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Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in My Life

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, which is the name of the Russian TV series written and directed by Igor Maslennikov after the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, were to play an important role in my life. By 1988/9 when I first watched it I have already been taking to writing short stories and poems. The first film I’ve seen, The Speckled Band, was vivid enough to scare the hell out of me: for a few nights afterwards I was afraid to go to the kitchen through the dark corridor, and I thought I could hear noises. I didn’t look for serpents under my bed, no, but I suppose I wouldn’t be writing this blog, had I found any.

The final outcome, however, was perhaps the most unexpected, as the fear gradually gave way to a loving obsession with the adventures and unbeatable charisma of both sleuth and his friend. And it was this obsession that made me take an exercise-book (not a notebook yet) and start writing the new chapter in the long chain of Holmes’s meanderings along London’s criminal web. It was in 1989. I passionately filled about half of the exercise-book when it downed on me that there was something wrong about the whole thing. You see, the cover bore a proudly written inscription “Arthur Conan Doyle. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson”, and I suddenly realised that it was me, not Conan Doyle, who was writing the story. I could very well change the name of the author, but even though I probably didn’t know the word “plagiarism” back then, I knew nonetheless that those two amazing characters had already been created, and the idea of continuing their story lost its charm instantly. This is how I learnt that I wanted to be original and to put my own name to the things I write.

But the film not only remained in my life, it became one of those films that I can watch again, and again, and again. In fairness, this is exactly what I’ve been doing, while in Russia. I probably haven’t missed any single time the series was screened on the Russian TV, and bearing in mind that this is quite a popular film I must have seen each of the episodes more than twenty times. As time went by, I stopped being afraid, and I began to pay attention to acting. And this was when I fell in love with this film once again, this time forever. Almost the entire cast were well-known stage actors, and although the names of the majority of them might not tell you anything, the series can be called star-studded. In the final episode, “The Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, you could see one of the universally acclaimed Russian actors, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, in a cameo appearance. He starred as Hamlet in the 1964 Kosintzev’s adaptation which earned him a BAFTA nomination and the praise from Sir Laurence Olivier. An Oscar-winning Russian film director, Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt by the Sun) appeared, as Sir Henry Baskerville, in the brilliant adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. By the time he played this part, he’d won the Golden Seashell award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 1977.

I strongly recommend you reading the article about Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin: The Russian Holmes and Watson, to gain the idea of how the film was made. As the author of the article correctly says, if one knows the Conan Doyle’s Canon, they can easily get the idea of what is happening on screen. Unfortunately, quite a few of the regularly appearing actors have left us, and not only Rina Zelyonaya (Mrs Hudson) and Borislav Brondukov (Inspector Lestrade), but Dr Watson himself (Vitaly Solomin). At the same time, Vasily Livanov is the only Russian actor to have received an honorary OBE for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.

The reason I wrote all this is not just a sudden attack of nostalgia. It was the Sherlock Holmes weekend of ITV Granada, and I watched a few films. I’ve seen some adaptations previously, the latest being with Rupert Everett in the leading role. Yet I keep liking the Russian film – not because it was the first screen adaptation I’ve seen or because I’m Russian. Simply, in my eyes the Russian series brings to the screen the solidity and dramatism of Conan Doyle’s stories in the way that no other adaptation does. Shot entirely in what was then the Soviet Union (the Neva in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) playing the role of the Thames, in particular), the creators of the film somehow not only got under the skin of the characters, but under the skin of the Victorian London and of the late 19th c. We may never know exactly how they managed to do this, but this is what art is about – creating a physical shape for the unthinkable.

The Sherlock Holmes Story on Flickr
London Visit of Vasily Livanov (Robert Graham, 16th January 2007)
Meeting Vasily Livanov (photoset accompanying the above)

Finally, to let you delve deeper into the Russian epic film, here is an excerpt (found on YouTube) from The Hound of the Baskervilles. In the first minute of it you see Sherlock Holmes (Livanov), Dr Watson (Solomin), and Mrs Hudson (Zelyonaya), and this is the dialogue between them:

Holmes: It’s interesting to know, Watson, what you can say about this walking stick?
Watson: One could think you’ve got eyes on your nape.
Holmes: My dear friend, had you read my monograph about the tactile organs of the detectives, you’d have known that on the top of our ears there are these sensory points. So, I’ve got no eyes on my nape.
Mrs Hudson: He sees your reflection in the coffee pot.

The music is by Vladimir Dashkevich. Enjoy!

Can You Pass On Something Good?

From the diary of Dr Horace Stubbs:

“Once upon a time during my travels through Europe I stayed in a small village just outside the old lovely city of Leuven. It was a cold November evening, and the village was all covered with the ghostly fog. A dog was howling in the distance, and it was about to rain. I knocked on the door of the first inn that I noticed. The porter, a boy of about fifteen years of age, gave me a room, but told me that their cook went down with the cold and that I would have to dine in the village. I was rather unpleasantly surprised for I have never been in this village before.

