The Doors of Pineappleception (Part Three)

[Parts One and Two]

This is neither the time nor the place to go into the cultural history of the pineapple. Interesting though it would be to explore their role in ancient Paraguan society; to note their significance amongst Southern Brazilian tribes (several of which worshipped them as deities); or to chart their appearance in Europe in the early eighteenth century, where, as status symbols, they held a power equal to the clavichord or the eight-wheeled cart; fascinating as this would certainly be, my readers are nonetheless advised to seek this story elsewhere. For I am fit to pursue other avenues; to wander down different roads; to dive into less regular pools.

Pineapples themselves are wonderfully intriguing objects. Visually stunning, they also combine magnificent textures: the tortoise-shell-like skin, the sleek sharp fronds and soft, yielding centre, hardening to a stony core. They are harsh fruits, in many ways, but also playful. I can for instance think of few better ways of spending a rainy day than chopping the top off a pineapple and balancing it on your head like a hat. People are known to have fun with pumpkins – but to my mind, at least, nothing beats the fun one can have with a pineapple.

And yet, like I said, they can be harsh fruits. One can get on the wrong side of a pineapple frond, with ghastly consequences. A full-grown pineapple tossed, with gusto, can injure almost anyone, whilst sharply cut slices of pineapple, put into the wrong hands, can cause serious harm. This is not something you can say of a mango, a passion fruit or a banana. Say what you like about watermelons (and some of you probably do), but I would much rather go to war armed with a pineapple. Step aside star fruit: this fight is for the pineapple tribe.

Leaving aside tropical fruit warfare for the moment, let’s dip our toes into quieter waters. Wonderful as pineapples are in their natural fully-armoured forms, I am rather more interested in what goes on inside those horny jackets of theirs. It is the juice that intrigues me. The sweet yellow juice, with its soft honeyed tang, its subtly sour, scintillatingly sugary aftertaste. Pineapple juice will never refresh one with the well-meaning directness of your orange or your apple: but it will ever beguile, mesmerize and, occasionally, even irritate its drinkers.

The restorative properties of pineapple juice are relatively well known. Mouths blighted by ulcers have long been known to be healed by the mixture of toxins and vitamins it contains. Cancer victims, I have heard, are amongst its greatest advocates – a worthy testament to the fruit’s kindest character.

The mind-altering qualities of the pineapple, on the other hand, are less well-researched. Pitzney (1993) says something about it – as does Fulcrome-Leap (2001) – but their words amount to little. Neither of them goes as far as Emmanuel Yile would like them to. But then no one but him has ever had quite so much faith in the brain-juggling, soul-shaking and, above all, life-changing qualities of pineapple juice. And why would they? For all the passion I have crammed into these paragraphs, history tells us that pineapples have their uses, many of them rather good, but none of them especially extraordinary. And whilst history is a dirty liar most of the time, it saves its greatest lies for the big stories: the stories that really matter. And the mildly-hallucinogenic properties of pineapples is not, all things considered, the biggest story you’ve ever heard, is it? Why would anyone suppress it? Why, in short, should we believe a man who thinks chooses to think differently, based on nothing more than gut feeling (and a handful of figures and charts that only a scientific genius could understand)?

[Part Four]

The Doors of Pineappleception (Part Two)

[Part One]

God only knows how long we went on talking that night. In any other case I would have tried to shake him off before we left the supermarket. Vladivostok is where I go to escape the world; conversations with wild-eyed Belgian scientists are not something I’ve ever sought, or had any trouble wriggling out of, for that matter. But something about Yile put the brakes on my customary wriggling. I felt, for once, that he was someone worth listening to; someone worth risking the wrath of my wife when I invited him back to our cottage for a dribble or two of Japanese whisky and a crawls-on-till-morning chat. One can never be sure, of course, but he seemed like someone in whom it was worth investing time. I didn’t even choose the cheapest whisky.

