News from Norfolk

Dogma is the enemy of useful discovery. This is the phrase I repeat to myself, mantra-like, hoping that someday I shall even come to believe it, as I watch friends exclaim in delight over that dismal, popular, incomprehensible thing, the Barn Conversion.

‘But it’s so light, so airy, so full of character!’ they exclaim. ‘And there’s so much space!’

What I have to stifle, repeating my mantra silently, is this: ‘But that space ought to be full of corn, agricultural machinery, or perhaps even livestock. Because it’s a barn. It isn’t a house. It’s a barn.’ Read the rest of this entry »

My grandmother was born on a US Army base in the Philippines, in a bed with the Stars and Stripes draped across the headboard, just after the beginning of the last century.

Her father was a colonel in the US 16^th Infantry who had been posted to Luzon in the course of the Spanish-American War. He was Dutch by birth — his clergyman father had left the Netherlands in the 1840s along with his congregation in the doctrinal split the Dutch call ‘the separation’ and moved to Michigan — and an idealist by conviction. His various projects over the years included a plan to improve the lives of prisoners by encouraging them to take up gardening and early support for the infant League of Nations. During the First World War, when German-speakers in the USA risked lynching, he demanded that his two young daughters learn the language of Goethe and Schiller.

His Calvinist upbringing notwithstanding, he died a Shinto Buddhist. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in my student days, I once loaned a dog-eared copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada to a flatmate. There are plenty of criticisms one could throw at this book — it’s overwritten, self-indulgent, whimsical in places and also goes on about itself too much, although this was probably precisely why I loved it so much in adolescence. My flatmate, though, came back with a criticism I hadn’t anticipated. ‘It’s too elitist’ she complained.

I would never have thought about it in those terms. Ada was, is, a book about aristocrats, but then it was self-evidently building on a literary tradition that was almost exclusively preoccupied with aristocrats. But perhaps that was not all that my flatmate meant? Ada is also full of long words, a few of them marginally obscure. It is laced with in-jokes that require a passing grasp not only of European history and literature, but probably also Nabokov’s own Speak, Memory.

But even this wasn’t the problem. Read the rest of this entry »