Second part of a post about the Philadelphia Museum of Art this weekend. The story continues…

Till human voices wake us: Edvard Munch’s ‘Mermaid’

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

- T. S. Eliot

One of the more interesting exhibits currently on at the Museum is a mini-exhibition of the work of Edvard Munch, centred around Munch’s superb ‘Mermaid’ painting. ‘Mermaid’ is a true classic, an evocative allegory of young womanhood, a vision of the mermaid as a metaphor for sexual awakening. The focus of the painting is the figure of a young woman emerging tentatively from the water – flaming red hair, budding breasts, legs tapering off into the water that end in the barely visible tail of a fish. The expression on the woman’s face is plainitive, haunting – Munch captures perfectly the balance between fear and confidence, between desire and innocence. Behind the girl the moon extends a long, almost phallic line of light in the water, a line rippled and broken by the girl’s feet. The appearance of a tree on the side gives the impression of something secret, a hidden harbour, a dream glimpsed through the trees of sleep. This is a trembling and intimate painting, there is a strong sense of being on the verge of something, of a discovery about to be made.

The museum’s special exhibit essentially explores Munch’s art through the lens of this painting, bringing together a set of diverse Munch paintings that are somehow related to the ‘Mermaid’.

Most notable among these are a set of other paintings of mermaids by Munch. The most beautiful of these for me was a painting called Mermaid on the Shore. There are many similarities between this painting and the Mermaid – both feature young women arising out of the water, but Mermaid on the Shore takes the young mermaid out of her solitude and locates her in a broader context of girlhood, introducing a set of fellow-bathers into the picture (something about the picture made me think of Renoir’s bathers. I’m not sure what). Ironically, this actually increases the isolation of the young woman – where the Mermaid is a timeless dream-figure, the Mermaid on the Shore is a young girl alienated from her companion, her gawky figure and vivid, lonely eyes emphasising the awkwardness of her situation. The colours are fuzzier here, the whole picture has a blurred, overblown feel, which only serves to emphasise its sense of angst. The exhibition features a couple of other mermaids and a small, glorious Munch nude, but Mermaid on the Shore was easily my favourite.

Other works in the exhibition were more tangentially related to the Mermaid. A number of paintings here contain elements that return in the Mermaid, including two dramatically different versions of Voice (the setting is exactly the same, but oh what a difference in the central figure!) and a set of brooding paintings featuring a male figure seated by the sea in sorrow.

Most interesting perhaps were a series of paintings that deal more directly with female sexuality. These included:

A stunning black and white drawing of lovers in the sea, a woman’s face, pale and beautiful emerging out of the waves of her hair, which are also the waves of the sea that her lover (barely visible in side profile) is drowned in.

An allegorical painting of three phases of womanhood – the young, virginal figure of a girl, dressed all in white, staring up at the moon; the temptress, sex as confrontation, a woman completely nude, her legs spread out, staring straight out at the viewer; and finally an old woman, with bent back and shaky hands, beginning to slouch her way out of the frame. (Comparisons to Klimt’s famous Three Ages of Woman are inescapable)

A wonderfully ambiguous painting of a man sitting with his head on a table and a woman bending over him, her hair flaming orange. My initial interpretation of the painting was that the woman was consoling him, trying to share in his grief. Friends of Munch, however, have interpreted the painting to be the figure of a female vampire, sucking the blood out of her male victim – and looking at the painting you can see that image working as well. I’m not entirely sure how Munch meant it to be interpreted, but to me the dichotomy is what makes the painting interesting – the idea that a woman can be a caring friend and blood-sucking vampire at the same time.

My favourite painting in the exhibit though, was the one below – Madonna – an incredibly sensual image of a woman caught in the moment of conception; the flawless execution of an intriguing and irreverent idea. Thin threads of sperm dance around the border of the painting, and a tiny id-like figure crouches in the bottom left corner, but what draws you into the painting is the undeniable sexual tension in that figure of a woman that is at once vision and instinct. This is a spectacular painting, a work of dark and hypnotic power.

