Category Archives: Photo Essay

Swindon, lovely Swindon in the wintertime

December 9, 2015 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

A niece was married over the weekend…not last weekend, the weekend before. We took our happily unmarried selves to the wedding, danced all night, drank an immense amount of wine, had the best wedding meal in the history of weddings, ate all three of the chocolate deserts, and met the glitterati of Cirencester’s Venn diagram where art students and gamers intersect. I enjoyed it immensely.

I love the countryside in fall and winter, bare branches against the sky…and what skies. Colours unknown in summer, banks of dark cloud and opalescent light.

Also hell of cold and rather unpleasant to walk in, I confess. The wind was up, and we didn’t last long out there. The great wood remained unexplored, which no great wood ever should.

Still, we had a surprise, and such a pleasant one. A garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll, something of a heroine of mine. It’s winter, and yet still quite beautiful and full of fragrant things:

I’m not sure quite who at the Stanton House still loves it…an old manor house with its village immediately next door. It’s a curious place, Japanese owned and catering to the Honda manufacturing plant nearby, and also to people like us. This is the house from a distance, now a hotel, the gardens to the left:

The view inside our room — I saw pictures of simple white walls and furniture, but we didn’t get one of those as you can see:

A walk around the pond is complete with broken arches and its forgotten kingdom closed for refurbishment

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Dérives, Photo Essay, Walking

Everyday Bristol, Totterdown Way

February 9, 2015 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

I was thinking of how I often save my camera for what I feel are special or spectacular things, and don’t take it along on wanders along back streets or through the neighborhoods. Especially on Sundays, when we just need to get out of the house and have nowhere special to go and don’t care to face the same old hill to get central. But these residential streets, of course, are as important to how we live in and think about the city as anything else, and it’s funny here how much the feel of them changes from street to street.

Here is today’s walk. It made me realise I still couldn’t face pictures of many of the houses and streets, if they were too grim, boring, sad. Perhaps a challenge for future Sundays. To find their hidden beauty or uncover just exactly what is wrong with them.

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Films, Photo Essay

Apacheland

January 22, 2015 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

`My last set of pictures and post from Arizona…just a few days wandering yields so much. After reading Orientalism I know when writing about an old movie set I should do something more thoughtful about Westerns and representation and how I sit in relationship to the myths of the West and its occupants. But this won’t really be it, just a quick beginning.

In my youth I refused to watch most Westerns at all, especially after the first time I realised a white dude had actually painted himself brown and was pretending to be an Indian. That was a moment of pure WTF. I sided with the Indians and Mexicans and I knew in advance they always lost. I hated that male violence was always so stupidly extreme and defined everything, as women fluttered around them like anachronistically clean and well-fed butterflies. We did, I confess, watch a lot of Bonanza, but I thought John Wayne was an asshole and wanted no part of anything that made him look like a hero.

I still think John Wayne is an asshole. That’s why I now like The Searchers so much.

Now that I have left the desert, I yearn to catch site of it in the multitude of films shot in the very same hills to the SW of Tucson where I grew up. Along familiar trails even. But there are more reasons than that to like James Stewart in Winchester ’73.

Tucson never appears at all in the TV show Maverick, but James Garner cheers me up just to look at him. Nichols may be even better, I’m just sad that the Rockford Files aren’t filmed in Tucson too. L.A. is overrepresented.

I’ll stop listing the Westerns worth watching because I will leave things out (like Lee Marvin! Cat Ballou!) But what is fascinating is the way that the the manufacturing of the Western myth in movies left a trail all across the South West in the form of movie sets and theme parks that sit oddly with the detritus of mining and cattle ranching that actually marks the passing of the old west.

The name itself is after the Apache trail, or Apache Junction perhaps. All of them together just serve as another expression of how white people have no shame at all at appropriating the names and cultures of those they have massacred and forced to leave the area entirely. And then made money making moving pictures about a rewritten version of that history.

This makes the use of the word ‘innocent’ in its own description a bit dubious:

Apacheland 1956-1959

From its innocent inception of a theme park and western movie studio in 1956 to its founding in 1959 as “The Western Movie Capital of the World,” this is the first chapter in a 55 year history of Apacheland Movie Ranch that covers Richard Boone, Ronald Reagan, Elvis Presley, John Wayne and Henry Fonda to name a few. Apacheland Days at its finest.

This was always meant to be a tourist destination, a show:

Sadly most of it burned down, so its relics have been picked up and moved to the Superstion Mountain Musuem:

Despite all of this, I get a little thrill knowing that these buildings have been the backdrop for the work of some of my favourite people:

I will include Elvis in that, here is the chapel from Charro!:

It is, of course, dedicated to Elvis. Vegas, eat your heart out.

