http://italiannotes.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/lisbon-sunday/

Alex Chilton

A sad farewell to Alex Chilton
Your music meant so much to me.
It got me through some dismal times.
You always sang with honesty.

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee,
You tuned into that Soulful current;
Making it big with the Box Tops,
Put into Big Star all you’d learned.

You wrote such songs of ardent joy,
with melodies of sweetest sugar,
and sang about being thirteen,
of youthful joys and youthful hunger.

Even so your songs were haunted,
I heard real sadness in your voice.
By sister lovers your despair
Blacked out the rest — you had no choice.

Sinking into an opiate haze
Cruising the streets in your Big Black Car.
A vacant zombie at the wheel,
You sank too deep, you drove too far.

Those wasted years your holocaust,
Your melodies still sweet as sugar.
You went off course and lost your way,
Got written off as one more loser.

And recognition had to wait
The world was not yet ready.
Your name lived on among a few,
Your voice it grew unsteady.

The ‘mats paid homage with a rousing
anthem, the fannies never hid
their debt to you. Soon all the hipsters
Knew who you were and how you’d slid.

Then every other band would name drop
Big Star and cite you as a major
Influence. So that you were,
No longer seen as such a stranger.

Last month you passed, leaving behind
A staggering body of work.
You take your place among the greats,
You transcended the gloom and the murk.

http://italiannotes.wordpress.com/

I suppose it was good for me in a way. I had next to no distractions from my work and so I got much more done. I mind when I was studying for highers or for various university exams when I really had to work at finding a way of weaving my study rota around the Christmas TV schedules. There were things that I just couldn’t miss. Plus I loved the whole ritual of getting the TV listings magazine a week or so ahead of time and then sitting on the floor with my pencil and eagerly circling the films and programs I wanted to watch. The anticipation was almost the best part.

TV was what I turned to, to relieve the stress of poring over all my notes and trying to get all of this mass of data to stick in my head.

But no, not any more. It’s not just that I’m a grown up now, since TV isn’t supposed to lose its appeal the older you get; nor is it that I have better things to do than plump myself in front of the box and switch my brain off, like parties to go to, or people to meet, an exciting swirl of a social life or anything resembling a social life — I really don’t.

Actually my age does play something of a role here: I guess, I’m much more impatient and irascible now that I’m older and my mind has narrowed ever so slightly. I’m definitely far readier to find something on TV an insult to my intelligence and much quicker to dismiss it as a waste of my time.

And maybe that’s because now that I have less time to put aside for leisure I want to use what little I do have more profitably: and being on a (perhaps misguided) self-improvement drive at the moment I’m convinced I have to spend even my time off in a way that engages my brain or my emotions in a deeper way. Something can’t just be entertaining or funny – oh no, I have to learn something from it.

Notwithstanding all that, and notwithstanding my sentimentality and my overly nostalgic tendencies, I’m pretty sure my 15 year old self, or even my 18 year old self, to whom the idiot box was such a source of comfort and reassurance, would have felt similarly indignant at just how pedestrian Christmas TV has become. I really do believe that things have changed markedly for the worse over the years television wise.

I’m not asking for overtly Christmas themed films or programs here; it’s just that a little bit of escapism, and some enchantment would be nice, and it would definitely help to make amends for the mediocrity the TV channels foist on us the rest of the year. If nothing else they could have some old fashioned black and white films on or that weird arty foreign cinema they used to put on Channel 4 or BBC2. I mind they put La Reine Margot on at Christmas or Boxing Day about 10-12 years ago and I fell desperately in love with Isabelle Adjani and had a massive cinematic crush on her for the next year or two.

Of course I realise that the media landscape has undergone momentous changes over the past decade, what with the advent of digital TV and the internet, of new media and all the rest of that shite I’m barely keeping up with. Nowadays of course the main terrestrial channels are much more risk averse, far more unwilling to depart from tried and tested formats and bland populism and more than happy to shunt off more interesting fare into specialist, niche channels.

