a change of plans

I have decided to postpone my visit to Iran by three weeks.

What happened is this. I had been hanging around in London waiting for an agency in Turkey to arrange for me a train from Istanbul to Tehran. A few days ago I was sorely disappointed when they informed me that the weekly train, leaving next Wednesday, was fully booked. By then I was determined to make this train journey and asked them instead to book the next available one – leaving Ankara on the 5th of October. I was waiting for news of this when, through a friend, I made the acquaintance of Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, who happens to be a professor at Edinburgh University specialising in Achaemenid Persia. In the middle of giving me inspiring advice about travelling in Iran, he told me that he was hosting a conference on Persepolis in Edinburgh in mid-October and invited me to attend.

At first I thought to continue with my original plan, but the temptation to go to this conference grew in me until, this morning, I told him I would attend. I have asked my Turkish contacts to book train tickets for three weeks’ time, and I will be returning to Edinburgh tomorrow.

I will try and report my experiences from the conference – apart from wanting to go for the content, I’m also curious to see what they’re like – I’ve read so many collections of papers from such conferences. My understanding is that the achaemenid community is quite small, and that these conferences are rare beasts…

I’m really rather excited at the prospect 🙂

a new renaissance?

a concert under Concorde…
Lammermuir Fesitval 2011

Sunday past I went to a performance of Philip Glass’ 1000 Airplanes on the Roof in a hangar, at East Fortune in Scotland, that has been built around a decommissioned Concorde. It was a promenade concert – allowing us to walk around as the piece – a “melodrama in one act” – was acted out, and the music played. I found the conductor Jessica Cottis to be more worth watching than the actor. She conducted Red Note Ensemble – a small chamber orchestra consisting of synthesisers, some wind instruments and a soprano – with amazing control, delicacy and precision: the whole a tad surreal as the musicians played beneath the belly of the giant ‘paper dart’ of the Concorde.

This was as mesmerising a performance as I have seen anywhere – not unworthy of New York, never mind rural Scotland! It was part of the Lammermuir Festival (my little house nestles in the foothills of the Lammermuirs) that is only (as far as I understand) in its second year and, from the size and enthusiasm of the audience, I can hardly believe it will be it’s last. That such an ambitious undertaking should even be attempted in the countryside near Edinburgh, and so soon after that city’s own massive festival, left me pondering…

Ever more people live on this planet of which an ever increasing proportion are becoming ‘educated’. Consequently, audiences for all kinds of art are swelling, as are the cohorts of artists and performers producing that art. That these ‘creators’ must surely form a normal distribution implies that there must be unprecedented numbers that are extremely skilled – including the Red Note Ensemble and their excellent conductor.

These things taken together may perhaps suggest an explanation as to why rural East Lothian might be capable of supporting an arts festival of its own. Could we be living in a new renaissance? Certainly there is more of every kind of art out there than there has ever been, and more people able to appreciate it. But perhaps more is less. Is so much art now being created that it is in danger of becoming a consumer product like any other…?

9/11 in a Mexican jungle…

On the 11th of September 2001, we returned from a miraculous day wandering, eventually barefoot, through a jungle in the Mexican Yucatan, led by a Mayan girl to waterfalls that tumbled down steps gouged into smooth bowls in the soft limestone. Between the trees enormous blue crabs scuttled. At last, exhilarated, we found ourselves in the girl’s hut, a circular house with a palm frond roof and an earth floor and, bizarrely, satellite TV. As I politely handled bracelets and necklaces the girl and her mother had made, bright seeds and pods strung on wire, I was distracted by an image of furious violence on the screen; a skyscraper being pierced by an aircraft blossoming a fireball and smoke. I thought it was something from a James Bond film that I had not seen before. But my partner seemed alarmed and something about it did not look like a film.

As we were driven back to the hotel we had left the day before, we talked about this incredible thing we had seen, having learned from the driver that it was an attack on New York. We picked up a hitchhiker, a man in his fifties, an American. We asked him if he’d heard the news. He told us that he had, and that two of his children were in the towers.

Back in the hotel we located a TV in a corner of a lounge. We turned it to CNN and watched the news, trying to make sense of what was happening. Other guests, a Mexican family, asked for the sound to be turned down because it was disturbing their game of cards.

Over the next few days we exchanged emails with our family and friends back home. Amidst the calm and the heat of the Yucatan, hysteria and fear poured at us from those communications. American airspace had been closed down and the airplanes of the carrier that had brought us to Mexico were grounded. We talked about whether we should try to get home; whether we would even be able to get home. None of it felt real.

