Carnival

I'm reading Marina Warner's 'Stranger Magic:  Charmed States and the Arabian Nights' and yet again falling in love with the way she explores how a narrative - this time the '1001 Nights' - is carried through history, being changed by the contexts in which it finds itself and, in turn, changing that context by subtly changing its vocabulary, its concepts, its imaginary - by bleeding outwards and beyond itself. I was reading it yesterday in The Arboretum in Nottingham.  Robin was next to me reading Murakami's '1Q84'.  A brass band was playing.  And carried through the heavy August air were also the cavernous beats and visceral basslines of the Caribbean Carnival as it edged away from the city centre and back towards the Forest Recreation Ground.  We stopped reading.  We packed away our books.  The carnival had won out.  It had pulled us to it.  We hitched into its beats and let it carry us home.