Desk Notes No.3

Women in the city, Nabokov's Enchanter and recycled sounds

Jun 26, 2022

Dear friends,

Here in Birmingham the skies turned pink and purple for the summer solstice. The preceding rain battered the garden’s most delicate flowers, but also brought forth the most perfect rainbow I’ve ever seen. My gardening philosophy is not very sophisticated: simply to plant the flowers I love most. It means my attempts are not always successful. By pure accident, I have ended up with a late spring garden. I tolerate a lot of barren foliage for the burst of colour in May and June. Most of all, I look forward to the pale pink ruffles of the Sarah Bernhardt peonies, blooms that remind me of upturned petticoats, fine and full as cotton candy. I chose them for my wedding bouquet, nestled between purple spikes of veronica, antique roses and eucalyptus.

Something I hadn’t considered until then, was the seasonality of the floristry trade. Generally speaking, you can only get what’s in season. We could have peonies that year, only if the weather was kind to us. We might simply be too early. Every year, as the garden comes to life, I watch the growth of the peonies through this lens. In the end, we were lucky. The day was baking hot, unexpectedly so, and the sweet, heady scent of peonies filled our tiny venue. Whenever I catch the aroma of peonies now, I’m transported there. I recently learned that this is the ‘Proust phenomenon’ described rather more poetically by him in Swann’s Way.

In this edition of Desk Notes I share the things I’ve been thinking about in June:

Pictures - Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Print - The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov (Content Warning: abuse)

Sound - Film scores and the Kate Bush controversy

Pictures

Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery has paused renovation work and reopened for the Commonwealth Games. Until 4 September, the Gas Hall is home to Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. It explores the legacy of the architectural design and urban planning decisions made by men, on the lives of women. Think dark underpasses, busy roads with no crossings, steep concrete steps impossible to negotiate with prams and buggies. Amongst the exhibition’s memorabilia, adverts and news clippings, one article reads:

“Surveys show women like kitchens you can eat in, so that people talk to you while you cook; yet kitchens continue to be tiny one-person work slots. An ideal town like Milton Keynes is laid out for car drivers; yet even if families have a car, too often the man takes it to work, so any woman at home is more isolated than ever.”

In 2017, Artist Cathy Wade made a short film about this problem in Birmingham, titled For the Car and for the Body. It is playing at the exhibition but you can also watch it below.

Photos titled ‘urban obstacle course’ hammer home the problem. They were originally part of Making Space, a manifesto for feminist architecture published in 1984 by Matrix, a collective of female architects aiming to put women at the centre of design decisions. According to the article above, the problem with existing cities was one of separation - the division of different spaces for living, working, shopping and educating:

“Walkways, subways, open communal spaces are designed by men, who forget a factor that women think of half the time — fear. The more that anyone at work, anyone at school, lights, action, shops are somewhere else, the more vulnerable the people round the home area feel.”

We need look no further than the murder of Sarah Everard to see that travelling through urban geographies remains dangerous and frightening for women. Diane Abbot MP tweeted, “Even after all these years if I am out late at night on an isolated street & I hear a man’s footsteps behind me I automatically cross the road.” Julie Etchingham wrote that: “Keys in hands, planning safe routes, shoes you can run in, talking loudly on phone - I’ve done all of this.” I have too. Show me any woman who hasn’t. Poor design decisions only increase our sense of fear. As Wade says in her film, “being in places you’re not supposed to be is a poor justification for assault; day or night it’s a self-imposed curfew.”

In another corner of the Women in the City exhibition are Markéta Luskačová’s photographs of Chiswick Women’s Aid in 1977. Mothers wait in crowded rooms, holes in their tights, paper cups in their hands. Families sleep on floors. There is solidarity among the children, new friendships being made. Two toddlers kiss. An older boy lies back on a tired sofa in a fit of laughter. The photographs are available in a collection from Cafe Royal Books and you can see many of the images on their website. One woman, with what appears to be a fresh black eye, looks wearily into the camera surrounded by her six children. Chiswick was the first women’s refuge to open in 1971. Rebranded as Refuge in the 1990s, the charity explains how, “Women and children flocked to our doors because, for the first time, someone was saying it was wrong to beat your partner.” Luskačová’s photographs are amongst the first of their kind, but they were never used or displayed at the time.

Print

The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov

Novels allow us to inhabit the mind of any narrator, no matter how diabolical. But is there a limit to the kind of mind we want to occupy? Lolita has been doing the rounds on Instagram recently; its readers justifiably having more to say about the horrifying subject matter than the skill of the author in exposing the monster at its heart. I read Lolita twenty years ago; my memory now a fog of alliteration and handsome prose. I threatened to read more Nabokov but there was always something more pressing on my list.

Before Lolita, there was The Enchanter. Nabokov penned it in 1939, describing it as “the first little throb,” of his most famous novel. He showed it to a few friends and then destroyed it. Or so he thought. Leafing though some papers in 1959, he rediscovered a copy, “a beautiful piece of Russian prose, precise and lucid.” Its brief fifty-nine pages immerse us in the mind of an unnamed voyeur who marries a dying a widow in order to possess her twelve year old daughter.

On picking The Enchanter up this month, I discovered it’s impossible to read passively. The sensuality of Nabokov’s prose (visual, haptic, cinematic) is beyond beautiful, but it’s also in constant conflict with our moral judgements. Take this passage, where the protagonist sees the object of his desire for the very first time:

“It seemed to him that right away, at that very moment, he had appreciated all of her from top to toe: the liveliness of her russet curls (recently trimmed); the radiance of her large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries; her merry, warm complexion; her pink mouth, slightly open so that two large front teeth barely rested on the protuberance of the lower lip; the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek little fox-like hairs running along the forearms; the indistinct tenderness of her still narrow but already not quite flat chest; the way the folds of her skirt moved; their succinctness and soft concavities; the slenderness and glow of her uncaring legs; the coarse straps of the skates.”

