1.
Reading Persepolis has sensitized me all over again to Iranian stories.

-- Ben Hubbard asked in a June article whether political Islam was on the back foot in West Asia. Many argue -- drawing on evidence from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran -- that it is, and that nationalism is now a more effective rallying-point. "Even in Iran, the great holdout," says Hubbard, "the government has increasingly deployed national symbols as opposed to religious ones to unite its people. In arguing their country's case, its leaders lean more on international law, global treaties and the concept of national sovereignty than on religion -- suggesting a recognition that Islamist arguments have limited purchase." There's one possible exception to all this, however. Many Islamists still draw support for the cause of standing up against the United States and Israel. Donald Trump's actions have therefore enabled Iran's hard-liners to become much stronger than before: "In that way, the Iran war may do more to fortify Iranian resistance -- and what remains of political Islam -- than to shake it."

-- Also from June: Iranian singer Parastoo Ahmadi was sentenced to 74 lashes for performing without hijab. I haven't found any reports that the sentence has been carried out. Please God it won't be.


Yazd, 2000

-- And Granny Would Dance is a whimsical and moving short film by Maryam Mohajer. Told from the perspective of six-year-old Marmar, the story offers a poignant insight into the lives of Iranian women. Granny used to dance when her husband played the accordion. Then he died, and now she can't smile, let alone dance. Time goes by, and women gather in her home to play cards, and complain about their husbands (who leave them with the burden of housekeeping and childcare, and in some cases take second, younger, wives). Inspired by -- what? -- the ghost of granddad's playing? a snatch of music off the street? -- the women begin to dance. And Granny's icy grief begins to melt. "Granny," says Marmar, "is going to teach me how to dance." The little film concludes: ""Dedicated to the forever fighting, forever dancing, women of Iran. Woman, Life, Freedom."

-- Also on the theme of women, Iranian and otherwise, this article alerted me to a book by Serene J. Khader (translated into French by Manon Garcia but originally in English) which calls for the decolonization of feminism. The key argument (quoted here from the free sample of the English version): "Feminism requires universalist opposition to sexist oppression, but feminism does not require universal adoption of Western -- or, more specifically, what I will call 'Enlightenment liberal' -- values and strategies. The mistaken view that it does, a view I call 'missionary feminism', results from misunderstanding of the role normative concepts should play under nonideal conditions and conditions of moral diversity -- and, sometimes, from noninnocent idealizations of Western culture as aligned with moral progress." Good stuff. Totally agree. I can imagine the interesting discussions this would have provoked with students.


Kerman, 2000

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2.
Vintage mystery writers still drive headlines.

-- This month's Agatha Christie story examines the writer's decision to investigate the (real-life) 1876 poisoning of Charles Bravo. In a letter to The Sunday Times Magazine in 1968, she concludes the one who dunnit was Dr Gully... The case has never officially been solved, though, and this year saw the appearance of another study, by crime historian Angela Buckley.

-- Jem Bloomfield, meanwhile, has a wonderfully detailed analysis of Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, in which he argues that the book is essentially a novel of manners. It examines not just one closed social circle but "a whole set of such circles"; and using a mixture of satire and humour, puts under the microscope "the very different ways people live, [and] how their standards and ethics jar against each other". Bloomfield concludes: "Dorothy L. Sayers is a very funny novelist indeed."

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3.
Complementing all the 1920s literature The Velvet Cushion has looked at (most recently Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story and Nella Larsen's Passing) are loads of interesting stories:

-- This run-down of cultural trends provides useful context. It covers Art Deco, Expressionism, the Harlem Renaissance, Surrealism, Bauhaus, and Constructivism (as the term applies to architecture and design).

-- Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) floats persistently in the background of Florian Illies's 1913. He's one of the key representatives of the modernity for which Vienna was the focal point in that era, and there's a really interesting guide to Klimt's work here.


The Danube, 1989

-- An article by Anton Cebalo also draws together many of the names familiar from Illies's 1913. He begins with an anecdote about Peter Altenberg, and the way a spontaneous poem about the disappearance of a young girl, written at Cafe Central in Vienna, alerted Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and other literary luminaries to his talent. For the rest of his life, Altenberg gave the Cafe Central -- one of about 1,000 coffeehouses in Vienna -- as his postal address. Cebalo's point is that creativity, in the shape, inter alia, of modernist art and Young Vienna, flourished among the coffee cups. Serbia's coffeehouses (or kafanas), on the other hand, functioned almost as community centres, drawing people looking for work, for medical help, for matchmaking advice. Often, too, they were sites of political anger, conspiracy theories, and violence. It was "the clash of these two very different worlds [that] provoked the end of what was thought to be a permanent empire". Satirical writer and journalist Karl Kraus, says Cebalo, "understood the fractured and inward-looking attitudes of Viennese writers as having disastrous consequences... For Kraus, the artists had turned the outside world into a detached ornament. They cultivated a kind of beautiful neurosis that made them ignorant of catastrophe."

