Further to the post about the last days of Tolstoy and the upcoming film, The Last Station, here’s some rare footage showing the man himself in the period just before his death in 1910.
Accompanied by Tchaikovsky, we can see it all: grandchildren pulling faces, sleighs, pines, railway stations, fawning retinues, Sophia, and what must be his daughter, Sasha. We even see him on his deathbed.
And guess what? Leo Tolstoy walked like Charlie Chaplin.
Dear Marukami san,
I love you, but … WHAT HAPPENED WITH KAFKA ON THE SHORE?
True, Mr Nakata has an excellent character, and his first conversation with Otsuka, the “elderly black tomcat,” is very enjoyable. And the episode with the school teacher having an erotic dream of her husband and it all getting mixed up in her mind with her period starting, the young boy finding the bloodied towels she’s hidden in the woods and her subsequent shock and shame is masterful.
But Marukami san, what about the rest? That you, the author of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart, should have had anything to do with this tottering wreck … well, it pains me.
Marukami san, I know how much you are fascinated by time, just like me. And yet, Marukami san, you let me spend a week of my life with this dunce of a boy, Kafka Tamura, and both of us know it’s a week I’m never getting back!!!
Please, Marukami san, ease off on the marathons and buckle under when you write your next.
Respectfully yours,
Ms Solid Gold
*****
He wrote like a radical in favour of the moderate.
– David Kaufmann writing in Tablet, Jan 20, 2010, about Jacques Derrida.
*****
“Meanjin” is an Aboriginal word meaning “rejected by The New Yorker.”
– Susan Johnson writing in The Age about the Australian literary journal.
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And finally this month, I read Elena Vosnaki writing in her excellent blog, Perfume Shrine.
‘One day soon you may be able to capture a fragrance snapshot of your environment and send it attached to a text message or email.’ Thus begins the fantasy of digitalised scents, the elusive captured into pixels that can be stored and transmitted, a concept that up till very recently seemed as wild as colonising Alpha Centaur with men.
Yes, that’s right. It’s “teleolfaction.” Move over iPad and iPod; soon, there’s going to be iSmell.
*****
When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone.
Trust Chekhov to get it exactly right. He puts his finger on what matters most about Tolstoy: “because Tolstoy achieves for everyone.”
Because for all us readers and writers, Tolstoy has always already written. No matter what happens, what we do and don’t read, what we do and don’t write, what device we do or don’t use for reading, Anna Karenina and his other great works will already have been brought into existence.
2010 is the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, and many events and commemorations of his life are planned. One such event is the release in London and Berlin of the new film, The Last Station, starring Christopher Plummer (my dear Colonel von Trapp) and Helen Mirren. The film covers the tempestuous period immediately before Tolstoy’s death at the age of 82. The film is based on the 1990 novel by Jay Parini which is itself based on the diaries kept by the various members of Tolstoy’s household.
As Robert McCrum says in yesterday’s Guardian in his review of The Last Station, Parini was the first to spot the huge potential of the diaries as raw material for a novel. Which is one of those things that makes you wonder how it cannot have been spotted previously.
I’m a fan of the film in advance. Because of its subject, naturally, but also because of its title.
The common story is that Tolstoy died at the tiny railway station of Astapovo after leaving his beloved estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the middle of the night for fear his deteriorating relationship with Sophia, his wife, would kill him.
However, according to a new website established to mark the centenary of his death, he didn’t actually die at the station but at the station master’s residence where he’d been taken after getting off the train. And he lingered for several days before dying. Long enough for Sophia to hire her own train and bring the family to see him, though by the time they arrived, he was not conscious.
Regardless of whether it’s the location where he actually dies, or where he begins to die, the railway station is crucial to the story. Because, as hinted in the film’s title, railway stations have featured throughout his novels as the scene of event and death.
In Anna Karenina, for example, his masterpiece above masterpieces, Anna first meets Vronsky at the railway station, soon after a guard is killed at the station when de-coupling carriages. So too Anna experiences the “greatest joy she will ever have of Vronsky,” alone in her carriage at the halt between St Petersburg and Moscow, and disembarks, grasping the cold post in her hand, to find Vronsky waiting on the platform in the swirling snow.
