The Silver Eel II

Weekends and other addenda

2011-10-26T13:36:00.004+01:00

As the world really is going to hell in a handcart, it's as well to note that this decline may have been going on for longer than we imagine. Listening to Tim Butcher talking about his book Blood River on Start the Week a few years ago, I was struck by something he said about how connected the Congo used to be with the rest of the world, how very civilized it was at the turn of the century. Pre-WWI, there was a perfectly good postal service, for instance. You could quite dependably get a letter to and from Britain, right the way up the river. While in Europe, again before WWI, Orwell claims in one of his 'As I Please' columns it was quite possible to travel across Europe without having to produce a passport (Russia was the exception). By 1937, the sanctity of the weekend (now what's that?) was under serious threat:

It's a masochistic pleasure to read newspapers, not every day but once a week, on Sunday, at the height of the weekend, which is one of the most important factors in politics since the beginning of the apocalypse. Whatever good and useful thoughts and decisions begin to burgeon in democratic statesmen on Friday afternoons have begun to evaporate by Saturday afternoon. But tyrants don't have weekends. God created the world in six days, and on the seventh He rested. Peaceful statemen rest on the sixth and seventh. For forty-eight hours they celebrate the Lord's day. They exceed the demands of religion, and they overdo the example set by the Almighty. It's a striking thing that dictators don't play golf. Their Sabbath is not reserved for sport but surprises. Golf plays a considerable responsibility for the end of the civilized world. Napoleon played chess, Prince Eugene played dominoes. Politicians have fewer good ideas on the greens than they once did on the much reviled "green baize". On Christmas 1916, I was at the front. Our divisional staff, the colonel, the company commander, were all getting ready for a well-deserved "breather". They had forgotten that our opponents, the Russians, celebreated Christmas two weeks later than we did. They took advantage of our peaceful celebrations and launched a surprise attack on us, distracted as we were by Christmas lights and pious thoughts. Two weeks later we duly retaliated, but without success, because they were waiting for us. It's a pity the democratic statemen didn't serve at the front, especially the Eastern Front. Dictators always postpone Christmas by a couple of weeks. Democrats are always sticklers for punctual Christmases and punctual Sundays, thanks to which they have been able to celebrate many glorious victories: on the golf course.

- Joseph Roth; from the final section 'From an Author's Diary' of The White Cities: Reports from France 1925-39

There's an anecdote in the final chapter of Something of Myself which provides comparable insight. The Times had received by Sunday mail some verses titled 'The Old Volunteer' purporting to be by Kipling, but which to his mind were such an obvious forgery,

[...] the contribution should not have deceived a messenger-boy. Ninthly and lastly, they were wholly unintelligible.

Human nature being what it is, The Times was much more annoyed with me than anyone else, though goodness knows - this, remember, was in '17 - I did not worry them about it, beyond hinting that the usual weekend English slackness, when no-one is in charge, had made the mess.

[...] On the heels of my modest disclaimer which appeared, none too conspicuously, in The Times, I [had] a letter in a chaffing vein about 'The Old Volunteer' from a non-Aryan who had never much appreciated me; and the handwriting of it, coupled with the subtlety of choosing a weekend (as the Hun had chosen August Bank Holiday of '14) for the work, plus the Oriental detachedness and insensitiveness of playing that sort of game in the heart of a life-and-death struggle, made me suspect him more than a little. He is now in Abraham's bosom, so I shall never know.

To conclude, Kipling received a visit from a detective, sent by The Times, who more or less suggested that Kipling really was the author not only of the verses but of the letter, sent from himself to himself, for the purposes of publicity. Kipling was so intrigued by the notion that he "forgot to defend my 'injured honour'. The thing had passed out of reason into the Higher Hysterics."

*

Incidentally, that casual anti-Semitism of Kipling's recalls a line of dialogue from Chariots of Fire:

Master of Trinity: There goes your Semite, Hugh. A different God; a different mountain-top.

*

A quantum of solace from the Father of Humanism himself, Petrarch:

"[...]all those who have been, are, or shall be, seized by this passionate and diseased craving to write."