‘We’ve only got one pub’, the boy told me, ‘but surely it is the best one in your life, sir’.

‘What is it that makes this pub the best one?’ I inquired, still wishing I asked the post carriage to drive me to Leuven.

‘They always pass on something good there’, the boy replied.

While travelling, I have come across many strange customs and laws, and I have heard so many puzzling proverbs and sayings that I did not even ask the boy for details of that “something good”. As long as I could have a dinner and a pint, it was fairly good already.

I truly craved a good dinner, and my legs seemed to have been carrying me to the pub by themselves. The pub was a short building with the steep roof and a few lanterns that hanged along the wall. I saw a cart driving up the street towards me. When it went past I turned back, and then I noticed a tall slim gendarme walking down the street. We smiled at each other, but his face was serious as if he was looking for somebody.

When I entered the pub, I took a table in the farthest corner. In most of my journeys I enjoy taking such table. Of course, at times it is delightful to sit in the middle of the dinner hall, especially if you are eating out in a company of your good friends, or your acquaintance is a lady who is lovely to be seen with. But if I dine alone, I take a table in the farthest corner. I ordered a grilled beef steak and, knowing I was in Belgium, asked for a chalice of Artois. The chalice arrived, and the taste and the smoothness of this beautiful drink were such that I instantly forgot about the cold November night outside the pub, about the policeman, about the long months that I spent travelling from country to country.

Furthermore, as I looked around I noticed people who were all jolly and nice, and all women who were there were fair and beautiful in this peculiarly bucolic way that you can only see in the village. I felt very good indeed, and by then my dish had arrived, and I was having another chalice, and the meat was cooked so gently that it was, by Nature, the best meat I have tasted in my life. While I was enjoying the food, I observed that the local people were most considerate, as they passed a hat of the old gentleman on to him. I did not want to leave, for somehow I felt very much at home in the place I barely knew, with people I have never seen before, and most likely will never see again…”

This extract from the imaginary diary was inspired by the new Stella Artois TV ad. As I entered La Publicite section of Artois.co.uk, there was the screening of Pass On Something Good. I was instantly taken by the warmth of the pub atmosphere. The capacity to “pass on something good”, which in the case with La Famille Artois runs in the family, makes you want to find yourself in that pub, on that exactly night. And so, being a wanderer at heart who nonetheless loves arriving and staying (and eating and drinking, of course) at a warm cosy place, I imagined myself as an English gentleman travelling abroad a century ago, and arriving by chance to this place where I was served not only with a perfect steak and beer, but also – with indelible memories.

Closing my notebook and getting to facts, this new Artois commercial is perhaps quite different from the ones we’re all used to. Read Sam’s article on Artois Blog about making this cinead (I can’t just call such ad an ad!). There are also a few interesting facts about it, of which I am going to divulge you all but one. If you ever wondered if or not animals ever audition for their parts, now there is a solid proof that they do. Two apes auditioned for the part of monkey. The one who got the part ended up passing on something very dazzling. Oh, and music was specially composed by Jim Copperthwaite.

One last thing – ArtoisAds and ArtoisBlog have both got their pages on YouTube.

remember, remember THE FIREWORKS on 5 of November

I am getting really weary of the traditional celebrations of 5 of November night in England. It’s like a competition in the neighbourhood…

This is probably a surprising kind of rant from somebody who spent several years studying Medieval & Early Modern History, and Tudor & Stuart History in particular. But I am getting really weary of the traditional celebrations of the Guy Fawkes night in England. It feels like every year there is a competition in neighbourhood – to see how many fireworks one is capable of setting off, say, in the matter of 10 minutes. While somebody is celebrating, you are interned in the four walls of your own house, feeling hot and brimming with headache. There is no point to try and open the windows, for the air somehow seems to be fresher in your house than in the street.

I think I already told the story of my coming to England precisely on November 5th 2002. A somewhat abrupt landing at Heathrow was outdone by our landing in Manchester, when the plane literally dropped down instead of landing gradually. A few Russian people sat next to me across the aisle, and one of them instantly phoned his relatives, and said jokingly:

“Hello, we’re OK, we’ve just fallen down. No, no, we landed, but it was like falling down”.

Needless to say, my head was pounding after such landing.

This year it went from bad to worse, particularly today. The astonishingly loud fireworks were intercepted by an even louder fugue of cars’ sirens. If I’m not mistaken, there were two or three cars involved. I’m being told that this was a long Guy Fawkes weekend because children go back to school on November 5th. Apparently, this means that my week of vacation that started on Friday evening, should not be spoilt any more.

