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Laura Alexander

Anthony Bourdain, The Memory Magician

Posted on September 1, 2018

Written by Laura Alexander

I’m lousy at food, and as far as I know his show was never broadcast in the UK, so when Anthony Bourdain died this summer, it was more or less the first I’d heard of him. Over the week or so before the next big story, obituaries filled my newsfeed and the home pages of my standard news sites. Reading them, I was amazed by the outpouring of love on the screen. My head is firmly up my own arse at the best of times, but it seemed crazy that so much love could exist for a person in the public eye without a word having even vaguely trickled through to me – I couldn’t even remember having heard the name. Before I knew it, clips of Bourdain were making their way into my killing-time-on-youtube-when-I-should-be-doing-something fare. He seemed nice, this gangly, grey haired figure standing around on street corners getting excited about things, asking questions and bouncing with enthusiasm. I searched for clips of him in the cities I’d visited, and the cities I’d hoped to visit, and salivated every time the camera zoomed in on some cheese. And then, while I was explaining to him how to make a Negroni (clearly the most delicious of summer drinks, as Bourdain, it turns out, also knew) the editor of this magazine asked me to write him a piece on the guy. All of which is a convoluted way of saying that I’ve been thinking about mussels.

My mum doesn’t like them at all, and my dad will eat them if they’re there, but isn’t really fussed, and so I went my whole childhood and adolescence without ever tasting a mussel. I knew they existed, sometimes I saw them on menus, but it would never occur to me to order them. The same is true of most seafood, but it’s the mussels that stand out. As far as I was concerned, I just didn’t like mussels, right up until the moment after my first year of university that I went to Istanbul for a week. It was the farthest I’d ever been from home on my own, and I was planning on staying there a week or so and then meandering down the coast and entering Greece through the islands.

I was nineteen and ready to explode with excitement. I’d been put in touch with a friend of a friend who could give me a couch to sleep on, and as soon as I arrived he took me out to hang on a street corner with his friends, drinking gin and playing the guitar and spitting the husks of sunflower seeds out onto the street. All of them were much older than me, nobody I’d ever met knew where I was, the night air was warm and I didn’t understand what anyone was talking about, I was in heaven. Someone looked up and across the street suddenly, at a vendor setting up a tiny stall, and then ran off and came back with a couple for mussel shells.

If you’re new in town you have to try this, they said, or something like it. I would have said I didn’t like mussels, but I was scared of losing face so I didn’t, so I slurped it down.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez

I found out later it was called midye, mussels stuffed with slightly spiced rice and served with a twist of lemon juice. Fresh, salty, ever-so-slightly spicy, smooth-mussel-texture against the slightly rougher rice. Down in one bite and swallow, you can just keep eating them without stopping until you’re full. Sold on every street corner, with judicious warnings from everyone that the street trade in them was totally unlicensed and possibly illegal, and if you happened to get a bad one the food poisoning would lay you out for days. I had at least ten every day for a week, and then I went away and I haven’t had them since.

That was four years ago, and yet I still find myself dreaming of them, in the nostalgic way a lost love is dreamt of, like remembering the look in someone’s eyes on a particular night, like the smell of jasmine. They’re still, probably, the best thing I’ve ever eaten (although I tried steak tartare for the first time a few months ago and that suddenly became a serious contender for the prize), but it’s more than that. Alone in a big new city for the first time, a romantic and impressionable teenager with no self-preservation instincts, they were the new, the unexpected, the opening of a door I hadn’t quite known was there.

Midye shows up in Bourdain’s work. Half an hour into an episode on Istanbul from 2010, there they were. Sampled fresh down by the water with the general lack of food safety highly emphasized.

“Nothing I like better,” quips Bourdain as he strolls along the waterfront, “than unlicensed seafood of indeterminate provenance”. They are favored with a quick these are in fact excellent before the camera moves on.

No matter. My magic doesn’t have to be his. But even a cursory glance at this guy’s output is enough to get you thinking of all those meals the memory of which locks into place with the right trigger. Neapolitan pizza out of a box on the steps of a church, whiskey old fashioned out of mugs in Paris, gyros in deep-fried pitta in Athens. So much food over the years since Istanbul, mostly eaten ad hoc, outdoors and in moments of such intense joy. I don’t know much about the guy Bourdain, and I probably never will, but this gift alone, to be able to share these little jolts of magic, is enough for me to mourn, just a little, that he’s gone.