It would impossible to relate all that we talked about. A range of topics were covered, albeit sparsely, by the rich blanket of our words. I recall a short debate on the merits of fifteenth century German poetry, followed by some witty banter on French art of the medieval ages. Art was not, of course, all: we also delved into Austrian politics, crane construction and the farming of cabbages. In fact, I rather think that we also sorted out all the problems in the Middle East between ourselves that night, though I struggle to remember exactly what our particular plan of action entailed.

At one point or another, however, conversation finally turned to the subject on which our acquaintance depended. It was in fact my wife who brought it up, popping her beautiful little head around the door and enquiring if I had managed to come back from the supermarket with a little more than a mad heavy-shouldered scientist. ‘Ah yes,’ said I, ‘I almost forgot – the pineapple juice’. And at this I saw Yile’s face light up. He too had remembered something. ‘The pineapple juice! Yes!,’ he cried, ‘the pineapple juice!’

What was it about pineapple juice that excited Emmanuel Yile so much? That, in one sense, is the subject of this article. Suffice it to say, for now, that this was something he truly cared about. Enthusiastic about all aspects of life, he was almost delirious with exhilaration when one broached the topic of pineapple juice. His shoulders shook with pleasure every time he, or anyone, so much as whispered those two words. When I poured some of the precious liquid into a glass for him, I thought his eyes would pop out. What would happen when he drank it, I wondered? Would he be able to get the glass to his lips before fainting?

As it happens, he didn’t seem too interested in drinking in. He preferred to examine it instead, as if were a fine wine, rather than cut-price fruit juice. ‘Look at the colour,’ he said. I looked at the colour. ‘Smell it,’ he said. I smelled away. ‘Think about it,’ he said. I thought about why I should be thinking about it – and then I thought about it. ‘Now drink it,’ he said. I drank it. A glass of pineapple juice. ‘Now,’ he said, as I pulled the glass away from my mouth, ‘read this’. And he passed me a scrap of paper, on which was written a four line poem. I read it. ‘It’s good, huh?’ he said. I nodded, uncertainly. It wasn’t special, but I didn’t want to offend him. ‘Ah,’ he said, noting my reluctance, ‘but imagine what it would be like after drinking sixteen glasses of pineapple juice!’ I tried, and failed, to imagine this. It was, in all honesty, beyond my comprehension. Why would anyone want to drink sixteen glasses of pineapple juice?

This, my friends, is the question.

[Part Three]

The Doors of Pineappleception (Part One)

[As promised]

One late summer in Vladivostok I met a man called Emmanuel Yile. He was on placement at the university, researching the properties of a substance he called ‘Vitamin T’. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had been given this assignment for one main reason: it kept him out of the way. I should have known this – Vladivostok is full of such characters; men and women cast adrift from the main stream of life, pushed into the margins: sent into informal exile. I suppose you could say that, all things considered, it isn’t quite a centre of cultural excellence. Then again, you could say a lot of things about Vladivostok, not all of them true.

He approached me in the queue of a cut-price supermarket. I like to think that it was because I possess the palpable aura of a phenomenally remarkable man, but it was probably because I spoke good English. And because I was cradling in my arms a rather large carton of pineapple juice. Why was I doing so? My wife, it turns out, had requested the item in question. Or at least she had asked for orange juice – but, alas, there was none, which explains the recourse to pineapple. Which explains, in turn, the encounter with Yile.

The first thing I noticed were his shoulders. Broad, yet elegant. Powerful, yes, but also graceful. Above all, noticeable. And I speak as a man who isn’t usually drawn to the shoulders of another man. Yile’s shoulders, however, sang loud – they simply refused to be ignored. ‘Here we are,’ they sang: ‘Snub us at your peril’. His was a full figure, granted, but one could never say that he took up too much space. No, if ever a man had earned the right to have an extra pound or two of flesh, Emmanuel Yile was that man. Don’t ask me why – that’s just the way I feel.

From his shoulders I moved upwards, along that noble trunk of a neck to the large and kindly face above. To that soft alluring smile, that charmingly bulging nose and those big sparkling eyes. Wild eyes, maybe, but the kind of wildness that kept you interested, not the sort to scare you off (unless of course you lacked the will to live adventurously). For Yile, it was clear, was not an easy man. And yet he had something that few people have. He had true enthusiasm. That and strangely handsome shoulders.