But the question I’ve suddenly asked myself this evening is both strange and not, considering the fact that it comes from somebody who studied History. I know that sometimes most strange customs survive for centuries, and I am by no means attempting to discard the importance of the Gunpowder Plot or of the Guy Fawkes Night. What I am wondering about is exactly what is now being celebrated. So, Guy Fawkes didn’t get to blow up James I in the Parliament in 1605 – great. But it only took another 44 years for James’s son Charles to be executed in 1649. One king was saved, another wasn’t, so this is certainly not the reason for a festival. Perhaps, people are celebrating the fact that the magnificent Houses of Parliament weren’t blown up. Fair enough, but the Parliament that Fawkes was plotting to destroy had perished in the 1834 fire.

Obviously, it is impossible to forget the historical reason for the festivities held on November 5th. But upon looking – and smelling – those festivities, I feel it may be more appropriate to give them the name of the Fireworks Night. At least, such name will reflect the now spirit of the celebrations, which have evidently ceased to do with history.

Western Approaches in Schmap Liverpool Guide

I mentioned that I loved photography. I discovered it in my late teens, and I owe the interest not so much to my father, but to my acquaintance with and passion for surrealism. Back then I adored Man Ray. Later I discovered Helmut Newton, and Cecil Beaton, and David Bailey, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and of course Eugene Atget, and so my passion has crystallised. I should note that many of the pictures you see on Flickr were taken with cameraphone, although I’ve recently begun to upload those that were taken with a regular camera.

Quite a few people recently have told me that they liked my pictures, which is very encouraging. Even more so was a Flickrmail from the editor of Schmap Guides a couple of weeks ago telling me that one of my Liverpool pictures was shortlisted for the inclusion in the forthcoming edition of Schmap Liverpool Guide. Then yesterday at work, when I checked my email during lunch, I found out that my photo of the Western Approaches Headquarters was included in the Guide. What a wonderful way to start the weekend!

I am thoroughly delighted and grateful to the editorial of Schmap for this inclusion. I would certainly like more of this and similar things to come, but ultimately, this means that I should finally start taking my passion for photography just as seriously as I take my passion for literature, cinema, and music.

You can navigate the guide below, in the cultural section of which you will find, apart from the Western Approaches Museum, St Georges Hall, Walker Art Gallery, and Liverpool Museum and Planetarium.

http://www.schmap.com/templates/t011g.html?uid=liverpool&sid=tours_tour2&ultranarrow=true&#mapview=Map&tab=map&placeid=106184&topleft=53.41894,-3.00304&bottomright=53.39643,-2.9694&autoplay=1&c=f6f6f6A72122A62122A62122FFF88FFAF5BBffffffFFF88Fd8d8d8A4A7A6A621226990ffECEBBD0000005C5A4E5C5A4E000000929292F0EFDA

As a matter of fact, although I’ve been to Liverpool I haven’t been to many Liverpool museums, and reading about the Western Approaches, which is now a part of Liverpool War Museum, absolutely makes me want to visit it. Bearing in mind that I’m currently on a week-long holiday, this should be a great opportunity to navigate the Schmap Guide. As Liverpool War Museum website tells us,

The Western Approaches is a rectangular area of the Atlantic ocean lying on the western coast of the United Kingdom. It is roughly the same height as the west coast of Britain, starting directly on the coast and ending in the Atlantic roughly at Iceland. The area is particularly important to the UK, because many of the larger shipping ports lie in this area. (http://www.liverpoolwarmuseum.co.uk/history/)

The bunker, we are told, had played a crucial part in the Battle of the Atlantic, “its role being to ensure the successful delivery of supplies and equipment into wartime Britain from the sea”. Reconstructed by the Walton Group, the bunker “is the original building where the original battle was fought and won. It has been reconstructed exactly how it used to be”.

Below is a bigger version of my picture of the Western Approaches Headquarters.

La Poesie: The Kiss

I’ve sometimes written poems that were inspired by a piece of music or by a painting. One may appropriately call such poems impressions, the consequences of reflection or meditation on a subject. But sometimes a poem was written “independently” from the influence of another work of art, yet it may still be possible to find a parallel to it in cinema or painting.

In the case with this poem, I didn’t have any work of art to inspire me. And I didn’t conspire to write a poem on the subject of a kiss. It was one of those occasions (quite usual with me) when the idea, together with the interpretations, has simply descended. On such occasions I usually don’t work on a poem – it arrives in the exact form.

One thing I was consciously trying to do was to write the poem “neutrally”. The beauty of the English language to me is in the fact that it generally doesn’t distinguish grammatically between the masculine and the feminine, which is the case of other European languages, including Russian. My love for this grammatical “neutrality” is naturally connected to my regular pounding on the necessity to shrug off the “categories” and “identities”. The story of an act of a kiss is told in the first person, and I wrote it in such way that it contains no indication of a gender, so both a man and a woman can read it. In this regard neither of the authors of playcasts for this poem succeeded at following my vision: both images have a male figure as an active partner, whereas my idea was to allow women, who evidently do kiss men, to play the leading part, providing they dare read the poem aloud. I don’t mention same-sex couples, since my idea was to write a poem that could be read by everyone and for everyone.

