tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-144965652024-03-13T04:55:58.675+00:00The Silver Eel"A gape-jawed serpentine shape of pale metal crested with soot hung high for a sign."The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.comBlogger159125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-15620618455155362302008-10-29T17:41:00.002+00:002008-11-01T20:06:48.390+00:00Fare-well but not good-byeAh, so that's where you find the post title box...<br /><br />Well, it was time for a relaunch anyway, so I'm stopping <span style="font-style: italic;">The Silver Eel</span>. You can now find Eelish musings on writing and reading at the imaginatively titled <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://thesilvereelii.blogspot.com/">The Silver Eel II</a>.</span> I do hope this will mean more regular posting, and reading of others' posts...The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-70900446688689760732008-09-28T22:35:00.003+01:002008-09-28T22:50:38.290+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">HUMBLE APOLOGIES<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span>Our computer died and we've only just got the new (actually, acquired) one up and running on tinternet: hence, lack of recent posts.<br /><br />Also, despite switching to 'Layout' rather than 'Template' on Blogger, I'm still not getting a 'post title' box when composing posts, a small but persistent irritation for anyone using RSS - not to mention me - which I suspect is due to my ham-fisted buggering about with HTML in order to change the font and colour scheme about two years ago...I shall be conferring with Ningauble and Sheelba.<br /><br />In the meantime...I note that <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3046488/Collins-dictionary-asks-public-to-rescue-outdated-words.html">Andrew Motion's endangered word is 'skirr'</a>, which I'm sure is used by Leiber in a Fafhrd and Mouser story - the Mouser parries and his opponent's blade skirrs past his ear, or somesuch.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br /></span></span>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-36689793484263861912008-07-28T23:25:00.002+01:002008-07-28T23:44:15.283+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">MAKING NICE TO ESCAPISTS</span><br /><br />I was mean to fantasy recently - not, as Yvonne pointed out, that it doesn't deserve it a lot of the time. When you apply Sturgeon's Law to the fantasy genre the figures don't change - it's just that the 94% is so egregious. Here is <a href="http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/INTRVWS/garner.htm">Alan Garner speaking in its favour</a>:<br /><blockquote>One of the things I realised soon after I began was that fantasy was the only way to approach reality with any clarity. I didn't set out with that intent, but I did become aware of it quite early on. I recognised that fantasy wasn't mere entertainment, that it wasn't escapist. [...] Words will not go where we want to go. We cannot say what we most deeply feel. In the end, we can only say what we mean through image. Not through the words, but only through the images that those words can construct. Therefore I came to realise very early on that fantasy was reality, and that I had been aware of it in my classical studies as well. Homer and Aeschylus linked up with my grandfather quite quickly.<br /></blockquote>(Garner's grandfather was a blacksmith, a fund of knowledge and a nigh totemic figure to the boy and the writer.)<br /><br />*<br /><br />On the subject of escapism, John Sutherland in <span style="font-style: italic;">How to Read a Novel</span> says that the division of literature into low escapism for servant girls and counter-jumpers, and high art which engaged with life and made it more real (Lawrence apparently being the epitome), was codified by the Leavises.<br /><br />The term escapism is seriously misplaced, I think. Even the most godawful fantasy novel grants not escape, but only a temporary reprieve. That too is a use of literature, and hardly to be sneered at.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-11603977606089936912008-07-16T00:51:00.004+01:002008-07-16T10:12:36.331+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">BROUAGE</span><br /><br />Brouage is a small town on the west coast of France, once known for a superb natural harbour and the most important salt-production and export trade in Europe. It also has extremely well-preserved fortifications by Vauban, as can be seen in the following photos:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_T-3Wfkj3nJw/SH04Tk0IDMI/AAAAAAAAABg/1LJb3Z16ZYg/s1600-h/9221818.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_T-3Wfkj3nJw/SH04Tk0IDMI/AAAAAAAAABg/1LJb3Z16ZYg/s400/9221818.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5223393051770621122" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_T-3Wfkj3nJw/SH04MJ1E4VI/AAAAAAAAABY/jOvclnGmJJo/s1600-h/2843030.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_T-3Wfkj3nJw/SH04MJ1E4VI/AAAAAAAAABY/jOvclnGmJJo/s400/2843030.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5223392924267766098" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://brouage-uk.weebly.com/pics.html">(more here)</a><br /></div><br />Four years ago I spent an afternoon there, and had a wander round the walls, stared over the salt-marshes (which once would have been salt-water) and kind of half-mused about the story you could set in such a place, young love, exile from the court at Versailles, a young noblewoman in apparent safety who becomes aware that, far from being removed from court politics in a backwater, she is still very much under observation and suspicion, and that anything can happen to her out here, and what allies she had are beyond her reach...ya-da, ya-da, you could write it yourself. What appealed to me was the juxtaposition of retreat and vulnerability, and the reach that politics can have.<br /><br />Then, just a few weeks ago, I happened to read this in the Michelin Green Guide to the French Atlantic Coast:<br /><blockquote>In 1659, the 21 year-old Louis XIV was in love with Marie Mancini, the raven-haired niece of Richlieu's successor, Cardinal Jules Mazarin. The young couple wanted to marry, but their dreams were thwarted. The Cardinal had decided that "for reasons of State", the King must marry the Infanta of Spain [the Queen of Spain's beard, yes, yes] to guarantee the peace brought by the Treaty of the Pyrenees, recently signed by the two countries. Marie Mancini was sent to La Rochelle, where she heard, with despair, of the forthcoming marriage. From September to December that year, she withdrew to Brouage, where another of her uncles was Governor, "because solitude is the only solace for my broken dreams" [quote unattributed]. Mazarin subsequently allowed her to return to Paris.<br /><br />Six months later, after the royal marriage in St-Jean-de-Luz, Louis contrived to absent himself from the official cortege, returning to the capital, and then rode to Brouage, where he occupied the room in which Marie had stayed, pacing the ramparts, as he too sighed for the love he had lost. Racine was inspired by this melancholy episode to write his tragedy <span style="font-style: italic;">Berenice</span>.</blockquote>At the time I read this I was, if not gobsmacked, at least a little boggled. I'm almost certain I hadn't come across it somewhere else. Given the setting, though, it's pretty hard not to imagine something like this taking place there.<br /><br />*<br /><blockquote>A worthy repayment for the blood you shed, to be wrapped round buns by a Nuremberg confectioner [think of the scene with Rageneau, poet and baker, in <span style="font-style: italic;">Cyrano de Bergerac</span>], or if your luck's in, to be hoisted on stilts by a French tragedian, and pulled about like puppets on a string!