PLATONOV’S SOUL

Andrei Platonov – “Soul” (New York Review Books)

I must admit that I have a soft spot for between-the-wars Eastern European writers, a predilection that stems from finding a copy of Jaroslav Hašek’s ‘The Good Soldier Svejk‘ on my father’s bedside table thirty years ago and falling in love with its chaotic ‘otherness.’

However, my recent obsession with gaining mastery over the Latin classics had been diverting my literary gaze until late last year when I tackled Vassily Grossman’s superb ‘Life and Fate,’ which led me to scour my shelves for other unread gems from the same milieu.

This was how I came to read Andrei Platonov’s ‘Soul,’ a collection of stories published by New York Review Books which to my shame had lain disregarded in my cabinet for at least three years after buying it on the recommendation of a friend.

I say shame, because this small collection is as breathtaking and thought provoking as the aforementioned and currently in vogue ‘Life and Fate‘ by Grossman.

Platonov, an early supporter of the Russian Revolution later at odds with the Soviet authorities, died in the 1950′s, his writings largely unpublished until the political thaw of the late 80′s for the usual political reasons: only now is his renown beginning to extend to the West, although I know of only two works thus far published in English, this collection, and the novel ‘The Foundation Pit‘.

I was perhaps a little sceptical of the glowing testimonials on the book’s jacket proclaiming Platonov one of the greats of Russian literature, but after having read ‘Soul‘ I can only say that they are right – Platonov is a writer of extraordinary genius.

This collection consists of eight stories, beginning with the one hundred and fifty page novella which lends its name to the tome.

I had no idea what to expect, having deliberately avoided the introduction with its inevitable spoilers, and at first this story of a graduate returning to his homeland in Soviet Central Asia seemed fairly routine.

It wasn’t long, however, before the ‘otherness’ clicked in, and I found myself immersed in a surreal,  fantastical and sometimes disturbing journey that took me far beyond the bounds of my own world.

Without giving too much away, this strangely sad but ultimately uplifting story concerns the quest of the young protagonist to find his tribe out in the wilds of the steppe and save them from oblivion under the auspices of the Party.

When he finally catches up with their remnant, they seem to be already dead, having lost their souls.

Platonov’s style is refreshingly simple, avoiding the lexical complexities of such contemporaries as Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, but nonetheless deep, as the translator’s notes reveal : there is much going on here beneath the surface that is difficult for the modern Westerner to appreciate.

What fills the work with a disquieting sense of unreality is the nature in which characters act without regard to the practicalities of the real world in a way which is both childlike and magical.

The subsequent stories in this collection were, with one exception (The Third Son), equally stunning, all suffused with similar magic and an emotional depth lying partially hidden beneath a rather bleak industrial exterior.

Platonov’s father was a railway engineer, which must account for the trains never being far away in each of these tales, often the actual centre of the piece, with this mechanical framework being juxtaposed with the inner emotions of the characters.

I hope in time that more of the oeuvre of Platonov is made available to English-speakers, such is his quality.

Meanwhile, ‘Soul‘ comes highly recommended.

REFOUND SOUNDS

Back in the late 70′s Britain was in the throws of a musical revolution, and those thirsty for new aural experiences listened to maverick BBC DJ John Peel of a weekday evening.

At that time, my school friends and I, being caught up in all the excitement, would come to school singing whatever musical phrases had stuck in our heads from the previous night’s Peel show.

I clearly remember walking along the river on the way home from school one day singing ‘Alphaville‘ to my friends as we ambled along, horsing about, the only word I remembered from a particular song.

It wasn’t really a typical punk song – it was slow, relatively complex, and was sung in a suave, disaffected intellectual voice and contained bizarre but intriguing lyrics.

I must have forgotten about ‘Alphaville‘ as soon as Peel stopped playing it, and when I started buying records shortly afterwards, it didn’t feature in my purchases.

I think I’ve relayed this story once before in a blog entry, but it bears repeating as a prelude to further musical anecdotes.

Fast forward sixteen years to 1994 and I find myself in a friend’s apartment in Hiroshima, Japan, leafing through his voluminous CD collection.

