Last week, I was invited to a conference on Speculative Fiction at the University of Aveiro and I talked about M John Harrison’s The End of Everything and Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, both which say interesting things about AI and literature. ( wildly, Blue Lard was written in the 90s but I warn you its not funny unless you’ve read, or tried to read Platonov et al) The thing which I love and which feels very European to me is drinking coffee from a vending machine in a slightly ramshackle modern university building. There was a book festival on in Porto at the same time and the university very generously gave me a ticket to see László Krasznahorkai speak. I’ve never seen such a big queue and audience for a book event in my entire life. It was in Hungarian and Portuguese with translations available through an app, which they said were a mix of human and AI but were clearly only AI- Krasznahorkai’s name was translated as ‘Glasgow’ and ‘Krishna’ and when Krasznahorkai was giving the audience book recommendations they came out as ‘Ann’ and ‘Doug’. ( Gogol? Dostoevsky? Anne Brontë or Anna Akhmatova? Arany? George Sand?) Will I be the fool when a Doug, no last name, wins the Nobel Prize next year? Still, it was magnificent to see Krasznahorkai and hear him speak in his native Hungarian and I was cheerful because I had some strong vodka drink before it . He wore headphones to translate the Portuguese into Hungarian and I hope he at least had a human translator. It’s beautiful to imagine a room filled with interpreters frantically typing out the answers in various languages and transmitting them to everyone instead of a machine. I’ve worked with interpreters before and they are basically just as fast as that app but with fewer mistakes. The sun was very bright in Krasznahorkai’s eyes and someone from backstage brought him a pair of sunglasses, we all cheered and roared when he put them on, he looked so cool, it felt like a literature concert. He talked about overpopulation and about Bach too. There was no q&a but I wanted to ask him is it Glenn Gould or get out when it comes to Bach’s keyboard pieces. I wandered around Porto and Aveiro listening to Beethoven a lot because my main leisure activity is listening to Beethoven at the moment and it’s hard to stray from that but they went very well together indeed. On my last day a Portuguese friend took me to The church of Santa Clara do Porto which used to be part of a Poor Clares nunnery. The 17th century interior is covered in gold leaf and carvings, lots of cupids and saints, and little naughty Bishops burning in liquorice like red wooden flames. Someone was practicing an old pipe organ, the sound was pleasantly fruity, like something you’d encounter in a 19th century toyshop. There was a spiked gate and the nuns sat on the other side of this, and on the nun’s side an odd figure in a glass box wearing a ragged silk dress and hat in the fashion of the time, with broken fingers, and I heard, real human hair, a long forgotten rich patron.
There was another organ, a portable one in a big wooden cabinet with doors that opened, revealing the organ inside, it made me think of a magician’s Saw box and the child catcher carriage from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or that a very old withered nun inside, the organ like some gloomy little city belonging only to her.
The church was restored not to long ago. My friend told me someone had written a thesis on how many types of insects had burrowed into and eaten this Christ statue over the years.
It’s worth watching this video on the restoration from 7 minutes to see the rotting Christ statue pre-restoration.
I saw a Vivian Maier exhibition in Porto too and in the same photography museum there was a small show of author portraits and an elderly man there was taking selfies with them all. I didn’t realise Maier took so many photos of Canada so I am glad I went as I can be impatient with any sort of 20th c americana.
I am reading Seneca, and with my constantly turning attention span felt called out by this (trans, John Davie)
In a panic, I am trying to refresh all the languages I studied in my early 20s and half heartedly since then, on top of writing and working and reading. I want to become a much better human than I am! I picked up some French books in Portugal, including La femme gelée by Annie Ernaux, and while reading it (very slowly) I found a good rebuttal to Seneca « ça va pas te boucher le trou du cul!»
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