Library At Night ~ Alberto Manguel

A Good Library is an Adventure and a Sanctuary, is the title of one of my boards on Pinterest, and this is a conviction I’ve held since my teenage years. I first saw libraries as a sanctuary from a school that I’d come to despise and from an English teacher who, from a lack of interest in the subject,  combined with an authoritarian nature that brooked no alternative view, almost killed my love of books. I learnt of them as a source of adventure, via the books inside, these were my guides to at first my own country and then by following the paths suggested by those books and their writers to other worlds beyond the shores of this Isle. This lead to my impression of what a library is or could be.

Like most readers & Lit-bloggers I have the library that exists in my home and the ideal one of my dreams, that if money, time, and space were no object, I would build, where each book and shelf would represent each reader as they perceive themselves to be, and as a receptacle for all the gained wisdom/knowledge gained over the years. Alberto Manguel has obviously been dwelling on this subject and the result of all his cogitation is ……

The Library at Night is a book by one of my favourite readers, a man who has made a career writing about us and our obsession, in the process creating a series of books that highlight the joys of books and all that would relate to them. <<

In this particular one, Alberto Manguel’s subject is libraries, taking us the reader from his own, created in an old stone barn beside his 15th century home in France, through the centuries to Alexandria, via places such as China, Greece, Egypt, and Rome.

This book although seemingly inspired by the creation of his own library, and his obvious passion for books, is also a call to arms. Although Manguel knows he is calling from the ramparts of a castle already stormed and taken, that libraries as repositories of physical books are on the decline, this doesn’t stop him passionately defending libraries & books against the digital onslaught. This book is also a prayer, and love letter, calling all of history – real or imagined - to present it’s case.

The Library at Night, is divided into fifteen chapters, each one an essay on an aspect of the library as seen by the writer, they range from The library as Myth, as Order, as Power,  ending with The Library as Home. These headings provide a starting point, a diving board for Alberto Manguel, to regale us with anecdotes, stories, quotes, ransacking his own wealth of knowledge & historic documentation to allow the reader to consider the impact this repository has had on civilizations and how in times of darkness it has been a safe-holding, awaiting the next period of enlightenment.

Ranging from the doomed library of Alexandria to the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Aby Warburg and Count Dracula, this personal and deliberately unsystematic book defines the critical role that libraries have and must continue to play in our civilization as deep repositories of our memory and experience.

In the game where you imagine people from the present or the past, sitting at a dinner table with some wonderful repast & inspired banter, or at some quaint bar a glass of something warm and golden, the conversation flowing the same way, Alberto Manguel would be one of my guests, I love how he writes, how his thought process seems to work, how he somehow adds warmth & passion to subjects that could appear dry & dusty.

This is the fourth book by him that I’ve read and like the others they somehow manage to be both page turners, and something you just want to relish, the writing is something you want to wallow in, to savour, repeating sentences whilst grinning inanely knowing you have found a likeminded soul & one that has the words to communicate how you feel.

“The Ideal Library symbolizes everything a society stands for. A society depends on its libraries to know who it is because libraries are societies memory” I’ve used this  quote in my credo to define my blog, and although it comes from A Reader on Reading, it works just as well to define this book and probably Alberto Manguel’s world view.

Alberto Manguel was born in 1948 in Buenos Aires to an Argentinean diplomat and spent his early years in Israel. He spoke English growing up before learning Spanish. He learned to read when he was four and, due to illness, spent most of his childhood alone with books. He worked in a bookshop during his time at school, and when he was 16 he worked for the poet Jorge Luis Borges, who was going blind, as a reader. Manguel studied Comparative Literature and worked as an editor at a publishing house as well as writing reviews, stage plays and film scripts and translating literature, including the works of Marguerite Yourcenar, into English.

