My Big Reading Plans for 2013

I have been thinking about what big old books I want to read in 2013, to fill in the embarrassing gaps in my reading of the classics. These are the ones I have come up with, which I propose to read in a yet-to-be-decided order:

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. Apart from me, everyone in the world has read this. Even I have absorbed a lot of what this book contains from film adaptations (in particular, Andrea Arnold's fascinatingly grotty version from 2011), Kate Bush, and the ether generally. When I mentioned this book some time ago, I was struck by how many people I know hate it. Maybe when I read it I will hate it too, but I want to have enough knowledge of the book to feel that I am entitled to express an opinion on it myself.

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. This is another one of those books I feel like I know a lot about without ever having read, though I did read the first couple of pages some years ago (and they are stunning - the only reason I did not continue was that some other book was making demands on me at the time).

The Collected Tales, by Nikolai Gogol. I like any Gogol I have come across, which may be why my beloved bought me this fine collection. In 2013 I hope to actually read it.

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. I feel that by this stage in my life I should have read more novels by Charles Dickens, so I hope to have got through this porker by the end of 2013.

Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope. Lots of people love Trollope. I have never read anything by him and am actually open to the possibility that he is priggish and boring rather than actually entertaining, but I would like to have read something by him on which to base an opinion. The appeal of Phineas Finn is its setting in the world of 19th century politics, which I think could be rather interesting.

The Iliad, by Homer. That's right, I have never read the Iliad, though I have read a re-telling of it for kids. I want to read this as part of a programme of reading epic poetry, starting with this and going on to the Odyssey and maybe continuing with the Aeneid (or maybe skipping that) before finishing up with Paradise Lost. My interest in the Iliad has partly been rekindled by my current taking of a class in ancient Greek, through which I have been able to read the first couple of lines in the language of the ancients. That has made me excited about reading all of the Iliad (in English, obviously), but has made me a bit wary of all the available translations.

So that is it. I know what you are thinking - "a whole year to read six books???". In my defence I can say a number of things. I am a slow reader, easily distracted away by other things. I also have any number of other demands on my time. And these are not all the books I plan to read in 2013 - as well as these I hope to keep up with SF book club, make progress on eliminating the Panda Mansions book mountain, and possibly even tackle some of the books that my friends in classic and modern book club are reading.

One other thing I am still undecided on is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. As you know, I have been reading War & Peace a chapter a day this year. We have found this a most enjoyable experience, with the grand scale of the book suiting the slow reading we have given it. Some of my friends are looking to chase the buzz next year, by reading another porker of a book over the same time scale. From a list of longest books ever, this 14th century Chinese novel looked like it has a similar kind of epic sweep to Tolstoy's masterpiece so my friends are opting to read it over the whole of 2013.

I have not fully committed to this myself yet, as it seems like a big commitment (Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a good bit longer than War and Peace) and I do not want to compromise my general reading. But the book does seem intriguing, giving an account of a vicious struggle for supremacy between the three warring states into which China was divided in the second and third centuries AD. It is fiction, but it is based on real events, and real events in a period I know little about, making it very tempting to a history lover like myself. It also seems like every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, which would suit reading it in a drawn out manner.

Or I may plough a lonely furrow and read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables a chapter a day next year. It has the advantage of having exactly 365 chapters (one reason we read War & Peace this year was that it has 366 chapters). However, one thing that proved very enjoyable with War & Peace was reading it with other people and trading comments on each chapter with them in our Facebook group. So I think if I was to read anything over the whole of 2013, it would be better to read something with other people. And I have learned through bitter experience that French novels are rubbish, so I suspect that in 2013 it will be Romance of the Three Kingdoms or nothing.

Some links:

A list of longest books ever

Facebook War and Peace readers group

Facebook group for people reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms in 2013

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NaNoWriMo Fail

Alas, this year I have failed to complete NaNoWriMo, which means I have not written a 50,000 word novel in November. For the curious, I have posted the two first chapters of my failed attempt on the internet, where you can see them here and here.

This is the fourth time I have tried NaNoWriMo and the second time I have failed. Various things got in my way this year, but I was struck by a couple of similarities between my attempt this year and my last failed attempt in 2010. Like that, this is (partly) a first person narrative, while my two successful attempts were in the third person. I also had a more developed sense of where I wanted the two unsuccessful attempts to go before starting than with the NaNoWriMos I completed. The lesson here may be to either very heavily plot out what is going to happen beforehand (no fun) or else to have no plan on beginning and just go where the mood takes you.

