February: journeys
Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine, été, Gustave Courbet, under CC BY-SA 4.0
February! This month I barely went more than twenty minutes’ walk away from home, so I guess it makes sense that I spent a lot of time thinking about travelling and moving around and distant places. I particularly enjoyed:
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)
Star Trek Voyager (1995-2001)
I Wonder As I Wander (Langston Hughes, 1956)
Random Restaurant Bot (Joe Schoech, 2021)
Il viaggio del veliero (C.S. Lewis, 1952, trans. Chiara Belliti)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh)
Thematically this was kind-of a holdover from January, which was Sleepy Beautiful Women month. But you know what: when I started reading this I found it was simply too sleepy for me. I had to stop, because the book and the short winter’s-end days made it so hard to stay awake.
The narrator of MYOR&R decides to sleep for a year, and she works so hard at achieving this. She convinces a psychiatrist to prescribe her a wide variety of experimental and variably fictional drugs, and she lies in bed, and she naps and wakes and watches movies on VHS and naps again, and it’s all a lot for bleak February. I would read two pages and find myself drowsing asleep. Of course this is an absolute feat of writing, to create something that lulls the reader into sleep not because the book is difficult or boring but just because it is convincing, because it makes the case for not being awake so well that the reader’s body begins to comply. But I’m a bad napper, I wake up grumpy and confused, I found this book ill-advised.
And then around 4am one night I woke up and couldn’t sleep so I thought I would try it again, that perhaps I could make some use of its ability to send m to sleep, and I started reading, and kept reading, and finished several hours later, still awake, the sad and terrible heroine having become less or at least differently sleepy, her drowses no longer luring me to join her. Instead I became invested in her attempt, tense about the difficulties, the awkward details of the logistics. I cared about the plan. I wanted to know if it would work. This is a heist novel, but instead of diamonds the narrator is stealing more than her fair share of sleep.
I Wonder As I Wander (Langston Hughes)
A friend recommended I Wonder As I Wander when I complained about how sleepy the Moshfegh was making me. She thought it might work as an antidote. It was a good recommendation! This book is all events and adventures and short chapters and things happening. Hughes is writing in the 1950s about his experiences in the 30s: his travels through Cuba and Haiti, and back home to the United States, and reading his poems at Black colleges across the South; he goes to Russia as part of a doomed project to make a movie, then to China and Japan, around the world back to San Francisco, through to New York and then to Spain in time to report on the Spanish Civil War. The book covers 1931-1938, and he does a lot of stuff.
It’s great, it’s full of weird anecdotes and terrible moments and ridiculous coincidences and also just a bunch of famous people popping in for a chapter or a line, Sylvia Townsend Warner arrives for half a sentence in Madrid, Arthur Koestler knocks on the door of Hughes’ room one night after overhearing him playing records, then the two of them just hang out in increasingly remote parts of Russia for a while. Visas go wrong. Hughes befriends people with whom he has no languages in common. He tries to colour in the yellow dots on a tie so that it’s appropriate to wear to a funeral. He lugs his record player around the world, throwing it onto and off of trains that he doesn’t quite miss, playing music loud in Madrid to hide the sound of bombs. He goes to weird theatre everywhere:
And one amazing production was so designed that important things were happening all over the place, so the spectators sat in swivel chairs, whirling around at will to catch whatever interested them most.
It all has such a curious and friendly tone, holding the emotions of it at a distance, recounting them like the weather or a late train, not trying to give us the experience of feeling the things Hughes felt but rather the experience of being told about them by him twenty years later.
Star Trek: Voyager
Speaking of long journeys: Terry and I have been watching Star Trek: Voyager at lunchtimes over the course of the last couple of months. We've skipped a lot of episodes, mostly guided by this consolidated watch list, which means we’ve missed, as I understand it, most (although by no means all) of the more regrettable moments (racist / weird about sex / all a dream / particularly egregious holodeck shenanigans).
Honestly, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, you know what this show is like, even if you haven’t watched this specific instance: 5-8 major characters and a largely irrelevant number of minor characters are in space somewhere; they have adventures. Usually two of the major characters are women, but in this case three of them are women, which is nice. And here the people in space are on a long voyage home, with plenty of stops for moral dilemmas and minor adventures, which I like. I am the sort of viewer, or reader, who does not mind spoilers; in fact I’ll quite often stop halfway through a book or a movie to read a plot summary on wikipedia because the tension of not knowing what is going to happen has become obstructive. I like the way Voyager is pulled together by its drive towards a destination, plenty of space for curlicues and oddities on the side but with a sense of direction to make it feel whole. Plus one of the three women is “Katharine Hepburn but she’s running a space ship”, which if had known it in advance might have prompted me to watch the show much sooner.
I also enjoy the big clearly-drawn personalities in this, how the writers decide what someone is like, and then you always know how they’re going to act. Here is this guy, who is kind-of vaguely rebellious, he likes to disobey orders, kiss ladies, and fly fast! Here’s this guy, who is hapless in romance, overlooked for promotion, and plays the clarinet! This woman says things like “it is in my nature to agree with the collective”, and is working very hard at learning to understand human behaviour!
