Michael Wells's Blog

heaps of anagrams & their mutations by Emil Swells & Swithun Wells

MLSW books is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Phase Shape.s, heaps of anagrams and their mutations by Emil Swells and Swithun Wells: a light-hearted, quirky and sometimes queer collection of sixty anagrammatic poems, prompted by Emil’s love of quick crosswords, translation and language learning apps.

The 60 poems evolved from the curiosities of the anagram. They have elements of sound and visual poetry. The poems are semi-abstract, semi-surreal, semi-detached and sometimes half-baked.

Book launch on Tuesday 9 April.

How did this collection come about?

In the early twentieth century the great French writer André Gide wrote a book called Corydon in defence of homosexuality, which has always been an important element of human civilisation. Gide considered that Corydon was his most important work and first published it one hundred years ago in 1924, despite friends’ concerns that its reasoned and passionate defence of the naturalness of homosexuality would harm his reputation.

Emil read the elegant Gallimard–Nouvelle Revue Française edition with its sober cover design: pale straw yellow background, austere black and red type with simple black and double red line framing. As they read, Emil’s eyes glazed over and saw Croydon, prompted by thoughts of their newly-divorced lesbian friend who had sadly had to move to Norbury from Balham and was feeling emotionally and geographically dislocated.

The ways in which letters in a word can dance mischievously set Emil to thinking about how feelings and meanings spring out of words and produce strange images: a beautiful ancient Greek shepherd boy, Corydon, frolicking among the hills and vales of verdant suburban South London.

Given Emil’s penchant for gay French writers, London and anagrams, no surprise that they all figure prominently in the collection. Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the French Academy, was born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour a Franco-Belgian aristocrat; she flipped the last bit of her name into her almost anagrammatic pseudonym. Her Memoirs of Hadrian tell of the passion between the eponymous Roman emperor and his young lover Antinous.

Marcel Proust, another part-time cross-channel shirt-lifting scribbler shape-shifted Whistler into Elstir as the paradigm artist in A la recherche du temps perdu.

Emil and Swithun’s Greater London is alluded to in Epsom poems, the aforementioned Croydon, The Sam, Crayford Daisy, but above all in Their Erith, birthplace of their ancestors. They sent a copy of PhaseShape.s to another native of the north Kent river port, the great poet, Wendy Cope, who responded, “It’s fun and very ingenious. I’m delighted with the Erith poem dedicated to me.”

As a translator fascinated by words, their strange and multiple forms, Emil became preoccupied by the ways in which slight rearrangements of the same sets of letters could produce curious variations and potentially novel meanings. As a result, some of the poems in the collection are both aural and visual, some are semi-abstract: abstractions from a primary source of meaning, but perhaps capable of transmitting other ideas, images or emotions.

Non-binary Emil (they/them) has long held in great esteem the American poet Marianne Moore. She referred to herself as her brother’s brother and insisted that her close family referred to her (he/him) with the masculine pronoun. Her/his/(their?) Poetry aims to “present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

The German language has a beautiful expression, Aha-Erlebnis, to describe the moment when you solve a problem or you get a sudden insight, like finding the answer to a crossword clue or understanding a phrase in a new language.

Emil and I wish the readers of Phase Shape.s many real live toads and aha-experiences or even just an occasional haha!

We hope it sells well 😉

Swithun Wells

Kentish Town, 1^st April 2024

ISBN: 978-1-7384493-3-0

Published by Scantech, Hastings, Great Britain, on behalf of MLSW Books.

Copyright © Swithun Wells, 2024. www.swithunwells.com

Phase Shape.s is available from the Owl Bookshop, Pritchard & Ure or on request by email to mlsw[at]duck.com

RRP £12.34

Monday 14 August 2023

Today would have been my father’s 100^th birthday. In part to celebrate his life, in part out of curiosity about his early adult years, this coming autumn I will publish a collection of his Letters to Long Lane from the 1940s.

In 1943, Arthur joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and trained in various places around England, mainly in Bury, Lancashire, and Aborfield, near Reading, in Berkshire. In early 1945 he was posted to India and spent most of the following two years there. He returned to England on the Empire Windrush, in June 1947, shortly before the independence of India.

Arthur Lewis Wells (1923-2019) was born in Erith, Kent to Stan & Peg, fairly modest, upwardly mobile sort of people, living on the edge of the sprawling metropolis of London. Arthur was named after my grandad’s only brother, killed in the First War in 1915 at the age of 19. In the early 1930s, the family moved to a newly-built semi at 6 Long Lane, Bexley Heath, Kent, England, which is the address on the letters home, whence the title of the book.

Letters to Long Lane is the correspondence I found in an embossed leather pouch in which my grandparents had carefully kept Arthur’s letters. There are letters from other people, too, including Mrs Jessie Macnaughton-Smith, whose son Michael, a school friend of Arthur’s, joined the RAF as a navigator and died in 1944, at the age of 20, shot down over Belgium.