You can read the first chapters of my two completed NaNoWriMo novels here:

Furry Folk (2008)

Organisation Man (2011)

And as a special treat for all true believers, here, for the first time anywhere, is the first chapter of my never completed 2010 NaNoWriMo attempt:

My German Friend

Reading that again I found it quite entertaining. Maybe one day I will bring that tale to a conclusion.

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A Hero Will Rise

(yes, it is a trailer for Fatal Deviation)

Belfast Cat Goes On Big Journey

When Northern Ireland man Gary O'Sullivan set off on a drive from Belfast to Derry, he heard some strange noises coming from his engine but assumed they were mechanical in origin. But when he eventually stopped to have a look, he found a perturbed feline. The cat had apparently climbed under the bonnet when it was parked in Belfast and then been unable to jump out once it started moving.

The cat's name is unknown, but he has a collar and is believed to be from the Four Winds area of Belfast, from which Mr O'Sullivan departed. The cat is being cared for at the Rainbow Rehoming Centre, where he is making a good recovery while efforts are made to find his original home.

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Rainbow Rehoming Centre

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"Searching for Sugarman"

This is a documentary film about this guy Rodriguez, who released two folk-pop crossover albums that no one bought in the late 1960s and then sunk into obscurity. It is named after one of his songs, 'Sugarman', and follows the attempts of the filmmakers to track down what happened to this reclusive figure.

Or so you might think. The film is not actually about that at all. What it is actually about is how Rodriguez, largely unknown in his own country, somehow became massively popular in South Africa. This was during the apartheid-era. The music of Rodriguez struck some kind of nerve with left-wing white South Africans, with his songs acquiring enough counter-cultural cachet to act as a signifier of alienation with the status quo while being sufficiently vague lyrically to avoid state censorship (mostly - we did see copies of Rodriguez albums in the state broadcaster's archives, where one of the more risqué songs had been scratched over by the authorities to stop it ever being played on the radio).

Because South Africa was pretty isolated in that time, both geographically and increasingly culturally, it was a while before people in the country registered that Rodriguez was more or less unknown in his home country. This to them seemed strange, as in South Africa he outsold Elvis. Nature abhors a vacuum, so rumours began to go around about what had happened to him. One report said that he had killed himself, embittered by his lack of American success. Another said that he was so upset at the lack of respect shown to him by a talky audience that he shot himself onstage. Or maybe he had died of a drøg overdose. Or been abducted by aliens. Or whatever. For the South Africans, no story was too outlandish.

The film then starts to concern itself with some guys who tried to track down Rodriguez and find out the truth about what happened to him. One guy found a phone number of what he reckoned was Rodriguez's manager in the USA. But when he rang it, he received a non-committal response; when he rang again the number was disconnected. After that the trail ran cold.

Time moved on, apartheid fell, the march of progress meant that the World Wide Web reached South Africa and the country was no longer so isolated. One of the Rodriguez-hunters set up a website about his idol. And then out of the blue he received a phone-call from a woman who said that she was Rodriguez's daughter… and that Rodriguez was still alive! OMG! TEH EXCITEMENT!

The film does rather play on the fact that most people watching it will never have heard of Rodriguez, so the singer being still alive is presented as a shocking revelation. Obviously, to all mt hipster readers who already have all Rodriguez's records and have seen him live on numerous occasions this is not such a big deal, but imagine what it must have been like for the South Africans.

After that the film tells the story of what had happened to Rodriguez in the meantime, which was a pretty mundane tale of life after a failed attempt at the big time. He had remained in his home city of Detroit, working as a labourer, bringing up three daughters and involving himself in community causes. He seemed untroubled by the failure of his music career and fundamentally at ease with himself, for all that he came across as a bit shy (isn't everyone?).