Eugene Atget: The World in Black and White

Also on display at the Museum is a collection of photographs by one of the great pioneers of photographic art – Eugene Atget. At first glance, Atget’s pictures seem simple, almost stark, unadorned images of everyday objects, the quotidian rendered with loving precision in black and white. Atget covers a wide range of subjects – from Paris street scenes and shop windows, to the interiors of houses, to pictures of prostitutes, to loving chronicles of ancient sculptures in the great gardens and palaces of France. His photographs seem timeless, definitive, as though time were irrelevant, and the object, having been seen that way once, could never be different again. This is a form of exact nostalgia, of memory polished to a high silver sheen.

Looked at more closely, though, Atget’s pictures turn out to have a lot more to offer. Most intriguing to me is the way he manages, time and time again, to find the right spot, the one exact perspective, from which the lines of the photograph will seem to radiate out in razor straight lines. There is a subtle geometry to Atget’s work, an implicit exploration of line and angle that is truly beautiful to behold. Atget is also, in many ways, a nascent surrealist, every now and then his photographs juxtapose wildly disparate objects, creating a series of dreamlike images. But Atget is also a realist, who is enthralled by the camera’s unparalleled ability to show us things as they really are. A number of his photographs show ragpicker’s houses, broken down old carts, etc, all in an attempt to capture the beauty inherent in all decay. Conversely, his pictures of ancient sculptures are quick to put the decay of these sculptures on display.

Perhaps Atget’s greatest gift then, is to find the dream in what is real, to produce images of fantasy without in any way distorting the truth of the visible world. In part this is achieved through Atget’s loving use of light. Light in Atget’s pictures is a tangible presence, palpable as fog. Seen through Atget’s lens, even something as simple as a tree becomes an explosion of brilliance and shade. There’s also the probing, whimsical nature of Atget’s muse, his ability to spot the entertaining, the off-beat. So we have pictures of the turn of a staircase, pictures of a market where boots are laid out by the dozens, pictures of a shop with corsets, a picture of a crowd staring at an eclipse. What stands out in these pictures is Atget’s incredible eye for beauty, his ability to discover the sublime in the everyday.

Nowhere is this great talent of his better exemplified, I feel, than in his pictures of various gardens and sculptures. As Atget photographs them, these are no longer pictures of mortal places, but images that date back to that earlier, purer time when gods and goddesses walked the earth. It’s the casualness of the figures that’s stunning here – Atget doesn’t glorify the gods, he makes them familiar, almost unremarkable. In achieving this effect, Atget does with light what the great sculptors of old did with marble – he makes the gods human.

Endnote: A dash of colour

I can’t end this post without a passing mention of the final special exhibit on at the museum, a tribute the work of four photographers (Eliot Porter, William Christenberry, Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggleston) who played a pioneering role in developing the art of colour photography. The images that stood out for me here were the photographs of Eliot Porter, particularly his photographs of birds caught in flight, as well as the urban portraits of William Eggleston. Beautiful stuff.

First part of a two-part post about the glorious day I spent today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s a really exciting weekend at the Museum because there are four different special exhibitions on – featuring the works of Beauford Delaney, Jacob von Ruisdael, Edvard Munch and Eugene Atget. This post discusses the first two exhibitions – the others will follow

Beauford Delaney: The Colours of Jazz

Whenever you see colour, think of Beauford Delaney. Delaney’s pallete is vibrant and masterful – his paintings literally seethe with colour – vivid reds and passionate yellows run like worms within the living clay of his art. The current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum showcases Delaney’s evolution as an artist, from a loving chronicler of the explosive energy of New York in the 1940s to the purer abstraction of his Paris years. The difference between the two is stark – the early paintings are blurred negatives of plastic colour, pulsing landscapes of a city that capture almost perfectly the manic energy of New York. These paintings start with a vision of urban beauty that owes much to the Ashcan school and the aching peoplescapes of Hopper and others, except that where these painters are muted and sombre, Delaney is vivacious and daring – combining these visions of his beloved city with a range of colouring that owes more to Van Gogh and Matisse than to any of his contemporaries. Highlights for me from this part of the exhibition were a painting for Marianne Robinson as well as a series of portraits of James Baldwin that highlight Delaney’s versatility – ranging from a simple pastel sketch of a young open-faced Baldwin, through a gloriously god-like portrait of Baldwin as Dark Rapture and a intense, almost disturbingly close portrait of Baldwin done in darker tones, to a portrait of on older Baldwin as a black sage, an idol of dark and terrible gravity, a negative force on a background as red as blood.