<br /><br />Schiller, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Robbers</span></blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>*<br /><br />Racine can be described lazily as France's second-best playwright, after Moliere. Which raises the question, who, after Shakespeare, would be England's? (Sons of Ben shouldn't stir themselves to reply.) And who would be Scotland's number one?The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-13174970962858803422008-07-14T20:23:00.000+01:002008-07-14T20:24:17.295+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">RE-MEMBERING AND FOR-GETTING</span><br /><br />One of the things about literature and literacy which continues to trouble me, and makes me wonder if the whole shooting match is worth the bother, is the problem of recall. A while ago Scott Pack blogged about some books which he had a record of having read, but without being able to remember a single thing about them. Given the enormous number of books he /has/ read this is hardly surprising, but it does raise the question, can you really be said to have read a book if you don't remember anything about it? Worse, even with really good recall of a book you've read several times, I'll bet that at best you retain - how much? Does 10% sound about right?<br /><br />It's a false question, of course, or one which is easily answered. The books are there precisely so we don't /have/ to remember, for a start, they are there to be revisited or not as we please; and secondly, we don't remember every conversation we've ever had verbatim, but we don't deny the capacity of friends and acquaintances to shape our lives, alter our opinions, form our character, or simply make the day-to-day business of living run a little more smoothly and pleasantly.<br /><br />Moreover, books are not poems or songs or tales, all of which we might be expected to remember in their entirety, certainly if we lived in a preliterate society - though even then, I suspect that most of that task would be given to specialists, tale-tellers and likewise custodians of the common word-hoard.<br /><br />Lastly, it's my contention that relatively few books hold up well to re-reading. A number of times I've revisited books which I've enjoyed in the past, only to find that they have nothing more to tell me, that whatever work they had to do has been done.<br /><br />What made me consider all this again was a poem I came across today which addresses, in a sideways manner, some of this question, although really it's about...well, read it and decide for yourself:<br /><br /><blockquote>THE SECRET<br /><br />Two girls discover<br />the secret of life<br />in a sudden line of<br />poetry.<br /><br />I who don't know the<br />secret wrote<br />the line. They<br />told me<br /><br />(through a third person)<br />they had found it<br />but not what it was,<br />not even<br /><br />what line it was. No doubt<br />by now, more than a week<br />later, they have forgotten<br />the secret,<br /><br />the line, the name of<br />the poem. I love them<br />for finding what<br />I can't find,<br /><br />and for loving me<br />for the line I wrote,<br />and for forgetting it<br />so that<br /><br />a thousand times, till death<br />finds them, they may<br />discover it again, in other<br />lines,<br /><br />in other<br />happenings. And for<br />wanting to know it,<br />for<br /><br />assuming there is<br />such a secret, yes,<br />for that<br />most of all.<br /><br />- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Levertov">Denise Levertov</a></blockquote>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-38248672199784635092008-07-01T20:05:00.002+01:002008-07-01T20:10:29.451+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">WHIMSICALLY, THIS AND THAT</span><br /><br />I've tried a few times to read Steven Erikson's fantasy novels, and always bailed. (Probably the first thing that attracted me was a momentary confusion with Steve Erickson, author of <span style="font-style: italic;">Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Leap Year</span> and a whole bunch of other stuff. Slipstream author, much huzzah'd by William Gibson. Personally I've enjoyed reading his work and found it nifty, quirky, intriguing, though never quite satisfying. People who dig Pynchon should definitely try him if they haven't already.) To return to Erikson, I see where he's coming from, I see what he's trying to do, and for all I know, achieving, but reading him is like listening to someone playing an out-of-tune piano with more enthusiasm than ability.<br /><br />Practically the first sentence of <span style="font-style: italic;">Gardens of the Moon</span> is something along the lines of: "The winds were contrary that day above Ravenspike, blowing the smoke from the rioting this way and that." What he means, I'm certain, is inconstant. After a few chapters of same, one's tongue gets fuzzy and one's ears tintinnabulate.<br /><br />However, I continued to wonder what I was missing, given the plaudits he continues to attract, until I saw the latest title, which is <span style="font-style: italic;">Toll the Hounds</span>.<br /><br />This is Erikson, and much of fantasy fiction, in a nutshell. What he means is unleash the hounds, summon the hounds with a tolling bell, but all that came to mind was half a dozen bassett hounds being swung by their tails in a steeple, baying mournfully. Or, as a friend wondered: "Does he want to charge them for crossing a bridge?"<br /><br />*<br /><br />As nipper #1 is now three and a half, I've been introducing him to his letters, spending 10 minutes a day trying to encourage him to write and recognise them. Wanting some tips, I asked my father how he taught me to read, and he said he just used <span style="font-style: italic;">Janet and John</span>. Which names tolled a hound, but I couldn't visualise the books and certainly didn't remember them. Then I came across a facsimile edition which has recently been published by Summersdale, containing immortal lines such as, "See the boats, John. Big boats, little boats. I like my little boat. Float, boats, float."<br /><br />No wonder it worked. The literary equivalent of march or die. Anything to get away from Janet and John. Same friend pointed out that anything involving a plot, or any action whatsoever would seem revolutionary: "Hey...there's a cat - he's wearing a hat - he's got a box - there's two, two things are comin' out of it! Hey, Timmy, come over here! You're never gonna believe this shit!"<br /><br />*<br /><br />I was curious to see if <span style="font-style: italic;">Janet and John</span> would stir a memory, flicking through the pages. Nothing tangible, but it did provoke a small and delicate internal shift, a realignment which was suggestive of memory, of another place and situation. Of being taught to read, aged three and a half? Possibly, maybe.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-64605977092122810562008-06-29T11:28:00.004+01:002008-06-29T19:28:26.117+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">THE GOLDEN AGE</span><br /><blockquote>Sleep and slothful beds and gluttony<br />have banished virtue from the world of men,<br />so that our nature, by such use undone,<br />is almost exiled from its proper way;<br /><br />and every kindly light that from the sky<br />shapes human life so spent that anyone<br />who strives to bring new streams from Helicon<br />is pointed out as some strange prodigy.<br /><br />Who cares for myrtle now, who for the bay?<br />'Naked and poor you walk, Philosophy',<br />the crowd, intent on wretched profit, cries.<br /><br />You'll have few fellows on the other way;<br />thus all the more, O gentle soul, I pray,<br />abandon not your noble enterprise.</blockquote><a href="http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140448160,00.html">Petrarch, <span style="font-style: italic;">Canzoniere</span></a> book 1, no. 7.<br /><br />*<br /><blockquote>MOOR: I hate this age of scribblers, when I can pick up my Plutarch and read of great men.<br /><br />SPIEGELBERG: Josephus is the man you should read.<br /><br />MOOR: The bright spark of Promethean fire is burnt out. All we have now is a flash of witch-meal - stage lightning, not flame enough to light a pipe of tobacco. [...] An age of eunuchs, fit for nothing but chewing over the deeds of bygone days, mutilating the heroes of old with their learned interpretations and mocking them with their tragedies. The strength of their loins is dried up, and the dregs of a beer-barrel must help to propagate mankind.</blockquote><a href="http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140443684,00.html">Schiller, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Robbers</span></a>, scene 2.<br /><br />*<br /><blockquote>Stop. Please.