A garden square gentles the pace of the city
Hello,
Almost at the turn of the year. Then back the other way. Then off we go again. Remember Camus: ‘In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’ A sign of the season; Anne is doing an advent of tiny stories again.
Some things:
I’ve been reading and listening to the new George Smiley novel by Nick Harkaway. In the intro Harkaway talks about how inconsistent Smiley’s date of birth is across the novels and suggests it’s because le Carré wanted to keep him at roughly the same age in every story.
“Smiley is in his fifties the way Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street or Poirot is Belgian.”
I like that type of consistency a lot and it’s a great way to explain it. But, also, I’m almost older than Smiley. And it’s only going to get worse.
I actually read this in November, in Russell Square. I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown, I was having a rather pleasant coffee, but I know what she means:
“To stand in the centre of Russell Square Gardens, London, WC1, in the November rain is to summon all your losses in life. It will remind you of every time you have been abandoned, felt desolate, been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles. Its punctuation is a pause in the life of the city. A place where the beginnings of a latent nervous breakdown can express itself and God can be glimpsed inside the body of a London pigeon. As you stare at the block of rat-grey sky above the naked winter trees and listen to the roar of traffic that circles the square (for this is a square in a circle), you will experience the vertigo of standing still while passers-by are on the move. Here in the square, wooden benches have been positioned under the trees. In the November rain those benches appear forlorn, damp, stuck with dying autumn leaves.”
From The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy.
We can argue, if you like, about how many words the Inuit have for snow. There’s a wikipedia page about it. You can’t argue, though that Roland Barthes didn’t have a lot of words for note-taking.
“Roland Barthes spoke of his love of, his addiction almost, to note-taking. He had a system of notebooks and note cards, and Latinate names to designate different stages of note-taking: ‘notula’ was the single word or two quickly recorded in a slim notebook; ‘nota’, the later and fuller transcription of this thought onto an index card.”
From Index Cards by Moyra Davey
I wonder if he knew ‘zibaldone’:
“No-one knows exactly when the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone appeared, or what it originally meant. The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like ‘mess’ or ‘jumble’. The fifteenth-century merchant and art patron Giovanni Rucellai referred to his own zibaldone as ‘una insalata di più herbe’, a salad of many herbs, which gives an impression of something variegated and wholesome. But by then it had also become firmly attached to the notebook in one of its most enduring applications. For this informal culinary term came to signify a personal anthology, or miscellany.”
From The Notebook by Roland Allen
What a glorious and life-affirming way to start and arrange a song. You’ve got to watch this. Bounce with us. (From 16:33)
MASSIVE PROMOTIONAL NEWS
Two new Haudoo! books have hit the FLI store. How To Set A Goal and How To Grow Potatoes. Both absolutely essential reading and perfect Christmas gift ideas.
Also I think I’ve hit on a format for my stupid StampFans thing. It’s written on a typewriter. Like and subscribe.
I’ll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 975 of you. 975 is the country code for the Kingdom of Bhutan. In 1999 Bhutan lifted a ban on TV and the internet.)