It also contains some pictures of what Apacheland once looked like:

And then because this is indeed a mixture of the real and the unreal, they of course have my favourite exhibit in all western museums — the obligatory board of barbed wire:

Outside, and again outside of Hollywood all together, is this wonderful collection of old mining machinery, like the Cossack Stamp Mill, dragged here with love from Bland, NM and now being restored to working condition.

An old water drill:

And amazing bits of machinery rusting:

Perhaps the most memorable exhibit is inside:

But to return to Hollywood, here is the monument to the wonderful Tom Mix, who died here in a car accident — much further down the highway, but it seemed to fit here:

And a monument to the leisure activities of many a good resident of Arizona. I miss it.

Apacheland Filmography

1956 Gunfight at the OK Corral – Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas

1960 Apache Trail Documentary – Documentary of Superstition Wilderness

1960 Have Gun, Will Travel – Richard Boone

1961 Bonanza – Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, Dan Blocker

1961 Stagecoach West – Wayne Rogers, Robert Bray

1961 The Purple Hills – Gene Nelson, Kent Taylor

1961 The Broken Land – Jack Nicholson, Kent Taylor

1962 Showdown at Redrock – Frank Wilcox, Leland Wainscott

1964 Blood on the Arrow – Dale Robertson, Martha Hyer

1964 Arizona Raiders – Audie Murphy, Michael Dante

1965 Death Valley Days – Ronald Reagan

1965 General Motors – Lorne Greene

1966 Death Valley Days – Robert Taylor

1967 Ice Capades in the Desert – Carolyn O’Kelly, John Labrecque

1967 Pepsi’s ‘Girl on the Go’ – Corinne Calvet

1967 Dundee and the Culhane – Warren Oates, John Drew Barrymore

1967 Death Valley Days – Robert Taylor

1968 Hang Fire – Jerry Vance, Lindsay Crosby

1968 Charro! – Elvis Presley, Ina Balin

1968 Will Rogers Institute – John Wayne

1968 Death Valley Days – Robert Taylor

1969 Ballad of Cable Hogue – Jason Robards, Stella Stevens

1969 A Time for Dying – Audie Murphy, Richard Lapp

1971 Second Chance – Brian Keith, Rosie Grier

1972 Guns of a Stranger – Marty Robbins, Chill Wills

1976 The Haunted – Aldo Ray, Virginia Mayo

1977 Sweet Savage – Aldo Ray, Charles Samples

1977 Jacob and Jacob – Alan Hale, Jake Jacobs

1978 Blue Jay Summer – Ken McConnell, Teresa Jones

1983 The Gambler: The Adventure Continues – Kenny Rogers, Linda Evans

1994 Blind Justice – Armande Assante, Jack Black

1994 Playboy Goes West – Royce O’Donnell, Ed Birmingham, Hank Sheffer

1995 Ford Motor Company – Waylon Jennings

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Photo Essay, Pillars of Capitalism

Protection Through Power: Titan Missile Museum

January 17, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

Able to launch from its underground silo in just 58 seconds, the Titan II was capable of delivering a 9-megaton nuclear warhead to targets more than 6300 miles (10,000 km) away in about 30 minutes. For more than two decades, 54 Titan II missile complexes across the United States stood “on alert” 24 hours a day, seven days a week, heightening the threat of nuclear war or preventing Armageddon, depending upon your point of view.
— Titan Missile Museum website

If you had any doubt about the masculine nature of this power, and this strategy….

Titan II’s primary mission was deterrence. Deterrence is the art of creating in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack, preventing the start of the war.
— Sign posted at site

The video we watched was entirely cold war, full of ‘the enemy’ this and ‘the enemy’ that. It left me with a visceral hurt. A fear for our future. A quaking at this kind of madness because I can only see people’s faces, imagine their lives and loves and dreams, I cannot imagine an enemy. I was suddenly grateful to Stanislaw Lem, who pushes this thinking as far as it can go to serve as a warning too bitter for real satire (I had just read Peace on Earth, which chimed word for word with the rhetoric here).

It has a terrible logic to it, one you can feel and understand. Yet a logic that at no point meets with or shares anything with the logic by which I live my own life. My own logic that is continuously at risk due to theirs.

Not only did we create a missile capable of destroying this world as we know it, the propulsion system was driven by a mixture of two deadly chemicals, in themselves destructive of our earth.

