The Knowledge of London Streets

The Knowledge, Brain Mapped
Photograph by Anthony Cotsifas
Prop stylist: Victoria Petro Conroy
The NYT Magazine

I've spent some time wandering London's streets and getting lost, sometimes with Sun-Ae back in the early 1990s, when we were still getting acquainted and angrily misreading London City maps, and in those days, one of the things we heard about was "The Knowledge," that mental map of London that the drivers of black taxicabs were supposed to know by heart, so I was excited to see an entire article on the subject written by Jody Rosen, "The Knowledge, London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS" (NYTM, November 10, 2014), in which I learned that these cabdrivers must memorize not only streets but the buildings and history relevant to the streets:

It is said that the Knowledge is as much about learning history as learning your way around. After completing the Knowledge, [David] Hall undertook a years-long course of study to earn the "blue badge" of an official London tour guide. While Hall strolled around the City pointing - logging road works and making notes about new restaurants and bars - he led me on an impromptu walking tour: more Wren churches, medieval livery companies and guild halls marked with elaborate coats of arms, the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers, the Innholders Hall, a carved likeness of Winston Churchill's face in the center of a clock above the doorway of an office building. Toward evening, we made our way back along Queen Victoria Street, passing a massive three-acre building site, the future home of Bloomberg L.P.'s European headquarters. The construction project had revealed further remains of the Temple of Mithras, a Roman ruin first discovered in 1954. The temple once stood on the banks of the Walbrook, a now-buried river that brought fresh water to Roman Londinium. Hall said: "In the religion practiced here, they used to have seven ordeals. If you were a Roman soldier, one of the ordeals was to put you over a fire pit. If you could withstand that particular ordeal, you went to the next stage in that religion."

Hall said: "The thing about London is, it's forever changing. The old city is preserved, of course, but there's always a new city coming forth. There really is no end to the Knowledge. It's infinite."

The same could be said about wine expertise. My school friend from elementary school days, Bruce Cochran, is a wine expert who serves as a guide on wine tours around the world, so he has to learn about soils, microclimates, grapes. architecture, art, history, and so on. Some jobs require that sort of learning, and this takes a retentive, inquisitive mind.

I have the curiosity . . . but not the retentiveness.

Peter Ackroyd: A Boozer and an Eccentric

Peter Ackroyd
Photo by Tung Walsh
New York Times T Magazine

Maybe I ought to try reading Peter Ackroyd's books. Jody Rosen writes of "Peter Ackroyd's London Calling" (New York Times T Magazine, September 12, 2013) in a way that makes him appealing to me:

In person, Ackroyd can seem a bit like a statue . . . . He sits for an interview, barely stirring, answering questions in a deadpan tone, wearing a jowly frown that conceals occasional flashes of humor. He is a large, round, walrusine man; he has a bad leg and he moves uncomfortably, heaving himself up from chairs with great groans. He has always been a heavy drinker. "I used to drink spirits, but my liver said no," Ackroyd says. These days, he only drinks wine, but lots of it: a bottle with dinner at a restaurant (he always dines out), and another bottle when he gets home at night.

He is, in other words, a boozer and an eccentric -- an old-fashioned, classically English type. He certainly stands apart from his contemporaries . . . . Ackroyd is a provincial and proud of it, with a hermetic lifestyle that supports his writing regimen. He hates to leave London, professing a strong dislike for the countryside ("It's too noisy, too dangerous, I don't trust their food") and no interest in traveling to other cities ("I don't understand their histories"). He avoids nearly all the rituals of literary celebrity, restricting his promotional efforts to the occasional interview and a single appearance per year at a literary festival. He lives alone, and reserves just two Sundays each month for socializing, taking day trips with a friend to visit historic English towns.

