Spooky

Well, we thought we’d get this book. A bit of fun, a laugh, entertainment – entertainment is priority at the moment.So we sent off for it. It arrived the other day. It’s de-contaminated now, and so I relished the thought of opening it.

The book?
Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.

Ok, the full title:
The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases
published by PanMacmillan in 2003.
Note that date – it is very important.
Especially when we get to page 182.
For those who have the book, I’ll give them time to dig it out, and find the page.

The book is in mock turn-of-20th century style, with illustrations both baroque, grotesque, and eccentric. All in black and white. Most effective, that way.

The book examines different diseases; an alphabetical examination of the bizarre.
It has, for instance, and opening at random… Buscard’s Murrain, subtitle Wormwood.
Each disease is introduced giving country of origin, then First Known Case, then Symptoms. This is followed by History, then the all-important Cures. This is then followed up by who submitted the information, Endnotes, and Cross References.

It is, as you see, all very plausible.
Buscard’s Murrain, we discover, was from ‘Slovenia (probably)’, and first noted in 1771, in Bled.
It takes up to three years before showing itself.
Dr Samuel Buscard, on examination of deceased sufferers found their brain tissue contained ‘worms’.
This was later discredited evidence – the good doctor had examined the brain tissue with a corkscrew, and made the worm-forms by accident.
And so it goes on.
Who was the entry submitted by?
Ah, here we have it. By Dr China Mieville.
Ring any bells?

Yup, the book is a complete spoof.
It was published in 2003 by NightShade Books, then by PanMacmillan in 2004. Some entries appeared in earlier iterations, for example Shelley Jackson, “The Putti’, in 1996.
This book has not been updated.
The real writers are Jeff Vandermeer (‘The Void’), and Dr Mark Roberts.

Oh, and, probably not to be read whilst eating.
Which is also a Warning that ought to be on films. We noticed this with the quantities of vomiting going on whilst we have been eating late dinners.

But what of page 182?
This is where it gets very spooky.
There is a disease here, whose subtitle is, Wangji-Cunzai or “forgetfulness-of-Being”
which is priceless in itself.

This particular disease attacks the uncovered parts of the human body, and turns those parts, eventually, to powdery snow. Which blows clean away. Cures, you see, are hard to find, due to lack of subjects. Texts on the disease were published in 1959, China.
The entry here was submitted by Dr G Eric Schaller.

It is thought to be a disease contracted through the word or text. Prohibited texts, therefore, include:
The Xiaping Annual Agricultural Report for the year 1959.
The Ticket that Exploded (Turkish version) by William S Burroughs
works from the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver, and

The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases

Ok.

So what’s spooky?
The actual title of this disease.

The Wuhan Flu.

Remember: published 2003/4.

Footnote:
Let’s not get all conspiracy-theory, here, though.

Stanislaw Lem Year 2021

The Einstein of science-fiction, according to some.

2021 marks the centenary of his birth, 1921.
The Polish Parliament declared 2021 Stanisław Lem Year. (Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Lem)

He was born in Lwow, then Poland, a much disputed region, now part of the Ukraine, as Lviv, and of a Jewish family. 
Religion, however did not play much of a part in their lives. He said himself, later, for moral reasons … the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created … intentionally…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Lem

And who could argue with that.

It’s not what religion meant to them, but what others made it mean for them.
He survived the War on forged papers. Wiki tells us : During that time, Lem earned a living as a car mechanic and welder,^[11] and occasionally stole munitions from storehouses (to which he had access as an employee of a German company) to pass them on to the Polish resistance.^[19] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Lem)

Under Soviet rule he managed a full medical education, only to find the sight of blood…. 
He was a polyglot, a language devourer, and educationally hungry, devouring fields of knowledge outside of medicine – which, he knew, would land him a life-time service in Army medical corps.

He became an expert in early AI studies, and what Wiki terms ‘the sociology of science’
His own web page writes of 
Such staggering polymathic curiosity over such a vast range of material, all of it explored with lucidity and charm
https://english.lem.pl

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Stanislaw Lem?
Think of the film, Solaris (the 1972 one, not the later travesty) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
His books have a sophistication that a great many sci-fi novels do not. Even the Strugatsky brothers fail, there. 

His opinion of American writers was mostly scathing. He excepted Philip K Dick – although, stylistically Philip K Dicks’ books were/are ‘not good’. I used to sigh with exasperation when opening one yet-to-read: the turgidity of language, as he felt his way through to admittedly, unknowns, the un-thought of.
Now, writers like Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, of the period he was most active in his writing of science fiction, had intelligence, style. I’m sure readers could come up with many writers that I am myself unfamiliar – it is such a huge field of writing.