I find some albums by a band called ‘The Monochrome Set‘ which immediately rings a bell. I borrow them, and like what I hear. Perhaps a year later, a new compilation by the band appears in a local CD store, and there it is – ‘Alphaville‘ at last, and it sounds just as good as it did all those years ago.

 

Now, last year saw two further rediscoveries at an even greater distance in time.

By 1979 I’d begun saving my pocket money and going in to the nearest city, Bath, to frequent Cruise In Records, an exciting ramshackle cubbyhole filled with the kind of underground vinyl I was after. One of my earliest purchases was a four-track 7″ EP on the wonderfully-named Sofa Records (tag line : ‘part of the furniture’) by Midlands band The Shapes.

This ensemble, minor by any standard, quickly vanished without even releasing a full-length album, but their slim oeuvre was unusual in its comic themes and featured the stellar bass playing of the improbably-named Brian Helicopter.

 

Stand out tracks on the EP were the parenthesis-heavy ‘Wot’s for Lunch Mum (Not Beans Again?)’ and ‘(I Saw) Batman (in the Launderette),’ tongue-in-cheek ditties revelling in their small-town Britishness and rightfully garnering the moniker ‘punk pathetique.’

I tried unsuccessfully for years to find out if this gem had made the transition to CD, but to no avail until a couple of years ago Brian Helicopter himself appeared on the web with an amusing history of the band and a CD collection of the their output. Last year it was finally in stock on Amazon and so, after a staggering delay of thirty-two years, I was once more reunited with the sounds of Leamington Spa’s finest.

Many of us are likely horrified when we hear the melodies of our teenage years, and nostalgic value aside, cringe at the pap we were obsessed with. Not me, though – immodest though it may be, I can honestly say that I had impeccable taste even in my early teens, and virtually everything I listened to then has stood the test of time.

Another tune that had been stuck in my brain since 1979 was a little number called ‘Paint it Black’ by an all-girl ensemble entitled ‘The Mo-dettes,’ who despite the connotations of the appellation, were not mods at all but purveyors of quirky pop, again with a stellar bass player.

 

Such were my punk credentials that I wasn’t even aware until many years later that ‘Paint it Black’ was actually a cover version of a tune by a well-known sixties outfit called ‘The Rolling Stones.’

I never bought ‘Paint it Black’ or an earlier single called ‘White Mice,’ both heard frequently on John Peel in 1979, something I’d regretted, as the band vanished without trace after one album, and until very recently barely a footnote in punk’s pantheon was to bear witness to their short existence.

I remembered them again last year when a friend ‘acquired’ some dubious digital transfers of these old songs, but before I listened to them, a quick check on Amazon revealed that their oeuvre had finally been unearthed and given a belated CD release, much to my joy. I ordered it immediately, at the same time as The Shapes album, and was again blown away by the quality of the songs I had waited so long to hear again when the goods duly arrived in the post.

So there you have it – good things come (back) to those who wait.

 

Some songs are so meaningful and evocative not only of a sentiment but an era, that being reunited with them after more than three decades only confirms the strange hold that music has over the lives of most of us.

Right, I wonder if ‘The Door and The Window‘ ever made it into the digital realm?

PHONES and PHOTOGRAPHY

Smart phones are increasingly equipped with cameras that in many ways encroach upon the domain of the compact digicam. While their lenses may be somewhat lacking in comparison, there is no contest when it comes to immediacy and connectivity.

A dedicated camera must be plugged into a computer to have the stored images available for manipulation or dissemination on the web. The smart phone, however, short-circuits this, enabling increasingly comprehensive post-processing and direct transfer to online mediums to occur on board: the digital documentation of life has never been easier.

I found out the hard way how the digital compact is no longer a viable proposition for the casual smart phone-owning photographer: I purchased a high-end compact (the well-respected Canon S95) earlier this winter, thinking it would be a good substitute for the times when I couldn’t carry my bulky Nikon D7000 DSLR.

However, despite boasting full manual controls, the ability to shoot in RAW and a host of other ‘pro’ features, I quickly realised that such cameras are merely the worst of both worlds rather than a handy stop-gap.