“Beyond the national library of any nation lies a library greater than all. because it contains each and every one of them: an inconceivably vast and ideal library of all the books ever written, and of those that exist only as possibilities, as volumes still to come. This colossal accumulation of libraries overshadows any single collection of books and yet is implied in everyone of their volumes.” (From the chapter library at home)

Alberto Manguel.com

Alberto Manguel(Wiki)

Vanishing Lung Syndrome

 

Miroslav Holub

I've discussed & posted before on how Crow by Ted Hughes is one of my favourite all time single collections of poetry, but there are others that over the years have sat like milestones marking my path through poetry. In time becoming part of the sacred pantheon of poetry this bloke likes. What I would like to do is every now & then highlight one, to reread what were at one time, a book, that I would spend hours, days or months with. A book that I would pour over and read  to myself in quiet moments or that was declaimed out loud to all who would listen, whether a lack of sobriety or just the enthusiasm for the work providing the lubrication necessary to let my world know about this new collection. One such collection was Vanishing Lung Syndrome by Miroslav Holub, a writer I became aware of through another collection, The Rattle Bag, one of whose editors (Ted Hughes) claimed that “Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere”. This was enough for me to find out more and on a trip back home from Germany, where I was working out the time, I picked up Vanishing Lung Syndrome from my local bookshop and the first poem I read was:

1751

That year Diderot began to publish his Encyclopaedia,
and the first insane asylum was founded in London.
>>>So the counting out began, to separate the sane, who
veil themselves in words, from the insane, who rip off
feathers from their bodies.
>>>Poets had to learn tightrope-walking.
>>>And to make sure, officious types began to publish
instructions on how to be normal.

This is one of my favourite poems – ever. It hits me emotionally, it hits me logically, and it is just this book’s opening volley.

Vanishing Lung Syndrome, is a radiological syndrome in which the lungs appear to be disappearing on X-ray. The syndrome is characterized by a progressive decrease in the radiographic opacity of the lung. Causes include the accelerated progression of emphysema destroying the lung or the rapid cystic destruction of the lung by infection.  It’s use as a title for a collection of poetry, declares it’s authors scientific vocation,

Miroslav Holub was born in 1923 in Plzen,(Pilsen Czech Republic) western Bohemia, the only child of a lawyer and a high school teacher of French and German. He attended a gymnasium specializing in Latin and Greek. After the war he studied medicine at Charles University, Prague, working in the department of philosophy and the history of science, and also working in the psychiatric dep’t. He became an MD in 1953. In 1954 he joined the immunological section of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Science and obtained his PHD.

It was in his student years that he started writing poetry, and also became an editor of the scientific magazine Vesmir, New Scientist. In 1954 he obtained his PHD and also published his first collection of poetry establishing what would become the twin paths of his life & going on to become the Czech republic’s most important poets and also one of her leading scientists, publishing many short essays on various aspects of science, particularly biology and medicine (specifically immunology) and life, as well as poetry.

 

Heart Transplant.

After an hour

*********

there’s an abyss in the chest

created by the missing heart

like a model landscape

where humans have grown extinct.

*********

The drums of extracorporeal circulation

introduce

an inaudible

New World Symphony.

*************

It’s like falling from an aeroplane, the growing

cooler and cooler,

until it condenses in the inevitable moonlight,

the clouds coming closer, below the left foot, below

the right foot,

a microscopic landscape with roads like capillaries

pulsing in counter-movements,

feeble hands grasping for the king of blood,

“seek the Lord while he may be found”

ears ringing with the whistles of some kind of cosmic

marmots,

an indifferent bat’s membrane spreading between the

nerves,

“It is unworthy of great hearts to broadcast their own

Confusion.”

***********

It’s like falling from an aeroplane

before the masked face of a creator

who’s dressed in a scrub suit

and latex gloves.

************

Now they are bringing, bedded in melting ice,

the new heart,

like some trophy

from the Eightieth Olympiad of Calamities.

************

Atrium is sewn to atrium,

aorta to aorta,

three hours of eternity

coming and going

***********

And when the heart begins to beat

and the curves jump

like synthetic sheep

on the green screen,

it’s like a model of a battlefield

where Life and Spirit

have been fighting

*********

and both have won.

 

Vanishing Lung Syndrome is divided into four sections

Syncope = Episodic interruption of the stream of consciousness induced by lack of oxygen in the brain.

Symptom =  A sign of physical or mental disturbance leading usually to a patient’s complaint.

