I first read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wonderful travel books about 30 years ago (when Penguin books were $5.95) and they’ve stayed on the at-hand shelves ever since. The recent publication of his last (and posthumous), The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos was reason enough to order from amazon.uk, and I’ve been enjoying its narrative and geographical/historical felicities since its arrival a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a wonderful self-reflective passage that goes right to the heart of problems of the aging mind:

…two main problems beset the very curious and enjoyable task of compiling this private [mental] archaeology. The first is a sudden blur, when exact memory conks out and a stretch of itinerary looms eventlessly ahead and no pencil mark on the map comes to my help. This has occurred on several occasions and will again, no doubt. At first these blackouts filled me with distress. I would gaze from page to map with growing misery as the minutes passed and nothing, absolutely nothing, surfaced. Not now. I interpret this blank as an indication that there was nothing, for my private purposes, memorable there. No reflection on the landscape, the villages, towns even –or their denizens. Often I must have wandered through, or just missed, or completely failed to remember, owing to some private defect, buildings of tremendous interest (that I would give perhaps a great deal to see now), whole mountain ranges teeming with history and with natural wonders, political trends and events of momentous importance. This last consideration prompts the thought that even after such a long time-lag, this must be one of the unscoopiest travel accounts ever to see the light. My private let-out here is that this is neither a cultural handbook, a guide, nor a political or military report. (It is impolitic to dwell any longer on these shortcomings.) The cheerful obverse of all these lacunae is that they save us both from drowning in the indiscriminate flood of total recall.

The second problem is the opposite of all this: while piecing together fragments which have lain undisturbed for two decades and more, all at once a detail will surface which acts as potently as the taste of madeleine which made the whole of Proust’s childhood unfurl. The haul of irrelevant detail, interlocking trains of thought and associations, and the echoes of echoes re-echoed and ricocheted, is overwhelming, and in the hopes of attaining some redeeming shadow of symmetry and balance, a lot of this irrelevant catch must be thrown away again to swim back to the dark pools where it has been lurking all this time… (pp 153-154)

Some other Patrick Leigh Fermor resources:

Anthony Lane’s 2006 New Yorker profile (full text available to subscribers, but see here for toothsome extracts)

Colin Thubron’s 2008 NYRB review of 5 books, which ends with this:

…It is a beguiling picture: a prelapsarian world sweetened by memory, perhaps, and by the author’s genial nature. For certainly that innocence did not belong to the continent Leigh Fermor was crossing, which had suffered an atrocious war only fifteen years before. It lay rather in the vision of the gifted youth who, ashplant in hand, went striding into his own Europe, and who would bring it back at last, still rich and vivid, after half a century.

Mary Beard’s 2005 London Review of Books review of Roumeli and Mani

Year’s end finds me doing the sorts of things I most enjoy: playing with collections, reading new stuff, listening to a wide spectrum of musics, eating/cooking wonderful food, messing with photography. Today I’ve been exploring a project on Borneo, making a database of the hundreds of albums I’ve gathered into Spotify playlists in the last 12 months, and keeping fires going in both woodstoves.

On the organizational front, I’ve just installed a new (3 TB!) Time Machine drive on my desktop computer, and done some of the housekeeping to reorganize the other backup drives that dangle from the machine. I still need a good backup strategy for the terabyte-plus of music files,

The books I’m actively working on include

A History of the Future in 100 Objects

Hild: A Novel

Swann’s Way

Only Yesterday

Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History

All Change (Cazalet Chronicles)

Pogo: Bona Fide Balderdash

…and just finished Still Inside: the Tony Rice Story

Other regular reading includes The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Baffler, all in somewhat helter-skelter fashion. Lapham’s Quarterly will join the stable soon.

The Borneo project began as a waking dream about a week ago, as I found myself thinking about how I would teach a class centered on that always-fascinating corner of the world, with which my life has been entangled for about 50 years. Nobody wants such a course, but it’s been an interesting Gedankenexperiment to rehearse how I’d go about it. And almost needless to say, it’s as much a matter of how to approach the study of anyplace as an essay upon the island itself. And so (especially as I’ve been going to sleep) I’ve been turning over what I know (and what I’d like to know more about) in realms of geography and history and ethnology and trade and hydrology and ecology and demography and politics and musics and arts and epidemiology and agriculture and development and… A couple of days ago I spent a few hours interrogating JSTOR for articles on Kalimantan, from which I downloaded 20 or so, and I’ve been reading those, extracting juicy bits that fit into my evolving narrative, and starting to collect a bibliography of sources that I could get to at Harvard if I spent a day or so in those familiar libraries. This phase of information gathering is all very familiar territory, from years of teaching and preparing to teach, and even without any prospective audience it seems a constructive thing to be doing.

It’s been a very productive year for photography, and I’m anticipating a lot more in 2014. The just-acquired iPhone 5s has a remarkable camera, and my new Nikon D610 oozes potential too. And of course there are still a great many old negatives awaiting digitization. The question of audience continues to not trouble me: I’m content to put photos up on Flickr, and have no grander ambitions along the lines of gallery display or publication.

Just what to do with the music resources continues to baffle me. I’d love to share what I have with like-minded others, and I’d certainly like to expand my circle of musical acquaintances, but I don’t see pathways to either of those ends. I’ve made a list of the year’s Spotify playlists, which offers a glimpse at what I’ve been listening to in that medium.