The film goes all heart-warming when he is lured out to South Africa to play some shows, with the aging members of an Afrikaans punk band backing him. He seems to really enjoy being onstage again and the film ends telling us that he has played a number of big concerts out there. And that he mostly gave away the money he made from them.
I realise I have just done that boring film reviewer thing of just summarise the film, so now let me mention some random things I liked about it:

(1) The window into the world of left-liberal white South Africa. If you are my age, you will remember the Spitting Image song 'I've Never Met A Nice South African' (implicitly, 'I've Never Met A Nice White South African'), and it is nice to get a sense that not everyone who grew up during the apartheid-era was some kind of racist gobshite (as I already know from the one white South African I have met).

(2) Rodriguez's daughters. He himself is not much of a talker, so they do most of the speaking to camera. They are three of the most charming people you could ever hope to have speaking to camera in a film, with their stories of their father's social activism and love of art being quite affecting.

(3) Rodriguez's Detroit friends. Detroit has a reputation as a bit of a dump, but these guys were all really funny and likeable in a no-bullshit blue-collar kind of way. I am not quite sure why this appeals to me so much given that I am a white-collar guy who is arguably all about the bullshit, but still, if everyone in Detroit is like this then I want to go there.

(4) The succession of record company guys (South African and American) who get all shifty when asked about whether they had been sending on royalty payments to Rodriguez. One American record company boss, who was also one of the big people in Motown, flat out accuses the South African interviewer of racism for daring to ask about financial matters.

(5) The Afrikaans punk musicians. Their punk stuff was only on-screen for a couple of seconds, but it did sound quite intriguing. Surely this kind of thing is ripe for some reissue label to bring to a wider audience? I mean, if shitey Irish post punk can rise again then this kind of exotica would haul in the punters.

Rodriguez's own music was intriguing enough. I am not entirely sure whether it has a unique selling point that makes it more interesting than any of the other folk-rock crossover acts of his era. But I would not mind hearing more of it and am interested that he is playing live in Dublin in November.

I suppose his story is a bit reminiscent of some other rediscovered artists of the past - Vashti Bunyan, Terry Callier, Nick Garrie, and so on. It must be strange for these people to have a half-forgotten episode of their youth suddenly resurrected. For me it would be like if I discovered that my one foray into play-writing had somehow become hugely popular on the other side of the world, where I have somehow become a bigger contemporary playwright than Tom Stoppard or Harold Pinter.

Just checked Google, just in case. I seem not to be famous anywhere, though another person with my name appears to be making a go of this playwriting business. Bah.

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"Ek Tha Tiger"

This is the famous Bollywood film partially set in Dublin. The main character is an agent for RAW, the Indian secret service, whose codename is Tiger. He is played by Salman Khan; for some reason it seems that all Bollywood leading men have Khan as their surname. First off we see him in Iraq, hunting down an agent who has been lured into defection by the ISI, Pakistan's evil intelligence agency. Then, back in India, Tiger is given a new mission. A brilliant but eccentric Indian missile scientist has retired from the service of India's government and taken a job in the "famous Trinity College Dublin". RAW's fear is that the scientist is planning to pass the details of the anti-missile defence system he designed to Pakistan. Tiger's job is to simply monitor the scientist and find out if he is really up to no good. "Try not to kill anybody this time, Tiger", says RAW's director.

Once in Dublin Tiger tries to ingratiate himself with the scientist, but it proves difficult. So he takes the indirect route, trying to get in with the beautiful British-Indian woman who keeps house for the scientist, claiming as cover to be a writer planning a book about brilliant people (of whom, clearly, the scientist is one). Naturally he starts falling for the woman (cue huge song and dance number in the grounds of my old college).

It also becomes apparent that RAW are not the only people to have sent agents to Dublin. This last brings us to a chase scene through Dublin as Tiger pursues an ISI agent through Temple Bar and then has to climb on top of a LUAS to stop his man getting away. But as if that was not exciting enough, the first half of the film builds to an explosive climax and intermission cliffhanger, details of which I cannot reveal. After that, we bid farewell to Dublin - in true spy film style, the film then takes us on a journey to a number of other exotic locations, in this case Istanbul and Havana. As the latter is somewhere I have been to, it was interesting to compare its somewhat fanciful depiction with that of Dublin.

The climactic motorbike-plane-car chase makes for an astonishing piece of set-piece action, like Momma used to make.

