A Good Drink is Hard to Find*

It’s not as easy as it should be to order a drink in India.

We stayed at an Ayurvedic retreat near Cochin, a place where consumption of alcohol in the public gaze was verboten. Chakra disorientation or something. Thousands of years of clean living make it a habit. Maybe that is why Hindi culture has lasted so many thousands of years. Anyway, there was no alcohol on the menu whatsoever. Calling room service, however, changed the story. Not only were the staff ready to deliver beer to the door of our bungalow, they were prepared to charge into town and purchase any booze we wanted, as long as it was drunk behind closed doors.

We traipsed through Fort Cochin looking for cocktails with zero success. Here’s Lucy and Laura on the hunt. Two wine bars and one very seedy bar called XL, a non-option, were all that we turned up. Later, over dinner, a Dutch woman whose manner seemed innocuous and credible informed us that all the waiters at these establishments had hidden cocktail menus in their pockets, hard liquor licenses being too expensive. All we needed to do was turn on the old nudge-nudge, wink-wink, what-have-you-got-in-your-pocket, and we’d be showered with margaritas and martinis and, ahem, pina coladas. This prompted several days worth of suggestive, significant looks and hopeful queries. ‘Do you have any, you know, other drinks?’ ‘There wouldn’t be another drinks menu, would there? Something harder?’ The responses ranged from bafflement to giggles to offended refusal. Not once were we able to procure either a hidden menu or a civilised mixed drink. Was this an example of the fabled Dutch sense of humour?

The rest of the family left India this morning. There was a bar at our hotel in Chennai last night so plans were laid for final drinks and some moral debt wrangling and settlement via games of chance. My sisters and I set upon a pre-dinner reconnaissance mission to Grammy, described as ‘a sensual and intimate cocktail bar, with stimulating music.’ Although Grammy was a cocktail bar, nothing on the cocktail list looked drinkable. My days of blithely considering the merits of a drink which combines beer and whiskey are gone. The door seemed to disappear behind us as we entered the bar, an unventilated pit. Apart from an early nineties triptych of Madonna sucking her thumbs, we were the only women in a very full bar. It was neither sensual nor intimate and there wasn’t any music to offset the tranquillising smoke of four hundred Classic cigarettes. To make matters worse, the cricket was screening and if the headlines are anything to go by, being Australian in India is a bit of a liability at the moment. We drank our G&Ts very fast and bolted. There were no cocktails. End of story.

* And, with further apologies to Flannery O’Connor and decorum, a Hard Drink is Good to Find.

In an effort to salvage a modicum of high-mindedness, I enthusiastically commend O’Connor’s story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ to everyone to whom bleakness, Faulkner, the South, observation of the similitude of skulls and cabbages, the literature of the heinous mother-in-law, and clean-lined, hard-headed late Modernist short stories appeal. There.

The Honeymoon Crasher

November 2007 will stand as the month I crashed not one, but two honeymoons. As a follow-up to Sharath and Sorcha’s safari bonanza, I met two lovely fellows from London who had just tied the knot. We hung out at Kendwa Rocks and, until their departure the day before mine, my new friends shielded me from an influx of proposals involving cattle, life planning, and large families. As a result of this meeting, my life has moved one step closer to some kind of completion (or, alternatively, aesthetic entropy). Life experience #492: Part immersion of self in turquoise waters at sunset whilst wearing a loud bikini and large sunglasses and drinking the daggiest drink in the cocktail manual, a pina colada, complete with paper umbrella and redundant fruit slices.
Yeah yeah, I know, enough already with the sunsets. I was directed to Kendwa, a beach village on the north of Zanzibar, by a Zanzibar old-hand, an American lass whose judgment I uncharacteristically decided to trust on the briefest of encounters. I caught a dala dala along bumpy back roads from Stonetown through concrete block villages and wondered whether I’d been lead up the garden path. No, it was stupidly beautiful there, an impossible convergence of turquoise, aquamarine and out further, darker, deeper blues captured in the sea.

I lay on the beach, all white sands and palm-fronded umbrellas and my entire genetic being was confused. I am not configured for idyllic beaches but for fens and moors and crags: I have the pink and beige complexion to prove it. What with the sun and the photosensitivity enhancing medication, I’ve gained a whole set of interesting new freckles which may in the future form some meaningful constellations on my shoulders and hips. No doubt a few cells have started to wonder whether they should start to wriggle and twist in a non-conformist, melanoma type fashion. It was stupidly beautiful back there on Kendwa and I’m beginning to suspect that this kind of environment does in fact make you stupid. I certainly feel a whole lot stupider, like my brain has been poached. Sunsmart and pasty as I should be, I’m veering towards tan-dom, for starters.