Inside it is full of old technology, boxes of unknown lights:

The gear I associate with dreams and hopes of space travel, rather than mass destruction, making them eerie in this place:

Technologies to maintain a constant temperature for the sake of the chemicals, to protect the missile so it can be sent even after our own destruction at the hands of the Russian has been assured, to protect the people who must send it:

Everything on springs so the ground rocked by impact of their nuclear missiles, the release of our own nuclear missiles … nothing can be felt, and nothing but a direct hit can destroy this place.

The control room with its fascinating banks of ancient computers and instruments.

The control panel from which the missiles are sent to any one of three targets — no one at this site knows what these targets were. Absolved from responsibility of prior knowledge, crisis of conscience about loved ones, remembered streets, priceless treasures. The tour guide walked us through the launch sequence, the buzzers sounded, just as they would have sounded at the end of the world. Even knowing it was all for show, I can’t describe the feeling this left me with. The way my heart stopped its beating a moment. The sadness.

And the missile itself, the first glimpse with a reminder that no one can ever be alone in this place:

The blunt face of extraordinary violence, terror, death.

The relationship to space exploration technology is so clear I wonder that I ever felt them disentangled, that I ever could have possibly imagined a benign program to explore the stars. The components below evoke SF memories to me, I love metal. You could forget they were designed to kill every human being within 900 square miles of an air blast — because we could chose whether it detonated on impact or at altitude.

You are allowed to see everything, take pictures of everything, ask any question. Because technology has advanced so much we now have far deadlier weapons deployed in very different ways. Probably in many more places. We still stand on the brink of destruction.

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Environment & Justice, Photo Essay, The Wilds

Apaches, Trails, Flats and Dam(n)s

January 11, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 2 Comments

From Apache Junction we headed east, out to Tortilla Flat. An old camp ground for prospectors, stagecoach stop, camp for the workers carving out the road and long-time tourist destination. Population 6.

Canyon Lake:

The makers of the road, from the Tortilla Flat Museum:

Construction of the road began in 1903. Crews worked at both ends building towards each other. Nearly 400 Pima and Apache men worked on the road and later the dam.

Severe thunderstorms washed out sections of the road from time to time causing setbacks. However the crews prevailed, surmounting some of the most difficult construction challenges known up to that time.

Apaches were to do the roughest work on the road to the dam. And article read: ‘Where water is 4 miles distant and white men won’t labor, Indians will work for cheaper wages and will walk for the water.’

War had raged through this basin between 1871 and 1875 as General Crook fought to force the Apaches into the reservations.

After short, brutal wars with the government a Military Reserve of 900 square miles was established in 1871 to accommodate both groups. However, this Reserve was rescinded by Presidential Order in 1875 and all of the people, Yavapai and Apache alike, numbering around 1,700, were forcibly marched to the San Carlos agency east of Phoenix. By the late 1890′s the reservation system was breaking down and beginning in 1900 the survivors of the removal began drifting back to their home country in small family groups. In 1909 a postage stamp reservation was established in Camp Verde, followed by additional parcels in Middle Verde, Clarkdale and Rimrock. Today the descendants of these stalwart Yavapai and Apache people live in communities totaling about 600 acres.
— Intertribal Council of Arizona, Inc.

This explains the shift from warriors to exploited workers, part of the economics of oppression and broken treaties.

After Tortilla Flat, State Route 88 shortly turns to dirt (a surprise, that, I didn’t do my homework and didn’t realise any state routes were still dirt). It is well graded, but very narrow in places as it winds through a spectacular canyon wilderness. I was pretty glad to get to the bottom, I think my passenger was even happier. I honored the men who built it. Definitely drive it from Apache Junction to Roosevelt Dam so you get to the hug the inside of those hairpin curves and watch the views opening out beneath you.

Apache Lake:

You can get a better sense of the road looking back at it winding over the hills:

Roosevelt Dam:

Made entirely of mortared blocks of stone and brick, Roosevelt Dam created what was in 1911 the world’s largest artificial lake – Roosevelt Lake with a million-acre-foot capacity, a depth of up to 190 feet and 89 miles of shoreline. Wrestling the 344,000 cubic yards of masonry into place in the remote, flood-prone canyon proved unexpectedly dangerous. During construction, which relied on an innovative 1,200-foot-long cable line with iron scoops that could hold 10 tons of rock and mortar, 42 men died.
—Arizona Scenic Roads

The spectacular Route 188 bridge:

I love bridges.

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Photo Essay

Picacho Peak, Rinches and the Civil War

January 5, 2015 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

This is one of the places I have always driven past, never actually been too, yet has always been a marker so eagerly looked for. The distinctive peak can be seen heading both ways on the I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, but my favourite sights of it have always been when it’s telling us we’re almost home.