It is amazing how much Lem got right, or even predicted. This ranges across artificial intelligence, the theory of search engines (he called it “ariadnology”), bionics, virtual reality (“phantomatics”), technological singularity and nanotechnology.

Simon Ings “New Scientist”
https://english.lem.pl

Ok, so let’s distinguish here, between ‘hard’ sci-fi, and ‘soft’.
Stanislaw Lem could well be called the Einstein of ‘hard’ science-fi – his imagination works mostly on material aspects, structures, developments.

So, I have only just launched myself into one of his first published books, Return From the Stars, (1966).
So as not to Spoil too much, let me just give a brief synopsis so far: our narrator has just returned from a ten year space mission, to find that one hundred and twenty seven years have elapsed on Earth.
And things have changed. Drastically.

After a debriefing and up-dating session at the Luna Space Centre we encounter him as he returns to Earth for the first time.
We encounter the term Betrization. It is a process all undergo at birth, and prevents the worst kinds of behaviour. No one can kill another. The same for animals.
How and who does the aggressive work, then? Robots, naturally.
But what are the other implications of this process? A world without aggression of any kind?

It is quite a thick book, and I am only just beginning.
Don’t hold your breath, but read it and the others yourselves.

For the period, mid 1960s, in Eastern Europe, the imagining, detailing – everything has been thought through – are astounding.
Wiki tells us: Translating his works is difficult due to Lem’s elaborate neologisms and idiomatic wordplay. 

As ‘soft’ sci-fi, the sci-fi of people, you could say, he falls behind. In this book are racial and gender stereotypes to make our contemporary toes curl a little.
He tries; he delves into the sociology of cities, mass societies. He constantly tries with psychological changes, developments, but he does not shift perspectives sufficiently to truly tangle with the issues.

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How did Stanislaw Lem cope under the Cold War regimes?
He worked in the sciences, and wrote such astoundingly well-researched science-research books. As well as his science fiction – they got under the censor radar by not openly challenging the system (he wrote very early works in line with Socialist Realism that he later castigated), and were considered unimportant by the system.
By the time of the 1980s Solidarity Protests and consequent Martial Law, he and his family were able to move to West Berlin, then Vienna. They returned to Poland in 1988.
He had also toured the West, lecturing in America, England, Europe, enough to get a feel of the rancid redundancy of the much vaunted Capitalist systems.

Philip K Dick stated that Stanislaw Lem was dubious, the name a pseudonym for a collection of people. I suspect he was picking up here on the man’s wide range of interests and activities, his achievements in various fields.

In his later years he concentrated mainly on science-based projects, books, and what was termed ‘futurology’. The New Scientist quotation, above, gives good grounding for that.

His science Fiction books – in no particular order:

Eden
Fiasco
His Master’s Voice
Mortal Engines
Return From the Stars
Solaris
Tales of Pirx the Pilot
The Cyberiad
The Invincible
The Star Diaries

He also wrote a collection of Reviews and Introductions for Non-Existent Books, and crime novels, one without a murderer, as well as copious science books.

He died in his eighties, in 2006, his wife ten years later.
Like many writers who started pre-information era proper he did not use a computer; he bought his son an early Apple, but that’s as far as he went.
He was also dubious about the internet; it swallowed you up in low-grade information, he stated.
Yep.

Miriam Van Hee – a political poet?

In 2017 Flemish poet Miriam Van Hee won the Ultima Prize.

Of course, she has won prizes before this : Jan Campert Prize; Dirk Martens Prize; Herman de Connick Prize etc.

But with the Ultima Prize Flemish Culture Award went a bronze statue, and 10,000 euros.
This prize affirmed her status.

She is also a participant in the Puzzling Poetry trilingual innovative app :
studiolouter.nl

She was born in Ghent in the 1950s, studied Slavic Studies at university, and taught Russian in schools.
She has translated from the Russian such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, into Dutch.

1

Her first books were met with a little puzzlement, and then categorised : Neoromatic, they said. This was not it, no. A sense of bleakness, exploring of isolation and loneliness, became predominant.
This changed later, and her work took on a new vibrancy, outwardness.

I have misrepresented here. The earlier books were realist, dealt with real subjects. That, of course, is indeed bleak. The world is nowhere near as settled and human-friendly as we think it is.

Her work has sought out places of healing, of peace from our turmoil of experiences that living is.

