Lost in Translation

 

Life under “Lockdown” – A London Diary #6

 

Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Especially this year. It’s been the strangest of years for all of us. Normal life has been derailed or re-routed so comprehensively that none of us seem to have any idea where we are heading anymore. Earlier in the year I decided to write a post here on Waymarks with some personal reflections during the first ‘lockdown’ – inspired mainly by having taken part in this year’s Mass Observation project. It seemed like an unprecedented moment – at least, unprecedented in my lifetime at any rate. I did so because I thought such thoughts would be interesting to look back upon one day, hopefully many years hence, when all of this – our on-going predicament – will be a dim and distant memory. A kind of diary, personal thoughts written at the time, of an unforeseen national and global disaster.

 

In Britain the uncertainty has perhaps only been compounded by the additional (and unendingly circular) uncertainties of the on-going Brexit negotiations. Like many people, the predominant emotions I have felt this year have been: disbelief, confusion, powerlessness, despair, frustration, incredulousness, hilarity, cynicism (on a repeating loop cycle). In short, it has been a rollercoaster ride which has felt mostly sickening and not at all exhilarating. It’s also been a rollercoaster ride which never seems to end. Just as we get to a slower, less bumpy section of the track it suddenly starts to climb steeply or plunge once again at a perilously precipitous rate. I want to get off. We all want to get off. We’ve had enough. But no. We are powerless. And now Christmas has been cancelled. We’re stuck in a perpetual state of ‘lockdown’, though the ever-changing and hence unfathomable rules which apply seem geographically nonsensical. Europe and many parts of the world have closed their borders with us. We’re going to run out of food, hence panic buying apparently is (and isn’t) back, and the value of the pound is going to leap off a cliff on January 1^st, and yet there’s nothing that can be done about it. As I said, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 

Humour is a very British way of dealing with trauma, crisis, despair, etc. But it is a cultural trait which doesn’t always translate very well, even to ourselves at times. We currently have a Prime Minister who has built himself a professional-persona which is based entirely upon a very particular kind of English humour: the loveable eccentric, the daft buffoon, the over-grown school boy, a Billy Bunter-esque type of charm. But when things get tough his demeanour and his antics simply baffle everyone. Some problems and difficulties can’t be laughed off. Perhaps rather paradoxically, we’ve been told he idolises Winston Churchill, and so he sees himself as some sort of Churchillian statesman-like successor. I’ve certainly seen many people saying in all seriousness that, in this country’s present hour of need, as with Churchill before him, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man!” I’ve laughed at this – not because I think it’s funny – but because hilarity is often the best and most natural response to incredulity. I don’t envy the Prime Minister his current lot. He undoubtedly has a difficult job on his hands. But part of those difficulties, arguably, were of his own making (Brexit), while the other half (the pandemic) very definitely wasn’t, at least at its start. The Government may well have handled all of it in a manner which is either: valiant/incompetent, or well-meaning/self-serving, doing the best they can/making it up as they go along, informed by experts/guided by cronyism, etc., etc. The list of perspectives goes on and you can choose your side for any number of personal reasons or motives, deriving your ‘facts’ from whichever source you feel most comfortable accepting as true. But none of it seems to change the status quo. And at present I can’t see how anything can possibly change for the better.

 

I’m now finding it hard to laugh even incredulously. Instead, I have found myself beginning to review how I have framed my own outlook, not just over the course of this year, but over the course of my entire lifetime. I have grown up with (what I’ve always assumed to be) a healthy sense of scepticism, a distrust of Government (both Right and Left), and a wariness of bias in the Press and mainstream Media. But this year I have felt like whatever anchors I have hitherto relied upon have been ripped from the seabed and I am now wholly adrift. I’ve become so cynical that my cynicism has revolved full circle and I’m now cynical of my own cynicism, or to put it slightly less tautologously – I no longer like my own thoughts, or feel at ease with my own way of thinking. And this is because I am now so confused that I no longer know what to think, who to trust, what to believe, who to listen to, or what to feel … I just want it all to stop. It’s not that I’ve had enough, it’s more that I no longer know how to respond. I feel like an inflatable punch-bag whose slow puncture has reached equilibrium. The air pressure inside and outside has equalised, and I am now just a flaccid bag half-filled with a lingering stale second-hand sort of air. I am a broken sparring-device which is being kicked and punched back and forth, bouncing off all sides of the boxing ring. I am spent.

 

So, what is to be done? – “Keep calm and carry on!” – those motivational posters from WW2, which have had a resurgence in popularity in recent years (I’ve lost count of how many times I have seen them pinned up on the walls of shops, workplaces, homes, Facebook pages, etc.), their ubiquity has now seemingly long since lost its knowingly ‘self-aware’ sense of irony. I never liked its reappropriation in the first place. Archly nostalgic. I only ever found it half-funny at best, but I understood the intentions behind it because I’m British and I ‘get’ the intrinsic cultural nuances it seeks to convey on multiple levels. But reflecting on this phenomenon in other contexts has set me thinking along broader avenues of themes concerning cultural appropriation, re-appropriation, reinterpretation, assumptions, sensitivities, reclamation, etc., and above all humour and how it translates, and, perhaps more importantly, how it does not translate.

