The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 10

Normally I would have raced though this book, but am reading small chunks at a time. Depressingly the theme of antisemitism grows and grows, dominated for me by what will happen when Hitler comes to power in Germany.  I find it incredible that despite the Emperor's enfranchisement of the Jews still there are open calls in the Reichstrat for Schusgeld - a bounty for shooting Jews. As the author says, after his Paris researches,

"It looks as if I am going to spend another winter reading about antisemitism"

And how true that is, despite the riches, the successes of the Ephrussi family and others like them, they are still outsiders to a rabid section of Europe. 

Then there is assertion in the book that suicide was a common among these rich nobility - and a list follows - three of Wittgenstein brothers, Mahler's brother - but I think this might be the literary equivalent of "Britons dead in balloon crash".  Add in the suicide of the Crown Prince after he had shot his mistress and you have every ingredient for a massive press ghoul fest. Just because they are the relatives of the famous the suicides stick out, but we know that suicide is one of the most common causes of death in young men even to this day. I want to see the figures!

There is in  fact an entire book on Suicide in fin-de-siecle Vienna, by John David Deak, but I can't get any more information. But there is this amazing passage from a book on Budapest, that speaks for itself!

The final chapter of this section, “Rites of Becoming Visible and Invisible,” is a magnificent exposition on metropolitan suicide and suicide attempts. Sadly, Budapest had the highest proportion of suicides of any European city, with figures for the period from unification until World War II averaging between 5.3 and 5.7 per thousand. In 1883, the Public Health Commission speculated that the city’s high rate of suicide was due to mental illness and imitative behavior, and encouraged journalists to exercise restraint in reporting suicides. Gyáni notes that while the commission may have been mistaken about the issue of mental health as a principal reason, their observation about imitation actually had some clout in reference to suicide attempts. Thanks to his close attention to visuality throughout the text, Gyáni’s subtle observation that many attempted suicides were efforts at becoming visiblein the crowd of metropolitan strangers is even more effective. Distressed people atop elevated sites, such as bridges or one of the city’s very few tall office buildings, thus made their “entourage” or fellow alienated people aware that their personal problems had become untenable. “Such gestures are, logically, more effective if they are spectacular,” he adds (p. 131). A fire chief’s report from 1927 indicated that such dramatic attempts had become almost routine, yet actual suicides got far less coverage in the press than the “unsuccessful” attempts atop a bridge. (Firemen even got a bonus for rescuing people atop the bridge.) Gyáni undertakes a social analysis of suicide statistics, concluding that those most likely to commit suicide were those who had least control over their destiny: domestic servants among women and industrial apprentices or officials among men. Those who were least socialized in making decisions for themselves, Gyáni speculates, were thus most likely to seek the ultimate extrication from their lot.  (My bold italics)

Metropolitan Identities in Fin-de-Siècle Budapest, from a review of Gabor Gyani. Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-Siecle Budapest. Translated by Thomas J. DeKornfeld. Wayne: Center for Hungarian Studies and Publications,

Google, Google what did we know before Google?  Right now, using these figures, which may or may not be accurate, there are 5.3 to 5.7 suicides per thousand of population Budapest, late 19thh to early 20th century, and this is more than Vienna.  The suicide rate in Great Britain in 2011 was 11.8 per hundred thousand.  So the Budpest figure is incredibly high - equivalent to approx fifty per hundred thousand - or five times the rate in modern day Britain.  I take it all back - suicide was certainly much more common, although my italics in the quotation above assert that it was manly amongts servants, apprentices and officials, rather than the rich and famous. 

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 9

Writing this blog is subtly altering my process of reading.  Where I might have put the book down and left it to read something else for a while, I am reading everyday. And when I do read I try to read a chunk that will facilitate some kind of rounded writing for the blog.  The fact of writing about the reading makes me read more critically and more constructively  stops me rushing though too much too quickly. I read a short chapter last night - Zionstrasse - and am starting to read with a little bit of envy as well as interest   How convenient to be the scion of such a hugely wealthy and influential family, and inherit not only money, but art.  No wonder he has the time to wander about Paris and Vienna, no wonder he was able to be a potter. However these thoughts, while they flit through my mind at odd times ( a cliched description seems apt for a cliched resentment) are just dismissible trash.  It is possible to spend one's entire life enviously looking at others who have more, and slightly more satisfyingly looking at those who have a little less, and then guiltily at those who virtually nothing.  Of course we know this isn't they way to live any life, but it i surprising how much time my thoughts run up and down this little comparative continuum  comparing him or her with me, him with her and him. Comparisons, comparisons, fitting ourselves into the world.