[Part Two]

Many-headed Dinosaurs

I’ve been dreaming of many-headed dinosaurs. Who hasn’t? I refer, in the main, to the readership of Fjona Uu’s new novel, The Brontesaurus Sisters, but then one doesn’t like to exclude anyone who might be engaged in personally-inspired many-headed dinosaur dreaming, does one?

In all honesty, I don’t know much about these so-called Brontë Sisters. They wrote some books, I’ve heard, and were, I’m told, sisters – thus the collective title. Indeed, being related to one another seems to have ensured that they are considered, more often than not, as a group; that they are compared to, complemented alongside and in constant competition with each other. Charlotte, Anne and Emily were their actual names, but it is much easier, is it not, to simply say ‘Brontë Sisters’?

Easier, yes – but is it fair? To what extent should we allow ourselves to stuff siblings into the same categorical sandwich? No doubt the sisters shared a similar background; perhaps even more than this. Maybe they led very similar lives, who knows? Clearly I don’t. But I do wonder whether this isn’t worth a second look, this whole ’sibling group’ thing. No?

My wife, for instance, has a sister she hasn’t seen for thirty years. They have so little in common, these two – and yet one can see how someone from the future might be tempted to compare the two. For they are, after all, sisters. They come from the same family. And what are families, ultimately, but an elementary filing system: a way of ordering this chaotic universe of ours?

As non-readers may have guessed from the title, Fjona Uu’s book imagines the three Brontë Sisters as a single entity, albeit a three-headed single entity. In short, a Brontesaurus. Imagine that: a Brontosaurus  with three heads, each representing a sister in the same family. Now imagine your own siblings (should you have any) as heads on the shared body of a large dinosaur.

Why imagine such a thing? I can’t quite see why, but at the same time I can’t quite help myself. I hear that someone is contemplating a critical biography of the entire Laami family and, once again, my Fjona-U-fueled-fancy takes glorious flight. A bloated diplodocus hoves into view, fourteen or fifteen heads swaying above its fat heavy body. I see it in the swamp, thrashing wildly. I see the heads turn on each other, snapping and snarling. I see rivers of senseless blood running around the thick feet of Triassic monsters.

I’ve been dreaming of many-headed dinosaurs. Perhaps I should stop reading Fjona Uu and eating cheese before I sleep at night.

Mysterious Telegrams (2)

Picking up on yesterday’s postage: whatever could have provoked an able-minded thinker such as Johannes Speyer to send a seemingly absurd telegram to the equally-significant sage Michael von Stürker? ‘Butter gone rancid. Off to the docks’, read the strange message in question, sent in early 1973 from a personal telegraph machine given to Speyer by a lady who went by the name of Joy (though her actual name was Hephzibah). Oh yes indeed, Speyer personally owned a telegraph machine: on its own an interesting fact, make no bones about it – but, more importantly, why send missives to von Stürker, and why this particular one?

For years it puzzled; and even now sense oozes only slowly from the set of facts we find before us. Speyer and Michael von Stürker were not the best of friends, but for some years (four, to be exact), they did get along relatively well. During these four years they quite often communicated, sometimes by letters, sometimes by the telephone – but most often by telegram. For yes: von Stürker too owned a telegraph machine, which he used for two purposes only – petty flirtation with girls in their early twenties, and messages to Johannes Speyer.

If Speyer’s telegrams tended to lean against the queer cliff of absurdity, the same could certainly be said of von Stürker’s. I will not, can not list them all, but here are a couple of choice examples: ‘Fourteen eagles. I run merrily’ and ‘The egg is canned. Callous jaws collapse’. Intriguing, no? What a weird way for two middle-aged academics to communicate.

Or is it? Not when you realise that Speyer and von Stürker shared a passion for two particular things: early seventeenth century Japanese poetry – and the idea that art should be filtered through unfamiliar mediums (an idea which led Speyer, eventually, to the concept of Active Reading).

