'The greatest curse brought down on us by technology...'

There are odd moments in Stefan Zweig's The World Of Yesterday when he could be writing about... the world of today. Consider this:
'The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time.'
And Zweig wrote that before the internet, before television, before the mobile phone, WiFi, the tablet and PC, rolling news, Twitter... How would he have coped in today's wired (or wireless) world? Could he have functioned in such a seething ocean of instantaneous information, misinformation, opinion and reaction? Well yes, he would probably have coped the way most of us do, by ensuring that we have at least some time cut off from it all, for our soul's (or our sanity's) sake. For myself, I barely glance at newspapers these days, saving most of my reading time for something more sustaining; I never go near Twitter or FaceBook, and make as little use of telephones (mobile or otherwise) as I can get away with; I walk as  much as I can, and without anything plugged into my ears; and I spend as much time as I can listening to music, surely the best refuge from a world of meaningless noise. It is possible, if only for short periods, to escape the present, even now.
  Zweig identifies another curious feature of News too - that those closest to where it is happening often have least awareness of it. Visiting Vienna for a few days in February 1934, he was quite unaware that Dollfuss was putting down a 'worker's revolution', storming municipal buildings with machine guns and artillery, and pursuing the rebels from street to street. Zweig knew nothing of this until he read about it in the foreign press, and when eager friends questioned him about it aferwards, he had to confess he knew no more of it than they did. And then, a few months later, Dollfuss was assassinated one day at 12 noon and Zweig was reading all about it in the London papers at 5.30pm. Telephoning Vienna at once, he found that no one there, even within a few streets of where it happened, knew any more than was known in London. 'In our days,' Zweig notes with some amazement, 'you may be ten streets away from the scene of events which will have wide repercussions, and yet know less about them than people thousands of kilometres away.' Such is News, such is the modern world.

Sandwich Matters

Lord, National Sandwich Week is upon us again, and nearly over! I hadn't realised, though perhaps some dim intuition was at work when I made myself two cheese sandwiches for my dinner last night (Jarlsberg, since you ask, with a little tomato chutney, on white, with plain crisps). The British Sandwich Association is, as ever, making much of National Sandwich Week, and another major sandwich record has been broken: read all about it here (and ask yourself why these people are dressed as if for a crime scene or a chemical spill).
  This is, by the British Sandwich Association's reckoning, the 251st anniversary year of the sandwich - i.e. of the first written reference to the snack named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, its supposed inventor. But the story begins even earlier, according to Woody Allen's chronicle of the Earl's agonised progress to his Eureka moment...