It was cool to see it from the desert instead, across the biggest saguaro ocean I have seen:

I never realised how this same peak had marked space for so many others through the past centuries…must have been so much more important through past centuries. Imagine the relief traveling cross-country when it finally came into view and you knew you were on the right trail through these thousands of miles of desert.

This lovely little resume is from Arizona State Parks: The Beginning by Charles B. Eatherly:

The unique shape of the 1,500-foot Picacho Peak has been used as a landmark by travelers since prehistoric times. One of the first recordings was in the 1700’s by the Anza Expedition as it passed through the area.

In 1848, the Mormon Battalion constructed a wagon road through Picacho Pass. The forty-niners on their way to California used this road. In the late 1850’s the Butterfield Overland Stage was carrying passengers through this area. Picacho Peak’s most noted historic event occurred on April 15, 1862, when Confederate and Union scouting parties met in the Battle of Picacho Pass during the Civil War. This was the largest Civil War clash to take place in Arizona.

I never knew there was a Civil War battle fought here. The Arizona Rangers were on the side of the Confederacy I believe, given the flag flying above the monument they raised.

A good reminder of history and the role the frontier areas played in the racial oppressions of slavery…and apparently proud of it. Of course in old corridos, Rangers are los rinches, and always bad guys. They were part of the anglo land grab, enforcing the transfer of claims from Mexicans and Native Americans, and rinches were used to break up the cowboy strike of 1883. It’s hardly surprising they’d chose the side they did.

Here’s more on the Confederate Rangers and the godforsaken idea of the ‘ocean-to-ocean’ Confederacy:

In February 1862, a band of Confederate Rangers under Capt. Sherod Hunter raised the Stars and Bars of Tucson, Arizona, part of an effort to create an ocean-to-ocean Confederacy. In order to thwart this move, a Union “Column from California” under Col. James H. Carleton set out across the lonely desert toward Tucson. On April 15, Union cavalry under Lt. James Barrett met with Confederate Rangers near Picacho Peak, a rocky spire 50 miles northwest of Tucson. Barrett was killed almost immediately and fierce combat continued for more than an hour before the Federals retreated. Although the Rangers’ victory at Picacho Pass delayed the Union force, the following month Carleton’s Californian’s eventually took Tucson without firing a shot.

They do a reenactment now every year I am told. Luckily we missed that.

We got in just at sunset — a bad time of day to capture the massive face of Picacho Peak itself sitting in deep shadow, but very beautiful climbing up and looking out over the desert:

Picacho Peak remains in my memory for one other reason, as the first place I ever saw a porn magazine. They were just sitting stacked up on a shelf at the perfect kid eye level in the little store there we’d stopped at to get water or something once. It was a funny little fake-tudor place that is now just a heap of beams and rubble though the sign is still there (you can see it on the far right, I didn’t manage a shot of the ruin). The tradition of smut continues however:
The Ostrich Ranch has been a fixture for years as well (1999). I love that it’s the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch — don’t know how happy John Wayne would have been of course…

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Dérives, Photo Essay, Walking

Gissing’s Camberwell

December 21, 2014 Andrea Gibbons 2 Comments

Having just read In the Year of the Jubilee (there is some repetition here between posts, apologies), I thought it might be fun to wander over from Brixton to Camberwell and to see just how much was as Gissing described, how much had changed. Brixton these days smells much more of fried chicken or curry than fried onions — for someone like myself who gave up the fried chicken I love to avoid industrially raised chickens, rancid oil and a growing waistline, this is fairly tortuous it must be said. I don’t know where Beatrice lived when she moved off on her own, sadly for me, but I do love Coldharbour Lane, and I think it still has much the same feel of picturesque, somewhat industrial decay as it long ago did due to absentee landlords (now cashing in of course):

Before his admission to a partnership in Mr. Lord’s business, Samuel Barmby lived with his father and two sisters in Coldharbour Lane. Their house was small, old and crumbling for lack of repair; the landlord, his ground-lease having but a year or two to run, looked on with equanimity whilst the building decayed.

(you can tell I need a new lens as this falls out of focus sometimes, but that will have to wait until the long-awaited day when this PhD pulls me a job instead of poverty)

Arriving in Camberwell I am always happy to see this:

and then we arrived at this particular corner, which is worth a smile:

And finally back to Gissing, as we came to De Crespigny Park, one side of which is still full of homes ‘unattached, double-fronted, with half sunk basement and a flight of steps to the stucco pillars at the entrance’. I also now have proof that those regularly-seen tall arched spaces that are almost always bricked up were actually once windows.

