Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

This is my last post before going into my usual one-month hibernation. Today I would like to focus my attention (and yours, too) on the books, films and albums which stood out for me in 2013.

This was a bumper year for me in literature, music and cinema. I finally got to read Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, Milan Kundera’s earlier works, Life is Elsewhere and Laughable Loves and William Burroughs’ Marmite-like Naked Lunch (either you like or you don’t. I fall in the former camp). I have also finished the year on a high with a re-read of one of my favourite Cuban novels, Memories of the Underdevelopment. Bearing in mind that I am writing this post about ten days before it’s due to come out, there could still be nice surprises ahead.

Unfortunately, because of the high price of cinema tickets, we do not get to go to the pictures a lot, which means we miss out on new releases. That is where Lovefilm comes in. We can tailor our movie time as a family and with a few exceptions most of the films that follow have a 12-certifcate. This year we have seen Badlands, High Fidelity (again!), The Killing Fields, Death of a Salesman (the one with Dustin Hoffman and a very young John Malkovich, who also had a supporting role in The Killing Fields), Ivan’s Childhood (based on a short-story that became my long-lasting companion when I was a child), The 400 Blows, The Truman Show (again!), A Soldier’s Story, Macbeth (Polanski’s version with a superb Francesca Annis playing Lady Macbeth), Gandhi, I am Cuba, Coriolanus (one of my favourite performances by Ralph Fiennes an Vanessa Redgrave. This is the movie that should be shown to presidents and prime ministers everywhere before they decide to invade another country), Pink Floyd-The Wall (again!) and the visually striking The Tree of Life. Funny, isn’t it? I started the year with Malick and ended the year with Malick. I say, who needs the local multiplex with this wealth of movies?

I have left music for the end because you all know how much music gets played on this blog. My most recent purchase was four albums by The Black Keys: The Big Come Up, Attack and Release, Brothers and El Camino. I can’t stop playing them. Theirs is raw, unadulterated blues-rock, with the emphasis on blues. Earlier in the year I got (finally!) Laura Marling’s four albums. I wrote about Laura back in the summer in one of my regular columns, Killer Opening Songs. Another record which I bought this year and which has been growing on me slowly is Mike Ladd’s Negrophilia, an organic synergy of jazz, house and hip-hop. Anoushka Shankar provided me with a beautiful, sensuous and spiritual soundtrack to my summer holidays with Rise, an album that shows off her excellent skills as an arranger, producer and composer. Dutch singer Nynke was the surprise package this year. I bought her album Alter after reading about it in Songlines magazine. I was not disappointed at all. Nynke’s music is hard to classify. I would call her a good, really strong pop artist with a strong folk influence. A serendipitous discovery was Yasmine Hamdan, the Lebanese singer whose debut record Ya Nass, found its way into my CD collection by chance. I was on You Tube, as you do, checking up clips by musicians from here, there and everywhere, when up pops this unknown (to me) artist. I was hooked immediately to her husky voice and electronica-infused arrangements. In this end-of-the-year review I cannot leave out the Brazilian brigade. 2013 was the year when I bought the whole Original Album Series by none other than Elis Regina, Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil. Five classic records per CD. A snip at less than a tenner for the whole lot. I also purchased The Definitive Collection by Caetano Veloso and Jorge Ben (the latter of Mas, Que Nada!). 40 tracks per artist, double-CD issue, low price, win-win. Beautiful! Having grown up in Cuba listening to all these great albums, I have been on a trip down memory lane this whole year. The icing on my musical cake was A Curva Da Cintura, a collaboration between two Brazilian singers, Arnaldo Antunes and Edgard Scandurra and the Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté. The only word I have for this album is poetic. That pretty much could describe my year, too.

I will be back on Sunday 12^th January. In the meantime, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 12^th January at 10am (GMT)