Rather odd of Rosen to describe a man who dislikes the countryside and prefers London as a "provincial," but Ackroyd, anyway, seems my sort of eccentric, namely, a literate, literary boozer. He also reminds me, surprisingly, of a man I blogged on recently, Russell Shorto. Why? They each love their special city. Here's Shorto on Amsterdam:

Having spent the past several years living in Amsterdam and researching a book about its history, I now find that virtually anywhere I walk in this city, whose center has been so tenderly and smartly maintained, I am jostled by ghosts. (Russell Shorto, "The Ghosts of Amsterdam," NYT, September 27, 2013)

Shorto goes on to describe those jostling ghosts -- Churchill, Marx, van Os, van Gogh, and more -- and hhow he experiences history as nearly palpable memory. Similarly, Ackroyd, touching on an almost palpable past in the first chapter of London: The Biography, which Rosen quotes:

"If you were to touch the plinth upon which the equestrian statue of King Charles I is placed, at Charing Cross, your fingers might rest upon the projecting fossils of sea lilies, starfish or sea urchins. There is a photograph of that statue taken in 1839; with its images of hackney cabs and small boys in stove-pipe hats the scene already seems remote, and yet how unimaginably distant lies the life of those tiny marine creatures. In the beginning was the sea. There was once a music-hall song entitled 'Why Can't We Have the Sea in London?,' but the question is redundant; the site of the capital, 50 million years before, was covered by great waters."

Well, perhaps Akroyd jostles up against a more distant past, but he and Shorto share with me a passion for what is not entirely gone . . .

Guy Trebay's Quiddities of London

Arab Hall
Leighton House Museum

Andrew Testa

New York Times

Here's a writer for me to remember: Guy Trebay. (Yes, I've read him before.) This past weekend, I happened to read an article of his about the "whatness" of London, "London's Odd and Empty Corners" (New York Times, March 8, 2013), and am so enthralled that I'm compelled to note it here in my blog! Trebay begins in medias res:

"You know, guv, that really gets on my goat," Billy Allardyce said from the front of the taxi, his amplified voice a warble of Abbey Road reverb.

We were barreling toward Portobello Road in a cold winter downpour, headed for an arcade I'd been tipped about by my friend, the antiquarian Alexander di Carcaci. Mr. Allardyce was griping about change. The peculiarities and quirks of his 1960s childhood, he said, had given way to the blight of center city sameness.

"When I was a boy you could still see all them little shops, streets of specialty shops," Mr. Allardyce told me. Back then, Columbia Market -- today a place of open-air flower stalls and hipster brunch spots -- was where East End families shopped for pet guinea pigs.

"Kittens, dogs, snakes, rabbits," Mr. Allardyce said. "They even had goats."

The image delights me -- a goat cropping grass in central London. It summons up both England's agrarian soul and also a capital city in which little-known spaces, odd corners and crooked byways have always had their place. It speaks to me of quiddity, that ineffable quality of what-ness. People have it -- places, too . . . .

[F]orgo the long lines and the touristic must-sees and practice instead some urban idling, the flânerie Balzac termed the "gastronomy of the eye." Walter Benjamin more famously characterized the flâneur as an essential urban figure, an amateur detective and investigator of urbanity. Predicting that rampant consumer capitalism would eventually spell doom for a flâneur's pleasures, Benjamin also neatly anticipated Billy Allardyce's gripe, and my own.

Not many writers could bring the quotidian goats of London's quiddity together with the erudite aesthete's flâneur eye and successfully bundle them all into a taxi for conversation with a driver who likely has all "The Knowledge" required of The City's best cabbies for rapidly getting passengers precisely where they want to be, say, Leighton House:

A visitor coming off the street and through a drab reception area (formerly the breakfast room) into Leighton House is thus plunged into an Orientalist delirium: Satsuma vases, scholar's rocks, a stuffed peacock perched on a railing, and the Arab Hall itself, a chamber whose blue tile panels, Genoa marble columns, gilded friezes and domed skylight were brought together, it would seem, to stun the viewer into aesthetic submission, a Victorian version of shock and awe.

That "aesthetic submission" is a clever play on the literal meaning of the word "Islam" -- less clever the Iraq War allusion, though nicely ironic, at least, since the Arab world is the astonishing, awe-inspiring one this time.

Read the entire article . . .

Guess I need to read Wodehouse . . .

Boris Johnson
Andrew Parsons / i-Images for Newsweek

Sunday evening, my daughter and I read a recent Newsweek article about the Tory party's politically ambitious loose cannon, Boris Johnson, by Greg Williams, "Why London Mayor Boris Johnson Worries Tory Leaders" (April 30, 2012), or rather, my daughter read the article, aloud, while I listened and corrected her articulation, along with fulfilling my role as offline dictionary and encyclopedia, until we reached this:

Most Londoners have never met anyone quite like the 47-year-old Johnson. He's practically a P.G. Wodehouse character, a bumbling, disorderly member of the upper class, except Johnson is genuinely erudite and fiercely ambitious -- and he rides the streets of London on a bicycle.

