The Silver Eel

Fare-well but not good-bye

2008-10-29T17:41:00.002Z

Ah, so that's where you find the post title box...

Well, it was time for a relaunch anyway, so I'm stopping The Silver Eel. You can now find Eelish musings on writing and reading at the imaginatively titled The Silver Eel II. I do hope this will mean more regular posting, and reading of others' posts...

2008-09-28T22:35:00.003+01:00

HUMBLE APOLOGIES

Our computer died and we've only just got the new (actually, acquired) one up and running on tinternet: hence, lack of recent posts.

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.

In the meantime...I note that Andrew Motion's endangered word is 'skirr', 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.

2008-07-28T23:25:00.002+01:00

MAKING NICE TO ESCAPISTS

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 Alan Garner speaking in its favour:

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.

(Garner's grandfather was a blacksmith, a fund of knowledge and a nigh totemic figure to the boy and the writer.)

*

On the subject of escapism, John Sutherland in How to Read a Novel 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.

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.

2008-07-16T00:51:00.004+01:00

BROUAGE

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:

(more here)

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.

Then, just a few weeks ago, I happened to read this in the Michelin Green Guide to the French Atlantic Coast:

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.

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 Berenice.

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.

*

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 Cyrano de Bergerac], or if your luck's in, to be hoisted on stilts by a French tragedian, and pulled about like puppets on a string!

Schiller, The Robbers

*

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?

2008-07-14T20:23:00.000+01:00

RE-MEMBERING AND FOR-GETTING

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?

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.

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.

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.

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:

THE SECRET

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was,
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines,

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

- Denise Levertov

2008-07-01T20:05:00.002+01:00

WHIMSICALLY, THIS AND THAT

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 Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Leap Year 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.

Practically the first sentence of Gardens of the Moon 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.

However, I continued to wonder what I was missing, given the plaudits he continues to attract, until I saw the latest title, which is Toll the Hounds.

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?"

*

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 Janet and John. 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."

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!"

*

I was curious to see if Janet and John 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.

2008-06-29T11:28:00.004+01:00

THE GOLDEN AGE

Sleep and slothful beds and gluttony
have banished virtue from the world of men,
so that our nature, by such use undone,
is almost exiled from its proper way;

and every kindly light that from the sky
shapes human life so spent that anyone
who strives to bring new streams from Helicon
is pointed out as some strange prodigy.

Who cares for myrtle now, who for the bay?
'Naked and poor you walk, Philosophy',
the crowd, intent on wretched profit, cries.

You'll have few fellows on the other way;
thus all the more, O gentle soul, I pray,
abandon not your noble enterprise.

Petrarch, Canzoniere book 1, no. 7.

*

MOOR: I hate this age of scribblers, when I can pick up my Plutarch and read of great men.

SPIEGELBERG: Josephus is the man you should read.

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.

Schiller, The Robbers, scene 2.

*

Stop. Please.

Listen to Nestor. You are both younger than I,
and in my time I struck up with better men than you,
even you, but never once did they make light of me.
I've never seen such men, I never will again...
men like Pirithous, Dryas, that fine captain,
Caeneus and Exadius, and Polyphemus, royal prince,
and Theseus, Aegeus' boy, a match for the immortals.
They were the strongest mortals ever bred on earth [...]
None of the men who walk the earth these days
could battle with those fighters, none, but they,
they took to heart my counsels, marked my words.

Nestor is speaking to Menelaus and none other than Achilles. Iliad, book 1.

*

Recently read for the book group: Ella Minnow Pea 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 verboten. Perhaps surprisingly, it's a light, entertaining read, though that doesn't undermine its effectiveness as fable.

2008-05-16T22:54:00.003+01:00

GODLESS COMMIES GAVE ME MILK

Here's an argument you don't see very often, from Tony Judt's introduction to his new collection of essays, Reappraisals:

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 prophylactic 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.

You should - but you don't.

*

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

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 - Darkness at Noon. Today, Koestler's best-selling novel of the Moscow show trials is an acquired, minority taste.

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 Smiley's People 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.

Nonetheless, though I haven't read Darkness at Noon 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 Darkness at Noon?" and drew a blank. Each of them has not only a degree but a master's in history.

Well, shit, thought I.

2008-05-16T01:03:00.002+01:00

NO MORE HEROES?

A nice quote:

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.

- James Rebontier (1873 - 1907)

2008-05-15T22:46:00.003+01:00

TANGLED WEBS

Listened to Radio 3's Night Waves tonight, particularly for Philippe Sands talking about his new book Torture Team. 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.

Two very interesting points came out. The first was that an episode of 24 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?" i.e. 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.

Incidentally, if like me you've never been quite clear just what waterboarding involves, or why it's effective, take a look at the wikipedia article. 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.

*

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 JFK and The Parallax View 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 The Manchurian Candidate and Project MK-Ultra, nothing those of us with our flying saucers parked out back haven't come across already. But then, then, 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).

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.

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.

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".

2008-04-16T20:16:00.002+01:00

FOR SERVICES ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF REASON

A review quote - from The Times, no less - on the back of Jamie's Kitchen:

Jamie should be given the Victoria Cross.

What kind of chef is he? Casey Ryback?

*

On a related theme, for a while you could find at least five novels with "A tour de force - 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 J.G. Ballard's claim never to have heard a single cliche pass Self's lips.

2008-04-16T18:47:00.002+01:00

THINGS USED TO BE SO MUCH BETTER...

From the journal of the brothers Goncourt:

2nd January 1867

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.

This feeling that things are going to the dogs is always with us. From a conversation between Philip Roth and Milan Kundera, different species, same genus:

Roth: Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?
Kundera: That depends on what you mean by the word soon.
Roth: Tomorrow or the day after.
Kundera: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.
Roth: So then we have nothing to worry about.
Kundera: On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages, there must be something to it.

I read Ignorance by Kundera earlier this year and thoroughly enjoyed it, which I found surprising given that I got very little out of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. Also read parts of American Pastoral, my first contact with Roth's fiction, and while I didn't enjoy the novel much, I though the writing was amazing.

*

From the Goncourt journal again:

16th March 1867

The opening night of Les Idees de Madame Aubray, the first play by Dumas fils I have seen since La Dame aux Camelias. 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 claque 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.

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.

Dictionary.com defines claque as:

1. a group of persons hired to applaud an act or performer.

2. a group of sycophants.

2008-03-06T22:25:00.002Z

NAPLES, IRAQ

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 Cockburn has done the same in The Occupation:

By the time Bremer 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 tabula rasa they could reconstruct [write on, surely?] as they wished. Bremer 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 Bremer's tenure in Baghdad I reread Naples '44, 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 Bremer. 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.

Probably Luciano knew a lot more about Naples than some of Bremer's American-Iraqi advisors did about Iraq.

Alan Whicker was quite scathing about Mark Clark in Whicker's War, accusing him of allowing German forces to slip away while he concerned himself with making a triumphal entrance into Rome.

*

We're used to thinking about Iraq as a catastrophe, but an article by Jim Holt in the London Review of Books from 18th October 2007 put forward quite a different interpretation:

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.

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 Joseph Stiglitz 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 negligible when set against securing the oil resources and the revenues derived from them. The description of the 'super-bases' I find particularly interesting.

2008-03-04T22:42:00.002Z

THE USE OF LITERATURE/FLAT HEROISM

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.

The key word here is desolation: without solace. From The Harlan Ellison Hornbook.

If England were what England seems
An' not the England of our dreams
But only putty, brass an' paint
'Ow quick we'd drop 'er. But she ain't.

Kipling, from 'The Return'.

*

It's been quite something to return to reading the Hornbook 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.

The Kipling lines come from my mother's copy of Other Men's Flowers 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, F. Spencer Chapman, a genuine WWII hero whose The Jungle is Neutral is a classic account of guerilla warfare (republished in 2006 by Birlinn).

Incredibly, what appears to be the original Time magazine review from 1949 is available online; the last paragraph reads:

The Jungle Is Neutral 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.

Though I haven't read The Jungle is Neutral, this description tallies with my reading of Eastern Approaches, 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."

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?

2008-02-04T22:51:00.000Z

THE PRAM IN THE HALL/RECALLED TO LIFE?

Recently came across this in a copy of the Scottish Review of Books from May last year. An article by Alan Riach on MacDiarmid, quoting the poem 'The Two Parents':

I love my little son, and yet when he was ill,
I could not confine myself to his bedside.
I was impatient of his squalid little needs,
His laboured breathing and the fretful way he cried
And longed for my wide range of interests again,
Whereas his mother sank without another care
To that dread level of nothing but life itself
And stayed day and night, till he was better, there.

Women may pretend, yet they always dismiss
Everything but mere being just like this.

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.

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:

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.

From Call If You Need Me.

*

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.

Alexander Vynograd plays J.S. Bach's Choral Prelude BWV 639

2007-12-26T23:19:00.001Z

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".

2007-12-10T22:27:00.001Z

WINTERING

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.

2007-11-18T16:41:00.000Z

[AMENDED MON 19/11/2007]

STAINED GLASS TELLS OLD STORY

From "Lost New York", the first essay in The Last Empire. Gore Vidal is reviewing a novel called Many Mansions by Isabel Bolton, published 1952 and set in 1950:

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 a habitual reader 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.

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 Z Cars.

*

In 1876 Vidal kind of provides his own answer, through the mouth of his narrator Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler:

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.

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."

*

I posted a little while back that 1876 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 Gilded Age 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.

-- SPOILER ALERT 1876 --

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 popular 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.

Tilden addresses the press:

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.

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.

All the way through this final section, Tilden is almost, almost there, but not quite. It should be his, it must 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 deja vu:

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.

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 carpetbag 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.

The entry for Tilden on Wikipedia notes:

While the Republicans boldly claimed the election, Tilden mystified and disappointed his supporters by not fighting for the prize or giving any leadership to his advocates. 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]

The italics are mine.

-- SPOILER ENDS --

I came to 1876 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.

*

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 irregularities. Gore Vidal wrote the introduction to Rep. John Conyers' report What Went Wrong in Ohio, which goes into these concerns in depth and is available as a PDF.

What it's all about - Death

2007-11-18T16:38:00.001Z

What it's all about - Life

2007-11-18T16:33:00.000Z

I did, by the way, clean some of the smeg off it before leaving it in a shady corner.

2007-11-09T17:07:00.000Z

GILDED IF NOT GOLDEN

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, rodina; from German, heimat. I'd always thought that heimat translated roughly as homeland, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*

Duncan Williamson died at 1am in Kirkcaldy on November 8th. RIP.

2007-11-01T15:23:00.000Z

HORSE SENSE

Edwin Muir'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:

But when at dusk with steaming nostrils home
They came, they seemed gigantic in the gloam,
And warm and glowing with mysterious fire
That lit their smouldering bodies in the mire.

Their eyes as brilliant and as wide as night
Gleamed with a cruel apocalyptic light.
Their manes the leaping ire of the wind
Lifted with rage invisible and blind.

Ah, now it fades! it fades! and I must pine
Again for that dread country crystalline,
Where the blank field and the still-standing tree
Were bright and fearful presences to me.

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.

*

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 Carlo Levi in Basilicata, from Christ Stopped at Eboli:

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. [...]
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.

That phrase 'a long time ago, more than a hundred years...' is very interesting because of something Garner says in an essay in The Voice That Thunders 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.

*

A couple of pages later, Levi describes a local feast of the Virgin Mary:
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 black-faced Madonna, 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.

I've posted before on religious ritual performed not as commemoration but invocation - a feature of it being the elimination of time.

2007-10-31T18:17:00.000Z

JUST ONE MORE THING AFTER ANOTHER

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 Columbo inflicts on the party he thinks and we know to be guilty.

"Uh-huh...Columbo. Smart cop plays stupid, yeah?"

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.

*

Thus, it's unfair to describe Edwin Muir's Scottish Journey 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.)

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 Smiley's People the other week was like looking at a museum piece.

*

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.

2007-10-30T21:54:00.000Z

EYES WIDEN, EYEBROWS RAISE

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 Point to Point Navigation which may throw light on why - a Roman preoccupation, or simply a male one?

[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.

Whether or not this is normal behaviour for a phallophobe is beyond me.

Dudley Moore Beethoven Sonata Parody

2007-10-17T00:12:00.001+01:00

2007-10-16T23:43:00.000+01:00

MAIR WURDS

Orwell complains - no, really - that the distinction between imply and infer seems to be in decline and beyond rescue. That was in the 1940s, so one can only assume that the patient, though still far from well, is proving remarkably hardy. But Bill Bryson notes this, in Troublesome Words:

The distinction is useful and, in careful writing nowadays, expected. However, it must be pointed out that there is not a great deal of historical basis for the distinction. Many great writers, among them Milton, Sir Thomas More, Jane Austen and Shakespeare, freely used infer where we would today insist on imply. Indeed, until as late as 1976, The Concise Oxford Dictionary treated the words as interchangeable.

*

I am currently putting on a convincing, interminable impression of a 19th century consumptive, possibly Doc Holliday as portrayed by Dennis Quaid. My wife is trying to outdo me. It's like having a pair of howler monkeys in the house. While trying to track down causes on the internet, I came across the following word, used in medicine: idiopathic.

It's Greek for "we don't know".

2007-10-01T00:49:00.000+01:00

NOT WHISTLER'S MOTHER

2007-09-24T23:23:00.000+01:00

NO MORE VILLAINS ANYMORE

In which we consider how dissatisfying the 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate was compared to the 1962 original, which was as quick, detailed and cunning as the remake is clunky, obvious and over-wrought. I was afraid this would be the case, and when it was released at the cinema I deliberately stifled my initial reaction to rush out and see it immediately. While I could think of many good political reasons to remake it, even with the application of thumbscrews I doubt I could come up with a good artistic one. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is simply the most finely-crafted film I think I've ever seen, even better than The Third Man. It works as a political thriller and as a psychological study; it uses every trick there is to tell its story and not one of them seems anything less than entirely right; it is, as Roger Ebert says, "inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience" - for which read, assumes the audience is intelligent, something you practically never see on film or TV - "and plays not like a 'classic' but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released." Quite. Why remake it?

Well, the road to hell, and all. Playing "overheard" audio or TV commentary as the transition between scenes is just the laziest, the most hackneyed, the most ham-fisted way of providing context, and when it's used to deliver a political message it becomes perfectly obnoxious - and I agreed with everything it was saying. Yeah, yeah - war on terror, undermining of civil liberties, America being destroyed from within, I geddit, I already goddit, and therein lies the problem. By taking elements which were floating around some hazy interzone of public consciousness, fitting them together and bringing them into sharp dramatic focus, the 1962 version was eery, disturbing, and as it turned out, in some measure prophetic. The 2004 version doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. It's playing catch-up.