And, of course, in the end there is Anna’s suicide at the station when, agitated and disoriented, she disembarks one last time and waits for the “midpoint between the two wheels” to come even with her.
That Tolstoy should also have his death scene at a railway station, 40 years after writing Anna’s death, brings to mind Flaubert’s exclamation over his greatest creation, “Emma, c’est moi!”
*****
In reading the website marking the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, I came across so many surprising and mind-boggling facts about the man I’m hereby starting a year of sharing them on this blog. Here’s a few to start with:
*****
To go to the website for the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, click here: http://tolstoy.beckerfilmgroup.com/index.html
To read Robert McCrum’s review of The Last Station in The Guardian, click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/31/tolstoy-the-last-station-film-mccrum
Images: http://tolstoy.beckerfilmgroup.com/index.html (top and bottom); Wikipedia (middle)
Last year when I was doing Landmark’s Self Expression and Leadership course, I struck up a friendship with a woman named Donna.
The course runs for four months during which participants create and implement community projects. By the end of the course, some participants were well on the way to implementing their projects; some had gone part of the way and become discouraged; and some, for a variety of existential reasons, had been stopped, pretty much from the outset.
Donna was a whole different kettle of fish. Donna created a project to establish an orphanage in Zambia. A month after the course finished she flew to Zambia, and within days, had bought a plot of land and started building.
Since that time Donna’s returned to Australia and continued to raise money and interest. And this week she told me of a new development which just confirms — if I didn’t already have ample evidence — that she is a woman who can make anything happen.
So Donna’s getting my first contemporary WCD (“Women who’ve Carried the Day”) gong.
The project Donna started is called “Zoe’s Hope” (Zambian Orphans Empowerment Support). The project aims to support two groups:
In Zambia, many orphanages do not take in very young children, especially those with “high needs”, for example, babies born premature and babies born with HIV. Zoe’s Hope aims to care for these babies until the age of two, and then re-integrate them into their extended families.
Zoe’s Hope will also care for those young girls who’ve been raped as a consequence of the cruel and desperate belief that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. These girls are often shunned by their families, and are at risk of becoming homeless and being sold into the sex industry.
Since Donna started the project, one baby has become extra special. When she was in Zambia last year establishing the orphanage, the local police of the town brought her a child that had been born only 36 hours earlier and then abandoned by the side of the road.
Donna took in the baby – a little girl – and then started to think of her own daughter, Lynda, back here in Australia and how Lynda had always wanted to adopt a child of her own. So she rang Lynda and together they decided to start down the adoption path, and because the police had requested it, they named her.
They called her Zoe Hope.
So Zoe was taken in and cared for at the orphanage while Donna, her annual leave expired, flew back to Australia to take up her day job, raise more funds and investigate the adoption requirements. A few months later she and Lynda were dismayed to discover these requirements were onerous.
They discovered the Zambian government requires any foreigner wishing to adopt a child has to reside in Zambia for two years before the adoption and two years after the adoption. So to adopt Zoe Lynda would have to give up her new business and go and live in Zambia for a minimum of four years. The situation looked hopeless. That is, until something highly unlikely occurred.
Lynda lives in a tiny town of a few hundred residents located in the high country of Victoria. One day a few weeks ago, Lynda was in the pub having a beer when in walked a woman from Zambia. Not only was she from Zambia, she was from the very region in which the orphanage is located and knew of the orphanage.
After Lynda told her about Zoe and the adoption requirements, the woman took on the issue as her own. And just last week this woman from Zambia volunteered to adopt the baby on Lynda’s behalf. So she and Lynda are going to Zambia in July to adopt Zoe and bring her back to Australia.
*****
To the naked eye it may look as if a Zambian woman walking into a pub in country Victoria is an extraordinary stroke of luck. And so it is. Yet knowing Donna’s capacity to make things happen that weren’t going to happen, I can’t help thinking she was also pulling the strings somewhere.