Syndrome = A group of symptoms and objective signs characterizing a disease or a defect of a structure or function.

Synapse = 1)The region of communication between two neurons. 2) The linkage between parental chromosomes preserving their individual identities.

It is through these that he asks what poets are, or what poetry means, using the language as a scientific instrument to discern and dissect it’s value, constantly stretching and challenging our conception and our assumptions about poetry. It is this rigour combined with an eloquence that just stuns, that makes this a collection of poetry that I constantly return to.

*************

Written whilst Czechoslovakia was still under communist rule and before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, through these poems Holub uses a humour as sharp as one of his scalpels to record the blunt, brutal absurdity of the modern world, and yet, although dark, and at times despairing, they are not without hope, it shines with a warmth and benevolence, that breaks the heart.

Spacetime

When I grow up and you get small,

then--

********

(In Kaluza’s theory the fifth dimension

is represented as a circle

associated with every point

in spacetime)

***********

-- then when I die, I’ll never be alive again?

*****************Never.

Never never?

**************Never never.

Yes, but never never never?

***********No …. not never never never,

**********just never never.

************

So we made

a small family contribution

to the quantum problem of eleven-dimensional

****supergravity.

Vanishing Lung Syndrome is Translated by David Young and Dana Habova.

Miroslav Holub(Wiki)

Goodreads (MH)

www2.arts

From The Fatherland With Love ~ Ryu Murakami

This book originally came out in Japan in 2005, placing the story in what would have been the near future, in a time of severe economic crisis, with the yen worth next to nothing, banks closed & both food & fuel in short supply. All this combines to leave Japan in a vulnerable state with it’s close neighbours vying for dominance & it’s one time allies unable or unwilling to help. Into this bleak picture steps an old enemy with a plan to invade, that is both as cunning in its set up as it is shocking in the simplicity in which it unfolds. 

Japan has become a nation whose time has passed, a place where camps for the unemployed and homeless are commonplace & living rough on the streets is the only reality for a growing number of the populace.

+++++++

Into this scenario a force of highly trained & ruthless North Korean commandos easily infiltrate and take over control of the city of Fukuoka, setting up their own government with little resistance from the local population and often with help from self interested parties.

With the national government having no plans, no solutions and no idea who to blame, although that’s not stopping them from trying to apportion it. With the government both local and central too scared to lift their heads out of their collective anuses, it is left to Murakami’s Marauders, a disparate bunch of disaffected youth, social outcasts murderers, bombers & satanists to face the foe. This group under the leadership of Ishihara, an accomplished poet and winner of Kyushu Prefecture Cultural Award for Literary Excellence, decide that they will take on the North Koreans, they formulate a suitably diabolical plan, grab what weaponry they have stockpiled, within a short period of time slaughter and mayhem commences.

This as a book should come with a warning Not Recommended by the Japanese Tourist Board. No one comes out well, or to be more accurate the characters that one would feel most for, are the same ones that should be locked away from sight as not suitable, not fitting The Traditional Japanese Image (TM),  in fact  any image a nation would want to project concerning itself.

Earlier this year I read the other Murakami’s (Haruki) books 1q84 and thought that it was an ambitious attempt to collate all of his ideas, themes & obsessions ( love, loneliness, surreal worlds, free will & religious cults) throughout his fiction and nonfiction into one grand expression, into one book. I also thought that although it was an epic effort – it was also a failure, that it didn’t gel as a whole. I think that this idea also applies to Ryu Murakami, except From The Fatherland With Love succeeds, this book covers the usual areas of  violence & technology, the divide between those that are excepted by and those society considers unwanted. It also shoves a great wedge between Japan’s old martial/ traditional image and the reality of it’s modern self, a nation that has not just lost it’s way, but had no idea it had one. It also manages to chuck in another Ryu Murakami bugbear with references to Japan’s reliance for protection on the USA.

The difference between From The Fatherland With Love, and 1q84 I believe is that  Ryu Murakami’s book works as a whole where 1q84 didn’t. Ryu Murakami has created in this book a wonderful cast of characters in a tale that rollicks along with all the mayhem, violence & action one expects from a Ryu Murakami book & yet he still manages to gel his vision, still manages to get his world view down on the page & into the reader.

