The insoluble pancake

I’m just back from a week in Manhattan. I stayed in a small hotel in Chelsea, down near 17th street, near sixth avenue. My room was long and narrow, perhaps no more than a few metres in width and with high ceilings. Once my meeting was over, I spent the weekend wandering the streets of Manhattan, visiting the many chelsea art galleries, attempting random walks. Manhattan now seems much less full of strange and unusual people than it did when I was first there, back in 1992; the city has changed a lot.

Each morning I found myself at the Hollywood Diner (open 24 hours!) where I could order pancakes and watch New Yorkers hurry to work along the pavement (I mean sidewalk) outside. This was the nearest cafe to my hotel, and I reflected on the differences between that cafe and the nearest cafe to my apartment in Paris, the “Bouquet d’Alesia” where I have eaten many an “entrecote gratin daphinoise” (but perhaps not at 9AM in the morning). Certainly the menus in Alesia were not nearly as extensive as proposed by the Hollywood Diner – there must have been hundreds of items to choose from, all of which I suppose were prepared at the same lightning-fast speed with with my pancakes materialised each morning. Could they really make all this stuff?

I spent a morning wandering around Chelsea, and attempted to visit the galleries – but there were hundreds of them, and I gave up somewhere in the middle of the afternoon after perhaps having been through only three or four streets. The galleries are very densely packed down there, one door after another. Bizzarely enough, the galleries alternate with garages and auto repair shops, so it’s not uncommon to leave one exhibition space only to enter another and think “My gosh, this installation looks exactly like a partly disassembled Toyota! And all that machine oil on the floor is so realistic! And those men in overalls!” only to realise that in fact, it really is a garage, rather than just looking like one.

About the best thing I saw the galleries of Chelsea were some new photographs by Andreas Gursky (a snip at around $300,000 each), amongst them one of some technicians in the Superkamiokande mine in Japan. One sees serried ranks of photomultiplier tubes up to the ceiling, a million eyes. In the middle distance technicians are paddling across the inky black surface of the super-pure heavy water in a canoe. Scale and proportion are hard to grasp – surely this is image has been altered in some way? But no, this is actually reality…

Amongst other things I did in Manhattan was to make a visit to the Strand bookstore – but more on that in the next few days I hope…

Two weeks ago I found myself in the far North – Edinburgh. The last time I had walked the streets of Edinburgh it was the winter of 1998, the threshold of 1999. Just before I left for the south, for Marseille, so there is a certain symmetry to write about this trip now, just after my last entry about Marseille.

Well, up north, the shadows are even longer than in Paris, that’s for sure. In early summer the sun in Edinburgh doesn’t exactly set it more sort of fades away. Even at 10pm in the evening there is a weak watery blue light that fills the streets. One leaves one’s restaurant and is surprised by a lingering glow still present in the sky.

I had returned to the city for the usual no-good reason. Of course I took a lot of photographs as I wandered the streets with my colleagues or alone. On the last day before my departure I made an epic tour of the city, walking from my guest house in Morningside (excellent Scottish breakfasts each morning) all the way to the modern art galleries in Dean village and then back across the city to the new Scottish parliament and the foothills of Arthur’s seat, the extinct volcano in the centre of Edinburgh. But after traversing the city I had no energy left to make the ascent so I contented myself with watching people trudging forcefully across its slopes. I remembered the last and only time I had made the climb myself, with my friend Brendan. The soles of my shoes were worn thin and it was impossible to get any purchase on the smooth mossy slopes which had been worn flat by generations of hikers. I slid around like I was on an ice-skating rink. It was only with great difficulty that I managed to reach the summit.

I know Edinburgh quite well, despite the fact that I’ve never lived there. In the dark days towards the end of my time in England I made constant trips there to escape the tedium of life in Durham and to visit friends of mine who lived there. I was attracted by the cafes and galleries which were non-existent where I lived.

Now of course I see all this a bit differently. The city centre of Edinburgh, at least in the old town, appeared to me now as hollowed-out, empty. A facade, almost. I was constantly surprised at how quiet the streets were only a few short steps away from the main thoroughfares, after the frantic density of Paris. I didn’t remember this. I didn’t remember either that at 9AM on a Saturday morning that most shops were not yet open, that life had not yet started. In the evening, walking around, it was hard to see anyone who was neither a student or retired, at least in the places around the old town. A cold wind pursued me relentlessly throughout my week-long stay there. (A friend of mine told me that a colleague of his had remarked that more wind passed over Edinburgh in one year than in any other part of the UK.)Nevertheless, the rain only really began in earnest on the last day of my trip, and the sinister bulk of the castle looming over Princes street was partially neutralised by the presence of a blue sky containing only a few scattered clouds….