Fiddly to use, with the resulting images way below the quality of those from the DSLR, I found that I just couldn’t be bothered to put in the necessary work on the computer to get them into shape. Why bother when the iPhone can circumvent all of this?

Perhaps those who don’t own a DSLR might still feel the need for a compact, in which case the way to go would seem to be a so-called ‘bridge‘ camera, compact, but with interchangeable lenses enabling it to do what the tiny smart phone fixed lens cannot.

What has fuelled the smart phone’s usurpation of the compact camera is the sheer number of amazing apps available for immediate processing of one’s snaps. Software such as ‘PictureShow‘ can transform your pictures into black and white, faux retro or lofi with the ability to add noise, frames, and so on, producing stunning results and expanding the realms of creative possibility. ‘Hipstamatic‘ offers similar, but goes one step further in actually turning your iPhone into a retro camera for which an array of different virtual lenses and films can be installed. The twist here is that you can’t change the look after the fact, you have to decide before hand, thus perfectly recreating the old days of analogue photography.

Probably the most successful, however, is Instagram, ostensibly just another iPhone photography app, but to all intents and purposes a form of social networking.

Instagram, like others, enables you to take a picture (or upload a pre-existing one), then apply a themed filter, a frame and perhaps add a ’tilt shift’ effect to simulate depth of field.

The difference is that the resulting snap is then added to your ‘feed’ on Instagram as well as being saved to your iPhone. You can comment on the photos of others, ‘like‘ them, annotate your efforts with hash tags to allows others to find them, and ‘follow’ other photographers, much as you would follow people on Facebook.

I’ve recently been very enthusiastic about iPhone photography after realising that I didn’t need a dedicated camera to get good-looking snaps on the fly because of apps like Instagram, and because it makes me feel part of a community engaged in something constructive, rather than the vacuousness of Facebook.

I even started two tumblr blogs to house my iPhone efforts, the mock-philosophical ‘Souvenirs from the Surface of Last Scattering‘ and the insanely niche ‘The Cutout Kid.’

In fact, my iPhone snapping was starting to rival the enjoyment of ‘real’ DSLR photography: However, I think the initial two-month honeymoon period is over, and I’m beginning to see its drawbacks.

As much as the Instagram software itself is very good and transforms already well-composed shots into works of art (which admittedly when viewed at resolutions greater than that of a phone screen start to lose their good looks due to inherent low-quality graininess), it is the interactive part of Instagram that is starting to pale.

Just like other social networks, the natural desire to share your life (in this case through pictures) just seems to debilitate into an empty popularity contest where the ‘winners’ are those who can gather the most followers and get the most ‘likes.’ However gratifying popularity is (and us humans all seem to like it), as an end in itself it is utterly vacuous and detracts from the nobler pursuit of enjoying a cyber-stroll through a vast gallery of art which is what it should be at heart.

This mass pissing contest results in the bizarre: one man posts a picture of a cup of coffee, not even a particularly arty rendering of a cup of coffee, and it instantly gets over a thousand ‘likes‘ and a line of posters tripping over themselves in praising the author. The same kind of acclaim seems to follow those who are teenage, female and blonde, irrespective of the merits of their artwork, although in this case it is perhaps more easily explained. In either case it has absolutely nothing to do with photography.

Another form of debasement revolves around the fact that Instagram allows one to upload pictures from elsewhere: hence, many folk with amazing photos are actually just cropping their high-quality DSLR masterpieces into the square Instagram format, which seems to be a betrayal of the whole retro-Polaroid fun aspect of the enterprise which the developers envisaged.

As a joke I wrote a sentence using a string of hash tags to comment ironically on the way people follow their pictures with enormous amounts of these things in other to get views. I don’t think anyone got the joke, but it did actually slightly increase my usual number of ‘likes.’

I’m now coming back to the only position that makes any sense to me: photography is a form of artistic expression that to have any value must first and foremost be satisfying to the artist even if it exists within a vacuum. Any appreciation by others must be regarded as icing on the cake, else the pursuit becomes debased by the unhealthy psychological motives so in evidence on the various social networking platforms. This is true no matter if the capturing device is the smart phone or a professional DSLR.