So this is a very enjoyable film. Part of the fun is seeing a slick spy film in my town, being amused by the somewhat universe-next-door depiction of Dublin. I particularly liked the scene where Tiger and the scientist's housekeeper have breakfast on a Liffey boardwalk that has somehow been swept clear of homeless junkies. The suggestion that in Dublin you do not need to lock doors or bikes is one that I hope any tourists from India do not take onboard on their visits. But for all that, it is great fun seeing a well-scrubbed version of my own city appearing as an aspirational location in an international film.

Beyond that, however, I was struck by how the film managed to avoid the reactionary politics that have bedevilled some of the contemporary Bollywood films I have seen (see, for example, A Wednesday. I was expecting something where all the guys from RAW would be depicted as saintly and all the ISI operatives as malevolent thugs. But the film does not deliver on that. Instead, there is an almost John Le Carre like sense of the two rival agencies being mirrors of each other, their ongoing secret war more of a barrier to reconciliation by their countries than something that increases the security of either. It is not quite a cynical spy film in the Bourne mould - at no point does Tiger exclaim that his employers in RAW are all a shower of gobshites - but the film does seem to have a "can't we just get along?" message, with RAW and the ISI as victims of their own South Asian Cold War mindset.

Image source

Watch the Trinity song and dance routine here

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Is it worthwhile being a clever tit?

Scientists have established that great tits are very clever birds - they seem to be adept at solving all kinds of puzzles in order to obtain tasty morsels of food. But one question that has perplexed the scientific community is whether their ability to solve problems is of any advantage to the little birds. After all, in the wild it is not particularly common for tasty morsels to be hidden inside a box that can only be opened by pulling on levers in an exact sequence. Could it be that all this great tit intelligence is just going to waste?

Dr John Quinn led a team that investigated this question while based in Oxford. They tested the ability of some great tits to solve problems and then tagged them with tiny radio transmitters and released them back into the wild. The scientists were then able to monitor the reproductive success or otherwise of the clever tits versus their less clever fellows.

The results were surprisingly inconclusive. Clever tits were more likely to produce a clutch of eggs, but they were also more likely to abandon their eggs. The scientists theorised that the clever birds were more likely to be frightened away from their nests than their more simple-minded fellows. The overall result was that there was no significant difference in reproductive success between more and less clever great tits.

But that is not the whole story, as there is more to success in life than an ability to spew forth progeny into the world (at least I hope so). The scientists found that the clever tits were able to spend far less of their time foraging for food and so were able to enjoy more leisure time than their less bright fellows.

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Dublin Butoh Festival Part 2: Short films and "The Speaking Body"

Part two of my visit to the Dublin Butoh festival. You can read part one here.

There followed an interval at which the organisers served us wine and bizarre Japanese sweets… strange green things made out of rice or green tea or something and brown things maybe dipped in cocoa with a hint of liquorice. I loved them. We then returned to the auditorium to watch more films. First up was Jesus Flower Death Life, a short piece on Kazuo Ohno. This seemed to have been filmed some time after An Offering to Heaven. In that one, Mr Ohno was 95 but clearly still lucid. In this his faculties seemed to have deserted him and in all the scenes in which he appeared he was unwakeably asleep, effectively dead to the world around him. The film began with a nurse undressing and cleaning him (all the while addressing him as "Sensei"). Then Japanese writing seemed to appear and flow over his body and arms, thanks I believe to the mystic power of CGI, with the words including the title of the film.

Then the film featured an odd Butoh performance by another guy (who turned out to be Kazuo Ohno's son), where he performed with a glove puppet of Kazuo Ohno to an audience that included a sleeping Kazuo Ohno. That performance ended with Kazuo Ohno being kissed by the puppet of himself, something that would have been very confusing had he chosen that moment to wake up. Then there was an extended shot of Mr Ohno sleeping in his chair… with one of his hands twisting in a manner suggesting that he was dreaming of Butoh.

The film as a whole did make me think how rare depictions of senility are in our culture, with senile famous people typically disappearing from view once their affliction stops them from being able to engage with the world around them. I suppose you could argue that having an unconscious man as an object in an art film was exploitative, but given how Kazuo Ohno had given his life to avant-garde artistic endeavour it struck me as the kind of thing he would approve of.