The book will be about 300 pages (75,000 words) long and gives insights into the life of a twenty-something year old in the 1940s. Arthur trained as an engineer, but his passion was singing and he devoted much time and energy to rehearsing and performing opera, his first performances were broadcast on All India Radio. In Delhi, he met Giovanni Lupato, a young Italian POW and tenor, who was to become a lifelong friend. After demobilisation in September 1947, Arthur travelled to Venice to stay with Giovanni and train with his relative, the operatic tenor, Luigi Lupato.

Arthur was a devout Roman Catholic and was wondering whether he had a vocation as a priest, yet was also in a relationship with Kay Povey, a childhood sweetheart.

Through these letters home, we follow the development of a young man from a modest background in south-east London, who left school at 16 to avoid evacuation and started work as an apprentice at the Gas Light & Coke Company in Beckton, while also studying for an engineering degree at Woolwich Polytechnic. He ended his military career, having worked as Deputy Assistant Director of Mechanical Engineering (DADME) for the Chief Administrative Officer War Department, New Delhi, with the rank of Major.

Letters to Long Lane, to be published in Autumn 2023.

A School for Joy, an extraordinary story of transformation in India

It is a great pleasure to announce the publication of “A School for Joy”, my English translation of “La Route de la Joie” written by Helene Khim-Tit.

You can get your copy from the publishers, Extraordinary Editions or from the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town Road, London.

A School for Joy is a life-affirming story of redemption, resilience and transformation in the face of grief and suffering. Helene, who lost her husband at an early age and then her only son, embarked alone on a trip to India. Against her initial inclination, she reluctantly included the town of Fatehpur Sikri in her visit, a less popular tourist destination in North India. In a remarkable twist of fate, she decided to set up a primary school for the children she met there. This is the account of how it happened and a compelling argument for universal education and socio-economic justice. The Sunrise School opened in February 2016 and after only five years of schooling, the eldest pupils passed the Indian secondary school certificate exam, which children usually sit after nine years of education.

If you have a bicycle and live in London, read this book.

Wheels within wheels go round and around. I was going to write a short email to Jon Day to thank him for writing such a brilliant book about cycling and psychogeography, but it has spun into a blog post.

Cyclogeography, published by Notting Hill Editions, is a natty little cloth bound tome and a book you want to keep. My bicycle shop brother Tom the Bike of West Wales, who appeared in this blog many years ago for our Brazing Bromptons in Brentford trip will get a copy for Christmas or his birthday.

Jon Day is a one-time London cycle courier and now an academic. As someone who has had a decades-long interest in Flann O’Brien and is a devotee of De Selbyian philosophy, accompanied by a practice of quotidian velocipedal observance, I rushed out to buy Cyclogeography a few months after it was published in 2015 and it has been winking at me ever since, edging its way up my pile of unread (yesIwillwillabsolutelygettoyou) books on the shelf by my desk. It must be the power of Ubu Roi’s pataphysics that finally took me from one book to the next. I had just finished reading André Gide’s masterpiece, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), a fictional work about love, deception, falsity, homosexuality and the search for authenticity, in which Edouard, one of the principal protagonists, a novelist, is writing a book about the same themes also called Les Faux-Monnayeurs. The picture in picture mise en abime idea, a vortex of reality and unreality twisting around itself in which the real-life Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu Roi, and wacko cyclist makes an appearance as himself. Feeling bereft after Gide, I reached for the patient pink copy of Cyclogeography only to find a thread of comforting continuity in the form of same Alfred Jarry, IRL this time, photographed on his Clément Cycle with wheels which revolved four times for every turn of his pedals. Tough stuff. But Day is tough enough to have survived for several years the grit and traffic of London courier cycling.

He drew me completely into his narrative; I felt that this was a book that had been written with me in mind, although he has absolutely no idea who I am, as it brings together so many of my cycling and literary interests. He devotes many pages to the flâneurs conceptualized by Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, of the Situationiste Internationale, whose work inspired the British psychogeographers such as Iain Sinclair and Will Self, and Luis de Miranda, the author of Being & Neonness, which I translated and which was published last year.

Day was a cycle courier just as the profession was waning, gradually replaced by the advance of internet-driven technology; businesses no longer need mad young people on bicycles to dash across the city with a package in their shoulder bag to be delivered at breakneck speed. Day’s deliveries and journeys criss-crossing the city struck a chord with me, as I spent my first year after graduating as a white van courier driver in central London. My head was so full of French literature and philosophy that I decided all I wanted to do was to discover London in depth, which is what I did in 1983-1984. I drove a VW LT 35 white unmarked van for a company in Clapham. Two dodgy brothers who managed motorbike couriers and van delivery drivers. I’d drive every morning to an undisclosed location in the entrails of Wardour Street where underground slaves sat day and night in cubicle cells copying VHS video cassettes of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. We delivered about a quarter of a million copies to various locations around London and a warehouse in West Bromwich. The drivers’ challenge was to load a pallet of unsecured boxes and deliver it to a depot in Barlby Road via the Westway without dropping a box and in the fastest possible time. I don’t now remember if I ever won the speed challenge, but I often got there without dropping a box. I do remember, however, one morning sitting around in the despatch bay at the bottom of the ramp, waiting for a job, when in walked a bright young, besuited manager, bristling with newfound officiousness and authority. He gawped in horror when he saw me. We’d been at university together, knew each other vaguely and had both graduated a few months earlier. He was outraged that I was doing what he must have considered such a menial job for a graduate, sneering disparagingly at my casual jumper and jeans. It seemed as if he felt insulted, his status undermined by having a peer at the bottom end of the pecking order in the big company where he’d landed a management position. Whatever. I learned a lot on that job, how to reverse a van down any narrow, winding loading bay entrance and how to navigate the streets of London in double-quick time. I kept the van at the weekends and unhooked the clock, so my weekend jobs on the side were not booked to the company. One of these was taking building materials for the refurbishment of the shop at the top of Coldharbour Lane, where Brer Tom the Bike was setting up the Brixton Cycles Workers’ Cooperative, which is still going today, albeit in different premises.