</blockquote><blockquote>Listen to Nestor. You are both younger than I,<br />and in my time I struck up with better men than you,<br />even you, but never once did they make light of me.<br />I've never seen such men, I never will again...<br />men like Pirithous, Dryas, that fine captain,<br />Caeneus and Exadius, and Polyphemus, royal prince,<br />and Theseus, Aegeus' boy, a match for the immortals.<br />They were the strongest mortals ever bred on earth [...]<br />None of the men who walk the earth these days<br />could battle with those fighters, none, but they,<br />they took to heart my counsels, marked my words.</blockquote>Nestor is speaking to Menelaus and none other than Achilles. <a href="http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140445923,00.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Iliad</span></a>, book 1.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Recently read for the book group: <a href="http://www.methuen.co.uk/titles.php/itemcode/927/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Ella Minnow Pea</span></a> by Mark Dunn. Good, not great, but recommended nonetheless. Someone from the group summed it up as, "Ye cannae say that", which is terrifically accurate: it's basically about what happens when a government tries to tell people how or what to think, in this instance by making letters of the alphabet <span style="font-style: italic;">verboten</span>. Perhaps surprisingly, it's a light, entertaining read, though that doesn't undermine its effectiveness as fable.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-73645895418522719072008-05-16T22:54:00.003+01:002008-05-18T21:10:11.324+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">GODLESS COMMIES GAVE ME MILK</span><br /><br />Here's an argument you don't see very often, from Tony Judt's introduction to his new collection of essays, <span style="font-style: italic;">Reappraisals</span>:<br /><blockquote>Moreover, and here the memory of war played once again an important role, the twentieth-century "socialist" welfare states were constructed not as an advance guard of egalitarian revolution but to provide a barrier against the return of the past: against economic depression and its polarizing, violent political outcome in the desperate politics of Fascism and Communism alike. The welfare states were thus <span style="font-style: italic;">prophylactic</span> states. They were designed quite consciously to meet the widespread yearning for security and stability that John Maynard Keynes and others foresaw long before the end of World War II, and they succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. Thanks to half a century of prosperity and safety, we in the West have forgotten the political and social traumas of mass insecurity. And thus we have forgotten why we have inherited those welfare states and what brought them about.<br /></blockquote>You <span style="font-style: italic;">should</span> - but you don't.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Elsewhere in the same piece Judt writes about the role that the intellectual used to play in public life and doesn't anymore; he cites among many others<br /><blockquote>Arthur Koestler, whose life, allegiances and writings established him for many decades as the intellectual archetype of the age, is no longer a household name. There was a time when every college student had read - or wanted to read - <span style="font-style: italic;">Darkness at Noon</span>. Today, Koestler's best-selling novel of the Moscow show trials is an acquired, minority taste.<br /></blockquote>I think this last sentence is pushing it a bit. If we want to be mock-pejorative, call it a museum piece, no longer relevant, which might go some way to explaining why it's no longer widely read. We watched <span style="font-style: italic;">Smiley's People</span> on BBC4 a while back, and it was like another world. I tried to imagine explaining the milieu to someone born after 1989. It would take you ages.<br /><br />Nonetheless, though I haven't read <span style="font-style: italic;">Darkness at Noon</span> I've had it mentally earmarked since I was at university in the early '90s. I kept coming across references to it, and the tones in which Koestler's name was mentioned clearly implied he was heavy-duty, significant. I hardly think he's disappeared from the public mind - or at least I did until I asked a couple of colleagues, "Who wrote <span style="font-style: italic;">Darkness at Noon</span>?" and drew a blank. Each of them has not only a degree but a master's in history. <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />Well, shit</span>, thought I.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-47930798805213605292008-05-16T01:03:00.002+01:002008-05-18T21:08:20.234+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">NO MORE HEROES?</span><br /><br />A nice quote:<br /><blockquote>Of course, chasing halfway across the world after a married woman, of whose affections he was uncertain, in very bad health and with little money, was typical not of RLS's character but his condition. Every man in love is an heroic fool.<br /><br />- James Rebontier (1873 - 1907)<br /></blockquote>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-51791178974711373982008-05-15T22:46:00.003+01:002008-05-18T21:08:57.751+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">TANGLED WEBS</span><br /><br />Listened to Radio 3's <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/nightwaves/pip/2a23h/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Night Waves</span></a> tonight, particularly for Philippe Sands talking about his new book <span style="font-style: italic;">Torture Team</span>. The skinny on it is: in December 2002 Rumsfeld's lawyer drew up a list of proposed interrogation techniques which breached the Geneva Convention. Rumsfeld approved the list and this led to use of said techniques, including the now-infamous waterboarding, in Gunatanamo and Abu Ghraib.<br /><br />Two very interesting points came out. The first was that an episode of <span style="font-style: italic;">24</span> where Jack Bauer uses torture somehow had a big effect not only on popular, but official opinion of what was acceptable practice. Nice to know the US government is taking advice from the best minds in, uhr, television. Second, Alan Dershowitz wrote an article, which I vaguely recall hearing about, in which he said that certain forms of torture might be permissible in certain instances, for example the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario (which has always seemed to me to be on a par with the question, "And what if you came upon a German soldier raping your sister?" <span style="font-style: italic;">i.e. </span>so restricted that it bears no relation to anything one might actually encounter in reality). Dersh's leetle contribution, which at least has the virtue of demonstrating that even Harvard professors can be nitwits, all of a sudden made it very difficult indeed for those in the Guantanamo administration opposed to the use of torture to carry on arguing their case effectively. The door, as Philippe Sands notes, had been opened, and once opened is nigh-impossible to close.<br /><br />Incidentally, if like me you've never been quite clear just what waterboarding involves, or why it's effective, take a look at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding">wikipedia article</a>. Among the merry pranksters who've used it are the Spanish Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge. One can only hope that those who believe it isn't torture (step foward, Rudy Giuliani) one day have the opportunity to experience it first-hand.