The basis of the original film is that, in a brilliant inversion, communist spies are using the very forces of tub-thumping anti-communism (read, clearly, McCarthyism) to work their way to the White House and undermine American freedoms by riding a tidal wave of public fear and hysteria which will allow them to assume "powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy" - presumably with full public support. In a final twist to this plot, Angela Lansbury's character intends to turn against her communist backers. The message that comes through is that by this stage it won't really matter who is in power, or what they believe, which is why a film ostensibly about dirty commies continues to appeal to knee-jerk liberals. It also chimes nicely with Senator Vandenberg's comment to Truman that in order to continue public funding for the military at a wartime level, they were going to have to "scare hell out of the American people" - a trick which continues to work well. In fact the old film is more on the button than the new one, which for its part tells us - what? That politicians can be bought? Indeed they can, in which case why go to the intricate trouble of brainwashing one? There couldn't be a more compliant president than Bush, though in his defence it doesn't seem he has much of a brain to wash.

As a final note, it's essential to both plot and theme that all of this is to be achieved through what Neil Gunn called the breaking of the mind - the cracking open of a single individual so he can be remade to political ends. It's as potent a central idea as that of Life is Beautiful - the protection of the child in the midst of horror, in order to save humanity.

*

I'd find the disappointment of Candidate Mk#2 easier to bear if it wasn't the second time it had happened in a year. The State Within was similarly shaky, disappointing and redundant, like a cut-and-paste of news clippings. A few weeks after the final episode was broadcast we watched Defence of the Realm, which was simply chilling, and accurately reflected the occult (to use David Peace's word) quality of politics in Britain in the 1980s. Now it just seems sordid, and sad, not to mention enormously destructive if you're Iraqi.

*

The buying of politicians is nothing new, and is a central motif of 1876 by Gore Vidal, which I'm reading with easy pleasure. I tried it ten years ago and couldn't get anywhere with it, said so to a friend, was so non-plussed I was even considering flogging it back to the second-hand shop. The friend, with not-quite mock condescension, counselled me to put it by: "You know, one day you'll be looking for something to read and -" he pointed and winked sidelong "- that'll be it." And he was right.

2007-09-24T23:16:00.000+01:00

BELLI STOCKS RISE

Awful, I know. An informative and enthusiastic review for the new translation of Belli's sonnets at textualities.net (formerly the Scottish Book Collector). Translator Mike Stocks' website is here.

2007-09-10T23:51:00.000+01:00

A USE FOR CATULLUS

Whose name I know only because we had to translate one of his letters for Latin GCSE. The gist of it was that he had uncharacteristically spent the day hunting, although he'd caught nothing having passed all his time writing, and was advising a friend to do the same if ever he got writer's block, "for you will find that Minerva does not dwell on the hills less than Diana" - or somesuch.

The immediate relevance of it is in the opening line: "You will laugh, and it is permitted that you should laugh." I've joined a book group.

First book was Richard Ford's Independence Day, which almost none of us enjoyed and only two out of six finished (I was not one of them). Good excuse for a natter and a trip out to Kinghorn, met some new folk whose company I enjoyed, and the discussion was useful and brought out a few things I hadn't considered, thus enabling me to give a more fully-rounded rejection of a Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Pleasant afternoon, shame about the book. I intend to give it a few months, anyway.

2007-09-09T23:08:00.000+01:00

FLY SEEKS WALL

At ‘the little Savile’ I remember much kindness and toleration. There was Gosse, of course, sensitive as a cat to all atmospheres, but utterly fearless when it came to questions of good workmanship; Hardy’s grave and bitter humour; Andrew Lang, as detached to all appearances as a cloud, but—one learned to know—never kinder in your behalf than when he seemed least concerned with you; Eustace Balfour, a large, lovable man, and one of the best of talkers, who died too soon; Herbert Stephen, very wise and very funny when he chose; Rider Haggard, to whom I took at once, he being of the stamp adored by children and trusted by men at sight; and he could tell tales, mainly against himself, that broke up the tables; Saintsbury, a solid rock of learning and geniality whom I revered all my days; profoundly a scholar and versed in the art of good living. There was a breakfast with him and Walter Pollock of the Saturday Review in the Albany, when he produced some specially devilish Oriental delicacy which we cooked by the light of our united ignorances. It was splendid!

From Chapter IV of Something of Myself by Rudyard Kipling.

*

It was indeed an immortal evening. Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, Keats' eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation, that in my life I never passed a more delightful time. All our fun was within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to. It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age, and my solemn Jerusalem flashing up by the flame of the fire, with Christ hanging over us like a vision, all made up a picture which will long glow upon

that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

Benjamin Robert Haydon, quoted in The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes [2nd ed.] p172.

The full excerpt is too long to quote in full, but for anyone up for a laugh, let alone having an interest in literary history, I can't recommend looking it up too highly. Note that the 2nd edition is now OP, and the 3rd edition (recently published) contains a completely different selection.

2007-09-08T12:47:00.000+01:00

EARTHY REALISM

[Riddley Walker reviewed in 300 words]

Riddley Walker is famous for being difficult, written in the vernacular of a post-holocaust world where language itself has become degraded: “On my namin day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint lookin to see none agen.”

Which might dismay the casual reader, but shouldn’t present problems for anyone familiar with non-conventional English, be it Chaucer or Irvine Welsh. This language is not degraded but powerfully authentic - in fact it’s a literal rendering of the Kent accent, the area in which the story takes place, and once the eye and ear become attuned, the reading is straightforward.

Moreover, Riddley and many of the other people in his world are highly articulate. What has become degraded is their understanding of where they have come from, and where they should be going; it becomes Riddley’s task to make the best sense he can of both, much of it done through the unravelling of stories which combine legend, litany and entertainment in the manner of the Mystery Plays, and have been passed down from “time back way back.”

As he picaresques around Kent, taking one side then another in the struggle to control the present and reawaken the past, it becomes clear that his true role is not to solve his smashed land and people, but to recount, interpret and provoke. A lesser novel would present a glimmer of salvation for all at the end. Hoban offers no closure, only another beginning and the prospect of an ongoing testing. This refusal to give easy answers is a mark of both strength and relevance. Riddley’s plight is ours, but unlike him we have not yet begun to live with its full consequences.

*

I know Joe disagrees, and look forward to picking this particular crow with him soon.

2007-09-07T18:10:00.000+01:00

GAPPED

[Music playing - my choice]

Me: Hope you're okay with Jethro Tull.

Colleague: I've got nothing against Jethro Tull at all. [Pause] It is like being in a car with my dad.

2007-09-05T23:07:00.000+01:00

KNOWING ABOUT ART

Art makes Europe European - Joyce's Dublin, Cervantes's Spain, Camoës's Portugal, Dickens's London, Kafka's Prague, Proust's France, Rembrandt's Holland, Bach's Germany, Sibelius's Finland, Ibsen's Norway, Mozart's Austria, Leonardo's Italy - all made common property by art's genius. You may find works by the divine Giorgione not only in his native Venice but in Amsterdam, Bassano, Bergamo, Berlin, Budapest, Dublin, Florence [...] Vienna. After a lifetime of familiarity with reproductions of his Sleeping Venus, all unexpectedly I came across its original among the war-ruins of Dresden. I was not in the least surprised. I was not even ecstatic - merely pleased to see it there. It was like coming across an old friend in the street one day, not far from home.

From Jan Morris's Europe [p54].

Though it should be pointed out that there must be, and must have been, many Spaniards who know who they are, collectively, know where they come from and what they belong to, without having to rely on Cervantes to put them straight. Which leads me to think that culture, like national identity, is expressed, not explained, and that drawing it from a book comes a very watery second to drawing it from the people around you.

If I were going to try to say what makes Europe European, I'd plump for topography, climate and Christianity before art.

I think what Morris is saying is that the European-ness of these artists comes from their work drawing on a common foundation, which makes it relevant and comprehensible to audiences in their neighbouring countries. That's the European dynamic, that torque between the provincial and the continental. I'd balk at saying it's the genius of art which permits them to be European - where present, genius makes them universal, which is why Darcus Howe could grow up in the Caribbean and still be enchanted by Great Expectations as a boy. Nor would I pick Bach over Beethoven as a typically German composer - Bach rises above not just nations but pretty much the rest of humanity.

In fact the more I look at this quote the less sure I am about whether it's profound or daffy. Sorry.

*

That said, I was pretty shocked to hear from an acquaintance about a recent theatre outing she'd made, in the company of two students, both of 'em well-educated and reasonably bright. Not only did they not know the story of Faust, they'd never even heard the term "Faustian pact". The common store must have been fresh out on the day they paid a visit.

*

I guess most people at some point have played the game of picking the literary character they feel most resembles them. Unfortunately I have just found mine: Doctor Desprez in the Stevenson story The Treasure of Franchard. The only consolation I can take is that this vain idiot is presented so sympathetically, I suspect RLS drew on some of his own worse characteristics to create him. The idea that we might now and then be pillocks in the same way is something I am, perversely, quite pleased about.

2007-07-27T21:28:00.000+01:00

JOLLIES

On hols as of tomorrow, though just how much rest we're going to get with Thing #1 and Thing #2 is open to question. Hol reading, more in hope than expectation, is Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies on a hot tip from Yvonne, and courtesy of Books and Ink in Banbury because both books are OP in Britain; Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby; the remainder of Italian Tales from the Age of Shakespeare.

We won't be doing a spot of roof tiling on a Venetian palazzo. I just like the painting, and haven't posted an image for a while.

2007-07-18T22:55:00.000+01:00

RIDDLEY WALKER

Finished RW today. Comparisons with Garner and Huck Finn are appropriate. Also with Davy. I have problems with the structure of the narrative at some points ('plot' would be pushing it), where it seems to me - and indeed Riddley himself says so - that arbitrary things are happening because it's as if they're meant to happen that way. Instantly, whether it's fair or not, one sees the hand of the author. As we know, it's the laziest, easiest cop-out going, and I can't believe that someone of Russell Hoban's evident imagination and skill (genius might not be pushing it) would make use of it, so I think I must be missing something, as I did with the first few readings of Red Shift.

So I will re-read RW at some point, though not immediately - this is most definitely a novel you want to let stew for a while. The experience of reading it is extraordinary. As a couple of people have written, Riddleyspeak forces you to slow down, to discover, and to absorb, even as Riddley himself does - in fact you begin reading like a child again. For this alone, probably for this most of all, I'd recommend it to anyone. Why did he have to make it so difficult, indeed! - that's the point!

*

Oh Jesus. Nearly two years since I bought it. This is a slow train.

2007-07-11T22:57:00.000+01:00

MEMORY AGAINST FORGETTING

Another use of literacy:

I keep thinking of Anna Akhmatova, outside the prison in Leningrad where her son was being held by Stalin. She wrote:

In the terrible years of the Yeshov [head of the NKVD] terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone recognized me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me...woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I answered: “Yes, I can.”

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

From the excellent fifth and final chapter of Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky, which I've just read for the second time within a few weeks.

*

There's quite a lot of useful learning in it, not least this snippet: apparently in the 19th century in America, schemes for the establishment of public libraries and schools were regularly denounced as socialist/communist. And this, in a section addressing the reduction in the number of publishers and news orgnaisations to a handful of conglomerate-owned companies:

Forces of silence can come more subtly from the market than from the edicts of a totalitarian state.

Which Roth and Klima also noted.

2007-07-10T03:08:00.000+01:00

ONE MAY BE PERMITTED TO HOPE FOR THE BEST

Belated post, I know. Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian that it's an indictment of our entire political system that Blair was not impeached over Iraq. One might add that it's an indictment of our elected representatives that any of them supported the invasion in the first place, a far more significant intelligence failure than any coming from the security services. But after all that has been revealed, for the House of Commons to give Blair a standing ovation at his last PM's questions...

And they wonder why the SNP won in Scotland.

*

One of the Glasgow car bombers qualified and worked as a doctor in Iraq. Which would be enough to turn anyone into an extremist - having to deal with the results of sanctions, radiation poisoning, invasion, civil war.

That doesn't mean that it's acceptable to attack civilians, of course. However, it must be noted that someone whom many might well consider to be an entirely legitimate target will shortly be starting work in the Middle East as, incredibly, a peace envoy. The Eumenides may yet have their day.

2007-07-10T02:25:00.000+01:00

DAVY, AGAIN

A first-contact response to Davy from US writer Carolyn Hill on her blog, and my comment.

2007-07-03T22:22:00.000+01:00

INVOKE AND SURVIVE

Continuing the theme of the role of literature, if it has one, in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe:

A work of imagination shares with a living creature or the ecosystem itself the characteristic of not being reducible to its parts, or explicable in terms of the technique of its manufacture. It cannot be exhausted by analysis. It is a system of interrelationships which, since it extends far beyond the words on the page, engages with everything else in the reader's conscious and unconscious experience, and is therefore virtually infinite.

The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes by Keith Sagar

This seems to me a rather hopeful prescription, rather than a description of an art-form, however sympathetic I am towards it. When it comes to literature, so much depends on how you read, or listen. How have you been trained? What prejudices, expectations, paradigms, what baggage do you bring to the work? How open are you to being shaped by it? Can you see the intention behind the words? It assumes that one does not read for entertainment, for a vicarious thrill which ends as soon as you put the book away. Instead one exposes oneself to it - there is an element of risk.

One other point - I'm not alone in having had times when I've been ill or depressed, and it's been story which has helped to carry me. Story as a means of healing, of restoration. That too is a use of literacy. There's a line of Sam Neill's to that effect in Until the End of the World, but it took me years to appreciate it. Hughes, of course, drew extensively on myth forms and saw his own role as shamanistic.

2007-07-03T05:42:00.000+01:00

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

I didn't enjoy the second volume of Anthony Burgess's memoirs, You've Had Your Time, as much as the first, but there are many memorable stories, and these lines, right at the end, made an impact:

Milan Kundera defines a European as one who is nostalgic for Europe, and he is probably right. Evelyn Waugh's words about the dismemberment of Christendom refer, proleptically, to that nostalgia. If, living out of Great Britain for more than twenty years, I have become a paying guest of Europe rather than a European, it is the better to indulge the soft-centred dream of belonging to a culture that I do not wish to believe is dead...

That identification of nostalgia may well be right - I know I look back more than forwards, and read very little modern fiction, though my defence is that it simply hasn't yet proved itself. By which I don't mean that not enough people have come to the opinion that a given work is a classic over a long enough period of time, though I admit to being as easily-led as the next fella. More that the contribution that any particular work has to give to the dream-life of the nation, the continent, the culture, has to be given time to work.

Literature is, for want of a better phrase, a big conversation, and by reading, writing and thinking, we take part in it. I was very pleased indeed to read recently that Borges thought of it in the same way - a conversation going back and forth in time.

However, when seen in the context of the whole of human history, that conversation is terribly young, even assuming a starting point with the ancient Greeks, and it is now under a greater threat than that of mass philistinism. There are any number of books at the moment telling us that we are in deep, deep trouble, and from previous examples of civilization-collapse it seems that we are virtually programmed to create progress traps and then walk into them. I can't recommend too highly Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress for an account of this, though Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World covered this ground first, and Jared Diamond's Collapse does the same at greater length.

In a recent article in the London Review of Books Susan Sontag was said to have wanted to spend more time trying to write a novel, because she believed the novel to be more relevant, more immediate and more necessary than politics or history. Well, from a certain perspective. The meme survives where an individual human will not, but it won't survive species extinction.

It's not that the conversation of our European civilization is not important, or not beautiful, or not great, but it is just far smaller than those of us who still partake think it is. I'm not optimistic.