The Guardian newspaper said that Ryu Murakami was “The godfather to the dark heart of modern Japanese Fiction” and whether he knows this or not I can imagine him liking the idea.

 

 

Pushkin Press

Ryu Murakami (Wiki)

THE RULES -

The Way Of The Cycling Disciple

Those that know me well, know that despite my pretensions, I’m really a man of quite simple tastes. A good book, a bottle of good malt whisky & I’m happy, in fact living the good life. Those that have delved deeper behind the mask of Parrish Lantern, will know that I have another love/obsession, one that is as strong as those previously mentioned & yet  has never been featured on this blog. I’ve discussed whisky, through books & the good stuff itself, have obviously talked about books, but have never as far as can recall discussed my love of cycling, never found a book that I wanted to shout about. Till now.

 

The Rules, is a book that has evolved over a period of time from the members of the website Velominati.com, one of the world’s most popular cycling websites.

In the prologue to the book, it states that cycling is a mighty sport with a rich and complex history, that behind every racer, company, component or kit, there is a history, a legend – a reason to be passionate for its existence.That this is a sport steeped in tradition and yet fiercely modern, seeking advancement through science & technology.

Velominati is centred on the notion that this passion is the foundation for the enjoyment not only cycling, but life itself and that a sense of humour is a wonderful mechanism for developing and sustaining such a passion.

Although this is a book of rules it’s through the rules that the humour really shines & as it states, you’d need to be a Velominazi*  to believe that the rules should be strictly adhered to. The rules are there as guidelines, points of discussion, style hints and traditions that have been merely formulated into words & then explained, reasoned and passionately argued, but with humour at the core.

Rule #12 – The correct number of bikes to own is n+1, where n is the number of bikes currently owned – this equation can also be written as s-1, where s is the number of bikes owned that would result in separation from your partner.

Rule #50 – Facial hair is to be carefully regulated. No full beards, no moustaches. Goatees are permitted only if your name starts with Marco and ends with Pantani, or if your head is intentionally or unintentionally bald. Also one may never shave on the morning of an important race, as it saps your virility, and you need that to kick @£$%.

Rule #24 – Speeds and distances shall be referred to in Kilometres, apart from allowing you to reference professional races in the proper context, it has the added bonus of making you appear to race faster & longer.

The ninety-one rules that feature in the published book, have evolved over the years on the website and are not in order of importance. Because of this when the book was put together it was decided to group them according to a theme creating  five sections:  The Disciple, The Ride, The Bike, The Aesthete, & The Hardmen. This gives the rules a heading to loosely follow allowing the velominati’s philosophy to be expanded on, and for their knowledge and passion for what is not merely a sport, or a means of transport – but a way of life, that can be defined by their five principal aspects;

1) The best way to become a better cyclist is to ride your bike, as often & as serious as is possible

2) Its history is held in reverence, and the current culture is to be treated with the same humility as of those whose shoulders we stand upon.

3) Approach the sport with the wisdom that evolution is key to survival, that the way things were done, need not be how we do them. love the tradition, embrace the future.

4) We believe aesthetics play a key role in building motivation. In practising to become the best rider you can, you ride your bike through all the seasons & if you look the part, you will feel it, if you look good, you’ll feel good.

5) This, the most important, is the believe that in order to best achieve the first four, you need a healthy and possibly sinister sense of humour.

The last one is also key to enjoying this book, I know this is an extremely niche book, but if you like cycling, with its style and heritage, its authenticity and wisdom  you’ll absolutely get and love this book.

This will improve your cycling better than any performance enhancing chemists set, or any of the latest titanium/carbon fibre/latest wonder frame material and for a lot less cost.

 

* At the back of this book is a lexicon, where the vocabulary developed on the website is defined, for example;

Velominazi =  A dogmatic enforcer of the rules

Velomiwookie = an unshaven velominatus, after having failed to shave the guns (legs) they are hairy enough to make chewbacca proud'.

Velominatus = A cycling disciple of the highest order.