Where Delaney really comes into his own for me, though is in his later, Paris years. The paintings here are entirely abstract, yet staring at them one has the hypnotic sense of shape struggling to be born, of the imminence of pattern. At first glance, these paintings seem blank, evenly shaded – it’s only when you look at them more closely that you begin to see the subtle dance of colour hidden away inside them, the clever little insinuations of light and dark that fall just short of becoming form. It’s because of this that these paintings seem startlingly alive, incredibly real. The overall effect is stunning – in a series of paintings titled simply Abstraction Delaney captures the essence of each season, contrasting the brooding maroon of autumn with the lighter, yellowish-green of spring. Also on display is his stunning tribute to Charlie Parker – a painting that is pure pulse – lines of electricity exploding out from the centre of the page.

The thing that connects these two very different phases of Delaney is colour. Whether his subject is an urban landscape or the pure abstractions of the mind, Delaney is an artist of furious and contagious hues – colour breaks out all over his paintings like a rash, like a disease. Throughout the exhibition there is a sense of passionate, almost greedy density, of paint scraped onto the canvas with a knife, of colour that is inches thick. There is something very solid and aggressive about Delaney’s painting, something insistently opaque, and it is this that makes him the exciting painter he is.

I can’t end this description without mentioning my favourite painting of the entire exhibition – a stunning portrait of Ella Fitzgerald – a background of abstract and living yellow from which a pair of eyes emerge, and a face like a half formed moon beams out onto the canvas. A painting that showcases, in a single work, both Delaney’s mastery of portraiture as well as his command of vivid abstraction.

Jacob van Ruisdael: Master Dutchman

From the rebellious to the sublime. If Delaney’s work dazzles you with energy, the exhibition next door, featuring the works of master landscape artist Jacob van Ruisdael, is a study in harmony and light, in the quiet perfection of the great Dutch masters. Ruisdael is one of the 17th century’s most admired landscape artists, a painter whose work inspired, among others, the great John Constable (a fact that the current exhibition makes much of – showcasing works of Constable that are clearly inspired by the Dutch painter). His works are masterpieces of timeless grandeur, paintings of exquisite and epic balance.

Ruisdael is the quintessential landscape painter. People are of little interest to him – indeed in most of his paintings the human and animal figures are added by other artists. What Ruisdael delights in is the sheer scale of the natural world – the soaring majesty of trees, the sad beauty of ruined towers, the breathtaking power of distance. His paintings are studies in perspective, touched impeccably by light and instinctively highlighting the glory of a universe where man is purely incidental. To see a Ruisdael painting is to be transported into a world of dreamlike perfection, where even the raging torrent of a waterfall seems stilled, timeless.

The first thing you notice about Ruisdael’s paintings is the sky. In painting after painting, the sky dominates the larger part of the canvas, a sky alive with majestic clouds, with shapes of unearthly power. There is an incredible depth to Ruisdael’s work, his paintings seems to sweep away into the distance, the line of the land perfectly horizontal, betraying the full breadth of open space. Nowhere is this more evident than in this landscape of Ruisdael’s native Haarlem, where the tiny rooftops of the town have been squeezed into the shadow of the church spire, leaving the horizon unbroken.

The second thing you notice about Ruisdael’s paintings are the trees. Ruisdael’s trees are more than just the big plants that make up a forest – each tree is a unique vision of beauty, a seething form of almost abstract energy, rising gloriously out of the earth, every leaf on its branches aflame with light. Again and again Ruisdael paints these mighty monarchs of the forest with a passion is almost nostalgia, until the trees in his painting have an electrifying, almost hypnotic quality – it is difficult to tear your eyes away from them to see anything else.

Yet if trees are symbols of the organic, chaotic quality of nature, ruins, in Ruisdael becomes pillars of light, razor-sharp evocations of lost glory. Remember the line about sunlight on a broken column. Again and again, Ruisdael returns to this vision of beauty, using the debris of history to construct images of desperate melancholy of aching and absolute longing. Light in these paintings (which are my favourite in the exhibition, and include some stunning landscapes of Edmonton castle, as well as a justly acclaimed painting of a Jewish cemetery) is an act of benediction, a form of grace.