Unfortunately my mother and I, rather stubbornly, haven’t got round to buying a set top box yet – I’ve been holding out because I was scared digital TV would be too much of a distraction ironically enough — and I’ve using a broadband key since I’ve been up in Glasgow, therefore my internet access is limited due to the prohibitive cost of data – so I’ve been stuck with terrestrial TV as a means to wile away the hours when I wasn’t working.

I should definitely read more.

I mean there’s nothing especially significant about the last 12 months over and above its being a year. Lots of little small things occurred in 2009, which, perhaps taken together over the passage of time and after much hindsight, may prove to have been of more consequence than now seems to be the case.

Life has been a little too monotonous and grey I’m afraid. I haven’t paid much heed to the changing of the seasons, barely registering the fluctuations in temperature or in the colours of the leaves; nor do I really break the year up into semesters or terms. I exist in my secluded little world most of the time ploughing my own, lonely, little furrow.

I have my quiet routine, the quota of hours I work each day. The work is mostly similar. Even the inconvenience of moving didn’t make too much of a dent in my schedule– thanks, in no small part, to the wee lady’s hiring a car, which enabled us to make a very successful trip to Ikea in Eastwood and made the actual process of moving much less painful. Mostly my routine got broken up by illness, several bouts of the cold, and various infections – I’m a magnet for viruses.

I had resolved to be more social this year but I didn’t really get round to it — my resolution to get up earlier also fell by the wayside, meaning I had to give up the pretence that I was really disciplined. I was going to join all these societies, learn a martial art, become part of the creative writing society and write poetry and share it with like minded people. I wanted to really come out of my shell and finally grasp and take a hold of all those opportunities I’d let pass me by in the last couple of years.

Two things got in the way of that, well three things if you count my natural shyness and my inborn reticence when it comes to having to talk to people, even folk I’ve known for years and years. One was my PhD – the fact that it leaves me very little time for anything else. It’s hotting up a bit now I’m in my third year and the end of my funding (though clearly not the end of my PhD) looms ever nearer. And what have I got to show for my — coming up to – three years of, picking up my EPSRC cheque each month, my three years of weekly meetings with Dr A, and working diligently to understand the rudiments of Modal Logic and Automata theory (most of which I ended up forgetting a short while later), for all the hours I’ve put into this enterprise? Pretty much nothing.

I have speaking as of now got no publications to my name – at least nothing serious. It’s no joke folks. I started my PhD before anyone else in the office, but everyone, including, Mrs Nga, the wee Vietnamese lassie who started a couple of month ago, has at least one publication in some kind of journal of repute; two of the cunts in the office can boast of a list of publications that numbers 7 or 8. Woe is me, what excuse have I got.

I could claim that what sets me aside is that what I’m working on is so much harder, or that I don’t have the luxury of collaborators, but it won’t really wash. My material is no more specialised or inherently difficult than what anyone else is doing – it might even be, gasp!, a wee bit easier — and I’ve actively chosen not to involve anyone else on my work. At the end of the day what it comes down to is a combination of my innate dullness, my lack of organisation and my wanting of initiative. I like having my lonely little furrow to plough, my quiet routine.

But this want of concrete results on my part has meant that, since I had no paper to submit I didn’t get to go to any conferences this year and envied those who did, I didn’t get to go to summer school –even though as the office idiot I would have benefitted the most from attending classes and talking to professors – and I generally felt like I was just wasting my time.

Near the middle of the year I thought I was onto something, a proof of a result that was worth proving, and that boosted up my confidence a bit. Yes, I had something semi-original to say, something I could write up, even if it was bordering on the trivial, even if my proof was longwinded and inelegant. But still, it was something, a meagre trickle of water to ease the more desperate effects of the drought. I’ve been living off that little bit of assurance for the past few months even though my faith in my work, in my hideously constructed proof, has taken quite a few knocks.

The biggest problem has been that I’ve had very little feedback. Dr A was too busy teaching and too involved in her own work and her collaborations with the other students in the office to go over what I’ve sent her in too much detail. And there’s no one else in the department who’s specialist enough in my area to give my work anything but a cursory, and superficial look. No one with the authority or clue enough to say, look sonny here’s where you’re going wrong, or, all this is needless, there’s a much better way of doing it.