 

Last month I was asked to contribute my perspective upon race to an initiative titled the Engaging Race Project, which is being led by Dr Amy Matthewson, SOAS, University of London (see here). Various individuals of widely different backgrounds have and are continuing to contribute their own personal thoughts and experiences of how ‘race’ has affected them and shaped their lives. It makes for a fascinating poly-vocal examination of issues which are pertinent to all, but uniquely diverse according to each individual’s personal take or experience of it. Reflecting upon such things shows us that individual responses complicate our ideas of right and wrong. It is not always easy to determine binary conclusions. Morally and ethically, we need to engage more with multiple perspectives in order to find our common ground. And this fact could not be more starkly apparent in these deeply polarised and polarising times. Particularly in our responses to issues which are bigger than us as individuals, such as the current pandemic, Brexit, climate change, the struggle for equality, the widening social divide created by wealth vs. poverty, etc.

 

These may seem or feel like unprecedented times, but I think that’s not true. We oscillate on a social spectrum wherever our society sits on a globalised scale. There’s a lot of talk about how political populism is skewing or skewering our democracies, polarising us into seemingly irreconcilable, opposing camps. Albert Camus, George Orwell, and even Michel Foucault are all quoted, and/or mis-quoted, amidst increasingly partisan screams of this or that being ‘fake news’, ‘conspiracy theories’, ‘truth or reality denying’ tropes all devised to suit personal means and ends. We are living in the age of “me and mine”, “I’m alright jack, you get off of my back”, it’s every man, woman and child for themselves, and to hell with the rest of you! – What has happened to that noble idea of “strength through diversity”, “many hands make light work”, many minds working together, seeing through several eyes to broaden our outlook and better inform our views?

 

Such notions, sadly, seem too noble for these times. It feels almost as though we deliberately want to misunderstand each other in order to bolster ourselves and our own sense that we are right and all others are wrong. We’ve atomised ourselves. But I don’t think this is anything new – vide the writings of Orwell and Camus. ‘Twas ever thus, it seems. But I think it’s an awareness of how we might be being manipulated which is the hardest thing to grasp these days, and this is where I come back to humour – which I fear is often culturally the most impossible thing to translate of all.

 

Humour is a great leveller, and a great unifier. It can unite us through a shared sense of humility, especially if we are able to laugh at ourselves and show others that we don’t take ourselves (or them as well for that matter) too seriously. But humour is also a great weapon – there are so many stories of how jokes which were told about Stalin or the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union could get you sent to the gulag or worse, get you killed. For all their seemingly iron-fisted grip on power all dictators who fear people telling jokes about them ultimately seem so fragile once they are removed from their god-like positions of power, because, unlike anything else, humour can undermine and erode the twin systems of extreme fear and blind belief which are but the smoke and mirrors that prop them up – the essays of Vaclav Havel illustrate this all too clearly and are perhaps just as crucially worth re-reading alongside Camus and Orwell today.

 

Yet humour can also be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and cause harm where none was actually meant. Anyone who has had any experience of cross-cultural relations should know and heed this fact well. Even though experience only ever reaffirms and reinforces it for those of us who do cross cultural divides in either our work or our home lives, it is something which we often forget or overlook inadvertently because we are all so deeply culturally engrained in our own worlds and our own worldviews. We cannot help it. To give a seemingly flippant but perhaps more widely accessible example of this I’d point to Bill Murray’s character in the movie Lost in Translation. This is a Hollywood film, directed by Sophia Coppola, which is much beloved and often thought of with real affection and whimsical humour among Anglo-American movie-goers. I know many people who cite it as one of their favourite films. I also know other people who find it an uncomfortable movie to watch. How you view it, as with anything in life – especially jokes – all boils down to your own personal perspective. I find Lost in Translation a fascinating movie, especially from the point of view of my own changing perspective upon it through time.

 

I first saw Lost in Translation soon after it came out around 2003-2004, almost immediately after my second prolonged visit to Japan over that New Year’s transition. I know a lot of people in Europe and America found it a very fresh and rather un-Hollywood-like depiction of Japan. It seemed more grounded in a real Japan which (up until then) we rarely ever got to see on our TV and movie screens. It was funny too, because it lampooned that acute discombobulation which anyone who has travelled to a place where the culture and language seem so utterly different and incomprehensible to our own. Picture Bill Murray, a man experiencing some sort of internalised existential crisis, sitting in his hotel room dressed in a funny, ill-fitting nightie (yukata) and slippers. He’s playing an actor who is there to film a TV commercial for a famous Japanese brand of whisky: “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.” The director gives a great long and emotionally emphatic speech as to how he wants Murray to say his lines. Murray looks to the translator and she simply states the director’s intentions in a scant four or five words. Bill Murray is baffled: “No, what did he really say? He clearly said more than that!” – We laugh at this because of the interplay of stereotypes which we think we can all recognise in this situation. The movie seems to oscillate delicately between two poles – one of humour and the other of pathos – which is perhaps poignantly summed up by the movie’s title, as both Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s character’s lives are lost in some sort of unspoken search for self-meaning.

 

When I first saw the movie, I liked it because it made me feel nostalgic for Tokyo and my two recent trips there. At the time I thought these might be once in a lifetime trips, but in fact they were the first of many, and now Tokyo is a place I can call home. A fact which I never would have dreamed of when I first saw Lost in Translation in the cinema in London. I didn’t speak Japanese back then either, so unknowingly I read the movie on one level only, relating it to my recent and very personal experiences. I was surprised to later find that some of my Japanese friends really disliked the movie. And so, several years later, after I’d become much better acquainted with the country, the culture, and the language, I watched it again. I was rather shocked at how I read the movie afresh from two angles. Because now I realised how my first reading of it had been firmly rooted in the humour of my own Anglo-American culture. That stereotypical scene with the movie director was so over-the-top that I thought it made its point through exaggeration (the director does just say the same thing in several different ways over and over) and that this would be just as translatable as anyone playing a hammed-up English eccentric might be in any other typically Hollywood movie. Stereotypes are just that after all, we’re meant to laugh at them, not necessarily take them to be generically definitive, as with all stereotypes they are an affected exaggeration of the truth. So my initial response to re-watching this scene was to think my Japanese friends were being a little over-sensitive, although I could see and understand and so feel sympathetic as to why it might cause them offense. English eccentric stereotypes in Hollywood movies have ruckled my pride on some occasions too.

