Craft: Jokes, jokes, jokes: Clive James #4 - travel memoir

"As an Australian expatriate I had grown used to the fabled English sense of humour but preferred to steer clear of it when possible, for fear of laughing too hard." (16)

This uncharacteristically blunt sarcasm comes at the close of paragraph 2 of May Week Was In June, the last in Clives James' memoir trilogy. By the same point in the story, James has established in very thorough fashion that, on the day he arrived in Cambridge, it was foggy:

• "I could see nothing except a cold white October mist."
• "For all I knew, Cambridge was receiving me with open arms."
• "The white opacity came all the way to my eyeballs."
• "I couldn't see the station and I could barely see the suitcase."
• "I had to climb the memorial to find out what the direction was."
• "At first she snarled at me, perhaps because I had located her partly by touch."

That is, roughly three gags about the fog per paragraph. And it continues in paragraph three:

• "I found, by stepping into it, a gutter the size of a small canal."
• "...to check the texture of the building with my carefully extended right hand."

The travel memoir, or at least the travel memoir in which the memoir bit dominates, relies less on exposition and description than on personality and personal impressions, with all the irony you can throw at them: the genre presents a narrative first and culture in slow second, with the first person point of view not only carrying your character but the character of the work as a whole.

The second set of jokes centres on Abramovitz, James' neighbour in college, who:

• "...appeared suddenly beside me with a silence made possible by monogrammed leather slippers."
• "At least five years younger than I, Abramovitz carried on as if he were fifty years older."
• "I asked him if he was going to be Prime Minister."

Then, dinner:

• "The [food] proved only useful as a discussion point. The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis had already taken place."

The students/social gatherings:

• "Five minutes after shaking hands with [the Tutor] I found myself left alone with an Iranian biochemist whose name sounded like a fly trapped against a window."
• "It struck me on the spot that if the English had spent their lives preparing to fit into one of these places, then the only smart thing to do was not to bother about fitting in at all, and I can honestly say that from that moment on I never wasted any time trying."
• Of Delmer Dynamo: "His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused him to resembles a piece of fruit going to a funeral."

And on it goes. (We are only up to the fifth page of the memoir.)

Of course it works, but if you can write like this - that is, with wit/a pen dipped in vitriol - note also that it works in memoir in a way that won't necessarily work in travel writing. Even in memoir, you have to be able to keep it up, and pace it evenly. (The moment sharp wit loses its energy, the personality behind it loses its hold on the reader, because we glimpse the hands that are holding the jokes together. And, at that point, we stop laughing and start pointing back.) But in James' travel writing, the wit comes as part of a broader range of interests, and his narrative and point of view are used in ways that often merely enliven rather than structure the content.

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Clive James study #3: Back to Italy

Back to Italy, in a way. But more accurately, perhaps, to Italian film. My next Clive James study takes me first to Florence in 1963, when Clive James is sitting next to his future wife, watching Fellini's film 8½ for the first time. "Long before the lights went up on the stunned audience, everyone in it knew that this was a work to grow old with" (131). James, now writing in 1994 for the New Yorker, is bringing us up-to-date with the ageing process (reference below).


More specifically, though, he is revisiting the film's central theme of marital fidelity, and, at the end of the fifth of seven introductory paragraphs, ends with this: "Whether 8½ is really about Fellini is a question raised by the film itself - a question answered, in part, by the uncomfortable certitude of any married man who watches it that it is really about him. Men, we're all in this together. Fellini had us figured out."


1) The introduction closes with two paragraphs explaining Fellini's initial desire to make a film not about a film director but rather about l'homme moyen sensuel and the process by which the setting became the mondo del cinema "right up front working its charm" (133). A section break (a classic New Yorker section break) announces that we are about to learn more about the world of Italian cinema.


2) The world of Italian cinema in five paragraphs: Italy as the centre of film-making in the fifties and sixties; Italian cinema as being as important as Italian masters; the close world of collaboration; the comedies, which gave us "an education in just how comprehensive and satisfying a popular art form could be without ceasing to be either popular or artistic" (135); the postwar neo-realist cinema.