We decided to continue our holiday, daily hearing more from the UK of the terror and fear there. Around us everything was serene. A Mayan woman described in the guidebooks the tourists carried, a woman who stood in a particular square holding a bright parasol, took us, with others, into the homes of local people, poor people. People who, having little, had crates of Pepsi that they used as a sacramental fluid in their religious rituals. Our guide had the demeanour of a saint as she told us about the lives of her people, and of the terrible civil war that had recently ravaged their land. Afterwards, we asked her if she had heard of the attack in New York. She had. I asked her what she thought of it. She said she was sorry for the loss of life, but that the Americans had brought her people a lot of harm, and to so many others in Latin America. She felt that this was something they had coming. What they were suffering now others, vastly more than had died in New York, had suffered. She asked me: Why is their suffering more important than that of these other people? She said that she hoped it would make the Americans open their hearts to others, to use their power more responsibly, to be kinder…

my journey to Iran is on

Ok, I’ve received the code notification that has been sent to the Iranian Consulate in London authorizing them to give me a visa. I received the news last night with some relief. Now that it is real, I am going to have to make all the preparations in earnest for the trip.

I have been in love with Persia, specifically ancient Persia, since I was a child. So this trip is going to be for me something of a pilgrimage. When I completed the structure for my novel set in ancient Persia quite recently, the notion to go to Iran came to me spontaneously – and, specifically, when I realised that there was still time to get there at around that part of the year when my characters are going to be moving across the same landscapes. My intention is to traverse the same path as my characters, observing the landscape, eating the food (I know it’s different now from what it was then), and looking into the faces of the people and watching their body language. Smelling the smells; feeling the weather on my skin. I have read that the light in Iran is peculiarly limpid and that this has a way of making colours more intense. It is likely that I am only ever going to write a single book set in Iran and thus it seems foolish, since I have been long determined to visit the country, not to go now. I wish to infuse the visceral reality of Iran into my work.

I am travelling on my own and am taking my iPad and have been told that wi-fi is available in hotels and bus stations. If this fails I will haunt cybercafes. By hook or by crook I intend to share my experiences through this blog with whoever is interested – hopefully you! *grin*

learning Persian

I am waiting to see if the Iranians are going to give me a visa – and, if it comes through, I should be off to Iran in a couple of weeks. I am a tad nervous about the visa because, against the advice of a friend of mine who has been to Iran, I wrote “author” for my occupation. He had expressly told me not to put “writer” because it could lead to the Iranian authorities thinking that I am a journalist and, for obvious reasons, they’re not keen to have such as visitors. Why did I do this? Well, because a ‘writer’ is what I am; what I do – and I don’t feel comfortable passing myself off as something I’m not.

While I wait (I have completed the ‘design’ for my Persian novel), I have been trying to learn Farsi. It seems to be an elegant and logically constructed language. I can now read it reasonably easily – and, suddenly, find that Arabic (Persian has been using essentially the same writing system since the Conquest, with the addition of some unique characters) has stopped being a bunch of squiggles (however beautiful) and actually makes sounds in my head. I noticed this last night watching the news from Libya – I could suddenly recognize letters in the graffiti scrawled on walls, and could begin to spell out words; my meagre skill should be good enough to read street and bus signs. This does beg the question: why don’t more of us spend the tiny effort needed to make at least this much of an approach to the ‘other’?

the empty buddhas

I was watching a TV program about Afghanistan where the presenter went to look upon the empty niche in Bamiyan that had once held a 55m high buddha carved from the sandstone cliff. This and other colossi were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001 because they considered them idols prohibited by the Koran. Being someone who has a profound reverence for history, I found this act of vandalism appalling.

There is serious talk about rebuilding the destroyed buddhas. What do such reconstructions of lost artefacts and monuments achieve? Surely, what makes such survivals valuable is that they have survived, and their authenticity; that those are the actual chisel marks made by people long ago. When we reconstruct something that has been lost – and there is a lot of this going on across the world – we are replacing something real with something that is fake.

Ultimately, everything physical that we make must disappear – that is the nature of things. There seems to me an unhealthy fetishism in feverishly trying to halt the passage of time. I am reminded of the somewhat creepy mummifying of Lenin. Everything has a life span, and then it should be allowed to die.