These city navigational skills came in handy the following year when I was temporarily back in London from Paris and got a job as a minicab driver for an outfit in a cellar on the Edgware Road, just near Church Street, run by a friendly Barbadian guy. I’ll write those stories up elsewhere, but suffice to say that I learned even more about the world on the end of a two-way radio, where my call number was 28 and I’d be told to pick up rich Nigerians at Heathrow, drive them as directed to Hatton Garden (gold? diamonds?) and then shopping for real estate in the West End. When I complained to my Barbadian boss that these Nigerians never paid what I asked them for and what they owed me, say £45 for three hours As Directed, he laughed and taught me about bartering. Nigerians need to haggle, he told me, so start at £60 and chew it over with them, then you’ll get your money and they’ll feel they haven’t been cheated. One day, when taking some thieving local kids to the Front Line in Notting Hill’s Lancaster Road (remember London had two then, the other was in Railton Road, Brixton) to visit the infamous dealer Reggie Guts, the radio buzzed, the controller urging insistently “Two-Eight, Two-Eight, don’t come back to base, the gabbas are after you.” The kids often paid in US dollars that they had come by in the local hotels. Don’t ask me how.

Cyclogeography plunged me deeply back into my time as a courier driver in London, yet the pages flew by and I was worried that there was no mention yet of the heroic Flann O’Brien (fear not, Day is an afficionado and apparently academic expert on him, too), who has been an inspiration to my artist brother Nick for many years. Day does indeed give full respect to O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which is a must read for anybody who owns a bicycle. I remember at that time, while I was lobbying for southern Africa in Paris, meeting a fun Irishwoman in a thinktank in Brussels and using the magical new-fangled fax machine in our office to send her a Private Eye cartoon celebrating European cooperation and cuisine ranging from Flan O’Brien to Quiche Lorraine.

As anyone who cycles regularly across London, north to south, east to west with a radius of say five to ten miles from Charing Cross, you become very aware of the Thames, its valley and tributaries, its old paths and routes and more, importantly its gradients. Jon Day brilliantly captures the closeness that cycling gives the rider to the ridden, the bonding with the London environment and possible perceptions of it. When I returned to London after over twenty years abroad, I cycled everywhere and still do, sensing a visceral attachment to the river and the valley with its fairly shallow ups and downs. Although this city may seem mammoth, it is surprisingly amenable to mid-distance cycling. A couple of years ago, one warm September evening, I cycled the 13 miles to a meeting in Richmond via Bayswater and Kew on my Brompton, thinking that I would get the train back to Kentish Town. But it was still so warm at 10 pm when my meeting ended, that I struck out along the Upper Richmond Road, was over Putney Bridge before I knew it and back in Kentish Town Road at 10.50 pm. I know this is correct as the kebab shop closes at 11 pm. Somewhere around Sloane Square a pang of hunger made me wonder if I would be in time for a donor with salad and chili sauce. I was their last customer that evening.

Day has a chapter on the alleycat races of the courier cyclists, which is quite fascinating, although races of any kind don’t usually interest me. I did have, however, a project to translate José Meiffret’s “My Dates with Death” (Mes Rendez-Vous avec la mort), a French speed cyclist’s autobiography. He set a speed record of more than 200 kph (127 mph) on his bicycle, fitted with a 130-tooth chainring, following a pacer-car on a German autobahn in 1962. It’s a book about a man’s spiritual quest and self-realisation. He fell off at speed and nearly died ten years earlier in 1952, but rebuilt his body and soul and achieved his goal. While researching Meiffret, I discovered that an American woman, Denise Mueller-Korenek, rode a bicycle more than 180 mph (290 kph) in 2018. Faster than the take-off speed of an Airbus A340. Surely De Selby would agree that this journey was a hallucination.

Day meets some of the great writers of cycling, psychogeography and London, including the Oulipian Paul Fournel (Need for the Bike) and Iain Sinclair of Hackney fame. Day visits the latter in his chapter ‘Off the Map’ which looks at ‘deep topography’, using the cycle to communicate with the unmapped past. His ride to Becton brought back multiple memories for me. During my white van driving stint, one regular job would be to take rubbish from Soho along the A13 to Barking Creek where there was a dump and recycling centre. Waiting to unload I used to watch the herons in the mud and muse on how sad and dirty we had made this beautiful environment. Another similar tip trip would take me to the recycling centre at the mouth of the Wandle where it flows into the Thames, just upstream of Wandsworth Bridge. Back East, however, Jon Day climbs the Becton Alps and views the remainders of the gas works that Stanley Kubrick used as a set in Full Metal Jacket. That gave me a sort of Aha-Erlebnis, as the Germans have it. A moment of illumination, if not quite a solution of a problem, but another jigsaw puzzle piece joining together place, people and history. My granddad Stanley worked for most of his professional life at Becton Gas Works as an industrial draughtsman. My dad also worked at the gas works as an apprentice and would cycle every day the ten miles there and back from their home in Erith.

