Fleapit revisited:Marianne and Leonard:Words of Love.

"Dearest Marianne. I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand. This old body has given up, just as yours has too, and the eviction notice is on its way any day now. I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more. Safe travels old friend. See you down the road. Love and gratitude." - Leonard Cohen's final letter to Marianne Ihlen.

It'd take a steel heart to watch a film full of the painfully beautiful music and poetry of Leonard Cohen, and one in which the two main characters die in the end, and not well up at least a tiny bit. My heart is made of much less durable alloys so, predictably, I ended up with 'something in my eye' on more than one occasion.

A listen to Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye is enough to elicit tears even without context so it's hardly a surprise that set against a backdrop of love, heartbreak, friendship, and reflections on mortality, it should set me off. But Nick Broomfield's Marianne & Leonard:Words of Love didn't just set about making us feel sad and it wasn't interested in acting as some kind of hagiographic study of either Cohen, the artist, or Ihlen, his 'muse'.

I've written before about my distaste for that word. It's both pejorative and sexist (how many men have you heard described as muses?) in that it seems to suggest that women only exist when viewed through the eyes of artists, always male artists. But, parking that for a moment, it can't be denied that Cohen got some pretty bloody good songs out of his romance with Marianne Ihlen (whose name was actually pronounced with a hard, rather than soft, 'e' - which just didn't scan right in So Long, Marianne).

We start at the end, Ihlen on her death bed in Oslo receiving Cohen's above message, but we're soon sent back nearly fifty years to the Isle of Wight festival and Cohen performing So Long, Marianne in a state he refers to, later in the film, as "relaxed beyond any reasonable state". He'd taken so many Quaaludes he'd earned the nickname Captain Mandrax and even then, in 1970, it looked as if he'd become a different man to the unsuccessful, but hard working, passionate, and questing poet that had met, and fallen in love, with a young Norwegian woman on the stunning Greek island of Hydra a decade earlier.

Broomfield's trademark, and now unmistakable, voiceover speaks of Hydra in the early sixties as some sort of Mediterranean paradise and certainly it felt very different to Cohen's snowy home city of Montreal. It was a place of magical night air, freshly baked bread, golden sun kissed people, sex, and LSD. A place where the few non-Greek residents (like the tragically doomed Johnston family who helped Cohen with his early work) all seemed to be poets, artists, or drug dealers.

 

Cohen described an ordinary day as one that would involve working, eating a sandwich, having sex, and doing some speed. At least two of these things would be provided by Ihlen who'd moved to the island with her first husband Axel Jensen in 1958 and given birth to a son, Axel Jr, on Hydra. Jensen had a temper and eventually left Marianne to live with another woman.

Cohen was completely different. When he entered her life she began to love not just herself but life itself. Neither of them considered themselves attractive (we hear archive recordings of Ihlen bemoaning her small boobs). Cohen took on Axel Jr as if he was his own and Ihlen supported Cohen when writing his last, difficult and critically maligned, novel. 1966's Beautiful Losers was described as 'hallucinogenic madness', as one might expect of a book primarily written in blazing midsummer Greek sun on a diet of acid and speed. Critics described it as 'revolting' and dismissed it as 'verbal masturabtion' and even though you'd think that would be enough to tempt people in it still didn't sell well. Certainly not well enough to pay the rent.

But who's read Leonard Cohen's books anyway? He decided if he couldn't make a living in literature he'd set his words to music but he'd been so isolated in Hydra that he had no idea of what was going on musically in the wider world. His natural home was the folk scene but he'd never even heard of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, or Phil Ochs.

When he played a version of Suzanne to singer/songwriter Judy Collins she was blown away. She loved it so much she, first, recorded her own version and then persuaded Cohen himself to sing it in public. Something he had never intended to do, imaging his career in music would be that of a songwriter and a songwriter only.

He was so nervous and emotional at his first ever live performance that he broke down in tears and walked off stage. Watching that, and a later performance of Chelsea Hotel No.2, you're inclined to join him in lachrymosity. He finally returned to the stage and soon he started to love performing as much as he did writing.