 

But it was later scenes in the movie, when Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are in the hospital, which made me realise why some of my Japanese friends found this movie so uncomfortable. I had read somewhere at the time when the movie first came out that these scenes were largely improvised, which was highly unusual for a Hollywood movie at the time. People said this is what made it feel so different, made it feel more real and more realistic, and so perhaps more relatable. And again, these scenes play upon that idea of things being ‘lost in translation’, finding yourself in a situation where you can’t understand or make yourself understood, so you flail about amiably trying to stay afloat, seeing the funny side of it all, and falling back on your sense of humour to see you through. And most importantly, at this point the film gives us no subtitles to translate what the fellow patients (who apparently are ordinary Japanese and not actors) are trying to say to Murray and Johansson. We aren’t given subtitles because we are meant to be seeing it from Murray and Johansson’s characters’ point of view – but if you can understand Japanese these scenes are really painful to watch because the Japanese characters are clearly trying to be kind and are empathising with the two Westerners, struggling to make themselves understood and not fully understanding why Murray and Johansson are larking about and are laughing at them in response. Here is a clear example of how humour and only seeing one side of a conversation can hurt and divide us, even if that wasn’t the intention of the person acting the fool.

 

I’m not saying we should all strive to be more serious. I still think humour is a great leveller, and I think it is a great weapon against oppressive or overreaching power, but it’s much harder to remember that humour can so easily be misconstrued, misunderstood, and/or seem to malign our own harmless intentions. Our worlds as individuals interacting in the greater social collectives through which we move or are embedded, are ever in constant danger of derailing us or those around us from making the connections which keep us sane and smiling, which help smooth the way or aid us in sorting out the ills which have inadvertently arisen between us. I make such cross-cultural faux pas all the time, and when I do, I can’t help feeling them all the more acutely for knowing I should be more mindful and more careful for having made such mistakes before. The lessons of forgetting are that we constantly need to relearn and relearn and relearn again the things which we already know and should have remembered. That’s life. It’s not the end of the world. But it’s something for us to improve upon. Because, ultimately, I’d much rather laugh and laugh together rather than cry or get angry about something which is simply a misunderstanding or a different perspective compared to my own. Life’s too short otherwise.

 

At the moment I feel like the world and the UK in particular is very much ‘lost in translation.’ Not just to those beyond our borders, but to ourselves as well. Boris may be a hopeless and a hapless buffoon, or he may well be a sinister and coldly-calculating clown (he may even be your latter-day Saint Winston Churchill!), but his past form makes it very difficult to comprehend him, let a lone take him seriously or trust him. He may well be ill-advised, or the indecision he seems to excel at maybe his own character flaw, but if we in the UK can’t understand him – how can we expect the rest of the world to understand him? I’d like to think our Prime Ministers should represent the best of us, and that they should always be seeking the best for us, but I know the reality is never quite so simple or straightforward. At the moment, as a divided nation, we seem to be morally bankrupt. Hemmed in by the biases of the news and the opinions we are fed by the Press and Social Media channels we choose and advocate to inform us and to trammel the way we think. Unusually we used to be able to laugh at our leaders’ faults and inadequacies, but that’s not possible at the moment because we are constantly being corralled into our partisan groups, opposed to one another to the bitter end.

 

Given the enormity of the challenges which we currently face, and the Merry-Go-Round circus ride of f*ck ups and failures we’ve witnessed as the crises of the last few years and 2020 in particular have deepened our situation, I’m beginning to think neither side should be given total control over such matters. Perhaps we’d get a sense that the rudder was being held more firmly if there were more cross-Parliamentary consultation and pooling of expertise to make decisions which are better informed, more balanced and more representative in order to find some way of progressing together as one? – I realise this might seem absurdly idealistic, but wasn’t this more like what happened in Parliament during the last World War? – If that’s the nostalgic kind of Britain people want to go back to perhaps it’s time to stop kidding ourselves as to what we think it was like back then during Britain’s “great glory days” on both sides of the current political divide, if only because I think we have reached the point where it is very genuinely and very worryingly no longer a laughing matter.

Also on 'Waymarks'

Life Under "Lockdown" - A London Diary

The Proust Questionnaire ...

Castaways in the Time of Corona

Falling Like Dominoes ...

The Singularity of Arthur C. Clarke

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Engaging Race Project

A Gentleman & A Scholar - Ian Jenkins

Dr Ian Jenkins OBE

I've just heard the very sad news that Dr Ian Jenkins OBE, Senior Curator in the Greek & Roman Dept. of the British Museum, passed away just over a week ago on Nov 28th.