-- Carl Jung (1875-1961), and particularly his spat with Sigmund Freud, also formed a running gag for Illies's chapters. But his most recent Velvet Cushion appearance was in The Joyce Girl. Hugh McGovern argues here that Jung's ideas on archetypes and the collective unconscious haven't been taken seriously enough, and the scientific study of psychedelic experience tends to back up what Jung described. McGovern concludes: "At the level of culture and potentially at the level of the brain, archetypes appear to be real. At the very least, they are a useful way of understanding ourselves. They tell us what was important for millions of our ancestors, what is important to us, and what challenges our species has faced. They reflect who we are by showing what we are, and thus what we seek -- in the stories we enjoy, who we admire, and recurring patterns in our social lives. In this way, archetypes are much like the reflective surfaces that we walk past every day, often without realising they're there."



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4.
Ah, Paris...

-- Return of the Native, a lovely blog which I really enjoy, recently featured Brasserie Lipp. So many recognizable names: Ernest Hemingway, and Hadley (his first wife), of course, and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. But also later literary figures: "In the spring of 1949, Lipp was the scene of a famous row between American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin... [And] it was here that the young 'it girl' of literature, Francoise Sagan, met Juliette Greco for the first time, and handed over her song lyrics in the hope that Greco might be tempted to record one or two. Much to Sagan's delight she chose four which were featured on Juliette's next album. Better still, the pair discovered a mutual affinity and became life long friends." Scroll to the bottom of that article for some surprising connections among these various people.

-- Oscar Wilde has been everywhere in my reading recently, featuring in The Picture of Dorian Gray, obviously, but also flitting around the edges of other reading. So I was drawn to this slightly breathless but still interesting piece by Sophie Goodwin on L'Hotel (formerly Hotel d'Alsace) where Wilde spent his last months on earth (during which time he ran up a massive bill that went unpaid). It's located at 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, and you can book yourself into the Oscar Wilde Suite. But at more than EUR 1,000 a night even in mid-November, I probably won't be. This article says it was much less grand when Wilde stayed there...


Wilde's tomb, at Pere Lachaise, Paris, 2019

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5.
Frida's causing trouble again...

I really enjoyed my recent forays into the life of Frida Kahlo. So I was interested to see that the Tate Modern is currently running an exhibition not only featuring more than 30 of her "most iconic works", and pieces by those she inspired, but also illustrating the phenomenon of "Fridamania" through "more than 200 commercial objects that encompass her art, image, style and persona". Hah, how ironic, says Rafa de Miguel: "The fact that visitors must pass through the museum shop -- filled with T-shirts, tote bags, mugs, costume jewelry, scented candles and even a skateboard bearing the unmistakable face of the Mexican artist -- before leaving the exhibition... can only be read as a provocation." Many museums organize things this way, he concedes, but "it feels especially jarring in a show expressly aimed at exposing how commercialization has overwhelmed artistic work". He admits that the exhibition is successful in illustrating the segue from the artist and her work to the often tacky products of a marketing frenzy. But he returns at the end to the inherent contradiction: "'Fridamania takes over London,' proclaims the gallery in a press release that says it has already [in mid-July] sold nearly 40,000 advance tickets for the exhibition... The exhibition's attempt to save Frida from an irrational canonization seems to have failed completely, but everything suggests the organizers knew from the start that it was an impossible mission."

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6.
Literary Britain, one of my favourite Substacks, made me nostalgic for Norfolk with this piece on Poppyland.


Cromer, 2020

Norfolk was where we got stuck during covid. Despite the horrors of that era, though, we rapidly learned that we'd fallen absolutely on our feet, and it turned out to be a fabulous place to ride out the storm.

With all that time we suddenly had, I grew interested in the area's literary connections. These two posts are place-related: The Pleasaunce; and Sea Marge. And these two are book-related: Norfolk-related stories from the nineteen-teens. It was all a wonderful distraction from the Great Worry of the day.

Anyway, Literary Britain reminded me of a few of my own discoveries, and also pointed out some further connections.


Happisburgh (pronounced Hazebr'h), 2020. Arthur Conan Doyle came up with the idea for The Adventure of the Dancing Men while staying here. And it was home for a while to his brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung (of Raffles fame)

Daniel Defoe also spent time on the Norfolk coast before writing Robinson Crusoe (he apparently said of Cromer that "there was nothing of note except the lobsters"). And then there was W.H. Auden, who went to school in Holt (slightly beyond our footsteps-limited radius at that time).

While we were in Norfolk, and so circumscribed, I used to say we'd go back, in more normal times. We haven't yet, but I'd really like to.