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The European Beat Studies Network conference on Burroughs ended on September 4th. I missed a few amusing pictures of the proceedings, so here’s one of the EBSN group, wearing Burroughs masks, outside Bill’s old flat in Dalmeny Court, Duke Street Saint James’s. Passers-by steered well clear of us.
The best thing about the EBSN conference was meeting Margarida Martins who cut short another conference in France order to attend. She is a Burroughs scholar teaching at the University of Lisbon. It was the same for Oliver Harris, the chair of EBSN and one of the conference organisers, who wrote to me afterwards saying the highlight for him was Margarida flying over for the event as he hadn’t seen her in 28 years since he supervised her MA on Burroughs.
On the 11th I flew off for another event. In fact it was mainly a long-standing invitation to see my friend Camila’s new flat in Lisbon, but I also took part in a seminar on Music and Literature at the University as well as did several preliminary interviews toward a possible biography about me, to be published in Portuguese. Proper Portuguese, that is to say Brazilian Portuguese not the eighteenth century mumbling of Portugal with all its shushing and hissing. (apparently before that it sounded more like present day Brazilian). We also took in some great and some terrible restaurants.
In order to have people to dinner, Camila first had to build the table. In fact, it wasn’t delivered in time so the meal was cozy as Camila’s old flatmates squeezed around something the size of a card table. It was great to see them again. Here we are Joan, Camila, Lilia, me and also Margarida from the Burroughs conference in London, who is a friend of Camila’s and works in the same department.
Camila had prepared quite a long talk for her class which constituted quite a bit of our presentation, but then we had a conversation about the Burroughs cut-up technique, which she illustrated with film-clips of both Dylan and Bowie demonstrating how they used it to create their songs. Dylan looked particularly out of it in his clip which must have been from around 1966. He tore the paper instead of using scissors which would have made difficult to do properly – you move the four cut quarters of the page against one another until a combination of words appeals or strikes you as interesting and then type it out.
Then came the discussion about whether Dylan should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. There are two questions there: should songs be regarded as Literature at all in the context of the Nobel Prize, which is awarded for a lifetime body of work, and two, if so, should Dylan have won it? Regarding the second, I say no, as he hasn’t produced any truly great work for sixty years, ever since Blonde on Blonde in 1966. We would obviously have to discount Tarantula, his amphetamine-fuelled ‘novel’ as it is garbage, which leaves a hundred or so lines of songs, or ‘poetry’ as this argument might call them, to be judged on a par with the collected works of Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Becket, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, all winners since WW2. It is an insult to them all. Annie Ernaux, one of my favourite authors, didn’t win until 2022. Also, if singers are to be included: Chuck Berry is a far better writer of songs than Dylan. His compressed vignettes of teenage life are masterpieces. And in terms of songs as poems, Leonard Cohen was still alive in 2016 – a far better poet than Dylan. For that matter many other songwriters are better or at least as good.
I find two things wrong with songwriters getting the Nobel for Literature: one is that they have an overwhelming advantage over writers because they have multi-million-dollar publicity machines behind them. Everybody knows what Dylan looks like, they know all the details of his life, he is a ‘star’. No-one knew what Annie Erneax looked like until 2022.
Two: it is not the work but the star, the fame, the personality that is being awarded not words on pages. In Dylan’s case, it was a group of English professors from Upsala University – hard-core Dylan fans – who had lobbied and campaigned hard for Dylan’s award for many years before the committee eventually succumbed. Also, songwriters have plenty of awards of their own that writers are not eligible for. Writers have a hard enough time as it is without having to compete with Mick Jagger or Taylor Swift. Harrumph!
Afterwards the organisers: Miguel, Sara, Camila and I had dinner. They all seemed pleased with the event and with the attendance which was better than they had expected. There was no real argument onstage, though Camila remained in favour of Dylan getting the award. It would have been nice to divide the audience into pro and con and given them cotton-wool balls to throw at each other, as in a production of Ubu Roi I once saw. There was a bit of discussion, and a student told me afterwards that they changed their opinion. That’s what a seminar is for.
We had lunch with Marina Watson, who’s hoping to move to London to further her journalist career. I hope she does. We also dined at a few restaurants which I always like to do because it gives a real sense of place. Downtown I felt a bit of that urban energy I usually think is missing in Lisbon which was good. The days were very hot and everyone wanted to be outside in the evening so the streets were packed.
Unfortunately, the first one we went to was Solar dos Presuntos on the Rua das Portas de Santa Antao: a huge place on several floor, the walls totally covered with framed photographs of previous clients. But though some were of the celebrities actually in the restaurant, many hundreds of them were either cartoons or publicity shots, all lined up, frames touching, in regimental order; the wet dream of a deranged interior designer let loose with several thousand photographs.
The first room they put us in was so depressing we asked to be moved, but the room on the next floor was just as bad. The whole place was sterile, like a big hotel restaurant. We should have left but it would have taken some time to find and get to somewhere else. The Jamón Ibérico was good, at least that was it looked and tasted like; it has a different name in Portuguese of course, but the meal was marred by incredibly poor service. The water glass smelled of washing-up liquid. The water and wine were both placed out of our reach and only after we attempted to serve ourselves did a waiter rush up. The kid was dry and had been hanging around a bit before being microwaved. The only proper attention came when they asked outright for a tip, even though this is not usually the case in Portugal where you only tip if the service really merits it. One to avoid at all costs.
However, the other two restaurants were great. Ofício on the Rua Nova da Trindade is listed in the Michelin Bib-Gourmand section and if the food remains this good will surely get a star soon. Book ahead.
And to complete the Lisbon restaurant guide for this posting – I feel like Grace Dent – we went to one of my favourite restaurants, the Casa do Alentejo, Rua das Portas de Santa Anta, a 17th century palace bang in the middle of the tourist area where all the restaurants have barkers and photographic menus. You enter a rather shabby looking entrance, with no indication that it leads to a restaurant that I could see. A magnificent flight of stairs takes you up to an internal courtyard, and from there, through more wood panelled spaces you finally reach two magnificent large Moorish tiled rooms, filled with hungry people. The food is not top-notch, but it is serviceable and made up for by the beautiful surroundings. Do try the Croquettes de Borrego. As usual they had too few staff, so the service was patchy. It was my third visit, and it didn’t disappoint.