Day’s final chapter, On the Road, is a homage to the early twentieth century poet, Edward Thomas, whose In Pursuit of Spring takes him in 1913 by bicycle from London to Somerset, a ride akin to others in the book that Day replicates, if that is the correct word. Relives, recreates, records. Reads and recycles. And again, in the cycle of my reading, Day’s tribute to Thomas brought me back to the book I had read before Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs. Robert Graves’s Goodbye to all that is his autobiography, mainly covering the horrors of the trenches in the First World War. Graves and Thomas were friends. Thomas was killed in action in France in 1917.

Cyclogeography is a very erudite, beautifully written book that should be read by anyone interested in literature, London and, of course, cycling and recycling.

– an English translation –

If you’d been walking up Kentish Town Road in London last evening, you might have noticed a party going on inside the Owl Bookshop. We were celebrating a book by Luis de Miranda, which I translated from the French original –L’être et le néon – and which has now been published in English by MIT Press as Being and Neonness. It is a cultural, historical and philosophical exploration of neon lights as a metonymy for twentieth century identity. It has already been positively reviewed in The Atlantic and also caught the attention of Matthew Sweet at BBC Radio Three’s Free Thinking who talked to Luis about it last week. To explain the background to the translation, here is an interview I did with Luis and here is how we began the launch party.

Being and Neonness, what is it all about?

When I was studying French literature and philosophy at Bristol University, it was a somewhat schizophrenic experience, because the philosophy department, true to the analytical tradition in the English-speaking world, only considered two French thinkers, 17^th century Rene Descartes and 20^th century Jean-Paul Sartre, to be philosophers in the strict sense. My beloved “philosophes”, 16^th century Montaigne and 18^th century Voltaire and Diderot, were rather sniffily dismissed. That taught me a lesson about translation and les faux amis, false friends: a “philosophe” in French is not necessarily a “philosopher” in English.

So, in English philosophy we did read René Descartes who said essence precedes existence, “Cogito ergo sum”, “I think therefore I am”, that is “to do is to be”. We also read Jean-Paul Sartre who said “existence precedes essence”, that is “to be is to do”. So, to do is to be or to be is to do and, of course, the great American philosopher, Frank Sinatra said “Doobey Doobey Doo.”

I think you will find that this little book brings together key moments in Western 20^th century culture, and mixes humour, music, poetry and philosophy in a very readable way.

A few words about the title. I expect most of you have heard of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 “L’être et le néant”, “Being and Nothingness”, which has recently been translated for a second time by Sarah Richmond, a philosopher here at UCL in London.

But what about the neon? Our book is “L’être et le néon “Being and Neonness”. Luis had an illuminating moment in Paris with a neon shop sign which prompted this whole enterprise. His title riffs on a passage from “Boris Vian’s 1947 novel. Let me read you a short extract in which Luis recounts this.

in “L’Écume des jours — literally, “the foam of days”— we discover that a fictional Jean-Sol Partre gave an imaginary lecture entitled “The Letter and the Neon,” a famous critical study on luminous signs.” What sort of light will we produce if we mix Vian’s poetic music and the real-life Sartre’s insights in a slim glass tube? In the months that followed my encounter with the neon trigger on the Quai du Louvre, the disingenuously anodyne character of neonness haunted me to such an extent that it pushed apparently more “serious” ideas to the back of my mind. I started reading Being and Nothingness, the seven-hundred-page slab that contains an entire historical era. A simplified version of existentialism has become the implicit popular philosophy of our times, encapsulated in the ideal of self-realization.

From its first sentence, […], this wordy but touching doorstop of a book brings out the twentieth century’s concern with phenomena and appearance: “Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it.” To exist for Sartre refers to the fact of emerging out of a background, getting out of what there is, to stand out. To exist is like an enforceable attempt to escape the flowing materiality or immanence of things, and it requires a twofold effort, like squaring the real, or a “decompression of being,” as Sartre put it. Moreover, to exist is to remove oneself from an undifferentiated being and bring out the unheard of, perhaps the incredible—to dare the fostering of a subtler Logos, to articulate a dialectic of sense and nonsense. To exist is to bring to life, in a certain manner, invisible flows of pre-existence. Elsewhere, in Situations, Sartre wrote that “it is impossible to correctly appreciate light without knowing the darkness,” echoing what Victor Hugo wrote in 1867 about the International Exposition and the idea of the City of Light: “Paris is a sower. Where does he sow? In the darkness. What does he sow? Sparks.”

End of quote.

