Thanks to a link in Facebook, yesterday I discovered the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. The title reminds me irresistibly of the academic syllabus - Reeling, Writhing and Fainting in Coils - in Alice Through the Looking Glass or is it Alice in Wonderland. Johnny Depp famously starred in a recent movie of Alice, and stars in a film just released, The Rum Diaries, written and directed by Bruce Robinson, the same man who wrote and directed Withnail and I one of my favourite movies (along with This is Spinal Tap). I watched Withnail last night in the new knowledge that the photograph of Uncle Monty, improbably in football strip, is a still taken from a movie in which my son in law Terry starred as a child actor. As the film progressed, I picked out some dialogue that for some reason I found particularly guffaw-inducing, as follows:
'This IS the morning. Stand back. Stand back' (as Richard E Grant/Withnail strides manic and wild-eyed towards the kitchen to do the washing up).
'We are drifting towards the arena of the unwell' (I think this is said by Paul McGann, the fellow actor and Withnail's hapless flat-sharer.
'We've gone on holiday by mistake' (Withnail, pleading with the farmer, whose left leg is mysteriously encased in polythene, for fuel and food).
'GET INTO THE VAN' (the policeman cutting across Richard E Grant/Withnail's increasingly implausible representations and arresting him for drunk driving).
I was also rendered helpless by the shot of Grant making his way unsteadily across a muddy forecourt with plastic bags tied round his feet (no wellies being available).
Then: the scene in the tea shop in Penrith where the far gone Grant orders: 'I want the finest wines available to humanity. And I want them NOW' My sentiments exactly.
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
Monday, 7 November 2011
Tatting
I have 29 boxes of books arriving today from the warehouse where they have been waiting for me to sort through them. This is my tatting type task for the next month. Tatting, for those too gently reared to have heard of - or practised - this repetitive exercise in economy, is the making of rugs from old bits of materials cut into strips and threaded through some supportive web (this is wrong - for the right description of tatting see below*. What I was thinking of, possibly, is 'hooking'. I'll get back to you on that). Anyway, sounds like William Boyd's recipe for novel writing, and none the worse for that. How am I going to tackle the task of sorting them? I have weeded my library twice, in 1996 and 2009. But that was before Kindle. I think I will now be able to give away quite a few books that I kept 'just in case'. My main aim will be to have within easy reach the reference material I need to write two books: one on Julia Reitlinger the Russian artist (1898-1988) whose life and career spanned Europe in the last century and the other on the fate of a particular type of spruce from a narrow 10-mile wide coastal strip of the northwest Pacific, which occupied - and still occupies - a disproportionate amount of space, both literally and figuratively, in the national imagination. When I say 'national' I mean 'British'. Using this criterion, which has crystallised itself through the exercise of explaining it in words (well done, words!), I can at least get the books required onto the shelves in my library/work room. I was sitting at the table with a caller at around 5pm yesterday and a group of school children - sorry, students, - passing by called out and waved at us, creating the uncomfortable sensation that we were appearing on a kind of tiny reality TV show. Have I mentioned recently how passionately I love Moffat? I seriously believe it is the best place in the world to live.
* According to Wikipedia: 'Tatting is a technique for handcrafting a particularly durable lace constructed by a series of knots and loops. Tatting can be used to make lace edging as well as doilies, collars, and other decorative pieces. The lace is formed by a pattern of rings and chains formed from a series of cow hitch, or half-hitch knots, called double stitches (ds), over a core thread. Gaps can be left between the stitches to form picots, which are used for practical construction as well as decorative effect.' Tatting has been used in occupational therapy to keep convalescent patients' hands and minds active during recovery, as documented, for example, in Betty MacDonald's The Plague & I.
Today's reading recommendation is Prof N T Wright's remarkable inaugural lecture at the University of St Andrews on Oct 26 “Imagining the Kingdom” – N.T. Wright’s Inaugural Professorial Lecture « Euangelion.
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Living in burrows
I am struggling with The Hobbit. Is it because they live in burrows? The language is laborious and terribly old fashioned. I will keep you posted on this one. I found myself flying into a rage the other day at a seminar on underground houses which seemed to me to beg virtually every necessary question about the 'free spirits' who get together (on benefits?) to tunnel into south-facing hillsides in Fife and New Mexico. I am going to visit the protesters outside St Paul's towards the end of the month to see and hear them for myself, since - for better or worse - their encampment seems to have provoked a crisis in the Church of England, to which I belong by virtue of my education (Portsdown Lodge, alma mater of the late Loulou de la Falaise; Benenden and St George's School, Switzerland, where I was confirmed). I listen to Songs of Praise on Sunday afternoon and attend services two or three times a year. I wonder if there is a chapel or church at Center Parcs where my family and I are going to spend Christmas this year. Our Lady of the Heated Pool in the Pine Trees? Other works I have downloaded onto my Kindle are: The Father Brown Stories by G K Chesterton and this year's Booker prize winner: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I looked at page one and the omens are not good.