In the final analysis, Ruisdael’s paintings are the landscapes of fantasy, perspectives from a world of uncompromising perfection, the kind of world that God would have created before he let humans in. Human presence is never wholly absent from these paintings, but for the most part it is there only to be dwarfed, only to be shown to be irrelevant. Sunlight and forests and clouds are the true heroes of Ruisdael’s world, and it is these that he is most interested in painting.

The final set of paintings in the exhibition is a fascinating series of late seascapes. Here again, we see the characteristic Ruisdael touch – a tiny sale of glorious white catches our attention, drawn into the painting by it, we observe the incredible distance that the canvas stretches to, the calm of the horizon contrasting so vividly with the churning sea closer at hand. I am reminded, inevitably of Manet.

Taken together, Ruisdael’s work has the awe-inspiring feel of a revelation; I walk out of the exhibition hall feeling as though I were walking out of a church.

He is two hundred miles out of the city when the dawn catches up with him. His spirits dip like the needle on the fuel tank. The night had seemed an endless highway, an endless escape; now the sky is the colour of newspapers he no longer reads. He tries to bring himself to believe in the day’s return, in its newness, its twilight hope; but the whole thing seems false to him, the very horizon an act of propaganda, a meeting of earth and sky that he knows can never come true.

He stops at a roadside diner, orders coffee and eggs, wondering where he’s going to find the appetite. The place is empty – he must be the first customer of the day. The waitress smiles at him as she takes his order. He wonders if she would still smile that way if she knew where he was coming from, knew what he had done. She probably thinks I’m some sort of travelling salesman, he thinks. It occurs to him that that’s exactly what he is – a salesman of Death – the condemned his only customers. No repeat business in his line of work.

He shakes his head. No use thinking that way. These out of town jobs are always the worst. Sure, they pay well and someone has to do them, but there’s something very alien about driving 500 miles just to kill a man (as though death were some sort of special delivery), a peculiar sort of emptiness. Like the hollow feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when your plane lurches into turbulence or when you come off the top of a roller-coaster and realise there’s nothing beneath you but the drop. Something almost sacrilegeous about being out in this lonely country, in the freedom of these distances, so soon after a man’s death. Something aching and misunderstood.

A man’s death. Say rather a boy’s death, for that’s what he really was, the one this morning, a boy, barely twenty years old. Just your average teenager – awkward walk, gawky hair, an uneven shave – and that air of demonstrative defiance that tells you they’re really, really frightened. Only the thing this teenager was afraid of wasn’t the future, it was Death, a much sterner school master, a grown-up much harder to defy. Still, just a kid, after all.

A kid who was a killer, he reminds himself. Running over the facts of the case one more time, running over those horrifying pictures in the paper (Why do they let them put stuff like that on the front page anyway?). Not his decision anyway. Due process. Jury of peers. Appeals, petitions for pardon. All the deliberate and venerable machinery of the law that led to that moment on the gallows. Besides, it had to be done – it was the law of the land, it was for the greater good.

He drops argument after argument into the black memory of that night, like cubes of sugar into a cup of coffee, watching them dissolve and disappear.

Better not to think about it. Still a long drive ahead before he gets home. Another five hours or so, if he doesn’t stop for lunch on the way. Mary will be waiting for him at home, he knows, having taken the day off, the way she always does. They will not talk about this, of course, will, in fact, say nothing to each other – he not wanting to dwell on the details, she knowing that he needs the silence. He will take all his clothes off, sink gratefully into a warm bath. She will stand behind him, rubbing the tension out of his shoulders with her firm, loving hands, while he closes his eyes and tries to forget, tries to wash the memory out of himself, leave it behind him like a pool of faintly muddied water. Afterwards a quick meal (he will have no appetite, but will have to eat anyway, she will insist) and then a long, long nap right through the afternoon, waking to find the children home, seeing the dim shape of anxiety in their eyes. He will spend the evening playing with the younger ones (though not with Eric – Eric knows what his father does for a living, Eric is old enough to disapprove), crushing them in his embrace as though they were Life, feeling how delicate their bones are.