After I’ve written it, however, I read it over and over again, and suddenly I realised that, without actually planning to do so, I wrote a verbal illustration to Roland Penrose’s painting Winged Domino. Portrait of Valentine. At once a painting that can potentially instill someone with awe or even disgust has become romantic.

I must admit that I still couldn’t translate the poem, so as to give the full idea of its meter and rhythm; I will include the English verbatim translation in the parentheses for the time being.

Поцелуй. Winged Domino. Portrait of Valentine (R. Penrose).

Как бабочка порхает над цветком,
Его бесценной красотой любуясь,
Так я касаюсь робко языком
Губ-лепестков твоих; а ты, волнуясь,

Мне отдаешь божественный нектар;
И, превозмогши головокруженье,
Я вижу сквозь пыльцу цветочных чар
В твоих глазах – мое изображенье.

(The Kiss. Winged Domino. Portrait of Valentine (R. Penrose)

Just like the butterfly flutters around the flower
Adoring its precious beauty,
So I hesitantly touch your lips
With my tongue; and you, excited,

Return to me a divine nectar;
And, having overcome my vertigo,
I see, through the pollen of flowery charms,
My reflection – in your eyes.

Blog Action Day: Nature and Memory

As decided, on the Blog Action Day we’re blogging about environment. But exactly what shall we say? On occasions like this I’ve always wanted to say something different, yet how different can you be these days when absolutely everyone seems to be aware of the necessity of environmental protection?

My problems were solved when my mother scanned and sent to me my first (and only) herbarium. I went to school in 1987, and upon finishing our first form we’d all got this task, to create a herbarium. My mother and I made it together in 1988, and I must be honest and say that it was actually her who made most of the job, although I did have my share. This, for instance, is the title page with my first-form handwriting. This is a poem by a Russian children’s poet, Valentine Berestov, and it tells of the author’s amazement at seeing different flowers out together in herbarium, even though “in the wild” they probably didn’t know about each other.

I must admit that I never liked biology or botany at school. I might have mentioned on the blog my Biology teacher, who was a Chemistry teacher by her uni degree, and who actually was up to teaching any subject, including History and Law. Her method of teaching, unfortunately, boiled down to reading from a textbook and drawing tables, and naturally perhaps, the lessons were far from engaging.

Believe it or not, but the first time we spoke about the environmental protection was at the English lesson. We had an improvised “environmental press-conference”, over which I presided. I introduced the topics and speakers, from “environmentalists” and “journalists” to “witnesses” of environmental catastrophes. The “speakers” discussed at length the pollution, and the green-house effect, and the animal protection, and the global warming. Yet I should be honest again and say that the only thing that has then benefited from such lesson was my English vocabulary, and not the awareness of the environmental problems.

I think in part the problem may have to do with how the subject of Environmental Studies is taught at schools. In those early years at school I had the lessons in what could literally be translated as Naturology. And I can never forget a quiz we had had when we had to answer questions and tick boxes. One of the question was to classify the objects by their nature – “animate” or “inanimate”. Everything was OK, until I saw “flowers”. I thought of photosynthesis, of everything I knew then about flowers, and ticked “animate”. Turned out, this was the wrong answer. To this day I cannot understand, why. If I go from Latin, it makes sense: “anima” is “soul”, and flowers, naturally, don’t have soul. But neither do animals, one would imagine, yet they do belong to the “animate” world.

And just as I was writing this post, I remember about Hans Christian Andersen again. I was sure he had had a tale about the four seasons, but when I went to look for it I found another tale, which I always used love, it is called The Elder-Tree Mother. The elder-tree tea is a great popular remedy against the cold, but Andersen presented the elder-tree as a dryad, whose spirit told the protagonist, a little boy, wonderful stories. Let me quote this passage to you:

Now the little maiden with the blue eyes and the elder blossoms in her hair sat up in the tree and nodded to them both and said, “Today is your golden wedding anniversary!” Then from her hair she took two flowers, and kissed them so that they gleamed, first like silver, and then like gold. And when she laid them on the heads of the old couple, each became a golden crown. There they both sat, a king and a queen, under the fragrant tree that looked just exactly like an elder bush, and he told his old wife the story of the Elder Tree Mother, just as it had been told to him when he was a little boy. They both thought that much of the story resembled their own, and that part they liked best.

“Yes, that’s the way it is,” said the little girl in the tree. “Some people call me Elder Tree Mother, and some call me the Dryad, but my real name is Memory. It is I who sit up in the tree that grows on and on, and I can remember and I can tell stories. Let me see if you still have your flower.”

Then the old man opened his hymnal, and there lay the elder blossom, as fresh as if it had just been placed there. Then Memory nodded, and the two old people with the golden crowns sat in the red twilight, and they closed their eyes gently and – and – and that was the end of the story….

