On 30 May 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld gave a lecture in Oxford about the international civil service. Now, 60 years later, the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (DHF) has reissued the lecture with Hammarskjöld’s original footnotes, a new introduction and a note on the text.
The cover of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation’s reissue of Hammarskjöld’s Oxford lecture, which includes his original footnotes, a new introduction and a note on the text.
One of the many surprises of the archival research phase was receiving a package of information from Oxford University Press, including details of the process leading up to the publication of the original chapbook version.
I also produced blog post that barely hints at the wealth of information I uncovered about Hammarskjöld’s trip to England, and a two-and-a-half-minute video courtesy of Different Films, which you can watch below.
I’m not sure which of these activities has involved the most work, but if I had to pick the one that has proven the most rewarding I’d say the video has it all.
From conception to treatment, selection of media and sequencing, it’s probably the only video about a publication I’ve ever been involved in but I am certain it won’t be the last.
While the history of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Oxford lecture could fill a book, my blog post explores the untold stories behind three known versions of the text.
Stéphane Mallarmé is dead. Long may his absence linger. Long may the horrifying abyss of the white (and black) pages confound we poets, prattlers and plagiarists. And long may we question the substance of our languages, the correspondences between organic, systemic lifeforms and the unstoppable progress of symbols: numbers, letters, marks, voids . . .
One hundred years have passed since the death of one of France’s most enigmatic and curious poets. And yet for one hundred chaotic and turbulent years editors and publishers all over the world have surveyed poems, articles, essays and stories stamped with Mallarmé’s indelible influence, brushed with his unmistakable reverie.
In the same way, his paradoxical presence could be felt at the Mallarmé Writers’ Event, a small-scale but intense seminar held at the Alliance Française de Melbourne on 8–9 October 1998. The event was a celebration as much of Australian writings and writers as of Mallarmé himself.
It feels like I only changed the WordPress theme for this site a week ago. But I’m doing it all over again today, by installing an early version of the Eksell WordPress theme by Anders Norén.
At the time, I claimed I made that switch because of the number of spam emails I was getting from WordPress developers offering to redesign my site. In reality, those emails haven’ stopped, and I guess they never will.
You could take Brazil in an afternoon, sure.
Knock yerself out, call me when yr done, etc.
Consider that continent's arc: it's gesturing
across the Atlantic, towards Ghana, or was it
Côte d'Ivoire, or both? — you decide, call me
when it's done. Let us speak of it forever, or
more. Speak of vast hillsides slipping into a
river, the minute sunsets, postcards, babies,
paperbacks: everything at once, yet nothing at
all to remember or recall, situated as you are
inside a hand-drawn map of Minas Gerais,
weeping over Nascimento's 'Os Povos'. Your ...
move, perhaps? Vast as a view across an ocean,
invisible strings, dotted lines stretched out:
sewing the imaginary gap shut. Stick figures
tumble overboard; waves do nothing but leer,
their foamy peaks a bit like tankards raised
in empty bars (by persons 'sketchy', you add,
but then why bother? The effect has already
been achieved, its correspondances noted. AO.
The old Sankt Olof Express puffing away at the Brösarp railway station in Skåne, Sweden.
No sounds, except the wind in the pine trees. Is the train even coming? How will I know? Should I crouch down, put my ear to the tracks and listen? I’ve seen countless people do this in movies but never believed in it until now.
Then I hear a high-pitched whistle. And the chug-a-chug of the steam train’s engine. Yep, that’s it, I think. That’s the Ångtåget på Österlen I saw 15 minutes ago at Brösarp Station, about to depart for Sankt Olof. And now it’s headed this way.
I cross the tracks, alight from my bicycle and lean it against the fence. Then I pull out my mobile telephone and open its native camera application.
Holding the phone in front of my face with both hands, I turn to landscape view. My eyes train on the screen, in which I see the still-empty railway track and the cutting and the pine forest. Patches of blue in the overcast sky.
At last, sensing that the train is about to round the bend, I press record.
The opening frame from my epic video of a train bawling round a bend just outside Brösarp in the Österlen region of Skåne, Sweden.
The spectacle that unfolds on the screen in my hands is nothing short of mind-blowing.
As I stand there spellbound, the old steam train comes barrelling around the bend in full cry. Its funnel jettisons smoke into the sky with majestic power. Its black fuselage tears through the cutting. Its whistle howls like a banshee.
Within seconds it’s past me, its packed carriages hurtling by. I swing around to capture the caboose disappear around the bend.
Within that brief period—twenty seconds, no more—an array of thoughts flit through my mind.
I think about Paul Theroux’s journey in The Old Patagonian Express. About his maddening companion, Thornberry. I think about Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. I think about my four-year-old son, and wish he was here with me to watch the train careening past.
And I think about my bike trip through Osterlen, which I am about to complete.
Once the train is definitely gone, I press the button on the screen once more to end the video. As I do so, a thrill runs through my body.
I have created a masterpiece of amateur cinematography, that much at least is certain. I will show the clip to my son and he will be awestruck. I shall post it to various social media services and then sit back as the torrent of likes and comments come in.
But as I press the screen, I hear a click. It is the sound my device usually makes when I’ve taken a photo.
That’s when I realise I haven’t filmed the train bawling through the cutting at all.
In fact, I’d pressed the button at the beginning and taken a photo. (I hadn’t heard the click that first time, in the bedlam of the train’s approach). I’d then panned around and taken an imaginary video. And then I’d taken another photo once the action was over.
You can just make out the puffs of steam coming from the engine of the steam train that passed by this very spot. One second ago.
It would be too easy to think of this non-event as an indicator of the mindlessness of modern-day tourism.
I do indeed take a moment or two to reflect on my utter stupidity as I stare in turn at the two photos I had taken. They aren’t bad photos, by any means.
But neither of them features a train. Not to mention a mighty, old-fashioned steam engine. Spewing black smoke as it carves its way through a primeval Swedish forest.
Then I think of my son and feel a familiar wave of self-pity, tinged with self-hatred. A heady combo, that one. A kind of depression-induced cocktail I’d imbibed for over 30 years. (I’d actually stopped drinking more than a year before the day in question. But I still recognised the emotions that coursed through me back then.)
You (adj.) idiot! Time for a drink or six, eh?After three drinks, you can post those two photos on Instagram anyway. And to (sheol) with trains.
—My former (dispomaniac) self.
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
Instead, I ride the final two kilometres back to the village of Ravlunda, where I’d first hired the bike. Then I make my way back to Stockholm.
That homeward journey by bus and train takes around eight hours. By the end of it, I’ve almost forgotten my attempt at cinematography.
But I’d be lying if I said it spoilt my trip. If anything, that imaginary video made my four days in Österlen something special.
