Pumps of Cairo

Even the most casual student of Egyptian history knows that flooding plays a big part in it.

The slightly less casual will know that, since the building of the Aswan damn in the days of President Nasser and the great Soviet engineers, the Nile has ceased the inundations that brought prosperity and perils for all the makers and admirers of pyramids.

So to arrive in Cairo yesterday and find the roads under varyingly many feet of water was mildly alarming - and not just because I had a plane home to catch.

My companions - one of them of about my approaching-sixty age - said that he had lived in the Egyptian capital all his life and could not recall anything like the brown, bottle-bobbing torrents that were usually his roads to the airport.

If this were true, the locals seemed to be doing well - rather better than the British when afflicted by our much more regular snow. There were ancient pump-lorries at work (well. ancient for a pump-lorry)  and drivers seemed to recognise that single file through the shallow part of the road would produce better results for all than a mass dash through the deep ends.

The bridge to the airport was partially blocked by a chicane of flooded cars. But the patience of the other motorist was saintly, by British standards as well as by the hooting traffic madness I had just left behind in Alexandria.

The cause, it seemed, was no more than heavy rain - in which there were drownings around the whole region - but the response suggested to me that the rules of flood-life still survive deep in the Heliopolis  gene pool.

 

 

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

This Saturday report on John Gross expresses less than total confidence in The New York Times's critics:

WSJ BOOKSHELF JANUARY 15, 2011
A Tonic, Humane and Civilizing Force
By ROGER KIMBALL

"He [Gross] was a book critic for the New York Times back when the paper had critics and a theater reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph in London."

However, what I am really interested in is the Steiner story:

"Before Gross's editorship, reviewers for the TLS had been anonymous, a pleasing system for disinterested expertise in theory but one that in practice invited all sorts of abuses, from score-settling to self-serving."

If Sir Peter could search his files and make sure that every precise detail is right, that would be appreciated:

"Gross remembered a long essay on the state of comparative literature that began by asking whether there were any heirs to the great European practitioners of the genre, men like E.R. Curtius and Erich Auerbach."

Somehow, it does not quite ring true. Perhaps a minute detail is slightly out of focus:

"Only, intoned the anonymous reviewer, perhaps George Steiner...
Gross, from his new swivel chair, looked up the piece. It was by George Steiner."

[Bill Smith]

It really only rains for three or four days per year I am told so most enjoyed the temporary insanity for a few hours.

I was staying at the Sonesta Cairo, a lovely little hotel about 20 minutes from the airport and the staff were smiling from ear to ear with excitment concerning the rain, almost like a child at the first winter's snow.

The Lavazza coffe and Fauchon chocolates the hotel offered apeased as as we waited!

[Clayton Burns]

In The NYT: John Gross Dies at 75;
Critic, Essayist and Editor
By WILLIAM GRIMES January 12, 2011:

"He edited The Times Literary Supplement when it was the preeminent literary journal in Britain and assembled a half-dozen anthologies for the Oxford University Press that reflected his extraordinary range as a student of literature, the most recent being 'The Oxford Book of Parodies,' published last year."

Well, William, since when has The TLS stopped being "the preeminent literary journal in Britain," and in the world, for that matter?

There has been a lot of generic talk on The NYT's "Why Criticism Matters" (Jan. 2nd), but little discussion of specifics, even if one NYT BR letter writer did comment on poetry criticism:

"Thank you for asking six critics 'well versed in the idioms of the
moment' to comment on the art of literary criticism.

But why did none of the contributors specifically address the state of poetry criticism?" NEAL WHITMAN Pacific Grove, Calif.

One striking feature of book reviews is the variability of the covers. The last few at The TLS have been especially beautiful, including that for the double issue of Dec. 24 & 31. (The New York Review of Books must imagine that it can shock us to attention with its hideous covers).

"Robert Frost's weather," by Paul Muldoon, is a classic example of Modern Critical Alexandrian scholarship--not without interest, but decorative and far-fetched. On a distinctly secondary poem. The TLS could set up a competition to explain "After Apple-Picking," from sound symbolism to its setting in the fallen world of "Paradise Lost," Book IX. If we were to say that we already have such an analysis, we would be dreaming.

Another NYT BR letter by a professor of English at the University of Chicago notes that you need "the whole machinery of Ph.D. programs, academic journals and so on" (Richard Strier).

He does not explain why the results of the investment have been so meager in psychoanalytic criticism, criticism of lyric poetry, and criticism of American prose style.