I’m pretty pleased with this image from a below-zero morning:

and note that the left and right arrows take you to the adjacent images in the Flickr stream. If you click on the image it opens quite elegantly in Flickr.

I’m exploring the interconnection of text with YouTube clips, starting with a passage from John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven, where he discusses Christoph Bach’s Es erhub sich ein Streit:

Creating a magnificent tableau in sound, Christoph portrays the great eschatological battle in which the archangel Michael and his angelic squadrons fought the dragon and snuffed out a mutiny led by Lucifer and the forces of darkness… the halo of beatific string sounds of the sinfonia soothes the listener up to the moment when two solo basses appear and sing:

are these dispatches from the front line or war reporters furtively recording their commentaries in the build-up to battle? Their antiphonal exchanges become steadily rougher, and they start to roar like a couple of meths-drinking tramps. Then almost imperceptibly the drumming begins.

One by one four field trumpeters bugle out their alarm calls and the voices start to pile up, while the circling angels size up the dragon and plan their attack. Soon a space opens up between the two five-voiced choirs… and a column of sound, six octaves tall, has been built up.

(that’s enough for proof of concept)

I have a lot more to say about Gardiner, but wanted to solve this problem of multimedia linkage. Stay tuned.

I read a lot of stuff, bouncing from thing to thing via fortuitous serendipities, offhanded references, bloggy recommendations, self-propelled curiosities and sheer accidents. Lately (in the wake of theTurkey trip) I’ve been reading Christopher de Bellaigue’s Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town, and this passage came along to broaden my conception of History:

I had dozens of hours of interviews… Many of these hours were worthless except as an illustration of history’s imprecision –not science at all, really, but the landscaping of churned ground so it looks nice.

We are not in the realm of historical interpretation. Under discussion are the bare facts. I had heard diametrically opposed accounts of things that happened 100 years before or last week. Concerning a single event dividing families or communities, I might be told three or four versions. Sometimes I sensed that all sides were lying or deliberately omitting things and I would be convinced that even on so simple a question of who started a riot, I would be unable to work out what happened. ‘It does not follow,’ the Cambridge historian E.H. Carr once wrote, ‘that because a mountain appears to taker on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.’ And yet that is what I saw: an infinity of shapes.

Here in the reserve store, rummaging through facts that no researcher had yet privileged with his attention, far less threaded into a coherent narrative, I got a new impression of the past: as a chaotic series of emotions, of outrage and guilt, scornful of chronology and very often founded on gossip, hagiography, or slander. A second obstacle was the tendency of my interviewees to dramatize things and turn them into a pageant; they shamelessly versified the most prosaic people and events. Every story had its ‘hero’, but often I found that the hero was spotted with villainy… (pg. 74)

Of course it’s not just History; the same could (should, even) be said of the data an anthropologist elicits from informants.

Santa Cruz is sure that it’s the coolest place in the hemisphere. The denizens run the gamut from racy to flaky, with all expressing pronounced Green tendencies. The bakeries are simply amazingly wonderful

and the grocery stores supply all that the racy/flaky desire

and of course the produce is preposterously fresh and succulent

The strip malls have all sorts of goods and servicesand politico-spatial correctitude aboundsSigils are everywhereand cover the ground from arcane to obtuse, with detours through the surreal. Wish I’d had more time to document, but it was just a quick trip this time.

I’ve been carrying an iPhone for more than two years now, though previously I swore never to have anything to do with such appliances. I rarely use it as a phone, and the several camera apps get the most mileage. While flying from Boston to San Francisco yesterday I tried it out as an aerial camera and was amazed at the results. Try these on for size:

Sometimes you meet an Original, a person whose chosen form of art and expression is not in any way derivative, who uses materials (musical [Daniel Heïkalo] or literary [Georges Perec] or graphic [Luigi Seraphini] or sculptural or culinary or…) in a unique or idiosyncratic way. I’ve known a few, and enjoyed the surprise of encounter when new instances appeared.

Ahmet Gezer, sometimes known as ‘Crazy Ahmet’

and as ‘Lord of the Roots’, uncovers forms hidden in wood, in roots and branches, and carves and prunes to liberate indwelling creatures. There are also less fanciful creations in his repertoire, table and lamp bases, candelabras, walking sticks, picture frames. Some of his source materials also include rocks imprisoned as roots have grown around them. Ahmet’s tools are pretty simple: saw, knife, chisel, file, minimal power tools. His imagination is of virtuoso calibre. His shop is underneath the family farmhouse in Sapanca, and his creations and raw materials overflow the shop.

He surely sells some of his creations, but I have the sense that selling has little to do with WHY he makes them. He’s not obsessive or batty, but he does project an air of deep personal contentment, and one can admire and even envy his calmness. He seems to spend a lot of time in nearby forests, hunting for likely material. Here’s a gallery of his creations:

(Jabba the Hutt? or somebody even stranger)

(I’d love to have this one)

(table bases)

(hard to say what it IS, just on its way to becoming something)

(light fixture)

(rock inclusions)

(pieces in process)

(raw materials)

(portrait?)

(vine-wrapped saplings)

(Jabberwocky)

There’s also an example of neolithic agricultural technology in the yard, two wide boards about 5 feet long, inset with flint blades and I think meant to be used on a threshing floor, pulled around in a circle by animals and weighted down by a squatting farmer (or so I imagine from Ahmet’s demonstration).