Gissing writes:

De Crespigny Park, a thoroughfare connecting Grove Lane, Camberwell, with Denmark Hill, presents a double row of similar dwellings; its clean breadth, with foliage of trees and shrubs in front gardens, makes it pleasant to the eye that finds pleasure in suburban London. In point of respectability, it has claims only to be appreciated by the ambitious middle-class of Camberwell. Each house seems to remind its neighbour, with all the complacence expressible in buff brick, that in this locality lodgings are not to let (loc 56).

But now the south side is part of the massive complex making up King’s hospital — and some buildings to the north as well, breaking up the solidly respectable line of homes that once stood there. This lead to Grove Lane, where Nancy lives and of which Gissing says:

Grove Lane is a long acclivity, which starts from Camberwell suburban dwellings. The houses vary considerably in size and Green, and, after passing a few mean shops, becomes a road of aspect, also in date,–with the result of a certain picturesqueness, enhanced by the growth of fine trees on either side. Architectural grace can nowhere be discovered, but the contract-builder of today has not yet been permitted to work his will; age and irregularity, even though the edifices be but so many illustrations of the ungainly, the insipid, and the frankly hideous, have a pleasanter effect than that of new streets built to one pattern by the mile. There are small cottages overgrown with creepers, relics of Camberwell’s rusticity; rows of tall and of squat dwellings that lie behind grassy plots, railed from the road; larger houses that stand in their own gardens, hidden by walls.

It was difficult, no, impossible, to take decent pictures, I’m afraid. Some of what was there when it was described this way is, I think, gone, but it has retained that piecemeal feeling of Gissing’s Camberwell which is fairly charming.

We walked up Grove Lane to the top of Champion Hill: ‘From the top of the Lane, where Champion Hill enjoys an aristocratic seclusion, is obtainable a glimpse of open fields and of a wooded horizon southward.’

No longer I’m afraid, but it is a lovely view:

And Champion Hill remains fairly ‘aristocratic’. We started back down the Lane’s ‘more formal neighbour Camberwell Grove’, finding fairly terrible decorative statues and much larger homes. While some sections had clearly been built by a single builder here, there was still a great deal of difference — no real jerry builders were allowed up here. Perhaps the nicest thing to find on this road was council housing — Lettsome Estate for example. The dream of neighbourhoods containing people of all income levels living side by side and enjoying the amenities of beauty and elegance is one of my favourite post-war efforts to make a reality.

We followed Camberwell Grove back down to Camberwell’s centre, where we sought out the new abode of the Barmby’s:

Samuel’s good fortune enabled them to take a house in Dagmar Road, not far from Grove Lane; a new and most respectable house, with bay windows rising from the half-sunk basement to the second storey. Samuel, notwithstanding his breadth of mind, privately admitted the charm of such an address as ‘Dagmar Road,’ which looks well at the head of note-paper, and falls with sonority from the lips (loc 2596).

A nice street. Writing this I’ve realised there must be an immense respectability that comes with half-sunk basements as Gissing never leaves that out of his descriptions. Best of all to see, though, was the new vibrance and color infused into what can only be described as a once stifling middle class area (because my god the Barmby’s, horrible people):

And that was the end. It was very cold and so we did not linger. It was probably the cleaning-out-the-canal work I did a couple of days later that has bequeathed the terrible cold I am currently suffering (this one is already at two-tissue-box strength), but I might still blame it on Gissing because he’s rather a miserable bastard after all. Still, I enjoyed this walk a great deal.

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Photo Essay, Walking

Liberec

November 21, 2014 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

Almost done sharing thoughts and pictures from the Czech Republic, alllllllmost done! With a host like Sandor Klapscik from the Technical University of Liberec, we could not go wrong (he invited Mark to work with students and give this awesome lecture: It’s About Time: Cinema, Science Fiction, Source Code). Far to the North of Prague, it is also beautiful. Only 60 years ago it was German speaking rather than Czech, which I found fascinating and yearned to speak either language so I could see how they had shifted and changed, or not. Being bilingual and from the Mexico/US border I love how I think differently in each language, the words that work in one that don’t exist in the other, the crazy mixing of the two that revels in wordplay and invention. Another thing that fascinates me about Kafka and I keep meaning to find out more (writing in German while living in Prague and speaking and surrounded by Czech also). Sadly, while I tried to learn some phrases, Czech is harder even than Russian I think, and the one person I practiced my greetings on turned out to be Hungarian and spoke neither Czech nor English. Language was definitely a barrier here in a way it wasn’t in Prague, and I was torn between frustration that there wasn’t more of a lingua franca and ability to communicate, and embarrassment that I was hoping such a language should be the imperial English that I lucked out on by speaking natively.