Highsmith’s Heroes and the 26-Hour Moralist

Posted on June 1, 2018

Written by Laura Alexander, Staff Writer

The police in the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 about a man seen prowling in the dark, night after night, the red glow of his cigarette floating along the back streets. He would pace for hours, heading nowhere in the starlight that hammers down through the thin air of the mesas. The police were not the only ones to wonder. At the national laboratory some physicists had learned that their newest colleague was experimenting with twenty-six hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with theirs.

Chaos, James Gleick

People’s actions have an internal consistency that can almost add up to a moral system. Consider Genet and Dostoyevsky, who constantly return to the morality of one’s actions being judged internally, where the greatest punishment is shame, where its opposites are honor and pride. Shame that can attack you, physically like heartburn, years after the act, shame you can learn to masochistically enjoy. And, most importantly, shame that isn’t distributed in proportion with, in the eyes of the world, are your biggest sins.

So it is with the men that Patricia Highsmith uses as her heroes, especially of her most famous, Tom Ripley from the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. When Highsmith’s heroes ever feel a drive to do ‘the right thing’ it is in the way a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. That story about the mathematician (Mitchell Feigenbaum) who decided to live on a 26 hour sleep cycles and cycled in and out of sync with everyone else, is very like what Highsmith’s characters do morally.

Their guide is the construction of this internal logic, the threading of these deeply individual networks of values, motivations, principles, desires, memories, that hides in plain sight because most of the time is doesn’t lead to any action so particularly extreme. Except when it suddenly does. In The Thief’s Journal Genet takes pride in his triumvirate of anti-virtues; treachery, theft and homosexuality. “There is a relationship among them which, though not always apparent, at least, so it seems to me, recognizes a kind of vascular exchange between my taste for betrayal and theft and my loves.” Vascular – related to the blood vessels, the arteries and veins of the circulatory system of the body. That is, something self-enclosed, something that must only be consistent with itself to survive. This is true of all theories, whether they’re ideas of moral philosophy or the standard model of particle physics. It’s also true of these networks of values and morals which could be called a ‘self’.

In The Talented Mr. Ripley, we get to watch the construction of a ‘self’ taking place. We follow Ripley over the course of five books, though between the end of The Talented Mr. Ripley and the beginning of Ripley Underground a lot has happened – he’s consolidated his fortune, got married, settled down in a country house in France – his character is in place and fully formed by the end of the first. We see him first as a drifter, a formless mass of vague malevolence and resentment. Over the course of the book, Ripley acquires what we might call a self – the things he will do and the things he will not do and the reasons for them. All this adds up to a unified personality that he doesn’t have at the beginning. Can we break down how he does this? Perhaps. In three points.

Photo by Srikanta Hu

First, Ripley superficially finds his self, by becoming an expat who can live in luxury; to be alone it helps to be foreign and self-sufficient. Ripley makes himself a sauntering, loping, slouching, rootless cosmopolitanism – I like these words very much, like the way of moving they suggest, both physically and metaphorically. The term ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, was originally used by the Stalinist regime against Jewish intellectuals as in ‘a rootless cosmopolitanism which is deeplessly repulsive and inimical to Soviet man’, that is repulsive to the great healthy mass of heroic workers. There are certain props that set the scene again and again, the trappings of Highsmith that make her so deliciously filmable. The sun, certain types of clothes, foreign languages, cigarettes, drinks. To what extent are these just visual tropes that Highsmith gets a kick out of and to what extent are they necessary for this kind of solitude? I have had something approaching this kind of solitude while penniless, but Ripley’s incapable of it.

