Barely a Book Club #5: Suggested Listening
Happy July. I was wondering how everyone was getting on reading Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, our current Barely a Book Club selection.
Myself, I am about halfway through, and I am enjoying finding myself lost in the bewildering, sometimes entirely mythical landscape Chatwin charted out for us some 46 years ago.
If you are like me, you might have found yourself wondering at all the Welsh names and language strewn across the Patagonian landscape. If you’d like to know more about how this colony came to be, and the status of the Welsh language there today, I’d like to direct you to Survival part 1: Second Home, an episode of Helen Zaltzman’s excellent The Allusionist podcast. It’s a fascinating story, and one whose end is not yet written, according to this article from Historic UK:
[D]espite the Spanish-only education system, the proud community survives to this day serving bara brith from Welsh tea houses, and celebrating their heritage at one of the many eisteddfodau.
Here’s a Bruce Chatwin fun fact I didn’t have room to include in our last newsletter: did you know he’s responsible, for better or worse, for the revival of the Moleskine notebook brand? It goes like this. In 1987’s The Songlines, he wrote:
With the obsessive neatness that goes with the beginning of a project, I made three neat stacks of my ‘Paris’ notebooks. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: ‘moleskine’, in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.
Chatwin goes on to explain that he discovered from the owner of the papeterie that the manufacturer had recently died and that the prized notebook was essentially dead. “Le vrai moleskine n’est plus,” the bookseller says.
Reading this passage in 1995, an Italian woman named Maria Sebregondi was inspired to approach a Milanese stationery company and persuade them to begin manufacturing (with the help of a Chinese partner), reproductions of Chatwin’s beloved notebooks. With some clever marketing that even today invokes Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and of course Chatwin himself, the moleskine was sold as a totemic creative object to scribblers around the world. Ownership of the brand was passed among various private equity firms and funds, launched an IPO, and now is mostly owned by a Belgian investment firm that otherwise specializes in car distribution. Romantic stuff!
If you missed our kickoff post, you can find it here:
Barely a Book Club #4: Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia
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Otherwise, please let me know if and how you are enjoying the book so far in the comments below. We’ll reconvene in about a month’s time to discuss.