<br /><br />*<br /><br />The second segment was more disappointing. Apparently there's a new film out claiming that RFK's assassination was down to a CIA plot involving mind-control, multiple gunmen and a cast of thousands. Well, we've been here, in <span style="font-style: italic;">JFK</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Parallax View</span> and god knows how many books and broadcasts. Presenter Rana Mitter and his guest Scott Lucas, American Studies prof at Brum Uni, dismissed it as tosh and had a brief and unenlightening chat about the mind control/assassination meme in fiction and reality, with reference to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Manchurian Candidate </span>and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA">Project MK-Ultra</a>, nothing those of us with our flying saucers parked out back haven't come across already. But then, <span style="font-style: italic;">then</span>, Mitter asks, what is it about America, that when a political figure gets assassinated, there is positively a public demand for a conspiracy to blame, instead of the lone crazed gunman? (This from the country which has spent god knows how many millions proving three times in court that Princess Diana died of the bleedin' obvious.) Lucas gave a reasonable-sounding answer but didn't challenge the premise underlying the question: that a conspiracy is never to blame and all arguments to the contrary are intrinsincally pooh-poohable (despite his having earlier given several examples of CIA conspiracies to assassinate Castro).<br /><br />Now, clearly, sometimes nutters strike. John Hinckley and Arthur Bremer are examples (although, weirdly, Hinckley acted out of an obsession with an actress in a film based on Bremer, who was, in turn, inspired by Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald. If that isn't a meme out of control, I don't know what is.) And just because JFK and RFK both died by assassination doesn't mean the two incidents are connected. Not least because there is an important disctinction to draw between them.<br /><br />RFK was assassinated by a man who was caught at the scene, tried, convicted and imprisoned. Regardless of why or even whether he did it, it's comprehensible.<br /><br />JFK was assassinated by a man who was subsequently caught, arrested, then himself assassinated by a man who dies in prison a few years later. That stinks. The thing is, if it happened in Italy, though it wouldn't stink any the less, one wouldn't be at all surprised. One would think: business as for the past several hundred years. In the white-picket America of the early sixties, only then does it become bizarre, in need of exegesis. Gore Vidal has put it more succinctly: JFK's send-off was "purest Palermo".The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-33111932360415284082008-04-16T20:16:00.002+01:002008-04-16T20:30:32.932+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">FOR SERVICES ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF REASON</span><br /><br />A review quote - from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Times</span>, no less - on the back of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jamie's Kitchen</span>:<br /><blockquote>Jamie should be given the Victoria Cross.<br /></blockquote>What kind of chef <span style="font-style: italic;">is </span>he? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Ryback">Casey Ryback</a>?<br /><br />*<br /><br />On a related theme, for a while you could find at least five novels with "A <span style="font-style: italic;">tour de force</span> - Will Self" somewhere on the cover. I'm convinced he used the phrase in every review he wrote just to see how many lazy publicists would seize on it, particularly after reading <a href="http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Content/title/default.aspx?id=40360">J.G. Ballard</a>'s claim never to have heard a single cliche pass Self's lips.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-89850771451227793052008-04-16T18:47:00.002+01:002008-04-16T19:23:00.371+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">THINGS USED TO BE </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">SO</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> MUCH BETTER...</span><br /><br />From the <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=5958">journal of the brothers Goncourt</a>:<br /><blockquote>2nd January 1867<br /><br />A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. France was the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat and waste a little time between sales. Nowadays books are bought standing. A request for a book and the naming of the price: that is the sort of transaction to which the all-devouring activity of modern trade has reduced bookselling, which used to be a matter for dawdling, idling and chatty, friendly browsing.</blockquote>This feeling that things are going to the dogs is always with us. From a <a href="http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=0099428431">conversation between Philip Roth and Milan Kundera</a>, different species, same genus:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Roth:</span> Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Kundera:</span> That depends on what you mean by the word <span style="font-style: italic;">soon.<br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Roth:</span> Tomorrow or the day after.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Kundera:</span> The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Roth:</span> So then we have nothing to worry about.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Kundera:</span> On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages, there must be something to it.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></blockquote>I read <span style="font-style: italic;">Ignorance</span> by Kundera earlier this year and thoroughly enjoyed it, which I found surprising given that I got very little out of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Book of Laughter and Forgetting</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unbearable Lightness of Being</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Immortality</span>. Also read parts of <span style="font-style: italic;">American Pastoral</span>, my first contact with Roth's fiction, and while I didn't enjoy the novel much, I though the writing was amazing.<br /><br />*<br /><br />From the Goncourt journal again:<br /><blockquote>16th March 1867<br /><br />The opening night of <span style="font-style: italic;">Les Idees de Madame Aubray</span>, the first play by Dumas <span style="font-style: italic;">fils</span> I have seen since <span style="font-style: italic;">La Dame aux Camelias</span>. A special audience, of a kind which I have never come across anywhere else. It is not a play that is being performed, it is a kind of mass being celebrated before a pious congregation. There is a <span style="font-style: italic;">claque</span> which seems to be officiating, while the audience writhes with ecstacy, swoons with pleasure, and utters cries of 'Adorable!' at every line. The author writes: 'Love is the springtime, it is not the whole year', and there is a salvo of applause. He goes on, working the idea to death: 'It is not the fruit, it is the flower', and the audience claps more than ever. And so it goes on. Nothing is judged, nothing is appreciated; everything is applauded with an enthusiasm brought along in advance and impatient to express itself.<br /><br />Dumas has a great gift: he knows how to appeal to his public, this first-night public of whores, speculators, and depraved society-women. He is their poet, and he ladles out to them, in a language they can understand, the ideal of their commonplace emotions.</blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Dictionary.com defines <span style="font-style: italic;">claque </span>as:<br /><blockquote><table class="luna-Ent"><tbody><tr><td class="dn" valign="top">1.</td><td valign="top">a group of persons hired to applaud an act or performer. </td></tr></tbody></table> <table class="luna-Ent"><tbody><tr><td class="dn" valign="top">2.</td><td valign="top">a group of sycophants.</td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-55219568226745711902008-03-06T22:25:00.002+00:002008-03-06T23:21:17.196+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">NAPLES, IRAQ</span><br /><br />In a post a few years back I noted the parallel between Norman Lewis's description of liberated Naples and what was, is, taking place in Iraq. Patrick <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Cockburn</span> has done the same in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Occupation</span>:<br /><blockquote>By the time <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Bremer</span> left Iraq just over a year later there were few, either among the Iraqis or the Americans who dealt with him, who had a good word to say for him. The White House and the Pentagon blamed him for everything, conveniently forgetting they once shared his imperial hubris and misconception that Iraq was a <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">tabula</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">rasa</span></span> they could reconstruct [write on, surely?] as they wished.