Columbia Records liked him too. They signed him up, a string of remarkable records followed, and Cohen was, of course, sent out to tour them. As he travelled, and his fame increased, Ihlen was left on Hydra with Axel Jr. Understandably to anybody who's ever been in love, they missed each other intensely, but Cohen's request for Ihlen and Axel to move to Montreal with him backfired disastrously.

Montreal did not seem the perfect family life they'd dreamed of and was a very unhappy time. The film doesn't go into too much detail as to why but it seems unlikely that Ihlen would have been overly happy with Cohen singing confessional songs about getting blow jobs from Janis Joplin. Ihlen saw just how loved Cohen was, she saw how compassionate he was, and she knew how handsome he was. She felt she was losing him. She felt suicidal.

As their relationship deteriorated, Cohen describes throwing himself into a 'blue movie' and 'gaining favours' from enormous numbers of women. But then goes on to say that we all know 'blue movies are not romantic'. Being a hit with the ladies, a huge success, and having what many testify was a great sense of humour does not protect you against depression and Cohen was riven with it.

At times he fell into such dark spells that people, even band members, would say they'd not see, or speak to, him for up to six weeks. Record producer John Lissauer describes a seven year period of estrangement . He was called back to produce the album Various Positions, which contained the slow burning future standard Hallelujah, in 1984 before leaving the music business entirely and without fanfare. Cohen's guitarist Ron Cornelius describes how Cohen's experience of depression had given him such an empathetic stance on mental illness that he insisted they play a gig at an institution.

A suggestion, Cornelius says now, that initially went down like "a fart in a diver's helmet" but one that, despite that, both happened and was such a huge success that Cohen, Cornelius, and band went on to give many more live performances in facilities for the mentally unwell.

As Cohen battled with his demons, either trying to shag his way out of them or swim his way out of them (he often rose at 5am to swim lengths in hotel pools, naked whenever permitted), Marianne and Axel's lives were spinning out of control. Ihlen spent time living in a squat in Kentish Town with Broomfield himself (who I was surprised to find out had skin in the game) and Axel spent most of his adult life institutionalised.

Marianne Ihlen returned to Oslo where she married Jan not once, but twice, and spent the rest of her life as a housewife and a secretary while, at the same time, Cohen's career and life took ever more bizarre turns. Acid was given to donkeys, festivals were played in Aix-en-Provence to a sea of pasty white bums and humping hippies, and 1977's Death of Ladies Man (featuring the you have to hear it to believe it Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On) saw Cohen working with Phil Spector who proved to be an ever bigger liability than even Cohen had expected.

Spector's life, Cohen recalls, was spent permanently drunk and there were guns everywhere. Guns lying around the floor, guns in cakes (!), and guns being quite regularly pointed at people's heads. It doesn't sound fun and Cohen was unhappy in Los Angeles so eventually he ordained as a Buddhist monk and went to live in a monastery. No small life change.

While he was in the monastery, his manager and friend (and remarkably someone he went on to speak favourably about) Kelley Lynch stole all his money. Cohen had no choice but to tour again, he was skint, and set about it with no little gusto. His twilight years as a jobbing musician, each night pulling ever more exquisite rabbits out from underneath his trademark fedora, were a huge success. Packing out enormodromes like the O2 to rapt audiences of all ages who were probably only too aware that their chances of seeing him in the flesh were getting slimmer all the time.

Hearts were won over as sure as monies were recouped, even Marianne turned up to a gig to sing a long to songs written about her forty years earlier with a tear in her eye. It was a coda to a life well lived. It certainly wasn't a perfect life. Cohen, in his quest for truth, for love, and, often it seems, for oblivion and salvation, made many mistakes but, in the end, he did right by those closest to him.

Despite the happiness of her later marriage, it seemed that Marianne Ihlen still carried something of Leonard Cohen inside her for the rest of her life (perhaps we all do, it's hard to ever truly stop loving somebody even if the expression of that love stops becoming physical) and he, also, quite clearly, carried something of her within his heart until his death, just three months after Marianne's.

Nick Broomfield proved to be less cynical than I'd expected with this film. I laughed at Masha Cohen, Leonard's Russian mum, being described as a great singer but a 'mad' lady, chortled at anecdotes telling of Cohen's friend, Irving Layton, always asking him "are you sure you're doing the wrong thing?", and I puzzled over what involvement The Dream Academy's Nick Laird-Clowes had in the film. But, most of all, I felt emotional and, yes, tearful. The tears of sadness, at the end however, were replaced with salty tears of joy as I realised this film was a wonderful testament to love. Not just love of romantic partners but love of music, love of life, and love of friendship. 