And so I looked my herbarium, and I saw things I’ve almost forgotten about, or haven’t recalled for years. Indeed, as the works of some historians would prove to us, Nature is the cradle of our Memory. This Memory is living and surviving, from generation to generation, and if this is not enough to persuade us in the necessity of its protection, what else will?

Links:

Hans Christian Andersen, The Elder-Tree Mother (in English)
The same in Russian
The same in Danish
The same in German
For translations in other European languages, check Hans Christian Andersen Centr e.
Julia’s Herbarium 1988 Photoset on Flickr.

Exercises in Loneliness – VII

I’ve been reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. It is an interesting book. It is easy to see why it was written; why it was written in such form and way; the content is much explained and restricted by the time when Woolf had been writing it. Her passionate appeal to write the history of a woman was received not only with accolade, but has brought much fruit in the form of the so-called “feminist studies”.

So many years and academic studies later, it is also clear that, had Virginia Woolf known everything we know these days about female authors of the past centuries, her take on female literature would probably have been different. Marguerite de Navarre had written Heptameron, a collection of novellas, clearly inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron. When Marguerite died in 1549, three daughters of Edward, Duke of Somerset (the unfortunate Good Duke of Edward VI’s reign) wrote Hecatodistichon (Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Navarre), which was published in France in 1550 and was promptly translated and augmented by the poems of The Pleiade (Ronsard and Du Belle, in particular). The first English translation of Euripides, of his tragedy Iphigenie in Aulis, was produced by Lady Lumley, the daughter of Henry Fitzalan, the 12th Earl of Arundel. Elizabeth I, as we know, was not overt on an occasional verse. Even this very brief look at female writing in the 16th c. shows that, although no Shakespeare’s sister would be able to become an actress, women were not always beaten by their fathers, but instead had the abilities which were recognised.

This is not to say that Virginia Woolf was deceiving herself or the women who would be reading her book. But recently, as I was reading Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer, I came across a chapter on loneliness. Written in what one could call a typically masculine style, the chapter is a blazing apology of solitude. The progress of one’s mind, says Schopenhauer, causes the regress in their necessity to communicate. Solitude is the haven of an outstanding, self-sufficient mind. Ordinary people are only so keen on communication because they are afraid to face themselves. Those who crave loneliness are strong people. Etc, etc…

Naturally perhaps, Schopenhauer didn’t say a word about women in that chapter. Many a feminist would probably point a finger at his chapter and sneer. Or perhaps on the contrary, they would cheer for him, because for some strange reason Woolf is speaking of exactly the masculine kind of solitude in her book. “A woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write” – is she not asking for women to have what had previously belonged exclusively to men?

What is quite obvious is that in order to give women money and rooms of their own it would take to break many centuries of tradition. There is no doubt that this tradition was stark and stifling, and that it still exists these days, when young teenage girls, still children themselves, decide to have children instead of seeking education and career. But the existence of this tradition may also very well suggest that there are two different kinds of solitude, a feminine and a masculine. There are also two rooms pertinent to each of these solitudes, and it may very well be that a masculine room will be a study, and a feminine room will remain a common room.

It would be lovely to think that when a woman says that she wants a room of her own she means that she wants to raise above the restrictions the society places on her gender and responsibilities entailed to it. She wants to acquire that sort of fortitude that a room of one’s own instills in the person who sits there. She wants to face herself. Her mind is strong enough not only to stand this solitude, but also to collect the fruits of such condition. And the fruit of solitude is the calmness of body and spirit, when the thought floats freely and effortlessly. The kind of calmness that gave us the works of Shakespeare.

But solitude, if we agree with Schopenhauer – and there is no reason not to agree with him – is a measure of self-sufficiency. The more self-sufficient one is, the happier they are in the room of their own. This is where Schopenhauer stumbles into a problem, at which Nietzsche had pointed in Human, All Too Human. “Lack of historical sense is the family failure of all philosophers”, he writes. Philosophers at the time of Nietzsche (from his point of view, anyway) “had the common failing of starting out from man as he is now”. It is hard to disagree with him, but this lack of historical sense, this failure in logic, is the direct consequence of extreme self-sufficiency.

I often feel – and this in part explains my opposition to the sometimes inevitable necessity to categorise people even by their gender, not to mention other things – that ascribing a category to oneself is retreating to the room of one’s own, to the realm of self-sufficiency, where one takes an immense pride in being different from all the others. For to be different is to be singled out; to be singled out is to be on one’s own; one can only be truly on their own in their space, which can appropriately be called a room. Of course, these days probably nobody any longer have that “family failure” of ahistorical thinking, thanks to all the academic studies. But now, probably, they have another failure of not having the knowledge of life in all its diversity, which is taking place in the common room.