Pieces of Me, Pieces of Havana

what woke me up at the same time every time in those years was not the sound of the mass being conducted in the flat downstairs no it was not the mix of violins and batá drums led by the elderly gentleman who dedicated this celebrations to his recently departed wife it was as if the world of afrocuban music and the classical one came together for just one night and oshún was more than honey queen sensuous woman feminine oshún and changó was more than lightning and genitals it was a pure symbiotic union but it was not this music that woke me up it was not the screams coming from the next door neighbour the one with the three sons one of whom was around my age the woman who always said within earshot i ain’t looking for no man me no i don’t wanna give my children no stepdad but that did not stop her from landing a different partner almost every year on christmas eve nochebuena was to be spent in company she said even if it was a short lived one she did not wake me up with her passionate screams and commands of así papito aprovéchame toda que los niños no están aquí así mi cielito tócame como tú sabes the x rated material coming out of her mouth was enough to make my mother give her the cold shoulder the next day and grass her up to the chairman of our comité de defensa de la revolución she did not however wake me up nor did the dog campeón was called that lived downstairs a bulldog that looked so much like its owner that you always wondered who led who by the lead the dog was the clue to what woke me up because its owner woke up too at the same time every time in those years and the dog immediately began to bark in the direction of our flat the dog knew and its owner knew that my grandmother had just finished making our christmas eve supper the roast pork that would be served the day after twenty fourth of december with my mum dad cousin auntie and nana presiding over the table the pork that had been killed at my relatives in the countryside a few days before probably killed with one stab because as one of my great uncles used to say you have to know where to plunge the knife if you do not do it right the pig begins to cry like a child and uno se apendeja you get cold feet mi’jo you cannot get cold feet when you kill a pig only once remember just once  he was the one also carrying this beast on his shoulders several miles to our house in havana so that my grandmother could cook her famous pork cracklings now that was what woke me up one minute my bed was my safe sanctuary after a whole day in school and an afternoon playing hide and seek with my friends in and around buildings that had slowly wrinkled up over the years and given up trying to hide their cracks the next minute the smell lured me out of the sheets or duvet if it was nippy as sometimes december was and my bare feet led me to the kitchen and my still somnolent eight year old voice said one mima only one and my grandma with a smile from ear to ear with the big earrings that she wore between seventeen and thirty first of december babalú st lazarus and new years eve bookended her outfits going from sackclothes to bright yellow dresses fished out a crackling in the still hot pot patted it dry on a piece of paper and put it in my mouth my eight year old mouth saying you know pork meat is the gossipiest of the meats mi’jo because it lets the whole neighbourhood know when it is being cooked all this she said to me with my hands rubbing my eyes with my mum behind me making sure that my sleep would not be further interrupted with my dad working that night maybe in a cabaret or nightclub with my auntie and cousin in deep slumber even with the lounge light on sometimes a second pork crackling followed a rarity as the big clocks hands marched slowly toward midnight to turn twenty third into twenty fourth and many a barrio in havana underwent a change of mood not even fifty revolutions would rid cubans of their traditional christmas eve rice and peas plantains roast pork salad consisting of lettuce tomatoes cucumber and raw onion yuca con mojo and the unforgettable chicharrones the pork cracklings that woke up the neighbour and his dog that woke up my eight year old younger self at the same time every time in those years

© 2013

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 15^th December at 10am (GMT)

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

I have written here before about what I have come to call “genetic determinism”. This is the theory that seeks to explain human beings’ socioeconomic success in life through their genetic inheritance. Or the opposite: failure to do well because of their DNA. In my opinion this analysis is reductive and narrow-minded. Recently I thought of it again on the back of an article and a speech.

To the speech first. Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was in hot water a few days ago once again for claiming that the reason some people struggled in life was because of their low IQs. We will not even go into the IQ test that Mr Johnson failed publicly on a radio phone-in less than a week later after his speech. Suffice to say that the person who runs one of the most important cities in the world does not know the price of a one-way ticket between Angel and London Bridge. Scrape the surface of his address, though, and you will find Boris’s comments very dangerous, which is usually the case with the “blond menace”. Behind his bonhomie and (faux) gaiety hides a ruthless and ambitious politician. On picking on minimum-wage workers, Boris replayed a theory espoused by a new current of scientists and specialists. The one that aims to convince policy-makers, educators and politicians that genes contribute significantly to a person’s academic achievement and later success in life. Moreover, supporters of this proposition suggest creating special classes of schools for gifted and talented children.

What will determine his future: nature or nurture?

This leads me to the article. Under the contentious title We can't ignore the evidence; genes affect social mobility, psychologist Jill Boucher recently rose in defence of the likes of Dominic Cummings, advisor to Secretary of State for Education in the United Kingdom, Michael Gove. Cummings has been a key figure in many of Gove latest school reforms (and U-turns). He is part of the Tory agenda of segregating students between achievers and non-achievers. What struck me about Boucher’s article was that she used her two adopted children as examples of what academic potential – or lack of it thereof – could do to a young person’s future. I confess that when she said how one of her sons “could no more have reached a C grade in GCSE maths than I could jump over a five-bar gate” made me cringe. I hope that neither of them reads her feature.

Both Boris and Jill ignore many factors in a child’s life, especially during her/his early years: they barely mentioned parents or carers and their influence. Environment was brought up by Jill, but as a passing comment, when it is actually one of the most important elements in a child’s education. The role that domestic finances play in a family’s aspirations was conspicuous by its absence.

The danger of brushing aside all these aspects is that we enter an either/or territory. We begin to see our offspring as, either the sporty type, or the arty type, the studious type or the naughty type, instead of seeing their personality as free-flowing, open-ended and adaptable. Another negative consequence is that focusing on genes gives parents (ironically, those responsible for children’s genes) an easy cop-out. The knock-on effect is that schools, then, have to fill up the gap where at-home learning should go.