The other two films were Butoh-themed shorts submitted to the festival. Mal du Pays saw two guys in a room fading in and out while doing Butoh stuff as sand fell down between them. There Is There saw a woman in an outfit that looked like it was made of cotton wool roll around in something that looked like mud. Both of these were fascinating while I was watching them but left relatively little lasting impression. That sounds like damning with faint praise, not at all - watching them made for a great end to a wonderful evening and I would be happy to see such films again.

The next day my beloved and I made it to another event in the festival. This was an evening event entitled The Speaking Body, which comprised Poem of Phenomenon, a Butoh performance by Ken Mail, who is based in Finland.

We had to wait in the lobby before it started, which was a bit tiresome as the foyer was rather small and cramped. But it made sense when we went in, because Mr Mai was waiting for us in the part of the room designated as the stage. And he really was going for it in terms of the whole crazy Butoh-appearance thing, as he was wearing white make-up and had wild black hair and was in and oddly constricting tunic-like costume. The connotations might be different in Japan, but he looked very goth (80s art goth more than 2000s metal flouncey goth).

He did the very slow precise movement thing, eventually sliding out of his tunic thing, revealing that underneath it he was wearing white tights and a corset. Eventually he lost his corset too and his wiry musculature became a key part of the show.

There were a couple of differences between Ken Mai's performance and that of Ambra Bergamasco the night before. For one thing there was the more extreme clothing and make-up of Mr Mai. Another was that he was performing to an accompaniment of recorded music (electronic and strange) while Ms Bergamasco performed to ambient sound. And another was distance - the previous night had seen Ms Bergamasco come very close to the audience, almost on top of us at times, while Mr Mai remained much further away. The contrasts made me feel like a great range of Butoh experience was being served up over the two nights.

I think perhaps the combination of the music, the greater physical distance, the strange make-up, and the extreme lighting gave Ken Mai's performance an almost ritualistic atmosphere. His movement was so subtle that he seemed to imperceptibly travel from one space to another, reminding me of the Shrike from Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels. His revealing clothing (once the initial tunic had gone) exposed the workings of his body and made it plain how demanding and strenuous the whole exercise was. Overall this was an incredibly immersive and endlessly intriguing performance.

Poem of Phenomenon was followed by more wine and funny Japanese sweets. For me that was the end of the festival, though there were more workshops and film shows on the next day.

The festival organisers continue to run Butoh themed events, so if my review piques your interest then hava look at their website. Next April they are bringing over Iwashita Toru, a member of the Sankai Juku group, for another performance and workshop - I reckon that would be well worth attending. There appear also to be ongoing workshops with Ambra Bergamasco.

See also Ken Mai's website and blog, from whence come the images of him. I particularly recommend the blog to people who like photographs.

While preparing this, I learned that both Yukio Nakagawa and Kazuo Ohno have died since the films mentioned above in which they appeared. Farewell.

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Dublin Butoh Festival Part 1: "An Offering To Heaven" and "Vulnerably Raw"

I went to some performance in the first Dublin Butoh Festival recently. But what is Butoh? Well, it is a form of Japanese modern dance that was invented by this guy called Kazuo Ohno in the 1950s. Butoh is characterised by very slow and deliberate movements and seems to often be performed without musical accompaniment. In my very limited exposure to the form, the dancers sometimes are made up in a very striking fashion, though this seems not to be essential. I have the vague idea that originally Butoh was some kind of response to the destruction wreaked on Japan in the Second World War, but with the passage of time it has become a bit less situated in that particular historical epoch.

I myself am something of an expert on Butoh, having once some Japanese guys called Sankai Juku performing a Butoh piece called Hibiki in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2007, reading the programme to obtain a background understanding of the form. On that occasion there were was no musical accompaniment as such, just the sound of running water, and the dancers were indeed dressed and made up in a strange and austere manner that complemented the minimalist movements they made. Sadly there were several event people in the audience who lost interest as soon as they realised how avant-garde it all was, and after shuffling in their seats a bit they made their way to the exits. The Butoh itself was fascinating. I had never seen anything like it before and I suspected that I would probably never see its like again either.

But then I received an e-mail saying that a Butoh Festival was about to take place in Dublin, with the events taking place in the Back Loft, an exhibition space in an industrial building converted into artists' studios. I resolved to attend.