The end result is that we tend to gravitate to those who are on a similar rung - or at least one of the same ladders. Partly by accident of place - if you can afford to live in this area, you'll have neighbors of a certain ilk.  Partly by job and progress - you mix with your work peers perhaps. Partly by birth and where you came from.  But somehow it seems to work that you choose to stay in contact with the people who you perceive to be at a similar level.  Nothing new or exciting about that. Exactly.  I probably have a bigger span of acquaintance than most, and it's sometimes its as uncomfortable spending time with someone who is hopelessly less well off than you as it is someone who is hopelessly richer or more successful. The singular thing that saves all this from a kind of same old same determinism is that sometimes you just connect with someone across all these gaps, and it works. Or it doesn't, because that spark isn't there.  And then there are the "same level" people as you who you keep in touch with out of comfort and habit ( as well as the ones with the spark).

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Days 7 & 8

Irritatingly I had very little time to read yesterday, and still less time to blog. meal out in the evening, went to see Cloud Atlas, which was very (over) long, so I didn't write yesterday and missed out on one day. This is two days combined, so I'll start with an indulgent rant. The BBC headline today is "Britons among ballon dead", as a hot air balloon has crashed in Egypt. What do we learn from this?  That the BBC believes its audience, above all else, is concerned with British deaths only, and these only if they have occurred in slightly bizarre or holiday situations.  It's another riff on the terrible dangers of going abroad, of not staying safely at home.

The Hare with Amber Eye author is walking around the Ringstrasse, marveling at the opulence and the architecture, mulling over the swelling Jewish population, (1863, 8000 to 145,000 by 1899), cognizant from his researches that Hitler painted all the buildings when he was a painting and architecture student. (The Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire gave civic equality to the Jews in 1867, many fled pogroms in other countries.).  But the undercurrents of antisemitism are still strong.  The flats hide behind the ornate facades, the richer Jews 'disappear' behind assimilation, says the author, of the feeling of the time. 

Then I come across this in a short story I was reading ( Uncertainty, by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), which is a timeshift story about the attempts of a group in the future to turn aside the use of nuclear weapons by either assassinating or saving Heisenberg (vis Heisenberg  and Bohr's strong friendship, working together before Fascism   the protagonists in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen that attempts to dramatise their meeting).  The question is whether Heisenberg deliberately hindered or helped the Nazi bomb research.  But in the time conundrum story our protagonist meets another time meddler who comes from the other side, a Nazi sympathiser   And this was the part that struck me with its relevance to Austria, now, everywhere, every time.  Our heroine is simply incredulous that someone of her time could actually believe and espouse Nazy ideology. How can it happen? I feel the same - maybe in the ignorance of years gone by, but now, with access to all the knowledge and history we have how are people Nazis, fundamentalists, Jehovah's witnesses - I realise now that the list could go on and on.  People believe what they feel like believing, and often that isn't very nice. The banal understatement of the century. Britons among the balloon dead, jesus fucking wept, that is the level we're at in our main news channel, what hope is there?

The Hare with Amber Eyes Day 5

Quick obsessive entry to keep my blog up to one post every day. Away visint a friend this weekend, without access to a computer, and really can't be arsed to type in any more than web addresses on a Nexus.. need a detachable keyboard for that.  Read the last entry in the Paris log, before Charles Ephrussi packs up all his netsuke(s) and gives it as a wedding present to a relation (Japonaise was getting so passe).  the sinister undertone in this chapter was antisemitism again - specifically the Dreyfuss affair.  I'd always known about it, about Zola's j'accuse, but I didn't realise how intent the establishment was on arresting Zola after his banishment, and how widespread the antisemitism  was. I wonder how it was for ordinary people, Jewish or not.  Was it like the anti-Muslim sentiment here, now?  Can you compare them - because of course there is an antagonism between fundamentalist Muslim states and the West, whereas the Jews were victimised simply for being Jewish - and rich - though that didn't stop antisemitism  against poor Jews either, which seems to me to point out the nastiness of any prejudice.  There's no real logic to it.