Five hours, maybe six. The eggs on his plate are getting cold but he isn’t really interested. He pokes at them with his fork, like a man fidgeting with a map, drawing and redrawing the boundaries of his hunger. He is tired of this place, it suffocates him, he wants to get away. But something very like necessity weighs down on him, something very like duty. There’s a voice in his head telling him he must be sensible, must eat, must do what needs to be done. He wishes he could get a drink but it’s too early for the bars to be open and anyway he has a long way to drive. He wishes he hadn’t given up smoking.

Through the diner window he can see his car, standing alone in the parking lot. His ceremonial gown in the back seat. People make fun of him for his gown – apparently they don’t wear them any more, the others – apparently they do the job in plain formals, sometimes even in jeans. Like clerks or mechanics. He can’t bring himself to think of it that way, as though taking a man’s life were no different from fixing a dynamo or selling a vacuum cleaner. He thinks of every execution as a special rite, the precise and ancient ritual of some pagan creed of which he is the last surviving priest. It’s silly, he knows, and superstitious, but he needs the sense of ceremony, the sense of something meaningful and mysterious. His one regret is that he’s not allowed to wear a hood. Hoods are important, he feels, they’re a way of denying his own role in the proceedings, of underlining the fact that is not he himself but some faceless servant of an anonymous system who is sending this man to his death. He hates the way they look at him, the condemned ones, how they stare into his face trying to recognise in it the features of their own death. This is not me, he wants to tell them, this is only the disguise I have been asked to put on for you, the mask of executioner, the camouflage of heartlessness. I am like the stripper who seduces you with a desire she does not feel. But of course, he is not allowed to talk to the prisoners. He is neither enemy nor confidante, neither friend nor foe. He is just a technician, brought there for his own special expertise to get the job done as efficiently as possible.

Just a technician. The thought is both demeaning and a release. Just a cog in a larger apparatus. He beckons to the waitress, signals that she may clear the food away. He has barely touched the eggs, but it is too late now, he has no appetite. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. But what if you didn’t want the omelette in the first place, what if you only asked for it because you thought you had to, because someone else told you to?

The waitress comes over and hands him his check, then wipes the table clean with a damp cloth. If only it were that easy, he thinks to himself, watching the sheen of the water glisten and then fade on the tabletop. If only we could wipe the table clean each time, get rid of all the crumbs, start again. If only he had gone to college the way his mother wanted him to, if only there were something else he was good at, something else he could do. He sighs. No use thinking about it now. There are bills that must be paid, roads that must be travelled; he is still five long hours away from home. Time to get on with it.

As he leaves, the waitress waves goodbye, wishes him a good day. He wishes her back, and in his heart those simple words are changed into a blessing, a prayer for the rightness of the world, for its abiding innocence. As he walks towards his car, the sun is just rising over the distant hills and the Utah sunlight seems removed, distant, heartlessly cold. He takes a deep breath and steps out into the light, his shoulders lifting in automatic defiance. Knowing that what must follow is irrevocable. Knowing that there is no other way.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

- T.S. Eliot

I’ve never understood the point of abridging Shakespeare. As a child, I remember reading this book called Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb – the book left me completely cold. The stories seemed lifeless, needlessly complex and, in most cases, fairly absurd. I wondered what the fuss was about. Then, at fourteen, out of sheer boredom, I read Twelfth Night, and “felt like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”. It seems a trite thing to say, I know, but that one afternoon, rich with its intimations of poetry, of the dizzying possibilities of language, changed my life forever.

The point is not simply that the Lamb book was a henious travesty of the original. The point is that it was a dangerous travesty – because it offered the reader the seductive idea that he / she knew about Shakespeare or had ‘read’ him, whereas in reality nothing could be farther from the truth. This wasn’t a harmless little book – it was the vilest, most potentially damaging book you could give your child to read – I’d rather give an eight year old a copy of Playboy than a copy of Tales from Shakespeare (and no, for a change, I’m not trying to be cruel to children!). In general I’m not for censorship, but if there’s one book that I would support making bonfires of, one book whose copies should be rounded up and burnt in the public square, it would be Tales from Shakespeare.

So you can imagine how horrified I was to read this. (hat tip: Prufrock) Classics on sms? Why don’t they just offer free lobotomies instead? They’d probably be more painless. It almost makes you hope that cell phone radiations are actually carcinogenic and all the people who subscribe to this service are going to end up with brain tumours because, let’s face it, it’s their only shot at mental growth. Classics on sms forsooth!