<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Bremer</span> had many faults but they were not without precedent. He may not even have been, as some believed, the worst American proconsul in history. Towards the end of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Bremer's</span> tenure in Baghdad I reread <span style="font-style: italic;">Naples '44</span>, the fascinating account by Norman Lewis, then a low-level member of British intelligence, of the US occupation of Naples in World War Two. I wanted to see if American rule in Baghdad sixty years later was uniquely incompetent and corrupt or if American occupations were always like this. Naples sixty years earlier and Baghdad in 2003 were both dangerous cities. Each was inhabited by destitute and desperate people equally willing to work as a gunman or a labourer. The US viceroy in Naples, General Mark Clark, left behind an even murkier reputation than Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Bremer</span>. On his first night in the city, Clark dined on exotic fish looted from the Naples aquarium and appointed Lucky Luciano, the head of the New York mafia, as his senior security advisor.<br /><br />Probably Luciano knew a lot more about Naples than some of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Bremer's</span> American-Iraqi <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">advisors</span> did about Iraq.<br /></blockquote>Alan <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Whicker</span> was quite scathing about Mark Clark in <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Whicker's</span> War</span>, accusing him of allowing German forces to slip away while he concerned himself with making a triumphal entrance into Rome.<br /><br />*<br /><br />We're used to thinking about Iraq as a catastrophe, but an <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html">article by Jim Holt</a> in the London Review of Books from 18<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">th</span> October 2007 put forward quite a different interpretation:<br /><blockquote>Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. [...] The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>The entire article is not very long and well worth reading. I'm no economist or mathematician, so I have to take the figures quoted on trust, though I see that <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/28/iraq.afghanistan">Joseph <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Stiglitz</span></a> reckons the cost of the invasion is $3 trillion, not $1 trillion as Holt says. However, the thrust of it is clear enough: the human cost of the invasion, and the consequences for regional and global stability, are considered <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">negligible</span> when set against securing the oil resources and the revenues derived from them. The description of the 'super-bases' I find particularly interesting.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-76601589557855520462008-03-04T22:42:00.002+00:002008-05-18T21:11:33.937+01:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">THE USE OF LITERATURE/FLAT HEROISM</span><br /><blockquote>Dreams. How we live in them. How they make the days of keeping appointments and spending time in the company of people who say things we've heard in just those same words a thousand times...just a little more bearable. Without them, what an utter desolation of predictability and frustration. Even for the best of us. Even for the most unstructured of us, the freest of us. Dreams. Without them, the suicide statistics would be catastrophic.<br /></blockquote>The key word here is <span style="font-style: italic;">desolation</span>: without solace. From <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.islets.net/essays/hornbook.html">The Harlan Ellison Hornbook</a>.</span><br /><blockquote>If England were what England seems<br /> An' not the England of our dreams<br />But only putty, brass an' paint<br /> 'Ow quick we'd drop 'er. But she ain't.<br /></blockquote>Kipling, from 'The Return'.<br /><br />*<br /><br />It's been quite something to return to reading the <span style="font-style: italic;">Hornbook</span> after a gap of fifteen years or more. It's verbose in places and dated in many others, but much or most of it remains forceful and invigorating and encouraging and just plain entertaining.<br /><br />The Kipling lines come from my mother's copy of <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1581257,00.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Other Men's Flowers</span></a> by Lord Wavell (still in print from Pimlico). The plate inside the cover states that it is a prize for Lower 6th English, and is signed by the headmaster, <a href="http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/tibet_Frederick_Spencer_Chapman.html">F. Spencer Chapman</a>, a genuine WWII hero whose <span style="font-style: italic;">The Jungle is Neutral </span>is a classic account of guerilla warfare (republished in 2006 by <a href="http://www.birlinn.co.uk/book/details/Jungle-is-Neutral--The-9781843410294/">Birlinn</a>).<br /><br />Incredibly, what appears to be the original <span style="font-style: italic;">Time</span> magazine review from 1949 is <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,933934,00.html">available online</a>; the last paragraph reads:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">The Jungle Is Neutral</span> is packed to the boards with incredible adventure and impressive evidence of human fortitude, but it is written without a note of excitement, understated to the point of monotone. For that reason, and by the simplicity of its statement, it makes most first-person war books seem almost shrill.</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>Though I haven't read <span style="font-style: italic;">The Jungle is Neutral</span>, this description tallies with my reading of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Approaches"><span style="font-style: italic;">Eastern Approaches</span></a>, which is weirdly unaffecting despite everything which takes place in it. You know: holed up in the Sahara after a disastrous night raid, half the men lost or killed or injured, water low, ammunition low, random aerial bombardment from the Germans, who know they're out there somehere: "Our position...left much to be desired."<br /><br />I mentioned this to a friend in the Army, and he more or less shrugged his shoulders and said, of course. How do you communicate the uncommunicable to those who weren't there?The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-87163679849100895702008-02-04T22:51:00.000+00:002008-02-04T23:19:32.655+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">THE PRAM IN THE HALL/RECALLED TO LIFE?</span><br /><br />Recently came across this in a copy of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Scottish Review of Books</span> from May last year. An article by Alan Riach on MacDiarmid, quoting the poem 'The Two Parents':<br /><blockquote>I love my little son, and yet when he was ill,<br />I could not confine myself to his bedside.<br />I was impatient of his squalid little needs,<br />His laboured breathing and the fretful way he cried<br />And longed for my wide range of interests again,<br />Whereas his mother sank without another care<br />To that dread level of nothing but life itself<br />And stayed day and night, till he was better, there.<br /><br />Women may pretend, yet they always dismiss<br />Everything but mere being just like this.</blockquote>According to the article the son, Michael, was three when this was published. The line "To that dread level of nothing but life itself" makes me think of Ted Hughes' poetry.