A paean to human connection if you will. As Cohen wrote in Bird on a Wire, another song inspired by Marianne Ihlen, "for like a baby, stillborn, like a beast with his horn I have torn everyone who reached out for me. But I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong I will make it all up to thee".

The Search for the Elusive Antepavilion:A Very Brief Odyssey in E2.

I've made bigger fuck ups in my life, that's for sure. But yesterday's hunt for the 2019 Antepavilion on Brunswick Wharf off Laburnum Street in E2 certainly proved to be just that. A fuck up. One that, to be fair, was not entirely my fault.

I'd read, in The Guardian, about the 'comically rackety' edifice 'inspired by Monsieur Hulot’s tumbledown building in Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle' and how it resembled an 'architectural battenberg cake' but could I find it? I absolutely could not.

Catherine Slessor's Guardian piece had linked it in with Junya Ishigami's Serpentine Pavilion and the Colour Palace in the garden of Dulwich Picture Gallery and having ticked them both off, somewhat perfunctorily I'm ashamed to say, over the last twenty-fours I was eager to complete the set.

I took the tube from Lancaster Gate to Liverpool Street, scoffed a packet of very vinergary Discos as I walked up a wet and windy Norton Folgate and through Shoreditch to Hoxton where, on reaching the mosque, I turned down Laburnum Street. The mosque was architecturally pleasing, the canal looked as good as it always does - in its usual post-industrial way, and there were architectural delights en route in the form of the gaily painted Laburnum Boat Yard and the imposing, yet welcoming looking, Bridge Academy but there was no bloody Antepavilion. No matter how hard I looked.

I made it all the way to the end of Laburnum Street, I wandered out to the canal again, I occasionally glimpsed unusual buildings on the horizon (when you're looking for unusual things, life tends not to disappoint) but none of them even remotely resembled a battenberg cake.

I checked the GPS on my phone and walked to the exact spot where the Antepavilion was supposed to be. There was just a graffitied wall and some boarded up windows looking across to an impressive brick chimney. There was no Antepavilion. Maybe the Antepavilion has gone. I'd e-mailed the Architectural Foundation behind the project and their response was minimal at best so I'd not been able to find details of how, and when, I could visit.

I thought I'd chance it. I thought how hard can it be to spot a rickety battenberg cake towering above the canals of Hackney. It turned out be very difficult. In fact it turned out, for me, to be impossible. I walked back to Shoreditch Overground station. The pubs were too busy for a solo drinker intent on a pint and a crossword so I took the tube to New Cross Gate where the train terminated (despite its planned destination being Crystal Palace). It was one of those days, yet again, so I walked home. I stopped for a couple of pints in The Ivy House. Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick were playing at The Goose Is Out folk night in the main room but it was sold out and I didn't have tickets. I walked home, I watched the news and then a documentary about Joan Armatrading while drinking San Miguel and eating mashed potato. I felt like I'd morphed into a real life Murun Buchstansngur. I went to bed.

Construction time again #4:Junya Ishigami and the Serpentine Pavilion.

I choose the wrong day to go. There's no getting around it. I had the whole of our, mostly glorious, summer to get along to see the Serpentine Pavilion (I'd even briefly glanced at it while visiting the gallery itself) but I left it until late September. Obviously we get nice days in late September but not the day I went, not yesterday. It was absolutely pissing down. To the point that I was worried that my phone would get so wet through my pocket that it would cease to function.

Luckily that was not to happen but it did mean my visit to Kensington Gardens was something of a damp squib. The Egyptian geese and moorhens seemed to be having a much better time of it than me. I can't complain though. In 2016 when I went to see the Bjarke Ingels Group's construction the sun was out, the year after it smiled one me when I made my annual pilgrimage to take in Francis Kere's lovely building, and last year Frida Escobedo seemed to have, almost, brought the weather with her from Mexico.

Into every life a little rain must fall and, sometimes, a lot of it. By the time I got to the far end of Exhibition Road I was drenched and when I eventually reached the pavilion a member of staff did a sad face at me and asked if I was okay.