I will leave it up to Luis to extrapolate further on the book’s content, but I would like to say something about the translation process. As you will see on the cover, it reads “Being & Neonness, Luis de Miranda, translated by Michael Wells, revised, augmented and updated for this edition by Luis de Miranda. This acknowledges the back and forth exchanges between Luis and myself, as I translated chapter by chapter, which I would send to him and we would discuss by email. This initiated a multi-layered conversation between us about the book and the ideas in it. When MIT Press got involved, Roger Conover, the editor, suggested we read one of their recent titles “Sympathy for the Traitor” by Mark Polizzotti, which is a follow-on from one of the bibles of translation studies, David Bellos’s “Is that a fish in your ear, translation and the meaning of everything.” Polizzotti considers the translator as a reader and as a new voice or writer in his or her own right.

As most of you know, I like talking and conversation, so I would like to add another label; the Translator as Conversationalist. The translator as a facilitator of the conversation between the author and the reader.

To conclude, I hope that you will read this book, which has some stimulating ideas in it about identity, creativity and it also has a political dimension. Above all, I hope you will find it enjoyable and illuminating.

Thank you.

Aura neon by Eric Michel.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London Town. So the song goes, so my heart follows. Despite the stuff and nonsense of so many of my confused compatriots at the moment, I love London and can feel a sense of homesickness when I’m away.

As a patriotic but not jingoistic Englishman, born near the Thames, son of an engineer and myself an erstwhile freelance diplomat, building bridges, physical or metaphorical, has always been my kind of thing.

London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady. In about 1970 my father took me to see our contemporary-modern London Bridge being built. It was officially opened by the Queen in 1973. We knew the old one had fallen down or at least had been sinking Venice-like into the river-bed mud. We knew its pieces had been numbered, packaged up and sent over the pond to The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, in the words of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics of what was to become the American national anthem. At about the same time, John Rennie, a Scots engineer, was designing our “New” London Bridge, which crossed the Thames from 1831 until 1967. One might surmise that the old New London Bridge was heading west to fulfil its manifest destiny, the civilising mission, to boldly go where no bridge had boldly gone before. United States Entrepreneur Robert McCulloch purchased the bridge, which became the largest antique in the world and rebuilt it to straddle the canal he dug across a peninsula, thus creating an island in Lake Havasu, on the Colorado River, the border between Arizona and California. “Neat and awesome!”, you might be tempted to exclaim.

Fast forward from the Sad Seventies to the steamy summer of 1986. I was living in Paris and the US Dollar had hit an exchange rate peak: one US would buy you 10 French Francs, Oh là là! (By way of comparison & strong Euro oblige, one single greenback will only buy you five and half equivalent French Francs in 2018.) So, thirty-two summers ago, swarms of American tourists hit Gay Paree; in their midst were busloads of mid-West high-school kids and their teachers; they had never been to a city before, let alone an international capital and were thirsty for culture, adventure and shopping. They weren’t the asses I have just found online, but from another outfit, which arranged one to two-week educational trips for American kids to Europe. I was hired as a tour guide-interpreter alongside some other bilingual students. We were each assigned a tour bus, driver and around fifty people, each high-school group of ten accompanied by a couple of teachers and the odd parent or two from back home. We showed them the sights of Paris, including multiple shopping expeditions. “Oh Mike, I just bought ten ounces of Joy for ten dollars!” exclaimed one teacher after I had herded her group through the Fragonard Perfume Museum, which is still there to this very day, near the Palais Garnier, Paris Opera. The Loire castles, complete with son et lumière, elicited a heart-felt “Humungous!” when I asked one of my rural teenage charges what she had thought of the Château de Chenonceau. Couldn’t fault her on that, it is rather ossum, n’est-ce pas! My colleague Roger, an English guy on vacation from his Cambridge studies, had a group of shy black kids from Washington on his bus. He coaxed and nurtured them, but eventually, in desperation, asked one of them why they seemed so unhappy with their French visit, despite his best efforts to interest and engage them. One diffident boy ventured that he was homesick for the shopping. Poor Roger, almost beside himself, retorted, “But you’ve hardly done anything except shopping since you got here!! What is it that you can get in Washington that you can’t get here in Paris?” he demanded. “Well, a lil’ bit of this an’ a lil’ bit of that,” came the rather sheepish reply. They did loosen up a little thereafter, pained at not pleasing their poor guide.