Her use of language and imagery have marked her out from her peers. Among Flemish writers of her time we have what has been termed the baroque style. Her language was the plain style, the everyday, ‘conversational’ style.

She has much, I find, in common with the Dutch poetry Rutger Kopland. He was also misnamed on first publication as a ‘nostalgic writer’.
If we take his An Empty Spot to Stay : that is what I always wanted to be/ an empty spot for someone to stay – alongside her own earlier writings, we find a similarity of questing style, quiet, ultimately sane, an undeceived awareness. But also an acknowledgement of emotion, and an unwillingness to allow emotion too great a say: a search for balance.

2

A phrase we find repeated from those earlier poems is ‘not afraid.’ We find it in Brussels, Jardin Botanique:

… it’s going
to rain, you think, and that you aren’t afraid.

and again, in Sycamores at Nimes Station:

they were growing old and would die
as we would but without fear…

The language betrays us.
There is no drama, no system of valuing here, other than the everyday sensibility we all employ.
The denied fear, with what seems such an easy gesture, is the existential fear, nonetheless, it is THE fear. How can we not be afraid of death?

The rain?
Did we leave the washing out?
No, this is the periphery, a sideways approach, to universal fears.

How can we not be afraid?
We are alive. Now. That is another time. This is the time for life.
That is the subtext.

In the Brussels poem someone asks, about transience:

whether you write to counter that
and if not, is it therapeutic then

Ah, yes the easy questions that demand easy answers. Living is a complex experience. Thinking can make it seem… accessible to thought; but it is not, except in fragments. For living is multi-cognitive.
Elsewhere she writes to the effect that she writes, as if to answer this earlier question, to integrate experiences and sense of self in the world, together.

All quotes are from Judith Wilkinson.

I have written elsewhere with reference to Rutger Kopland, that there does seem a strong phenomenology slant to his writing. I find it here also.
They both employ the ‘conversational’ tone; they both are quiet, ruminating, writers, and both are focussed on the here and now.

It is often said that Rutger Kopland had a anti-metaphysical sensibility.
This did not stop him reading and quoting St Augustine. The trick is to be, and remain, open.

Death is a constant, because it is… inscrutable?… to both writers.

Miriam Van Hee has a lovely poem, Summer End On The Leie, which begins, saying:

this is what a painter would see….

to counter, later:

how do you paint that you’ll never
walk here again, struggling
while your father holds you by the hand

And how that last image conveys so very much. It is, yes, a visual image, but it is also an experience, that struggling child with all her wants, annoyances, moods and excitements tumbling together.

Life, the here-and-now, are not just what is before us, it is how we react to it, what we bring to it, and what we’ll take away. The here-and-now is the focal point, only, of who knows how many dimensions of experience.

There is a still centre to these poems, a carefully discovered spot from where the writer can choose and manipulate words and language, mood and sensibility, to produce such multi-layered writing.

3

So how does she achieve her effects?
She eschews all format other than line-integrity and stanza form. There are no upper case letters, no stops; the only punctuation allowed are commas, to emphasise/clarify meaning.
And yet the lines are strongly metrical; there is the echoic whisper of assonance. 

The line follows thought, and breaks where thought moves. It takes great craft, skill, to arrange the line like this. The thought is often ruminative, considering a past action or event – after all, whatever we are aware of is a past event. To register a real now in a meaningful and full way still entails a future action of recording. All records are of past events. 

Anne Marie Musschoot in her essay With A View of the Landscape, the Poetic World of Miriam Van Hee, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55747832.pdf writes of the search for interiority in her writing. It is as though part of an equation with ‘out there’. The search for self space is very much in keeping with the European experience in the time of closed frontiers, entrenched political confrontation – to encapsulate, part of the Cold War experience for those on or near the front lines.

This can also be found in her use of language, avoiding rhetoric and big concepts. Her language persuades as all language does, is always rhetorical to a degree, but she asks us to listen and to also prompts us to think. The essay says: ‘Great’ feelings are expressed simply and unassumingly, in a manner averse to pathos and reduced to everyday proportions, in language closely resembling natural speech.  
That is, not street speech : the brag and self-promotion of ‘street’, nor the ‘social glue’ of like-sounds, phrases, but communication that is loaded with gender, culture, one’s time, one’s experience and response to one’s time.

She is often considered a ‘domestic’ writer, concerned with home, children, limited environment. There is always, as we noted above, the other part of her equation. The ‘distance’, and the longing are part of the exploration, mapping, of self’s space in collective society. This in itself is an act of refusal that is also a positive act of valuing. 