However, whilst it is hard to find a redeeming feature in Boris Johnson’s speech, Jill Boucher’s article, by contrast, finishes with a very good reflection and one which I would like to share with you today, regardless of whether you decide to click on the link I provided above and which takes you straight to her essay. Jill criticises the language used when politicians talk about social mobility. It is always “up”, she states. And working class people are forever aspiring to become middle-class ones and moving “up” the ladder. I agree with her that the value system we currently have in our society places too much emphasis on wealth and social status. Not everyone wants to be a banker, doctor, engineer, teacher or lawyer. Some people are happy being football coaches, youth workers or road-sweepers. They, too, deserve our respect and admiration. Regardless of their genetic make-up.

© 2013

Next Post: “Pieces of Me, Pieces of Havana”, to be published on Wednesday 11^th December at 11:59pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

It has been more than six months since I last read a book of fiction. Tonight, as this post goes live the situation will have changed. For the next couple of days I will be re-reading Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of the Underdevelopment), Cuban author Edmundo Desnoes’ magnum opus.

This decision to read non-fiction for so long was not taken deliberately. For my Easter holidays last April I took three books to Havana with me, one of which I was about to finish. The second one was The Help, which didn’t appeal much to me (entertaining, but playing to a certain audience of which I, sadly, did not consider myself a part) and then Jerusalem arrived. That set a chain of events in motion that culminated last week with me devouring the final pages of an epistolary memoir. Volver sobre mis Pasos (Going Back) is an intimate and candid portrait of the late Cuban film director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, a.k.a. Titón. Through the letters he wrote to fellow film-makers, officials of the Cuban government, friends, colleagues, his children and his wife, we gain access to the life of one of the most fascinating figures of Ibero-American cinema in the last fifty years. It seems to me, more than six months down the line, that the decision to read so much non-fiction was an attempt to forget The Help’s cliché-ridden style.



Yes, but how real is it?

What kind of readers are we? Non-fiction or fiction ones? In my experience we usually veer towards one of these two genres. I confess that I fall in the fiction camp. Most of the time you will catch me reading novels, collections of short stories or even plays (not my favourite read, I admit). I do, occasionally, wander into the realm of fact-based literature but I am always careful with my choices. The reason why for the last six months I read non-fiction uninterruptedly was because each book brought a different feature to the table. A feature or a group of features, that drew me heavily into its narrative.
Fiction is born from the disappearance of the self and the appearance of a third person that replaces this self. This metaphorical third person can be, ironically, narrated in the first person singular (Dr Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd comes to mind, especially that innovative twist at the end). This process is dialectic in and of itself, whether that be pursuing a truth the writer wants us to find, or arguing two views without leading the reader to think that only one of them is valid. Of course, I am referring to good books. Mediocre books give you the solution to the puzzle on page eight. The rest is just entertainment.

Where, then, does non-fiction lie? Do essayists and historians give up their selves for a metaphorical third person? If they do, that would imply bias. I certainly noticed it in Jerusalem, especially towards the end as the plot moves to the present-day. Bear in mind also that the book’s author, Simon Sebag Montefiore is a renowned novelist in his own right. That means that this biography of the holiest of cities is not just a historical and cultural account of the peoples who have inhabited it but also a gripping, page-turning thriller that starts with Titus’ siege of Jerusalem in 70AD and continues with Suleiman the Magnificent, the Crusades, the life of Jesus, etc. Eat your heart out, Ian Fleming! And you thought your James Bond was tough.

This – gentle – battle between non-fiction and fiction reminds me of the question short story authors are often asked: when will they finally write their long-awaited novel? The assumption that short stories are not real literature or that they are a lesser form, resonates with me when I analyse non-fiction versus fiction. Usually one is maligned at the expense of the other.

For starters we question the writer’s neutrality. I did that, too, when I read last summer Víctor Jara’s biography, written by his widow. To be honest, I did not mind Joan Jara’s bias; after all she was the one who had to identify her husband’s dead body in the morgue. I would lose any sense of neutrality straight away. But we do tend to think that the author has an axe to grind and by choosing a fact-based narrative they will render their vendetta a more veritable argument. Secondly, the absence of a deus ex machina device, as they have in fiction, limits the author describing real-life events somewhat. Where fiction provides a twist (even one that had not hitherto been hinted at), non-fiction supplies more conjecture. I am more lenient towards the former in regards to plot but expect a lot more from the latter when it comes to conclusions. However, does the word “history” not come from the Latin “historia”, via the Greek “historía”, which means “learning or knowing by enquiry”? This is where I think fiction and non-fiction cross paths. Both are attempts at answering questions, as well as asking them. They do choose different tools, though.