Aha. Now it all becomes clear, does it not? These peculiar telegrams are, in fact, poems translated. Or to be more exact, the poems of one Kokimizu Ishu (1681 - 1739), translated into English from the Japanese, by Speyer and von Stürker, friendly competitors in the complex art of Ishu translation. I say competitors: it is interesting to note how many of the telegrams sent between these two appear to represent the same poem. Consider the following from von Stürker: ‘It has become cheese. To the harbour I fly’. Surely a correction of Speyer’s ‘Butter gone rancid. Off to the docks’?

Perhaps this explains why their friendship finally fell apart – and why the ‘Ishu Telegram Project’ never got further than a series of retrospectively curious messages representing a fascinating attempt by two great writers to resurrect interest in a Japanese poet who was, and remains, sadly forgotten. Or perhaps it was something else entirely…

Mysterious Telegrams

Bring out your wheelbarrows and let’s all take a trip to the local incinerator. The first truckload of ‘Christmas books’ has arrived. And it’s full of the usual muck: the autobiography of a celebrity sperm, a gloriously bound unfinished short story by a great dead novelist, an utterly-unnecessary otter-filled sequel to a timeless classic (see here, those with strong stomachs) and, horror of horrors, several thousand flimsy books encumbered with long and ‘quirky’ titles, such as How to Brush a Spider off Your Sister’s Back and Reading Penguin Gestures: The South Carolinian Way.

Amongst these, I draw your rapidly waning attentions to the following work: ‘Butter Gone Rancid. Off to the Docks’ and Other Mysterious Telegrams by Walter C Inglesberry. Another tragic title, one sighs. Another sad waste of precious ink and paper. Yet another poor book keeping the complete works of Boris Yashmilye off the bookstore shelves.

So you would think. And you would probably be right. However, what is interesting about Inglesberry’s work (or the title at least) is that it represents a very rare reference to Johannes Speyer in what is, well, relatively popular culture. For it is so: ‘Butter gone rancid. Off to the docks’ was the content of a telegram sent from Johannes Speyer to the famous German academic (then teaching at Frankfurt) Michael von Stürker. What was the meaning of this missive? Well, that’s the point Inglesberry seems to be making: no one really knows.

Or do they?

More on this later…

Love and Leo

Philosopher, thinker, ponderer, muser, chin-scratcher, eyebrow-stroker, sense-stalker, hot-potato-juggler, call-him-what-you-will: Leo Barnard has announced, through his publishers, that his twenty-ninth book will be called Love and Selfishness.

Looks like it’s going to be a long book…

Lucio Ganzini and the Publishers (Part Two)

[Part One]

Perhaps I should say more about Ganzini’s relatively futile career. Fifteen years ago he wrote a novel, In Play, in which he attempted to cast himself as the ‘Pinter of Prose’; developing a theory of writing revolving around concepts of time. ‘Every sentence runs on from another,’ he wrote: ‘but supposing it didn’t? What if sentences were suspended from one another? What if we learned to read space as well as we read words?’ A fair point, perhaps, but Ganzini struggled to find a plot worthy of his ideas. He fought fiercely with publishers over his right to create books crammed with empty pages, failing to see that a large proportion of their resentment lay not in his revolutionary methods, but in a basic paucity of talent. He had the ideas, but not the ability to see them through. The ‘Ganzini Gap’ (his answer to the famous ‘Pinter Pause’) was, it seemed, no more than a gimmick.

His experiences with In Play shaped his critical writing. From here on in he took on the publishers with all his might, constantly bombarding them with ever more ridiculous ideas – and castigating them for their lack of foresight. As he writes in the memoirs, ‘I quickly gathered that there was no significant outlet for obscure European literature. Even the most consciously “different” publishing houses – Georgy Riecke’s Upside-Down-Then-Backwards, for example – showed themselves unwilling to experiment’. Once again, Ganzini is unable to perceive the possibility that there was a problem with his prose – and not with the publishing houses. I personally turned down his third novel (the turgid semi-autobiographical Ratt) on account of its sheer dullness, not its strange use of punctuation, cut pages and large swathes of blank space. I had – and have – nothing against his approach, only his style.