An interview in stellarmarispoetry https://stellamarispoetry.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/buitenland-miriam-van-hee/

has: 
The four elements – earth, water, air and fire – keep playing their game; every new landscape offers a treasure: you remembered / all those sunsets / behind the dark forests / breath-taking / sunsets. Apart from the different landscapes, she also ‘touches’ the earth’s origins: the earth’s crust moved and continents / they rose as tall, rebellious children, / they crashed / on others and out the fire / rose mountains, heavy and mad.

We also read in this article:
besides,/the word apricot disappeared and Moscow,/
which I would very much want to read as a reference to Inger Christensen’s Alfabet (published 1981), along with referencing the status of opennness of her study-centre, heart, of Slavic Europe and Asia. 
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of Russia, coincided with an opening up in her work.

So, is she a poet of resistance?

If we consider the Russian poets she has translated, then we can see that all were poets of resistance, poets of personal value in mass society.

Miriam Van Hee’s choice of non-punctual, upper-case avoidance, writing style, echoes the approach by East European poets in the Cold War. There – see Zbigniew Herbert, for example – the style challenges the monolithic power-structures imposed upon them. By inverting the grandiosity, style, structures of discourse, of the Socialist Realist ideology, they sought to undermine its energy-sources, their tentacular reaching into lives.
Miriam Van Hee grew up in that environment, in the midst of the post-War world of the Soviet experiment, and its human costs, and of the West’s at times maniacal responses and posturing.

Also, the path Miriam Van Hee has travelled in her books bears many similarities in tone and response to that of the East German writer Elke Erb.
Elke Erb has relentlessly sought out the self-value, not just of herself, but for each of us. She has also sought to identify power-structures in society, cultures, social interactions, and to refuse and defuse them, whether they be gender-based, economic (which, of course, are all inter-connected), political etc.

I argue that both experienced similar journeys towards wholeness, and away from vacuous but vicious social and political constructs.

Other voices are always given equal weight in Miriam Van Hee’s poems, the ‘I’ does not declaim or dominate. There is a searching out of the workings of democracy in this.

If we look again at the Summer End On The Leie, it begins:

this is what a painter would see :
the bleached grassy bank, chestnuts
and lime trees….
On the other bank a walker, and his
thoughts, how do you paint those
………..
……………

from where we’re seated you can’t see
the water itself and I’m still wondering how you
paint distances…..
……………….
……………… and how you capture the past
when you still walked there yourself

how do you paint that you’ll never
walk there again…….

Is there a teasing-out of who, and how that who, holds the definite interpretations? In effect, the accepted translation of experience and reality? In other words, who determines the power-relations between people, between personal and public, between personal knowledge and accepted knowledge?

In The Pyramid of The Sun (Teotihuacan) she writes of how the singular personal act of climbing the pyramid reveals further and further views. Of what? Of how the pyramid is part of bigger complex, how other pyramids show further off, how houses and dusty roads appear : ‘a kind one connectedness’.
The poem ends:

you thought of the birds again, you’d
always been in awe of them, the way
they’d spread their wings at the last moment,
to set sail in the sky

A form of transcendence? Of the ability of the singular human experience to experience a kind of ‘freedom’?

In Kriekerijstraat, Sint-Amandsberg , she writes:

there are gardens that have escaped someone’s
watchful eye…..

(Kriekkerijstraat, is the part of Ghent the writer grew up. If you look it up on Google Maps you find an incredibly clean, litterless, un-graffitti’d area. Astonishing. Like somewhere that has indeed ‘escaped someone’s watchful eye’)

If my argument has validity, then it may be possible to read those early books, the snowed-in landscapes, the isolated and shut-down discourse, as empathetic responses to the Cold War human experiences of cultures she found sympathy with early-on. Enough to pursue three year’s of highly concentrated study, and many, many years teaching, and translating.

3

The fullest current resource for the writing of Miriam Van Hee, in translation, is the generous selection of Judith Wilkinson, and available on Poetry International.
The site also has a great introduction to the writer, and lists availabilty. There is also a generous bibliography:

https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/866/Miriam-Van-hee/en/tile

The Shoestring Press selection of her work, Instead of Silence (1997), has long been out of print.

The translator, Judith Wilkinson does certainly need mention, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Wilkinson

Her own website:
judithwilkinson.net

How people lived in the 15th century

in Flanders.

Well, leaky roofs were, if not the norm, then, an expected annoyance.

