Le Sac du Quartier

Dans ce quartier-ci il est bon d'acheter, de temps en temps, un sac "du moment" pour encourager les autres.

At least, that is what Voltaire might have said if he had come to Marylebone in the noughties. The "it" bag here, though, doesn't cost £500; in fact, it's free with purchase at Daunt Books, one of my favourite bookshops in town (and also, conveniently, the closest to my flat). Instead of giving away plastic or paper bags to customers, they provide them with one of the two styles of tote bag--the kind you would pay about £3 in a supermarket and £10 in Paul Smith--either a flat, cream tote with a green line drawing of the shop on the front, or a bigger, sturdier green canvas version. Both varieties adorn the arms of a great number of people, both in the quartier and beyond.

I have a tote bag with a diagram of the Manhattan neighbourhoods etched on it, which I bought for about $15 in New York and I keep it in my handbag at all times so that impromptu trips to Selfridges, the South Bank book market or Waitrose aren't ever a problem. However, I wanted a new tote and I wanted a Daunt one in particular. I went into the store last week and asked if they sold the totes. "No," sez the friendly assistant, "we normally give them away if you buy lots of books."

"OK, well, do you have the new Jay McInerney novel then?" I ask.

"No, we're sold out."

"Then can I buy a tote from you? I don't really want any other books right now" I had also tried this trick to acquire a display model of a Nespresso pod carrier in Selfridges but with no luck.

"Sorry, afraid not," she said. Grr. Luckily, I met Dad in Daunt on Wednesday and Dad cannot go into a bookshop without buying at least 15 books (especially prior to a New York trip when he needed to top up his travel books collection as clearly, two shelves of NYC reading matter isn't nearly enough) and, sure enough, he was carrying an armful of tomes and, sure enough, we were given a tote, which I now carry around with me.

I really ought to support Daunt more but I buy almost all of my books second hand, the only exception being when I read a book's blurb and have to read it right away and so buy it on impulse, no matter what the price. Besides, I prefer the feel of second-hand books. I like the worn and battered look and I like the thought of the book itself having had its own history. That said, if money were no object, I probably would just go to Daunt and buy most of my books there, simply because it is such a pleasant place to shop and the people who work there are friendly, helpful and really know their stuff.

Distilled Milk

(L-R: Dustin Lance Black, Gus Van Sant, James Franco, Grauniad interviewer)

As I lead an incredibly glamorous life and have spent most of the past six years in the cosmopolitan Mecca that is Nowheresville, the preview screening of Milk I went to see tonight at the BFI wasn't the first preview/interview and Q&A with the director I have ever seen. That honour goes to Ne le dis à personne, in which I was surprised to discover the director of said director Q&A was the gorgeous Guillaume Canet. That time, I was caught without a camera and had to settle for a poxy autograph in my Moleskine. This time, I was cannier.

This time, there were also some surprise guests. After the screening of Milk, some bird from the Grauniad interviewed director Goosevanson (AKA Gus Van Sant), chatting with him about his film career and showing clips from several movies from his back catalogue (Mala Noche, Good Will Hunting and Elephant). I didn't think she did a very good job or maybe Van Sant is just tough to interview--he's famously shy (someone in the audience even quizzed him on that and he said he was definitely intimidated by the skater kids in Paranoid Park) but also very dry and sharp. Maybe there was also a UK-US cultural divide but the interviewer and Van Sant didn't even seem to understand what answer was given or what question was posed, respectively, some of the time.

As a special surprise, the BFI lady then whipped out James Franco (who plays Milk's lover Scott Smith) and the writer, Dustin Lance Black and invited them to join the fun. I perked up quite a lot at this point because James Franco is hot and I've had a soft spot for him ever since he was in the short-lived but brilliant TV series Freaks and Geeks about ten years ago. Sadly he wasn't very coherent (when asked how he went about researching his character in Milk, he sort of mumbled for about five minutes about how it was really sad that no one of his generation learned anything about Milk at school and, spurred on by the applause he received, he went on to say how he just wanted to be true to the real Scott Smith but that because we're all Brits it's not like we're going to know whether he succeeded anyway) and the film buff crowd targeted their questions almost exclusively at Van Sant and Black.