Memorias del Subdesarrollo is that kind of novella that blurs the line between the fictitious and the real; a style I really like. There was also another reason for me to take up non-fiction again. The book was adapted for the big screen by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the same man whose letters accompanied me for the last three weeks. A beautiful segue, I say, between non-fiction and fiction.

© 2013

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 8^th December at 10am (GMT)

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

“If I ruled the world” is a regular section that appears in the monthly magazine Prospect. Because of its location, on page eight of the publication, it is usually the first feature I read. There is always a nice mix of the idealistic and the zany, the romantic and the pragmatic.

I have often wondered how I would answer the question: “What would you do if you could rule the world?” Maybe because my response would probably be: “I’d rather pass up the chance, thank you very much”. This is not based on any self-deprecatory trait of my personality (I don’t do self-deprecation really), but on common sense. If I ruled the world, I would probably make a hash of it.

But, just like the writers, musicians, academics and politicians who are invited month in and month out by Prospect to describe what they would do if they were put in sole charge of our nations, lives, institutions and resources, I will volunteer my reflections on what a world governed by me would be like.

The temptation, according to what I have seen in some cases, is to aim high. World peace, for instance. That is too high for me. Even for a pacifist like me, that would be too ambitious and unachievable a goal to realise. What I’d rather do is educate people in such a way that wars would become a loss-making enterprise instead of the profiting business they are. Attack the motivation and the causes; that would be my way.

This would set the mood for further measures. Education would play an important role in any policy I implemented as the world’s ruler. All children would be entitled to try their hands at a musical instrument for free from the age of five. You read that right, instead of preparing our little ones for their first batch of assessments at six (in the UK), children would be making a racket on pianos, xylophones, drums and tambourines. That leads me to my next idea: children would not start formal school until the age of seven. That is already the reality in some countries around the world, like for instance, in Scandinavia. I’d sooner children played more and explored their surroundings better than chaining them to a desk and chair from the age of four.

In order to grant children this freedom parents would have to have a more flexible childcare arrangement. I would make both maternity and paternity leave so appetising that mum and dad would find it hard to say no. I would also guarantee equal leave time for both fathers/male carers and mothers/female carers. On the question of how I would fund this initiative, the answer is: taxation. Of course, if parents still insist on working long hours straight after their offspring is born, leaving them in nursery or in the care of strangers (sorry, I meant “child-minders”) for twelve hours Monday to Friday, they will have that option, too. My responsibility then would be to ensure that that “wee, little bairn” would have access to the best psychologist/psychiatrist possible. I would even be willing to fund that service if asked nicely.
 
Under my rule I would stimulate small and medium businesses and would support them financially through revenues raised from big companies. I would not strangle private enterprise, on the contrary, I would encourage it, but at the same time I would also raise awareness – through education, there’s that word again – of the need to think of the collective even if professional success arrives through individual power.

On culture I would go big. I would fund orchestras and ensembles. I would allow theatres and arts centres to commission non-mainstream and cutting-edge pieces whose main goal would be to stimulate independent thinking. Galleries and museums would remain free, as most of them still are in Great Britain. I would fund schools to use the arts as an active element in learning.

As a world ruler I would make the learning of foreign languages compulsory. That would be probably the only dictatorial measure my regnum would include. Since I would be in charge of all the peoples of planet Earth, it would make sense to make communication easier. Children would be exposed to foreign languages from an early age. There would not be negative comments along the lines of “I’m not good at languages”, or “I’m too old to learn another language”. Learning a foreign language is contextual, meaning that you appropriate the learning process and turn it to whatever suits you better.

Healthcare and education would be free under my rule. Gratis also would be provision for the elderly in their twilight years. I have always believed that we owe the previous generation a lot for the many benefits we enjoy nowadays.

 Last, but not least, is the economy. To me a mixed economy is the key to success. I would also foster a sense of individual identity. Every country in the world knows what it is good at. Therefore I would encourage manufacturing, the creative and cultural industries, fishing, farming, business (both private and social enterprises) and tourism. Under my rule, men and women would earn the same if they were doing the same job.

All of the above would guarantee a period of stability and satisfaction. How long would I govern for? I have no idea and that is the tricky bit. Give yourself a handful of years and you will run out of time before any of these measures becomes reality. Try to think long-term and you are entering dangerous territory. As in Mugabe/Castro/Tito/Mao/Chávez/Stalin territory. That is probably why, if someone were to ask me: “What would you do if you could rule the world”, my reply would be “I’d rather pass up the chance, thank you very much”. Even if that lost me a slot in Prospect magazine. Even if it meant I would have to wait for world peace a bit longer.

© 2013

Next Post: “Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts”, to be published on Wednesday 4^th
December at 11:59pm (GMT)