One of the perks for us tour guide-interpreters was that, if we could persuade at least three of the adults, i.e. teachers, parents or over-18 students, to buy tickets for a Parisian floor-show, then we would get in free. Over the week I got friendly with some of the teachers, one of whom I felt was on the same wavelength. Let’s call her Ghislaine. That wasn’t her name, which now escapes me, but I can clearly see her round, plump, smiling face and bright, intelligent eyes, framed in a tousle of curly blonde locks. (She looked like the real Ghislaine I did know, who was a teacher in a French school where I had taught in 1979). American Ghislaine and her group of students hailed from sparsely-populated Wyoming, cattle and mining country. Unlike my cosmopolitan self, none of them had been to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles or London, so for them this trip to Paris was quite the thing. Ghislaine and a couple of her colleagues succumbed to my sales pitch for the Moulin Rouge, so we rocked up one evening to the show there. On the Pigalle pavement, under the red neon sails of the old red windmill, we waited in line, briefly, before two thousand people were ushered – with amazing rapidity and exquisite crowd control – or rather shoe-horned, into the theatre; each guest sat either side of a mini-table facing the stage and complete with boudoir-shaded lamp, ice-bucket, half bottle of champagne and two glasses. I sat opposite Ghislaine. The lights went down and the show began. Well, what a show! Number after exquisite number, tableau after tremendous tableau, the multitude of performers whirled and danced across the huge stage, no expense spared for costumes, sets, lighting or musical extravagance. Then a sudden quiet pause, during which a large, transparent glass tank arose from under the stage, the green water eerily lit from below. Enter from stage left a heroic, moustachioed acrobat of sorts, dressed in a 19^th century style yellow leotard and black shorts, mid-riff buckled with a strongman’s belt. In one hand he held a leash, on the other end of which a rather mournful real-life alligator was trying to keep its dignity as it waddled on stage. The audience gasped, the strongman bent down and grabbed the alligator, flinging it into the raised pool, then jumped in himself after it. More gasps from the audience. Then ensued a mock mortal combat or rather a sort of semi-reptilian fisticuffs, in which the alligator conceded early, if ignominious defeat. Nonetheless, sceptics such as myself were sufficiently impressed, if not spellbound. A glance over to Ghislaine and her friends reassured me that they were delighted, intoxicated by the champagne and the culture. The curtain came down and after a few moments went up again. Gone all signs of the swimming pool and gator. We had been transported into a saloon from the American Wild West of Annie Get Your Gun, Buffalo Bill and Wyatt Earp! Dancing cowgirls in full petticoated skirts and cowboys in jeans, boots, ten-gallon hats, leather chaps and all the gear, high-legged it in time across the stage and back again, singing all the way. Wow! Then, from stage left a cowboy on a real-life horse comes a-gallopin’ (well, perhaps not that fast), Yee-Hawin’ and shootin’ his hand-gun as he arrived upstage centre. I glanced round to my neighbour to see how she was enjoying the show and saw streams of tears rolling down her flushed cheeks. “Oh, Ghislaine, are you okay? What’s the matter?”, I solicitously enquired. “Oh Mike, it’s so beautiful. It reminds me of home!”. The tears started rolling down mine, too. A night to remember.

So here we are, en route from beautiful Santa Fe to beautiful San Francisco and I, at least, have come to pay homage to old New London Bridge, on the shores of Lake Havasu City, Arizona. And here is the view from my window and it’s so beautiful, it reminds me of home, as I wipe a teardrop from the corner of my eye.

And if you want more background, the BBC has published a great piece about The Bridge that crossed an ocean! September 2018.

A miner, Sofka & Sarah and a National Coal board truck and driver outside Bolsover colliery in 1974.

Putney is one of the urban-suburban villages of South-West London, south of the river and just next door to Wimbledon, where I was born and brought up. It is also the title of a new novel by an old friend and accomplished writer, Sofka Zinovieff, who, as her name suggests, has some Russian in her.

Putney becomes a metonym for childhood, first love, friendship and the healing power of making art. It’s more complicated than that, though, as thirteen-year old Daphne, the main protagonist, is raped by Ralph, the thirty-year-old composer friend of Edmund, her writer father, so questions of underage sex, consent and parental protection also loom large. Literary names are clues, so let’s remember that in Greek mythology, Daphne was pursued by Apollo, who was smitten with her beauty. To escape his clutches, she pleaded with her river-god father, who turned her into a laurel bush

Daphne is a beautiful wild child, footloose and fancy-free, the daughter of freedom and adventure, but also an allegorical figure. Reading Sofka’s evocation of childhood, the discovery of passionate love, the comfort of friendship and the desire to take control of a life at its outset, flooded me with memories of that time and that place. Not so much Bildungsroman or roman à clef, this novel worked for me as a Proustian madeleine. Sofka weaves a marvellous mnemonic warp and weft of the 1970s fabric of South West London.

Putney the novel is a great read and prompted me to write a long essay, as it brought back memories of growing up in that part of the world in the 1970s. Rather than publish it in full here, I have posted two versions online: UK here and US here.

 

 

This is not a pipe, but my homework for the non-narrative fiction course at City University. Whoops! That should read “narrative non-fiction”, but we are allowed to submit our non-fiction pieces to the “City Writes” fiction competition as long as they are short stories with an ending. Interesting; the never-ending stream of fake news makes it hard to tell the difference between truth, fiction and facts, alternative or not.