The only other Van Sant movies I've seen are To Die For, Paranoid Park (which I liked) and Elephant (which I loathed, although perhaps just on principle). I didn't even realise (or didn't remember) that he also directed two films which have been on my long-term to-watch list: My Own Private Idaho (for obvious reasons) and Good Will Hunting (mainly because I used to have a big crush on Ben Affleck at the time it came out). I had just thought that he only made pretentious, plot-free movies so I think I am going to have to wade through his back catalogue a little, especially when asked whether he would make another comedy, after To Die For, and he noted that he'd always had his heart set on making Dude, Where's My Car 2.

I expected that the focus of the interviews tonight would be on Milk but it was really more about Van Sant's earlier films. How actually those helicopter shots in Good Will Hunting weren't that expensive to shoot. How the studio really didn't want Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to star in Good Will Hunting (which they also wrote) because they "weren't stars" (the studio had Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio lined up), although Ben and Matt had their way in the end. How he made the shot-by-shot remake of Psycho as an anti-remake movie--to show how you can't just use the same script and the same directions and expect the original magic to be there. How the cinematographer for Paranoid Park is a bit of a drama queen and a rabble-rouser (Van Sant checked first with the BFI lady that the cinematographer hadn't already been to talk at the BFI!). Quite entertaining, then, was Gus with lots of nice anecdotes, even if he wasn't really very good at answering questions. And even if he barely said a word about Milk all night (that is probably the interviewer's fault but the audience directed all Milk-related questions to the writer instead).

I liked Milk a lot though--a good thing, really, given the anticipation of having seen the trailer so many times (I was disappointed, if not surprised, that the David Gale music wasn't used in the film). A lot of laughs were coming from the audience--slightly fewer than me because although I found it funny the first ten times I saw Milk quip to Dan White (in response to White's question, "Can two men reproduce?"), "No, but God knows we keep trying," I had used up all my laughter on that line. And it was inspiring and sweet and powerful and all of those positive adjectives. I didn't like the character of Jack, Milk's boyfriend during the second half of the film, but nor was I supposed to. Someone asked the writer whether Harvey's intense feelings for Jack were realistic given that Jack was such an arse, and Black replied that Jack was an arse in real life but that Harvey had a certain type, which was both a strong and a weak point of his.

And now, I've got yet another preview/director Q&A on Sunday, this time with David Fincher for his new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If Brad Pitt shows up too, that would be so awesome, especially as I will be sitting in the sixth row rather than the twelfth...

Milking the Millions

I have seen the trailer for the movie Milk approximately 17 times at cinemas over the past ten weeks. I don't really mind because I really like the music, which is, I think, taken from the excellent soundtrack of The Life of David Gale (a film I think I disliked when I saw it at the cinema but which has since grown on me). It was also nice because I was in San Francisco the first time I saw the trailer and I'm glad that I am finally going to get to see the damn thing, along with a Q&A with its director, Goosevanson, at the BFI this weekend. It had better be good!

Tonight, the Milk trailer was followed by Slumdog Millionaire, about which I had read very little until I saw a clip while passing a TV (or maybe it was on a film programme on the radio) and realised that it involved Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Then, when I saw it leap into the IMDb top 250 (at number 34), I thought I really ought to see it. The plot is simple--at least, on the surface--18-year-old "slumdog" Jamal (Dev Patel) gets through to the final question on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, to the delight of the viewers, only to find he is thrown in jail and accused of cheating. After all, how could this poor, uneducated tea-maker-to-the-call-centre-employees possibly be able to answer all those questions correctly when so many before him had failed?

So, once the lackey stops torturing him, Jamal tells the police officer exactly how he knows the answer to each of the questions, in doing so, telling his story--the story of how he and his brother managed after the death of their mother when they were very young, escaping from an "orphanage" run by a man who makes Miss Hannigan look like a pussycat, cruising past the Taj Mahal, travelling on trains and through brothels, living on their wits, surviving. Falling in love, making the wrong choices, betraying each other and standing by each other, spinning a very neat yarn when needed (the Taj Mahal "tour" in particular involved a very sophisticated brand of cunning for one so young). By the time Jamal has reached the end of his tale, winning the jackpot is so clearly missing the point, the point perhaps being highlighted by the question which asks what is the motto under the lions on the Indian flag.