Why? Why can’t people just leave the classics alone? Isn’t there enough crap published every year for them to mess around with? All those thousands of books that are steadily reversing the process of paper making and converting perfectly good paper back into pulp? If you want to save the forests, go convert the Da Vinci code to an sms (‘Gibberish, gibberish, gibberish’ – there, now you can claim to have read it) or murder hacks like Chetan Bhagat (I’d pay for an sms version called One very, very short night at the call centre – at least the grammar would be better). Why go after Shakespeare for God’s sake? It’s bad enough that we have random film versions of Austen – but at least those have Keira Knightley – but this? Who says the classics should be made more accessible, anyway? That’s all wrong – the classics are books you deserve, books you earn the right to read. I wouldn’t consider someone who’s only read the sms version of Romeo and Juliet literate, let alone educated.

The thing I was reminded of while reading the article was a phrase from Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog – ‘high IQ morons’. That’s what we’re creating, a society of digitised souls, of miniaturised intelligences. A society where technological savvy has become a substitute for good, old fashioned thought. I’m no Luddite, but I think it’s time we realised that intelligence is only marginally about fact and analysis, that there are deeper wellsprings of creativity and silence that go into the making of intellect, the making of what we once called (even the word seems archaic now) wisdom. Yeats writes: “How can they know / Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone / And there alone”.

Meanwhile, of course, I’m waiting to get my sms version of Aristotle.

“Thinking about the spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing”

- Haruki Murakami ‘The Year of Spaghetti’

Murakami is GOD. Period.

Two thirty am. I am trembling on the edge of sleep when a sharp beep from my cellphone wakes me. In the darkened room the neon light of the phone makes it look ghostly, possessed – a spectre calling to me from another world. I have, it seems, a new message.

My first instinct is simply to ignore the damned thing. Just snuggle back into my pillow and forget about it till morning. But who could me text-ing me at this hour? Maybe there’s been an emergency. Maybe someone I care for is in hospital or in tears. Maybe someone needs me, maybe this message is a call for help.

Slowly I crawl my way out of the covers, make my bleary-eyed way over to the table (not forgetting to stumble over shoes, magazines and the occasional chair on my way), shivering in the early morning cold. Really anxious now, I thumb my way through the phone menu, mentally bracing myself for bad news. It takes a moment for my eyes to focus.

The message reads: “Dear Sprint Customer. This is to confirm that in accordance with your request, we shall no longer be sending you text notifications of new deals and offers on Sprint. To resubscribe to this service, please reply T to this message. Thank you.”

Aarrghhh!! The world is made up of morons.

Scene: A Library. Falstaff enters from left, come to pick up the copy of the new Marquez (my review here) that he’d requested and has just been informed is waiting for him at the counter.

Falstaff: Hi. I’m here to pick up a book (hands over e-mail notice that he’s carefully printed out to avoid having to say the book’s name out loud)

Library Guy 1: Okay Cool (Goes off to look for book. Comes back empty-handed two minutes later). Sorry, it hasn’t come yet.

F: Errr…but you sent me an e-mail last night saying it was here and I could come pick it up (points to notice in LG1’s hand)

LG1: Uh, ya, I guess. Okay (Goes off to look for book again. Returns one minute later with a copy of Arthur & George. Proceeds to check it out and hand it to F. Looks so triumphant that F. doesn’t know how to break this to him)

F: Errr…but this isn’t the book I’m here to pick up. I’d asked for this one as well, and I’ll take it, but the one I came to pick up is different.

LG1 (Checks record on computer): Oh ya, that other one is still pending. See, it says that right here, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

F (with nightmarish image of his grad advisor listening in on this conversation): No, no. That’s not the one either. As in yes, I’ve requested that as well, but the one that’s supposed to be on hold here is the new Marquez, (deep sigh) Memories of my melancholy whus.

LG1 (reads title of book in e-mail notice. Looks up. Gives F look that says ‘pervert’. F feels like he’s 15 years old buying condoms in a pharmacy): Uh, ya, well, it doesn’t seem to be on the shelf…

LG2 (coming up behind him): Hi. What seems to be the trouble?

LG1 explains.

LG2 (taking my card): Let me take a look. (Goes back to the hold section. Shouts from back a minute later) Say, what was the name of that book again?