 

Ian had lived valiantly with Parkinson’s disease for many years. I say ‘valiantly’ because it certainly never seemed to slow him down at all! – He was a genuinely dynamic individual, with one of the sharpest minds I have ever known. And to know and have the good fortune of spending time with him, chatting to him, was always a real pleasure. Always enlightening and amusing in equal measure. He'd always been very supportive of me since I first joined the Greek & Roman Dept. around 20 years ago, and I was lucky enough to continue working closely with him, as well as travelling the world together, with his 'Body Beautiful' exhibition, long after I'd left the Dept. We toured the ‘Body Beautiful’ exhibition in its various iterations over a period of almost ten years from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, to the USA, Mexico, and Australia, as well as to Spain and Switzerland, before it opened in its final form at the BM itself. Throughout the tour he charmed, delighted, and enthralled all of the audiences he spoke to – his wit and intelligence when speaking publicly always seemed so effortless, yet his words let you in and gave you a glimpse through an acute eye which saw the world in a different light to most of the rest of us. He delighted in discovering unusual connections, and, as such, he could often confound you by revealing something so obvious that you couldn’t fathom why it had always gone unseen before. In that sense he was truly brilliant. To chat with Ian was to always have your mind-blown wide open – in a nice way! – Plus, he had a wicked sense of humour, and was an endless fount of funny and often highly irreverent stories. It’s a genuine truth to say that I am forever recounting his stories to friends. He may have left us, but I am sure that amongst his colleagues and his friends, his anecdotes and his bon mots will long live on hereafter.

Ian Jenkins speaking at the opening of 'Body Beautiful' in Australia in 2014

Ian was, of course, best known for his association with the Parthenon sculptures (and the controversial issues which surround their current location). Classical sculpture and architecture were his specialism, but the culture of modern museums, and academic-yet-accessible curating for a well-informed popular audience was his forte. He was one of those intellectuals who simply assumed you were just as well-informed as he was, and if you weren’t (and who was?!) – no matter – you soon absorbed the information he was imparting and took flight with him because it was simply too infectious not to! – In that sense, as a scholar, as a colleague, and as a friend, he was always generous with all that knowledge and experience which he possessed, he was always open, always had time for you, and, always was supportive.

 

I feel I was especially fortunate. He and I clicked hugely after I wrote a short piece for the BM Magazine in 2005 about John Keats and the possible sources of inspiration for Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn - so much so, in fact, that he suggested we should co-author a book together about classical sculpture and harmony (with him writing about classical music, and me writing about Keats). I said we should perhaps give it a go once I'd finished writing my PhD, but sadly that will never happen now – life's too short.

 

He was over the moon though, when I very excitedly told him, several years after my article had come out, that, having done some research into my family tree, we'd discovered I had the joint family names of Keats and Jennings in my direct ancestry (Jennings being Keats' mother's maiden name), and so he was absolutely certain that this was a sign from the Gods, there must be some sort of mystical *cosmic connection* and that I must be related to the poet! – As ever, Ian’s encouragement was nothing if not enthusiastic!

 

Ian at the National Museum of Korea, 2010 

The last time I saw Ian though leaves me with quite a magical (and a rather fitting) memory of him. It was just before we (the staff of the BM) were all sent home ahead of lockdown at the start of the pandemic earlier this year. I already knew I was soon to be leaving the BM but hadn’t yet announced this fact to my colleagues, when I bumped into Ian in the Great Court. It had been a while since we’d last seen each other, so we stopped for a quick catch-up. It was super early in the morning, before the BM opened to the public, and he suggested we should take a stroll around the Duveen Gallery together, where the Parthenon sculptures are on display – so we wandered off in that direction. The Duveen was totally empty except for the two of us. This is one of the real privileges of working in such a museum, walking around the galleries out of public hours, when the place is totally peaceful and you have it all to yourself. You can stand and look at the sculptures, the artefacts, and the artworks in total silence, uninterrupted, and really lose yourself in contemplation of them. Walking with Ian through the museum’s galleries was always a treat even when they were bustling with visitors, as he could never resist, all those thoughts and ideas just came tumbling out as he’d share with you a running commentary on all the things around you, always asking and interested in your thoughts, and always fascinated as to how his ideas and yours might bounce off of one another.

 

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

We made sure we took a moment to say 'hello' to the panel which it seems clear inspired in part some of John Keats’ most famous lines, indeed, quite definitely some of the most famous of all lines of the finest English poetry that have ever been written, lines about truth and beauty – the panel which the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon saw John Keats standing in front of, utterly transfixed: the one with "that heifer lowing at the skies." Even then, after all those years, Ian was still telling me new facts and theories, fascinating things which I never knew, nor most likely would I ever come to know, about the sculptures had he not told me. He was a real Renaissance man – a true gentleman and a scholar, and a jolly good laugh too! – RIP Ian.

The photos above are a selection of objects from the British Museum's "Body Beautiful" exhibition taken by me at various venues around the world.

Friend & fellow former-colleague from the BM, Andrew Burnett's tribute to Ian Jenkins in The Guardian (15 December 2020)

Click on the images of Ian to link to their original source.

A Semiotic Archaeology of the Self

Umberto Eco

Sometime around 2005-2006, I forget exactly when, I read Umberto Eco’s (then most recent) novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005). I now can’t recall a single thing about the plot, or the characters, beyond the fact that it revolves around a man, late in life, going back to his childhood home to root around in its enormous attic in order to rediscover the books and comics which he’d loved as a child. My forgetting, it turns out, is entirely appropriate – because the novel’s main character, Giambattista Bodoni, is an amnesiac.

I do remember eagerly awaiting the publication of the English translation of this, Eco’s fifth novel. I was a huge fan of The Name of the Rose (1983), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), and The Island of the Day Before (1995). I also enjoyed Baudolino (2001), although not as much as I’d hoped I would. I’m still not 100% sure why I didn’t ... Again, I don’t recall much of the plot beyond the fact that it culminates in the search for the legendary king, Prester John. Along the way, as I recall, it contains some cinematically vivid descriptions of Crusader battles and sieges, as well as the poisoning of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I. The last parts of the book, the quest to get to the fabled land of Prester John, is where things get increasingly more fantastical and disorientating. As such, the story feels a lot like Marco Polo meets Terry Gilliam.