It's a neat idea for a film: that by telling the story of how one guy came to know 15 trivial facts, you can tell his history. After all so many of the things and facts we know are learned by chance--or even through misfortune and unhappy events, in the case of the film. It's only easy if you know the answer, after all, and, indeed, Jamal has to use one of his lifelines on the second question, which further arouses the suspicions of the policeman who claims, "even five-year-olds know that." The facts that Jamal knows each have their own story--some tragic, some comic, some scary, some coincidental--but together they form a rich tapestry of knowledge, the miscellanea of the individual. The film itself is colourful, rich and intense as Jamal and his brother scramble across a wide range of Indian landscapes and cityscapes. It is a fractal inside a patchwork quilt inside a kaleidoscope. It is sweet and funny and sad. As a film about a quiz show, it blows Starter for Ten out of the water (yes, I know they're in a different league but I really dislike the movie of the latter).

Oh, and the only question posed during the TV show in the film of which I was certain of the answer, was, of course, the final question but for me to reveal what that question was would spoil a reference to a nice moment from earlier in the movie.

Found in Translation

I'm reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen at the moment and finding it very entertaining--it even justifies the damage its 650 pages are probably doing to my back as I lug it around with me (the weight was probably the main reason I hadn't bought it before now--only Pynchon (and, more rarely, exceptional others) are allowed to give me back ache).

Then I got to page 74 and a strong sense of déjà vu swept over me--one sentence in particular was very familiar: "Enid enunciated from the kitchen doorway, 'Dr Hedgpeth says you should only sit in high, straight-backed chairs'." Language might be infinitely creative but that was a sentence I was unlikely to forget I had read, thanks to its quirkiness. The following paragraph contained plenty of description of a range of different types of chair in which the father of the very strange family in The Corrections could potentially sit.

It was a passage I had once had to translate into Italian, of course. While my first year "translation from Italian" course was marvellous with the lovely, jolly Prof. KP who believed in "translation for the soul, not for the tripos," my "translation into Italian" tutor in the second year didn't have quite the same inspirational effect on me, especially once we had reached the point in the year when I realised that I was going to switch into the linguistics tripos and my language skills were thus about to rapidly deteriorate so why bother to muster a pretence of fluency (well, for the First, obviously, although thanks to a certain tutor who only gave me a mid 2:1 on one paper, my average was screwed and I was doomed to 2:1 city that year).

I still have most of my university work on my computer, which is sometimes amusing. I panicked today as I thought I'd deleted it in favour of yet more choons in one of my mad hard drive purges, but actually I'd just moved them all to the second hard drive on my laptop (why Sony think it's a good idea to split your hard drive into two is beyond me) and sure enough, there it was!

Dalla porta della cucina, Enid proclamò: “Dott. Hedgpeth dice che tu dovresti sederti nelle sedie agli schienali alti e verticali."

Ugh, what an awful translation. In fact the whole lot was rubbish; The Corrections is a very funny novel as well as being sweet, charming and moving and my translation is absolutely dire--way too literal and just completely flat. I used to get very high marks for my "beautiful" translations from French and Italian into English but struggled with the reverse, mainly because a vocabulary failure can really screw up your wonderful translation when you have to paraphrase. Without a dictionary, it's hard enough to translate the meaning, let alone the tone, the style and the voice of the piece (especially if you're an ignoramus like me and when, in an exam, you have a piece to translate by an "A. Clarke" which is about a strange computer called HAL and you haven't got a clue what's going on). 

What's the Italian for a ladder-backed chair (what is a ladder-backed chair)? What's the Italian for colostomy? For pacemaker? For Khmer? All of these came up in this extract. I remember in an exam in the first year an Italian word came up and I had no clue what it meant so I had to try to guess based on context (the extract was from some weird, post-modernist Italian tome). I think I put down canoe, which seemed to make sense; the real meaning was something like vest or jacket.

Dictionary-less translation thus struck me as pretty pointless because if you were a translator you would have a dictionary while you translated because you would get fired if you translated the word for jacket with the word for canoe. Anyone--or any bot--can do a quick word look-up to give a rough idea of the meaning of a piece but the skill of a good translation lies in the crafting of words into sentences, the ingesting of the writer's voice and the avoidance of translation loss.

That being said, the only ever assignment on which I got a starred first at Cambridge was on a translation into English of a passage from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu for which I was awarded a 90, which is a score so rare in Cambridge, particularly in April of one's first year, that I was immensely proud, especially as I hadn't been convinced that my translation was that good. I was allowed to use a dictionary and--being Proust--the one side of A4 that was the extract probably contained only one sentence, along with about 6 semi-colons and 45 commas.