That’s what I’m really afraid of, that this stuff that I’ve spent a year and more working on will turn out to be redundant. But I guess that’s the price of being so fond of, or rather so habituated to isolation and loneliness: you shouldn’t, indeed can’t expect much in the way of support from anyone else.

The second excuse I have for not sticking to my resolution to be more social is the Nook. The Nook is where I’ve ended up on account of my sins — or at least on account of my awful miserliness. Up till September I was living on the Queens Road in one of Mr David’s rooms. I wanted to move for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the insincere, the insufferable and the insufferably smug, Mr David himself. Another reason was the torment of the creaky floorboards of the room upstairs.

The biggest pretext to move however was my large, poorly insulated room, the cold Nottingham winters, and the necessity of bargaining with one’s bastard flatmates to turn on the heating (Mr David tried to convince me to stay by claiming last year’s cold winter was a fluke, and that it wouldn’t get as cold this year. Ha!). The Nook doesn’t have that problem because all the utility bills are included in the rent – and the rent is very, very reasonable.

Of course there is a substantial downside, which is the inconvenience of living that much further from the university – it takes at least half an hour to walk there on an able day. It is also much, much further from the city centre. It takes forever to get to Market Square and even on the bus it’s a ponderous journey, you’re almost living in another shire. And nor are you within drunk stumbling distance to the nearest student enclaves in Beeston.

Being outwith what is reasonable walking distance of anywhere you’d want to go really limits your social possibilities and in ways you don’t initially realise. At first I thought, well, it’s just a few extra stops on the bus, or, I can add 20 more minutes to my walk to university, so what? I’m a healthy young man in the prime of life, I can easily just puff along the extra distance, innit?

But it’s funny how much that extra bit of time really starts to drag on you once the early enthusiasm has waned. As a student you demand ease and convenience, eager to keep the real world and all its attendant frustrations at bay, until you graduate at least. Going out on the lash with your mates and then having to face a 40 minute plus bus journey back – if you catch the last bus back, if you’re sober enough to do so – is almost as bad as the exorbitant cost of a taxi home, especially when you have no one to share the cab with and none of your pals live anywhere near you. That is if you have a small coterie of chums to accompany you in the first place.

I *was* planning to join some societies and enhance my social opportunities, but living so far from campus put me off to the extent that rather than the three or four I wanted to join I ended up joining only one, the Wing Chung society, where one cold November night during sparring practise I got my nose bloodied and ended up with concussion that took over week to finally ease off. Rather understandably this put me off ever going again.

My housemates in the Nook are nice, but they’re too young, they’re all a generation ahead of me, and I’m starting to feel irrelevant. The oldest is 23, I have a good 8-9 years on the youngest and that’s almost a fucking decade. It does bring back a lot of regrets, regrets for those wasted years of useless inactivity, so much worse than the lost years of recklessness and druggy excess that young people usually struggle to account for. Hanging around with that fresh faced lot, I can’t help but think back to what *I* was doing when I was 23 or 25 – or rather what I wasn’t doing.

Overall though the things that made 2009 pleasant were seeing the wee lady, and being in her company. I went to Italy to see her a couple of times and that was lovely. Our excursions to Newcastle and Leicester were also very enjoyable. Leicester, especially I wasn’t expecting too much from, and actually I was deeply puzzled as to why the wee Italian would want to go there of all places. But it turned out to be a great place to visit.

We took a day trip and spent pretty much all our time in the lively Indian or, to be more precise the lively Guajarati, quarter. Wee lady was understandably eager to pay a visit to all the clothes stores along the Belgrave road. She came to Leicester utterly determined to buy a salwar kameez suit, or two, or three. But thankfully there was also time to visit several vegetarian takeaways and restaurants — we were able to sample many of the gorgeous daal dishes on offer and to wash everything down with hot cups of masala chai.

I didn’t get to read as many books as I would have liked this year — what with my PhD, like I say, I haven’t been able to put aside too much time for anything else. But I managed to finish Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence a couple of months ago, part of an effort to get through as many of Lawrence’s books as I can while I’m living in Nottingham. Sons and Lovers actually really got to me, and it certainly made much more of an impact on me than Lady Chatterley’s Lover last year.