To conclude: on the positive side, the iPhone has enabled us to dispense with dedicated compact cameras for our casual photographic inspiration and multiplied the potential for our artistic self-expression: inevitably the Facebook generation, eager for the approval of as many cyber-citizens as possible, will utilise such portals as Instagram for the dissemination of endless shots of food and self-portraits, but it is still likely that real artistic talent will shine through, even if the signal to noise ratio is likely to be rather low.

And, lest I be accused of hypocrisy, I’ll refrain from revealing my username on Instagram so you won’t be able to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ me…

PROLONGING THE NOW

Time is a strange commodity.

Our watches tell us it’s ticking away at a standard rate and that it’s a constant, although anyone familiar with physics knows this is wrong, and it’s just a construct to keep us all in place at our shitty jobs.

Incidentally, I just heard today that in an experiment involving neutrinos at the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the speed of light was observed to have been surpassed. If true, the implications for physics, and our entire understanding of the universe may have to be radically altered…

But back to time.

Do you ever feel that time is so ephemeral and so speedy that you are hardly able to grasp a hold of events as they shoot past?

I feel like this when I’m on holiday, which lends a strange otherworldly air to the whole experience.

Let me explain a bit more.

Normally we don’t really notice the passage of time in our daily humdrum routine existences. We know we’re fatter than we were a year ago, and with less hair, and we aren’t earning as much money, perhaps, but on a day to day level we can’t easily detect change and can get a handle on things because there is an illusion of stability.

But in a way, nothing exists. I don’t mean this as a pessimistic manifestation of existentialist angst, but think about it.

The past has gone, and is just a ghostly memory which will fade, and the future hasn’t happened yet, and so doesn’t exist.

That leaves us with now. This is the only point at which we are experiencing things directly, the only point which is ‘real.’

But if you go deeper, you find that this point of real life is minuscule. If you try to pair it down with a temporal scalpel, you could say that one second ago is the past, and the next second will be the future, leaving a tiny window of now. But you could keep paring this down infinitely until you find that there is in fact no ‘now‘ at all, just the intersection between two unreal states. That’s quite a disturbing thought, isn’t it?

In our normal lives this kind of thing doesn’t matter, because what we did last week pretty much resembles what we’re doing this week, and chances are it will be virtually the same as what we get up to next week.

So there’s an illusion of stability and permanence brought about by the repetitiveness of everyday life, which dulls our awareness of the march of time and the ephemeral nature of all things.

On holiday it’s different, though…

It’s been eleven days since I returned from a three-week trip to France and Portugal.

Now I’m locked into a kind a stasis in which I go to bed at 4:30am, get up at noon, go and hang out in a cafe for a few hours, go back home, listen to some music, cook, watch DVDs, process photos, read books – everyday precisely the same routine, a lethargic torpor partly caused by extended jet-lag but also a desire to try to prolong this stretch of time before the horror of going to work starts again.

When I was in Europe, however, I was experiencing new things every day, changing my location frequently, meeting new people, and the whole thing shot past at a velocity which seemed so high that it was hard to keep a hold of anything.

I took to jotting down the events of each day in a little notebook, because if I didn’t, I had the feeling that they might vanish, leaving no trace of their existence.

Sometimes this feeling of temporal velocity and my inability to construct a wide enough ‘now‘ upon which to build a stable vantage point led me feel that the events passing before my eyes were not real, and actually appeared somehow ‘thin‘ and distant.

I felt like an observer watching someone else’s film at high speed, that my connection to the surroundings, the people and events was so tenuous that I couldn’t tether myself to them sufficiently to make them real.

And indeed, in recent years when I return home from extended trips I always feel as if I had never actually left, and only my photos prove that I was really there (and the enormous hole in my bank account, of course).

It’s for this very reason that I deliberately try to force myself to enjoy every new vista in quiet contemplation before picking up the camera.

So many people on holiday are snapping away that paradoxically, their very attempts to preserve the moment actual heighten their inability to connect with and experience it in any real sense, adding to the feeling of its unreality and ephemeralness.