And yet I must confess to enjoying these memoirs. Why I can’t quite say. Perhaps it is the unabashed confidence of the fellow, or the amusing way that, every time he attempts to tackle a serious subject, he merely slides, like a child on a snow-slope, into the dirty white valley of banality. Ultimately I find myself admiring his unconscious refusal to grow beyond a stereotype: his resolute two-dimensionality. If someone had created him as a character, we’d be booing from the stalls. Appearing as a real person, however, he is quite brilliant. In his memoirs, he has created his best work of fiction. The great Ganzini, revealed to the full extent of his idiocy, is an unintentionally charming creature.

A little uneasiness remains. The book is, as noted, something of a raging howl against modern publishing. Though I don’t blame anyone for dismissing Ganzini, there is nothing essentially wrong with a book that castigates this rotten old market. And yet we must return to the fact that the book itself, unlike Ganzini’s fiction, has not only been accepted by a major publishing house (The Olive Press), but produced at some expense, with a prize-winning cover by artist Paulo Sigel and soft creamy paper within. Has it taken a foul-mouthed attack on publishers to get him properly published? He calls throughout the book for more writers to turn to self-publishing, only to eschew it himself. What is going on here? Seen as such, the whole book is self-defeating: the literary experimentation for which he fights throughout is nowhere to be seen; brushed aside, as if non-fiction doesn’t require similarly bold tactics. Ganzini emerges, meanwhile, as the extraordinary man he’s always thought he was. Extraordinarily idiotic, not extraordinarily great, though it’s fair to say that it’s more his loss than ours: Ganzini is a lovable kind of fool, after all.

Lucio Ganzini and the Publishers (Part One)

[A month or so ago, The View From Here asked me to write an article for them. I decided to do a review of Lucio Ganzini's new memoir - only to change my mind, and write this instead. Here, however, is the abandoned Ganzini piece] 

Which of the many anecdotes Lucio Ganzini stuffs into his recently published memoirs comes closest to summing up his personality? There are a few options, the vast majority of which are too long, too convoluted; too altogether tedious to repeat here. I put forward, therefore, this short excerpt, which just about says it all:

‘The world is split into two distinct groups,’ he said – ‘on the one hand, the ordinary, on the other, the extraordinary’. ‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I hardly think you can call one man a group’ (Where the Power Lies: Prats, Pricks and Publishing Houses, Lucio Ganzini, 2009)

This is not presented as a joke. Ganzini has always taken his self-appointed position as ‘The World’s One True Literary Genius’ very seriously. His self-confidence is supreme, grandiose: unbreakable. He doesn’t for a minute wonder whether his opinions are worth the paper they are printed on.

We, on the other hand, may doubt all we like. And so we should. After all, for most of us Ganzini will be a complete unknown. We won’t have read a thing he has written, a lot of which is unpublished, out of print, or available in incredibly small numbers. Nor will we have heard of his exploits, few of which leap from the annals of history with frog-like determinacy. We will end up wondering, no doubt, what he has done to deserve writing a memoir, not least one which has a print run well above a hundred. How did that even happen? And why should we care?

It is, of course, not impossible that a failed writer can offer a fascinating perspective on the writing world. But I balk at the idea that Ganzini coughs up anything other than garbled wisdom, second-rate theories and the general understanding of a certified lunatic. No, the bottom line is that we can’t trust this man. Most of what he says is unadulterated gibberish. And yet there is something curiously entertaining about these reminiscences of his. Despite himself, Ganzini can occasionally come out with a sentence that cuddles the warm lap of sense. This happens, on the whole, when he isn’t trying to be clever: truth is something he only ever stumbles upon (usually when scratching around for something else entirely).

[Part Two]

Heavy Hedgerows

The first of this month’s exciting things can be found over at the excellent The View From Here. Yes, it’s an article by yours truly – and yes, it’s all about Johannes Speyer.

Coming soon: the abandoned article on Lucio Ganzini, the real story behind Speyer and the glass of vanilla milk, and various other tales plucked like blackberries from the heavy hedgerows of obscure European culture.

Meanwhile, for those desperately seeking superior ways of getting the most out of books, see my Active Reading archive. Or for more on Speyer himself, amble over here.