<br /><br />MacDiarmid wasn't the only one to resent his children. In an essay, 'Fires', Raymond Carver is absolutely bleak and uncompromising when he considers the effect his children had on his writing:<br /><blockquote>During these ferocious years of parenting, I usually didn't have the time, or the heart, to think about working on anything very lengthy. The circumstances of my life, the "grip and slog" of it, in D.H. Lawrence's phrase, did not permit it. [...] This hit-and-miss way of writing lasted for nearly two decades. There were good times back there, of course; certain grown-up pleasures and satisfactions that only parents have access to. But I'd take poison before I'd go through that time again.</blockquote>From <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Call-If-You-Need-Me/dp/1860468462"><span style="font-style: italic;">Call If You Need Me</span></a>.<br /><br />*<br /><br />I'm reasonably sure my reluctance, bordering on inability, to post or indeed read anything on the internet for the past couple of months is linked to mild SAD. I noticed on my way back home today that there was still a little light in the sky at around a quarter to six. Makes a hell of a difference. I haven't even been able to read much, other than a bit of poetry.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-47858948150435785712007-12-26T23:19:00.001+00:002007-12-26T23:19:41.690+00:00Alexander Vynograd plays J.S. Bach's Choral Prelude BWV 639<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/Q_tMjYxYTwA' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/Q_tMjYxYTwA'/></object></p><p>This is the music used repeatedly in Tarkovsky's film "Solaris", and as I particularly recall, over close-ups of "The Hunters in the Snow".</p></div>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-11337362015026471872007-12-10T22:27:00.001+00:002008-02-04T23:17:54.397+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">WINTERING</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_T-3Wfkj3nJw/R12-4zDUewI/AAAAAAAAABQ/oOuaY2QtgY0/s1600-h/350px-2001humanhibernation.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_T-3Wfkj3nJw/R12-4zDUewI/AAAAAAAAABQ/oOuaY2QtgY0/s400/350px-2001humanhibernation.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5142476232513059586" border="0" /></a><br />Not been very active, post- or comment-wise recently. Please for no-one to feel snubbed. I am succumbing to the now blindingly obvious and going into hibernation for a while.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-1640960059684521902007-11-18T16:41:00.000+00:002007-11-20T01:22:54.329+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[AMENDED MON 19/11/2007]</span><br /><br />STAINED GLASS TELLS OLD STORY</span><br /><br />From "<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/984">Lost New York</a>", the first essay in <a href="http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/Title/9780349115283"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Last Empire</span></a>. Gore Vidal is reviewing a novel called <span style="font-style: italic;">Many Mansions</span> by Isabel Bolton, published 1952 and set in 1950:<br /><blockquote>The old lady finished her reading: 'If her book should fall into the hands of others addicted as she was to the habitual reading of novels, what exactly would their feelings be?' One wonders - is there such a thing now as <span style="font-style: italic;">a habitual reader</span> of novels? Even the ambitious, the ravenously literary young Adam seems to have a suspicion that he may have got himself into the stained-glass window trade.<br /></blockquote>Of course, Vidal has been raising this question for all of his career, and continues to do so today. I think it's certain that there are fewer and fewer literary references in public discourse, and that people in general don't have a literary common ground (other than Harry Potter). When I was at university I met an old fella who told me his father would meet with friends of an evening to read aloud their favourite passages from Thomas Hardy, and that this wasn't at all an unusual pastime. But then I suppose Dickens was the TV of his day, and followed with the kind of unifying, street-emptying attention people would one day give to <span style="font-style: italic;">Z Cars</span>.<br /><br />*<br /><br />In <span style="font-style: italic;">1876</span> Vidal kind of provides his own answer, through the mouth of his narrator Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler:<br /><blockquote>My pen delays...Stops. Why write any of this? Why make a record? Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable. So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word.<br /></blockquote>I don't quite agree with this, but it's a good answer. Not quite as pithy as the beginning of his answer to a long, rambling and (to judge by the reaction) irritating question I posed to him when he was on a book tour in 1998: "Writing is basically an extension of thinking."<br /><br />*<br /><br />I <a href="http://thesilvereel.blogspot.com/2007/09/no-more-villains-anymore-in-which-we.html">posted a little while back</a> that <span style="font-style: italic;">1876</span> was much taken up with the buying of American politicians, but despite the massive and widespread corruption which Vidal depicts, I wasn't prepared for the thrilling change of gear in the final section, when the presidential election goes to the wire. Up to this point, grand theft has seemed wrong but still sort of fun, committed by boring or jovial rascals; in any case, everyone does it, fortunes are there to be made in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age">Gilded Age</a> and only the terminally unlucky or foolish suffer (we are talking here about the elect, the members of the American oligarchy which, of course, did not and does not exist - not the Civil War veterans who occasionally intrude on the narrative with their raggedness and missing limbs.) And then, having jollied and joshed us, Vidal gets serious, and it's like a slap in the face.<br /><br />-- SPOILER ALERT <span style="font-style: italic;">1876</span> --<br /><br />The candidates are Governor Samuel Tilden (Dem, dry, highly intelligent but somewhat charmless, a reformer) and Rutherford B. Hayes (Rep, a man seemingly without qualities other than being the one candidate his party can unite behind). Tilden will neither take bribes nor buy favours; Hayes is no more corrupt than any of his peers, which is still saying a great deal. Tilden has already won the <span style="font-style: italic;">popular </span>vote by a quarter of a million, has 184 electoral college votes, and one more will secure him the presidency; Hayes is on 165, and needs all of the 20 remaining votes from Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina and - yes - Florida. The results from all four of these states are in dispute.<br /><br />Tilden addresses the press:<br /><blockquote> With altogether too much delicacy Tilden referred to the current "subject of controversy," making the point that in the twenty-two previous presidential elections, the Congress had simply recorded the votes sent them by the Electoral College. But now the Congress must choose between two absolutely conflicting sets of votes sent them by four states.<br /><br />Tilden reminded the audience that three years ago the Congress had declared illegal the present Government of Louisiana, whose Returning Board has just seen fit to reverse the state's popular vote. Tilden also spelled out the illegality of the South Carolina and Florida boards. But where he ought to have thundered his contempt for the most corrupt and now tyrannous Admininstration in our history and unfurled his banner as our rightful lord, he was throughout his address very much the dry constitutional lawyer and in no way the outraged tribune of a cheated people.</blockquote>All the way through this final section, Tilden is almost, almost there, but not quite. It should be his, it <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span> be...and yet he seems to be unable to clinch it, despite the egregious nature of Republican attempts to pervert the count. By the time I got to this part, I was already experiencing a serious case of <span style="font-style: italic;">deja vu</span>:<span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><blockquote> During the week since the electoral commission was given the two (actually, because of a technicality, three) sets of Florida returns, things did not appear to go well for us despite the brilliance of Charles O'Conor.