Finally, this show has the absolute correct amount of plot stuff that either makes no sense or directly contradicts previously established fact but which nevertheless serves the immediate needs of the story (for a Star Trek series the correct amount of this is, I think, quite high, but not unlimited).
Random Restaurant (Joe Schoech)
Random Restaurant is a Twitter bot which posts, every half-hour, a random restaurant from Google: its name, the location, and four pictures. I have been paying a whole lot of attention to it this month.
I love it so much. I love:
The huge, unending, constant variety of restaurants
Here is a restaurant
Here is another restaurant
There is always another restaurant
Just the warmth of knowing there are so inexhaustibly many places saying “hey, come here, sit down, eat something”, chains and rip-offs of chains and tiny cafes and coffee machines with a little table hidden in the corner of a hardware store; that so many people have made a room you can go and sit in and have something to eat and drink, it feels welcoming and magical
The family parties, the birthday balloons, the groups of friends doing weird poses
Buildings in sunlight
Looking at meals and thinking “ooh I would love to eat that”
The way sometimes the pictures are fancy professionally-styled photos of food, “come here! consume this perfectly-lit platonic ideal of an ice-cream!”, and sometimes they’re someone’s phone-picture-with-flash of a misshapen scoop melting over a wonky cup
The way so many of the restaurants are pizza places! You never have to wait long for a pizza place with some plastic chairs and a shot of the counter and another of a huge pizza; this pizza place may be called Pizzola or Pizza Mia or Telepizza (Telepizza!) or La Piazza Pizza or La Pizza Piazza, Pizza Delight, Pizza Pizza, Ma’s Pizza Kitchen, Marco’s, there’ll be a Pizza Hut or a Domino’s thrown in, a Pizza Hot as well, Pizza Boys, Hell Pizza, Michelangelo Pizza und Warme Küche, La Boîte a Pizza, Fabrica de Pizzas, Pita the Pizzeria, Quick Pizza, Pizza Fast. Why are there so many pizza places? My guess is it’s something to do with the proportion of customers who want delivery / pickup versus eating in, and what that does to your margins; the low perishability of most of the ingredients so there’s less wastage; the way even so-so pizza can be pretty good if it’s hot enough; the way once you have decent dough and a pizza oven you can make pizza so so easily but most people who suddenly want a pizza just do not have those things sitting around at home. I don’t know. I just love to see the pizza restaurants go by.
Once, only once, back in January, the bot posted a restaurant I knew: not one I’ve been to, but one near my mum’s old house, one I have driven past a couple of times. A pizza place, of course. And I was so happy, it felt like the random numbers had chosen me. I posted about this on twitter, and a friend followed the bot, and the bot immediately, immediately, next tweet, showed her a restaurant that she had eaten at. Of course this will happen sometimes, with random things. The magic of random numbers is that when they select something that feels like it’s for you, it is a gift from fate in the way that anything with a conscious intent behind it can never be.
Il viaggio del veliero (C.S. Lewis, trans. Chiara Belliti)
I started learning Italian seriously a couple of years ago — by “seriously” I don’t mean anything dramatic, I just mean I stopped relying on Duolingo and a general sense of optimism, and instead started a weekly online lesson, and tried to spend at least five or ten minutes on the language every day. It is magical to me, an anglophone monoglot, that I can discharge my shame at speaking only one language by simply learning another, that change is possible, that doing a little bit of work for a long time really does add up; and at the same time, it’s absolutely infuriating that I have put real effort into learning a language over such a prolonged period and still, after two years, am only… slowly getting there. That I make mistakes about everything, that I have to stop and think hard if I want to discuss a hypothetical situation and I’ll probably still mess it up, that I may get the general gist of a paragraph but then when I really look at individual sentences within it, so many of the details elude me.
Still. I’m improving. I’m learning things. And I’m reading a lot — often books for kids, or Italian translations of books I know well in English, or in this case both. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was always my favourite Narnia book, a long meandering journey through clear seas and strange islands. There’s no villain, there’s no danger that lasts for longer than a chapter or two; just a destination, and a boat, and a bunch of incidents and people and interactions and pleasures and adventures along the way. I must have read it twenty times. This sort of journey with deviations might be my favourite structure of story; no wonder I enjoyed Voyager and I Wonder as I Wander.
Reading it in translation, I discovered something I didn’t expect, when I set out to learn Italian: that rereading a book I know well in a language that I don’t is a kind of magic. The unfamiliarity, the requirement for effort and focus, makes the jokes funny again. It makes the long corridor in the magician’s house frightening. It makes the image of the dark cloud that they sail into so clear. The attention I am able to pay to this book in English has been rubbed smooth by familiarity, but reading it in a new language makes it spiky again, there’s friction that lets me stop and notice. I don’t know. I’m thinking about that drawing exercise where you look at a famous picture upside-down and try to copy it in order to see afresh what it is like, the structures of its shapes. What a strange and unexpected gift.