At once beautiful and deeply disturbing.

It’s undoubtedly Nabokov’s gift for detail and sensual prose that makes him so readable. His sentences are delicious, his unfamiliar imagery inviting us to see what we never have before. When the protagonist is disgusted by the idea he will have to make love to the widow, “his imagination was left hanging on barbed wire.” Her stomach problems, which mean they usually sleep in separate beds, “sounded exactly as if she were pregnant (a false pregnancy, a pregnancy with her own death).” Then there’s Nabokov’s evocation of hideous desire: “The foretaste of finding the girl alone melted like cocaine in his loins.” As a writer, it’s hard not to be inspired by perfect sentences like this one: “Opalescent on the surface but translucent in her depths, she must be fond of sweets, and puppies, and the innocent trickery of newsreels.”

But Nabokov does not glamorise his protagonist’s behaviour; the hedonism of the prose serving only to make it more monstrous. The unnamed voyeur is a man almost entirely consumed by his own perspective. To female readers his fantasies are delusional: “Such warm-skinned, russet-sheened girls got their periods early, and it was little more than a game to them, like cleaning up a dollhouse kitchen.” Never more out of touch than when he daydreams about the young girl’s reaction to the “Edenic discoveries” she will make with him:

“There will be constant merriment, pranks, morning kisses, tussles on the shared bed, a single, huge sponge shedding its tears on four shoulders, squirting with laughter amid four legs.”

An abhorrent image.

The odd thing about prose, is that we can never quite read it as its contemporaries did. We can never truly know how they felt turning the pages. We bring our own experiences, the prevailing thoughts of our own culture, our zeitgeist, to our interpretation of the text. What we know today about the legacy of abuse (from survivors of Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris; from listening to people abused by parents, priests and guardians) makes this next line (in which the narrator romanticises himself in the girl’s memory) the most disturbing of all:

“She would never again be free to disassociate, in her consciousness and her memory, her own development from that of their love, her childhood recollections from her recollections of male tenderness.”

Sound

Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin & Dan Romer

The Four Seasons: Vivaldi Recomposed by Max Richter

Before the pandemic, I spent the better part of a decade writing about contemporary cinema for local newspapers and websites. Some of it good (you can find that here) and some of it less so. I was learning as I went, trying to figure out where I fit. Writing about films at home, I would listen to their scores; transporting me back to the film’s mood and pace.

As Katheryn Kalinak explains in her fantastic book Film Music, a film’s score communicates and defines the emotions of a scene:

“Music resonates emotion between the audience and the screen… harnessing the power of musical conventions to provide an audible definition of the emotion represented in the film. Elmer Bernstein puts it this way: “Music can tell the story in purely emotional terms and the film by itself cannot.””

Perhaps this is why I still listen to film scores almost every day. Take the score for Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film about six year old ‘Hushpuppy’ whose bayou home is destroyed by rising water levels. There’s poverty, homelessness, loss; but there’s also adventure, magical realism and triumph ushered in by the score’s surging brass. It’s a near singular vision - not only did Benh Zeitlin co-write and direct the film, but he also composed the score together with Dan Romer. ‘Once There Was a Hushpuppy’ never fails to make my hair stand on end. Catch me in the right moment and it can actually move me to tears (whether happy or sad, I can never quite tell). If I could take any piece of music to a desert island, this would be it.

The very best scores deliver more than the Proust phenomenon. They can stand apart from cinema as works of art in their own right. This makes them rich pickings for creatives looking to recycle and re-appropriate them in television and advertising. In How to Read a Film, James Monaco explains that, “We are used to hearing sound in every direction. Although we engage in selective attention to sounds, we don’t focus directly on a sound the way we focus on an image.” This explains why we don’t recycle cinema’s visual components, or indeed any other art form, in quite the same way that we do music; often transferring and reusing tracks whole.

The problem with this, is the way music and memory are connected. “Implicit memories,” write the Abbey Road Institute, “are memories stored in the unconscious and are a more reactive form of memory… The key to this long-lasting memory capability is that they are generally attached to a specific emotion.” Music is a trigger for getting us there; for recalling memories that may otherwise be inaccessible. It’s why re-purposing music doesn’t always go down well. We get precious about the things we love. We get territorial. Take the recent outcry made by some Kate Bush fans at the idea of a new generation discovering and associating her music with Netflix series, Stranger Things:

“Kate Bush did not go through wuthering heights, run all the way up that hill to make a deal with god & shout babooshka for y’all to be finding out about her in 2022!” @heyjaeee

“If y’all start calling Kate Bush’s music the stranger things songs I’m gonna kill you.” @_evanbaranowski

I can sympathise, even though I don’t agree. I can’t stand that the epic ‘Lux Aeterna’ (which conveys Requiem For A Dream’s painful story of descent into addiction) has been repurposed for light entertainment in the Britain’s Got Talent results shows. And I’m saddened that I can’t enjoy Max Richter’s gorgeous re-composition of Vivaldi’s Spring without thinking about Macmillan Cancer Support and the chain of memories that unleashes. But even I can concede that Spring is the perfect piece of music for Macmillan’s message of hope; its strings recalling the chatter of bird song, the flutter of wings, the awakening of flowers from hibernating bulbs.

Wishing you all a wonderful July. If you have any thoughts about the re-use of music in adverts and television - any axes to grind - or anything else to say about this month’s Desk Notes, please get in touch in the comments.

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