<br /><br /> For one thing, the commission has never seriously tried to examine any of the initial voting frauds in Florida. The Republican case is based on the fact that the Hayes returns are the only valid ones because they have been signed by the <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/carpetbagger?r=75">carpetbag</a> Republican governor of the state, while those favouring Tilden were only signed by the state's attorney general. For a whole week the number of angels able to dance on that pin's head have been counted and re-counted.<br /></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Tilden">entry for Tilden on Wikipedia</a> notes:<br /><blockquote>While the Republicans boldly claimed the election, Tilden mystified and disappointed his supporters <span style="font-style: italic;">by not fighting for the prize or giving any leadership to his advocates</span>. Instead he devoted more than a month to the preparation of a complete history of the electoral counts over the previous century to show it was the unbroken usage of Congress, not of the President of the Senate, to count the electoral votes. [Bigelow v 2:60]<br /></blockquote>The italics are mine.<br /><br />-- SPOILER ENDS --<br /><br />I came to <span style="font-style: italic;">1876</span> totally cold (apart from recognising the name of Rutherford B. Hayes), began it with mild trepidation, continued with pleasure, raced through the end, and put it down with real satisfaction. A thirty year-old novel about a one hundred and thirty year-old scandal, which shines a powerful light on America today. Yup, I'd say that's a vindication of the stained-glass trade.<br /><blockquote></blockquote>*<br /><br />It's accepted that the presidential election in 2000 was 'troubled', 'controversial' - that's to say, stolen. But no-one describes the 2004 election in those terms, which is astonishing given the number of complaints of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._presidential_election_controversy_and_irregularities">irregularities</a>. Gore Vidal wrote the introduction to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Conyers#What_Went_Wrong_In_Ohio">Rep. John Conyers</a>' report <a href="http://www.academychicago.com/conyers.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">What Went Wrong in Ohio</span></a>, which goes into these concerns in depth and is available as a <a href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010605Y.shtml">PDF</a>.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-60452156854929503562007-11-18T16:38:00.001+00:002007-11-18T16:38:10.613+00:00What it's all about - Death<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/qcXodj_rG5U' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/qcXodj_rG5U'/></object></p></div>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-37947396037559713962007-11-18T16:33:00.000+00:002007-11-18T16:34:00.022+00:00What it's all about - Life<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/fySndvjPcwA' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/fySndvjPcwA'/></object></p><p>I did, by the way, clean some of the smeg off it before leaving it in a shady corner.</p></div>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-27571793876070721442007-11-09T17:07:00.000+00:002007-11-10T14:05:51.360+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">GILDED IF NOT GOLDEN<br /></span><br />In one of Alan Garner's essays, he writes about the deep attachment he has to his particular corner of Cheshire, his - and here he has to reach for foreign words for which, he says, there is no English equivalent: from Russian, <span style="font-style: italic;">rodina</span>; from German, <span style="font-style: italic;">heimat</span>. I'd always thought that <span style="font-style: italic;">heimat </span>translated roughly as <span style="font-style: italic;">homeland</span>, but a native German speaker recently put me right: it's not just your home town but the area around it, the woods, the fields, the paths, and the bond that one feels with them.<br /><br />I experienced this myself in August, not for the first time and not unexpectedly. Doctor Jon-avec-le-Lotus was shortly to get married and had decided that he didn't want to go down the beer and strippers route; in fact he preferred that the two of us should head north and tackle a hill and camp out, something we hadn't done for years. I was content with this and so off we went. Stag day was celebrated in the pissing rain with steak cooked on a primus and champagne drunk out of unbreakable children's mugs, within sight of the cloudbase covering Lochnagar. I believe we were both quite happy. Happier still that the weather was so rotten come the evening it made a hotel the only sensible option.<br /><br />The following day we drove north from Ballater - at speed, a Lotus being constitutionally incapable of doing anything else - up the A939, over the Lecht summit and down again towards Tomintoul. Fourteen twisty miles after Tomintoul you come to Grantown-on-Spey, a fair-sized town which sits in the Strathspey running SW to Boat of Garten and Aviemore, NE towards a thousand distilleries. Due north lies Dava Moor and Lochindorb. I've driven in to Grantown-on-Spey a few times, knew the strath at this point to be arrestingly beautiful and was looking forward to seeing it again. The effect as you drop off the bleak high ground and into sight of greenery and fields is like a balm.<br /><br />But more than this, I know that north of the town is the beginning of what I continue to think of as my own country, the edges or boundaries of it, at any rate. Even a Mark II Elise makes a hell of a racket, but as we turned a bend and got a first sniff of the valley I realised I was becoming insensible to the engine, and to any conversation, which I was scarcely able to carry on with. It wasn't unlike being mildly stoned, the same feeling of detachment, calm and lightness, of being in some way carried. As I say, it wasn't unexpected though it was unsought.<br /><br />Sadly we were not heading north, but turned west along the A95, a surprisingly broad and good-quality road for the Highlands, to my mind. Mechanically efficient.<br /><br />Later, as we reached the Drumochter summit on the A9, Doctor Jon remarked that that was a really striking view as well. Indeed it is, bleak and spectacular; but every time I see it I feel sad, and something closes up inside me, and the defences acquired through years spent living in a foreign country begin to raise. It's the prospect of the south, and the knowledge that the Highlands (for want of a better and less loaded word) are being left behind; and something cries out against that.<br /><br />*<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theherald.co.uk/search/display.var.1820355.0.duncan_williamson.php">Duncan Williamson</a> died at 1am in Kirkcaldy on November 8th. RIP.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-37212341472229475732007-11-01T15:23:00.000+00:002007-11-07T19:10:55.912+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">HORSE SENSE</span><br /><br /><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/learning_journeys/scotlands_languages/edwin_muir/">Edwin Muir</a>'s early poem "Horses" (as distinct from "The Horses", much taught in Scottish schools) is a reverie of a childhood encounter. The last three verses run:<br /><blockquote>But when at dusk with steaming nostrils home<br />They came, they seemed gigantic in the gloam,<br />And warm and glowing with mysterious fire<br />That lit their smouldering bodies in the mire.<br /><br />Their eyes as brilliant and as wide as night<br />Gleamed with a cruel apocalyptic light.<br />Their manes the leaping ire of the wind<br />Lifted with rage invisible and blind.<br /><br />Ah, now it fades! it fades! and I must pine<br />Again for that dread country crystalline,<br />Where the blank field and the still-standing tree<br />Were bright and fearful presences to me.