• James ends the second introductory section with this observation: "In short, the Italian cinema of those years was a lush field for someone to stand out from. Fellini did, head and shoulders." (135)
• I love the phrase "childishly hipped on their own anger", which to me stands out (head and shoulders).
• Note that by the end of the tenth paragraph we have two strands established: firstly, that Fellini's concerns about affairs are universal; secondly, that Fellini stood out, and did so in a period of intense artistic activity.

3) The film: 8½ as being at the core of Fellini's output; Fellini's use of the camera; improvisation and the use of amateur actors; Fellini's childhood and Saraghina; the "primitive" imagination - "The mind is the house of the Lord, and in the house of the Lord there are many mansions, and one of them is a honky-tonk" (139). 

• Note how the fourth paragraph in this section, beginning with "In a TV interview", marks a transition from film form to the content of the film, with James' observations about about Sandra Milo (who plays the mistress) leading to this: "If it was just the story of a man caught between wife and mistress and satisfied with neither, it would be La Dolce Vita. But 8½ isn't about the melodrama in the life of its protagonist; it's about the psychodrama in his mind." (137)
• It is this development towards psychodrama that allows James to relate the movie to the early impressions on Fellini's mind, and a light psychological analysis of the movie itself. (In terms of the last part of the essay, establishing the inner subject of the film will be used as evidence of the film's enduring importance.)

4) The film (part 2): the "interior imbroglio" is the real subject of 8½: all that Guido wants is "all the women in the world" (139), including Claudia Cardinale, who "triggers Guido's mixed vision of carnal purity" (140); Guido's poor-taste mind. 

• More memorable phrases. Of Cardinale: "Dante's Beatrice on the cover of Vogue. Petrarch's Laura with an agent" (140). 
• The section ends with Guido being recast as a monster: "It is a clear confession, on Guido's part, that his sexual imagination is an unrealizable, incurably adolescent fantasy of banal variety and impotent control." (141) This is a central sentence in developing the point made by the essay as a whole, and a key transition point in its shift from film to film-maker (and from film-maker to audience).

5) I.e., "Just as clearly, it is Fellini's confession too" (141): Fellini's marriage to Giulietta Masina; Fellini and feminism; feminism in Italy; Fellini "was saying that men should be held responsible for what they did, not for how they felt" (143), as actions can be given their proper name; the role of Guido's wife, Luisa, in 8½.

• By now, the transition points between film and the world "around" the film are so well established that James can move back and forward between without much sign-posting: he can write about Luisa/Masina and Guido/Fellini as thought they are all real and all part of the same textual universe, one which we as viewers are able to join.

6) Fellini's oeuvre and standing as a director: in the order that James discusses them, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, Roma, La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, Casanova, La Città delle Donne, E la Nave Va, and Ginger and Fred.

• It seems an unusual move to put this fairly long exposition at the end of the essay, and one could debate whether it really carries the theme of the essay or merely allows James to enjoy his (admittedly very analytical) viewing history in detail. In favour of the section is the fact that it brings us closer to James, which in this case is important given James' arguments about the universality (or, male universality) of the inner drama of 8½ and what that means for the standing of the film. 

7) The relative lack of depth in Hollywood, and the problem in forgetting about the directors of the fifties and sixties: "Fellini's is the tragic view of life, the gift of the old countries to the new ones where people think their life is over if they are not happy." (150)

• Again, I'm not sure the essay doesn't become a little too wide-ranging at this point. I first read the essay in 2003, and it's the link that James established between Fellini, Guido, and himself that has remained in my memory. Re-reading, I am surprised to find that discussion "hipped" on a slight grumpiness about modern films.

But this, after all, is an essay called "Mondo Fellini" and not "Fellini, Fidelity, and Fantasy", and my doubts about the structure of the closing sections probably misses the point, which is that a New Yorker article is always more than a study: it is an angle. In this case, the angle has been widened because of the time that has passed between the essay and its subject matter. Perhaps essays, like girths, stretch with the years.

