps more than just a physical geographical guide, but turned them into something which both told a story (and I've always loved a story), and acted as a guide to the limits and navigation of knowledge. They also seemed to confirm the analogy between physical and mental exploration.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I tried to find some maps bearing this phrase to rekindle my imagination and discovered that it only exists on one map - and that that map is actually a globe (the Hunt Lenox globe - a tiny little sixteenth-century globe that is now in the collection of the New York public library). If you look below, you will see that the dragons appear to live on the south-east Indian sub-continent - and that the coast is pretty well delineated. So much for the limits and possibilties of knowledge - my monks probably just didn't know how to spell Pondicherry....

Nevermind - my love of maps that tell stories remains (mind maps not included - they do not tell a story), as does my fascination with Grayson Perry's map etchings. He doesn't always call them maps, but that is absolutely what they seem to be. They may not be a map of a recognisable place, and they may be full of judgement-laden labels as to population and perversion, but maps they nevertheless are (and I have seen more than my fair share of judgement-laden colonial maps).

Kathleen Jamie: "not all primroses and otters"

I am a sucker for aura. Walter Benjamin was never wrong, and so it is that live music frequently moves me to tears while back home on the CD player the same music, played or sung by the same individuals, can sound utterly banal. There are of course many notable exceptions - but, nevertheless, my CD collection is littered with mediocre albums of bands and artists who have since vanished into a well-deserved obscurity, and yet whose concerts I can still recall with a vivid, palpable sense of the wonder and reverie into which their music sent me. 

And yet I never learn... I still buy the CDs of soon-to-be-forgotten artists - and sometimes, now, it as much as a memento of that reverie, as it is a statement of belief in the true talent of the performer. Book readings are the slightly more grown-up equivalent: I enjoy attending them; I always go determined not to buy anything and find myself two hours later with a buzzing mind, waiting in the queue to have my book signed by the author. And so it was tonight that I found myself sitting opposite Kathleen Jamie, telling her about my childhood immersion in Gavin Maxwell, and about Kathleen Raine and rowan trees (although I may have mistakenly referred to Raine as "Kathleen Jamie". Oh dear).

In explaining the falling away of the aura of a work of art in the process of its reproduction, Benjamin turned to nature, and to the "aura" of natural objects, writing of, "a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you," and the way in which we experience their "aura" simply by looking at them. For Benjamin, "aura" is tied up with our relation to objects - and with immediacy, and therefore authenticity. If an object is a reproduction, how to therefore know one's position to it: if I am looking at a mountain, I know I am looking at a mountain; I know how big or small I am in relation to it, and how near or far from it, and also that I am looking at it right now, ergo it exists. If, however, I am looking at a fibre-glass mountain, every certainty about my relation to that original object is thrown into flux: I don't know if the mountain even exists. 

For Benjamin, the desire to reproduce objects is rooted in the desire to "bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly"; i.e. to have and to hold - to own - these objects, even if only in replica. Benjamin was, of course focussing on the "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction", and not on the natural world, however, were he to have cast his gaze towards "relics of nature in the age of mechnanical reproduction", Kathleen Jamie would have been able to provide him with at least one significant example: the replacement of the famous whale jawbone on Berwick Law with a fibreglass replica.

Whales and their bones - latter day relics - appear throughout Jamie's most recent collection (and my most recent purchase): Sightlines. I have only dived in deep to a few pages here and there so far, but feel the same sense of excitement that I get when reading the opening pages of "Ring of Bright Water." Hearing Jamie talk was to be reminded of the magic of reading and writing about nature, the alchemic preservation it can enact, and the tingling sense of "closeness" to the natural world which it can enable - without recourse to any attempts at Benjamin's aura-killing replication.