Or a Long Story Short…
Just back from Bruges.
Hardly an abandoned city, even in December it is crammed to overflowing with tourists.
The most fun was going through the city with The Abandoned City in hand, trying to figure out where everything was again.
If Copenhagen is dragons and Lucca lions, then Bruges is bricks. I think I could spend a week just looking at the bricks, which, like all materials that pass through fire, retain some of that intensity. The extravagent variety of simple shapes (building-block simple, but assembled in an infinity of fashions) makes for some of the most extraordinary architecture.
And staples – for want of a better word. (I’m sure there is one – metal bars, simple or forged into curls, crosses, numerals or fleur-de-lys – that are fixed through transversal bars equally fastened inside the wall, like a giant staple, to fix the walls to inner structures, I should imagine, or perhaps to hold older walls in shape. All this is pure conjecture on my part – I must buy myself some better books on bricks…) It never occured to me a utilitarian feature could take so many shapes. (Well, it should have, given all the ranting and raving in which I indulge on my favourite subject of LOOKING at things…) Wrought-iron calligraphy on the walls of Bruges.
But, it seems every story starts with an image.
Despite all this dutiful wandering, there remain two Bruges – the one through which we strolled, and the one we brought home. The one in the Guide Michelin, and the other one, the Bruges-la-Morte, the Bruges of Fernand Knopff and the Symbolists.
The Bruges in my mind is not the one we visited one early autumn a decade ago and then once again last week. That Bruges was noisy and crowded with tourists like ourselves, the canals were choked with jostling sightseeing boats nosing, museums seemed eager to close in our faces and an obstinate sun shone in a cloudless sky of tedious blue.
The Bruges in my mind is built of the same solid flemish brick in a grim flamboyance of facades reflected in the same deep mirrors of the canals, but the crowds have gone. The streets echo, not with hurrying sightseers, but with stories waiting to be told.
There is a welcome cloak of fog, and low storms out over the sea. The bricks are of that sepia which is neither warm nor cold, but can change in an instant, glowing in a stray caress of sunlight, or wintery in shadow.
In that Bruges, a stern trio of brick facades faces an empty pedestal in an empty square slowly being swallowed by the rising sea. The horizon is empty too.
The image is a story waiting, wishing, wanting to be told.
And sometimes I wonder, in a world that carries equal portions of both, where you can find the guide books to the latter…
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Left: The St-Jean Hospital
Right: Endpapers
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Left: The glass-blower’s shop
Right: Tourist… the building itself isn’t medieval, by the way, any more than the bridge… much of Bruges was rebuilt in the 19th century by a British architect who fell in love with the sleepy (and then abandoned) city.
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Left: The Belfry; 19th century too, I believe. (We visited a fascinating exhibition called “Fake, Not Fake” whch displayed dozens of Flemish paintings I’d always accepted at face-value as medieval, but which were actually copiously retouched and in many cases, actually repainted, by a very talented restorer early this century. Disconcerting.)
Right: The rising sea.
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Left: The Abandoned City
Right: Hans Memling Square
SCRIBBLES AND SIGNATURES
Will be signing the new books at BD Fugue in Lyon on Friday the 10th, at around 3:30 p.m.
For details:
BD Fugue Café Lyon
14 rue Confort
69002 Lyon
Tel: 04 78 37 41 46
bdflyon@wanadoo.fr
And in Annecy the next day, December 11 at around 2:30 p.m.
BD Fugue Café Annecy
Centre Bonlieu
74000 Annecy
Tel. 04 50 45 22 80
bdfannecy@bdfuguecafe.fr
I’ll also be signing the Artbook at a bookshop in Aix-en-Provence on Saturday, December the 18th. (Obviously, the instant I began writing this, I realised I have totally forgotten to ask WHICH bookshop, but I will inquire before I go, and post the location here in the next newsletter.)
There are no signature sessions planned in Switzerland for the time being.
Speaking of the Artbook, there seems to be rather a dearth of them here in Switzerland.
For more information, if you live in French-speaking Switzerland, call the distributer at this number (or have your local bookshop call it for you): 021 320 03 40.
And, last but far from least, I am not only sorely remiss in returning things people send me to sign, but I am even slower in providing postal rates for those foolhardy enough to wish to send me even more things to sign.
The information can be found here. Go to the Swiss Post web site and follow through the menu according to your country of residence, the type of service you prefer, and the weight of the package.
(The site is in English, German, French and Italian.)
I will get a simplified version of the information on the site for January. (Just what I need, another New Year’s resolution…)