Second, by trying on, and ultimately discarding, the identity of another, Dickie Greenleaf, who he first admires and envies, maybe even lusts for. Within 60 pages Ripley has murdered Dickie, and assumed his identity. There are resonances in the relationship between Ripley and Dickie with a particular kind of relationship between two men that shows up all over literature. We could call it the relationship between the charmer and the narrator. It’s a specifically male relationship, tinged with queer desire that’s never allowed to be exactly vocalised, between the inspiring figure who represents some more exciting way of being in the world, and the quieter friend who will eventually tell their story. A kind of murder through resentment seems sometimes to be inherent in all these relationships, even if it’s mostly metaphorical. The charismatic charmer must always be eliminated somehow in the end so that the shy narrator’s voice can be heard. Each version of the narrator begins to find flaws in the charmer, see the shallowness of their glamour and resent them always being the center of attention in what should be the narrator’s story. The train of thought that eventually leads to a murder in a boat begins with Ripley beginning to suspect he could live Dickie’s life better himself, that Dickie is not taking as much advantage as Ripley could of his privileges of wealth, of good looks, of charm. Even from when they first meet Ripley resents the fact that Dickie is a ‘lousy amateur painter’, finds himself ‘waiting for something profound and original from Dickie’ With Ripley’s murder and identity theft, Highsmith takes the dynamic to its logical conclusion. By the end of The Talented Mr Ripley, however, Ripley must discard Dickie’s identity and go back to living under his own papers, but with a self that has emerged crystallised from the experience of being someone else.

Third, and most importantly, by the act of committing murder. The key word here is committing, not murder. This is an act committed in knowledge of one’s total freedom, in which the culprit takes responsibility. Not responsibility in the sense of owning up and accepting the consequences but an interior responsibility that of not disowning the act, of facing up to the fact that you can’t ‘be pardon’d and retain the offence’.

The idea that such an act changes a person forever is an old existentialist theme. When I was younger I felt like I understood it because I felt I’d never made a decision and didn’t have a self. Now I’ve made decisions and have a self, and as a consequence I understand this idea less. It may or may not be true of life in general, but it does seem to be true for the kind of man made hero in a Highsmith book, and these actions are violent in nature (they don’t have to be). There are acts of violence that are sudden and life-altering, committed consciously but not exactly premeditated (less than three short pages sit between Ripley’s first thought of killing Dickie and him striking of the first blow), and since their culprits have no intention of taking the penalty for their actions, they come to live with the knowledge of their crimes without hypocrisy. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

There are other elements that push Ripley to become a full character by the end of the first book, but these three are most important. In all three aloneness is crucial, the changes that take place cannot even be communicated, let alone shared with others. Ripley’s actions take place under those special conditions of aloneness where one’s ‘self’ stops being reflected. That’s when internal moral consistency becomes the thing. Highsmith’s heroes live with one foot in this world of moral self-sufficiency and one in the real world, where there are bills to be paid, high-quality suits to be bought, and an image to be kept up.

Highsmith’s heroes are still able to live in this real world, even in the most high-class social world. Instead of forgetting all about it, or glorying in their renouncement of it they take pleasure in drifting through it, and sometimes out of it.

For all the social connections he eventually develops, Ripley’s character exists in isolation, revealed in full only to the reader through Highsmith’s close third person. Ripley is not like anyone else morally, his way of seeing the world appears similar to the majority enough to be able to hide, while his otherness lies just far enough below the surface to be ignored by everyone, even his wife (who doesn’t know or pretends not to know he’s a criminal).

The heroes of Patricia Highsmith who follow closely behind Ripley, are always alone. Entirely, metaphysically alone. For them, human contact only makes sense at the most trivial level or on the grand existential level of the internal emotional logic. The whole fun of a Highsmith book is that these conundrums are played out under the veneer of pulp.

HOMEWARD - May 2018 Laura Alexander

Portolaos

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Laura Alexander

Translation of the title of a book seen in the Benaki Museum:

“Portolaos, Namely book containing the seaports, the Distances between one place and another, and Other useful information for this Enterprise”

I was finally sitting down again to write after all the delicious laziness, in the dry heat where I fled the sun and moved like a sleepwalker, with things spread out so fine I only really did one thing a day, if anything. Hot hours drinking cold cappuccinos, sweet and strong with cold milk the texture of uncooked meringue, and later beer, on street corners, and then crashing to sleep naked in the heat. Crashing back into city life after a month of roughing it across the great scroll of Europe, a kind of self-hood had come back to me. Not a real self-hood of responsibilities and worries, still in the no-time of holiday, but my hitchhiker’s ghost feeling was melted away. I tried to look good, in clean clothes and the backless top I hadn’t worn all across Europe because it felt dangerous to be sexy while hitchhiking. I met people, and said goodbye to them expecting to see them again. I went to the café, and the bookshop, and the corner shop next to the cinema where the owner recognized me and spoke to me in Dutch because he’d once lived a year in Utrecht. Life was leafy and calm, easy to walk in, the streets patch-worked with graffiti and the cafes full of scruffy punks and gorgeous girls who sit with all the time in the world. At night, the open-air cinemas cast snatches of tinny dialogue in Greek or English over the walls onto the street like a football they expected to have tossed back.