Dumas had once said that he used history as a hook to hang his stories on it. A person who has a room of their own, be they a man or a woman, often has the hook, but no credible story up their sleeve. And so I think: we can earn money; we can have a study; but we, both men and women, are in far greater need for a common room – to see life, as it happens, and to better cherish the fruits of solitude.

The Public Transport in Russia

As I was writing about the British passion for queuing, I remembered about this text I wrote back in 1999, when I was still a student in Moscow and had to use public transport every day. After I read it again, I realised it was still topical, even so many years later, even in England. So, I translated it. It obviously utters things, as becomes a humourous text, but also sheds tons of light on what it was like – to use public transport in Moscow eight years ago. Enjoy!

The Ode to the Public Transport.

People like slagging off businessmen, actors and generally everyone who possess such a phenomenon of social life, as a private vehicle. One has lost the count of numerous jokes and black humour stories that feature these people and their cars. How many times did you hear, upon going out in the street: “Oh yes, of course, it’s this A* (or X*, Y*, Z*, etc), he’s driving this BMW 600 (or Cherokee, Ford, Fiat, Smart, etc)”? And how many times did you wish plague on all the houses of one unfortunate driver of a “Vauxhall” who managed to splash the entire puddle all over you?

Even so, we ought to always bear in mind that those who we consider lucky are, in fact, losers. Just think, why do they repeatedly say that they are cut off from other people? Exactly because they are hindered by their private means of transport. Of course, their public status is slightly at fault here, too. With all his love to us (people – JD) and to life, a world-known politician (who used to relish a thought of serving the Muses rather than politics) would never get on the bus and begin to read poems about the river Volga, Russia, and her enemies. He would not do it even if that provided him with a guaranteed number of votes at the forthcoming elections. To paraphrase a well-known TV ad, “image is nothing, life is everything”.

Nonetheless, the main cause of all misfortunes of the protagonists of popular legends is their personal transport. For when a man is driving his own half-rotten Fiat, he already considers himself the ruler of the Universe. When he is driving the notorious BMW 600, he considers himself the Universe without any ruler. Whereas, if he finds himself on the public transport, he’ll have to answer the Raskolnikov question: “whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the /right/ . . .”

Those of you, however, who do not possess a car, or who do but for whatever reason do not use it, should not grin gloatingly. Those of you should not do this at all, for you know the price of all trouble, so don’t put this trouble on anyone else.

Therefore, I shall allow myself to be a little more concrete because the main purpose of all that is written is to persuade those who use public transport not to sacrifice the chock-a-block for the solitude of a private car, and to inject the doubt in cars in the minds of the protagonists of popular legends.

Let us look at one day in the life of the public transport user.

Unless you are so lucky that you live in three minutes’ walk from the metro, you will first and foremost have to take a bus, a trolleybus, or a tram. The latter means of transport your humble servant, for all her love for it, uses fairly seldom, the second – more often, but both are a pure exotic in comparison to the bus.

Imagine: early morning, vernal freshness, not a raindrop, not a cloud, a sea of cars, and not a single bus in sight. “Splendid!” you think and slowly, with a bit of whistle, depart from your doorstep. If in the next five minutes you are walking the distance of 30 meters from your house to the crossroads, on the sixth minute you will get it in the neck for being so carefree. For on the sixth minute, when you are getting ready to cross the road, you will see right in front of you an elegant white, with a green stripe, rectangular on wheels, which we call a “bus”.

At such moment different people do different things. Some of them remember their P.T. classes – that is, if they are running with the minimum weight. Others in the same situation remind one of the times before our era. In those distant times there had also been the Olympic games, and a sportsman used to run in the full armour of a hoplite – a Greek soldier – that weighed around 30 kg. Although our contemporary is not a hoplite, and their bags don’t always weigh 30 kg, still, when such contemporary is running for a bus, they look fairly historic.

However, some people carry on walking as they used to. They may have their own reasons, and we shall leave them at this.

Suppose that in a record-breaking time – around 1 minute – you manage to cover three distances from your house to the crossroads. In such case it sometimes turns out that you have considerably outdone the bus (which is still standing at the traffic lights), and so you begin to get bored. This is a huge mistake! For if you reached the bus stop before the bus (especially if it happened), you should be extremely vigilant (providing you want to get onto your bus).

And so your flying carpet on six wheels arrives. Against all fears, you manage to get, or rather to wriggle, in the bus. You only get half of yourself wriggled in – the other half is helped by the closing doors. If your body is inside the bus but your bag is dangling on the outside, don’t start screaming hysterically. First of all, when you bag is in such interesting position, no-one can raid its contents. Secondly, if your bag is outside the bus, the doors will be closing and opening much easier.

Standing on the bus in one of the poses of the Indian traditional gymnastics, you may begin to meditate. The subject does not matter. Sooner or later you will be dragged out of your meditative state by the accent of a conductor. This conductor, who with effort, rale, and squeaks is pushing through the thick backs and wide chests, is chatting ceaselessly:

– What do we have for a fare here? Pay for your journey, please, and show your passes. There at the doors, whom did I not ticket yet?