Later in the same letter, Petrarch says, "The favour of humanity begins with the author's decease; the end of life is the beginning of glory." Or, as Gore Vidal observed pithily upon Truman Capote's death: "Good career move."

Regeneration

2011-08-31T12:23:00.004+01:00

I shall turn forty next year. Facing the prospect of middle age with all the unbounded delight you would expect, I find ‘forty is the new thirty’ less comforting than Erasmus’ observation that at thirty-five, dried-up old age tires the body’s strength. (He lived to be seventy.) It’s not that, barring accidents, I’m looking forward to thirty years of senescence, but that by taking Erasmus’ perspective we assume youth is well and truly behind us (and it is), the weight of expectation is off, any time left is a bonus, and we can get on with the things we want to do rather than the things we think we ought to have been doing. Which were? I’ve no idea. This must explain why I haven’t done them.

Meanwhile, from Milan Kundera’s The Curtain (2005):

How many Fabrices, Aglaias, Nastasyas, Mishkins I see around me! They are all just beginning the journey into the unknown; no question, they are drifting, but theirs is a singular sort of drifting: they drift without knowing that’s what they are doing; for they are doubly inexperienced: they do not know the world and they do not know themselves; only when they look back on it from the distance of adulthood will they see their drifting as drifting; and besides: only with that distance will they be capable of understanding the very notion of drifting. For the moment, with no understanding of the view the future will one day take of their long-gone youth, they defend their convictions far more aggressively than an adult man would defend his, a man who has had experience with the fragility of human certainties.

[E.M.] Ciorin’s outburst against youth shows something obvious: from each observation post standing along the line that runs from birth to death, the world looks different and the attitudes of the person looking out from it change as well; no-one will understand another person except by first of all understanding his age. Of course that’s so obvious, so very obvious! But only an ideological pseudo-obviousness can be seen at once. With an existential obviousness, the more obvious it is, the less visible. The ages of life stand concealed behind the curtain.

'[...]they defend their convictions far more aggressively than an adult man would defend his, a man who has had experience with the fragility of human certainties.' Milan...mate. Clearly not a Harlan Ellison fan. Fabrice del Dongo – The Charterhouse of Parma; Aglaia Lepanshin, Nastasya Filipovna and Prince Mishkin – all from The Idiot. But you knew that, right? Hold the relish.

The Great Bloomsday Tortoise

2010-06-25T10:09:00.009+01:00

Team Ulysses finally made it to the summit and have every reason to be proud of themselves. This was essentially a year-long online book group devoted to reading the world's second most unreadable English-language novel (actually the first, if you consider Finnegans Wake to be multi-lingual) at sixty pages a month, beginning on Bloomsday '09, ending a week last Wednesday, and hosted and led by the oft-linked-to dovegreyreader.

I left a partly encouraging, slightly patronising comment on the initial post, bestowing a handful of brief impressions of my own, as I'd begun Ulysses in December '08. I'd been working up to it for some time, having read The Odyssey in the Fagles translation at the beginning of the year, and then Dubliners and A Portrait. I was also dipping into Anthony Burgess's Here Comes Everybody, picked up second-hand a few years before, which is typically fluid, intelligent, enthusiastic.

By the time Team Ulysses began I had read around 200 pages. I toyed with the notion of taking part, but I had already been a member of a book group, and the joint-reading thing just doesn't ring my bell. (Anyway, I was well ahead of them.) Real life and other interests intervened, and when I got round to hefting Ulysses again, nearly a year had gone by. The hare had slept too long.

I have now completed 300 pages. It has gone back on the shelf. It won't be taken down again for a while. I have some sympathy with Roddy Doyle's invective against Ulysses, still more with his criticism of what he terms 'the Joyce industry', but most of all with something I heard him say in interview in 1996: at some point one has to accept that there are some books one is probably never going to read. He was talking about War and Peace (which he did in fact read, very quickly, when he was in his teens), but for me the most likely candidate is Ulysses. At some point I'll have a go at the final chapter, the famous Molly monologue, but I make no promises regarding the rest of it.