Over and above Lawrence’s vivid prose, the weird allusive mystical passages about fucking and the revelations earned from fucking, or the shining poetic descriptions of delicate, vibrant nature, it was Paul Morel’s relationship with his mother, the desperate intensity of that bond that affected me most strongly. I was surprised at the emotional warmth of the book, at its intensity of pitch given that it was the product of a society, a time and place, which, I assumed was cold and frigid and where emotion was tightly supressed.

They held a series of DH Lawrence celebrations in Eastwood in September, and I managed to make one of the guided walks that was being given. Accompanying me were two of my housemates who’d come along because I’d told them that Ikea was only a couple of stops prior. As it was the sun made such an impressive showing that morning that my housemates decided they’d rather join me on my walk than traipse round a huge airy warehouse decked out with reasonably priced Swedish furniture.

Eastwood high street, like most depressed small towns, is a parade of take-aways, charity shops and discount stores; there really isn’t anything more to the town over and above the fact that Lawrence was born there – and of course the massive Ikea down the road. But they aren’t at all backward about capitalising on the town’s most, indeed only, famous son. Certain streets have been permanently disfigured with a blue line running down them marking out a special DH Lawrence trail that visits Lawrentian places of significance.

I’d been to Lawrence’s birthplace house the last time I visited with Fifi when we’d come out to visit Ikea. They’ve made up the house to look like a typical Victorian miner’s family’s dwelling, furnishing it all with authentic period decor: the tin bath hanging off a peg on the outside wall, the kitchen range, the brass bedstead and the mangle to dry the clothes, everything. Well worth a visit.

This time round my two housemates and I took the guided walk around the surrounding countryside. There were around 20 other folk accompanying us, and apart from one German exchange student who had a placement at the Lawrence heritage centre, we were by far the youngest people there, no one else looked a day under 55, one or two could even looked old enough to have met Lawrence in the flesh. It was a wonderful day though. It had been billed as a tour of Eastwood mining country, but apart from one very well preserved set of headstocks, and a trail of ruts carved into the hills where there used to be a railway line, there wasn’t much sign of a mining industry — just wide open green spaces where the eye could wander and clear countryside air to fill the lungs. Walking around the beautiful green pastures of Lawrence’s youth it was easy to understand just why nature was such an obsession with him.

I also managed to finish Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I’d been wanting to read ever since I visited Lübeck last summer. What struck me most about it was just how ironic the tone of the novel was, how cruel and unsparing it could be in its portrayal of human frailty and its depictions of physical and psychological ugliness. I could detect almost no nostalgia for the Lübeck Mann grew up in and it did read at times like a bitter settling of scores against the town’s ruling caste, for what Mann perceived as their small minded pettiness, provincialism and lack of ambition. Notwithstanding its vituperative quality Buddenbrooks is still an outstanding literary achievement, especially for a 25 year old to have written.

At the moment I’m reading Dicken’s David Copperfield, on Fifi’s recommendation, and am also working my way through a C.H. Sisson’s translation of the Divine Comedy.

It was value for money for the department since she was sharing Nga’s room at our accommodation, and because Trang hadn’t officially booked a place at the summer school which charges quite a hefty enrollment fee – she’d just be tagging along with Nga at all the lectures since we were pretty sure no one would say anything. So that Trang would be there absorbing all that knowledge, which would be much to the benefit of our wee research group, and all that the department had paid for really was the return flights out to Hamburg.

Anyways that’s a bit of background for you. We were sitting at the airport lounge in Birmingham waiting for our gate to be called. We’d just changed some of our money at the airport currency exchange and I started making idle conversation with Nga while Trang went off to look around the duty free shops.

Nga’s a genius when it comes to anything technical or mathematical. And his English is really quite good given he’s only learned the language comparatively recently. It was just one more thing that came easily to a bright guy like Nga. But there were still some deficiencies, more in his pronunciation than with his grammar or his syntax.

We nattered on about his undergraduate years in Vietnam and the two years he spent in Germany doing his Masters degree. Naturally we discussed the relative merits of studying in Germany and studying over here in the UK — and one of the main issues that came up was about health care provision for foreign students.

