The Bull and the Lion

In Persian iconography, the bull and the lion symbolize dueling extremes of human nature: the base and the noble. And this week, the publishing world gave us a chance to ponder both. First, did you get that the bull represents humanity’s dark side, its underbelly, and that the lion stands for our nobler leanings? We didn’t either, but we took Mr. Elliot’s word for it as he presented slide after slide of Persian art, architecture and breathtaking landscapes during a presentation and reading from his recent book on Iran. Mr. Elliot is the author of two books, one chronicling his travels through Afghanistan and the more recent one on Iran. These are meaty tomes, well researched, but full, too, of personal anecdote. Mr. Elliot is a good old-fashioned British intellectual, the kind that digs into a subject until it has become part of him and he it. He spent a decade researching and writing his first book on Afghanistan (learned Farsi in the process) and about as long on his Iran history, with which, he says, he hopes to shed new light on Persia, beginning with a long list of things we owe to the Persians, from the Shiraz grape to the flying buttress.

We were invited, through friends, to a cocktail party to hear Mr. Elliot speak at the Palmerie villa of Maryanne and Gary. She’s a Senegalese-born designer, who is one of the true divas of Marrakech design, and he is an American ethnobiologist. Their villa and several maison d’hotes are some of the swankiest in Marrakech and we’d been hoping to get a glimpse of them after seeing photographs in various design books and magazines. Three or four times a year, Maryanne and Gary host a literary weekend in their villa. Paying clients enjoy writing workshops with the visiting author, and, in the case of Mr. Elliot, tours of Marrakech’s architectural highlights.

The lecture was lofty, the sepia-toned photographs gave us all instant wanderlust, and the smartly dressed group had plenty of thoughtful questions and interesting dinner table stories. And the villa proved even more beautiful in person than in photos. In all, a most lionine evening.

When we arrived home and hopped on our email for a late-night fix, we were greeted by headlines of the latest chapter in the Regan Books-OJ Simpson “If I Did It” scandal. The latest revelation was that a friend of a friend had ghostwritten the squalid memoir, as he has a number of Regan titles. It’s not to say that we don’t enjoy a bit of good smut from time to time – a quick peruse of US Weekly and other trashy magazines, for example – but on a night when books and the study of a culture had seem so elevated and refined, it was sobering to return to the low-brow razzle-dazzle that has the publishing world aflutter. What does it mean that Mr. Elliot’s book on Iran will sell, we imagine, in the meager thousands, while the Regan-OJ travesty has that many copies already “leaked” into the “right” hands?

Ultimately, who wins out, the lion or the bull? We’ll ponder this tomorrow as we shop for a Christmas tree and some lights for our courtyard – two more items we owe to ancient Persian culture, it turns out.