Selves are formed by cities. Having discarded myself to travel through all that land between here and home I found a new self here, waiting to be slipped into like the red shoes I found waiting for me on a street corner in Paris once at two in the morning, neat and unexpected and precisely my size. In the same way, here in Athens I find a plausible version of myself, to be tried on and discarded, or to fuse so completely with all the selves I have been up till now that if I looked back in a few years it won’t be possible to make out the join, like with Paris, like with Amsterdam. Just like when you arrive in a new place, especially a city, how it feels like cognitive dissonance to remember that it was always there, that these streets were stretched out against the earth’s surface exactly as you see them now while you were still living for years before blissfully unconcerned with them, like Stephen Dedulus says, “there all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end” – anyway just like that you have to face the fact that the person you could be here is already within you, lurking like a seed, and ever more shockingly, a seed already shaped and formed by all that’s gone before. So if I’d come here a year ago I’d have been calculating how to find a job in a bar here, how to scrape by and wait for adventure, wondering how many places would let you get along with not speaking Greek at first. Now after months of slightly fancier work I was looking at the local British Council, and cultural institutions here and whether I could possibly persuade them to hire me. So the potential self I can taste around me comes from me alone.

In Athens time was thick and golden. From one day to the next I could hardly remember what I’d been doing – the opposite of tourism. One day I dragged together enough energy to get to the Acropolis museum, bright and sleek. Another night we went to a free outdoor screening in the gardens of the French archaeological institute, and while we were watching a minor riot broke out a few blocks away. The film was a French one, with Jean-Paul Belmondo. It was subtitled in Greek so I could only follow about half the plot, which turned out not to matter as the plot was very silly and the visuals were stunning, all long slow shots of Niemeyer’s half-finished Brasilia buildings. The riot was over by the time the film was, and the restaurants were moving tables back out into the street. From the balcony of the apartment all we could see was a huge pillar of black smoke and the reflected orange light on a building about a block away. When I went down to the square to get more beer the fire was burnt out and I stood and looked for a while at the slightly smoking, twisted and blacked remains of two cars. It was the first time I’d seen a burnt out car, though in Paris I’d seen the melted tarmac remains of where two motorbikes had been burned then taken away.

Photo by Matt Artz

Hot night under the glow of colored bulbs, speed and slowness with hours passed in drunkenness and shouting and cicadas loud as sirens fading finally silent. Endless unremembered conversations jokes and absurdities, and above all movement and heat in stillness. The taste of beer and ouzo, the dirt under the feet, the smell of the pine trees in the bar on the hill with the hill looming black and the barely payable bill. Fuck roughly when we get home, beer-drenched four-in-the-morning cunts, and wake to a sunlight so clear and strong, the pinkness of flowers and their sticky-sweet smell on the street.

I finished the last volume of Proust a few days later, sprawled topless on a rock that was digging into my thighs, with my head in a girl’s lap and a picnic of melons and bread spread out. Me and the girl I’d been living with had gone out to an island to camp. We fucked on top of my sleeping bag in the forest of night and then come back down to the stony beach to sleep. In the sunrise by the cool clear water I felt the weirdness of finishing nearly a year with one great mass of book (about a week later back in Athens I came across where Anne Carson has a character say reading Proust is like having a second unconsciousness, a formulation of words which allowed me to give a shape to my sadness). By the end of the book all the tiny hundreds of fragments of story come together, and the outcome is that you can see how over time all those little fragments do become a life.

When we took the boat back to Athens and were sitting on the top deck of the boat, some hippy kids were taking turns throwing little bits of bread up to the gulls. Following along with the speed of the boat they seemed to be stationary above the deck. Every time a gull managed to snatch a scrap out of the air the whole deck would clap and whoop. By this point the clouds had come in, and everything around was soft shades of grey, different everywhere you looked.

That tremendous observation; that there is only one world and that everything you see and read exists inside it at the same time. These are many things, and it’s difficult to put them together in anyway that feels coherent. Like Proust and his fragments of life, all these othernesses, in a way so simple it’s a cliche even to say it, come together and form the fact of all the things that are the case.