This procedure is happening every morning, and every morning you most probably cannot understand, how you manage to get your pass from your bag. This is the reason why all passengers should remember: if they are being touched through their clothes by someone’s hand, it does not mean they are standing next to a sexual maniac. Most probably it is a passenger, like them, who is trying to reach for his or her bag.

Let us omit further particulars of the bus ride, and get on the underground. On the station where you change trains, upon going up or down the escalator you will inevitably hear this:

– Standing on the escalator, hold on to the rails by your hands only. Upon getting on or off the escalator, lift up the long ends of your upper coats in prevention of getting in the mechanical elements of the moving stairs of the escalator.

At some stations there sometimes occur such marvellous things, as the queues to the train. But we shall suppose we have got past this stage, and now you find yourself in the wagon, in the position of one of the Eastern martial arts. Your left hand with the bag got lost somewhere on the left, and your right arm is stretched straight, perpendicularly to your body. On your right you observe the tortoise-like skin of someone’s neck, wrapped in a checked mohair scarf. If you turn your head straight, your nose will get right into the hairs of artificial fur on the hood of a lady’s coat. Your appreciation of female beauty may deepen if the lady is wearing her hair loose. If you turn your head to the left, there will normally stand a slim gentleman in tiny glasses on the nose that is “as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus“. In general, your way to work, to the uni or wherever in these morning hours is as eloquent as The Song of Songs.

After all these troubles and sufferings, you finally get to work, to the uni, or wherever. At the end of the day you take the same journey, but towards your home. And it is then that you often think: why are the metro and buses not as empty in the morning, as they are in the evening? Your question will remain without answer. For a long time this phenomenon will be a phenomenon to you. Let us console ourselves in the fact that such was the design of Nature, and this was done especially so that every morning we could feel an immense force of physical, if not spiritual, union with all others who use public transport. Do those who drive a car have so many tempestuous emotions regularly? By the way, there is no need to shower offensive names and jokes on either party. Better get on the bus!

A few notes: 1) the politician in question is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of Russian Lib-Dems, who dabbled in showbusiness and, indeed, read poems in public during the campaign; 2) the ad mentioned in the same passage is the Sprite slogan: “image is nothing, thirst is everything”; 3) the hoplite’s armour weighed, in fact, about 50-60 pounds (22-27 kg).

What Do Your Legs Talk About?

Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t know that our body’s parts can talk. Alberto Moravia, an Italian author whose 100th birthday anniversary is this year, wrote an entire novel about a man’s conversations with his penis. It is called “Io e Lui” (1971) (Me and Him, and apologies but this Italian review is apparently the only review of the book that you can find without diving too deep into Google Search), and, apart from being a hilarious though thought-provoking reading, it seems to be the best critique of a literal interpretation of the idea of sublimation. Many people believe they follow Freud if they think that having sex casts the bad spell on one’s creativity; hence, if one wants to be a successful writer, they first and foremost must stop engaging in that carnal activity. Moravia subtly reminds us that sex does start in one’s head, so while you keep listening to your libido, even if you don’t necessarily follow it, sex goes on.

So, back to legs. Some time ago one actor had an online meeting with his fans. One question was if he liked telling jokes. The answer was positive, and such was one of his favourite ones: “Right leg says to the left leg: “Listen, let’s keep this one between us””.

Now, personally I find this joke funny, as well as everyone who I told it to. But it struck me today that sometimes blogs are being assessed on the level of humour in them. I scratched my head. I certainly wrote some posts that I consider funny, but humour is a difficult thing to estimate. The joke I alluded to is a perfect example here in that it begs the question of exactly what makes it funny. It is as ambiguous as it gets, but it is the ambiguity and the wittiness that make this joke work, at least as far as I am concerned. Undoubtedly though there are those who may disagree, so the question “what makes a joke funny” is indeed rhetorical.

I think there is always some prejudice against a “national” sense of humour. They say that the English humour is difficult to understand. Years ago with this thought in mind I was translating Russian jokes with gusto to a friend of mine, who eventually said, looking aside: “What exactly is funny about it?” That was the day when I realised that the Russian humour is probably just as difficult as English.

To an extent, it was a relief. I was even engulfed by some kind of pride, or at least joy, that a Russian joke can send an Englishman in exactly the same kind of stupor that people from many non-English-speaking countries find themselves in when they hear an English joke. But the same problem occurs in other languages, and the French or Italian humour is no different. And because translation means a migration of a text from one culture to another, those who translate humour have, in fact, to translate an impulse to laugh, not just mere words or phrases. This is really tricky.

Anyway, I didn’t want to make this post too academic, so I’d better tell you a few of my favourite jokes, and I can only hope you find them funny. Somehow almost all of them are about trains, which makes sense, I suppose, since I do love travelling by train.

