Launch of ‘Birth of Albania’

It’s always good to see a project come to fruition, especially one that you – and many others – have put a lot of work into: in my case, the design and production of the book. So it was great to attend the launch party for The Birth of Albania at the Albanian Embassy in London last week.

Written by Nicola Guy, the book explores how an independent Albania first came into existence, and how later actions during and after the first World War by the Great Powers in partitioning ethnic Albanian territory gave rise to problems that are still unresolved.

Fittingly the book is published, by IB Tauris in association with The Centre For Albanian Studies, in the centenary year of the declaration of the Independence of Albania (from the Ottoman Empire), in Valona on November 28th 1912.

The book is set in Adobe Caslon Pro, a font that I think works really well for books. The front cover features a detail of an illustration originally used on the front cover of the Italian journal La Tribuna in 1914, and depicts the 1914 uprising.

In the photo above Noel Malcolm, Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, is speaking, with His Excellency Mal Berisha, Charge d’Affaires at the Albanian Embassy in London, at left and the author, Nicola Guy, to the right of the picture.

London 2012

London 2012 stamps, a photo by @westrowc on Flickr.

I think (hope!) Games time is going to be great, even if I’m still trying to love the logo. Maybe I’ll finally get there in time for the opening ceremony. In any case, the logo works well on these stamps, so to celebrate the day the Olympic flame arrives in the UK, post of the more traditional kind.

new leaves

A brief step outside for a breath of fresh air and to see the waxy new leaves on the beech tree uncurling in the Spring sun.

Edward Lear in Albania

Happy Birthday Edward Lear. Google’s reminder that today is Edward Lear’s 200th birthday is a good prompt to get Edward Lear in Albania down off the shelves, a book I had the opportunity to produce for IB Tauris and The Centre for Albanian Studies. It’s one of the book designs I am most pleased with, and still the only one that has inspired a reader to enquire (via the publisher) what font is used: Goudy Old Style.

The book essentially covers the Albanian part of Lear’s Journals of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans, documenting the 15 months in 1848-9 this intrepid traveler spent exploring the countries around the Mediterranean.

In the journals and drawings he vividly describes the remote landscapes in which he traveled and the people he met along the way, and the pleasures – and many inconveniences – of journeying in such rugged and often perilous countryside.

Describing Albania, he writes

Luxury and inconvenience on the one hand, liberty, hard living and filth on the other.

Yenidje and Vodhena, drawn at the scene in pencil, later in the studio ‘penned out’ in sepia ink then coloured using watercolor washes, based on notes he had made at the scene:

Here, in the entry for October 4th, he describes the landscape around Skodra:

Perhaps the grandest of all the views of Skodra was from the rock eastward of the bazaars; the castle, the mountains above – the ruined town below – the river winding beneath its bridges into far distance, form one of the finest pictures. As the sun was sinking low, its rays, clouded through the day, lit up the northern side of the landscape brilliantly, and from the steep castle hill – my last halt – nothing could have been more splendid than the rich foliage and glittering dwellings on the one side and the dark ranges of deep blue and violet hills against the bright sky.

Edward Lear in Albania: Journals of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans

The wit and wisdom of Keith Richards

The 50th anniversary of the band’s first gig hasn’t brought forth the Rolling Stones themselves, but there’s a slew of memorabilia and merch available (as well as, to be fair, some great bootlegs now available for official download from the Stones website).

In addition, there’s plenty of biography action, both of the band and at least two forthcoming biographies of Mick, as well as the reissue of the ‘classic’ Stanley Booth account of the 1969 tour, finally published in 1984 after the author had successfully navigated bouts of depression and time devoted to LSD.

Cannily Keith (or should that be, Keef) got his retaliation in first with his autobiography Life. He is very well served by his ghostwriter James Fox (author of the excellent ‘White Mischief’ ).

Reading the book is like having Keith there, talking to you (in the audiobook literally so for the first section).  It’s a brilliant read, very dry and very funny – although his occasional references to women as ‘bitches’ is jarring, especially since the book reveals that, if it were ever in doubt, he is a man of highly attuned sensibility.

It is hard to think any of the current crop of books, authorised or not, will capture the flavour of the band anywhere near as well. Here the wit and wisdom of Keef is on good form:

On the fifties
England was often under fog, but there was a fog of words that settled between people too. One didn’t show emotions. One didn’t actually talk much at all. The talk was all around things, codes and euphemisms; some things couldn’t be said or even alluded to. … [But] People really do want to touch each other, to the heart. That’s why you have music. If you can’t say it, sing it.

Always ready with a surprising example -
But if you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom, same with anything. Same with running a whorehouse. I would just play every spare moment I got.

Knowing where it came from…
I forgot to say that to play the blues was like a jail break out of those meticulous bars with the notes crammed in like prisoners, like sad faces.

… And why it’s always moving on
They wanted a frozen frame, not knowing that whatever they were listening to was only part of the process; something had gone before and it was going to move on.