In the case of the buddhas in Bamiyan it seems to me that we are missing something quite profound. Why, after all, were these colossi constructed in the first place? No doubt it was an act of devotion. Also, a focus for contemplation. My next question is: what has actually been lost that matters? Consider how imperfect a representation of Buddhism the actual colossi have always been as things in themselves.

It seems to me that those empty niches contain far more potent representations of the buddha than the colossi ever were. What is left are buddha-shaped holes that have not lost their buddhas at all: we still see them there; we feel them there. These empty buddhas, that can never be destroyed (except perhaps by rebuilding them), are surely a more pure fulfilment of their purpose than wrought stone could ever be.

A related link.

naked books

Once upon a time books wore nothing more than a leather jacket. This could be decorated, it’s true, and be inscribed with the title and author’s name; brands burned into an animal’s hide. More recently, books began wearing paper covers sporting bold designs, but also an ever increasing baggage of quotes and comments and general blurb. Though this clothing can serve to make a book into a seductive and glamorous object, it seems to me that it is a false skin, a disguise – for it is generally only the content of the book that the author is responsible for; the cover is produced by other people, often with little direct understanding of the content, and whose focus – quite naturally – is a commercial one: a desire to get the book sold.

Ebooks are a return to presenting texts naked. If they are clothed at all it is in the shell of the ebook-reading device that they inhabit. Of course they will still, in a concession to tradition, possess a cover, but this will now consist of just another page. All the blabber of blurbs will be similarly demoted. Functionally, the ‘hook’ of the cover is now replaced by a downloaded sample: a free portion of the actual text of the book – analogous, in some ways, to the trailer for a movie.

This seems to me a profound development: a reader’s first point of contact is with the work itself – a connection between reader and author that is not only unmediated, but honest.

ebooks – a superior aesthetic?

Let me whisper to you a heresy: ebooks may be aesthetically superior to paper books. There, I’ve said it. Before they come for me, to burn me as a witch, let me try to explain what I mean.

First I would like to distinguish two different functional components of the paper book: the paper book as machine and the paper book as a (complex) surface that bears text. Though it is the latter that concerns me most here, I will say the following about the former:

Ebook reading devices can not only emulate many of the page turning, indexing, book marking etc functions of the paper book, but, by being programmable, can provide us with new facilities: ebooks can be searched, linked to other texts (or images, sounds, video etc), typographically modified (to use different fonts, or to use different sized fonts – thus tailoring the reading experience to the reader), and can come to possess any number of other features thought of or unthought of to date. These ergonomic issues are, of course, aesthetic in their own right, as are the actual physical characteristics of the paper book. This latter point seems to come up time and time again especially in the context of the ‘feel and smell’ of inked paper. I am the last person to dismiss this preference. However, not only is it possible that ebook devices will come to emulate – if the desire for this should continue – the ‘feel’ and ‘look’ of paper, but I would suggest that the ebook can bring its own feel and look to the reading experience; the slickness of metal and glass and all manner of textured plastics, and who knows what other materials. These particular aesthetic aspects of physicality will, no doubt, long continue to be a bone of contention – at least for those of us who have grown up with paper books.

Setting aside these considerations, I would like to turn to the second of my functional components: the book as a surface that bears text. This surface in paper books (and in scrolls, tablets and other devices that preceded the codex) is, after all, the one that most matters; it is that through which we actually ‘read’ the book. I would suggest that it is this surface that constitutes the primary aesthetic of any book (second only to its content). In the West (and I believe this carries through to other orthographies, printed or otherwise) the locus of this aesthetic lies in the laying out on the surface of crisp black characters in lines and in paragraph blocks, culminating in a macro-block, consisting of these components, that forms a ‘page’. It is thus the page that is central (everything else is merely a means of moving from one page to another). And it seems to me that there are two aesthetics that dominate the page: the quality of the print and the orthogonality of all the elements on a page.

Print by its very nature privileges repetition over individual uniqueness. For centuries scribes struggled manually to make each example of a given character identical to every other. With the advent of printing this became just about possible. I believe that the ebook represents the culmination of this process… for even printed books suffer from variations in ink density across a page and, because paper is an organic substrate, the kerning between printed characters can vary. Ebooks, by contrast, supply us with text that is of a perfectly uniform density and with precise, invariable kerning.