So, are the leaks in British plumbing real or just a figment of our collective imagination? Our downstairs neighbour was having her flat renovated when Mikhail, the Ukrainian plumber, told us that our central heating pipe, which runs under her floorboards, was old and corroded and about to start leaking, so he mended it for us. I didn’t ask about the visa requirements for him to come to the United Kingdom. Had he been Polish, he wouldn’t have needed a visa as Poland is a member of the European Union. What then is the threaded connection between our heating pipe and British plumbing in general? If you have been following the hoo-ha about Europe, in the wake of the 2016 referendum, you will have read last year’s Supreme Court ruling in favour of Miller and against the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union[1] and will be familiar with the metaphor of the “conduit pipe” to describe how European Union law has been introduced into UK domestic law since the 1972 Act of Parliament took the UK into the European Economic Community. Rather like the undersea channel tunnel that connected Folkestone to Calais in 1994 some twenty years later, the 1972 Act created this conduit pipe and an unprecedented constitutional connectedness across north-western Europe and the Atlantic Isles. It turned on a tap of trust to feed the 1998 Good Friday agreement and soothe the troubles in Ulster. Constitutional constipation might be another way of describing the brokenness of our plumbing, because our body politic is suffering from terrible intestinal pains and there are no plumbers on hand – Polish or otherwise – to unblock our democratic drains. Dr Fox’s Elixir of Global Free Trade whiffs of snake oil and quackery, rather than liberating legislative laxative.

Former Prime Minister, David Cameron, will be an interesting subject for historians. They will ponder whether he or his successor, Theresa May, more successfully aspired to failure. In 2010, Cameron’s coalition government commissioned the “review of the balance of competences”, an audit of what the EU does and how it affects the UK. It reported that the balance was about right, but that did not suit Cameron’s political purposes, so he buried the findings.[2] Not many people heard about the review, fewer read it and nobody acted it on it. “The evidence submitted to the free movement of persons consultation did not support the driving premise of government policy in this area for the last few years, namely that the free movement of persons must be reduced, that it is being abused, and that it encourages benefit tourists.”[3] So European Union immigration was not a big problem. In 2014 there was the referendum on the independence of Scotland. As an Englishman, I was outraged not to be consulted about the future of the union to which I, as a citizen, belong. Whatever. The process highlighted the asymmetric devolution of the four nations, in which Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have national-regional parliaments, but England does not. Although the crumbling Palace of Westminster – read physical, moral and political decay here – is located in the capital of England, there is a manifest imbalance. Curiously, the F-word so despised by Margaret Thatcher in her days of hand-bagging her European counterparts, has not resurfaced in mainstream English political debate, although federalism has served democracies such as the United States of America, India or Germany fairly well.

As we disconnect the European conduit pipe from our British constitutional plumbing and throw the Brussels baby out with the bathwater, the Scots and the Welsh – keen to protect their devolution settlements – watch as the CUP-DUP tinker with their confidence and supply spanners and bleed the budget radiators for magic money. This brings us, fiction or non-fiction, to the fantastical, technologically invisible border on the island of Ireland which will enable the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, its single market and customs union, yet allow Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom and at the same time enjoy complete and unfettered access to the people, goods and services in the Republic of Eire, which is part of the same European Union. Two plus two equals five. Top-hole! Our champion in the present Conservative and Unionist Party government is the Foreign Secretary, who has made a career out of turning fiction into alternative fact. A journalist colleague in Brussels wrote that during his time as The Daily Telegraph correspondent there, Boris Johnson “never let facts get in the way of a good story.”[4]

Question: What are we to do about this constitutional chaos, democratic decrepitude and European ejection?

Answer: We all know that the British Royal Family is German. In 2014 we celebrated the tricentennial of the Hanoverian Succession, commemorating 1714 when George I became king of Great Britain and Ireland. Hailing from Germany he didn’t speak English, yet his house ruled the country until the death of his descendent, Queen Victoria, in 1901. Luckily, she had married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Cobourg Gotha, also German, and their son, Edward VII, kept the family firm going, as does the latter’s great-grand-daughter today. Back in 1847 Albert helpfully drafted a constitution for the plethora of fractious German states, so why not enter the realm of semi-fiction and get one of our royal princes to draft a new constitution. Some people like republics, some kingdoms, others prefer cloud-cuckoo land, so how about a Federal Kingdom-Republic for Citizens of Everywhere? We could elect as leader King Boris or President William Windsor the Fifth.

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[1] JUDGMENT R (on the application of Miller and another) (Respondents) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Appellant). 24 January 2017.

[2] Cameron’s renegotiation and the burying of the balance of competencies review: http://ukandeu.ac.uk/camerons-renegotiation-and-the-burying-of-the-balance-of-competencies-review/.

[3] Ibid.

[4] The road to Brexit was paved with Boris Johnson’s Euromyths, Jean Quatremer: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/15/brexit-boris-johnson-euromyths-telegraph-brussels.

We might all end up as paper-clips!

Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American professor of physics at MIT, founder of the Elon Musk-funded Future of Life Institute and an optimist. His 2017 book, Life 3.0 – Being Human in the age of artificial intelligence, demonstrates his belief that a positive future is possible and that a conscious universe is more valuable than one made up of paper-clips.

“He finds it abhorrent and wasteful that humanity could die a “death by banality” if the objective of a goal-driven artificial intelligence turned out to be nothing more profound than “rearranging all the molecules in the universe to maximise the number of paper-clips”.