Now this is interesting, because that makes three key modernist novels I've been unable to finish: Ulysses, The Good Soldier, and That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. Perhaps I'm too bound to narrative, skewered by time's arrow, but in my more frustrated moments it seems as though modernism is simply a licence for the writer not to bother telling a story - and Al Alvarez, who if I recall correctly thinks it was the last great movement in European literature and possibly its high point, can go suck a runny egg.

From Here Comes Everybody [1965]:

[Ulysses] is, in many ways, a precursor of the new wave in the novel, which is quite capable of asking us to treat a work of fiction as if it were a dictionary or an encyclopedia - something to be stepped into at any point we please, begun at the end and finished at the beginning, partly read or wholly read, a plot of space for free wandering rather than a temporal escalator. The 'Wandering Rocks' episode of Ulysses is a reminder that the whole book has a spatial scheme in which time has been divested of its bullying hurry-along authority, and this is reinforced by the knowledge that the final image is of a human body, presented piecemeal in its various organs. Time is the great enemy, and books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake triumphantly trounce it. Time has to be put in its place.

On the other hand, one only has so much of it, particularly when one sees the chapters getting longer and longer, and Joyce's accretive writing method becoming more in need of a fierce edit. The two most attractive words in the quoted section above are 'partly read'. I accept that this is close to a contradiction of a recent post on the virtues of browsing, but whaddaya know? I am legion - I mean to say, I contain multitudes.

*

I find one thing to say without equivocation in defence of Ulysses, and have said it before: one does get to know Bloom to a degree that one simply doesn't and can't with the characters in Dubliners. (Dubliners, I should say, is one of the very few books which I think demonstrates art in prose, as opposed to craft, and which I would urge other people to read without feeling I was being an unjustified nuisance.) Orwell says something of the same in his essay on Dickens:

You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, Pierre Bezukhov. And this is not merely because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters that you can imagine yourself talking to - Bloom, for instance [...]

Just so, and this is down to the space that a novel affords, and to the terrific expansion in technique beyond the standard tropes of realism which Joyce made use of in Dubliners, the famous 'stream-of-consciousness' which has been very interesting to see at work.

The more Bloom is exposed, the more one sees of his various aspects (or inspects, as so much of what we read is internal mumblings, half-finished thoughts and reflections, flashes of desire and surges of memory), the more one appreciates him. Among other things, he is much more sympathetic than any of the Dubliners: kind, tolerant, humble, fallible - in fact, the complete opposite to his Homeric counterpart, who is cunning, proud, violent, resourceful, respected - a king, not an advertising canvasser - and of course fiercely protective of his wife's virtue, whereas Bloom is a cuckold perfectly aware and accepting of his position.

According to the introduction by Jeri Johnson in the OWC edition of Ulysses, Joyce saw that the ancient heroic attributes could not be applied to modern urban life, and sought to present an everyman heroic in his ordinariness, his life being lived internally rather than through action. It's an interesting notion, particularly in the light of a criticism by Gore Vidal:

Until the last century the mainline of imaginative literature had always been stories of the gods, heroes, kings of a people. From Aeschylus to Dante to Shakespeare to Tolstoi, what went on in the palaces or on Olympus provided the main line of narrative in verse, prose, drama. [What about The Beggar's Opera? Tom Jones? Simplicissimus? But perhaps these are stops on a branch line.] I think it a pity that, as a character in Saul Bellow's Herzog remarks, somewhere around 1840 the novel fell into the quotidian, to which Professor Herzog irritably asks, So where was it standing before it fell? The answer was in myth or history or whatever narrative is back of us.

[From the introduction to Creation.]

I'm not convinced by either argument, but I see the merits of both. It is of course Joyce's right to rework the ancient myths for modernity (and Modernism), but with considerable relief I'm going back to Richard III.

Changing tastes

2010-06-16T11:06:00.004+01:00

Recently got a text from a former colleague who is now also working furth of the book trade: a relief, she says, as she's rediscovered her enjoyment of books. Orwell experienced something similar:

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro.