What Nga said next really, really puzzled me.

He told me the only way to get health care coverage in Germany, the only way to get to see the doctor, was if you bought insulin. Somewhat surprised at this, I asked whether he was diabetic, and if this didn’t just apply to diabetics. No, he replied, he didn’t have diabetes. That was just the system in Germany, if you wanted to see the doctor you had to buy insulin.

I was really confused now. What was this? Was it some kind of conspiracy by pharmaceutical corporations to subsidise insulin production or were there health benefits to insulin that I hadn’t heard about before: perhaps insulin in small doses is good for everyone? Shit, maybe I should be taking it. Maybe it was some kind of public health drive, they don’t mind the nanny state so much over there in Germany.

I repeated my questions to Nga in disbelief, phrasing them slightly differently just to make sure we were reading from the same page here. So even if you didn’t need insulin the state made you buy up a whole supply of it? I asked. In hindsight Nga did seem a bit perplexed at my persistent questioning on this line …

Trang came back and I asked her about it – she’d just recently finished a Masters degree in Germany herself so maybe she’d had to buy a few boxes of Insulin as well. Trang discussed it with Nga in Vietnamese, they had a giggle together, and she came back with the explanation that Nga had been referring to, heavily mispronouncing,  “insurance” the whole time.

How we laughed.

I was wandering through the faintly musty rooms upstairs in the Grad Centre, just to clear my mind a bit of what I’d been working on, when I came across a flyer for a feminist reading group:

“The reading group is a fortnightly discussion group reading a variety of theoretical and literary feminist texts. Everyone is welcome, refreshments provided. Reading is emailed out about a week in advance. Please email aexjr@nottingham.ac.uk to be put on the Reading Group mailing list. Trent Arts Graduate Centre”

The flyer had a wee cartoon at the top that made the point that feminists can be normal looking women, and that feminism is mainstream and commonplace nowadays. I looked down the list of readings that formed the syllabus, just out of curiosity, perhaps anticipating something that might provoke my scorn. There might be something by Andrea Dworkin on there or some postmodernist shite. Scanning the flyer, my eyes stopped on the following entry for November the 26th’s reading:

“Text: Poetry about rape
(To ensure the emotional security of participants we are restricting this session to women only)”

Huh?!? I did a doubletake just to make sure I had read that last bit right.

I had.

This kind of thing just reinforces my feeling that contemporary feminism is unwilling to shed its indiscriminate hostility towards all men, and that it absolutely hasn’t been able to move beyond the pure grievance politics which have, to a large extent, helped consign it to the cultural margins. I mean there’s just so much that’s contentious about the `women only’ proviso they add at the end that I don’t know where to start.

Firstly, women and girls are not the only victims of rape, and to marginalise male victims of rape — the obvious corollary of excluding men from these sessions — whether they are for example, young boys, or those who’ve been raped in penal institutions, is deeply problematic and just reinforces dominant societal prejudices about rape victims. Shouldn’t they have changed the title of the reading to “Poetry about the rape of women” just to make thing unambiguous?

However, the greatest difficulty I have with the brief justification they offer for excluding men is that they’re basically telling me that, regardless of who or what I am, my opinions, or my personality, I am endangering the “emotional security” of the women present as they discuss rape, purely on account of being a man. OK, I would understand if this had been set up as a counselling group for female rape victims — but no, this is (for women at least) an open group discussing poetry about rape.

Digging a little deeper, the rationale seemed to be based on the old feminist slogan that as a man I am a potential rapist. Therefore my mere presence in the room, as the women attending the reading would begin to discuss these poetic accounts of forced sexual assault, and the fact I had a penis, would undoubtedly be a major cause for alarm and disturbance. Or maybe I would begin to get visibly aroused by the graphic depictions of rape on offer. So that I am immediately under suspicion just because I’m a man, regardless of anything else I might be or might have done in my life.

Not only that, but it’s also really patronising to women. It panders to this essentialist notion of women being overly fragile and sensitive creatures prone to emotional hysteria at the least thing. Women are like children, they need to be protected from anything that might upset their delicate emotional equilibriums.