LG1 (shouting back): Memories of my melancholy whores!

LG2 (still shouting): Memories of my melancholy what?

LG1 (shouting louder): WHORES!

Every one in a thirty feet radius turns. Falstaff stands at the counter cringing. Senior Library Guy comes over.

SLG: What’s going on here?

LG1: This guy had a book that is supposed to be on hold, but it doesn’t seem to be here.

SLG (looking at notice): Ah, the new Marquez. Hey, I saw that come in yesterday. It must be somewhere around here. Let’s look.

LG1, LG2 and SLG all proceed to spend the next five minutes searching through every book that’s been put on hold trying to find the Marquez. Meanwhile a line of some ten people has collected behind Falstaff, all listening intently to the conversation at the counter.

SLG to Other Senior Library Guy: Hey, Larry, you remember the new Marquez that came in yesterday?

OSLG: Huh?

SLG: You know, the one about whores.

OSLG: Oh, ya, of course, the whore book. What about it?

SLG: We can’t find it now.

OSLG: You can’t find ‘whores’? Really? (looks at Falstaff) You haven’t already checked it out have you?

F (wishing he’d just gone to the bookstore and bought the damn thing): No.

OSLG: Hmmm…that’s very strange. Tell you what we’ll do – give us your name and e-mail address and when we find it we’ll let you know (taking out sheet of paper and pen). Here, just put your name and e-mail address down on that. (Takes back paper. Scribbles on it, then puts it up where everyone can see) Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll turn up in a day or two.

F (staring at bulletin board notice that says ‘Melancholy Whores’ with his name and e-mail address on it): Oh, right. Thanks.

Note to GGM: The next time you write a novel, could you give it a slightly less provocative title? Something along the lines of Slow Man would do just fine.

What would you do if you had a sheep, a goat, a basket of cobras, a basket of mongeese (or whatever the plural of mongoose is) and a troupe of dancing women?

Friend heh heh argues that the combination could help you make the perfect presentation. I don’t disagree – I just think that as applications go that’s hopelessly tame. Imagine if P T Barnum had gone in for this kind of thinking. Let’s see – I have a fat guy with a tophat, three clowns, a trapeze act, a couple of fire-eaters, four lions, the incredible shrinking man, an elephant and this big monstrosity of a tent. Hmmm. Maybe I should organise board meetings.

So here, instead, are 10 things that you could do with the combination above that would be so much more fun:

1. Walk into the boardroom. Make an altar on one side and sacrifice the sheep, the goat and the women to propitiate the gods. Then throw mongeese out of the window and get a character reference from the snakes so that when the client gets around to suing you his lawyers will be on your side (seeing as you’re a friend to the species and all). Take deep breath. Present.

2. Use the James Bond approach. Walk into the boardroom. In one swift motion, grab the goat by its hindlegs and swing it around, using its horns to disable the guards you walked in with. Then, using the mongeese as hand-grenades to give you cover, knot the snakes together into a rope, hook the teeth of the first one into the CEO’s neck, grab a woman with one hand, tuck the lamb under your arm and shimmy your way out of the window. Find a cave to hide in for the night. Kill and skin the lamb (make sure it’s a small one) and then tell the woman that if the two of you are going to make it through the night you’re going to have to share the ‘blanket’ – you have to – it’s for survival.

3. Pretend you’re Aesop. Tell the following fable: “Once upon a time, a lamb, a goat, a snake and a mongoose were going on a long journey. On their way they came upon a wide and deep river. Seeing the river, the snake said, ‘Don’t worry – I shall bite the river and kill it’. So the snake bit the river, but his poison just floated away on its surface and he drank up too much of the water and it drowned him. Then the mongoose said, ‘Don’t worry – I will pounce upon the river and kill it’. So the mongoose took a big leap and jumped onto the river and he drowned as well. Then the goat said, ‘Wait! I have a better idea. I will simply drink up the river and then everything will be dry.’ (Scholarly aside: this, of course, is the origin of the tradition of using goatskins to carry water). So the goat drank and drank, but the river was too much for him and he exploded and little pieces of sheesh kebab scattered all around. After the goat was dead, the lamb didn’t say anything but just sat around looking cute, until a troupe of village women came along and took him across with them’. Then stand back (looking sheepish, naturally) and wait for someone to come up with a moral.