1736: Enters Cambridge University, at his parents' behest, to
pursue studies in rhetoric and metaphysics, but displays little
enthusiasm for either. In constant revolt against everything academic,
he is charged with stealing loaves of bread and performing unnatural
experiments with them. Accusations of heresy result in his expulsion.
1738: Disowned, he sets out for the Scandinavian countries, where
he spends three years in intensive research on cheese. He is much
taken with the many varieties of sardines he encounters and writes in
his notebook, "I am convinced that there is an enduring reality,
beyond anything man has yet attained, in the juxtaposition of
foodstuffs. Simplify, simplify." Upon his return to England, he meets
Nell Smallbore, a greengrocer's daughter, and they marry. She is to
teach him all he will ever know about lettuce.
1741: Living in the country on a small inheritance, he works day
and night, often skimping on meals to save money for food. His first
completed work — a slice of bread, a slice of bread on top of that, and a
slice of turkey on top of both — fails miserably. Bitterly disappointed,
he returns to his studio and begins again.
1745: After four years of frenzied labor, he is convinced he is on
the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of
turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all
but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great and
encourages him. Heartened by the philosopher's friendship, he
returns to work with renewed vigor.
1747: Destitute, he can no longer afford to work in roast beef or
turkey and switches to ham, which is cheaper.
1750: In the spring, he exhibits and demonstrates three consecu-
tive slices of ham stacked on one another; this arouses some interest,
mostly in intellectual circles, but the general public remains
unmoved. Three slices of bread on top of one another add to his
reputation, and while a mature style is not yet evident, he is sent for
by Voltaire.
1751: Journeys to France, where the dramatist-philosopher has
achieved some interesting results with bread and mayonnaise. The
two men become friendly and begin a correspondence that is to end
abruptly when Voltaire runs out of stamps.
1758: His growing acceptance by opinion-makers wins him a
commission by the Queen to fix "something special" for a luncheon
with the Spanish ambassador. He works day and night, tearing up
hundreds of blueprints, but finally—at 4:17 A.M., April 27, 1758 — he
creates a work consisting of several strips of ham enclosed, top and
bottom, by two slices of rye bread. In a burst of inspiration, he
garnishes the work with mustard. It is an immediate sensation, and
he is commissioned to prepare all Saturday luncheons for the
remainder of the year.
1760: He follows one success with another, creating "sandwiches,"
as they are called in his honor, out of roast beef, chicken, tongue, and
nearly every conceivable cold cut. Not content to repeat tried
formulas, he seeks out new ideas and devises the combination
sandwich, for which he receives the Order of the Garter.
1769: Living on a country estate, he is visited by the greatest men
of his century; Haydn, Kant, Rousseau and Ben Franklin stop at his
home, some enjoying his remarkable creations at table, others
ordering to go.
1778: Though aging physically he still strives for new forms and
writes in his diary, "I work long into the cold nights and am toasting
everything now in an effort to keep warm." Later that year, his open
hot roast-beef sandwich creates a scandal with its frankness.
1783: To celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday, he invents the
hamburger and tours the great capitals of the world personally,
making burgers at concert halls before large and appreciative
audiences. In Germany, Goethe suggests serving them on buns — an
idea that delights the Earl, and of the author of Faust he says, "This
Goethe, he is some fellow." The remark delights Goethe, although the
following year they break intellectually over the concept of rare,
medium and well done.
1790: At a retrospective exhibition of his works in London, he is
suddenly taken ill with chest pains and is thought to be dying, but
recovers sufficiently to supervise the construction of a hero sandwich
by a group of talented followers. Its unveiling in Italy causes a riot,
and it remains misunderstood by all but a few critics.
1792: He develops a genu varum, which he fails to treat in time,
and succumbs in his sleep. He is laid to rest in Westminster Abbey,
and thousands mourn his passing.
At his funeral, the great German poet Holderlin sums up his
achievements with undisguised reverence: "He freed mankind from
the hot lunch. We owe him so much."

Cotten: Too Much What?!

The great film actor Joseph Cotten was born on this day in 1905. Everybody has to start somewhere, and Cotten made his screen debut in a 1938 film called, ahem, Too Much Johnson. No - he did not, as many have, find his way to Hollywood via porn: Too Much Johnson was an Orson Welles production, a short film (now missing believed lost) that was intended to complement Welles's stage production of a William Gillette comedy of the same title. I can't help feeling that if there's ever another adaptation, it will come out under a different name...

Metamorphosis

The scientists have been making use of 'high-resolution computed tomography' to capture images of what's going on inside a chrysalis as it makes the astonishing transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. This rather beautiful slideshow takes you through the whole amazing process. Still more amazing perhaps is that memory persists through all this making and unmaking. How does that happen? Well, how does any of it? It's an everyday miracle. As Emily Dickinson succinctly put it:

THE BUTTERFLY’S assumption-gown,
In chrysoprase apartments hung,
This afternoon put on.

How condescending to descend,
And be of buttercups the friend
In a New England town!

The slideshow follows the metamorphosis of an Old World Swallowtail, and Dickinson's poem is probably about the Spicebush or Green-Clouded Swallowtail, whose startlingly arrayed caterpillar is pictured above.

Rehung

I'm glad to see that Tate Britain has been rehung on strictly chronological lines. This - rather than the thematic approach that has held sway for too long - is so obviously the best way to hang a historical collection of national art. Schools and 'isms' are more often created by art critics and historians than by artists, and the 'themes' dreamt up by curators can be deeply unhelpful. When paintings are hung with other works of their time they speak for themselves, loud and clear - the more so, in the Tate's new hang, because the gallery has done away with those tiresome interpretative captions. Now we can look at the work itself, unmediated by commentary, and set in the context of its time. This will surely make for a much more rewarding, illuminating - and demanding - experience. It's a sign of our retroprogressive times too: the recently reopened Rijksmuseum is also hung chronologically, with furniture and objets d'art of each period enriching the context - perhaps Tate Britain could have a word with the V&A?  And perhaps something could be done about Tate Modern...