Sa-Rah stopped reading and asked:

"What's a 'Wodehouse' character?"

I couldn't answer that with Johnson's own erudition, but attempted to bull my way through by restating the passage itself:

"Wodehouse," I explained, "was a British writer who wrote humorous stories about eccentric upper-class characters, inept figures who were somewhat shambolic, like Johnson except they're not as well read as he is."

As you see, I strove for a polished response. Didn't help. Sa-Rah cottoned on that I was bluffing:

"Have you actually read Wodehouse, Daddy?"

"Uh . . . no, but I intend to . . ."

Soon, maybe. I have to stay a step ahead of my daughter -- who, by the way, was caught at school surreptitiously reading a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover! The study hall teacher confiscated the book.

Good! I've not yet read that novel . . .

Omer Ibn Hajaj Pays a Little Visit

Tower of London Bridge

From some internet lounge, he gazes out...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Back on July 18, 2006, I posted an entry on Abu Bakr Naji's 'textbook' for jihad, the title of which has been rendered in English as The Management of Savagery.

Naji's text has been called "Al Qaeda's Playbook" -- a sports metaphor, I take it, making an analogy especially to the football strategies sketched out in the 'playbooks' that coaches put together.

Terrorism as sport? Perhaps a 'sport of nature'? A debased nature, I mean.

But back to the topic. My blog entry on Naji was merely a summary of his text, or part of it (for I couldn't find time to finish reading the entire, very long tome), along with some speculations of mine on what to expect if the playbook's strategies are put into operation. Here were my concluding speculations:

I've been assuming that this jihadist process will be undertaken in areas of what used to be called the Third World, but how might local application work in Europe itself, where demographic trends project large Muslim populations by mid-century? Expect Islamists to press for autonomy in Muslim dominated areas, to demand the right to apply Sharia in their own communities, to put pressure on non-Muslims to move out of Muslim areas, and to use intimidation to destabilize neighboring areas. Expect Islamists also to use radical versions of multiculturalism and local elections for political office as legitimate channels in pushing their agenda.

I think that we see some of this happening in Europe already, and the current riots in the Val-d'Oise department of France might have some connection, but that link remains unclear to me for now. Sometimes rioting 'youth' are just rioting youth.

Perhaps it's all beyond me anyway, or so says an Islamist from an "Internet Lounge" in London on his "first assignment" (according to information provided with the IP Address, which I've saved), who posted this comment:

however some tries, it will always be almost impossible to get a handle on the islamist and where are they really comming from.

Little knowldge of the cultural/historical and social context of the middle eastern political and religious discourse would always be the greatest block for any western mind when struggling with the modern islamic global resistence movement.

my sincere adivce give up lads and try your hands on something else more simple.

This Islamist signed himself as Omer Ibn Hajaj, which doubtless has some meaning that escapes me -- precisely as Ibn Hajaj expected, I presume, since he has me pegged as lacking "the cultural/historical and social context" necessary for understanding what he calls "the modern islamic global resistence movement."

Yeah, what do I know?

I do know that a certain Abu Omar Ben Hajaj of Morocco or Spain wrote in 1073 on agriculture and the proper fertilization of soil for planting sugar cane, as Felix A. Mathews tells us in "Northwest Africa and Timbuctoo" (Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York (1881), page 208). And a certain Amr Ibn Hajaj is mentioned -- in Imam Mohammad Jawad Chirri's Imam Hussein leader of the martyrs (page 13) -- as leading a battle against Imam Hussein, but that would refer to an Ibn Hajaj fighting against a so-called 'rightly guided caliph', which seems an unlikely nom de guerre for our Omer Ibn Hajaj to take upon himself.

So Omer Ibn Hajaj is right, it seems, about my ignorance. In my brief reply, I wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion, Omer Ibn Hajaj. Perhaps I'll try my hand at something simpler, like subatomic physics.

Except that physics is also beyond my ken ... but I sometimes report on that as well (though not for a good long while now).

So, I'll keep on 'striving' in my own spiritual 'struggle' to understand Islamism and its jihad.