Forgive all this blathering. I blame Richard Ford – I read The Lay of the Land on the beach. I should, all things being proper, loathe Ford’s WASPy male menopausal meanderings, in the same way that I should have loved Radclyffe Hall’s femo-sappho-Modernist extravanganza, The Well of Loneliness, which I suffered through last week. Oh gosh, modern life is so hard to understand and all of these changes in the social fabric, they’re tough too, and how, oh how, does one go about being a good citizen, a middle-aged man, a father and a husband, under these conditions? Oh me, oh my, blah blah blah. Three days are stretched into seven hundred pages, every incident a trigger to memory and digression, a more sophisticated version of the Sex and the City school of exposition: ‘and that got me to wondering/thinking/remembering…’ The Lay of the Land got under my skin in the same way that Independence Day did, with its expansive, waffly contemplations anchored by a litany of precise and incessant detail. I think it is the wry and bafflingly unironic narrative voice of the rambling, wondering Frank Bascombe, good man/everyman/sad man/just a man, that prevents the unabashed symbolism and allegorical contortions of the narrative from being as annoying as they really should be. It’s a smart, measured and weirdly affecting novel, one that I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to throw into the ocean. That’s praise, surely. Even though I can’t honestly hate Richard Ford, I do, however, hold him almost entirely responsible for the discursive nature of these last few posts. On the other hand, I have also recently read a couple of space opera sci-fi novels (ah, genre fiction, sweet narcotic) and you will note that there haven’t yet been any alien megaships setting down on the beaches.

Lacking only the fruit of the tinkle-tinkle tree

The Giraffe,On the Masai Mara

The Pelly,
Many pelicans actually, and a bunch of flamingos on the shores of Lake Nakuru late in the day.

And Me.And the rest of the safari crew looking very safari, again on the shores of Lake Nakuru.

There’s nought to this post save the nostalgic pleasure of being able to reconstruct the title of one of my favourite Roald Dahl books.

Adriatic content

Walking the Rilke path north of the Duino castle rendered me almost ecstatically happy. I spat plum-stones and mandarin-pips into the Adriatic from this lofty vantage point as I ate my lunch.

I haven’t been surrounded by so many birds since I left Australia; I could not dignify them with proper names – Wee Yellow-throated Warbler, Sparrow von Rilke, Bluestreaked Chappie of Duino, Adriatic Gleeskipper? – but the presence of so many chirping featherlings left me nevertheless twitchingly content after a marked insufficiency of ornithological companionship. On my right, Duino Castle beckoned.
Given the height of the cliffs and the luminosity of the midday sun, all injunctions to leap towards the light in the Duino Elegies have been complicated.

On the other side of the bridge

The Venetian Grand Canal is ubiquitous but this one is not.

This is the Grand Canal of Trieste and look who is walking over the via Roma bridge!

Joyce lived in Trieste during WWI and wrote a fair chunk of Ulysses here. Indeed, Ulysses ends with a gesture towards the compositional itinerary of the book which includes Trieste: 'Trieste-Zurich Paris, 1914-1921.' This final epigram doesn’t accurately describe or even condense the compositional history of Ulysses; in spite of this, I’ve been determined to visit Trieste for almost a decade. Researching Joyce for my thesis, I read enough about his stint here in Trieste to motivate me finally to drag myself here on the way to Istanbul. Italo Svevo, author of the incomparable Zeno’s Conscience also lived in Trieste and if that were not a sufficient literary draw, Duino Castle is situated about fifteen kilometres around the Gulf of Trieste. Il Castello di Duino is where Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies, poems which I love more than I can possibly express on a blog.

The first article published by a young Virginia Woolf concerned her visit to Bramley Parsonage, home of the Bronte sisters. She uneasily considered the uneasy matter of literary pilgrimage and the utility of visiting places in which great works were written, in which great authors lived. The question of whether it is necessary or not to visit Bramley Parsonage in order to understand Wuthering Heights (or, indeed, Trieste to understand Ulysses and Duino to understand the Duino Elegies) abridges Anglo-American literary theory in the twentieth century. How should we use biographical material and compositional history to understand a literary text? How does the empirical, the subjective, the historical, the geographical, bear upon the literary and the intellectual? OK. Do you want to break into small groups to work through the question or deal with it as a large group? Anyone? Any thoughts?

My PhD argued that Modernist texts, like Ulysses, which ally themselves with the mechanical innovations of the twentieth century should be read as printed books, as textual objects which come into being only when they have been published. Following this logic, Trieste represents a moment in the pre-history of Ulysses, just before disparate sheets of manuscript and typescript turned into a sheaf of galley proofs and obscenity suits. Accordingly, such a pilgrimage should not officially contribute to a reading of the book.