Source:

James, Clive. "Mondo Fellini." In Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993-2001. London: Picador, 2003. 130-151. (First published in The New Yorker 21 March 1994, 154 - available here.)

Wonder is culturally relative

Or, rather, I am full of wonder at Carolyne Larrington's essay, "'Undruðusk þá, sem fyrir var': Wonder, Vínland and Medieval Travel Narratives" (available here).

It looks at medieval Icelandic saga accounts of voyages to Vínland, the sagas' term for Northern America, in light of H. R. Jauss' reception theory and le Goff's and Grenblatt's work on the marvellous (references below). While the essay is in itself a study of medieval Icelandic literature and a number of relatable, early modern texts, it opens up a range of ideas and issues applicable to much travel literature, modern and medieval. The article, though:

• An opening premise, drawn from Jauss: in reading medieval travel narratives, we are able to map an "horizon of expectation of the addressees for whom the text was originally composed" (92).
• One of the curious aspects of medieval Icelandic accounts of the New World is the absence of what we might think of as a sense of wonder. The sagas, in typical style, prefer to create a sense of the real (even, the realism of the extraordinary) over the miraculous.
• Perhaps this is because realistic representations of new encounters are more useful, in a material and mental mapping sense, than representations that are quoting pre-existing tropes. 
• It may also be down to the sagas' narrative point of view, which is almost always a third-person, objective one.
• And, after all, "[w]onder...is culturally relative" (97) - medieval Scandinavians recognize that skis might seem extraordinary to those who are new to Scandinavia. But the New World is, to an extent, an extension of their own.
• And as important as wonder, in fact, is curiosity.

In the context of the saga accounts of the European discoveries of 1000, these are factors in an audience demand for the real as it is represented through a strongly communal history, but which, as part of a "[r]evelling in the sheer variousness of the world", produces an "openness to the marvellously unexpected." (114)

The important point for all travel writers is that realism and objectivity are always to some extent the products of how the audience reads, and that an "openness to the marvellously unexpected" is not at odds with a commitment to the real. The best audiences often want both.

In order of appearance:

Larrington, Carolyne. "'Undruðusk þá, sem fyrir var': Wonder, Vínland and Medieval Travel Narratives." Mediaeval Scandinavia 14 (2004): 91-114. 

Jauss, H. R. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

Le Goff, Jacques. "Le merveilleux dans l'Occident medieval." In L'Imaginaire Médiéval: Essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. 

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 

Letter from San Francisco, by Rob Adams

Land’s End, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

The city has turned into an amusement park, or perhaps it always was. I’ve been stalking the remains of the Sutro Baths, as I walk these Land’s End sea cliffs trails. But now you can rent a two person, side by side, yellow scooter pod with an electronic guidance system that will tell you when to turn right and all about the sixties.

Is this place all about the money? What about Silver Barron Sutro, underwriting a civic train, cutting the line into the cliffs, so people could see his grand house and have public baths – grandiose for the people.

The wind is howling east with the four o’clock fog, pushing over the rock grabbing cypress for centuries, and the city seems just out of reach, overshadowed by nature’s wonder. I can see the yellow of Angel Island, the red of the G.G. Bridge, and the Marion green of the fogged over pacific pallet before me. The city seems to hide in the hills behind, full of magazine cream, and top popping key punchers. From this vantage, I can see a lot of the surrounding area - the urban takes over the vast bay’s shores and hills. How many stops to segregated San Francisco from the Black East Bay? No cheap transport to the insular peninsula.

San Francisco, stuff of myth and lore, carved out of an image of a Saint who talked to animals, the underground and overground interface, and the over scroll marketplace. Is there a universal over-soul besides the internet?

We don’t make anything. I am looking for a job as a writer.

San Carlos, California

Combat-duty pay, in combination with lower house prices have brought more tattoos to selective satellite city pools and tennis courts.