Certainly it would be absurd to hold a discussion group about racism and ban all white people from attending, and I can’t see how the two cases are really all that different.

Rape is an issue which both men and women need to discuss together. It is an issue that needs to be brought out into the open in order to deprive it of its stigma and to help alleviate the feelings of shame and self-disgust that victims of rape often feel. Closing off discussions on the subject for spurious reasons wedded to dated anti-male ideologies is clearly counterproductive in this regard.

In the end the problem with feminism is that in order to perpetuate itself as an ideology — and there are a lot of academics, and writers whose careers depend on its continuing influence — it needs to constantly justify itself and its privileging of the female perspective on the basis of a systematic and widespread climate of discrimination against women.

But as the reality of gender relationships becomes much more complicated, and the important insights of earlier feminist thinkers are increasingly absorbed into the general cultural milieu, there is much less call for an explicitly feminist viewpoint. Instead what people will look for is a more dynamic and enlightened modern worldview that incorporates what were previously feminist ideas. So that as time passes and the more doctrinal strains of feminism struggle to deal with the subtleties of modern day life they will become ever more obsolete and find themselves ever more at the margins.

The director wanted to create an atmosphere, of course: to so captivate the audience with bewitching visuals, and moments pregnant with uncanny early 20th century weirdness, that they wouldn’t be too distracted by the overly vague and elusive nature of the plot. This open ended lack of resolution, in addition to challenging the expectations of the audience and being in striking contrast to the clarity of the visuals, is I think integral to the films treatment of its central themes. OK, granted that the film is supposed to be an enigmatic riddle; the problem is that I didn’t feel the other aspects of it were strong enough to compensate for the plot’s open-endedness.

Like lot of European Arthouse cinema, White Ribbon works more as a series of memorable vignettes loosely held together by a tangle of interweaving plots, or even by a common set of underlying visual and symbolic themes. Usually in this kind of cinema, each of the different scenes which compose the film will have its own internal logic and cohesion — whereas with mainstream commercial fare everything tends to be in service of the plot: details arise only if they have a direct relevance to the central storyline. It’s the contrast between a non-linear versus a linear view of plot.

Often the overall effect of this diffusion of attention onto tangential details is that the director is able to create the impression of a self-contained world — and since real life doesn’t run in terms of single overriding plots these films have a certain realism and depth, an “organic” feel that can make for a more profound and immersive cinematic experience.

My main problem with the `White Ribbon’ is that the characters were rather flat and underdeveloped, especially the baron and his wife. Plus, there was no unity of effect in the sets or locations, neither was there any particular sense of eeriness or gloominess, no real atmosphere. Like I say, none of these things really made up for the lack of plot.

But then I’m not even sure how much that judgement is coloured by my preconceptions of the director’s motivations. This is, I think, the result of having seen`Funny Games’, after which I had trouble viewing Hanake as anything other than an arch-ironist, a conceptual artist playing at being a film director. Consequently I was primed to see `White Ribbon’ as some kind of joke at the expense of an audience drawn into seeing some deeper meaning or into making connections that aren’t there.

After finishing Dorian Gray I decided that the next book I was going to read was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. I haven’t read as many novels as I would have liked this year, so I thought I’d finish off 2009 with something substantial – and Mann’s debut is certainly that. Actually I’ve been wanting to read Buddenbrooks in particular for a while now.

I can trace back the origin of that desire to an exact time and place: to last year’s day trip to Lübeck during my two week stay in Germany – and more specifically to that point in our tour itinerary when we passed the Mann family house on Mengstraße and our guide stopped and talked a little about the book and the momentous impact it has had.

Lübeck had begun to work its olde-world charms on me as soon as we’d arrived, and I was already completely taken in by the place by the time we made it to Mengstraße. The old part of town is one of the most quaint and charming places I’ve ever been to: a maze of narrow sloping streets crammed with neat little old fashioned gabled houses so tightly clustered together that it felt claustrophobic to walk among them –and so much of it looking like it came straight off the front of an ornamental biscuit tin or an old book of Grimm’s fairytales. This was truly teutonic eccentricity at its best.