To find out more about Zoe’s hope, go to http://www.zoeshope.org/index.html
*****
I rode down England
as they fired the crop
that was the leavings of a crop,
the smashed tow-coloured barley,down from Ely’s Lady Chapel,
the sweet tenor latin
forever banished,
the sumptuous windowsthreshed clear by Thomas Cromwell.
Which circle does he tread,
scalding on cobbles,
each one a broken statue’s head?(from Leavings by Seamus Heaney)
Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, is talking about Ely Cathedral near Cambridge in England, one of the most atmospheric places on earth. A place of water and faeries and destruction, and last refuge of the Anglo-Saxon princess, Etheldreda, who ran away from her husband, the King of Northumbria, in order to preserve her virginity.
And it’s Etheldreda who’s kicking off this series on “women who carried the day.”
*****
Ely has been a site of worship for over 1300 years and has endured through many vicissitudes: from Etheldreda’s founding of a monastery in 672, to the destruction of the monastery by invading Danes in 869, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the smashing of the statues of Mary in 1539, and the armed entry of Oliver Cromwell (Thomas’s descendant) in the 1640s.
Throughout it all Ely has persisted. And when I first saw it rising massive from the dark plain on a day of cold, low sun I felt the same awe that all who’ve seen the “Ship of the Fens” have felt.
*****
Etheldreda (also, Æthelthryth, Audrey) was born around 636, one of four daughters of King Anna of East Anglia. She was ”remarkable for personal beauty and for gentleness of character” (note 1), and was devoted to God (2).
Despite an apparent vow of perpetual virginity, she married her first husband, Tondberct, a prince of the Gyrvians or “fenmen”, at the age of 16.
When Tondberct died three years later in 655, Etheldreda retired to the Isle of Ely, given to her by her husband on their marriage. Ely was then a tract of land surrounded by marshes and water, and accessible only by boat. Even today, after the draining of the Fens in the 18th century, it’s a place of water and mists, and one can imagine a long ago time when it might have been joined to the low lands of Holland across the Channel.
In 660 Etheldreda married again, this time to Ecgfrith, who later became King of Northumbria. By her own account, in this marriage, and her first marriage, Etheldreda was able to persuade her husbands to respect her vow of virginity. At least, that is, until she formalised her devotion and became a nun in 670.
At first, Ecgfrith acceded to her decision, and allowed her to set up home at the monastery of Coldingham where his aunt was abbess. Soon after, however, he changed his mind, and began planning to seize her and consummate the marriage.
Etheldreda got wind of Ecgfrith’s plans and fled to Ely. In some accounts, she caused miracles on her journey including a sudden rising of the tide that made good her escape and the sprouting of her staff into a tree while she lay sleeping on the ground one night. In 673 she founded a monastery on the island, a monastery for both nuns and monks.
The monastery flourished under a long line of abbesses (including, after Etheldreda’s death, her sister Sexburga and Sexburga’s daughter, Ermenilda) until the Danes invaded in 869. When the Danes invaded the monastery was burnt and pillaged, and the nuns and monks were either killed or fled for their lives. Ely was left in ruins until a century later when it was revived as a Benedictine monastery. A century later again, work began on the massive stone structure that’s still there today.
Etheldreda died in 679 (aged 43) of a throat tumour caused by bubonic plague. Almost 20 years after her death her remains were moved into the church and Bede “records that the body was found to be in an amazing state of preservation, with the tumour healed.” (3)
For many centuries, Etheldreda’s fame was immense and attracted wealth and pilgrims to Ely from all over the world. She is remembered today on her death day (23 June) and as the source of the word, “tawdry.” A common version of her name was St Awdrey, and many of her admirers brought lacework at an annual fair held in her name at Ely. Over time the lacework acquired the reputation of being cheap or old-fashioned, particularly by the Puritans of the 17th century who “looked down on any form of lacy dressiness.” (4)
Etheldreda, this mighty and determined princess-cum-abbess, this queen of a watery world, is also the patron saint of throat complaints.