Molotov’s, Lower Haight, San Francisco

There is a loud drunk guy talking. It’s afternoon and the whole bar is painted black. The bartendress is a punk rock girl better than Joan Jett.

The drunk’s talking her ear off, and the rest of us. “That was the climax of my fucking story --!” the drunk says, “A Toast!”

“Are you happy?” the drunk says. He’s kind of a bald blond yuppie. “Are You happy?”

The punkers murmur. I’m sitting at a table by the window, not at the bar, so I don’t have to answer.

“I don’t have a job,” says the drunk. “But yeah, I’m telling you, I have an idea…I had it all. I had it all set up, because I speak French and I used to be employed. I’ve been sitting around Smoking Pot! – watching French movies because I speak French but I forgot a word!…Intellectual Property! Year of the Fucking Tiger! Kick some fucking ass! But basically I’d be licensing intellectual property to a market five times as big… but here’s to clean sperm and no condoms and my heavily employed wife, a Chinese sector narcissistic explosion – so here’s to making babies.”

The Wu-Tang Clan is on the jukebox, simple piano and the cut-count rhythm of the ODB. The drunk starts up again: “Here’s what I’m trying to tell you…”

The jukebox changes to Johnny Cash, and the drunk sings along to the guitar solo. The drunk’s tolerant new bar mates scatter. He starts flirting with the bartendress. There are professional borders on the TV with the sound down, another corner screen with the original Bad Lieutenant, sound down plus subtitles. There is also a red felt pool table near the back. The drunk mumbles, “Marriage…ha ha ha. When do you say yes – when do you say yes to That?”

There used to be peanut shells on the floor in here, and black plastic baskets of peanuts on the bar – and before that, you could smoke in here and the pool felt was purple. But it is 2010 now, nobody knows me in here anymore and it’s afternoon.

My wife and child arrive tomorrow. I thought I might have a job by now.

*

The 4600 Block of 12th Street, Oakland,
Has Only One Sidewalk...

… and one abandoned railroad line.
The cement of the sidewalk is stamped with the mark: WPA 1940

And surrounded by the sparkle of broken glass, and white dog faeces,
     there is a yellow
plastic package of black meat on the sidewalk.

It seems to have been cooking there for years.
A criminologist would be able to tell better.

The plastic wrap has burst into strips and mini-flags,
but the yellow polystyrene tray remains intact.

What used to be the meat, looks like melted dung or mud (which perhaps
     it is).
Gently quivering in the breeze, the tentacles of clear plastic seem to
     beckon, advertising.

The longer you look the more you want to gag – though it is hard to tell
     the smell from all
the others, and it’s nothing you’d notice from a car.

There was a dead dog in a plastic box, and that got picked up after a
     phone call and a
couple days. But the old yellow Styrofoam remains, even after the recent
     rains.

And a small puddle of rainwater has sort of eroded a crater,
leaving a small pool of meat tea.

The author: Rob Adams recently completed an MCI in Creative Writing at QUT. His major project was the novella Day-Glo Noir: C'est une Faux Memoir.

Letter from Mexico, by Donna Hancox

Mexico City sits 2,240 metres above sea level and is one of the most polluted cities in the world. There are days when the pollution is so bad residents are advised to stay at home. Standing outside the airport I tried to fill my lungs with oxygen but the air was thin and gritty, with a chill that dug into my bones and made me ache. I had waited, tears beginning to burn in my nose and at the back of my throat, for three hours for my bag to arrive via a San Francisco flight, although I flew from LA. I’d grabbed it off the carousel, my knees buckling slightly with relief. This, this is my bag, I murmured.

Finally I made it to my hotel in the city centre. All tawdry glamour, peeling paint and colonial architecture. When I lay on the bed after a lukewarm shower I started to cry great heaving jet lagged sobs. Doubting my ability to stay in this city for even a couple of days before I made my way down to Chiapas. The southern-most state of Mexico, and an area still shuddering with civil unrest. It was the beginning of the Millennium and I was in search of the Zapatistas: a Marxist grass roots revolutionary group that posted manifestos and missives via the internet, and were led by a balaclava wearing, pipe smoking philosophy professor. In that dank hotel room I suddenly saw myself through Subcomandate Marco’s eyes: self-indulgent and pretentious.