What am I doing in Trieste then, apart from taking the less than obvious route to Istanbul? Despite being a little dubious about the scholarly utility of too much bio-geo-psychographical information about authors, I didn’t work on Joyce for years without developing some curiosity about his homes and haunts. I shudder at the kind of literary tourism which takes large gawping groups on tour through an author’s house in quest of an exact locus of inspiration. Part of that shudder is plain old elitism but most of it is scepticism about the accessibility and even definition of such moments. The Trieste that Joyce lived in was part of a different Europe; the late nineteenth century civic and mercantile buildings which now look Old would have been flashy and new before WWI.

Idle wandering around Trieste or Duino or Bramley Parsonage makes for an unofficial, unscholarly, speculative kind of criticism: I climb the hill behind Trieste to look into the San Guisto Cathedral and the majestic sweep of the Gulf of Trieste captures my attention, interrupting my efforts to remember whether San Guisto or San Apollinaire figure in Ulysses. Hellas surges in via the Adriatic and the tide washes away just as fast as I walk past the nineteenth century silliness that is the Trieste Lapidario, a walled garden in which large stones of antiquity are displayed. The Joyce and Svevo museums were both shut for refurbishment so there was no chance to examine the official relics. Oh look, there’s a bar. And how about these pigeons desecrating the angels in the middle of the Piazza D’Unità D’Italia? Plotting random points on fantastical theoretical trajectories on the ‘Blue Book of Eccles’ only to abandon the journey over a drink and start another one is terrifically exciting. Doing so with no compunction to transform the musings into an integrated theory, a learned article, a witty anecdote and a grant application is a liberty and a joy I could have barely imagined a year ago.

In the last week I’ve swooned past the house where Byron lived in Venice, I’ve sat on Rilke’s balcony at Duino Castle and I’ve sauntered and sashayed right on through Joyce’s Trieste and I’m still not quite sure what to do with these sites of literary apart from enjoy them and the weird process of reflection they provoke. Rest assured, mavens of Modernism, there will be no official ficto-critical recapitulation of this journey to Trieste. Of greater concern to the general populace should be the future stream of anecdote, wind, and creaky memory which will undoubtedly overcome my best defences. To this unpleasant scenario, I can only offer as remedy the oft-cited aphorism which is also the title to the novel of which the title of this blog is the first line.

Post scriptum: If this seems like an impossibly long post, please bear in mind just how much longer it could have been.

List the First

I’ve been thinking a great deal about lists lately. My thoughts on the matter have not yet sufficiently ripened for me to elaborate fully on the definition, appeal, poetry, history and significance of the list. I have a terrible feeling that I am going to develop a grandiloquent theory on the list which will seem vitally important to expound via this highly convenient medium. Suffice it to say for now that I have decided to start posting some lists on this blog.

List 1
Books that I’ve read in the last four months whose titles make reference to celestial happenings.

John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Paul Bowles, A Sheltering Sky.
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn.
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night.
Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated.
Neal Stephenson, Zodiac.

Strawberry Fields Forever

Corsica may be the birthplace of Napoleon, but this island is a land apart from France. Closer to Rome than to Paris, Corsicans insist that the French colonised the island. The Corsican flag is ubiquitous – printed on t-shirts, flapping in the sun, tattooed on forearms, stuck onto windows – whereas the tricolore only flies before official buildings. This distance from metropolitan France perhaps accounts for the fact that it is quite easy to get online. I’m wwoofing chez Myriam and Felipe, a Corsican-Colombian couple, until around the 27th in the high and searing mountains smack bang in the middle of Corsica – the nearest town is Ponte Leccia – and should be able to provide updates if not of the minute, then surely of the prolonged moment, on the reality of the frontline of organic strawberry production. Fifteen varieties of organic strawberry. Chèvre du maison. More chooks.

I’ve just finished reading the extraordinary first installment of Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Fever and Spear, a book which has given me more than enough to think upon as I pick strawberries, weed strawberries, prune strawberries in the Corsican sun. There’s a copy of the Slow Food manifesto and companion on my desktop following some interesting conversation on the matter in Aix-en-Provence; the most recent issue of a triennial organ devoted to Ecology, Civil Disobedience and Peasant Solidarity in Corsica is within reach, as are many Corsican cookbooks. I’m also in possession of a book about life on the other side of the Mediterranean that I’ve been wanting to read for years, Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. After that, I’ll have only one more hot weather, Mediterranean-appropriate book left, William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain. In order to avoid the absurdity of Reading Thomas Mann in Corsica, I’m learning to incorporate Slow Reading into my Slow Living.

Bonanza!

I’ve killed a fair amount of time addressing my reading needs in the secondhand bookshops of South East Asia. Whilst the heinous state of the modern publishing industry and the crisis in contemporary fiction are certainly both in evidence on the shelves of South East Asia, I have always been able to find something or other that I actually want to read. Onerous exchange terms no longer make me wince. I am still baffled and nerdily entertained by shelving protocols. Samuel Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women was shelved in the self-help section of a bookshop in Pai, in between The Surrendered Single and Healing Back Pain Naturally, just a few down from Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus and a book assessing Nabokov’s contribution to lepidoptery. Genius! Memories like this bring me real pleasure. They also make me wonder whether spending too much time on my own is warping my idea of fun beyond any hope of repair.