I was. Because (a) I was now in the dry - predictably enough it stopped raining almost as soon as I got there and (b) I love looking at architecture. It's an absolute pleasure for me. I even arrange walks so I can bore my friends about it! My Serpentine Pavilion visits have, of recent years, been solo visits though. A quick look at the gallery, maybe a coffee, some cake, on to the pub, read the paper, look at my phone, go home. Watch Mastermind and Newsnight. You can see why I look forward to getting out. Even if it's hoying it down.

I'm waffling on about myself here (even more than normal) and that's because there's not really that much to say about the pavilion. Tokyo based Junya Ishigami is the architect responsible for this year and he's gone for a functional, and aesthetically pleasing, structure rather than one that grandstands or operates as a tourist attraction.

The main feature, luckily for me, is the roof. Formed from randomly arranged stone slates as has been the case in Japanese architecture for centuries and made to appear as if it's grown organically from the lawn of Kensington Gardens. It swoops up and down in a sinuous, slinky style that would look charming on a prettier day but, following a downpour, was simply providing channels for water to cascade somewhat dramatically down from!

The interior is described as 'cave like' - which is pushing it a bit as is the description of the columns that hold up that all important roof as 'a forest'. It's an open space with a few steel rods holding up a roof. There's nothing wrong with trying to reimagine traditional architectural styles using new materials, in many cases it seems like a necessary and positive development, but if you're going to write of caves and forests it'd be a good idea to have something that at least resembles a cave or a forest.

In fact I thought more about the grey slate mines of Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia as visited many times on family holidays. The imposing grey, and overcast, skies certainly gave it the dark and moody Welsh melodrama that you'll find both in that part of the world and in the darkest recesses of my psyche. The 'Evans' in me has had to manifest itself somehow!

It was only the weather that made this visit less fun than previous years but as I wandered out to the Long Water and the Italian Gardens (a regular occurence for me, though this time I gave the pub a swerve - at least until much later) I could still reflect on a worthwhile visit. I think the yearly ritual of the Serpentine Gallery providing a space for architects who have yet to build anything permanent in this country is a great idea and long may it continue. All being well, I'll be along again next year and hopefully I'll not require windscreen wipers on my glasses to make the most of it! 

Inside the Palace of Colour:Dulwich Pavilion 2019.

"A colour palace, monumental in scale and delicate in construction. A palace of images; a lantern balancing on elephant's feet; four men carrying a roof bought at a market; a grain store raised on straddle stones; a theatre; a masquerade; the folds of hanging fabric in a Lagos market; the gateway to a paradise garden".

In terms of writing a review of Dulwich Picture Gallery's 2019 pavilion, one of several that appear to have sprung up around the city in response to the Serpentine's annual creation, it appears that the architectural pairing of Pricegore X Yinka Ilori have done the heavy lifting for me. On entering the grounds of the gallery you're confronted with a hulking, but extraordinarily colourful, box hoisted aloft on four overweight red piloti that you can look at, take photos of, climb stairs up into, and that's about it.

It looks lovely but it serves no purpose. Even the Jude's ice cream counter (pistachio, mango sorbert, and my favourite mint choc chip all available) was closed and the bar taps were covered up. The tables sat empty. I'd probably have been better off visiting in the height of summer when I'd like to imagine hoards of art pilgrims relaxing with ice cream, coffees, and beers as their kids run around in the sunshine.

It would definitely have worked better then. Instead I climbed the stairs of what looked, from the inside, like a gaily coloured building site, walked round, came back down again, had a look at an architectural model in a vitrine box, went for a piss and, so as not to waste my journey, went to Pizza Express before walking home through the rather lovely Dulwich Park.

That's not to say that The Colour Palace, to give it its proper name, is crap. It's anything but. It's rather lovely. Spaces like this, and Kensington Gardens and elsewhere are improved by colourful temporary buildings and bizarre mastabas, they bring a smile to our faces, give us something to talk about, somewhere to go and visit.

But I went on my own on a grey and overcast day so I had nobody to talk to about the pavilion and it wasn't even good enough weather to sit on the grass nearby and read. So I just appreciated it for what it was, imagined how much better it would be with company or in summer, and moved on. I like my own company but too much of my life is spent experiencing things and not enough spent sharing them. I felt a little bit sad.