I was convinced I would feel differently in San Cristobel, the small town in Chiapas I was heading to. As though Mexico City was the problem. The bus trip took eighteen hours and we arrived in San Cristobel at dawn. I stepped off the bus and gulped in the crisp mountain air. After days enveloped in the chaos of Mexico City the silence of San Cristobel was jarring. A small line of taxis waited next to the bus stop, and I watched as Mexican families filled them until there was only one taxi left and I was the last person. The driver smiled at me and beckoned like I was a stray animal. I thrust a piece of paper with the address of the posada into his hand and said,

‘Porfavor.’

Trees ringed the town square and the municipal building stood at one end of the park. It was the building the Zapatistas had briefly taken control of five years earlier. Later that day I would run my fingers over the bullet holes.

The posada was pale blue and bright yellow. In my room was a vase of lilies next to the bed. I wasted the first two days lying in the sun at the town square reading books, torn between crippling self-consciousness and the desire to follow my plans. In the make shift office at the posada I noticed some Zapatista posters and asked Luisa the owner if she could help me find a way to visit one of their communities.

‘I suppose,’ she said in stilted English. ‘There is one that allows visitors. But why?’

‘Because that is why I came here. They are famous. And revolutionary.’

‘They just want their land,’ she replied, looking at me hard for a moment before adding, ‘I have a friend. I will speak with him and see if he can take you next time he goes.’

‘Muchas gracias.’

The next day she gave me the address of a street corner towards the edge of town. I was to meet Guillermo at 7am on Sunday morning. As I walked in the stark morning light I worried about meeting a strange man and going into the mountains with him. Life, I thought, is made up of a series of small choices and this is one of them. A very short, wizened man holding the reigns of two donkeys greeted me cheerfully.

‘Hola.’

My fear subsided as I patted one of the donkey’s heads. Its ears were so soft and silky I wanted to throw my arms around its neck. Then I saw the saddle. Wooden. Just to be sure I touched the saddle. Definitely wooden.

‘Up, up,’ Guillermo urged me.

We rode out of town, and down a dirt track. The countryside reminded me initially of South West Queensland where I grew up. Scrubby and tough, with huge birds flying above circling unsuspecting prey. We left the dirt track, the donkeys marching up the mountain dodging trees and loose stones. Guillermo spoke almost no English but smiled a lot. When he did speak I did not understand, but I felt safe. We arrived at a small village, which was really just a white church surrounded by tables. It seemed to be the meeting place for the Indigenous families living in the mountains. The donkeys stopped by themselves, and Guillermo got off saying to me,

‘Comer,’ and putting his hand near his mouth in case I didn’t know that it meant to eat. He walked me over to one of the tables and I pointed to a plate with beans and rice and corn. An old woman held up three fingers. I pulled out a five Peso note and waved away the offer of change. After lunch we kept riding and the air kept getting thinner, but not like Mexico City. It was thin and sweet. We came to a clearing with huts and tents and a school house in the middle. Men and women stood around in colourful clothing with carved wooden guns slung over their shoulders. They smiled to Guillermo but looked away from me. He went to talk to a group of men, and spread his arms out as if to say, I brought you here the rest is up to you.

It seemed so absurd, so stupid that I would be standing on there on the edge of a community fighting for their lives without anything to contribute and no way to communicate. So I sat down and waited for Guillermo.

A young girl walked over and sat next to me.

‘Rosa,’ she said.

‘Donna,’ I answered. ‘Australia.’

‘Australia,’ she repeated. Turning the word over like a stone in her mouth.


The author: Donna Hancox lectures in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology.