2007-07-03T04:16:00.001+01:00

THESIS, ANTITHESIS

Well, here're two opposing points of view:

Interviewer: You have been a public relations man and an advertising man— Vonnegut: Oh, I imagine.
Interviewer: Was this painful? I mean—did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
Vonnegut: No. That's romance—that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.

The above from the Paris Review interview with Kurt Vonnegut. Volume I of the selected Paris Review interviews has (fairly) recently been published by Canongate.

Then this:

Doctorow, like Roth, came of age in the 1950s and belongs to what Joan Didion calls "the last generation to identify with adults", well-behaved, sternly educated young people who looked down on the hype and trivialisation of the publishing business because they believed in high culture, high principles and the moral authority of literature.

...not to mention clearly in need of a doobie. From Al Alvarez's introduction to the Penguin edition of Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.

Of course, both are right.

*

I read Vonnegut's Man Without a Country, which I enjoyed, a wonderful slice of Vonnegutania, that inimitable, humane, wry despairing voice, but £7.99 for just over 100 pages of wide-spaced text is pretty steep. It is basically a pamphlet, like Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War and Imperial America, the first two of which I've read and enjoyed and recommend, but which come in at £9.99 apiece.

About the worst offender for this practice is Verso, which publishes a lot of good leftist stuff, but at eye-watering prices - I finished one of these recently, Sara Paretsky's Writing in an Age of Silence - at £12.99 (hardback) for 136 pages it can hardly be described as being for the common man, which is a tremendous shame because it's excellent, and certainly written for the common man, and especially the common woman. Also, she's the only person I've come across citing Irina Ratushinskaya as a source of hope and inspiration.

2007-07-03T03:22:00.000+01:00

WHY RANGE MATTERS

It is, again, more the duty of broadcasters in the public service to give people what they don’t know they want and what they need for society to mature itself, not to be mired in low-level tastes. That means that you should not start the news by saying that a famous football manager has had a heart attack. We may be very sorry to hear that, but not as the first item of national, even international, news. The BBC has by now much the same bad habit. The ITV executives above were implying that what is "the news" should be largely decided by what people already think and believe and know; whereas the essence of a civil education is that it shows that you do not know what you can like and what you can enjoy and judge well, until you have been introduced to it. As E. M. Forster reminded us: “How do I know what I like until I see what it is possible to have?”.

From a lecture by Richard Hoggart to Glasgow University's Department of Adult and Continuing Education in 2001.

2007-07-03T01:35:00.000+01:00

OUROBOROS

First, a confession of ignorance. In one of his many fine essays in United States, Gore Vidal writes warmly and admiringly of V.S. Pritchett.

Who? V.S. Naipaul? No. Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trinidad and Tobago and is demi-Indian. Awarded the Nobel in 2001. Knighted 1990. Writes about the Third World, particularly India, and got into scraps with Edward Said, apparently for not being Indian enough. Pritchett was English. 1900 - 1997. Also knighted, in 1975. Poor, unstable middle-class background. After spending some time in McJobs got into literature and wrote throughout his long life, travel, novels, short stories, biographies, criticism and autobiographies, all of which, with the probable exception of the novels, were well or highly regarded.

Still at this point ignorant, I came across a collection, The Essential Pritchett, and began to dip with increasing happiness. This amazon review of the American edition gives a very good account of it. Here's Pritchett on Gerald Brenan's Thoughts in a Dry Season:

There is a moment in the old age of a writer when he finds the prospect of one more long haul in prose intimidating and when he claims the right to make utterances.

Which, oddly, and as if to prove him right, was a very good description of the second volume of autobiography from Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation. In fact it's less of an autobiography than a series of utterances, anecdotes and reflections, most of which have autobiographical roots.

It's very much an old man's book, and has the quality of conversations with the old - you listen, and you gather the scraps, without being sure of how you got from one part to the next, and you wonder if you missed the link. Probably not. It was clear enough in the speaker's mind, but it would waste time to ask for an explanation, and we've moved on now. The title is completely appropriate.

It is still very readable - Vidal is incapable of writing inelegantly, even when his energy is limited. I will buy it, but not in hardback.

*

Pritchett describes Brenan, apparently an incredibly learned man, as being "innocent of university", as was Pritchett, as is Vidal. What's the collective noun for autodidacts?

*

At some point in his memoir, Vidal mentions how one of his early novels, Dark Green, Bright Red, was based on the coup mounted by the United Fruit company against the democratically-elected government of Guatemala. Just a few days ago I was encouraged to take a look at Jungle Capitalists, which is all about United Fruit, how it began, the power it wielded in the original 'banana republics', and how it serves as a template for and warning about today's multinationals. There's a summary written by the author on the FT site, but you'll need to log in to read it.

2007-07-02T02:09:00.000+01:00

TOCSIN

I hope that [Other Men's Flowers] may continue to give some pleasure and afford some help in these difficult days. I have a great belief in the inspiration of poetry towards courage and vision and in its driving power. And we want all the courage and vision at our command, in days of crisis when our future prosperity and greatness hangs in the balance.

- A. P. Wavell, April 1947 introduction to Other Men's Flowers, originally published March 1944.

I've been wondering what the uses of literacy will be, in the coming global environmental catastrophe, and I suspect we will see a return to poetry, song, the story, the fable, myth - those creations which are portable, condensed, and above all, can be transmitted orally. I've always said that when it comes to books you need to be ready to burn them for fuel if you have to, and indeed, we may have to.

2007-06-29T00:04:00.000+01:00

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

The Puir Family [La famijja poverella]

Wheesht nou, my darling bairnies, bide ye quaet:
yir faither's comin suin, jist bide a wee.
Oh Virgin of the greitin, please help me,
Virgin of waymenting, ye that can dae't.

My hairts, I wuss that ye cuid ken hou great
my luve is! Dinna greet, or I sall dee.
He'll bring us something hame wi him, you'll see,
and we will get some breid, and ye will eat...

Whit's that ye're sayin, Joe? jist a wee while,
my son, ye dinnae like the dark ava.
Whit can I dae fir ye, if there's nae yle?
Puir Lalla, whit's the maitter? Oh ma bairn,
ye're cauld? But dinnae staund agin the waa:
come and I'll warm ye on yir mammy's airm.

Hesperus Press, who published the excellent Words Are Stones, have begun a new line, Oneworld Classics. As with their main imprint, I'm a little underwhelmed by some of their choices - do we need another edition of Wuthering Heights? - and I guess we'll be seeing more translations by J.G. Nichols, whose writing has left me cold, so far. These are minor cavils though, and blown away by the genuine delight of discovering Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli's sonnets, translated into energetic, earthy, vulgar English by Mike Stocks - and finding at the back, incredibly, twelve translations into Scots by none other than Edinburgh's own Robert Garioch.

Such a surprise. It brings it closer still, even as a non-Scots speaker. You're sitting there reading Stock's version, admiring, enjoying, sometimes charmed, sometimes disgusted - and then it's as if Belli has disappeared off the page, metamorphosed into an Edinburgh street person, and is standing right behind you, breathing down your neck.

*

...Belli was the great master of the [Roman] dialect and a scholarly recorder of the filth and blasphemy. [p. 242]

There were a lot of these sonnets - 2,279 - in three fat volumes, and I sometimes thought of dedicating my life to their translation. It would have been a useless venture, for who in the Anglophone world would care about an obscure dialect poet? There were some, not all Romans, who believed Belli to be the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, but his greatness rested on the use of a dialect difficult to translate. Robert Penn Warren, on one of his regular visits to Rome, gave it as his opinion that the nineteenth century greatness had to be shared between Belli and John Keats. [p. 327]

High praise indeed. From You've Had Your Time by Anthony Burgess.

2007-06-25T22:51:00.000+01:00

DOT-JOINING

Of minor interest to me, and still less to anyone else, most likely. Came across this, which I know I've quoted before, in Anthony Burgess's introduction to Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year:

There are people who still find Defoe hard to take as a novelist, and this is because they have become accustomed to regarding the novel as a form almost aggressively 'literary', full of barely concealed machinery, self-conscious fine writing, the personality of the novelist himself peeping through as a show-off divine puppet-master, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. Up to the time of the first dissenting writers (men like Defoe and Bunyan) which happened also to be a time of great literary artificiality, literature had been almost exclusively in the hands of men with a classical education. Elizabethans like Nashe and Dekker and Greene produced, as did Defoe, fictional works about a real, low, smelly London, but all in a language - for all its conversational vigour - highly contrived and often reeking of the lamp. And, after Defoe, the novel was again in the hands of the cultivated who could not resist showing off their cultivation [...]
[Never in Defoe do we find] the evocation of classical heroes or the sewing on of classical tags.

This intrigued me a little, but I haven't read widely enough to tell whether or not it's a fair judgement. I do know Herrick uses classical references and mimics classical forms, and in this he follows Ben Jonson. Marvell does too, I think.

Then came across the entry on euphuism in The Reader's Encyclopedia by accident. Apparently it's related to culteranismo in Spain, also known as Gongorism, which the encyclopedia describes as:

Designed to appeal to the cultivated (los cultos), it is characterised by an emphasis on Latin terms and syntax, by frequent allusions to classical mythology, and lavish use of tropes, metaphors, hyperbole and antitheses.

*

Gongora, after whom the style is named, apparently had an ongoing feud with Francisco de Quevedo, author of The Swindler. This is the second of the Two Spanish Picaresque Novels published by Penguin and would be worth the price of purchase alone, if it weren't preceded by the even better, truly wonderful Lazarillo de Tormes, which should be made available in an audio version read by Eli Wallach.

2007-06-17T23:06:00.000+01:00

FOR THE HICKS

Part of the introduction to William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, (1575):

[These tales are] pleasaunt so well abroade as at home, to avoid the griefe of Winter's night and length of Sommer's day...Delectable they be for al sortes of men, for the sad, the angry, the cholericke, the pleasaunt, the whole and sicke.

From Italian Tales from the Age of Shakespeare, ed. Pamela Benson.

*

I find Painter's promise to the reader charming, and indeed accurate, but it's nonetheless a bit of a shtick. Surely someone in the 16th century must have replied to Painter along these lines:

"Verily I say to you, if thou dost travail in the fields of advertisement, thou art a scurvy knave, and thou shouldst kill thyself. Nay, I speke troth."

*

In addition to the pleasure of the stories themselves, there's another benefit. Because they're written in 16th century English, they've set me up nicely for a serious attempt at Riddley Walker. In fact I'm finding it a doddle, and I honestly can't see why people have trouble with it. Smug git orl rite ent I.

2007-05-23T22:54:00.000+01:00

CONCRETE POETRY

Been after the full context of the following quote for some time, as it's mentioned by Heaney and Hughes in essays. Found it in the introduction to Penguin edition collected Milosz poems:

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless... A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges tilt and displace them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of literary cafés, and wherever he went was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems, recalled in such a moment, seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real; and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions. In the intellectuals who lived through the atrocities of war in Eastern Europe there took place what one might call the elimination of emotional luxuries. Psychoanalytic novels incite them to laughter. They consider the literature of erotic complications, still popular in the West, as trash. Imitation abstract painting bores them. They are hungry - but they want bread, not hors d’oeuvres.

*

Found this site on Scottish lullabies. Warms me to see they're operating out of my home area.

*

Won't be doing a lot of posting for a while. Baby daughter born 14th May at 12.22 am. Good lungs, feeds and sleeps a lot. Parents less so. Her older brother is, blissfully, attentive and (so far) not jealous.

2007-05-11T23:53:00.000+01:00

NOW HERE'S AN IDEA...

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

- Sinclair Lewis

2007-05-10T22:07:00.000+01:00

KIPLING'S MOT JUSTE

From Wressley of the Foreign Office:

One of the many curses of our life in India is the want of atmosphere in the painter’s sense. There are no half-tints worth noticing. Men stand out all crude and raw, with nothing to tone them down, and nothing to scale them against. They do their work, and grow to think that there is nothing but their work, and nothing like their work, and that they are the real pivots on which the Administration turns. Here is an instance of this feeling. A half-caste clerk was ruling forms in a Pay Office. He said to me, ‘Do you know what would happen if I added or took away one single line on this sheet?’ Then, with the air of a conspirator, ‘It would disorganise the whole of the Treasury payments throughout the whole of the Presidency Circle! Think of that!’
If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.

This is pretty typical of Kipling's work, certainly the early Kipling: cynical, superior, funny, precise, and the mean-spirited edge softened a little by an acknowledgement of the other fellow's point of view, or of the narrator's own weakness. Edward Said, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Kim, has a fair old go at its author while still admitting that it is a great book; Orwell snipes at Kipling now and then in Orwell in Tribune, yet he still quotes from him and makes reference to him. I guess that may be a tribute to Kipling's talent, the truth and relevance of much of what he wrote, and especially his enormous popularity. Whether one agrees or no, Kipling seemed to speak for many of the English of his time, and he could speak to them, and listen as well, at all levels of society. What writer nowadays could claim to do that?

I must admit to being in awe of his technical ability. This is the start of 'On Greenhow Hill':

'Ohé, Ahmed Din! Shafiz Ullah ahoo! Bahadur Khan, where are you? Come out of the tents, as I have done, and fight against the English. Don’t kill your own kin! Come out to me!’
The deserter from a native corps was crawling round the outskirts of the camp, firing at intervals, and shouting invitations to his old comrades. Misled by the rain and the darkness, he came to the English wing of the camp, and with his yelping and rifle-practice disturbed the men. They had been making roads all day, and were tired.
Ortheris was sleeping at Learoyd’s feet. ‘Wot’s all that?’ he said thickly. Learoyd snored, and a Snider bullet ripped its way through the tent wall. The men swore. ‘It’s that bloomin’ deserter from the Aurangabadis,’ said Ortheris. ‘Git up, some one, an’ tell ’im ’e’s come to the wrong shop.’
‘Go to sleep, little man,’ said Mulvaney, who was steaming nearest the door. ‘I can’t arise an’ expaytiate with him. ’Tis rainin’ entrenchin’ tools outside.’
‘’Tain’t because you bloomin’ can’t. It’s ’cause you bloomin’ won’t, ye long, limp, lousy, lazy beggar, you. ’Ark to ’im ’owlin’!’
‘Wot’s the good of argifying? Put a bullet into the swine! ’E’s keepin’ us awake!’ said another voice.
A subaltern shouted angrily, and a dripping sentry whined from the darkness—
‘’Tain’t no good, sir. I can’t see ’im. ’E’s ’idin’ somewhere down ’ill.’
Ortheris tumbled out of his blanket. ‘Shall I try to get ’im, sir?’ said he.
‘No,’ was the answer. ‘Lie down. I won’t have the whole camp shooting all round the clock. Tell him to go and pot his friends.’
Ortheris considered for a moment. Then, putting his head under the tent wall, he called, as a ’bus conductor calls in a block, ‘’Igher up, there! ’Igher up!’
The men laughed, and the laughter was carried down wind to the deserter, who, hearing that he had made a mistake, went off to worry his own regiment half a mile away. He was received with shots; the Aurangabadis were very angry with him for disgracing their colours.

The main body of the story is pretty thick with Victorian sentiment, but the framing narrative, and especially the ending, is simply sublime. Brutal, but sublime.

*

Email is back up.