Outside the Mann family house our German tour guide, whose English didn’t extend much beyond her well rehearsed tour commentary, asked how many of us had heard of Thomas Mann – which of course I had, though I hadn’t known, hadn’t cared that he was from Lübeck. Then she asked how many of us were familiar with his magnum opus Buddenbrooks, which was set in Lübeck and was all about its ruling merchant class. I kept quiet to show that, philistine that I am, I had never heard of it. A few of the Italian students in our party returned happy smiles and nods of recognition – bastards they’d probably read it in the original German.

The guide, an average looking middle aged woman with cropped blonde hair, mentioned with a proud and self-satisfied smile that Buddenbrooks was generally reckoned to be one of the best novels of the 20th century. At the time of its publication in 1900 the patrician families of Lübeck hadn’t been best pleased at their portrayal in the book. But I guess Mann was forgiven now what with all the money and prestige he was bringing in. They’d even done up his old house and turned it into a heritage museum.

After all this, the impact of visiting Lübeck and hearing about Mann, I was dying to read the book. Prior to this little trip Mann hadn’t really made it onto my long to-read list, now he was near the top. However it did take me a full year and a half to actually get hold of a copy of Buddenbrooks, which tells you something about how pressing my `to read’ list is.

I had managed to read Death in Venice in the meantime, and in the introduction to the edition I had the translator had a bit of a go at H. Lowe Porter, Mann’s first translator. Her translations had been, up till recently, the sole means through which Mann’s written work was accessible to the English speaking world. Anyway, he pointed out all the mistakes Porter had made, basic errors really, and this made me determined to go and seek out the more recent translation by John Woods. Being a cheap bastard, and being unable to find Wood’s version in the library or in any second hand bookshops (though I found quite a few copies of Porter’s translation in the process) it took me a while before I was finally able to convince myself to throw some caution to the wind and buy a brand new copy off Amazon.

I’m really excited about reading it now that I have it. Indeed recently I’ve begun to develop a strong fascination for fin de siècle Europe, for that transition period from the 19th century to the 20th, right up to the First World War — Mann’s milieu when he was writing Buddenbrooks. This is reflected in my reading preferences. The last two books I read were Lawrence’s `Sons and Lovers’, and of course `Dorian Gray’.

For me the chief allure of that period lies in the extent to which it was in the grip of two wildly opposing socio-cultural tendencies which were able to coexist together and maintain an uneasy balance. A balance that lasted up to the first world war after which the old order was finally swept away.

So that on the one hand you had all the stagnation associated with the cultural sediment accumulated from centuries of settled tradition and orthodoxy, in addition to the reactionary grip that Europe’s antiquated monarchies still wielded over vast swathes of the population. (Granted that at this juncture the princes were vainly striving to maintain the final vestiges of their power and privilege in the face of their bourgeois usurpers.)  And opposing this static conservatism was the massive forward surge of a myriad emerging modern ideologies, movements, and nihilisms, fuelled by the bewildering discoveries that were being made in physics, biology, and chemistry, and the advances in technology that would end up drastically reshaping our perceptions of the world and our intuitions about reality.

The contrast between the recognisably modern and an antique world with its roots in some dim dank medieval past which would soon vanish for ever is something I find deeply compelling.

The German speaking world was at the forefront of all this, it set the pace in almost everything bar the visual arts. In science and mathematics the centre of gravity (pardon the pun) undoubtedly resided with the Teutons. And it wasn’t just Einstein, so many of the big hitters during this period were German or Austrian: Cantor, Planck, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Hilbert, Born, Dedekind, and Gödel to name but a few.

In philosophy you had thinkers like Wittgenstein, Husserl, Frege, and Heidegger, who were decisive in setting the philosophical agenda for the rest of the 20th century. And of course it’s hard to overestimate Freud’s contribution to the nascent field of psychology. Indeed it’s hard to overestimate his contribution to the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. In music, the “German art”, the towering influence that figures like Mahler, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern exerted would determine avant garde composition for at least the next half century.