Letter from a Small Room in Berlin, by Stuart Glover

A week in Berlin has underlined the boundaries of travel. Not quite in the way that Laika, the space dog, might have experienced in the launch of Sputnik 2—perishing from overheating in a tiny craft at the very limits of transportation—but in a more mundane way that helps remind us of the different reasons we might be on the move. Berlin makes clear again that tourism, travel, and expatriatism are different things. It is clear after a week that this city serves each of these impulses differently well. Berlin accommodates the tourist in a perfunctory way, but it returns the embrace of the traveller and the émigré.

My own imagination about Berlin has always been jejune. I have read about the bunker; I have read about the bombings; and I have read about the spy swaps on Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam. My contemporary sense of the city is even less informed, but here my ignorance is coloured by paranoid fear rather than by wartime romance. Contemporary Berlin seems to suggest avantgard art and artists. I am not sure what I mean by this but it involves Nick Cave and a coal-eyed woman called Petra pointing out that I am just not cool. As though in Berlin you can be anything: rich, poor, German, Turkish, a sex-worker from Moldova—but you must be cool.

As a tourist, I am easily satisfied by old things. Not so much museums, although there are plenty to enjoy in Berlin, more so streetscapes that crowd you with a sense of history. But Berlin, so wretchedly bombed in the war, has had much of its past erased. I came to Berlin from the Swiss World Heritage-listed town of St Gallen with its intact 15th century townhouses and its startling Abbey Library. By contrast, Berlin in a gloomy moist Autumn is not pretty. Like, say, Exeter in Britain, Berlin has a long history but the war truncated its physical connections to it.

This erasure turns sight-seeing into a task of sight-seeking. You must travel to Postdamer Platz to see the cold, but striking, contemporary architecture that marks the re-unification of the city. You must travel to Postdam on the city’s outskirts to see the Kaisers’ castles and summerhouses. But the city itself is plain, ugly even, dominated by post-war apartments—few of them higher than five stories—which sprawl outwards for many kilometres to house more than three million people. As a local explained it to me, Berlin is a trick for the tourist because despite its fame and romance, “there is no there, there”.

The city seems to deliver much more to the traveller, intent on staying somewhere for a month or more, or the émigré looking for somewhere to live. Berlin is easier and more rewarding to inhabit than to visit. It is cosmopolitan in two senses of the word. On one hand, it is touched by the exotic, sitting as it does between Western and Eastern Europe and home as it is to waves of migrants since its establishment in the 1300s. And on the other, it is welcoming, tolerant, and curious about things from elsewhere. It is the budget World City.

And cost seems to be much of the reason that young westerners are here in large numbers from the UK, the US, Australia and elsewhere in Europe. In my home town of Brisbane—which is hardly a world centre—the inner city rents, the food prices and transport costs make the life of a moocher or the life of an artist more and more difficult. But Berlin with its eight-dollar meals, its two-dollar glasses of wine, and its $1000 a month apartments supports a large population of musicians, writers, gap-year students, and art-scene poseurs who eek out a life through part-time work in bars or suchlike.

And the city is enlivened by this wash of the young and the adventurous. Since unification, suburb after suburb has been gentrified, often marked by the arrival of cheap restaurants, idiosyncratic bars, street buskers, and tiny cafes that welcome everyone, even smokers. Late on, just as the train system shuts down and the night buses start up, the city comes alive with clubbers and drinkers.

I am awkward in the face of this kind of self-propelled fun at the best of times, so I am not sure how as the lone tourist, adrift, to enjoy Berlin on its own terms. I am just here for a week and I have nothing to offer but tourist cash. But alone in my pension room, late on a rainy and cold Wednesday night, overdue on a conference paper deadline, I can still tell it is out there: Berlin, a real city.

 
The author: Stuart Glover lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.

Craft: A second Clive James study

My second analysis of Clive James' travel writing is, like the first, based on a piece in his Flying Visits collection, now out of print but included for free on James' website. "Postcard from Biarritz" (available here), begins, as is often the case in his travel writing, by indulging James' knowledge of aircraft and flight schedules.