</blockquote>I think it's common in the civilized West to associate this sort of revelation with childhood, as part of a natural inheritance we lose as we grow up. The last stanza makes me think of Housman's land of lost content, yet Muir's poem is clearly suggesting something more than what one might call the everyday magic of a child's perspective. These horses are not simply magical, they're elemental, totemic, numinous. If we take these presences to have been part of the common life of farming in Orkney in the late 19th century, then it should be borne in mind that Muir wasn't cut off from this particular source by time alone, but by place and culture. He said that in moving from Orkney to Glasgow he aged about 150 years, and he was not being jocular.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Fortunately modernity did not overtake Europe's remaining primitive enclaves so quickly that we don't have some record of what the European dreamtime was like. Here is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Levi">Carlo Levi</a> in Basilicata, from <a href="http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141183213,00.html?breadcrumbList=%7B+Carlo+Levi+%7D&bcPath=c590614%2D00000000%23%23%2D1%23%23%2D1%7E%7Eq617574686f723a2266617374706266617374204361726c6f204c657669206661737470626661737422&searchProfile=UK-590614-global&strSrchSql="><span style="font-style: italic;">Christ Stopped at Eboli</span></a>:<br /><blockquote>There is nothing strange in the fact that there were dragons in these parts during the Middle Ages. (The peasants and Giulia used to say: 'A long time ago, more than a hundred years, long before the brigands...') Nor would it be strange if dragons were to appear again today before the startled eyes of the country people. Anything is possible, where the ancient deities of the shepherds, the ram and the lamb, run every day over the familiar paths, and there is no definite boundary line between the world of human beings and that of animals or even monsters. [...]<br />To the peasants everything has a double meaning. The cow-woman, the werewolf, the lion-baron, and the goat-devil are only notorious and striking examples. People, trees, animals, even objects and words have a double life. Only reason, religion, and history have clear-cut meanings. But the feeling for life itself, for art, language and love is complex, infinitely so. And in the peasants' world there is no room for reason, religion and history. There is no room for religion because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not merely symbolically, divine: Christ and the goat; the heavens above, and the beasts of the field below; everything is bound up in natural magic. Even the ceremonies of the church become pagan rites, celebrating the existence of inanimate things, which the peasants endow with a soul, and the innumerable earthy divinites of the village.<br /></blockquote>That phrase 'a long time ago, more than a hundred years...' is very interesting because of something Garner says in an essay in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Voice That Thunders </span>about memory within an oral tradition only going back about four generations. All previous history becomes compressed or refined, turns into myth and is associated with the great-grandfather.<br /><br />*<br /><blockquote>A couple of pages later, Levi describes a local feast of the Virgin Mary:<br />Amid this warlike thundering there was no happiness or religious ecstacy in the people's eyes; instead they seemed prey to a sort of madness, a pagan throwing off of restraint, and a stunned or hypnotized condition; all of them were highly wrought up. The animals ran about wildly, goats leaped, donkeys brayed, dogs barked, children shouted, and women sang. Peasants with baskets of wheat in their hands threw fistfuls of it at the Madonna, so that she might take thought for the harvest and bring them good luck. The grains curved through the air, bounced on the paving-stones and bounced up off them with a light noise like that of hail. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Madonna">black-faced Madonna</a>, in the shower of wheat, among the animals, the gunfire, and the trumpets, was no sorrowful Mother of God, but rather a subterranean deity black with the shadows of the bowels of the earth, a peasant Persephone or a lower-world goddess of the harvest.</blockquote>I've <a href="http://thesilvereel.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html">posted before</a> on religious ritual performed not as commemoration but invocation - a feature of it being the elimination of time.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-80931753508086811182007-10-31T18:17:00.000+00:002007-11-01T17:48:21.599+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">JUST ONE MORE THING AFTER ANOTHER</span><br /><br />I'd been trying to extoll to someone the virtues, the cleverness, the neatness, the deliberately narrow but rich set-up, the exquisite pleasure of watching the psychological torture that <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2458244">Columbo</a> inflicts on the party he thinks and we know to be guilty.<br /><br />"Uh-huh...Columbo. Smart cop plays stupid, yeah?"<br /><br />Which stopped me short. "Yes, I suppose so," I said, deflated, and saddened that she had managed to reduce one of my household gods to his essence so completely that there was no possible comeback. At the time I was arrogant enough to think that this indicated stupidity on her part: I mean, couldn't she see...? Of course, it was acuity, and a technique that I've found to be useful since then.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Thus, it's unfair to describe Edwin Muir's <span style="font-style: italic;">Scottish Journey</span> as an extended grump - but not by too much. Granted, it does not take account of Muir's elegance, perception and the force of his argument, in a book which is still in print, regularly name-checked or quoted in Scotland, and has served as an inspiration for similar, later tours which try taking the nation's temperature; granted also that by any standard the view becomes depressing once Muir leaves Edinburgh, particularly in the industrial West. In fact, one can't imagine that anyone in the low dishonest decade was having a particularly good time of it, post-economic crash and pre-war (apart from in Spain and China, where war had got off to an early start.)<br /><br />Nevertheless, Muir seems to see the 1930s in Scotland as an endpoint, with no prospect of things improving. In a way he was right - they got worse, but they did get better afterwards. Without falling into the traps of hindsight or historical inevitability, one can still say confidently that things do change. Watching the first two episodes of <span style="font-style: italic;">Smiley's People</span> the other week was like looking at a museum piece.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Thinking of this, I predict that Labour will lose the next General Election. Brown simply doesn't feel lucky, not enough of a winner. My tip is to begin preparing for the consequences of this now, and try to see past the grey, muddled, inglorious 18 months which I guess are in front of us. I will be delighted if I'm wrong about this.The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-54615569834046189042007-10-30T21:54:00.000+00:002007-11-01T18:30:55.838+00:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">EYES WIDEN, EYEBROWS RAISE</span><br /><br />There's a sonnet by Belli which consists of almost nothing but various names for the male member, which must present an interesting task for the translator. Here's a little snippet from Gore Vidal's <span style="font-style: italic;">Point to Point Navigation </span>which may throw light on <span style="font-style: italic;">why</span> - a Roman preoccupation, or simply a male one?<br /><blockquote>[Federico Fellini] was certainly a phallophobe in a culture rooted in phallophilia. He had even done a book of caricatures of phalluses, with such labels as "the happy cock", "the snobbish cock", "the angry cock". He entertained ladies with these drawings.</blockquote>Whether or not this is normal behaviour for a phallophobe is beyond me.<blockquote></blockquote>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14496565.post-78206987441526618022007-10-17T00:12:00.001+01:002007-10-17T00:12:33.618+01:00Dudley Moore Beethoven Sonata Parody<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/GazlqD4mLvw' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/GazlqD4mLvw'/></object></p></div>The Silver Eelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03615661656637047142noreply@blogger.com0