2007-05-08T22:01:00.000+01:00

QUITE BUSY, QUITE TIRED

In the past few weeks and months we have found, bought and moved house. New baby is due on Monday. Moreover, our two year-old is making full use of the new space and has discovered he can run like a fuckin' deer.

Have been locked out of my email account.

Reading, when I can, Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills with delight; reading Mark Lynas's Six Degrees with nothing less than choking horror. It makes everything else redundant, frankly.

2007-04-05T22:24:00.000+01:00

KID TIPS

Poisson Rouge is a very decent website with games (in French and English) for kids - or indeed, hungover adults.

We've also just been given a CD called Sing Along with Putumayo which includes a funk-blues version of "Old Macdonald Had A Farm", and lists the wonderful Arlo Guthrie among its performers. It's the only thing we've come across so far (though I've no doubt there's lots and lots of good stuff out there, if only you know where to look) in English which rivals Henri Des, a popular French composer and performer of children's songs who gives live concerts. I can't think of an equivalent for him in English - musically accomplished and genuinely entertaining for all ages - other than the Muppets, who are as old as I am.

Anyway, feel free to check 'em out or pass 'em on with my recommendations and compliments.

2007-03-26T21:28:00.000+01:00

PROUD DAD

Had my first real sword-fight with my son today, with those cardboard tubes you get inside rolls of wrapping paper. He's two. Not only that, he attacked me first. Very satisfying.

2007-03-21T22:25:00.000Z

THE AULD COMPLAYNT

Read this today, and laughed:

I tossed my imagination a thousand ways to see if I could find any means to relieve my estate: but all my thoughts consorted to this conclusion, that the world was uncharitable, and I ordained to be miserable. Thereby I grew to consider how many base men that wanted those parts which I had, enjoyed content at will, and had wealth at command: I called to mind a Cobbler, that was worth five hundred pound, an Hostler that had built a goodly Inn and might dispend forty pounds yearly by his Land, a Carre-man in a leather pilche, that had whipped out a thousand pound out of his horse tail: and have I more wit than all these (thought I to myself) am I better born? am I better brought up? yea and better favoured? and yet am I a beggar? What is the cause? how am I crossed? or whence is this curse? Even from hence, that men that should employ such as I am, are enamoured of their own wits, and think what ever they do is excellent, though it be never so scurvy: that Learning (of the ignorant) is rated after the value of the ink and paper: and a Scrivener better paid for an obligation, than a Scholar for the best poem he can make; that every gross brained Idiot is suffered to come into print, who if he set forth a Pamphlet of the praise of Pudding-pricks, or write a Treatise of Tom Thumb, or the exploits of Vntrusse [sic]; it is bought up thick and threefold, when better things lie dead. How then can we choose but be needy, when there are so many Drones amongst us? or ever prove rich that toil a whole year for fair looks?

From Pierce Penniless by Thomas Nashe. Date? 1592.

2007-03-19T22:25:00.000Z

ENCOMIUMS FOR RLS

Among the authors I have always read and, willy-nilly, have taken as a model is R. L. Stevenson. This is because Stevenson himself wrote the books he would have liked to read, because he, who was so delicate an artist, imitated old adventure stories and then relived them himself. To him, writing meant translating an invisible text containing the quintessential fascination of all adventures, all mysteries, all conflicts of will and passion scattered throughout the books of hundreds of writers; it meant translating them into his own precise and almost impalpable prose, into his own rhythm which was like that of dance-steps at once impetuous and controlled. (Stevenson's admirers are a chosen few in all literatures; J. L. Borges is the most eminent of them.)

...aaand breathe out. From Italo Calvino's introduction to Our Ancestors, translated by Archibald Colquhoun.

*

Stevenson's greatest charm, in a literary sense, is the personal relation he establishes with the reader; he shares with Montaigne, Sterne and Oliver Wendell Holmes this rarest and most endearing of qualities. Once he comes into a household, no matter how unobtrusively, he is apt to stay. He brings a genial and comforting presence; he is helpful, brave and kindly; one is the better for an hour passed in his smiling company, and he takes on, in a very actual way, the aspect of a friend. It is noteworthy that his collected editions sell mostly to people of very modest means - which is to say, to struggling people; hard-working, ill-paid people; people richer in cultivation and refinement than in money; who turn to him in fellow-feeling for solace and fortitude. And to these I should like to say that the real man, the real Stevenson, was no other than as they regard him [...]

From Lloyd Osbourne's introduction to New Arabian Nights, vol. 1 of the Tusitala edition.

*

DOCTOR LECTER, I PRESUME

[He] had keenly enjoyed the Colonel's amazement and disgust. He had the vanity of wickedness; and it pleased him to see another man give way to a generous movement, while he felt himself in his entire corruption, superior to such emotions.

From The Suicide Club: Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts, by RLS.

2007-03-19T02:32:00.000Z

FIGHT FOR YOUR MIND

Second part of Adam Curtis's The Trap broadcast this evening. As before, a lot of ideas and information being flung at you thick and fast, so you don't really get time to stop and analyse what the flaws or missing links might be. However, as this presents such a total change from most documentaries and news programmes, which seem to assume a mental age of about 12 on the part of the audience, one can hardly complain, even if one does feel on the receiving end of a polemic.

One of the reasons for being thrown a little off-kilter is that he's telling a familiar story - the breakdown of the post-war consensus and its replacement with what, in the 1980s, we used to call Thatcherism - from the perspective of the meme of individualism. Specifically, individualism in a free-market economy, with the same principles increasingly applied to all areas of social provision and political interaction.

This episode hung together rather better than last week's - either that, or I'm being converted against my judgement to Curtis's argument by subliminal messages hidden in his jump cuts - though the flaw in the Thatcherite argument (no such thing as society, only families and individuals, market forces rule) is rather obvious, has already been hinted at, and presumably will be dealt with in the final episode. Against the models presented by game theory (and there was a rather extended debate taking place on Blairwatch over whether game theory really is as pernicious as Curtis is making out) and pointy-headed bean counters, people do actually care for one another quite a lot of the time and will often act altruistically when given the opportunity.

Or, as G'Kar said in a recently-viewed episode of Babylon 5, "We are fighting to save one another."

*

Regarding freedom, I heard about a van being stopped by the polis on a Scottish road last week. The van had been loaded to such an extent that the front wheels were barely touching the ground, and none of the three Chinese gentlemen inside had a driving licence.

Now one - OK, I - am inclined to snort at this point, in a manner which becomes more and more like George Macdonald Fraser the older I get (see The Light's on at Signpost), and utter a few disparaging remarks on the lack of scruples and common sense displayed by...well, anyone who isn't me, come to it. But then I remember a moment, personally witnessed, from Hanoi: one scooter, one driver, one pillion passenger carrying upright on his knees a sheet of glass, say five foot by four, no seat belts, going the wrong way through rush-hour traffic, which in Hanoi has to be seen to be believed. Now that's freedom.

I mean, of course you transport sheets of glass this way. Of course you load a van to breaking point and beyond. Hell, it's our van. Licence - what licence? Back home you just have to keep your mouth shut and vote the right way once every four years. Other than that you can do what you like.

*

Orwell complains about the shallowly optimistic repetition of

'the abolition of distance' and 'the disappearance of frontiers'. [...]

Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.

He goes on to note a decline in immigration, and state interference in non-national radio, as well as bars and censorship of foreign post, newspapers and books by the totalitarian countries, which of course were numerous in the 1940s.

*

Orwell is here criticising restrictions on travel, but I suppose they have the virtue of being obvious. Curtis is warning us about restrictions on thought itself - as good a recommendation for reading widely, curiously and imaginatively as any you might wish for. I'm sure this used to be encouraged, through the pursuit of what used to be called a liberal education.

2007-03-12T01:52:00.000Z

NEW FEARS FOR OLD

Just over three years ago we were given a telly. Very little of the enormous amount of time we've spent watching it since then has been worthwhile, but two programmes stand out for me: Whicker's War and The Power of Nightmares by film-maker Adam Curtis. This, I felt, was the only broadcast since 11/9 which really gave a sense of context to the war on terror, a job the BBC and other news organisations could and should have carried out long before.

Curtis's new documentary series, The Trap, on changing notions of freedom in Britain and the US aired tonight, and it covers a similar period (Cold War to the present day), using similar techniques: extended voice-over, interviews, and lots of music cues and archive footage for illustrative and sometimes humorous purposes. What he's doing in this one, really, is tracking the progress of an idea, or a perspective, about power, government and human nature: namely that a particular way of looking at human beings and human interaction, which had origins in analyses of nuclear war strategies, was developed and disseminated through political elites so that it became the dominant - even only - notion of freedom today.

As far as I can gather, it is this: human beings are basically selfish, and even when they think they're being altruistic they are actually acting for themselves. The attempt by government to intervene and regulate will inevitably fail (think Britain in the 1970s - the 'British disease', a failing economy, rampant strikes) because it will be unable to contain the demands of competing interest groups. Therefore, government intervention should be scaled back, and people should be left to compete with one another within a certain basic framework. This will ensure social stability, since competition on such a scale will always end in stalemate, and people will be free to pursue their interests without the state getting in the way. The benefits, and the drawbacks, of the application of such a world-view should be obvious to anyone who has been awake at some point in the past twenty-five years.

Now, put like this, it doesn't really seem like anything new, and indeed we saw some old enemies: Hayek, the Adam Smith Institute and the NHS Internal Market. But Curtis was tracing this idea back to a number of unusual sources: the Rand Corporation, the game theory of John Nash, and the anti-psychiatry movement pioneered and inspired by R.D. Laing. All very interesting, and most of it new to me, but I'm still not convinced that all of these elements fall into the smooth, continuous and rather sinister development that Curtis's film seems to suggest. I'm perfectly prepared to accept parallel developments in the popular perception and use of psychiatry, and the use of game theory in military thinking, but to say that herein lies the origin of the current notion of freedom as sold to us by government and media seems to me to be laying it on a bit thick.

The anomie, apathy and atomisation we see in contemporary society has certainly been worsened by Thatcher and her ilk, but the tendency has been there for a good hundred years, I'd say, with the consequences of mass industrialisation and urbanisation. One only has to read The Waste Land ("I had not thought the dead were so many") or Edwin Muir's autobiography (he moved from Orkney to Glasgow when he was fifteen, aging in the process about 150 years, he said) to see that.

Curtis is a just a little too slick for me, this time. I'm not seeing enough evidence for the extremely sweeping statements he makes, often summing up the nature of society at a particular moment, in order to move his thesis along. Is it really the case that people right across America began making use of psychiatric self-diagnosis forms, challenging both the medical establishment and, by extension, Big Government? No, I can't quite get that one. I may have got it wrong - he does move very fast.

He makes some extremely interesting links - for example, I didn't realise that Alain Enthoven, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the 1960s and full-time number-cruncher, was the Downing Street consultant behind the NHS Internal Market. Indeed, he's still at it. Nor did I know that the economic theory of Public Choice underlay every episode of "Yes Minister". In fact, I'd never heard of Public Choice theory, which seems like one of those convoluted ideas that extremely clever people use to explain something which most of us take for granted.
Nor had I heard of the "thud" hoax/experiment. But I don't buy that all these things tie neatly into one another as Curtis is implying, rather than simply resonate.

Nevertheless, it's a challenging and intelligent piece of television, which acknowledges that things happened before last week, so that makes it practically unique. I look forward to episode 2.

There's an extended discussion of the programme on Blairwatch.

PS Something Curtis regularly does, which I deeply dig, is to challenge the notion that the Cold War did not simply fizzle out without consequence. The psychic hangover from 40 years of living with the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the half-life of the crazy theories that were used to justify it, are still with us.

PPS R.D. Laing, who I confess I've never read, looks like a real snake-oil salesman, and in love with his own image. He may have been right about some things - or he may not - but I look at him and think, naah, I wouldnae trust you to sell me a toothpick.

2007-02-22T07:21:00.000Z

ENTER THE PLAYERS

From the Wikipedia entry on commedia dell'arte.

2007-02-10T21:52:00.000Z

RUDE BOY

This really is worth looking at. Guy humour, but makes me laugh : More on Men of Parts on Michael Gilleland's blog.

2007-02-01T22:53:00.000Z

IN WHICH THEY SERVE

Whoever did this deserves an award at public expense. Seen in today's Metro, picked up from Bristol Indymedia.

2007-01-30T23:04:00.000Z

TWO ESSAYISTS

Good news, boss, good news, as Rosco P. Coltrane used to say. Though it's been out for a couple of months now, I've recently been taking the time to dip into the latest collection of Orwell's writing, Orwell in Tribune, and I report that it's excellent. The pieces are from his column "As I Please", published in the '40s, and it's a blog in all but name: he'll write at length about some weighty political issue of the day, or a literary dispute, then there'll be an asterisk, and "Have you noticed how the price of postage stamps has shot up?" or somesuch will follow.

I was trying to figure out just what it is that makes Orwell's writing so good, so compelling, other than the range of his interests, the depth of his reading, and the passion with which he discusses both. What is it about the writing itself? - and I woke up this morning and realised that it lies in how completely he closes the gap between what he thinks and what he manages to get down on paper. As anyone who's written even a postcard knows, that gap can be punishingly wide. Most of the time you wind up with an approximation - an awful lot of professional writers complain about how their finished work fell short of what they imagined and hoped it could be - but in Orwell, in his essays, anyway, there's no sense of any codge. His thought and his pen fadge perfectly.

*

Seeing and flicking through Hazlitt in Love gave me the impetus - that, and remembering Bernard Crick's comment that Orwell was the best essayist in English since Hazlitt. Two years after purchase I realised the time was right and I've begun reading a collection of Hazlitt's essays. I did try once before, but got beaten back by the language, which is ornamental by modern standards. The solution I've found is the same one I used when reading The Last of the Mohicans - take a deeper mental breath before each sentence, and that'll carry you through. True, I've had to re-read some sections a few times to get the sense of them, but not too often.

In life, Hazlitt seems to have been pretty disagreeable - he fell out with almost everyone he knew - but I guess he saved the best of himself for print, and the strongest impression is one of tremendous enthusiasm. One of his most famous essays, "The Fight", which I've just finished, involves nothing more than getting to the fight, a bare-knuckle match, describing it, and getting home again. That's it. What keeps you reading is the immediacy, the freshness he brings to even the smallest observation. Everything seems to play directly on his nerves. I remember being like that in my late teens and early twenties, when I was raw and even trivial experiences could be brutal, but a little age covers you up. It's a real delight to come across someone like Hazlitt, or Kipling, so you feel the jolt of electricity coming off the page, and the carapace being split open.

*

Interesting times he lived through, as well. I've been surfing Wikipedia this evening. I knew a little about Peterloo and the United Scotsmen, but nothing about the Cato Street Conspiracy, or the Six Acts, or the Radical War in Scotland.

*

The father of a friend of mine once said to me, "If Scotland had won the World Cup in 1978 we would be independent today." Given that a fair amount of psychic stock is still (wrongly) invested in the fortunes of the national team, and given that Scotland is currently head of Group B in Euro 2008 (which includes France and Italy), and given that the SNP is currently doing well in the polls ahead of the elections in May to the Scottish Parliament, is it too much to imagine that Walter Smith's baffling departure from the Scotland manager's job has been engineered for political purposes?