At the time it was intriguing to find that Eco was heading in a new direction with this novel and its strangely exotic title, but it seemed that not all the contemporary critics reviewing the book were entirely pleased with The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. There seemed to be a general consensus among them that in essence it was a good idea for a book, but in execution it would have been better if Eco had simply written it as a straightforward memoir, exploring his own past and his personal nostalgias in the first person. The book’s lavish illustrations were widely seen as props to reinforce the weaknesses of the text within. I do recall it did feel like quite a change in gear, perhaps even an imaginative slowing-down, and I’m fairly sure it was my reading of this novel which has since long-stymied me in getting around to reading his two subsequent novels, The Prague Cemetery (2011), and Numero Zero (2015). Although I’m sure I will get around to reading them, eventually.

What has recently put me in mind of this particular book, with its themes of a quest for lost literary and pop culture memories, is the process of packing up my possessions ahead of an imminent house move. Pots and pans, tables, chairs, and other items of furniture are one thing, all easily sorted and quantified. But books and other personal items are things of a different order of complexity. For me at least, they form an inventory of memory that needs to be handled with utmost care and a significant amount of forethought. This is because moving house is often the (sometimes much needed) prompt to off-load. Hence, in ideal circumstances, you would hope to be able to allow yourself sufficient time to sift through such items, allowing the time to review their relevance to you, to decide whether or not they are something you’ll need to keep and cherish into your future, or if they represent an aspect of your past which doesn’t need to be retained, something which can be jettisoned if not actually deleted. All too often though we end up packing our personal effects in a clock-racing frenzy, compelled to make fearlessly decisive choices, usually boiled down to the simple fact of whether a cardboard box of books is too heavy or not.

It’s only after this process, once countless bag-loads of things have been off-loaded at the local charity shop, and, worse still, if many of the boxes you have packed end up in a period of limbo in temporary storage as you transition from the old place to the new, inevitably the fretting begins to set in. You didn’t have time to make a detailed inventory. Hence you can’t help but mentally chase your tail, over and over, recreating a mental catalogue of your most precious possessions, for these are the things which define who we are. Whilst stuck in limbo you can’t help wondering what you got rid of, and what you kept ... Hoping you made the right choices. Wishing by some magic device you’ve actually not thrown anything away at all, or at the very least that all those specific things you feel fairly certain you have thrown away, which you now ardently wish you hadn’t, might somehow magically reappear at the other end of the move when you finally re-open your personal stack of Schrodinger’s boxes …

However, as we progress in life, moving house and the culling of our possessions is something we are all destined to do time and again, a ritual we’ll repeat at various key points in our lives. It’s an exercise which is actually very healthy. Shedding some things, retaining others. As I’ve said, the key thing is the process of evaluation, but an overlooked element is the age at which we do these periodic sifts and culls. Our perception of our possessions changes with time. At the tail end of childhood getting rid of our comic books and toys can feel like a liberation, lightening our passage into adulthood. But later on in life these books and objects might be the very things we rather unexpectedly find ourselves returning to once again – like Charles Foster Kane shallow breathing the single plaintive word “Rosebud” on his deathbed in Orson Welles’ most famous film – realising that what is most precious to us is perhaps something we lost a long time ago; something which, alas, we might never be able to retrieve, save for the memories we have of it.

Citizen Kane (1941)

This latest exercise in “life editing” – rather like Eco’s protagonist, the antiquarian bookdealer, Bodoni – set me pondering upon the thematic continuity running through my lifetime’s library. How each of the books currently sitting on my shelves (and those I recall which I once owned) are all connected by distinct threads of similarity. There’s an essential equivalence, a kind of continuity which refracts in different ways over the course of time. Staring at the spines now looking up at me from cardboard boxes during the process of packing up and emptying my home of the last sixteen or so years, I began to see a picture of myself passing from childhood to adulthood, yet essentially remaining a static point throughout that self-contained continuum. In many ways I am the same me that I’ve always been. My literary likes and interests have fundamentally remained unchanged since day one. But this realisation only served to get me thinking: what was the initial catalyst for my interests? … What one book (at some point) in my possession was, so to speak, the essential “lode-tome” which first set all of this continuity into perpetual motion? … And, perhaps more intriguingly, do I still own it?

Most of my interests have happily crystallised into the topic of my PhD, these being: history, culture, exploration, science, adventure, writing, maps, travel – all topics which aim at elucidating people’s experience of the wider world, the drive to cross boundaries and borders in order to seek out the unknown, and thereby to create some form of lasting knowledge which can be shared. My first degree is in anthropology. Originally my main academic interest was archaeology, and it was something which I’d gained quite a bit of practical experience of before I went to university. I had hoped to study archaeology and anthropology combined, but, inadvertently, I got diverted into the lesser-beknownst-to-me of my two allied interests.

Finishing university and beginning to work full-time in a big museum channelled that practical side of my interests (from archaeology) into material culture, but over time I slowly began to realise that I was never much interested in the technical aspects of manufacture or the evolution of typologies across the ages. I suspect this was because I never really got shot of my more anthropological leanings, instead I constantly found myself wondering about the person who made this object: why did they make it, and what did they think of it when they put it to use; how was it perceived by those around them; what did their world look like through their eyes, and how different or similar was it to ours?