Hanna's Choice (Part II)

When 15-year-old Michael is reading aloud from Tolstoy's War and Peace to his older lover, Hanna, in The Reader, he does not read out the sentence, "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner," which is, perhaps, intentional given that there isn't much compréhension or pardon in Stephen Daldry's latest film. 

I almost didn't go to see The Reader, firstly because of the absolute slating The Grauniad gave it yesterday, which was the only review I'd read. The reviewer gave it one star, even though he admitted he thought it was actually a good film but just too glib, shallow and sentimental--the lone star seemed rather petulant to me, but anyway. I was also getting fed up of the way Ralph Fiennes seems incapable of playing a character who ever feels any emotions other that distance, passiveness and coolness (The Duchess? The English Patient? The End of the Affair? The Constant Gardener? Maybe it's the presence of the definite article in the film title that causes this).

Anyway, I did see it and I'm glad I did--I certainly gave it a lot more than 1/5, thank you, Grauniad. It's 1995 and 50-ish Michael Berg (aka Ralph) is looking back on the summer of '58 when one rainy day, he became ill on a tram in Berlin and was helped by a woman who took him back to his house. The woman was Hanna (Kate Winslet), who was some 20 years older than Michael but the two begin an intense, if short-lived love affair in which the foreplay usually consists of them taking a bath or Michael reading aloud to Hanna from one of his books. However, all is not well as Hanna is clearly troubled by something and is by turns passionate and cold, tender and cruel and it turns out that she is keeping a secret from Michael--actually, more than one secret, but the *main* secret, which Michael finds out by chance, years later as a law student attending a Nazi war crimes trial, is that Hanna was an SS guard in World War II.

Michael gets in way over his head and is devastated when suddenly Hanna just disappears from her flat one day and never returns. 1976 Michael, 1980 Michael, 1988 Michael and 1995 Michael don't appear to have recovered from the damage this--and the later betrayal he feels when he finds out what Hanna was hiding from him--and he looks back with bitterness and regret and acts like a cold arsehole to the women he sleeps with and then discards. He's damaged, all right.

The centrepiece of the film is in 1966 where Hanna is being tried along with five other female guards--in some ways, this movie is the opposite of--or maybe the same as--Female Agents, showing that just as men have the capacity to do both great and terrible things, so too do women. The specific crime they are on trial for (Michael's law prof carefully makes the point that we cannot judge what is right or wrong; we can only judge what is legal or what was legal at the time) is locking 300 Jewish prisoners in a church in the countryside while on the Long March and refusing to unlock the doors when the church was bombed and caught on fire, leading to the deaths of all but one of the prisoners. Unlike the other defendants, Hanna admits to her role in this but she fails to understand--or appears to--exactly why what she did was wrong. She was just following orders; "they would have escaped if we'd unlocked the doors," she sez.

During the trial, Michael discovers Hanna's second secret--one that is powerful enough to potentially change the verdict on the trial and even though many would consider this secret to be trivial compared to the fact that she had been a guard for the SS, it is this secret that she is most ashamed of and because of her shame for this secret above the other that Michael cannot forgive her. She does not want to admit to it, however, and he remains silent, mainly, it seems, because he is suddenly struggling to understand exactly what "doing the right thing" means and how best justice should be served. Actually, it's not entirely clear he cares a great deal about "doing the right thing" unlike one of his holier-than-thou, sanctimonious fellow students (who seemed to have fallen right out of a John Grisham novel), who declares that if he had a gun, he would have shot Hanna right there and then.

In fact, it's not entirely clear whether Michael cares about anything very much--the later versions of the character seem to have neglected his parents and siblings and, later, his estranged wife and daughter, but maybe all of his thoughts are just constantly occupied in trying to understand just how someone he loved could also, in a past life, have done something so terrible. At first, it seems that the constant baths that take place in the first half of the film (it does for baths (and perhaps for reading aloud) what Nine 1/2 Weeks did for food) are purely erotic; later, the idea of self-cleansing and absolution enters the picture; finally, it's hard to tell whether the first theory wasn't right after all.

I didn't find the film glib or petty or missing the point. I liked that it wasn't what I was expecting. I liked that it reminds us that there isn't always a neat, clear explanation for everything, that not everyone is "a good person," especially when we don't really know what is meant by that phrase. Kate Winslet was excellent and I liked that her character was so ambiguous. But jeez, will someone give Ralph Fiennes a part that actually requires him to express some emotion and act like a human being? Please! (In his defence, I will recant a little and admit that I threw my copy of The End of the Affair at the wall at one point, as I often do when I get frustrated with a character, so I will concede that I just don't like Maurice Bendrix.)