I'm not sure that I ever had to lie about a book (this is one of Orwell's characteristic, too-strong assertions; time and again one admires the cadence and force of one of his sentences, and agrees with the bulk of the sentiment, while being unable to entirely submit to his fiat) but one does have to learn the market, recognise what certain types of people are likely to want to buy, and simply accept that one won't approve of an awful lot of it.

In my experience, even when I was asked for advice, people very rarely took it: instead, I would present them with no more than three options, often only two, and let them get on with it. You could actually see them making their decision in the first few moments, and even when they asked about the merits of Y over X, they would almost always go for their first choice. It was very, very rare for customers to actually listen to what you were saying. Perhaps I didn't lie often enough - or maybe I should have read Gladwell's Blink. Certainly it proved that the cover of a book is terribly important.

Anyway, since leaving bookselling I've had the opposite reaction to my friend: books no longer seem as vital as they once did. Partly it's because I am no longer in the daily swim of things, peripherally aware of even the dross which contributes to the front-of-store bricklaying, let alone the fruitful oddities of customer orders. I don't regard this with any particular sadness. It's a reflection of growing older, changing priorities, developing new perspectives, and in any case I've always been of the opinion that one should never forget that books are, in the final analysis, a handy source of fuel. What matters is the stories, which don't rely exclusively on print.

The process actually began prior to leaving, when Bastardstone's saw fit to introduce staff searches. No longer could you blithely bring in your two or five or twelve titles, proofs, sample chapters, library copies: everything had to be signed in, every day and - this was what drove me hog-wild with fury - had to be witnessed by other people. What in the name of fuck was this? Scotland in the 21st century, or the 17th? I could just about have tolerated the signing-in, on the grounds that if anyone had suspicions of jiggery-pokery, there would be some means of checking what one declared against what one possessed. But the introduction of the staff searches, the proofs becoming store property until being signed out, and the everyone-is-guilty-until-proven-innocent-before-the-kirk attitude killed off the last of my enjoyment. I stopped bringing books into work, and nearly stopped buying them.

Because I needed something to do on the bus I began listening to classical music again, after a nigh-on twenty-year hiatus, and so got back into Beethoven, discovered Mozart, Copland, Boccherini (through, yes, Master and Commander), and am making some progress with Schumann who, it turns out, was my maternal grandfather's favourite composer. I can recommend the following recordings in particular:

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20; Clifford Curzon with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britten

Beethoven Piano Sonatas 8, 14, 21; Wilhelm Kempff

These are very well known pieces, and recordings, to anyone who knows anything about classical music, but I pass them on with the unashamed enthusiasm which only an amateur or newbie can muster. The Kempff has some dropped notes here and there, but I understand that's almost inevitable unless you are Maurizio Pollini; both Curzon and Kempff seem to me display concentration but not overt seriousness, they're not showy but they don't let the music play itself either.

Finally, here's a link to a YouTube video of Vladimir Horowitz playing Schumann's Traumerei in Moscow in 1986. If I read it right, this was his first return to Russia in over sixty years. The reaction of the audience is fascinating.

A rounded education

2010-06-11T22:53:00.004+01:00

Throughout All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque has his narrator make various bitter comparisons between the academic subjects he and his classmates spent so much time and effort studying at school - little different from the ones I studied myself - and the knowledge and skills they've been forced to acquire as soldiers.

We remember mighty little of all that rubbish. Anyway, it has never been the slightest use to us. At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood - nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.

Something of the same sentiment is expressed in lines by Ezra Pound from the poem-sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (which I have not read - I came across them quoted in another book):

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilisation.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
At the quick eyes gone under earth's lid.

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books

and again, rather more convincingly to my mind, in the passage I've quoted before by Czeslaw Milosz, which begins

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless...

It should be pointed out that All Quiet... passes this test admirably, and provides an answer to the question it tacitly poses, 'What use is a liberal education?' Plenty, if the result is a novel like this.