Tegmark’s institute is more focused on the future of intelligent, conscious life than the Future of Humanity Institute, based at the University of Oxford, set up by his colleague and fellow Swede, Nick Bostrom. It is a noteworthy distinction between life and humanity. Tegmark’s accessible, readable book explains cutting-edge science in a comprehensible way and belongs to a burgeoning genre of singularity titles, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s 2011 Sapiens: A brief history of mankind and his 2015 Homo Deus, a Brief History of Tomorrow. They follow on from Stephen Hawking’s 1988 A Brief History of Time, Bostrom’s 2014 Superintelligence and Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 The Singularity is Near. The singularity is sometimes taken to mean the point at which artificial intelligence becomes more powerful than human intelligence. This has been interpreted in various utopian and dystopian scenarios; either the robots decide that the greatest threat to the universe is represented by humans and act accordingly or, slightly less scarily, a few mega-wealthy humans morph into super-transhumans by updating themselves periodically with the latest biomedical technology and blast off in their private spaceships to residences on Mars or some other exclusively expensive corner of the universe, while the impoverished mass of mankind scrabbles around on over-heated earth for the leftover scraps.

Tegmark is the optimist to Harari the pessimist, who is more worried about the dangers posed to humanity by artificial intelligence and the need for a serious discussion about how to prevent catastrophe. Tegmark is no slouch, however, and one of the fascinating aspects of his scientific method, compared to Harari’s literary-historical approach, is his discussion of the Really Hard Problem, that is, how to explain consciousness scientifically. In Homo Deus, Harari worries that advances in computing mean that advanced intelligence has been decoupled from consciousness and that it is therefore very dangerous if non-conscious intelligent machines take decisions that may adversely affect humans.

Tegmark’s Life 3.0 pursues a less doom-and-gloom-laden exploration of what perhaps is to come. He approaches consciousness from a different angle, arguing that information is substrate-independent. For example, we understand that a “wave can travel across a lake, even though none of its molecules do”[1]. Tegmark’s optimism is underpinned by his use of scientific theory to test out new ideas. He explains modern theories of consciousness, which focus on activities in the brain, what are called the neural correlates of consciousness or NCCs. The current challenge is to explain how these NCCs are – or can be – PCCs or physical correlates of consciousness, “defined as the patterns of moving particles that are conscious”. Tegmark is very taken with his Italian colleague Gulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) which supports the idea that “consciousness is a physical phenomenon that feels non-physical because it’s like waves and computations: it has properties independent of its own physical substrate. […] If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!”[2]

So, what about the paper-clips? Well, it’s hard to compress 300 brilliant pages into a short review, but suffice to say that Tegmark feels it would be terrible if humanity’s molecules were all rearranged into said stationery. He does not explain why.

 11 February 2018

[1] Tegmark, Life 3.0 pg. 66.

[2] Ibid., pg. 303-304.

            Swimming is one of my favourite pastimes for many reasons. It keeps me fit, it gives me precious private space and it acts as a sort of punctuation to articulate the day. There is always before and after a swim. Sometimes, especially in winter, it takes me a while to convince myself that I must go for a swim. If it’s cold outside, the prospect of walking down to the baths, getting changed and diving into the water is not terribly appealing. But I know from experience that it is a question of managing perception, as the water temperature, whatever the outside air temperature, is fairly constant, between 26 and 28 degrees Centigrade, winter or summer alike. After the first surprise of immersion, your body adjusts to the water temperature and by the end of a kilometre, 50 lengths of a 25 metre pool or only 20 of a rarer 50 metre Olympic pool, the mind has completely forgotten about the initial perceived difficulties.

            In my imagination swimming reconnects me to the primal life form that crawled out of the swamp millennia ago, the faint cross-shaped patterns of the vellus hair on my upper arms suggest the paddling fins of my prehistoric ancestors, genetic tattoos of our fishy forebears. Swimming reminds me, however, that I don’t have gills and need to raise my head out of the water to breathe in fresh air. Inhaling and exhaling carefully produce a yoga-like attention to the breath, which is always calming. When I learnt to swim the crawl, after decades of breast and backstroke, my instructor told me to imagine that my body was encased in an invisible sheath and that I should attempt to keep inside it as I took each coordinated stroke, to keep my arms close to my torso and my legs as serpentine as possible. He also told me to point my fingers to the front of the pool and my toes to the back, stretching in both directions at the same time. It works wonders on the spine and was confirmed as beneficial by a more recent yoga teacher, whose exercises I have now incorporated into my swimming routine.

            During the forty-odd minutes it takes me to swim a kilometre, space-time is all my own and throughout the almost weightless progression through the invisible water, thoughts churn and coagulate, and ebb and flow until they seem to bubble and evaporate into the nothingness whence they came.

            Swimming regularly is like a surrogate religion or rather a surrogate religious practice, creating a structure, like a ritual, which allows you to follow, mindfully or mindlessly, the same set of movements, gestures and behaviour wherever you are. Swimming pools become like chapels or churches, places of worship, each with their local differences, styles, practices and customs, but all with the same central liturgy of diving, plunging, arm and leg strokes and their clergy of life-guards, pool attendants and receptionists. Praise the pool!

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This was my first homework exercise for the Narrative Non-Fiction Writing course I’m doing at City University run by the fabulous Peter Forbes.