These are just some of the ways in which archaeology and anthropology can coincide and collaborate, but as we get closer to our present time these two aspects can be augmented by a third element – the archive. If those past peoples we are interested in have left some form of written record, attesting to their thoughts, feelings, reactions, responses, justifications, pontifications – we can get a different angle on the material things they have left behind. All three elements combined, with a little imagination added in, can help us to visualise how the world might once have been.

As a young kid the books which helped me best achieve this sort of visualisation of the past were those published by Usborne. This publisher’s books managed to combine the perfect balance of information and images, telling stories through visual snapshots or windows into the lives of past peoples using intricate drawings which buzzed with lively interest, rather like comic books. They were filled with the kind of drawings in which your imagination could roam freely and all too easily get lost deep within. The Usborne Book of World History was a fantastic, large format, magazine-style book which spanned the globe in both time and culture. There were also lots of smaller format books which achieved the same aim but on more specifically focussed topics, such as Ancient Greece or Rome. A slim, large format book in their ‘Young Scientist’ series on Archaeology was a book which I read repeatedly, so much so that even now I can close my eyes and clearly see some of its pages.

Usborne books were never weighed down with words, but there was always sufficient text to elucidate the things the images were illustrating. And it wasn’t just history books they excelled at – one of my most treasured early possessions was Usborne’s Dictionary of Science. This was a hefty tome and delving into this book felt like serious-minded study indeed. Drawing was one of my fortes and so I used to love copying and recreating some of the magnificent scientific diagrams from the pages of this book, such as the cell structure of our skin and its pores (the epidermis through which we perspire) or the leaves of trees (the means by which plants similarly conduct evapotranspiration) as seen under a microscope. The format of Usborne books were their true genius – I think visual stimulation is key to teaching kids. It is a clear and concise way to convey certain facts and ideas, and it helps to harness and fix attention with arresting immediacy. The genius of Usborne books though was that they weren’t simply limited to straight educational topics, but that they similarly extended to books and guides on such off-the-wall topics as Ghosts, UFOs, and Monsters too!

Comic books, far from being mindless juvenile diversions, are a classic visual way to enter into reading more broadly. Like most British school kids I had a subscription to The Beano at our local papershop. Catching up with the antics of Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher, as well as Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, and Lord Snooty, was the highlight of every week. Later on, Superman and Green Lantern comics were added to my weekly subscription, Hal Jordan being my favourite of the Green Lantern Corps. The bite sized chunks of scene directions and character dialogue were far less daunting than a page of closely spaced text. This made it easier to see how certain words could be stressed or inflected with an accompanying illustration. Word and image once again working in tandem.

Having grown up watching the original Star Wars trilogy coming to a close at the cinema with the Return of the Jedi (1983), science fiction was a large part of my imaginative early world. Old TV show repeats such as the original Star Trek, Lost in Space, and The Invaders – even Mork and Mindy, were some of my favourites. There were also Sci-fi elements to some of the storylines in The Avengers, with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, such as the Cybernauts and a carnivorous triffid-like plant from outer space. Older Sci-fi movies too, such as Robinson Crusoe on Mars, This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and War of the Worlds, were just as familiar to me as ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). V was a rather chilling TV phenomenon of the mid-1980s which spooked me and my friends no end. And, of course, whilst “hiding behind the sofa,” I watched Dr Who from Tom Baker’s tenure to that of Sylvester McCoy. Red Dwarf, which first aired in 1988, quickly got itself a similar cult following.

The Avengers

The Tripods

Around this time the BBC also made a fantastic adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ trilogy, which prompted me in my early teens to read the original books. I think these could well have been the first science fiction stories I read, but it was also around this time that I discovered Isaac Asimov’s ‘Space Ranger’ series. These were fantastic, fast paced tales of adventure which spanned the solar system – following the Space Ranger, David ‘Lucky’ Starr on his adventures for the Council of Science with his sidekick, John ‘Bigman’ Jones. It made little cognitive dissonance that some of the actual science was outdated, vide: The Oceans of Venus. If anything, that’s what made them all the more interesting; realising how much our knowledge of space and the solar system had changed since they were first written (astronomy being another one of my earliest and longest running interests). Plus, reading a name like Asimov felt very grown up at the time!

It wasn’t long before I’d graduated onto the first of Asimov’s Foundation books, as well as Arthur C. Clarke, whose Fountains of Paradise was suitably mind-blowing given the scope of time it covers, with Voyager returning to Earth millions of years in the future, barely recognisable for all the hybrid extra-bits of alien kit which it has accrued on its journey around the galaxy. Sci-fi again offered that potent combination of the visual to illuminate words and ideas. My school friends and I were all big fans of the comic book, 2000AD, which famously features the futuristic lawman, Judge Dredd. I loved the combination of the bizarre in storylines such as ‘Attack of the Fatties’, with the macabre in ‘The Body Sharks’ and the ‘Block Wars’, as well as the oddly transposed contemporary Cold War geopolitics of Mega City One’s on-going battle with Sov City. The peak of our enthrallment with all things Judge-Dredd-related came with the advent of graphic novels in the early 1990s and with the release of the seminal Judgement on Gotham in particular. SF, as Sci-fi is now known, is still a favourite form of light relief for me – with an expanded orbit which nowadays also takes in the likes of Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, and others – Gollancz’s SF Classics series is my favourite place of refuge when all the academic PhD stuff gets too heavy.