But to return to education...perhaps we should side-step the dilemma by trying something like this, from Gore Vidal's Creation:

In my time, school life was strenuous. We were up before dawn. We were taught to use every kind of weapon. We were even taught farming and husbandry as well as mathematics and music. We learned to read and even to write, if necessary. We were taught how to build not only bridges and fortresses but palaces too. We were given only one meager meal a day.
By the time a Persian noble is twenty, there is very little he cannot do for himself if he has to.

Although the catering smacks of Orwell's memoir of school days, of the slab of suet used to break the boys' appetites, of Lamb's account of Christ's Hospital, of Dotheboys Hall. Assuming this reflects research and not invention on Vidal's part, the practice of educating children through partial starvation clearly has a long pedigree.

*

Some cheering news: Frederik Pohl, he of The Space Merchants, Gateway and Man Plus, is not only still alive (which I was surprised, impressed and oddly comforted to learn in 2008 when The Last Theorem was published, Arthur C. Clarke's last novel, for which Pohl was co-author) but he blogs. Pretty good it is, too - and it has got him a nomination for Best Fan Writer in the 2010 Hugos. I intend to read all of it.

E-reading

2010-06-10T23:33:00.007+01:00

I can think of three ways of reading a book.

The first is straight through, cover-to-cover, one page at a time, front to back, put it down - the way most novels are read. For that I reckon the iPad and similar devices are absolutely fine.

Second: reading only specific sections at a time, cross-referencing with other texts, using the index to find related subjects. Relevant to manuals, guides, technical documents, textbooks. For something like this, an e-text is almost certainly superior to a printed book - it weighs nothing; it has to be less intimidating than the thousand-page behemoths the students pick up at the beginning of term; you can hyperlink and add your own notes; updates and revisions can be uploaded (one hopes) easily; you can look up unknown terms or references; you can search the entire text almost at once.

Third: browsing, dipping in and out, relying on serendipity to give you what you need at any given time. This is the way I read a book of essays, a poetry collection (particularly an anthology), some reference books (the Oxford Companion to English Literature, the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, the Encyclopedia of SF, even for that matter an English dictionary) and, at present, Henry Kamen's European Society 1500-1700. Because I'm pretty slow to take in something from a history book I'll often need to flick back and forth to check a name or an event, or to re-establish a context, from several pages before or after; it takes several visits before the details of a passage are memorised. That is the weakness of an e-book - all it gives you at any point is, at most, two pages. A printed book is present in its entirety, and nothing an iPad can do is going to match the speed of simply riffling through the pages; nor can it give you the fruitful resonance, the chord-making which results from juxtaposing one passage with another; nor can it aid memory through the association made with the physical layout of the text on the page.

Writ large, the same holds true of the bookshelf. If you were to take all the books you own, chuck 'em out and replace them on an e-reader, no doubt the sense of liberation would be very welcome, and it'd be a weight off your floorboards, but you simply wouldn't have the pleasure of scanning the shelves at a glance and seeing something you'd forgotten, or taking something down at random.

I am emphatically not against the iPad. I'm in favour of anything which upholds and develops literacy, and by extension, a thinking and informed public. It's just that the technology, while it brings many very useful benefits, does not meet all the needs of the reader. In certain specific ways the printed book cannot be surpassed. Novel-readers and textbook-users will gain from the iPad, but I doubt very much that the same will hold true for browsers like myself.

Of course, prior to the invention of books, browsing couldn't exist; no doubt the iPad will lead to fascinating and rewarding new practices appropriate to the technology, just as the internet has given rise to blogging (itself impossible to define precisely in a paper-print context - not quite a diary, not quite an essay).

*

I'm glad to have come across this passage from a 2002 article by Malcolm Gladwell which neatly expresses what I've been trying to reach for above:

According to Sellen and Harper, paper has a unique set of "affordances" -- that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.)

(Hat-tip to blogger Brett at Branches and Rain for this.)

I'm even more heartened by Dr Johnson's comments, the only one of which I knew was the following:

Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. Johnson: “I have looked into it.” “What,” said Elphinston, “have you not read it through?” Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, “No, Sir, do you read books through?”