So for me the reason why Thomas Mann’s work is potentially so exciting is because he was part of this world, he breathed in its dazzling heady atmosphere, and through his own art he played an important role in making it so special.

For a start, I think Wilde succeeds superlatively well in giving sophisticated voice to the aesthetic and moral sentiments underpinning a certain `aristocratic’ worldview, at least in the guise under which it held sway over much of late Victorian English nobility.

This was a worldview held together by a clear notion of the limits of the role of the nobility in instilling moral purpose: namely by the idea that although the gentry had an important duty to maintain a facade of conventional moral propriety as an example to the rest of society, it needn’t go beyond the surface appearance of such. For in this view morality was nothing more than a means of imposing order and stability on a savage and chaotic mass and therefore need not detain those whose role it was to oversee this rabble.

So that while the `proper’ conventions should be (must be) adhered to on all the `appropriate’ occasions, the preservation of an outward appearance of rectitude was in itself sufficient to maintain overall moral order and to fulfil the exemplary role assumed by the upper classes. Indeed, the whole elaborate, ritualistic, system of etiquette, in which these conventions were embodied, served to distinguish class and good breeding and had grand aesthetic value in itself (much like the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church with which Wilde along with so many other late 19th century decadents were enamoured).

In place of any simplistic, bourgeois, sense of obligation to commonly understood notions of ethics or moral obligation was a commitment to the perfectibility of experience through the arts and through bodily pleasure. Correspondingly debauchery and excess was to be tolerated, and even implicitly encouraged, as a sign of worldliness and refinement – as long as it were done discreetly so that there was never any open lapse in proceedings such as would breech decorum and cause scandal.

To inhabit this dual world of masks and shifting roles where the real thrill lay in committing outrages by night and cosily resuming one’s lofty public office by day meant taking part in a very cynical game. But this is the world so utterly embraced by Dorian Gray, the young aristocrat who thanks to the mysterious workings of some occult mechanism (perhaps something as simple as Noel Edmond’s cosmic ordering) takes on the ability to inhabit a further dual role: both as a beguiling object of desire, an idol and muse, and as a predatory libertine, hungry for pleasure and experience and resolutely callous to the consequences. For Dorian Gray discovers that he has become immune from the ravages of sin and time, and can pursue his depravities free from any outward physical blemish — indefinitely.

The only catch is that while his own beauty remains undiminished, the ruinous effects of his lifestyle start to work themselves on to the lifelike portrait of Gray caught at the peak of his youthful grace – the very portrait which incites him into make his fervent prayer that the effects of the passage of time on his dazzling looks might be stayed.

But this seems no catch at all. Once he has hidden the portrait away beyond the reach of prying eyes, fate itself seems to take a hand in protecting Gray from the terrible consequences of his actions: at one point his youthful visage itself stays the hand of his would be murderer, a young sailor hell bent on avenging Gray’s mistreatment of his sister – for the man who wronged his sister all those years would not be this young.

The wonder of the book, in my opinion, lies in the irresistible brilliance of Lord Henry’s epigrams, dispensed as effortlessly as from the lips of some wizened Eastern sage. And with their utter contempt for the artless, sincere and ugly, set in opposition to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure for their own sake free from any self-imposed ethical inhibitions and society’s dreary pieties, Wilde perfectly distils the essence of the aristocratic ethic mentioned above. Lord Henry’s teasing paradoxes are – along with an unnamed book which Lord Henry gives him to read – enough to seduce Dorian from his initial youthful earnestness on to the path of amorality and physical excess.

Gray takes greedy advantage of the license offered both by his agelessness and by his prominent social standing, and rather understandably his arrogance begins to snowball quite quickly. He thinks he can get away with anything – and he does, leaving behind him a trail of broken lives, and at least one corpse. He pays no mind to the necessity for discretion and reputation so that his name becomes blacker and blacker — he’s still invited to some of the best parties though. Finally, it is his arrogance, which has now attained to gargantuan proportions, that leads him onto his final act of destruction, the one that proves fatal. So that the book seems to be saying that Gray is not up to the demands conferred upon him by his kind of immortality, that perhaps no mere human being is – and that in the end our ideals should always be unobtainable.