The first thing I went to was a selection of short films and one live performance under the umbrella title Dancing Senses. First up was a film called An Offering To Heaven about Yukio Nakagawa, a non-conformist flower arranger from Japan. That immediately struck me with how Japan is different from here, in that I could not imagine Irish flower-arranging having its own radical avant-garde.

The film partly presented a profile of Mr Nakagawa and partly showed up as he worked up to a big event, collaboration with Kazuo Ohno. Mr Ohno was to perform in the open air while a helicopter flew overhead and dropped half a million flower petals down over him. While obviously such a thing largely works as a conceptual piece, it was interesting to watch the practicalities of it unfold. Where do you get that many flower petals? What happens if the weather does not play ball? And so on.

Another striking feature of the Ohno-Nakagawa collaboration was how old and infirm they both were. Nakagawa suffers from spinal problems since his childhood, but this was not too much of a problem for his artistic work. Mr Ohno, however, was 95 when the collaboration took place and was wheelchair bound. Undeterred, he just did his dancing while sitting in a chair.

That was followed by Vulnerably Raw, a dance piece by Ambra Bergamasco. For this, the audience were sat in armchairs. Ms Bergamasco came in from a door in a corner to the back left of the room and then moved very slowly in front of us. There was no musical or other sonic accompaniment apart from the ambient sounds of the room - creaking chairs and floorboards and the click of the shutter on the camera of the official photographer. In contrast to the Butoh piece I saw in 2007, the dancer's make-up and clothing was not particularly extreme - she was wearing an attractive dress and did not have any kind of austere make-up, with the one immediately odd feature of her appearance being that she was wearing just one stocking.

With art sometimes the viewer projects meaning and context where it might not have been intended by the artist. In this case, Ms Bergamasco's entrance through a door that closed behind her, her slow movement along to the front of the audience, and the shadow projected on the wall behind her put me in mind of one thing - Nosferatu, the German expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau. That the dancer looked nothing like Nosferatu (unlike a great many other Butoh performers) made this a more bizarre juxtaposition.

The overall performance was slow and intense. Some of the actions suggested a meaning outside of the pure abstraction of the dance, but nothing directly obvious sprang to my mind, though some of it did seem to lean into a somewhat sexual area. And there was some audience participation - at one point she squatted on a pile of yellow melons, basically pretending to be a chicken, and then gave out the melon-eggs to members of the audience, including me. This reminded me of how avant-garde art can often be kind of funny but in a way that requires everyone to pretend not to notice this.

At the end of her piece the dancer was sitting in a pre-arranged circle of flowers more or less directly in front of me, so close for me that she almost stopped being a whole person and became a collection of individual body parts. And then the performance was over. From Ms Bergamasco's demeanour at the end it seemed that this had been a very emotionally draining for her. For me and I think also the rest of the audience it was a demanding but intensely rewarding piece of work.

See also:

Butoh Festival website

Sankai Juku's minimal website

Yukio Nakagawa website

Kazuo Ohno image source

Ambra Bergamasco image source

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They Saw Me Coming - Things I Brought Back From Egypt

A jellabiya
A sunhat
Some post cards (unsent because I had forgotten my address book)
A copy of the English version of the Al Ahram newspaper
A scarf
A face flannel
A Concise History of Egypt (listing all the Pharaohs and other rulers)
Photos of Abu Simbel
A scarf
Photos of members of our tour group, including myself, dressed up for a "Jellabiya Party" on our Nile cruise boat
An American University of Cairo printing of The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany
An American University of Cairo printing of Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, by Naguib Mahfouz
A t-shirt from Animal Care in Egypt (ACE)
An ACE badge
A copy of The Black Corridor, by Michael Moorcock
A white short-sleeved shirt (made the very night before I bought it, hence the special price)
A CD entitled Music from Nubia
Ya Mesahharny, a CD by Oum Kalthoum
An Anubis fridge magnet
A Horus fridge magnet
A Scarab fridge magnet
Two Nubian bracelets
Two Nubian necklaces
An Eye of Horus fridge magnet
An Akhenaton bookmark
A paperback copy of David Roberts' A Journey in Egypt
A bust of some ancient Egyptian person
A Pyramids and Sphinx set
A Pyramids set
A Tutankhamen bust
An alabaster candleholder
Two glazed Scarabs
A Horus tote bag