*****
Notes
1. W. E. Dickson, Cathedral Churches, edited by Prof. T.G. Benney, Volume 1, Cassell and Company Ltd, London, 1896
2. Christianity had been introduced to the region about half a century earlier.
3. Ely Cathedral, A Pitkin Cathedral Guide
4. Wikipedia
Images: I D Kippax (top); E Smith, RIBA British Architectual Library Photographs Collection (middle); Old Photos (bottom)
News in The Age that David Mearns, the UK-based shipwreck hunter, plans to search for the Endurance, the ship crushed by ice and abandoned by Ernest Shackleton and his men on their Antarctic expedition in 1915.
Readers of this blog may remember my wonder and torment when reading Shackleton’s account of the expedition (click here and here). It’s left me in permanent awe of his name and everything associated with it.
Mearns has previously discovered the wrecks of the British battleship, HMS Hood, the German cruiser, Kormoran and just last week, the Australian hospital ship, Centaur, torpedoed by the Japanese off the coast of Queensland in 1943.
While the Endurance is beneath the ice cap somewhere, and ”it’s 3000 metres deep beneath ice caps,” Mearns says he’s more confident about the Endurance project “than anything else I’ve done.” It also happens to be, as he says,
… the absolute ultimate challenge in shipwreck hunting.
All he needs, according to the article, is ” … a wealthy benefactor with a cool $US10 million.”
*****
The Age Weekend Edition also featured a profile of Lucy Feagins, the blogger behind The Design Files, a very handy local site. As well as holding down a day job, Lucy prepares a lavish post every working day. Her dedication and hard work must be enormous.
And courtesy of Lucy’s site, I just discovered the knitwear designer that Melbourne — the logical home of knitwear design excellence –has long deserved. Her name’s Nikki Gabriel and this is one of her beautiful designs below.
*****
Image: Nikki Gabriel’s knitwear (The Design Files)
On Christmas Eve, Australian knitters got the Christmas present they’d been waiting for. The Australian Government finally removed knitting needles from the list of items prohibited on a plane.
It’s been a sore point for many years that famous knitters in North America like Stephanie Pearl McPhee could swan on to a plane with an armoury of steel and bamboo implements. While we in the Antipodes were having a little cry at check-in for all the wasted hours ahead when obliged to relinquish our project to the hold. How was the heel going to get turned down there?
Knitters would scheme endlessly at ways to outwit the authorities. Which just goes to show they’d got us knitters exactly right: we were not to be trusted.
One woman on a blog speculated about using a bamboo circular to hold her hair in a bun while getting past the x-ray machine. Which was clever, yes, and probably could have worked, only I did wonder a tad how she was going to explain the woolly mess on her tray table on the “final rubbish pick-up.”
And then — would you believe it? — we Australian knitters had been celebrating for a mere 24 hours when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a US plane with chemicals in his underpants. We’ve all been vwerry vwerry quiet ever since lest the Australian Government again put 2 and 2 together and get 5: knitters + Australian planes = terrorists in the US.
*****
Of all the needles worth getting caught for smuggling on to a plane it’d be my Clover 4mms made in Japan from the finest bamboo, or the acknowledged Rolls Royce of knitting needles, my 5mm Addi Turbo circular, made in Germany from nickel-plated brass.
The Clovers are as pleasing to look at as they are to use. They’re long and light and strong with – really there’s no other way to say it — the most sweetly shaped knobs at the end. The Addi Turbos claim to be the fastest in the business and they are. Hollow little torpedoes, they move the yarn smoothly and silkily from one point to the other with a lovely airy click.
Both of them are shown in the picture, along with my unloved Casein needles and my current project. The Caseins are the white ones and that’s because they’re made of milk. Yes, milk. Don’t ask me how a milk protein – Casein – ends up as a stick but it does. They’re probably designed to imitate the antique needles made of ivory, yet given ivory was the ultimate covetable material I can only think it’s a rather poor imitation. Because the Casein feels plasticky, and too cool and inert to my hand.