That eidetic marriage of text and images with other world-building imagination, essentially anthropology projected into space, which so absorbed my friends and I during my high school years also came together in fantasy role-playing game books, which reached their peak of popularity around this time in the mid-late 1980s. In the Dungeons and Dragons-type gaming tradition, these were essentially story books which you interacted with, directing the narrative yourself either by the choices you made at the end of each chapter, or by random number selection from a chart printed in the end-pages of the book, or a roll of the dice. They were the paperback equivalent of early computer games, or a sophisticated step-up from Top Trumps card games. The most well-known series of this genre were the Fighting Fantasy books, such as Death Trap Dungeon, but my friends and I were always more taken by the Lone Wolf series. 

Part of the attraction of these books was very definitely their elaborate cover art. I spent what felt like hours stuck in a mesmerised contemplation of the cover of The Jungle of Horrors, which seemed like a hyper combination of the swamp planet of Dagobah from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and the David Bowie / Gothic Muppets movie, Labyrinth (1986). However, the main frustration of these books, for me at least, was how I always seemed to die the very instant I came into contact with a monster, hence it was often more expedient to thumb back and forth through the sections and cheat your way to the end of the book in order to get any sort of narrative satisfaction from the underlying story. It was a losing trait which I somehow dexterously transferred over to actual video games, at which I am frankly totally inept. Little wonder then that I eventually gave up these role-playing books and similar games, instead immersing myself in more straightforward story books and movies.

The novels which had always hooked me the most before I graduated to fantasy game books were simple kids’ adventure stories. In the school holidays I used to pester my older sister into reading me Enid Blyton’s eponymous ‘Adventure’ books, such as The Castle of Adventure and The Island of Adventure. My mother says when I was very young, about four or five years old, I used to like hearing stories read aloud Jackanory-style, particularly listening to her reading C. S. Lewis’s books at bedtime. Around the age of eleven I discovered a series of books in our local bookshop which I went on to collect and read avidly – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators. Rather like the better-known Hardy Boys books, they were the stories of three boys – Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews, and Pete Crenshaw – who operated a private investigator firm from their ingeniously hidden and carefully booby-trapped headquarters in an old junk yard run by Jupiter’s aunt and uncle in Rocky Beach, California. They were forever going off on detective-style adventures, investigating haunted houses and thereby uncovering criminal smuggling operations and the like. As with James Bond movies, or TV programmes such as Airwolf and Knight Rider, there was always a moment of peril before the denouement in which the boys triumphed and saved the day.

However, there was one mystery which always intrigued me and my school friends at the time we were reading these stories, and that was who they were actually written by. The Three Investigators books were published in the UK in the 1980s by Armada and the covers always had the name of Alfred Hitchcock prominently at the top, which initially led us to believe they were penned by the inimitable film director himself. After all, the introduction was always signed by him, and he usually made a cameo appearance himself as a character at the start and end of each story; but a closer inspection of the front matter of these books credited the text as being created by a man called Robert Arthur. A mysteriously nondescript name if ever there was one. We were intrigued. Most of the books in the series were attributed to him, but later numbers were credited to a variety of other names, and often weren’t as good in our estimation; hence Robert Arthur was clearly the most authentic of them all. It wasn’t until many years later, when the internet was fully up and running, that I read more about who Robert Arthur was and how he had come to create these wonderfully captivating characters and stories, which Alfred Hitchcock seemingly endorsed. They really were the first books I read which I found utterly unputdownable!

Again the cover art of this type of kids’ adventure books amplifies the interest of what treasures are to be discovered in the text within – echoes of which can be found in the poster art for contemporary children’s adventure films, such as The Goonies (1985) or the original Indiana Jones trilogy (1981-1989). I remember on one holiday in 1989 I read the novelisation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade over and over. At the time, lost in my own abstractions, I lived and breathed these stories and films ad nauseam, so much so that I can still pretty much quote my way word-for-word through all four of these particular movies even today! – Since then people have often assumed (as with many of my contemporary colleagues) that it was the character of Indiana Jones who inspired my choice of career, but this isn’t true – he merely augmented something I was already deeply interested in and already reading about. As I’ve described above, the fire already had ample fuel, not least in the form of Usborne history books. But these weren’t the only non-fiction books which I was reading.

In tandem with my love of The Goonies and The Three Investigators, the real history of pirates was a topic which deeply fascinated me, hence I read books such as Captain A. G. Course’s Pirates of the Western Seas just as avidly. Frequently returning to a specific book (whose title and author I can no longer recall) about genuine treasure islands, such as Cocos Island off the coast of Chile, or Nova Scotia’s Oak Island Money Pit, in my school library. Documentaries such as John Romer’s Testament and the Blair brothers’ voyages around Indonesia in the Ring of Fire also aided in furnishing the reality and thereby helped to consolidate the fantasy. David Attenborough’s natural history programmes brought the adventure novels of Rene Guillot’s Mokokambo – The Lost Land, and The Mountain with a Secret, all the more vividly to life. – But, on further contemplation, the real root may well still lie within that realm of awakened imagination, in the form of a different Hollywood adventure movie altogether, one which was released much earlier – and that movie was The Island at the Top of the World (1974).

It must have been around 1981-1982 or thereabouts. I was playing at a friend’s house when his mother unexpectedly announced that we were going out for an adventure. I remember the thrill of not knowing where we were going, or what we were going to do when we got there, as we put on our coats and set off down the road. After a short walk I recognised the place we were heading to – it was a huge old Art Deco cinema, which I usually visited with my older brother or sister. They still showed afternoon kid’s matinees in which the main feature was always preceded by one or two Children’s Film Foundation-type short movies (I very vividly remember one such film about a young, wheelchair-bound boy who kept homing pigeons). The main feature on this particular occasion was The Island at the Top of the World, in which an eccentric English aristocrat, played by Donald Sinden, goes in search of his lost explorer son with the aid of an American archaeologist in a magnificent airship. They eventually find the wayward explorer on a hidden island in the Arctic which is also home to a lost civilisation of Vikings. But the Vikings take them hostage and so they have to fight for their freedom, winning the respect of the Vikings and learning a number of lessons about humanity and struggles for power in the process, before they are able to depart and return to the modern world. It was the airship which captivated me the most, for weeks afterwards I used to make paper cut-outs of it with its trailing lines, its gantries, and its aquiline netted balloon. The idea of sailing off over the clouds to adventures in far off distant lands was very probably a seed which was planted in that very cinema watching this particular movie which later grew into a real, globe-trotting career of working in museums around the world.