Anyway, Liberec in the morning light:

I thought it quite beautiful, and was so disappointed their castle was closed to the public:

From Sandor’s office the view was amazing — I was rather jealous I’m afraid. These are looking down onto the Opera House and the Town Hall on a most beautiful fall day:

The building needed a little renovation outside, but I loved this — Ještěd Tower I think?

And speaking of unnecessary awesomeness, this is their staircase:

A few more views of the city:

Like Prague, the details were all beautiful and I was just as fascinated by doors and ornamentation here as there:

Sadly, they also had a terror of cherubs, this must be one of the most frightening of all, because there’s no way holding its neck at that angle hasn’t killed it — if it wasn’t always dead:

This almost made up for it:

As well as the great street art:

The awesome handbills showing counterculture alive and well (a punk band called Rosa Parks? I am so there):

One of the loveliest street art installations I’ve seen about remembrance, focusing attention on the self and the soul in ending violence and accomplishing reconciliation (and that’s us there in the mirror!):

The birds painted on all of the glass:

The wonderful pub signs — and pubs. Their dumplings were most unexpected, but delicious. I also loved how often the most unpretentious strip-mall kind of exterior always contained a warm and unique recreation of a traditional village restaurant with wood paneling, old photos and flowers. I enjoyed every meal, particularly the soup.

Liberec, in a word, was wonderful to wander around. Of course there’s also Ještěd Tower, and its beautiful countryside, and we didn’t partake of the tour of the city hall or get to any museums. We did enjoy the sunsets however, a good way to say goodbye to the city.

Until I remembered the robot that greeted us our last morning as we grabbed a coffee before catching our bus back to Prague:

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Photo Essay, Walking

Prague Walks: The Big Picture

November 20, 2014 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

So much focus on details and beautiful craftsmanship (doors! naked statues! the terror of cherubs!) along with Kafka (I’ve been reading and greatly enjoying Bohumil Hrabal and Karel Čapek, and Čapek is perhaps my favourite yet their words don’t map onto the city as much as Kafka — surprisingly). I’ve maybe missed the big picture, the feel of the streets and the city itself. So here it is. Starting with a bit of the town just outside the tourist quarter walking east, and then heading down to the river and along to reach some of the more well-known vistas:

There are these beautiful streets in Mala Strana, NE of the Charles Bridge (packed with people and thus fairly horrible and we mostly avoided it entirely):

Then you turn up through this beautiful arch, climb up towards the castle area, stare out over the city. One of my favourite things is the SF space station away in the distance (I know, I know it’s really something else):

You come down the other side, towards the street where the Čapeks lived, where together they invented the word robot (I’m sure I have mentioned that already, it was most exciting)

Their vista

One of the most beautiful turnings in the world

You continue down and cross the bridge again, we didn’t make it as far down as Vyšehrad, but there are beautiful modern buildings to be found here, This surprise glass walkway:

Gehry’s Dancing House (1996):

The wonderful Manes Gallery:

There are some really interesting contrasts between the old and the new:

Prague had some tagging going on, but wasn’t too full of street art. Still, we found this:

And this wonderful trompe l’oeil:

And then just vista after vista of the beautiful and the unexpected, the non-sanitised splendour as you wander:

So that the tourist trail packed (and I mean packed, even in November) across the Charles bridge:
Down into the main square with its extraordinary clocks (which I loved despite the hordes):

Even that square in the sunset:
was hardly the most beautiful place. I’m glad there is a centre and a focus for most tourists, I almost felt bad wandering the places many others didn’t seem to go, because I imagine Prague’s residents are even more protective of their city and their space. It is hard to imagine it as it was before the industry of travel, though on many of the more distant streets this seems possible. Still, I am so glad, feel so lucky, that I have had the opportunity to go.

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Books, Dérives, Photo Essay, Walking

Kafka: The Castle

November 18, 2014 Andrea Gibbons 3 Comments

An amazing book, and how lucky I got to read it in the Czech Republic! I had it for kindle, translated by John Williams I think, so I may have to read the alternative translations. A little fan-girl of me perhaps, but to be reading it as we explored Prague’s castle and the Kafka Museum (which I wrote about here) was brilliant really. Though also existentially terrifying, as I find all of Kafka.

The book opens with a concrete description of the castle, a clear vision of its place and structure as well as the clarity available to those living at that height, but one that becomes more and more complicated as he gets closer to it:

Now, he could see the Castle above him clearly defined in the glittering air, its outline made still more definite by the moulding of snow covering it in a thin layer. There seemed to be much less snow up there on the hill than down in the village, where K. found progress as laborious as on the main road the previous day. Here the heavy snowdrifts reached right up to the cottage windows and began again on the low roofs, but up on the hill everything soared light and free into the air, or at least so it appeared from down below.