But I also felt a little bit happy. I was pleased I'd got off my arse and gone for a walk, gone to look at something. I realised I was lucky to live in a city that was overflowing with art and other distractions and to live in a city that was blessed with such beautiful green spaces. I appreciated things could be a lot worse. There probably won't be another pavilion outside the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2021. I hope I'm still around to visit it - and I hope somebody will come with me.

Read it in Books:The Sheltering Sky.

"From a certain point onward, there is no turning back; that is the point that must be reached" - Franz Kafka.

"Each man's destiny is personal only insofar as it may happen to resemble what is already in his memory" - Eduardo Mallea.

"Alienation and existential despair" - now, they're themes I can get down with. When my friend Dan gave me as a gift a copy of Paul Bowles' 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky I must admit I had no clue what it was about. I was vaguely aware of a 1990 film (directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich) but I'd not even seen that. I put the book on my shelf and pretty much forgot all about it.

I didn't even really expect to read it but over the next couple of years I caught it winking at me and, finally, in July of this year I grabbed hold of it and gave it a good seeing to. For the most part I was glad I did because it was interesting and, occasionally enriching, if not always totally gripping.

The author, Paul Bowles, is actually better known as a composer. He studied under Aaron Copland and went on to receive considerable acclaim for his Ravel inspired piano improvisations as well as becoming an ethnomusicologial pioneer, specifically in North Africa. Which is where, in his late thirties, he had the idea for the story of The Sheltering Sky. It took him a year, mostly in Tangier and Fez, to complete what became his first major novel, and soon he was the toast of the literary world. Receiving praise from the likes of Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess, and William Burroughs.

The basic gist of the story is that married couple Kit and Port Moresby have drifted apart, intimacy between them has ceased, and they've relocated to Algeria to see if the desert heat can put the heat back into their marriage. As you might expect, things don't work out quite like that.

In fact things go massively tits up. Port has his passport stolen and feels obliged to drink cognac with a lieutenant, Kit takes to necking French whisky neat, they take it in turns to be ill, and at times it's so breathlessly hot that the Americans start to feel like insects under magnifying glasses.  They both question the very definition of their own and each other's existence, their place on Earth, and their failing frames. People cheat on each other, people steal from each other, and people punch each other.

The spiral just intensifies. They're forever moving from one place to another (places with evocative names like Ain Krorfa, Bou Noura, El Ga'a, and Sba) and yet this just seems to multiply their woes and maladies. At one point Kit imagines Port has meningitis. Or is it malaria? Typhus? Typhoid? Diptheria? Yellow fever? Kala azar whatever that is)? Or just the plain old plague? He's certainly sick, but then so is she and the sense of being aliens in a land they barely understand does not help with either of their convalescences.

Their story, their unravelling if you like, is set against a backdrop of Arabs in fezzes drinking mineral water, shoeshine boys with their faces covered in flies, trams dinging their bells, idly plucked ouds, and waiters proffering declasse pastis. The emotional backdrop, too, is fiercely drawn. Port suffers a cultural cringe as he walks around town. People stare at him, talk about him in a language he can't understand, and he feels guilt at being well fed and healthy in a region where so few are. He wonders if "any American can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with suffering".

The language is often one of negativity and despair. Colours are "indifferent", designs are "apathetic", landscapes are unreachable, Kit's pain "unendurable and endless", dark dreams are shattered, and "the light of terror" is constant . Certain phrases conjure universes in their imagery. "There was a certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness", Port's "being was a well a thousand miles deep". They stop you in your tracks and when Port compares life to smoking a cigarette it's hard not to become overwhelmed by sadness:-

"The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realise it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste".

Ouch! The essence of the story is not, however - or at least not entirely, a treatise on mortality but instead an incisive, yet abstracted, deconstruction of both a marriage in trouble and the personality traits of both Port and Kit that allow themselves to let this happen. Port appears dogmatic and reticent to admit any fault on his own behalf, a holier-than-thou type who insists he's a traveller rather than a tourist and even has a theory to back that up.