My current project is, wonders, not a sock. It’s a short cardi-bolero-thingy from a Jo Sharp pattern. This one’s definitely a “product” knit, not a “process” one. Can’t say why but it’s boring to knit. Only way I’ll be smuggling it on a plane is by wearing it.
*****
Images: Jo Sharp (top); by me (bottom)
Just heard that one of my blog posts will be included in an anthology of blog posts to be published by Karen Andrews at Miscellaneous Press. The anthology will be called Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing #1 and will be released in April.
Ironically, the post chosen for the anthology is about the persistence of a great anecdote. It’s the post from last October concerning Bill Clinton and the literature professor, Stephen Greenblatt titled ”The curious half-life of an ethically inadequate object.”
Seems there’s still some half-life to go; this time in an Australian book.
To read the post, click here: http://solidgoldcreativity.com/2009/10/11/the-curious-half-life-of-an-ethically-inadequate-object/
… too many are mezmerised with the sound of their own voice, thereby neglecting the content or the substance of their intended message.
This is what Kassandra said on this blog the other day. We were talking about the pitfalls of translating classic texts. But her comment can apply equally well to a subject raised recently in The Atlantic Monthly: the conventions of newspaper writing.
The Atlantic’s article titled, “Cut This Story!” by Michael Kinsley is entertaining. Yet there are several points Kinsley doesn’t raise, including one I hereby dub the “just enough” rule of writing.
*****
Kinsley cites the way in which newspaper articles are padded with unnecessary quotations from “experts” and “observers” so as to “magically turn an opinionated story into an objective one.” He illustrates how every piece at the national level – at least in the US – is suborned by the political angle.
He also nails the jettisoning of the old “pyramid” style of writing which means many articles nowadays begin as “you’ll-never-guess-what-this-is-about, faux-mystery narratives.” And the tiresome close with its frequent “rueful irony about the limits of human agency.”
These aspects of newspaper writing are all unsatisfactory. But I would have liked Kinsley to go further, and look at the following three issues.
So much newspaper writing is utterly hammy. It’s phoney, dishonest cant. I’m not a big fan of Raymond Carver’s work, however, he does a good line in the morality of writing: “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.”
There is a deep mistrust of the audience: of their acuity, their capacity, even — as Kinsley jokes about stories being written to “accommodate readers who have just emerged from a coma or a coal mine” – their sentience.
It’s either mistrust, or an acute failure of self-confidence on the part of the writer/publisher which has points readily intelligible from the context spelt out in detail, and slightly unfamiliar vocabulary belaboured or withheld altogether.
Which leads me to the third aspect. There’s a failure to understand that writing works when the reader works, just enough.
I’ve talked about this before in relation to web writing, about how many “how-to-write” sites urge a type of writing that is “so pre-fab, so pre-masticated” that it leaves the reader with nothing to do. I suggested that the best kind of writing
is fast and smooth, yes, but it also needs to stick in the craw a little. It’s writing that gives the reader just the right amount of something to do.
The same applies with newspaper writing, all writing. What this “right amount of something to do” is in each case may vary, but that’s where the skill of writing lies.
In a lot of commercial writing on the web the amount of work required by the reader is zero. Which is why so much of this writing kind of bounces off the surface of one’s mind. On the other hand, in a lot of newspaper writing the amount of work required by the reader is both too much and too little. Take one of the passages Kinsley quotes from The New York Times:
Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.
If you managed to get to the end of this sentence, bravo!
If you look at it more closely, you’ll see there’s too much for the reader to do at the level of syntax, and too little to do at the level of inference and comprehension. Every last statement of the bleeding obvious is crammed in: it was a victory for Obama, it’s a bill with big consequences, the successful party will trumpet its significance, and so on. As if the audience couldn’t have inferred these things for itself.
Instead, it leaves the audience with absolutely nothing to do: passive, enervated and effectively redundant.
*****
To read the Kinsley article, click here. And to read what Andreas, a journalist himself, had to say about it on The Hannibal Blog, click here.
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