1) Then, he gets the reader there (2 paragraphs), that is, to "the mini-golf course that Biarritz calls an airport". And some background: what was/is Biarritz, the author's previous visit (2 paragraphs).

• As with the Rome piece, James includes himself in a way that adds a humorous/personal element, and that also begins to hint at theme. His friend and compatriot Michael Blakemore has bought a house in Biarritz: "The purchase cleaned him out, but the climate, cliffs and waves reminded him of home. They did the same to me. We spent two weeks not writing a film. This year we planned to spend another two weeks not writing a play."

2) A history of the rise of the town as a summer destination for the European nobility (5 paragraphs): the broad sweep of the town's rise and fall; a twelfth-century fishing village; the arrival of Napolean III; the resort town of kings and queens; a last resort of the exclusive/anti-democratic culture of old Europe.

• In typical James style, the history lesson is kept fresh through pacing (James skips through a big history by keeping it close to a central theme of the rise and fall of the town) and through his humorous turn of phrase: the whales "sensibly moved away"; during the town's high point, there was "a commingling of crowns, a tangling of tiaras"; the then Prince of Wales "acquired much of his girth in the Biarritz pastry shops". 

3) A narrowing of the historical perspective (6 paragraphs): the public works and architecture of the nobility; swimming in the sea ("Previously the idea had not occurred to anyone"); "the ritualised fuss and elaborate machinery" of going for a swim in the nineteenth century.

• The piece becomes a little frivolous at this point: James enjoys himself in the precise terminology associated with a nineteenth-century swim: the terms peignoir, guide-baigneur, la cabine, and trottoir roulant are not there so much for historical precision as the precise impression of absurdity they create. It's all a bit silly, so James can be a bit silly, too: "What went on beneath the waves must remain forever unknown, but one trusts that class barriers were suitably eroded. Ankles must have touched. Knees must have collided. Surely the occasional rendezvous was made, as it is today in the winter resorts, where fine ladies sometimes invite their ski instructors to bed, although never to dinner."

4) Finishing off the history lesson (3 paragraphs): the town's fall from favour; the beginning of a period when Biarritz "was preserved by neglect": "Biarritz still served the turn as a plush funk-hoe, but as a display case it was past tense." The young rich now went to St Tropez, "where the waves were very flat but there was a chance of seeing Brigitte Bardot's behind".

• The last sentence of these paragraphs signals the move back to the theme that is hinted at the beginning of the piece: "Nobody thought of the big waves at Biarritz with any special fondness until 1956, when Richard Zanuck and Peter Viertel arrived on the coast to scout locations for The Run Also Rises." With the surf rising, we are a little closer to Sydney... 

5) Back to the personal (3 paragraphs): Zanuck and Viertel surfing instead of movie-making brings us back to James and Blakemore not writing their film.

• The return to the opening idea of surfing instead of working brings the historical sketch up to the present point in the town's history and in James' encounters with the place. It also helps to develop a second, related idea, which is that leisure and indulgence are not necessarily wasteful things: sometimes it is best not to do anything - Biarritz, after all, has in the past been saved by neglect. Renewed interest in the town is not necessarily a blessing.

6) Biarritz today, home to a "new, penniless royalty" of surfers, including Australians "with John Newcombe moustaches and countersunk eyes like tacks in a carpet" (5 paragraphs): increasingly popular with surfers and families, Biarritz is no longer able to crumble quietly into the sea - but how can it afford the redevelopment costs, and the broader costs of redevelopment?

• This section ends with James attending a public meeting that erupts into disagreement, allowing the author to make the last transition in the piece, towards some thought about the Basques and their famous temper.

7) Final thoughts (3 paragraphs): the local game pelote as a symbol of the local temperament; the time to visit is now, when "those elegantly turned-out gentlemen" of the nineteenth century have been replaced with "some of the most heartbreakingly pretty girls in the world springing around with hardly anything on at all."