He imagines himself the protagonist of the story and Kit a mere spectator, or accessory, to his life. Denied her own narrative. He's not so much cruel as he is neglectful. His own concept of living a free, romantic life means he's barely able to entertain other people who may feel differently. His great passion is not for Kit, it's not for other people at all but for "solitude and the proximity of infinite things". He has shut himself in a cage to protect himself him from love and hurt, yet he wants for Kit to share in his almost abstracted passions. Alas, she does not.

 

Kit, who some days "could feel doom hanging over her head like a low raincloud", struggles with the knowledge of impending, yet suspended, personal disaster. She plays out past scenarios in her mind again and again even though she can't change them. She relies on a self-constructed system of omens, dream interpretations, and superstitions to guide her life and these, of course, only serve to consign her to further unhappiness.

She's barely able to relate to other people, empathise with them, or even dislike them. She can only view them as signifiers or influencers in her own existence so when she claims  "other people rule my life" she doesn't mean it in an altruistic way. She struggles to accept she cares about what Port does but still loses sleep agonising over everything. Even when Kit feeels happy she is aware that she is on a pendulum and in an hour's time it will swing her back towards despair. I found myself identifying with her more than I did Port. 

Even if I've never, quite, woken up with a hangover and necked an entire bottle of champagne before getting out of bed. Her relationship with Tunner, the seeming third wheel in this adventure, is one she views completely through the prism of her prior relationship with Port. Tunner bores her and she finds him "offensively chipper". She tells herself he's a "dolt" because "his emotional manouevres all take place out in the open. Not a tree or rock to hide behind". She even gets annoyed when his eyes sparkle! This distaste doesn't appear to register with Port who is suspicious of Kit and Tunner's one-way friendship.

 

What are Tunner's motivations for joining them on a trip in which he's seemingly unwanted? He's described, memorably, as "an essentially simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp" and it's suggested that he's normally, and effortlessly, very popular with everyone he meets so trying to ingratiate himself with ingrates may, subsconsciously, be "giving his personality the exercise it required".

The local Arabic population aren't treated particularly well by Port, Kit, or Tunner, dismissed, at one point, as "monkeys". But does Bowles treat them any better? Are their characters fleshed out as well as our three leading protagonists or even as well as the deserts, hotels, and souks? It sometimes feels as if the camels, the strong black coffee, and the "draped indigo veils" are there to give flavour rather than texture and it has to be said that none of the African characters are given the depth of character that Bowles has provided for Port and Kit.

 

That can be justified, just, by contesting that this story is about Port and Kit, it's about strangers in a strange land, and their very real inability to understand the behaviour or the motivations of those who have actually grown up there. While The Sheltering Sky whispers uncomfortable truths about colonial hangovers it also speaks softly, yet powerfully, about man's attitude to women. Often Kit is treated as mere property. By Port, by Tunner, and by the local Arabs. For most of the book her story is played out as an interior monologue. Her most meaningful conversations are the ones she has with herself in her own head because her male companions have not bestowed her with sufficient agency to view her as an equal.

Whether that was Bowles' intention, back in the forties, it's hard to say. It seems unlikely. But Bowles is an astute observer of human behaviour as evinced by some lovely observations and meditations about life and how we live it. Kit feels sad each day at sunset as it feels like the end of an epoch, as if something is dying. Port thinks most clearly on journeys and makes "decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary", and vermouth-cassis sipping Lieutenant a'Armagnac (a minor character) allows "himself the luxury of not being snobbish about the indigenous population".

It's a book in which large events take place but you barely notice them as you're forced to experience them through the worldview of people who, despite their undoubted intellect, don't fully understand what is happening to, and around, them. My attention did drift at times, the book was not without longueurs, and I rarely found myself particularly emotionally invested in the lives of Kit, Port, Tunner, or anybody else who cropped up but I still found it rewarding. I take away Bowles' meditations on life, ageing, the passing of time, and his frustration at just how difficult it is for people to make true and lasting connections with each other more than I accept the book as a page turner and certainly more than I'd accept it as a travel guide to Algeria and the Sahara. But then I doubt that was ever Paul Bowles' intention. Thanks to Dan for this and all the other books, jazz CDs, and Tunnock's tea cake mugs he's gifted me over the years.