Taking a stand, insisting Exile on Main Street should be a double album
And anyway, if you don’t make a bold move, you don’t get fucking anywhere. You’ve got to push the limits.

And who would want to be without Keith’s recipe for bangers and mash -
‘4. […] Throw them on low heat with the simmering bacon and onions (or in the cold pan, as the TV lady said, and add the onions and bacon in a bit) and let the fuckers rock gently, turning every few minutes.
5. Mash yer spuds and whatever
[…]

Go mash! If you haven’t read it already, get to it now.

Joanna

Eric Gill is far from an example of an ideal parent, but I enjoyed this note (at adobe.com) on ‘Joanna’, the typeface he designed in 1930, released by the Monotype Corporation in 1937:

He created the typeface for the printing firm of Hague & Gill, which he formed to give his idle son-in-law an occupation, and named the design for his daughter. Only the Caslon foundry cut it for hand composition. It is, as Gill himself described it, “a book face free from all fancy business,” with small, straight serifs and a spare elegance that makes it notably attractive and distinguished.

 

Wislawa Szymborska

I was sad to learn that Wislawa Szymborska, one of my favourite poets, died yesterday in Krakow, aged 88.

Her total output was small – when she was awarded the Nobel prize she had published barely 200 poems, and in her lifetime published something less than 400 poems – but, like their author, the poems have a quiet authority and always brought a new way of seeing.

Take Cat in an Empty Apartment for example, a wonderful poem about the death of a friend – from the point of view of the cat:

Die — You can’t do that to a cat.

Since what can a cat do

in an empty apartment?

Climb the walls?

Rub up against the furniture?

Nothing seems different here,

but nothing is the same.

Nothing has been moved,

but there’s more space.

And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,

but they’re new ones.

The hand that puts fish on the saucer

has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start

at its usual time.

Something doesn’t happen

as it should.

Someone was always, always here,

then suddenly disappeared

and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet has been examined.

Every shelf has been explored.

Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.

A commandment was even broken,

papers scattered everywhere.

What remains to be done.

Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,

just let hims show his face.

Will he ever get a lesson

on what not to do to a cat.

Sidle towards him

as if unwilling

and ever so slow

on visibly offended paws,

and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

[Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh]

Posted also in memoriam of Barney, faithful family dog who you can see at the coast at Kimmeridge in the masthead above, and who in his own way was quite fond of cats, who also died yesterday.

Walking in the new year

Muddy this year, unlike the snow of last. Walking, thinking, and enjoying the smell of the wet wood and the suck and ooze of the mud; and then the shafts of sunlight glowing through the bare trees.

When I get back, interrogating the experience, playing with the memory with camera+:

 

 

Exile’s Letter

I was reading ‘My Heroin Christmas’, one of the essays in Terry Castle’s excellent The Professor and Other Writings, and an aside took me to this astonishingly beautiful poem by Ezra Pound, a ‘translation’ from the Chinese of Li Po.

Widely considered the greatest poet of China, Li Po wrote the poem in about 760 AD whilst in exile. It takes the form of a letter to the Hereditary War-Councillor of Sho, “recollecting former companionship.”

Read ‘Exile’s Letter’ by Ezra Pound

Pound knew ittle Chinese himself, and the translation is based on notes on the original poem made by Ernest Fenellosa, an American scholar who studied Chinese poetry while living in Japan.

The poem first appeared in ‘Cathay’, published in 1915, and containing, according to its title page ‘translations by Ezra Pound for the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku.’ However, it is not a good idea to look at the poems as literal translations – in fact, as the prominent Pound scholar Hugh Kenner argued, to do so is to miss the point.

Pound sought to produce innovative English poems using the ancient Chinese texts as an inspirational springboard, not a constraining template

… maximizing three criteria at once, criteria hitherto developed separately: the vers-libre principle, that the single line is the unit of composition; the Imagist principle, that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets before the mind’s eye by naming them; and the lyrical principle, that words or names, being ordered in time, are bound together and recalled into each other’s presence by recurrent sounds.

Also included in Cathay was Pound’s ‘translation’ of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’, written in roughly the same historical period and, thematically, very similar. In the ABC Of Reading (New Directions, 1960) Pound wrote that he considered ‘Exile’s Letter’ and ‘The Seafarer’ the two greatest poems of the eighth century.

Art Pepper (and/or his wife with whom he wrote the book) used the lines

What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.

as the epigraph for his autobiography ‘Straight Life.’

Read ‘Exile’s Letter’ by Ezra Pound

Can you live without French fries?

I had never heard of Nora Roberts, massively bestselling writer of romance fiction, before last week, but from the article and interview with her in The Observer 20.11.11 there are two things I liked about her right away:

- That she wrote one of her books, ‘Remember When,’ with J D Robb – who is also her.

- And this response to a reader who had asked her for her views on French fries:

Barb, how can one live without French fries? Not well, I say. In fact, I’ve been known to say a day without French fries is like a day without an orgasm.

As she says later on (and memo to self) –  there’s nothing wrong with being happy.