Two men are riding on the train. They ride in total silence for a long time. Finally, one of them decides to break the silence and says:
– Hello, I’m Smith. John Smith. And you?
– And I am not.

On the train, a man stands at the window in the corridor. Relaxed, he observes the landscape that flies past. Suddenly the train derails, drives across a field, stops at the forest, then turns, moves back, returns to the rails, and drives on, as if nothing happened. Perplexed, the man rushes to the train manager: “What’s going on?!” – “Ah well, you see, there was this man walking on the rails in front of the train”. – “Oh, but you should’ve run him over!” – “Well, that’s it, I only got him near the forest”.

A station warden, while checking the rails, finds on them a rat that was killed by the train. He lifts it by the tail: “Oh for god’s sake, look at this! D’you think you’re Anna Karenina, or what?”

Stella Artois: Just the Name Makes the Beer Taste Better

Whether you are a cinema fan, or a beer fan, the name of Stella Artois is familiar to you. Exquisite TV adverts with an anecdotal story at heart of each of them, praising the labour of love of the Belgian brewery in Leuven. The Belgian tradition of brewing the beer dates back to 1366, and last year saw Stella Artois’s 640’s anniversary. The launch of a new interactive website this year is a perfect birthday gift to the dedicated beer-makers and to all faithful Artois lovers.

The website is located at www.artois.co.uk, but on October 8th it was only open to a limited number of people invited for its online premiere. It was a pleasant surprise for me to have been invited (along with “various designers, marketers, film enthusiasts, beer connoisseurs and reasonably friendly-seeming people”, to quote the invitation email), and I have just spent the most wonderful hour on the site. As you see from a very blurred image on the top left, I had to type in two special words to access the site, and once I did I have entered the Artois Wonderland.

On your journey through the Wonderland you are being guided not by a White Rabbit, but by a newly appointed (i.e. invented) Artois brew master (left). As the creators of the website, Johan Tesch, Noel Pretorius, and Tim Scheibel, explain, the whole visual language of the journey is strongly influenced by the early 20th c. posters., films, and Artois’s own print ads of the time. To get in the mood for your journey, watch this teaser (courtesy of http://www.artoisblog.co.uk/).

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As it happens in all polite houses, La Famille Artois first introduces you to their beers (left). After learning everything you certainly did not know about these wonderful beverages, you are taken to the dawn of history of La Famille Artois. The section Le Courage (right), which, as the creators admit, is one of the most entertaining, captivating, innovative and humorous parts of the site, potently reminds one that to brew a good beer in 1366 was indeed an act of courage. The hard-working citizens of Leuven had to balance the Earth, fight against the evil spirits, and even to appease gods. But we, modern people, obviously know that the Earth has got no end, and we can help, for example, to balance it. A Greek mathematician, Archimedes, reportedly claimed that he could overturn the Earth with the help of a mere stick, all for the sake of science. Well, to make a perfect beer is a science, too, so you have 30 seconds to turn the Earth with your mouse, to save the precious hops.

I must admit: although I managed to balance the Earth and to appease the gods, I was unable to do any more for the lovely people of medieval Leuven. In particular, I couldn’t lit the lantern of a brewer who went to collect water, and I was told that “the people of Leuven would be sorry tonight”. So am I.

The next section, L’Origine, tells the actual story of La Famille Artois, from 1366 when Den Horen brewery had been established in Leuven to 1926 when the Artois produced the first filtered lager (left). La Publicité is a deftly arranged collection of diverse and sundry TV adverts, of which you may perhaps recognise the one on the right. And the section L’Etranger is the best place to test your knowledge of pouring the ideal glass of beer, or better else, of learning how to do it (below). At least with regards to La Publicité, I can imagine its content being enjoyed and put to good use by some clever cinema or media student.

Although the Stella Artois website would be impossible without the three gifted guys I mentioned above, it is accompanied by a special Artois Blog, written mainly by Sam. The blog serves as a hub of everything you want to know about La Famille Artois, as well as the website developments, and Sam has granted permission to use some of the contents in this post.

The website will be up and running full-time since October 9th, and I hope the teaser and the pictures have put you in the right mood for enjoying the process of “passing on something good”, as Artois have been doing for over six hundred years. As for me, I totally enjoyed it, mostly as a cinema fan rather than a beer connoisseur, but also as an historian. I notice I keep getting back to where I came from academically, that is Medieval and Early Modern History. Le Courage is absolutely a hit for me, for its amazing animation and subtle jokes on the Titanic labour of medieval beer-makers. But as you also know, I am a Francophone, and all the sections after Le Courage is a great treat for someone like me. Finally, I just loved this phrase, which sounds like a perfect tagline and has been used in this post’s title: “just the name makes the beer taste better”. Vraiment, c’est ça!