How sad then, that it is the mundane repetitiveness of everyday life that keeps us grounded and lends our lives a sense of stability in a sea of constant flux, rather than the spontaneous adventures into new territories which are gone in the blinking of an eyelid, leaving faint traces of a fantastic ‘otherness‘ to be chased after in daydreams like a rare butterfly, always just out of reach…

‘Prolonging the Now‘ – well, that sounds like a great song title to me, but it’s also something to strive for in making the most of life.

Just as a Buddhist acolyte seeks to transform his insights into a permanent state of satori, so should we be looking how to deepen our connectedness with reality in order to heighten experience.

However, it has just occurred to me that some people might argue that it is precisely those repetitive rituals of daily life that should be cherished and enjoyed since they are the only realities. ‘The more you travel, the less you see‘ kind of thing.

As Hitchcock might say (Robyn, not Alfred), these are all very much late September kind of thoughts….

FACEBOOK FREE

I’ve just deleted my Facebook account, and it’s so very liberating to have dispensed with all that vacuous nonsense.

I was an early adopter, signing up just out of curiosity when it was it in its infancy, then leaving it dormant because I didn’t really know what it was for.

Then it hit the big time, and very soon I found myself with a whole roster of new ‘friends.’

Sometimes I thought it was good: old acquaintances in other countries found me and we would exchange messages. Family members too could keep in touch.

But very soon I found myself pressured into accepting friend requests out of political expediency from people at work I dislike.

Then people from school who I didn’t really know would appear, and I would casually (and foolishly) accept them. Likewise large numbers of my students. The vast majority of both types would submit friend requests, only to never engage in a single word of communication once connected. Why did they bother, if they didn’t want to get in touch?

Far from facilitating interaction, then, Facebook has proved to be an exercise in futility.

I’ve no desire to post anything on my ‘wall,’ since I’m effectively muzzled by the nature of the people in my friends list, and would never ‘share’ anything even remotely personal. Similarly, I have little interest in the meaningless drivel posted by others.

So, what is the point of Facebook?

I have never met or got to know anyone new there.

I’ve had next to no meaningful interaction with my family or ‘friends.’

I don’t need it as a platform for my ideas and thoughts, since I have two websites and two blogs for that.

Even if faced with loneliness, these are no substitute for real face-to-face human interaction.

I would have got rid of this shallow and superficial all-pervasive monster long ago, but I kept thinking ‘what if someone wanted to find me, what if friends want to send a message – shouldn’t I just leave it open for that?’

Now, I realise, this is unnecessary.

If anyone wants to get in touch with me, there’s this thing called email. It’s private. It’s easy to use. My friends and family have this channel already.

Likewise, if someone else wants to find me, an internet search will work wonders.

Being part of Facebook is not only a pointless waste of time, it’s allowing yourself to be sucked into the paranoid creation of some dysfunctional megalomaniacs.

Think this is an exaggeration? See what happens when you try to leave.

First, try to find the ‘deactivate’ button buried somewhere in your settings menu.

You might assume that pressing this leads to your account (and all of your personal data) being deleted, but oh no.

You are transported to a page where Facebook tries to emotionally blackmail you. Almost unbelievably, a selection of your friend’s images are displayed, together with a message that they will miss you if you leave.

One might be tempted into thinking this was a joke, but no: despite having five hundred million souls signed up, they can’t bear it if just one slips away, and they’ll do anything to keep you there.

So, assuming the blackmail doesn’t work, and you decide to go anyway, you then make the astounding discovery that ‘deactivating’ your account doesn’t mean ‘deleting’ it at all.

Facebook wants to make it as difficult as possible for you to leave, and thus ‘deactivation’ just means that while your mugshot and profile are removed from the public gaze, all of your photos and data are stored away somewhere so that you can revive your account any time by just logging in again.

That’s right, they’re going to keep your stuff for you just in case you ‘change your mind.’