Something Old, Something New

Unknowingly, I took a suggestion of Tyler Cowen's today (unknowing because he posted the entry after I had returned home from my day's activities), the suggestion being to have a *new* day, on or soon after New Year's Day where you don't do anything old but try out some new things. Actually, I did do some things I'd done before as well and being me, the new things weren't massively exciting or bold but then I didn't know that I was taking up a challenge.

So, today, I tested out a new running route. Not that I'm bored of Regent's Park and its environs but after last night, I felt I should give the Outer Circle a bit of a rest for a few days so instead, I did a couple of laps of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. I did not plunge myself into the Serpentine even though inclement weather and inconveniently timed illness meant I escaped the Med--this morning, it couldn't have been much above zero, though, and I don't really have all-weather swimming gear (my bikini isn't particularly suitable). I was pleased to discover that I could jog to High Street Ken in about 15 minutes so if I ever feel the need to do a Whole Foods shop, there are alternatives to the tube. 

I had lunch at Canteen, which isn't new, but I worry that if I don't go there often enough, it will close and they do make an exceptionally delicious bacon sandwich with perfectly crispy bacon--and the (Monmouth) coffee is great too. Better still, I didn't get served by the one waitress in there who doesn't know anything about customer service (the others are all great). I cut across Oxford Street, via Selfridges and Liberty, to Soho. The shops were all open, of course, but naturally, the only things I wanted to buy in Selfridges weren't on sale. I stopped for coffee in a new (to me) cafe called Canela. The coffee was good but I still prefer Fernandez & Wells, which is just around the corner on Beak Street (when it comes to getting a decent cappuccino in London, the motto "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" usually pays the highest dividends).

The only evidence of last night's firework extravaganza on the embankment was a scattering of barriers. The London Eye still looked pretty, all lit up for the evening, though not quite like last night. My next--and final--novelty was a film at the BFI. Of course, the cinema itself is no novelty for me but the film or, at least, the genre of the film was, I think, a first. I went to see The Wild Bunch, which, I believe, is the first proper western I've seen (excluding any that might have been on at home in the Shire while I was in the room) and it was a pretty good one to start with, although unsurprisingly, it's probably never going to be my favourite genre--wot, no dialogue? Wot, no character development? Wot, no women (apart from the Mexican bonitas, of course)? Anyway, it was frolic- and action-filled and had some funny moments and plenty of glory, honour, loyalty and brothers doin' it for themselves, although I'm probably not really qualified to comment further. At the very least, next time someone tries to persuade me to see a western, I probably won't say no, on principle (and it's another one to tick off the IMDb top 250).

That's quite enough novelty for one week, although that said, I really do need a new pair of gloves as all existing my existing gloves seem to have acquired holes or lacking a partner. Needs must, and all that, especially given the shopping dearth of France (OK, I did get one dress but that's not really very much at all!).

Under a Blood Red Sky, a Crowd Has Gathered

This was my first New Year's Eve in London in seven years and I have to say that Boris did well with the fireworks. Put off by the warnings that the viewing areas along the river would probably be full by eight and given that we didn't fancy standing outside in the icy weather for four hours, we decided to go to Primrose Hill to watch, which was much closer and had a much more chilled out, fun atmosphere. It was really the best of both worlds as people were letting off their own fireworks on the hill between eleven and twelve and then after midnight, and then the elevated location gave a great view of the skyline and the big, official fireworks. 

[UFO!] Some people were also letting off what looked like lampshades or mini hot air balloons with a fire inside, which floated off into the distance--I kept missing them with my camera, not least because I kept setting it to the fireworks mode only to have to switch back to manual. 

My photos weren't particularly great a) because I didn't have a tripos and although I'd only had a very strong G & T, my hands weren't exactly their steadiest and b) because the fireworks were a couple of miles away and using the zoom wasn't exactly going to solve the problem of blurriness.

The grand finale--the big blur is actually the London Eye, BT Tower and a hella big segue of fireworks, lasers and other exciting visuals.

"All is quiet on New Year's Day

Nothing changes on New Year's Day."

And in their blazing solitude

The stars sang in their sockets through the night:

'Blow bright, blow bright

The coal of this unquickened world.'