Anyway, browsing away in Luang Prabang I came across this book.

Everything about this, I love. I love its refusal to entertain any of the nuances which might accumulate to the title. I love the expression on Ralph E. Baney’s face. I love that the photographs are authentic. I love the old-school yellow scuba gear. I really love the many stand-in phalluses. It’s a goldmine.

No incommodality

Should my mortal form be less than ineluctable, should my immaterial side have to face up to the murky business of metempsychosis, I think I could cope with safe passage into the body of a Mekong catfish. This, hounds and harlots, is how I passed much of Bloomsday.

Of course, today, it’s back to the grind. And enough with the Joyce references.

tantara

Tantara and tirra lirra. I'm smiling my best golden toothed smile because 'tis Bloomsday in Vientiane. I've swapped the Mekong for the Liffey and soon will be exchanging Beer Lao and sticky rice whiskey for Guinness and Jamesons: rejoycing by means of cross-cultural alcoholic translation.

Alas, I'm having trouble uploading photos so my very exciting shots of tanks and barren plains and vegetables will have to wait a day or two.

free fall

I’ve returned to Gravity’s Rainbow after a bit of a pause and am now immersed, infuriated, confused and completely SOLD. It’s a strange and masochistic satisfaction, being halfway through a very difficult book and knowing that you’ll have to return to the beginning and read it through again a couple of times before the pieces start to fall into place. It’s hilarious, perverse, paranoid, encyclopediac, schizoid and dazzlingly labyrinthine in terms of plot. I have no idea what the hell is going on. I desperately want to have a long ranty boozy conversation about this book with someone so I’ve been sitting in public places reading with the cover on full public view. Thus far, no one has walked up to me and started to enthuse. Now if I see people who are reading books that are particularly excellent and they don’t look like they will bite, I usually go and earbash them. Why will no-one come and talk Pynchon to me? Pynchon readers are freakazoid cultists, for crying out loud! I have questions… If I had full-time net access, I’d probably be plugged into Spermatikos Logikos or whatever it is called (actually quite good Pynchon fansite accessible through the really quite good The Modern Word) trawling through all the allusions that space cadets mourning the passage of modernism have gathered in their spare time. Doesn’t anybody study Postmodernism anymore? It can’t have gone out of fashion that quickly. I mean, I was teaching a course on Postmodernism last year and Pynchon was on the syllabus.

The closest I have come to a Pynchon chat was with a nice young feller sitting next to me on the bus who read the back cover when I went off for a wander. ‘Your book sounds a bit interesting,’ he said on my return. I think the blurb about the coincidence of Slothrop’s sexual conquests and the flight of the V-2 bombers is what got his attention because when I started rabbiting on about Pynchon, his eyes glazed over reasonably quickly and he started fidgeting in a purposeful manner with the controls of his iPod. Honestly. If some big dumb square-jawed American college jock walked up and said, ‘Pynchon, dude, aaaawesome,’ I’d be happy.

Anyway, if I could have a conversation about GR, I’d first of all get really excited about the sequence ‘You never did the Kenosha kid’ and Slothrop’s confectionary torture at Darlene’s… And what about the journey into the Central Nervous System? And what the hell is the relationship between Leni and Peter Sascha and Pointsman? And I want more Pirate Prentice! Brigadier Ernest Pudding – Ha! Entropy, entropy, is it the nature of the beast that I feel overloaded every time I try to consolidate my thoughts about entropy? Paranoid? Moi? What’s with maximum disorder within a poised, highly ordered formal structure? I know there’s zillions of Joyce-Pynchon trainspotters, what’s the official D&G line on Pynchon? What? You never read that book? Wow, I can’t believe you never did. The Kenosha kid sure did her research.

Hopefully by this stage, I’d be at the whiskey blurry phase of the conversation and then I’d really start to speculate about the great faceless polyvalent complexity that is the War, the possible putative mysterious controlling force of the narrative and History and then try to find some contemporary analogies…the event an always deferred eventuality, a delayed reverberation of its own consequence. And then I’d confess my recurring daydream that I sit next to TP on a plane and recognise him from that early Navy photo and the James Bone expose and play it cool about the whole secret identity thing and he knows that I know and we get on like a house on fire and it’s all really knowing and we have a long convoluted cryptic conversation which turns into a mutual admiration session and then we become friends and hang out from time to time and exchange slightly obscure but vital emails and I have to somehow keep it under my hat that Thomas Pynchon and I are Great Mates, Chums in spite of Chance…