No, I have not, pace Gore Vidal, arrived in the studio by flying saucer. The only harbour in the UK capable of taking nuclear subs is in Scotland. If Scotland goes independent and implements a no-nukes policy - something the SNP is actively promoting at the moment - the remnant of the UK has nowhere to put them. Moreover, the UK's diminished military and geographical status would likely call into question its position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Of course, given our recent behaviour, the rest of the world would probably see this as a good thing.

This makes Scottish independence a matter of national security rather than constitutional affairs, and means anything - or indeed, everything - is possible regarding a UK response.

2007-01-16T22:10:00.000Z

DR JONES WILL NEVER BELIEVE THIS...

2007-01-12T00:28:00.000Z

NEARLY E-LITERATE

Really rather worrying news from a story on BoingBoing about a - perhaps the - U.S. book distributor being closed down for bankruptcy. The comments about an Enron-style culture within it, and about how this can be considered an example of monopoly capitalism, make interesting reading.

I'd like to say I came across it while reading BoingBoing, but it was through a link on Publishing News.

2007-01-10T02:37:00.000Z

MORE ART WHAT I LIKE

A View of the Certosa di San Martino with the Castel Sant'Elmo in Naples by Thomas Jones (thanks to CGFA Virtual Art Museum).

2007-01-10T00:10:00.000Z

MORE FROM HERRICK, HUCK

I'm really beginning to enjoy Herrick. He doesn't seem to my under-educated poetic ear and eye to be polished, not for the most part, and some of the poems are no more than doggerel, but he's bawdy, rich, fulsome. I like the way he grabs hold of life:

Come, let us go while we are in our prime,
And take the harmless folly of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short, and our days run
As fast away as does the sun,
And, as a vapour or a drop of rain,
Once lost can ne'er be found again:
So when you or I are made
A fable song, or fleeting shade,
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night.
Then, when time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come: let's go a-maying.

[From "Corinna's Going a-Maying"]

Here he is in praise of contrasts, or indeed, lingerie:

So, though you're white as swan, or snow,
And have the power to move
A world of men to love:
Yet, when your lawns and silks shall flow,
And that white cloud divide
Into a doubtful twilight, then,
Then will your hidden pride
Raise greater fires in men.

[From "The Lily in a Crystal"]

And on giving up wine (for Lent?):

Let others drink thee freely, and desire
Thee and their lips espoused, while I admire
And love thee - but not taste thee. Let my Muse
Fail of thy former helps, and only use
Her inadulterate strength: what's done by me
Hereafter shall smell of the lamp, not thee.

[From "His Farewell to Sack"]

*

This last poem is right for me. Last month I realised that my continually-referred-to "recent" bout of detox took place ten years ago, and so, for the next couple of months, I hope, I'm cutting out caffeine and fast sugar, and strictly regulating my alcohol consumption. The last time I did this I felt physically lighter and more energetic quite quickly, and saw just how powerful these stimulants are. So today, one coffee (I'm breaking myself in slowly, giving myself a week or two before I cut it out totally); no buns, cakes or biscuits; one whisky after supper, purely for medishinal purposes. I read somewhere once that a large malt, preferably well-peated, is good for the blood.

*

50 pages to go before I finish Huckleberry Finn. I'm really not enjoying it that much, partly I suspect because I went into it with certain expectations or preconceptions which have, of course, been disappointed. Nevertheless, I keep finding myself wanting to roll my sleeves up, dismantle the narrative and take it in the direction I think it should be going. Partly it's Clemens' writing, which I find believable (especially his dialogue) but not charming, not artful, not exciting, with the exception of one line: "And he wanted to know all about it right off; because it was a grand adventure, and mysterious, and so it hit him where he lived."

Partly it's a question of tone and structure: the novel starts off being one thing, a sequel to Tom Sawyer, then turns into another. That's fair enough - The Lord of the Rings does the same thing, but Tolkien had the huge backdrop of the First Age of Middle-Earth to draw on, and went back and revised his text several times. Clemens may have done the same, but the novel was put aside for years halfway through, and the gap between the two halves doesn't feel as if it's been well-bridged. Although this development, as it's called, is praised as a sign of the work maturing as it goes on, there's a significant difference in tone, including depiction of character, which I find fatal.

One can have an episodic novel, like a picaresque, in which one has no development of character, and no plot, but the vitality of the scenes and language keeps you going; one can have plot and narrative tension featuring characters who are no more than ciphers; one can have beautiful, descriptive prose without much happening at all (I'm thinking of The Leopard) - but you need something to hang onto, and I'm just not finding it.

There are scenes, moments, throwaway lines which provide an insight into the brutality, ignorance and crudity of life in the South, and they are fascinating, and shocking - men standing around with nothing to enjoy, save when they pour kerosene on a stray dog and set light to it, or tie a pan to its tail and watch it run itself to death - the description of mud in the main street of a small town - the casual way in which "nigger" families are broken up, some sent north, some south - which is fascinating, but it's by the way, it doesn't feel as if that's what the novel's concerned with. It's merely one of the ingredients, and hasn't been well-blended with the others.

In short it is nowhere near as good - and I really am sorry to keep banging on about this all the time - as Edgar Pangborn's Davy, which Damon Knight compared to Huck Finn. Fairly, I think: it's possible, probable maybe, that Davy would not exist without the model or template of the older book to draw on, but Pangborn does so much more with it, in terms of weight, tone, language, insight and depth of character. I read it again for the third time last year (1st reading 1986 age 14; 2nd in 2001 age 29) and yes, it is a masterpiece and deserves a place in the Fantasy or SF Masterworks series without a doubt. On this reading I found one weak line in it, a repetition of a gag he'd used two pages earlier, and that was it. I admit it's love, not an uncommon reaction for those who admire Pangborn's writing.

Huckleberry Finn will not stop me reading other things by Clemens, though I think I'll go for non-fiction the next time. I'm pleased to see that Tom Sawyer draws much of his appetite for romance and adventure from the likes of Casanova, Cellini and Dumas, however confusedly. He's better-read than I am.

2006-12-29T23:58:00.000Z

I'LL SEE YOU IN THE FUTURE

Off on hols after 3 hard months without a break. Boy, am I looking forward to it. So a Happy New Year to one and all, in advance. Holiday reading is Huck Finn, New Arabian Nights by RLS, Henry V (I've been reading or re-reading some of Shakespeare's plays this year - Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, so far). I'll be happy if I get two of them finished. Also, a collection of poems by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), who's best known for "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" ("Gather ye rosebuds while ye may..."). I've been picking away at this for a couple of months now, and as ever with poetry, it's taken me a while to get what he's about, but it's coming. He can be very rude, and funny with it, as with Byron's epitaph for Castlereagh, which Yvonne quoted a while back. I daresay this one is popular among published writers:

ANOTHER [the previous poem is "To His Book"]

Who with thy leaves shall wipe (at need)
The place where swelling piles do breed:
May every ill that bites or smarts
Perplex him in his hinder parts.

Have a good one.

2006-12-23T20:50:00.000Z

THE KING SAYS...

Have a bitchin' Yule, fool...

2006-12-14T23:11:00.000Z

WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD

k d lang is on record as saying homo sapiens is her least favourite species. Well, at least we just moved one place up the list.

2006-12-14T19:47:00.000Z

SIGNIFICANT SF

The Key:
Bold the ones you've read.
Strike-out the ones you hated.
Italicize those you started but never finished.
Put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings(*), J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune(*), Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea*, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer*, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions*, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories*, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War*, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion*, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash*, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

I can't really say I've hated any of them, although The Sword of Shannara left me pretty underwhelmed even at 15, and I found On the Beach a bit dry,
and The Book of the New Sun still felt like a chore after 150 pages, so I let it lie. Lots of portentous foreshadowing going on, which was irritating - "I meant this promise at the time, though I have broken it since, as with so many others" - that kinna thing. Howandever, John Clute and Ursula Le Guin among many other heavy-hitters think it's hot stuff, so I may well give it another go at some point. It does have a genuine sense of strangeness, of other-worldness, which most fantasy, ironically, doesn't.

Can't say I've really loved any of them either, except A Wizard of Earthsea and, at the time I first read it (age 12?) and for a couple of years afterwards, The Lord of the Rings. I have quite a few doubts now about many aspects of LotR, both in concept and execution, though the scale of it is still awesome, and its essence, which seems to me to be a fable about hope versus fear, and the pitfalls of pride, is laudable. These things are pretty much lost on a 12 year-old though, for whom it's just a very long, satisfying and totally involving story.

So an asterisk in brackets for it, then, and for Dune. Again, I loved at 15, but recently read a few pages at random and found it pretty long-winded, which made me understand a little better those who, like Harlan Ellison, have made many attempts on it with the best intentions, and have simply found themselves unable to get through it.

The other asterisks indicate either that I would recommend the book, or that I simply enjoyed it. If this seems an unnecessary distinction, I recently finished Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean, and while I'm glad to have read it, and think it's got a lot of good stuff in it, and would happily encourage other people to give it a go, I didn't actually have that great a time reading it - there's something rather flat about Maclean's writing - weird, when you consider how adventurous his life was between the ages of 25 and 34: Foreign Office, Paris, Moscow, Stalin's show trials, SAS in North Africa and Persia, with the partisans in Yugoslavia, liaising between Churchill and Tito.

A chance for Joe to get his own back, and (rightly) take me to task for not having read Alfred Bester. Of the rest, I would like to have read or attempted the Clarkes (I have Childhood's End somewhere), Sturgeon (ditto), Farmer, Smith and Bradbury.

2006-12-11T22:30:00.000Z

LESS IS MORE

Back in September I finally got round to reading Philip Roth's Shop Talk, a collection of interviews and conversations with a bunch of writers, many of them Jewish. One was Aharon Appelfeld, someone I'd never heard of. He was seven when the war started, was sent to a ghetto, then a concentration camp, from which he escaped. He then spent two or three years living in the wilds. In the passage I quoted from the conversation with Roth, he said he found it extremely difficult to write about his life 'factually'; then just a few days ago I came across The Story of a Life. Looks like he decided to give it a go. I'm reading it at the moment. Everything is reduced to the bare bones, and for this reason:

More than fifty years have passed since the end of the war. I have forgotten much, even things that were very close to me - places in particular, dates, and the names of people - and yet I can still sense those days in every part of my body. Whenever it rains, it's cold, or a fierce wind is blowing, I am taken back to the ghetto, to the camp, or to the forests where I spent many days. Memory, it seems, has deep roots in the body. Sometimes just the smell of rotting straw, or the sharp call of a bird, is enough to take me back, piercing me deep inside.

I say inside, although I still haven't found the words to give voice to those intense scars on my memory. Over the years I tried, on more than one occasion, to go back and touch the planks on which we slept in the camp, and to taste the watery soup that was doled out there. But all this effort yielded no more than jumbled phrases, incorrect words, disjointed rhythm, weak or exaggerated characters. Profound experience, I've already learned, is easily distorted.

You would think that with his war-child experience having become limited to, judging from this book, snapshots and fragments of narrative, reading it would be unsatisfying, like trying to reconstruct an entire play from a few scraps of parchment. Not so. Because so much has been lost to recall, what is remembered is told with clarity and with all the overtones and harmonics present. One of the effects of this concentration, this extremely tight focus, is to give everything in the book tremendous authority. You pay attention.

If that sounds facile, given the subject matter, I should point out that while Appelfeld does relate some terrible stories, others give reason for hope, and others are simply observations on the different ways people behave in extreme circumstances. Reaching a judgement, trying to give a critical assessment or a summary, is what seems to me to be facile. It's like trying to contain the uncontainable. Appelfeld relates: the reader pays attention. That's it.

2006-12-10T10:18:00.000Z

KIPLING'S GUANTANAMO

From "On the City Wall", first published December 1888

Whence it is easy to see that mere men of the flesh who would create a tumult must fare badly at the hands of the Supreme Government. And they do. There is no outward sign of excitement; there is no confusion; there is no knowledge. When due and sufficient reasons have been given, weighed and approved, the machinery moves forward, and the dreamer of dreams and the seer of visions is gone from his friends and following. He enjoys the hospitality of Government; there is no restriction upon his movements within certain limits; but he must not confer any more with his brother dreamers. Once in every six months the Supreme Government assures itself that he is well and takes formal acknowledgement of his existence. No-one protests against his detention, because the few people who know about it are in deadly fear of seeming to know him; and never a single newspaper 'takes up his cause' or organises demonstrations on his behalf, because the newspapers of India have got behind that lying proverb which says the Pen is mightier than the Sword, and can walk delicately.

Now check out the fate of Ahmed Urabi, who led a revolt against the European, particularly British, domination of Egypt. The entry on the Urabi revolt itself has more on the background, although I'd personally want to confirm this from other sources. Interesting to see debt being used, then as now, as a weapon.

Incredibly, there is a street in Pontypridd named for the deciding battle of the revolt, somewhat modified as Telelkebir.

2006-11-27T16:16:00.000Z

REAL FICTION

In 1955 Carlo Levi, author of Christ Stopped at Eboli (a book I've tried and failed to continue reading three or four times), published Le parole sono pietre, an account of three visits he had made to Sicily. I cannot find exact dates for them, but I'm assuming they were made in the ten years after the end of the war. On page 67 of Anthony Shugaar’s translation (Words Are Stones, published by Hesperus), Levi is visiting a puppet theatre in Catania, where they use near-life-sized marionettes to tell “stories of the Paladins.” Crusaders? Not exactly, judging from context - more exemplars of knightly courage and Christian virtues, like Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

That evening, they were performing one of the episodes from Erminio, the Knight of the Golden Star, which, like a novel published in installments, lasts for seventy-five evenings. The audience knows in advance what will happen and passionately roots for its favourites. In this story there is no appearance by Rinaldo, or Roland, or any of the other better-known Paladins; instead there are a number of characters whom, I confess, I did not know and who appeared to me, to tell the truth, spurious.

One of those who underwhelmed Levi was the evening’s protagonist, a character called Tigreleone.

I said to my neighbours that I would have liked to see him killed by the valiant [Saracen] Ideo, but they said that if such a thing were to happen, the theatre would be transformed into the Valley (that is, the Valley of Roncesvalles), littered with the dead. The Paladins are present-day idols, even more than Coppi or Bartali [cyclists]; when they are victorious, there is rejoicing; when they die, there is weeping. A carriage driver, they say, woke up one morning in a black mood and told his family that he would not be taking his carriage out into the main square because it was a day of mourning: that evening, at the Teatro Garibaldi, Rinaldo would be killed.

This rang a bell with me from personal experience: in 1983 I was in Greek Cyprus at Easter. The ritual or tradition which takes place is for everyone to gather at the church at midnight, those who can’t get into the building mustering outside, and at the climax of the service the lights are put out, and in the pitch blackness the word is passed from person to person, “Christ has risen.” The intimacy of being locked into this press of bodies, the eerieness of the whole occasion, makes it easy to imagine what it must have been like to take part in one of the Greek or Persian mystery religions. But the relevance to Levi’s account is that it is not a ceremony of remembrance, it is a re-enactment. Christ has risen again now, as if for the first time, as he has done before, as he will do throughout time, but only for as long as the ceremony takes place.