Fifty Shades - What to Do?

Worrying news today that charity shops are being bombarded with unwanted copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, the allegedly erotic megaselling  'bonkbuster', at such a rate that they simply cannot cope. As soon as they shift one copy, two more come in - and they can't even be recycled (apparently there's a problem with the glue). Surely, you're thinking, Fifty Shades is a book that repays endless rereading, constantly revealing new depths and resonances, a book that speaks anew to us at each stage of life's journey. Alas, it would seem this is not the case...
Something must be done before this fair land of ours disappears under mountains of unwanted bonkbusters. But what to do with them? How about compacting them into bricks and using them as a novel (geddit?) building material. If only on a small scale, they would surely be of use - we could have, as a starter project, fifty sheds of grey...
Any more ideas? We'd better come up with something before the wave of unwanted copies of Dan Brown's Inferno hits the charity shops next year.

The World of Yesterday

I'm reading Stefan Zweig's extraordinary memoir, The World of Yesterday (Pushkin Press). In recent years I've read several of his fine novellas and the novel Beware of Pity (about which I wrote here) - but The World of Yesterday is something quite different, a memoir that is also a portrait of an age, the age in which Europe moved from peace, security and wellbeing into the destructive horrors of two world wars. Zweig, born in Vienna in 1881, was to experience - to intensely experience - this terrible transformation in his own lifetime, losing almost everything along the way. The World of Yesterday was published in 1942, the year that Zweig and his wife, having been driven from their homeland by the coming of the Nazis and having lived a peripatetic life in Britain and America, died in a double suicide in Buenos Aires.
  The World of Yesterday is not a suicide note, but it bears powerful personal testimony to the shattering impact of the wars, and what came between them, in the most murderous century in human history. In 1942, the tide of war was actually turning against Hitler, but Zweig had probably concluded that, even if he was defeated, too much damage had been done for Europe ever to recover and be itself again. At least, dying when he did, he was never to know the full extent of what the Nazis and their allies had inflicted on his fellow Jews...
  But no, The World of Yesterday is not a suicide note. It is, for one thing, immensely readable and suffused with Zweig's large humanist (in the best sense) spirit. It begins with a vivid and richly detailed picture of what Zweig calls the Golden Age of Security, that world into which he was born, one that seemed permanent and endlessly promising, but was to be entirely lost when Europe stumbled into war in 1914. (He is, though, by no means uncritical of that lost world - particularly of its brutal and deadening education system and its extreme hypocrisy in sexual matters.)
 'I never considered myself important enough to feel tempted to tell others the story of my life,' writes Zweig. 'Much had to happen, far more in the shape of terrible events, disasters and trials than any other single generation has known, before I found the courage to embark on a book in which I feature as the main, or rather the central, character. Nothing is further from my mind than to bring myself to the fore...' And indeed this is the most self-effacing of memoirs - we don't even learn that Zweig is married until the second person singular suddenly appears. Zweig sees himself not as the subject, but as 'the presenter of a lecture illustrated by slides. The times provide the pictures...' And what pictures they are. There are unforgettable images here, particularly in the riveting chapter on The First Hours of the 1914 War - or, at the end of that war, crossing from Switzerland into a ruined Austria, while the last Emperor travels in the opposite direction, standing at the window of his train, 'a tall, grave man, looking for the last time at the mountains, the buildings and the people of his land'.
  Much of this rich book is given over to accounts of the literary, artistic - and political - milieu Zweig moved in, with pen portraits of many friends, some (like Rilke and James Joyce, who was not exactly a friend) still famous names, others forgotten. There are certainly passages that can be skipped (it's a big book, getting on for 500 pages), but the narrative gains momentum as it goes along and becomes ever more gripping. I've still got something over 100 pages to read, and I really don't want it to end - especially to end where it does.