Similarly, the orthogonality of the macro-block of text on an ebook page is also invariable, whereas its paper counterpart is not. However, there is, I feel, a more important difference in the orthogonality (the perils of orthogonality are another matter: refer to “orthogonality” tag) of the macro-block: the gutter of a paper book. We are so accustomed to this that we hardly notice it, however, it is for many of us a cause of some irritation. It seems to me that, with all the advantages gained in the move from scroll to codex, there came also a major disadvantage: the gutter that was introduced by the need to attach the pages to the spine. Of course, in expensive books, hardcover rather than paperback (or even worse, those that are perfect bound), the way a page slopes down into a gutter is somewhat ameliorated – not only because the superior binding allows the book to lie flatter when open, but also because the macro-block is often kept away from the gutter by a wider margin. Paperbacks are altogether a different matter, with sometimes a reader being forced to peer down into the gutter into which the text seems to be slipping. In this sort of book the reader almost has to pull it apart to read it; perfect bound books literally come apart, so that the cover ends up as a folder holding a sheaf of loose pages.

The reader of an ebook is spared all of these misfortunes. Each page is presented perfectly flat and square and with no danger of being lost or of any damage coming to the device from the attempt to read what it displays.

So – I’ve not got long now before they come for me – though ebooks may be extremely disruptive to us readers, and though some things may be lost, I feel that, on balance, ebooks are destined to provide us with an aesthetically (never mind functionally) superior reading experience…

life and art in one gear

In writing, and in other art forms whose expression occurs across a span of time, pace is important, however I feel that we are, as a culture, somewhat obsessed with it, and I would like to lightly explore why this may be so. Let me admit from the outset that some of my work has been criticized as moving along at too slow a pace, and so you may say: I would say this, wouldn’t I.

My key concern is the notion that there is an ‘optimal’ pace, ‘correct’ even, that should reign over all time-spanning artworks (books, films, music, dance). This seems to me akin to claiming that our hearts should always beat with the same rhythm. Of course the pace that is supposed to be optimal is a fast one; the complaint is predominantly that something is ‘too slow’. The corollary of this seems to be that ‘slow’ is equated with ‘boring’ and ‘dull’, whereas ‘fast’ is equated with ‘exciting’. To suppose that everything needs to be exciting (in this frantic, breathless sense) seems to me to be related to the way in which our culture worships youth. Human beings slow as they age. I feel that to see this slowing as some kind of unfortunate diminishment is to miss the point. Travelling in a train, we watch the world rush by; as we slow our progress by driving a car, riding a bicycle or walking on foot, we see, geographically, less and less of the world, but, critically, we see it in much greater depth and detail. Similarly, artworks that possess less pace can allow for greater depth. Western classical music – and probably many older traditions of music – can match the frantic pace of popular music, but deploys many other paces besides, and by this means can explore a much more expansive and deeper realm of musical experience.

In short: I believe that the gearbox of our art and lives has more than one gear.

the retreat from reality

For most of human history our facsimiles of reality were very clearly man-made representations: no colour we could produce or use could compare in subtlety or vibrancy to those in nature; no fabric could approach the glossy texture of a rose petal; nothing, not even the finest acted mimicry, could hope to capture an animal in motion. Reality in all its splendour remained unassailably enthroned beyond our attempts to emulate it. This hierarchy has, more recently, begun to be eroded with, I feel, unfortunate consequences for each of us.

Film first captured moving images in a manner wholly artificial – jerky black and white and silent. Still, the excitement of this primitive capture of motion drew crowds. With the advent of sound, and the addition of colour, film became the first of our technologies that could plausibly represent an experience of reality. Mostly, what we have done with this technology is to give our fantasies the semblance of reality. More recently, flat screen technologies have taken over the accelerating process of making our dream representations ever more ‘real’. As each year passes the resolution of these screens (the pixels per inch), and the depth of colour (the number of bits assigned to a single pixel to encode colour) approach and will finally exceed that which our eyes are capable of discerning. Our dreams are coming closer to mimicking reality so completely that, in comparison, actual reality is beginning to seem less real.

Our inner notion of reality as expressed by facsimiles (pictures, carvings) has always been so compelling that, even when these were crude in the extreme, we could still fetishize them in preference over the far more luscious outer reality, coloured as it is in infinite gradations and displayed to us at an infinite resolution (in that however close you look at something, it has levels of detail beyond the acuity of our vision). How much more compelling then are the facsimiles we are beginning to produce? The one triumphant quality of reality that we could not deny – its irreproducibility by us – is under attack. Surely there will come a point when we will dethrone reality and set up before it an idol of our own making; our own dreams and aspirations clothed in all the seductive glory of reality. Nature dethroned, we shall instead worship the products of our minds. Turning a blind eye to reality, we shall worship ourselves.

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