William Boyd
I owe William Boyd an apology for calling Any Human Heart 'mechanical'. It was an excellent read. Now that I have discovered Boyd, I have downloaded another, 'Fascination' which may be even better. The novels are escapist not in the sense that they are improbable, but they take place in beautiful parts of the world: France, London and New York, among beautiful people. A propos: Loulou de la Falaise, a contemporary at my prep school, Portsdown Lodge in Cooden, Sussex has died aged 63. Her obituary in The Times today reads:
In 1948, Maxime (Birley - she changed her first name from Maxine when she wed) gave birth to Loulou (she claimed to have been christened with not water but Shocking de Schiaparelli) but by the time she was 3, her parents were divorced. Maxime went on to act as a vendeuse mondaine for Paquin and Schiaparelli. Cecil Beaton proclaimed her the only truly chic Englishwoman of her generation, yet her elegance was matched by her infidelities. An affair with an Italian playboy had led to her being declared unfit by a French court and Loulou and her brother, Alexis, were placed in foster care. When she was 7 she went to a Sussex boarding school. This was followed by the French lycée in New York and a finishing school in Gstaad, where she was expelled for keeping a St Bernard which, as she led her hound down the street, set upon and devoured, as she described it, “a little café-au-lait poodle”.
It was her turn to be in disgrace and she returned to her grandmother in England. Whether by error or design, Lady Birley failed to arrange for Loulou to “come out”. In any case, she made a splendid match when she married, at 18, Desmond FitzGerald, the 29th (and last) Knight of Glin. The union did not endure. They separated without bitterness a year later and divorced in 1970. Later in the same year, the Knight of Glin married a friend of Loulou’s.
Newly single, Loulou joined her indefatigable mother in New York where Maxime, having survived affairs with Louis Malle, Max Ernst and the painter Bernard Pfriem, had just married John McKendry, curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an early patron of Robert Mapplethorpe. There Loulou fell in with Maxime’s new friend, Andy Warhol and his Factory crowd, as well as Schiaparelli’s beautiful granddaughters, Marisa and Berry Berenson. Discovered by Diana Vreeland, she briefly modelled for Vogue, posing for Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, and designed some fabrics for Halston.
In 1968, when a junior editor of Queen magazine, she met Yves Saint Laurent, who had established his own couture house six years earlier, after briefly assuming Christian Dior’s mantle on his death in 1958. It was in 1968 that Chanel had declared him her spiritual heir and he repeatedly cited her and Schiaparelli as his favourite designers. Loulou and Saint Laurent immediately took to each other. Apart from her striking red-haired, wisp-thin beauty, he was attracted by her directness of manner and edgy sense of humour. They shared a love of colour from their childhoods — his Algerian, hers from what she called “Irish-gypsy”.
She appreciated his gesture in sending her a box in 1971, after a disastrous showing, of high-cut emerald green fox fur coats, said to have been inspired by Parisian prostitutes. By 1972 she was working with Saint Laurent in Paris and while she became part of a wider louche, hip demi-monde that surrounded him, she was more significantly an indispensable member of a protective coterie that included his éminence grise, Pierre Berge, and Saint Laurent’s “twin sister”, Betty Catroux. Loulou looked beautiful in his creations at all-night events and made jewellery for his fashion shows. She became, in short, his official muse.
In 1977, Saint Laurent hosted her wedding to Thadée Klossowski de Rola, the younger son of the painter Balthus. The wedding party was held at the Chalet des Iles in the Bois de Boulogne and remembered in Paris as the first grand social stir-fry of “punks and baronesses”. Saint Laurent continued to show four times each year despite increasing fits of manic depression, ever dependant on his muse and devoted circle. Certain mischievous fashion journalists would dub some seasons Yves Saint Loulou.
On the master’s retirement, she launched her own label of clothes and accessories. She laconically observed, “I am looking for my muse now.” But she appeared not to need one. Her jewellery became celebrated as whimsically and characteristically hers — huge cuffs of gold-tone metal, colourful enamel and bright glass; necklaces made of shards of jet; chokers of pebbles.
Asked what clothes she collected, she replied: “I don’t collect clothes — I hand them down. They do sometimes turn into a pile of dust, but that’s a tribute to a good life.”
De la Falaise is survived by her second husband and their daughter, Anna.
Loulou de la Falaise, designer and muse, was born on May 4, 1948. She died on November 5, 2011, aged 63
Saturday, 5 November 2011
The Hobbit
I follow a Cambridge cleric called Malcom Guite on Facebook
. He has been giving a series of talks on The Inklings, the group of academics who used to meet to read each other their own work. The group included C. S. (The Lion , The Witch and The Wardrobe) Lewis and J R R (The Lord of the Rings) Tolkien. I somehow missed out on reading Tolkein, and am going to start with The Hobbit. Malcolm Guite's seductive lecture on Tolkein's imaginary world argues that his vision is essential to compensate for the reductive, atomised nature of our modern scientific and technological world. There is a no doubt apocryphal anecdote that when Tolkein started to read one evening, one Inkling exclaimed 'Not another f*cking elf'. There will always be sceptics. Talking of scepticism: I published a haunting photograph yesterday, taken by my cousin James, of my mother standing in the sea, staring into the distance off the island of Spargi in Sardinia in 1960. She knew by then that my father was seriously involved with the woman who became my stepmother - he used to beetle off to the post office in La Maddalena to collect letters from her and post his replies. There is a brilliant study of the truth behind family photographs by Halla Beloff, professor of psychology at Edinburgh University. I looked online for a reference to it with no success, so have asked her to let me have chapter and verse. My cousin James recorded an interview also available online about his many years living and collaborating with Karl -Heinz Stockhausen http://www.mixcloud.com/TechnicallyClassical/episode-4-karlheinz-stockhausen/. His holiday snaps reveal a remarkable gift for photography too.
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