I’m sure this chimes with Thursbitch, and the Aboriginal religions (if that’s the right word) which re-shape and preserve reality through story, and the Greek tragedies, which of course were performed at and grew out of religious festivals, one of their purposes being to provoke catharsis in the audience.

2006-10-24T21:57:00.000+01:00

MMM....DOUGHNUTS

"If the landowner finds that one of the twain (and God knows whether he beat one or both, but this man is certainly beaten) be in the city, there will be a murder done, and then will come the Police, making inquisition into each man's house and eating the sweet-seller's stuff all day long."

From 'Gemini' by Rudyard Kipling, in The Man Who Would Be King and other stories. Date of first publication: 1888. Some things never change.

*

In Louis Cornell's notes to 'The Strange Ride of Morrowby Jukes' he writes that it "reflects the dominant influence of Poe's tales of the fantastic." In the introduction to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, John Seelye writes, "Setting out with Huck in search of buried treasure, Tom clearly operates under the influence of such fictions as Poe's 'The Gold Bug'." In the essay 'My First Book' RLS writes, "No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe"; in his introduction to Treasure Island Seelye writes, "As for Stevenson's other, acknowledged borrowings, such as the parrot from Robinson Crusoe, the stockade from Marryat, and the pointing skeleton from Poe's 'The Gold Bug,' these are perhaps best regarded as tributes to authors Stevenson admired."

All of which makes me wonder if it isn't high time that I read some stories by Edgar Allen Poe. I've read about him, in Brian Aldiss's excellent Trillion Year Spree fourteen years ago, and I know that he's widely credited with having invented both the detective story and the science fiction story, but that's it.

*

Seelye goes on to write, "And so it goes, that joint interweaving between texts that is not only essential to the notion of genre but suggests the larger kinship, the DNA as it were, that joins the various members of the great family of adventure fiction in one common blood-bond."

2006-10-18T20:54:00.000+01:00

POET LAUREATE RECOMMENDS SF, HOOD GOES SOUTH

Not Andrew Motion, but William Wordsworth:

If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself.

A quote I'd never come across before, in Andrew Rutherford's preface to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Kim. The context is praise of Kipling as a "bard of engineering and technology". Not how we usually think of him, but Rutherford cites the poem 'McAndrew's Hymn' and the stories 'The Ship that Found Herself' and 'Bread upon the Waters' "in which he shows imaginative sympathy with the machines themselves as well as sympathy with the men who serve them".

*

A & C Black have recently published 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels in their Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide series. I took time to have an extended flick through, and noticed that much of the SF Masterworks list is duplicated therein, but the summaries are considered and well-written, as is the potted history at the beginning, and the 'Reading On' suggestions are excellent. Also, Yvonne is thanked and acknowledged for an unspecified contribution.

*

Found out today that Spider Kiss, Harlan Ellison's 1961 rock 'n' roll novel, will be republished next month by Dark Horse Comics. When Ellison's good he's the best, and when he's not I admit he can be pretty dire, and I understand why some people can't stand him. Nevertheless, I remain a fan. I've read reviews, criticism, essays, reportage, stories and screenplays by him, but never a novel (there aren't many, and all of them early) so I'll be interested to see what it's like. Apparently Greil Marcus called it "the finest novel about the world of rock in the past quarter-century". As an aside, Kipling is also generally held to have been at his best in the short format, only producing one novel which was wholly successful - Kim.

*

While looking for a reference to Spider Kiss on the Dark Horse site, I came across this. Excellent news that the Chaykin/Mignola adaptations will be republished. I have the original set, discovered quite by accident (I'm not a big comics fan) when they were first published around 1991, and they are first-rate.

As regards "developing the property as a major motion picture"... un-huh. We'll see.

*

Finished Kim. Brilliant writing, strange novel. Clearly a great book, but not quite sure what to make of it, probably because it doesn't fit neatly into any category, and doesn't appear to make use of any boilerplate in the writing or structure at all. Going to read it again, definitely. Begun The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as a prelude to tackling Huck Finn. And at the end of Chapter 8 what do we find but Tom and Joe Harper, kitted out with makeshift swords, bows and hunting horns:

"Hold, my merry men! Keep hid till I blow."
Now appeared Joe Harper, as airily clad and elaborately armed as Tom.
Tom called:
"Hold! Who comes here into Sherwood Forest without my pass?"
"Guy of Guisborne wants no man's pass. Who art thou that--that--"
"Dares to hold such language," said Tom, prompting--for they talked "by the book," from memory.
"Who art thou that dares to hold such language?"
"I, indeed! I am Robin Hood, as thy caitiff carcase soon shall know."
"Then art thou indeed that famous outlaw? Right gladly will I dispute with thee the passes of the merry wood. Have at thee!"
They took their lath swords, dumped their other traps on the ground, struck a fencing attitude, foot to foot, and began a grave, careful combat, "two up and two down." Presently Tom said:
"Now, if you've got the hang, go it lively!"
So they "went it lively," panting and perspiring with the work. By and by Tom shouted:
"Fall! fall! Why don't you fall?"
"I sha'n't! Why don't you fall yourself? You're getting the worst of it."
"Why, that ain't anything. I can't fall; that ain't the way it is in the book. The book says, 'Then with one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy of Guisborne.' You're to turn around and let me hit you in the back."
There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe turned, received the whack and fell.
"Now," said Joe, getting up, "you got to let me kill YOU. That's fair."
"Why, I can't do that, it ain't in the book."
"Well, it's blamed mean--that's all."
"Well, say, Joe, you can be Friar Tuck or Much the miller's son, and lam me with a quarter-staff; or I'll be the Sheriff of Nottingham and you be Robin Hood a little while and kill me."
This was satisfactory, and so these adventures were carried out. Then Tom became Robin Hood again, and was allowed by the treacherous nun to bleed his strength away through his neglected wound. And at last Joe, representing a whole tribe of weeping outlaws, dragged him sadly forth, gave his bow into his feeble hands, and Tom said, "Where this arrow falls, there bury poor Robin Hood under the greenwood tree." Then he shot the arrow and fell back and would have died, but he lit on a nettle and sprang up too gaily for a corpse.
The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.

Date of publication: 1876, and Twain says in his introduction that everything in the book, however tweaked, was common in boys' lives 40 years before. Similar games were being played in Scotland in 1980.

Idiots. Glad to see Joe having a go at them, too.

NB caitiff

2006-10-11T22:06:00.000+01:00

BALANCE OF TERROR

Following North Korea's nuclear test, we hear from the BBC tonight:

'Threat to peace'

President Bush told reporters that Washington remained committed to diplomacy, and had no intention of attacking.

Well, not now, anyway.

*

WHISTLING DOG HAS TIN EAR

Re: Robin Hood

I saw nothing I hadn't seen 20 years earlier in Robin of Sherwood (though I was pretty glad not to see Ray Winstone's barnet); I heard some pretty dodgy accents (though none worse than Ray Winstone's east-endish); I saw no acting that would come within a spit of Ray Winstone's dust (though, to be fair, no-one on Robin of Sherwood came close to him, either).

I hated it, and I didn't want to, really I didn't. I wanted to be surprised, bowled over, whirled away, enchanted, ambushed, and instead I watched this - production, this piece of product - fall into every pitfall I'd feared it would. Style over substance - worse, style over story; characters not people; scenes dropped in like stray turds because they allowed those characters to display their characteristics; the same pop-video flashy direction that distracts more than it engages that you see in every goddamn TV programme these days (and it can be used well - Doctor Who being an example); infodumps and sore-thumb attempts to educate sticking out of a bland, featureless script; thrill-free "action"; worst of all, no consistency of tone. No-one uses contractions - which is the first, most obvious, most fundamental error that writers across all media should sidestep when they try to write something vaguely historical - and yet we have the Sheriff saying "Yippee" in a clearly modern, deliberately self-conscious manner. Robin is the Earl of Huntingdon, yet speaks with a northern accent; his manservant, recently freed, speaks RP, and there is no sense, none, of the social gulf which would have existed between them, let alone between Robin and his villeins.

OK, it looked good, mostly, but why did it have to have that ubiquitous grey, grainy look which seems to have been exported from NYPD Blue? Correction - it looked stylish. It looked like - like a Hungarian forest in style. I'm not asking for Technicolor, but where was the brio, the dash? Did that look like a Merrie English forest to you?

I am genuinely pissed off about this, not just missed, but fouled opportunity, because I fear that kids will look at this whale-drek and mistake it for action, adventure, excitement, things it seems to have heard about third-hand but is incapable of providing. I suspect, I hope, the kids will not fall for it, but it offends me that anyone should offer it to them under those auspices. How do you make Robin Hood dull? Robin Hood managed it.

Does it matter? Yes. Adventure, best coupled with charm, intelligence, wit and style, is a birthright of children. They should not be cheated so.

*

Funnily, Polanski's Oliver Twist has similar problems. The backdrop is three-dimensional while the foreground is two-dimensional. It's now a cliche to say "X's performance was terrific and clearly in search of a decent film to appear in", but I've never seen a better case of it than Ben Kingsley's (Keith Allen does not qualify). Avoid. Better, watch the Lean version again.

I do recommend a couple of what I call solid three-star movies: The World's Fastest Indian, which I admit is entirely predictable and a little slow in parts, but is honest work done well, with an excellent performance by Hopkins; and Around the Bend, which is similarly simple and straightforward, but affecting, a little quirky, with excellent performances by Caine, Walken and Lucas. And, incredibly, only an hour and twenty minutes long.

*

I am reading Kim for the first time. Riches! Wot riches, Pip!

2006-09-18T00:21:00.000+01:00

BALLARD AND BRAGG ON PAPES AND PRODDIES

The South Bank Show this evening profiled and interviewed J.G. Ballard. In discussing the film of Crash, Ballard noted that at Cannes the Spanish, Italian and French critics all got what it was about, while Alexander Walker (film critic of the Evening Standard) stormed out, and the film was banned in Norway. It was those viewers from Catholic countries, with an appreciation of original sin, the notion that fundamentally we are all rather perverse (and, Bragg interjected, have a death at the centre of their religion - right, said Ballard [and Protestants don't?]) who were equipped to deal with it.

They didn't go on - at least I don't think they did - to consider what Protestantism has at its centre instead. I guess, unequivocal salvation or damnation, with no grey area in which perversity can take place. The notion of perfection, the city on the the hill. As I've mentioned before, Garner has stated he thought the English people cut themselves off from an imaginative tap-root with Protestantism.

One of the things I find very interesting is an idea that can follow from this: that even if you don't consider yourself to have religious faith, the matrix of thought laid down by a religious tradition will continue to operate long after the practice of that religion had faded. Over recent years I've become aware of how important a weak but persistent ambience of Scottish Calvinism in my background has been to shaping my world-view. I escaped, thankfully, the genuinely traumatising blood-and-hellfire sermons of my father's youth.

*

I was most relieved to see Martin Amis admitting he didn't get what Crash was about until his third or fourth reading of it, in preparation for reviewing the Cronenberg film, and that in his 1970s review of it, he used sarcasm to cover his ignorance.

2006-09-13T22:56:00.000+01:00

LE CARRE AND SCIASCIA

My father has recently finished Smiley's People. One of the attractions of spy fiction is that it is, even at its most downbeat (e.g. The Looking-Glass War), an extension of boyhood fantasies, of stepping beyond the banalities of everyday life into a world of danger and excitement which few others are privy to. One can think of any number of popular kids' books which draw on this - the Alex Rider books, Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials - and going back a bit, The 39 Steps and Treasure Island. Also The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. I suppose that's one of the things that draws people into spying in real life. I can understand the romantic attraction, but it's a false one, I think: at root it's a profession which depends on lying to people. That's before you consider the uses, or abuses of it - CND, miners, Northern Ireland, Spycatcher, Iraq. Doris Lessing was on Desert Island Discs a while back and said there was something dreadfully childish about the spies she met.

Thinking on Sciascia's work, and trying to figure out why it attracts me, I realise that it is, similarly, the portrayal of a hidden world underlying the everyday one, with this additional, horrific element - it doesn't so much underlie it as suffuse it. Everyone knows what is going on, and no-one acknowledges it (it was routine for a long time to deny that the mafia even existed). This notion of the mundane life being continually subverted by a nightmarish one is fascinating, and true to experience.

2006-09-12T22:04:00.000+01:00

CPL ALEX MARKEY, USMC

Thanks to Joe for this link to an article on the Guerilla News Network. There's little that's new here for sandal-wearing, tofu-munching Grauniad readers like myself, but Markey is articulate, and because he has served in Iraq what he has to say carries weight. The most interesting comment he makes is this piece of analysis:

What is really at stake here, and what stands to suffer the most is U.S. credibility. The term may ring paradoxical to some these days, but most in Washington can say it with a straight face because they understand the functional usage of the term.

At this stage of the game “U.S. credibility” has less to do with fulfilling our pledge to bring a democratic Iraq to fruition. It has nothing to do with the long abandoned search for weapons of mass destruction. What U.S. credibility hinges on now is our refusal to accept humiliation (political or military) at the hands of a third world insurgency. Often I hear the argument that “cutting and running” in Iraq will embolden these faceless enemies of ours to install a “terror vacuum” in the failed Iraq, from which they would soon launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. and her allies. This is not the outcome that our policy makers fear. This is propaganda that means to keep the American public believing that their own personal safety somehow depends on the outcome of this war.

Our perceived enemies must never be given cause to believe that the U.S. will ever relent in the fight to destroy them. This is the school of thought to which U.S. policymakers subscribe. That is what is meant by U.S. credibility. Everything else you hear is window dressing.
The Iraq war is rapidly becoming a referendum on U.S. credibility.

This ties in absolutely with a comment Gore Vidal reports, from the time of the founding of what he calls the National Security State, in 1950: "If you want this to work [unprecedented spending on the military in peacetime] you're going to have to scare hell out of the American people." America has effectively been on a war footing ever since.

As to the trigger-happy nature of US troops, that has been the case since at least WW2. My mother served in the RAF in the 1950s, and told me that she knew of Aussie troops who refused to fight with the Americans because they considered them too dangerous, not to the enemy, but to themselves and their allies. Norman Lewis reports the same in Naples '44.

*

I have a couple of friends in the army. Friend #1 held a bash in January which my wife and I attended. The military bods there were (ironically) the liveliest. I actually got asked a couple of times which newspapers I read - I said, well, The Guardian. In one case this actually resulted in the chap I was talking to backing further and further away, with an expression simultaneously friendly and fixed. When I reported this to Friend #2 a few months later he just shook his head slowly and said, nope, the answer to that one is, The Daily Telegraph and The Sun, without exception.

2006-09-10T12:23:00.000+01:00

UNKNOWN ROUSSEAU

...at least to me. I don't claim to have any kind of knowledge of art, beyond knowing what I like. I've had a print of Rousseau's The Snake Charmer for ages, and remember how it had an almost physical impact on me when I first saw it: Yes - that's it! That's how it is! though the 'it' in question was and is beyond articulation. Some perspective, some sense of mental ordering or state of imagination. Certainly it had a lot to do with my personal dream-world. Dali's Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee... and Ernst's The Angel of Hearth and Home had a similar effect. It's not something that happens now, sadly, but I like how in the above image it seems the lion is a product of the gypsy's dreaming, yet it still presents a threat to him.