That said though, I think the genuine origin of these deep-rooted preoccupations with exploration, discovery, and adventure lies even further back in my very early childhood, stemming from that notion of navigating ever onwards, in search of new worlds. All of childhood is after all a process of just such exploration and discovery, seeking to understand and classify the world around us. It is a lifelong quest. Throwing out the books, toys, and films of our earliest years doesn’t necessarily bring any of that process to a close; if anything, they merely represent a prologue, setting us up for ever-expanding expeditions heading even further afield from home. When I was a child a trip to the shops, or to the cinema, or better yet, to a grandparents’ house, or to the local park, was a world-enlarging adventure in itself. Sifting through my memories of the earliest books I loved best (such as Sheila Burnford's The Incredible Journey), whilst packing up my things in order to move house, I think I have finally managed to narrow my search down to just two books which were my favourites when I was aged around four or five years old.

The first book was Leila Berg’s Little Pete Stories. It helped that Little Pete, as depicted on the book’s cover and in the illustrations inside, looked a lot like me. He also took an uncanny fascination in the same kind of things that I did, for instance on similar trips to the shops or to the park. There was one story in which Pete is fascinated by a steamroller he finds chugging slowly but heavily up and down the street. Just like Little Pete, before I started going to school I was forever sauntering up to grown-ups – park keepers, road menders, or just old folk sitting on benches – and asking them what they were doing, or what they thought about unusual things, such as how was it that the Moon could be out in the sky at the same time as the Sun?

The second book is actually another series of children’s books – the Rupert Bear Annuals. Here again was another character with whom I could very easily equate myself. Rupert was a small bear whose curiosity led him to embark upon all sorts of unlikely adventures and discoveries. And once again, as with the Usborne books much later on, here too was the winning formula of text and image, for Rupert wasn’t simply a one-dimensional comic, it was a series of narrated portraits. Each image was contained in and of itself, your eyes could read whatever storylines or overlay whatever dialogue your imagination could suggest. But each image was also accompanied by two types of text: one a straightforward prose narrative, the other a shorter and more fluid text in verse which zipped along with a lot more pace. As I recall the verse sequences were always my favourites. In this manner the Rupert books were inexhaustibly multi-layered. The stories were also about transformations, Rupert was forever coming across mysteries which when looked into altered his perspective on the world, making him see the hidden magic at its core in operation, simultaneously astounding and entertaining him in equal measure. These transitions and transformations were similarly echoed in contemporary kid’s TV programmes, such as Jamie and the Magic Torch and Mr Benn, which were two of my favourites, as well as the movies which captured my imagination when I was a little bit older, such as Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989).

Jamie and the Magic Torch

It’s no surprise then that the subtext of these cartoons readily translate into the more mind-expanding interests of anthropologists, many of whom have written about and studied cultural transcendence, social-boundary crossing, and transformative ritual practices, defining other worlds, other cultures and other ways of being from the supra- to the supernatural. All of these things get codified in the stories that we craft and hand down through the generations. It’s the magic formulae which belies all our children’s story books and much of the celluloid which has spooled itself endlessly out of Hollywood.

Thinking about it further, it was probably because of Rupert Bear that polar bears were my favourite animal when I was a child. I see now that the totemic significance of the polar bear to my early childhood-self probably ran far more deeply than I’ve ever realised. If we all have a spirit animal who guides us, shapes us, leads us, and helps us to explore and interpret our own personal view of the wider world and our place within it – it seems highly likely that my true spirit animal has always been a little bear in a red jumper and yellow-checked trousers with a matching yellow-checked scarf.

For many of us the interests we had as children are the things which have shaped who we are in later life. For some people cinema, theatre (pantos/musicals), sport, or music might have had more of an influence than books. An amusing question to spark lively conversation amongst friends in a pub is usually something like: what was the first album or single you ever bought? (for me, album: Lovely, by The Primitives (1988); single: Youth of Today, by Musical Youth (1982)). However, all of these things to varying degrees undoubtedly combine as the cultural influences which have shaped our characters.

For me it was definitely storybooks, movies, and comics more than most which have had the deepest influence. Looking into the mirror and delving deep into the roots of who I am, sifting back through all the accumulated layers of memory, conducting a kind of semiotic archaeology of the self, reflecting on all these lost elements of my past and the long forgotten personal possessions which have made me who I am, as I box all these things up, ahead of a move to a new life and a new chapter in a new home, it is a genuinely pleasant – and wholly unexpected surprise to find Rupert Bear looking back at me out of this mirror of my earliest memories ...

As I tape up the last of my boxes, ready to move 9000 miles across the globe, leaving my home country behind me – I can’t help wondering if perhaps, one day (hopefully still sometime far off in the future) when I eventually reach the end of my life’s personal road and look back upon the long distances I’ve covered, when I breathe my last, like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, the single word “Rupert” might very well be my “Rosebud” … unfathomable to anyone else but me.

Citizen Kane (1941)

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