• The final final thought is that, "as a place in which not to do something, Biarritz is unbeatable." The sentence pretty much does what James hopes it will, which is to bring the elements of this piece (which are, in the main, historical) together around the more broadly social theme of leisure and its consequences. Surfing, doing nothing, watching girls: they suit James the Sydneysider, and James the artist, even if we really know that he has been busy writing all along.

The first day of summer

Summer has confirmed its arrival with a sudden wall of morning humidity. By the time it arrives each year, I've somehow forgotten it will be coming. It's a cloak around your skin, impossible to take off, even when you go inside. It releases the smells of summer: tarmac, wet grass, the mulch that is always heavy from afternoon storms, clay under the rocks, the heady stickiness of the pollens, wood that is beginning to bend. In the early evenings, it stops: the humidity becomes a kind of lazy heat that can't quite be bothered leaving. And then, when the sun sets at around seven, it begins again: both nocturnal and a creature at home in the blinding mornings. 

Enter, the internet.

My sister Frída is commenting (via Facebook) on pictures I took last February in Iceland. She says she's only just seen them - they must have come up on that new Facebook application that shows you people's old photos. Right now, I can't imagine what it's like to be that cold, but posting some pictures from the day feels like putting an ice bucket in front of the fan.

The ice had frozen about twenty metres out into the lake, Thingvallavatn, 40 minutes' drive from Reykjavík.

I'm not sure how the water had frozen in this way, but it seemed as though each stage of the freezing process was documented in the layers and shadows of the ice.

My friend and I photographed the lake for about half an hour. I was only using a little Canon Ixus, but it took the most gorgeous photographs of the slow winter sunset being refracted in the surface ice and in the waves that had formed at the edge of the lake.

In this last one, the light is not as distinct and sharp as in the others, but I love the way the ice seems to be reaching for the mountains in the far distance, almost like an army flag bearer.

(A piece that I wrote about this trip for M/C Journal can be found here.)

Remembrance Day

My grandfather on my mother's side, Harold Diggons, was serving in the British Navy in the D-Day Landing of 6 June 1944. His war experience affected him profoundly. He was never really able to settle down afterwards: he would be looking for the intensity of those years for the rest of his life. This was a restlessness that, after the war, brought him to Australia, that five years later took him back to England, and that a year after that brought him and the family back to Australia again. And it was a restlessness that my mother inherited, and so has shaped much of my own life. 

I can't say I'm not grateful. I like the feeling of restlessness, insomuch as I like to feel that there is always another trip to take, albeit less dramatic than the D-Day one that Harold took 65 years ago. 

Harold's photograph of his vessel approaching the French coast (I still can't quite believe that they were allowed to take photos). 

My grandfather is pictured here, in Brighton for training in May 1944, second from the right. 

And, here, the before and after of D-Day: his vessel waiting to be loaded for the invasion (above) and in Bordeaux on his last day of active service (below, first on the left).



The Benefits of Content

The first part of An African Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby was screened on ABC television last night, and comes as a second television travel story to delight (Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine's Last Chance to See has also been screening recently, and also on the ABC). What the programmes share is actual content: interviews, background information, research, and insights into local cultures and environments.

I know I sound old-fashioned when I say that content seems an increasingly rare element in television. But sometimes, when a show delivers more than personality (although this is not missing in either show), you really notice what we normally go without.

And, in the context of travel writing, I think we have to be told about what's going on. Without exposition and analysis, we remain on the surface of the images that we're being shown, a surface that quickly becomes unreliable if it isn't contextualized.

Journeys to Envy: The Saga Steads of Iceland

One or two of my colleagues in Australia will make fun of me for this (as I am more or less always going on about Iceland), but I am deeply jealous of my friend Emily Lethbridge, who soon begins a year-long pilgrimage of the saga steads of Iceland, that is, the sites from Iceland's medieval saga literature. It's a journey I have often dreamed of making, and which I suppose over the years I have been collating in parts.


Good luck to Emily! Her blog about the coming travels can be found here, and a conference paper that I have written about literary tourism in Iceland is available here.