On the whole this distant prospect of the Castle satisfied K.’s expectations. It was neither an old stronghold nor a new mansion, but a rambling pile consisting of innumerable small buildings closely packed together and of one or two storeys; if K. had not known that it was a castle he might have taken it for a little town.

This shifts into a more mundane reality of village homes, churches, streets. But always the Castle itself remains something always seen yet always out of reach, an impossible distance to cover. K. walks and walks, yet overcome by strange weariness and drifts of snow, he turns aside. Day by day the castle becomes ever more distant, unreal yet at the same time ever more powerful in its oppression of his spirit and his circumstances.

The castle is home to rarefied beings, almost supernatural in their powers over those in the village and their effect on them. Controlling K.’s fate is Klamm, yet he is as out of reach as the castle, and K.’s attempts to contact him are the stuff of daily nightmares. K. crosses boundaries and suffers the consequences — for example here, in a hidden courtyard he waits for Klamm to enter his waiting sleigh. Instead the coachman eventually leaves K. alone in the darkness, turning off the lights as Klamm cannot, will not face K. This transgression of space is unforgivable and brings with it a Pyrrhic sense of defeat in victory:

…it seemed to K. as if all contact with him had been broken off, as if he were now freer than ever, as if he could wait here in this otherwise forbidden place as long as he wished; as if he had fought for this freedom as few others could have done, as if no one could touch him or drive him away, or even speak to him, and yet at the same time — and this conviction was at least as strong–as if there were nothing more senseless, more desolate than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability (loc 1792).

Above all remains the split between Castle and village, rulers and ruled at varying degrees of distance. There is a visual refinement in the faces of those who have been there, particularly the women singled out for gentlemen’s pleasures. Government is designed to preserve and enhance this split. The landlady tells K.

‘Herr Momus is Klamm’s secretary like any of his other secretaries, but his office and, if I am not mistaken, his official duties too…’ Momus, still writing, shook his head vigorously, and the landlady corrected herself: ‘Well, only his office is confined to the village, but not his official duties. Herr Momus deals with the written work relating to the Village…That’s the way it is; all the gentlemen from the Castle have their village secretaries.’ (loc 1841)

Absolute power reflected in the weakness and uselessness of petty officials. K. only seeks to be informed of his work, his purpose. Instead he is told by letter:

To the surveyor of Bruckenhof. The surveys you have made so far meet with my approval. The work done by the assistants is also commendable… (loc 1953)

He has done no work. He has been given no direction. The assistants are mad. Sill, it is the interview with Olga, sister to the messenger Barnabas, that I found the key to it all in my own mind. I was completely surprised by what was essentially an attempted rape at the centre…a letter demanding a village girl come to a Castle gentleman, her refusal at the heart of the entire family’s destruction. K.’s involvement in it all by extension. It is an extraordinary thing I thought, to find in this bewildering maze of rural geography and bureaucracy and madness. Something so much more real than in The Trial or the Metamorphasis, just as K. is better defined and more sure of himself. Yet K.’s initial outrage changes, shifts, softens to accommodate itself to Olga’s views, the villagers’ beliefs, and it all falls back into the nightmare as Olga continues to describe their desperation and scheming. After the museum, though, I was particularly focused on the geography, and these descriptions of barriers formal and informal, physical and mental, visible and invisible are so fascinating, they almost make me want to study the geographies of bureaucracy–or paranoia:

…it gives us doubts about everything. Is it really Castle work that he is doing, we ask; he goes to the offices, certainly, but are the offices actually part of the Castle? And even if there are offices that are part of the Castle, are those the offices he is allowed into? He’s admitted into some offices, but only some of them, then there are barriers, and behind these are more offices. He’s not actually forbidden to go any further, but he can’t go any further once he’s seen his superiors and they have dealt with him and sent him away. What’s more, you’re watched all the time up there, at least that’s what we believe. And even if he did go further on, what good would it do him if he had no official business there; he would just be an intruder. And you mustn’t imagine these barriers as a hard and fast divide, Barnabas is always reminding me of that. There are also barriers in the offices he visits, so there are some barriers he goes through, and they look no different from the ones he has not yet gone through, and so it can’t be assumed that the offices behind these barriers are any different from the ones Barnabas has been in (loc 2775).

It isn’t just the geography of bureaucracy that is opaque, confused, unreadable. Barnabas works for Klamm, he thinks, yet no one can ever be sure even just of Klamm’s appearance, so at times he is not even sure of that:

…all these differences are due to magic, they are quite understandable because they depend on the present mood, the level of excitement, the countless degrees of hope or despair on the part of the observer, who is in any case only able to catch a momentary glimpse of Klamm (loc 2809).