To really shut down your account you’re going to have to work a little harder : there’s no button for this – you actually have to submit a request, and even then they don’t immediately shut things down – they wait two weeks, in case you have ‘second thoughts’ about your rash and unreasonable desire to regain control of your privacy and start communicating with people the good old fashioned way, by using your vocal chords and looking into their eyes.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

John (Ivan) Demjanjuk has been found guilty and sentenced to five years imprisonment in Munich today. This is justice, and the result of decades of complex legal proceedings, so unlike the recent disposal of Bin Laden.

For those who don’t know, Demjanjuk is a 91 year old Ukrainian collaborator and mass murderer. During World War II as a Red Army soldier he was captured by the invading Nazis, then willingly changed sides to become a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. Here, during a period of seventeen months around 200,000 people, mostly Jews, were exterminated. Demjanjuk has been found guilty of taking part in the deaths of some 27,900 of this total.

Like many involved in the Holocaust, Demjanjuk somehow evaded detection and managed to become a naturalised US citizen, but eventually his past caught up with him and he was extradited to Israel where he spent eight years in detention, accused of being the notorious ‘Ivan the Terrible,’ a sadistic guard at Treblinka, another death camp (more than 700,000 victims). Unfortunately, despite clear evidence to his having been involved in the Holocaust, he was found not to be the aforementioned guard, and had to be released.

However, Demjanjuk, now stripped of his US citizenship, was extradited to Germany in 2009 to stand trial again, this time prosecutors placing him in the correct death camp.

Although the sentence seems somewhat mild given the enormity of his crimes, the point is that justice has been done, despite a gap of nearly seventy years, and this despicable individual will be remembered for what he was – a willing mass murderer who showed no remorse for his crimes.

He may not have been Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, but he certainly fits the bill for that of Sobibor…

THE CHARMS OF KHARMS

DANIIL KHARMS – “Today I Wrote Nothing” (2007)

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was an obscure and bizarre Russian writer, poet and dramatist of the twenties and thirties.

A member of the absurdist ‘OBERIU‘ circle based in Leningrad, little of whose work has filtered through into the West, his unruly artistic outpourings became increasingly hard to realise by the late 1920′s as Soviet intolerance of the unorthodox grew.

Finding occasional work as a writer of children’s stories (very suitable given his absurdist sensibilities), his eccentric existence on the fringes of society came to an early end when the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany in June 1941.

Escaping the draft by feigning madness (not difficult for Kharms), he was subsequently arrested by the NKVD in a round-up of suspicious characters as the Germans encircled the city, and was sent to a psychiatric prison where he perished from starvation the following year, sharing the fate of hundreds of thousands of fellow civilians caught in the siege. He was still in his thirties.

This volume collects together some of his fragmented and unusual output in the form of stories, plays and poems, for the most part brief in the extreme.

As an absurdist, Kharms‘ work is wonderfully free of restraint. His stories end prematurely when he can’t be bothered to finish, or even start them. His characters often do nothing, or die suddenly for no apparent reason. Violence prevails as in the unexpurgated Grimm stories, surreal and nonsensical. A deep dislike of children and old people underpins the proceedings (the former being ironic in that Kharms‘ work for children was what fed him and established his posthumous reputation).

Some pieces are intensely funny, but many are so wilfully obscure and futile that they are almost pointless to read, which, I suppose, paradoxically, is the whole point.

Nevertheless, after finishing the book I felt I wanted more, having become immersed in the strange world of Mr Kharms, where people die of blows to the head from giant cucumbers, Pushkin and Gogol appear in a play in which they just fall over each other repeatedly, and Frenchmen try endlessly to find the most comfortable furniture in their rooms.

A great read for people willing to experiment and who do not need the conventions of plot and linearity (or indeed logic) to derive enjoyment from the written word.

Think of Kharms as the literary equivalent of some of the more extreme forms of modern painting that were appearing in the same era: breaking boundaries and challenging the audience, like shock troops, but ultimately not for everyone.

Here are two prominent examples of Kharms‘ micro-fiction:

 

BLUE NOTEBOOK No.10

There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a rehead arbitrarily.

He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him any more.

 

THE MEETING

Now, one day, a man went to work, and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.

And that’s it, more or less.

 

More of my book reviews can be found here.