2006-09-08T22:40:00.000+01:00

REALITY VERSUS FICTION

From Shop Talk, part of a conversation between Philip Roth and Aharon Appelfeld:

AA: I have never written about things as they happened. All my works are indeed chapters from my most personal experience, but nevertheless they are not "the story of my life". The things that happened to me in my life have already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded them and given them shape. To write things as they happened is to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, sort out, and choose the words and the pace that fits the work. The materials are indeed materials from one's life, but ultimately the creation is an independent creature.

I tried several times to write "the story of my life" in the woods after I ran away from the camp. But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be faithful to reality and to what really happened. But the chronicle that emerged proved to be a weak scaffolding. The result was rather meager, an unconvincing imaginary tale. The things that are most true are easily falsified.

This ties in, though not exactly, with what I was trying to say earlier about narrative and our sense of time: that one of the uses of story is to make sense of and reflect the way we feel experience to be, rather than on the terms of the calendar or clock - inner time, not outer. Or indeed, dreamtime.

2006-09-07T23:00:00.000+01:00

SANTAYANA RIGHT AGAIN

I found Terry Jones' series Barbarians a little lightweight, as with most BBC documentaries these days, but fascinating nonetheless. The book covers the same ground and presents the same arguments, but in much more depth. I didn't know, though should have guessed, that Caesar's invasion of Gaul was carried out on the pretext of protecting a client tribe from its enemies - who, Jones says, weren't enemies at all, but just happened to be migrating across their territory. The real reason was gold. The Celts of Gaul were rich, and Caesar was broke.

Given how close this is in nature if not time to America's Middle Eastern adventures, I should have remembered the following quote, from Gore Vidal's Dreaming War:

Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our Junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured - or threatened - party before he struck. But he had a great many predecessors not least Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowans' War in Afghanistan: A $28 Billion Racket quotes Joseph Schumpteter, who in 1919,

'described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: "There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented....The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours."'

2006-09-04T23:41:00.000+01:00

SPURLING REBUKED

Joe took issue with Hilary Spurling's comment. There are two sides to this - every woman a Joan, every man a Napoleon, and the Long Tail of e-publishing to support them all, as the hive mind of the internet elevates all of us into a higher state.

The other finds voice in Isaiah Berlin's observation that while the general standard of university students seemed to be improving with the years, the really brilliant minds didn't seem to be around any more; and, more darkly, Kingsley Amis's maxim "More will mean worse!"

Both, of course, have a long pedigree, and unfortunately I can't tell which one I'm more tempted by. I do ponder, from time to time, on the fact that Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Kit Marlowe all wrote pre-internet, pre-just about everything, and that England's population was - what? Three million?

*

Irritated beyond measure that I failed to Listen Again to the Radio 4 programme Watching the Doomwatchers before the week was out, as I enjoyed it so much the first time. There is an article about it here. If you ever get the chance to hear or see Rear Admiral Chris Parry, take it. Quite the most cogent and balanced assessment of Al Qaida and global security threats I've heard in a long time - since Jason Burke on Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares. The soundbites, unfortunately, don't do him justice. And thirty-plus years after Rendezvous with Rama the government still isn't taking the posibility of asteroid collision seriously.

2006-09-04T23:14:00.000+01:00

WHAT'S HE TO HECUBA, OR HECUBA TO HIM?

I read on Michael Gilleland's blog a while back a quote from George Gissing, which chimed with me, as it made me think about my own continuing interest in the culture of Southern Italy, which is a little irrational as it's a place I have never been and whose language I don't speak. Chimed twice over, in fact, as Gissing himself was in Southern Italy when he wrote it.

Then I came across this in a poem by Wilfred Owen:

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.

This fetishistic attitude to ancient Rome and Greece has of course been going on for centuries, and is more than a little ridiculous. I suspect it has to do with a deeply ingrained notion of the Fall, at least in the Christian West, or possibly a more general belief in a lost paradise. As the introduction to Kevin Rushby's new book on the subject points out, we only start believing in paradise when we feel that we have fallen from it, that things have been going to the dogs ever since - and in the comfortably solid artifacts and literature of Greece and Rome - comfortably distant so that we can project out hopes and fears onto them - we have the proof that it really used to exist. It even gets into Star Trek.

Then again, when I was listening to The Odyssey recently, I suddenly realised, my God, this is Star Trek - captain and crew land on strange island, mysterious seductive woman with tame monsters beguiles them and tries to seduce captain, who has to use his wits get them all out of trouble, etc etc.

2006-09-04T18:03:00.000+01:00

AT THIS I KVELL

From Shop Talk by Philip Roth:

Isaac Bashevis Singer: I once was sitting in the subway with the Yiddish writer S, who had a beard, and at this time, forty years ago, very few people had beards. And he liked women, so he looked over and sitting across from him was a young woman, and he seemed to be highly interested. I sat on the side and I saw it - he didn't see me. Suddenly right near him came in another man also with a beard, and he began to look at the same woman. When S saw another one with a beard, he got up and left. He suddenly realised his own ridiculous situation. And this woman, as soon as this other man came in, she must have thought, What's going on here, already two beards?

Philip Roth: You had no beard.

Isaac Bashevis Singer: No, no. Do I need everything? A bald head and a beard?

2006-08-31T00:14:00.000+01:00

ENCOURAGING QUOTE

"A certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering" (Frank Kermode). Huzzah, say I.

*

We are watching Season 2 of Babylon 5. I first saw it around seven years ago, when the whole Clark/Psi Corps/Nightwatch story brought Nazi Germany to mind, but now...sheesh. You don't see anything but Bush, and the Office for Homeland Security or whatever it's called. JMS called this one exactly right, and how we wish he hadn't.

2006-08-22T23:23:00.000+01:00

SPURLING SPOKED

A horrible quote comes back to me, from, I think, Hilary Spurling on Start the Week in March this year. She said: "There are more creative writers [in Britain] than the culture can support." She was mostly speaking about the Royal Literary Fund's Writing Matters report, though.

2006-08-22T22:41:00.000+01:00

SHPAWN OF SHATAN SHPEAKSH

Interesting interview with Scott Pack, former buying manager at Waterstone's. He also has a new blog, on which he gives his reasons for quitting. Pack was seen by many book and book-trade people in something akin to the way politics junkies view Peter Mandelson. This may or may not have been fair - at least he writes very well.

*

I have rejigged links - simply too many of them. Have removed the political stuff, which I hadn't looked at in ages. If and when I become politically active in the real world again, then they'll come back.

2006-08-17T22:25:00.000+01:00

HARD READS

John Sutherland was on Front Row this evening punting his new book How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide and saying some not wildly original but still cogent and welcome things, among them, that reading well is nearly as difficult as writing well - which is very, very difficult, as anyone who has ever tried to write a novel will know. It's like, says Sutherland, picking up the violin and expecting to be able to play it at concert level on the first go. Quite. Ties in nicely with Alvarez and Thoreau. It'll be good to compare it to Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why, which I enjoyed and found useful a few years back. Worth a listen.

*

The Collins Complete Works of Shakespeare has an introductory essay by Anthony Burgess on Shakespearian (Bryson says -ian, Amis -ean. Infinite are the arguments of mages) theatre. It includes a few paragraphs on pronunciation in Shakespeare's time, and how it has changed, thus making understanding of some of the rhymes and puns difficult for modern readers. AB makes reference to this at least a couple of times in his autobiographies, once by recounting how a demonstration he gave of how Shakespeare originally sounded shocked his academic listeners. There are a couple of mp3 examples given on this page - most interesting.

*

With Blackadder in mind, I listened to the BBC's - or rather Simon Armitage's - radio dramatisation of The Odyssey this week. It was good to put all those names and episodes which one constantly stumbles across into narrative context (I haven't read the book). Rich use of Yorkshire accents among the sailors, and Yorkshire vocabulary too - "Stop your mithering!" I still have on tape from 20 years ago the radio version of The Golden Ass, which uses Geordie accents in the same way. Odysseus is played by Tim McInnery. He does very good work, and you get used to him, but for the first half-hour or so it's impossible not to visualise Captain Darling, or Lord Percy.

2006-08-16T20:51:00.000+01:00

IN WHICH I ENLIST THE SUPPORT OF THOREAU

As with many, many other books, I have eyed and been tempted by Walden/On Civil Disobedience (Penguin Classics) for a few years now. I was flicking through it the other day and came across a chapter titled "Reading", which includes the following:

"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."

And:

"Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to
stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

"I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on
the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little Reading," which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true
love run smooth -- at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of `Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All this
they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella -- without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market."

*

Thoreau and Alvarez have been welcome because I've been having some doubts over the past few months about the worth of reading...literature...books in general. It seems a sorry substitute for life - RLS said the same thing, somewhere, which I find ironic, given that he's one of the few writers I can depend on to revive one's faith in writing. I do recognise, however, that the world is created in our imaginations, and our beliefs, and that writing is a powerful means of influencing those things. Also that in a highly mediated world, we spend a lot of time thinking - and worrying - about things that we have no direct experience of. And that writing is a way of extending experience. One can describe the War on Terror as a perverted use of story. And while we may experience event (x) directly, the way we interpret it may depend on internal narrative pathways laid down by - blah blah blah, I'm really too tired for this. But it's a notion, which I'll have to float with four acquaintances who're practicing head-shrinkers of various denominations.

As with other sloughs, I suspect the answer to this one will simply be to get the head down, and keep moving forwards.

2006-08-13T22:13:00.000+01:00

FROM "THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS"

I only saw Foss [a famous stagecoach driver] once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranch called Fossville, One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss. Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered "Yes." Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilisation, I should have used the telephone for the first time in my civilised career. So it goes in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.

FROM "MONTEREY"

RLS is writing about the prevalence of forest fires in the California mountains:

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have retained a thrill from the experience. I wished to be certain whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree. I suppose I must have been under the influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my experiment, what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at work combating the original conflagration. I could see the waggon that had brought them, tied to a live oak in a piece of open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood into the sunlight. Had anyone observed the result of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been run up to a convenient bough.

"To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil."

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I went out of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater vigour.

THE WRITER'S VOICE

I've recently finished an intermittently brilliant (and rather expensive, for the size of it) book called The Writer's Voice by Al Alvarez. He manages to crystallise something I've been mulling over for the past couple of years, namely that the worth of a piece of writing lies ultimately in what he calls 'voice', the sense of what is implied, the tone, the sense of what lies in between and underneath the words used, in the same way that music is what takes place between the notes. Writing that doesn't have that depth, that level of perception and control, is no longer of any interest to me. But you have to be awake to it, and I don't think I was, prior to beginning to read poetry in 2003 - with poetry, each word has to be in the right place in order for the whole to work. When you begin to apply that level of focus to prose, in which I think one can get away with a lot more, it begins to reveal things you weren't previously aware of. That's been my experience, anyhow. Alvarez goes so far as to say:

"In order to acquire facts efficiently, scan a synopsis, or gut a newspaper, you have to master the art of reading diagonally. Real literature is about something else entirely and it's immune to speed-reading. That is, it's not about information, although you may gather information along the way. It's not even about storytelling, although sometimes that is one of its greatest pleasures. Imaginative literature is about listening to a voice. When you read a novel the voice is telling you a story; when you read a poem it's usually talking about what its owner [owner?] is feeling; but neither the medium nor the message is the point. The point is that the voice is unlike any other voice you have ever heard and it is speaking directly to you, communing with you in private, right in your ear, and in its own distinctive way [...] an undeniable presence in your head, and still very much alive, no matter how long ago the words were spoken."

That thing about the secondary importance of storytelling seems radical to me. I can't remember who it was - possibly Somerset Maugham - who said something along the lines of, one has to be slightly immature to care whether or not Tom will fall for Daisy and vice versa. What I take from that is the essential silliness and vulgarity of the machinery of plot, the sense of things working out so, just because the author has determined they will. Stephen King describes plot as a jack-hammer - but then he also also asserts the primary importance of story. Of the novels in my top ten, plot only has a significant role to play in two of them; and in Kidnapped, the heart of the novel, what Henry James called the "really excellent" chapters of the flight in the heather, is pure narrative; in The Day of the Owl, the plot is merely a skeleton on which to hang the exploration of the mafia mentality - whether or not Colasberna's killer will be caught quickly becomes a moot and relatively minor point.

I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say voice is the single most important, or significant thing in any novel, but I do agree that no novel can reach the summit of achievement without it. One simply isn't convinced, otherwise.

A final note on this - Alvarez distinguishes between style and voice, noting that one can get in the way of the other.

*

Alvarez quotes Samuel Beckett's phrase for the hard work of getting the right words down on paper: "balls-aching". Which ties in neatly with a quote from RLS, from a letter to his mother, in fact, during the writing of The Silverado Squatters: "I work, work away, and get nothing or but little done: it is slow, slow, slow: but I sit from four to five hours at it, and read all the rest of the time from Hazlitt."

2006-07-13T00:21:00.000+01:00

TOP TEN REVISITED

I hate top ten lists. Arbitrary, inherently unfair, downright unlit'rary, idiotic in assuming, even for argument's sake, that one masterpiece is definitely better than another. Here's mine:

Still there:

Davy by Edgar Pangborn
Red Shift by Alan Garner
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Life's a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Open Letters by Vaclav Havel
United States by Gore Vidal
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

In:

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia
Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen

Out:

Essays by George Orwell
Grey is the Colour of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya
Swords in the Mist by Fritz Leiber

Should is probably the worst word in the English language. The first two of the three I've ditched are excellent, essential books; I'd recommend them without hesitation to anyone, but there's too much of a feeling that I should include them because I find them worthy, not because they matter to me. With all three there's a question of fading influence: Ratushinskaya because I read her book over ten years ago, and Orwell because although I read the essays only a couple of years ago, I read them too quickly. As for Leiber, much as I revere and enjoy him, I've moved on.

Lampedusa and Grimmelshausen I've read in the past year and feel important; I'll see how they stand being revisited. Interesting to see the other week in The Guardian that Marcel Berlins, who writes a column every Wednesday, reads The Leopard every summer. Sciascia I first read nearly four years ago, have re-read twice since, and will re-read again. I recognise that he's sunk in, and that I really admire him.

Tarka, which I've read only once, and with difficulty, still seems to me a work of genius because it eliminates almost completely the human perspective. I've never come across anything so plot-free - it is pure narrative, and carries no moral judgements. It's all sensation - pain and release, joy and suffering - and everything in it passes.

Two Italians, Americans, and English; one Scot, Spaniard, Czech and German. Seems about right. Seven novels (four of them nominally for children), two essay collections and one play. No poetry, which I'm not going to let bug me.

If I had to pick only one out of the lot it would probably be Davy. "I'm Davy, who was king for a time. King of the Fools, and that calls for wisdom."

It's as good a way of marking time and measuring the changes it brings as any. Very many thanks to all those who have read my posts, and especially to those who have left comments.