Take the case of George Chastellain, appointed chronicler and celebrator of the ducs de Burgundy, Philip the Good, and successor, Charles the Bold.
This spanned the period 1419 to 1477.
George Chastellain was active in his role between 1450s to 1470s.

It is the latter part of his life we have most incidental details.
In 1455 he moved into a ducal property in Valenciennes, of the Flemish/French border. The move was permanent.

There is nothing material of that period left, now. WW2 saw to that; the city had to be almost wholly rebuilt after the War.

1

What we have, was pieced together from various written sources by Graeme Small, in his book :
George Chastellain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy, (The Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1997).

In his earlier career, setting out into his literary life, he had work performed before the best writer of the time, Charles D’Orleans, resettled from a quarter century of ‘enforced’ English residence.
The work presented, The Azure Throne, was warmly received, both by duke Philip the Good, as well as Charles D’Orleans.

The residence, we are told, was situated in central Valenciennes as-was. The building (‘le lorgis Jorge’) overlooked the Escaut canal at the back, whilst the front had a courtyard. Oh, and a well. How easily we forget these basic necessities.
It was situated ‘close to’ the house of the grand receiver, and on the other, er… an oat loft. OK.

The building had a cellar, and chapel. Standard, then.
The ground floor was a ducal stables. Also there was a kitchen down there. Hm.

The actual rooms, chambers, etc, were up a staircase, which had doors leading off.
The staircase led up to a gallery. Here were the main rooms.
This gallery, however, was sort of like a cloister, open to the weather. In time he had to have installed wooden frames to stop the wind.

‘Off this draughty passage,’ writes Graeme Small, ‘lay several rooms…. Among these rooms were ‘le grant chambre de George Chastellain’, and one further, private room…. Built at Chastellain’s request, this was his ‘comptoir’ … where he wrote….‘

This was not a property for a family to live. George Chastellain did not marry, although he did have an acknowledged child, Gonthier.
Gonthier was brought up by his mother. By the time of his ‘majority’ his father had already died. His successor, Jean Molinet, elected to support the claims of Gonthier to applications for ducal support.

The times had changed, however. Charles the Bold was a very different character to Philip the Good. He was ‘the Bold’, but this also meant merciless, fearless. He was a warrior duke, and died in battle. He was expansionist, and his time was an unsettled time.

2

Here was George Chastellain at Valenciennes, away now, from the ducal court, as well as his ambassadorial missions to the royal court.
But Valenciennes was at an important meeting place en route between the two. Missives and ducal and court callers came constantly.
He wrote his great Chronicles here.

These Chronicles were lost, forgotten for centuries, until rediscovered.
… first edited by Buchon in Les chroniques nationales 1827 and re-edited by Kervyn de Lettenhove.: https://en.google-info.org/2406219/1/georges-chastellain.htmlhttps://en.google-info.org/2406219/1/georges-chastellain.html

These Chronicles, as well as George Chastellain’s surviving written works: political poems, ballades, formal poems, pieces written to other writers, allegorical plays etc became the main source material, or should we say, spring-board, for the huge and famous work
The Waning of the Middle-Ages,
by Johan Huizinga.

Here we read of the all-round sensual experience of the times: the noises – of parades, animals, people in general; the smells: no toilets, remember, and living close to animals, as here; the colours – this was the time of Jan Van Ecyk: look at those costumes.
jan-van-eyck.org
The gorgeous costumes, and furnishings of the Arnolfini portrait, give us a glimpse into the period, the Italian connections, and supposedly portrays their residence in Bruges.
This was also the period, and environment, for the great works of Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Ockeghem)

Interestingly, when George Chastellain was taken on as chronicler of the Duke of Burgundy, Jan Van Eyck was also on the payroll. From the records of their recorded pay, George Chastellain’s the highest of the two.

George Chastellain was one the earliest of what became known as the Grands Rhétoriqueurs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grands_Rhétoriqueurs).
They were many, in time, and what may of begun as a latinate chronicling and court entertainments, evolved as writer responded to writer. We had eventually a force, and their fascination with “copia“, verbal games and the difficulties of interpretation link them to such Renaissance figures as Erasmus and Rabelais. (http://artandpopularculture.com/Rhétoriqueurs)

Such literary movements set off their own trajectories.
They were succeeded by rejection, and counter-claim for prominence, by Pierre de Ronsard’s La Pléiade.
But also both were rejected by the example of Francois Villon and his anti-rhetorical, ultra-realist writings.

Tiananmen Square 1989

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