All the cafes and bars I remember from those distant winters in Edinburgh were still in the city; no changes, it seemed. On Saturday morning I found myself once again in Florentin’s, where I had spent many long hours at the end of the last century. But I found it strangely different than before, than the last time I was there which I remember very clearly as being January the 1st, 1999. What had changed? The wall between two halves of the cafe had been removed, making one large open space. It no longer felt so cramped as before, but perhaps just slightly less intimate. I think I wrote a lot of letters there, in the days when I still wrote letters. It is strange how these places continue to exist, even in our absence.
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I am at the other side of the country, in the south. Marseille. A southern city. I won’t mention Milosz, his southern cities, except to say that his words return often to my mind …

I’m here for a few days, the usual no good reason, a conference, and actually quite a few people are here that I’ve known for a long time, friends from when I lived in Canada a decade and a half ago. I’m here in my sixth floor hotel room, a few streets back from Vieux port, it’s the evening, from my window I see the bone-white illuminated spires of the Panier, and although now it’s dark in the daytime I see red rooftops and a shard of water through the gaps between buildings. A few bars of accordion can be heard from time to time, drifting past, but it’s the end of the evening, the tourists have left, there’s no point playing much longer. Maybe there is the sound of water. And a few lost seagulls.

My relationship to the city is a complicated one. I came here in 1999 from a subterranean existence in England and lived here for two and half years. You must first imagine a sky deeper and bluer than any sky you have seen before. A deep, clear and perfect blue. Each morning in my apartment high on the hill near the Notre Dame de la Garde the very first thing which entered my consciousness in the morning was the blue of the sky. I opened my eyes and through my window my line of sight intersected a clear and faultless square of sky. On most days the breeze, the endless wind, clears the atmosphere of particles, renders everything luminous. I was very grateful indeed after the heavy skies of the north of England to find myself here. I remember a recurrent thought almost every morning for the first few months after I arrived – that I had left for good the place I had come from, and I did not need to return. I felt immensely relieved.

Once again today, crossing the Vieux Port at the middle of the day, I felt almost overpowered by the amount of light streaming down from the sky. No ghosts could hide here in this light. I felt nostalgic for the weak, diluted rays of Parisian sunshine, always coming from the sky at a long oblique angle and casting tall shadows in the street. That was always the first thing I noticed when made the trip between Paris and Bologna – the long shadows on the Parisian buildings.

But it does no good to keep one’s eyes too closely on the sky, as anyone who has ever visited Marseille will tell you. Back at ground level, the city is chaotic, disordered, and hazards may arrive from any direction. It’s best perhaps to fix one’s gaze at point somewhere in the middle distance and walk towards it as fast as you can.

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Mr. Kurt Vonnegut died around ten days ago. Last weekend, I spent a few hours in a nice cafe near my house to write this essay about Mr. Vonnegut and his brother, Bernard.

I was a great admirer of Mr. Vonnegut’s fiction from a very early age, and I had read almost all of his books by the time I left Ireland for university in England. Of course, I was a very impressionable young man. So you can imagine my astonishment when I arrived in Manchester, at UMIST, to discover that the scientists in the physics department actually knew Bernard Vonnegut, Kurt’s brother. Not so surprising of course – they were atmospheric physicists after all, and were working on the same research topics that Bernard was interested in. Bernard and Kurt had actually visited the department a few years before I arrived.

In my final year at UMIST I had a summer job in New Mexico, which in the end lasted six months because I had problems with my PhD grant and had no immediate reason to return to the UK (in the end I did a Masters’ program in Canada). I worked at New Mexico Tech, in Socorro. For the first three months I helped out with measuring radon transport in the desert (a lot of houses in New Mexico are built on granite and are a little too tightly insulated…) For the second half of my stay I was the sole inhabitant and operator of the Joint Observatory for Cometary Research (JOCR for short, ho ho). A very interesting experience which I should some day describe at length….

For the first few weeks I was on the mountain, the only other inhabitants for miles around were those at the Langmuir Labs, on the other peak, where they were doing their wacky experiments with thunder and lightning. This involved firing rockets up into clouds and seeing what would happen, that kind of thing. Observing, measuring. I visited there a few times, and I watched the experiments in progress. Bernard Vonnegut spent most of his summers at Langmuir Labs, but, of course, he was not there the one summer that I happened to be there.

And that is how I got to thinking about Kurt and Bernard. My favourite Vonnegut book, after Cat’s Cradle is probably Mother Night. Mr. Vonnegut informs us in his introduction that it is the only book of his which contains a moral: “Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be”. Indeed.

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