2006-07-03T20:50:00.000+01:00

REVISIONING CHURCHILL

And so back to Anthony Burgess. A literary butterfly I yam, but at least I'm on the home straight with this one. The book is essentially a long train of anecdotes and observations, clearly written too quickly, with too little revision in some places, and an overall lack of structure which makes it difficult, for me at least, to maintain attention for more than 100-150 pages (not at the one sitting!). One thinks, where is this going? which is unfair because for those of us without the ambition of a Blair, life tends not to go anywhere in particular - it just goes. Part of the problem is Burgess's intensity, which remains constant no matter the subject. He is so bright, so erudite, certainly by modern standards, so energetic, that you get worn out after a while, like eating too much of a very good meal. Being buttonholed by him after a few gin-and-tonics must have been either awesome or indescribably tedious, or both.

There is so much to quote which is entertaining, funny, insightful, but one thing which has really struck me is his account of his war service. Burgess was enlisted from the ages of 23-29, a waste of six years, he says, during which he learned nothing. The war, for him and many others, was a distraction, an unwelcome interruption, fought under the leadership of men they did not respect against an enemy they did not want to fight. It is worth noting that Burgess was never involved in combat, being based in Britain and then Gibraltar - this is not meant as a criticism, merely an observation. Would his opinion have been different if he had? Was the opinion of front-line troops different? Maybe.

Here are the excerpts, taken from pages 303-5, with lacunae:

"The cynicism of the troops was profound. The chief symbols of their alienation were the men who were leading them to victory - Field-Marshal Montgomery and Prime Minister Churchill. [...] Montgomerian austerity was highly unpopular, and Churchill, who stood for its opposite, was unpopular for profounder reasons. He was a warmonger [see Christopher Priest's The Separation for an elegant, intelligent (though still to my mind rather cold) treatment of this perspective] whose qualified approval of the Russian destruction of the Nazi gangsters he excoriated with his teeth out would soon turn to open belligerence. [...] From the professional angle, Montgomery and Churchill had, respectively, military efficiency and political righteousness as their aims, and their programmes were praiseworthy. But conscripted troops are primarily human beings who resent being converted into disposable counters [...] and their humanity was outraged by the inhumanity of their leaders.

"[Churchill's] techniques of democratic bonhomie were ham-fisted. It was his custom when inspecting Home Forces troops to go down the line grinning with a big cigar. The cigar, intended to endear, did not do so. The men were usually starved of tobacco and enraged by the Cuban aroma. Churchill would ingratiatingly use obscenities that would have shocked Montgomery, but the men saw that it was all an act. They heard in his Edwardian twang (as Orwell called it) not the voice of equality but that of a ruling class more deeply entrenched than that represented by their haw-haw officers."

Burgess is equally scathing about the men, and the unions:

"On a fine spring afternoon I took a small group of men in convalescent blue into the grounds for a discussion on the progress of the war. Few of the men could see why it was being fought. We came in because of bloody Poland. Bugger Poland. Us coming in because of Poland has meant these so-called Free Poles shoving their poles into our wives and daughters. The Jews? Bugger the Jews. Why fight for the Jews? Rubbing their hands and making money while we lot gets the shit at half a dollar a day. It was a depressing session. And when this is bloody over it'll be the same as it was after the last lot. The buggers what stayed home will have the jobs and us sods go begging. A certain Corporal Hardwick spoke sensibly, much in the tone of Cecil Day Lewis's poem about defending the bad against the worse. I dismissed the group and Corporal Hardwick walked off on his own. He walked, I discovered afterwards, down to the railway line and laid his head on it." (p. 272)

"It had been one of the tasks of the old trade unions to educate their members. The unions now had the sole task of holding the country to ransom. Even the Daily Mirror published a cartoon in which striking miners or dockers, I forget which, raised their banners over the bodies of the slain in khaki or blue. The caption was: 'Your fighting comrades thank you.' The conscribed dockworkers had no sense of solidarity with these comrades. Their ignorance was astounding. They would be as well satisfied with living under Hitler as under Churchill. Hitler was right to kill the Sheenies. The original inhabitants of America were the Negroes, and the Yanks had dispossessed them." (p. 306)

Burgess has earlier related how many Brits on the Home Front felt quite close to the Germans and rapidly came to see the Americans as the real enemy; also, how a local pub, when faced with American demands for a colour bar, put up a sign which read 'Blacks only'.

How much of all this is mischief-making, and how much simply reportage, is open to debate. However, the stuff about Churchill makes one think again about history being written by the winners. A certain image of Churchill was projected during the war, for propaganda purposes, and no doubt from the same lazy deferential journalistic practices which continue to treat Blair with respect today. That image has persisted, and become history. What ordinary people, especially ordinary soldiers, really thought of him, has not endured in public awareness - though on the plus side it's to be hoped that much of the prejudice and ignorance Burgess writes about has gone. I wonder what Angus Calder's The People's War and The Myth of the Blitz have to say about this.

Finally, despite the cavils I made earlier, I should say that Little Wilson and Big God is an exceptional book which I recommend wholeheartedly. It is difficult - maybe impossible - to find a page without something worth quoting in it.

2006-06-27T20:08:00.000+01:00

SCUMBAGS

The older I get, the fewer things there are that make me really, blood-spitting angry, but this is one of them:

8.00pm Property Developing Abroad Having been stationed in Iraq, Charlie and Sascha took early retirement from the Army to become developers in Bulgaria, and are now looking to buy up as much property as possible on its Black Sea coast. With the help of presenter Gary McCausland, the couple view potential purchases and consider how best to increase their profits by targeting British holiday-makers seeking luxury villas (888) (Stereo)

Place is not about profit, it's about belonging - unless you're Bulgarian - or Greek Cypriot - or - or - or - in which case, good luck. If this was happening in Wales you'd get your luxury villa burnt to the fuckin' ground and rightly so. But this is a lost debate in the UK, ever since Margaret bloody Thatcher decided to create a class of kulaks by selling off the decent council housing stock and leaving the poorest to rot.

The most interesting thing - and the one I've never seen properly addressed - about all these programmes on whinging poms buying abroad is why they decide to leave in the first place. What has gone so badly wrong with the country that they are not prepared to stick and try to make it work? How have they become deracinated, so that not only do they not belong in the place they move to, they don't even belong to the place they've come from?

2006-06-17T10:08:00.000+01:00

ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG

"Youth is a time of melancholy."
- Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

"By the time you're nineteen you have a pretty good idea of some of the things you're not going to be; but more often, this sense of one's limitations, the really penetrating understanding, happens in late youth or early middle age."
- Raymond Carver, 'John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher', in Call If You Need Me

2006-06-13T00:54:00.000+01:00

BLOWBACK

In Tony Hawk's autobiography Occupation: Skateboarder, a photo of the author with none other than Monica Lewinsky, both of them grinning at the camera. The caption reads, "Close, but no cigar".

2006-06-11T16:45:00.000+01:00

LA VIDA ES SUENO

It may be a factor of age, or possibly parenthood, that I rarely seem to be able to read a book all the way through these days, not at the one attempt. Simplicissimus took three or four, with gaps of months - the best part of a year to get from cover to cover. It doesn't appear to have affected my ability to enjoy them - not so long as I stop and switch to something else when I start to get bored - or to remember what's happened, more or less, when I pick them up again. So I have put down December Bride for the time being and restarted The Count of Monte Cristo. The padding in it is outrageous, but I'm managing to forgive Dumas for being such a hack, and taking pleasure from his nonpareil eye for a good yarn.

It may also be a sign of age that I'm taking equal pleasure from the footnotes by Robin Buss, viz:

"The sinister byways of Italian history held a peculiar fascination for French writers at the start of the nineteenth century, particularly for liberals who saw political capital to be made out of relating past papal misdeeds. But there is more to it than that: Stendhal, who tells similar stories in his Chroniques italiennes and Promenades dans Rome, admired the mixture of refinement and savagery that he perceived in Italian culture, and was fascinated by its reversals of expectations (noble bandits, degenerate nobles). The Italian scenes in Dumas' novel are an interesting reflection of the image of Italy in his time and suggest the appeal of a country that French visitors often found liberating after Restoration France."

Stendhal's not the first, or last. Shakespeare and his contemporaries made use of Italian stories on a regular basis (there's an Everyman book of selected original translations, now seemingly out of print), and Thomas Harris had Hannibal Lecter seek refuge in Florence. Refinement and savagery - about right.

And (one for Joe):

"The short novel, Lord Ruthwen, or The Vampire (first published in 1819 in the New Monthly Magazine), was written by Byron's companion and physician, Dr Polidori, who did not discourage the attribution to the poet himself. It was soon translated into French by Henri Faber (1819) and again by Amédée Pichot (1820), and helped to fuel an extraordinary vogue for vampire stories and melodramas, including Cyprien Bérard’s Lord Rutwen, and the melodrama Le Vampire (1820), co-authored by Charles Nodier. Dumas saw this in 1823 and devoted several chapters to it in his memoirs (3rd series, 1863).

"Nodier’s play was promptly re-translated into English by James Planché, as The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles (1820), and before the end of the same year in France there had been at least five other vampire productions on the Parisian stage: a burlesque, a farce, a comic opera, a vampire Punch [interesting!] and a ‘vaudeville folly’ in which one character says: ‘Vampires! They have come from England…That’s another nice present those gentlemen have sent us!’ Nodier observed that ‘the myth of the vampire is perhaps the most universal of our superstitions’. It revived, of course, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1899); and lives on in our own century in a medium which might be said to feature only the shadowy figures of the Undead - the cinema."

- most of which he'll already be familiar with, I'm sure.

Then there's this, from the text itself:

'Do so, my dear guest, do so. But do not be content with just one experiment: as with everything, the senses must become accustomed to a new impression, whether it is pleasant or not, happy or sad. Nature wrestles with this divine substance, because our nature is not made for joy but clings to pain. Nature must be defeated in this struggle, reality must follow dreams; and then the dream will rule, will become the master, the dream will become life and life become a dream. What a difference is made by this transfiguration! When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream for ever. When you leave your world for that of others, you will feel as if you have travelled from spring in Naples to winter in Lapland, from paradise to earth, from heaven to hell. Try some hashish, my friend! Try it!'

Which, as a pitch, beats "Wan' a score some grass ther pal, likezey?"

*

I note, with the grim satisfaction of one whose end-is-nigh prognostications have been proved correct, that Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy is now out of print in the UK. Oh, the irony.

2006-06-02T23:22:00.000+01:00

SPACE AND SOLIDITY AND SAM

What I like about this image (never having seen the painting, I gotta say image - I'm told that reproductions, no matter how good, never match the original) is that though the subject appears to be the bridge, which is precise and definite and firmly rooted, what takes my attention is the the sky beyond and above it, the way it seems to go on forever, not in spite of, but because the bridge itself is so limited and particular.

It strikes me as an illustration of what prose can do, when used properly - the right words used with full intent. Have recently begun a book bought ten years ago and by happy indolence neither read nor re-sold nor thrown out, just laid down until one or other of us was ready: Sam Hanna Bell's December Bride. They made a film of it in 1990, which I saw at the Filmhouse in the days when just about every film seemed to contain hidden meanings, and if I hadn't fallen slightly for Saskia Reeves at the time, I'd probably never have bought the book. Here's an extract:

'Let us be going now,' said Andrew. The ram was urged to the water's edge and hoisted into the boat. Sarah was snatched up by Frank, and as he stood thigh-deep in the water he turned a little towards Pentland with his burden before he seated her in the stern. Already the two men on the beach were vague and indistinct, and their shouts of farewell came torn and disjointed to those afloat. 'He's a crabbit ould blirt, too,' grumbled the servingman, referring to Andrew, as he and Pentland turned away. But his master only grunted. He was preoccupied with the image of the sturdy, pale, smooth-haired woman in whose company he had been for the past three hours. He remembered Frank Echlin's fingers sunk in her thigh and waist and a tremor ran through him. The slipe [sledge] caught on a stone, and Pentland turned round to look down on the lough. the boat had vanished and the grey fretted water was hardly distinguishable from the rain and mist that swept across it.

Bell's compression of time (something Garner goes on about, but which I'm only now coming to appreciate) in this passage is superb, and he gives you what is required, no more, in the way of description and narrative. In limiting himself he creates space, suggests tension, though nothing very dramatic is happening. Though it may not be evident here, in other parts of the novel the evocation of silence underlying action or behind the dialogue is quite incredible - rather like the sky in the Van Gogh - something they brought out well in the film, as I remember.

*

A lot of it seems to be written in Scots - but I didn't know that Bell was born in Scotland, or that his father was manager of the Glasgow Herald - or even of the existence of Ulster Scots, shame on me. It comes as no surprise, however, that he was a folklorist - from the sounds of it much like Hamish Henderson or David Thomson or George Ewart Evans.

2006-06-02T20:09:00.000+01:00

ETERNAL YOUTH

Through no fault of my own, have been hearing a fair bit of frog rock recently, including the perennially silly "Je t'aime...moi non plus". It's worth reflecting that Jane Birkin will be 60 this December, and it makes you wonder if, were she our mother or aunt, we wouldn't be a tad embarrassed at her heavy breathing being broadcast for the benefit of all. In a personal or family context, this sort of thing would be locked away, only occasionally brought out for reminiscing with one's peers or amusing the children. Stuck on a public record, of course, it becomes timeless.

And, as Barry Norman used to say, why not? It chills me to see a pensioner with a book on Frank Zappa, and it amuses me to see a student with a biography of Edie Sedgwick. The uses of the '60s. In the early '90s, when I was a student, we looked back to it for inspiration - read the Beats and Hunter S. Thompson, listened to the Velvet Underground and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Frank was on the back of the bathroom door, sitting on the can with his pants around his ankles. So it should be. There's an excellent essay by Harlan Ellison called "The Song the Sixties Sang" which lays out why they were, and are, important. No young person's education is complete without knowing something about them, and being fired by it.

2006-05-05T22:48:00.000+01:00

IGNORANCE IS BLISS

Because you really do learn something new every day. Oh. That Iain McCalman. Also general editor of the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. Clearly a total stranger to academic rigour.

In my defence, it's perfectly possible for people who have had a good track record of publication to balls it up suddenly. Clive Ponting, post-Whitehall, post-Belgrano affair, went on to write a number of highly-praised books on history and politics. I confess to having read none of them, apart from his latest, called Gunpowder. Actually I only read about a third of it, because I was beginning to feel embarrassed on Ponting's behalf. Shoddy, repetitive writing; so little information it's like watching the news on TV; and the illustrations can only be described as laughable. I mean it. Go into a bookshop, find a copy and take a look for yourself. Just for God's sake don't buy it. Buy and read Jack Kelly's Gunpowder instead, which despite some rather rough-hewn sentences and occasional loss of focus, is packed with stuff you didn't know and dashes along con brio (sorry about the link to Amazon, but Atlantic Books' website is under construction).

*

Watched the news on TV tonight. It's clear now from his reshuffle - as if it wasn't after his "God will be my judge" number - that Blair has lost the plot, along with much else. The longer he stays, the more he puts at risk all the good that Labour has done, and their chances of winning the next General Election. Not that this appears to matter to him. Would he rather - as some have been suggesting in the papers - that Cameron won, not Brown? If that happens, it will be very interesting to see what happens to the SNP vote, particularly if Alex Salmond is back as leader in fact and not just name.