And so we come to the greatest fear of all perhaps, the method of governance instilling the idea that if one were only stronger, more connected, wiser, everything would be all right. That it is all your own fault:

What I mean by all this is that something is there, Barnabas is being offered something, at least something, and it’s his own fault if all he can get out of it is doubt, fear and hopelessness (loc 2923).

And all of it an exercise in collective (mis)understanding, world building:

Olga’s story was revealing such a vast, almost unbelievable world to him that he could not resist intruding on it with his own little adventure, in order to convince himself of the existence of her world as well as that of his own experience (loc 3402).

I loved most of all that amazing nighttime meeting in the bureaucrat’s hotel wing, which is itself an incredible description of physical space that is as much mental space, constricting, suffocating, claustrophobic:

Here everything was small but elegantly constructed, and space was used to the best advantage. The corridor was just high enough for them to walk upright. Along the sides was a series of doors almost next to each other. The side walls did not reach right up to the ceiling, no doubt to provide ventilation, for the tiny rooms along this deep cellar-like corridor probably had no windows. The disadvantage of these walls that were open at the top was that the noise in the corridor must have been heard in the rooms too (loc 3790).

Everything is concealed, bewildering, yet at the same time there can be no privacy:

The servant climbed onto K.’s shoulders and looked over the gap above the wall into the room. ‘He’s lying on his bed’ (loc 3803)

K. is betrayed by his own weakness, his own tiredness, he cannot take advantage of the interviews he obtains. And then follows the most brilliant of all scenes: the men pushing the carts, distributing folders, the opening and slamming of doors, whispered negotiations, hands emerging from rooms, peeping through cracks and recriminations. K.’s very presence throwing everything into complete chaos as no one can bear to let themselves be seen, much less spoken to.

It ends in mid sentence — I didn’t know that when I started, so it was an almost vertiginous ending. Kafka couldn’t find his way to the ending, I know the feeling, and I’m not sure it could have ended. I found the beginning quite terrifying in its way, but that steadily dropped off, you can feel the tension unwinding somehow, even as it gets more interesting in other ways.

There is so much more here — as always — but being in Prague and reading this, I am thinking most about Kafka and space and remember I found this in the museum:

…Kafka carries out a more difficult operation: he turns Prague into an imaginary topography which transcends the fallacy of realism. Kafka’s phantasmal architecture has other ends. Rather than a particular house, school, office, church, prison or castle being important, it is what these constructions reveal when they act as topological metaphors or allegorical places. What surprises does this transfigured Prague hold in store? Just how far can the metamorphosis of a city take us?

I think they do act as metaphors and allegorical places…in some ways I think they are also ways of imagining the barriers and impassible places in our own minds and actions. But the castle of Prague itself makes some concrete sense of this as well perhaps, the relationship between writer and city a dialectical one. Prague’s castle is no one large building surrounded by defensible stone walls that I would imagine from living in England or Scotland. We looked for it and I’m not sure when we actually found it, entered it, reached the castle. You go through this splendid arch just off the Charles bridge

And you wander up and always up past a whole lot of Baroque magnificence, becoming more magnificent the higher up the hill you get. You go up a whole lot of steps and suddenly you are there, and walking through stately home sort of buildings to get to the splendidly gothic St Vitus’s Cathedral, which is surrounded by this labyrinthine pomp and what seems like administrative space. Maybe. But there is palace after palace up there, making sense of homes for the many named and revered Castle gentlemen. It is not until you are walking along part of the backside that you really get a sense that this is in any way the defensible space I associate with the word Castle — or was once:

and there the contrasts are more striking:

There are some fake turreted kind of battlements at the top awash with tourists, but there you can also get a real feel of just how high above, how far removed this castle complex is from the rest of Prague:

We went back down and I found more remnants of ‘castle’ the way that word sits in my imagination:

But really, despite the wonderful drain covers, to me here was no sense of any one place you could call a castle

Instead it seemed a collection of powers, a complicated administrative centre…and of course, for much of its history, an empty shell, a representation, with the real power always residing with the Hapsburg empire far away. A Kafkaesque castle in more than one respect. Also a beautiful place:

Of course, there are other candidates for the inspiration for The Castle, but Kafka grew up beneath this one, and being here made the book a little less dreamlike and removed from reality — just a little less.

I searched for images of The Castle to see how others had imagined it — conventionally I am afraid, the bookcovers imagine it most conventionally. But I also found this, the most startling, built by architect Ricardo Bofill outside of Barcelona. A modern day construction for your viewing pleasure:

Apacheland 1956-1959

Just communities. Just cities. Just connections between country and city. Also, the weird and wonderful.