4. Walk into the boardroom. Hand the sheep to one manager and the goat to another. Then set the mongeese loose in the room so there’s total pandemonium. When the CEO catches you trying to sneak out, tell him you can’t work like this – point out how one manager is always wool-gathering and the other really gets your goat. Assure him that no, you’re not trying to weasel your way out of it. That’s a mongoose. But it’s okay, many people can’t tell them apart.

5. Write a letter to a Bollywood producer with a new film script involving icchadhari mongeese. One of those things where the hero (who’s a cobra naturally) accidentally kills the male of a loving mongoose couple, whereupon the female comes after him pretending to be a snake. So now the people are mongeese and the mongeese are snakes and the snakes are Miss World finalists and no one’s quite sure what species Bappi Lahiri might be. And then, just as the vengeful mongoose is about to kill the hero God calls and reminds her of the pre-nup. What romance, what action, what drama! Suggest using the goat as the lead instead of Shah Rukh Khan because the goat will work for less and can actually act. Use the women for an item number. Use the sheep for costume (pretend he’s a mink coat from Switjherland)

6. Send the basket of cobras to your client CEO in a long, mournful looking black car with a note that says ‘Hiss’ and ‘Hearse’. Sit in a dark room and get the sheep and goat to say Bah! to you (repeatedly) for making such an atrocious joke. Dissect the brain of a mongoose to see what a sense of humour might actually look like. When that doesn’t work, console yourself with women.

7. Skin a mongoose and put the pelt on your head so that you look like Donald Trump. Practise saying “You’re fired” to a sheep until it looks like he may actually believe you. Get the cobras to hiss at you behind your back while you’re doing this, just to make it feel authentic. When you feel confident that you really have no personality left at all, verify this by bringing in the troupe of women and making sure that they find the goat more sexually attractive than you.

8. Pretend you’re Mel Gibson. Make a movie called ‘The Passion of the Lamb’ with the following script: Scene 1 (30 seconds): A cobra slithers across the ground hissing while a woman with a shaved head looks on. Scene 2 (30 seconds): A group of women stand around looking mournful Scene 3 (49 minutes): A pack of mongeese attack a sheep and slowly bite it to death. Scene 4 (48 minutes): A long still of the dying sheep slowly bleeding into the ground. Get the goat to do voice-overs, and pretend that it’s the Bible, only in Aramaic.

9. Make an ad for shampoo. Voice-over starts: “Does your hair look like this” (shot of snakes writhing about) “or like this?” (picture of mongoose with fur standing on end). “Don’t worry. With the new XYZ shampoo” (picture of hot woman in skimpy bikini, as if using a shampoo is going to give you a 26 inch waist and perfect tanlines) “you’ll get the soft, lovable hair that everyone loves to touch” (picture of woman with flowing hair running loving hands over cute little lamb”. Air ad on TV three times. Then cast goat in bronze and pretend you won him at Cannes.

10. Find a river that can only be crossed by a small boat. First take all the women across in one trip, placing them on your lap. Row in slow, rhythmic motion. Come back with only woman to keep you company. Leave her on the side you started from and take the mongeese across next. Come back with another woman. Pick up the snakes to take them across next. As you’re about to go across again, wonder what’s happened to the sheep, the goat and the first woman you’d brought back. Remember too late about the tiger (have you ever seen a river-boat crossing thing where there was no tiger? So there). Panic. Jump hastily into boat to escape to safety. Upset basket of cobras. Get bitten 378 times. Die.

Bonus application: Tell fortunes. Charge 1/4th of normal admission. Put the mongeese on sticks and colour them pink so that they look like candy-floss. When people walk in ask them if they’re Aries, Capricorn or Virgo. If they are, direct them to the appropriate counter (sheep, goat or women). If not, sic the cobras on them. Then have them watch in amazement as you predict the time of their death with formidable accuracy.

How’s this for a bookshelf? The complete set of Penguin Classics – all 1,082 of them. Talk about being a book snob.

Let’s see – say three friends a year, one book per birthday, plus one book a month I give myself – all I have to do is live to be a 100 and I could do it. Actually, probably more like 96 given the books I already own. Hmmm.