On the internet, on Facebook ffs, I've sen a post of a scan of typewritten note (yes, typewritten) saying that asylum seekers get £x which, it maintains, is double what our pensioners get.  It is of course a pure scan, it's untrue - but people believe it.   I suspect it is propagated as a scan so that it is more difficult just to search for the actual phrases, and find out that it is a scam. Nasty stuff.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 4

I didn't read much yesterday, but the theme of the super-rich art salon continues. Charles was Jewish, so the insidious creep of antisemitism makes itself known in Renoirs complaints that Charles has hung Gustave Moreau near his own paintings. Renoir says of Moreau, it's "Jew Art".  On the internet today I have a look at Gustav's Galatee and it reminds me of sixties album covers - in fact very specifically,  King Crimson covers, and in especial the cover to In the Wake of Poseidon. Further "research" (research is just a euphemism for Wikipedia), shows that Gustave Moreau was regarded as a Symbolist painter and one of the precursors of Surrealism, so I don't think I'm that far off the mark.

It's a strange mix, high finance and art, although Charles doesn't do much of the finance, he is just a recipient of the family's huge wealth.  The antisemitism also manifest itself in financial scandals that are blamed on the Jewish banking families. The market crashes also demonstrate that perfidious banking and the making of money from money were uneasy and very fallible things even in the 1880s, with scapegoats always being sought.  But I don't think we have that association of blame with racial groups, at least not overtly anymore. 

It's good reading about this other world, and having the internet to hand to look up the pictures - but that does then beg the question of looking at the pictures for real. It seems easy to accept the digital image as the real thing, but it isn't.  I remember seeing Paul Klee's golden fish in a Hamburg art gallery, having only ever seen reproductions before, and being amazed by the tiny size of the painting, and the reflective shiny quality of the gold paint that he used.  This is one of the things that Edmund De Waal muses on - what it would be like to see all these Moreaus and Monets and Degas and Renoirs crammed into a little room with a vitrine full of netsuke.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 3

There's a fantastic passage  in a letter from Jules Lafourg, who is an artist helping Charles Ephrussi by indexing his book on Durer, where he says how much he loves working in Charles room - and then follows this explosion of description of the paintings (Pissaro, Manet, Degas, Renoir - you get the picture). It  gave me an imaginative insight into what Charles and his ilk were trying to do. All these art objects are there to be looked at, that's so startlingly obvious - the reason for restating it is because there is so much intensity in the collecting,  the planning and the looking.  We have so many distractions, ways of filling our lives with music, TV - films and programmes, radio, all on tap, available immediately.  They were creating this kind of rich experiential environment purely with paintings,  objects, drapes, carpets.  Imagine an evening at Charles Ephrussi's house, when there isn't a salon to go to , it's an evening in.  What do you do? You watch paintings, read books, fondle netsuke.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 2

In the 1880s in France boxes, no ship loads,  of (very) artistic tat (bibilots) were arriving in France, and the author's great grandfather, Charles Ephrussi   was up there collecting with the best of them, in this world of japonaise , salons, affairs and of course, Japanese porn (shunga -mainly sexually explicit prints, sometimes with fantastical creatures - he says that octopuses were often featured for their "sinuosity", by which I think he actually means having arms for every orifice at once ).

I begin to want to see some of the pictures he's talking about (and no, not just the porn, though that is worth a look, just type shunga into Google, but not perhaps at work. Shunga + octopus is weird - it's got a whole Wikipedia entry to itself). So there is this sumptuous picture of Manet's wife in Japanese costume, he wasn't just all muddy light and lilies then.  I should say that I'm reading with a little Nexus 7 beside me, the poor man's iPad, so I can look up things whenever I want without that heavy shift of the body from reading chair / bed to desk and computer.

There's this real sense of the voluptuousness of fin-de-siecle Paris - the tapestries and hangings, the collections of gold laquered Japanese boxes, the salons. All of it dripping with money.