- and that from a quote on the cover of Schott's Miscellany. It turns out there are quite a few others from Johnson on the benefits of browsing, all of them worth reading, and they are helpfully collected at this post on blog Miscellenies. Ain't e-reading great?

And this too shall pass...

2010-06-08T14:12:00.008+01:00

Yes, I know all of this happened a while back. Yes, I've been out of touch. Yes, we'd be better off with these guys still around.

I went to an author event with Mailer in Glasgow when he was promoting The Gospel According to the Son in 1997. It was thoroughly enjoyable: he was funny, a professional performer, perfectly happy to engage with his audience, and really quite sweet...he was tiny and stout, a wee ball of an old man. He didn't have a lot of energy, it's true (as he carefully poured a glass of water he joked, "At my age everything become existential - you don't know if you're going to make it") but his voice was still good: he did superb impersonations of Truman Capote and Gore Vidal during a mock obituary of himself, written in the early '80s, which should have been printed alongside all the real ones. I'm glad I made a point of going.

Damning the Amazon

2010-06-08T12:02:00.004+01:00

It's a toss-up which would be easier: bring the river to a halt, or bring the world's most popular online retailer to its senses and make it behave with something approaching common decency. I'd heard of Amazon's use of union-busting tactics before now, and have tried to use publishers', authors', and independent booksellers' websites when linking to particular titles. However, I hadn't been evangelical about it until I found this on my Blogger dashboard:

Do you link to Amazon in your blog posts? Our Amazon Associates integration makes linking easier and can even earn you some money! Details here.

I'm leery of such propostitions anyway: who, I think, is using whom here? Is this an offer of payment, or a bribe? Am I being invited to do Amazon's work for them, pretty much for free? How easy is it to de-integrate if you decide to withdraw? (The penny first dropped twenty years ago when I read, in a portrait written by Harlan Ellison, that Steve McQueen would cut the little red tab off his Levi's. I did the same, wincing. The Levi's 501 is the only product I've ever consciously bought as a result of advertising - the coolest being the one with the Screamin' Jay Hawkins cover of a Tom Waits song. Waits sued, successfully.)

Well, I took a look at Amazon's record on unionisation, and it's not pretty. In 2001 the GMPU had a go at getting the 500 workers at Amazon's Milton Keynes warehouse to sign up; Amazon responded by (allegedly, our lawyers advise) improving terms and conditions while at the same time spreading black propaganda about the union; by constructive dismissal of organisers - sorry, agitators; and by arranging and simultaneously undermining a ballot of the workforce on union recognition. The tactics worked, the ballot failed and the GMPU was driven off, all under the appearance of consultation, democracy and corporate avuncularity on Amazon's part. The details can be found on the Guardian, The Register and on an article at the Word Power Books site.

Now I know this is all some time ago, and one could be forgiven for thinking, well, what's the point now? But no, no no no...just because this shmuck is coming late to this particular party dun't mean the party isn't still going on. One thing I know from bitter experience is that a corporate culture which is this malign doesn't just fade away with time: it's embedded, it permeates the structure, the practices and the souls of the people of work for the company - especially in management, and regardless of who goes and who stays. And so in a Sunday Times (hardly a firebrand publication of the hard left) report from late 2008, we find that the working practices and the attitude towards the workforce are...well, as you'd expect.

Of course, there was a total contradiction between what Amazon said and what they did in 2001, but I still can't help being shocked and enraged by it. I mean, treating your workers like shite is one thing - it's to be expected that employers will try that and get away with it whenever they can, and of course it is always unacceptable and should always be fought against - but bare-faced lying and manipulation is something which drives me to a fury beyond reason.

So from henceforth this will be an Amazon-free zone. Neither by link nor by reference nor by passing comment will they be acknowledged.

Yeah, that'll bring 'em to their knees...but what else can you do?

On bookselling

2010-06-07T12:44:00.001+01:00

From Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's by Brian Aldiss:

Those were years of revelation for me. Every day brought new discoveries. I fell into books in my eagerness to catch up on all those years lost in the sun [military service in Burma]. History, psychology, philosophy, biography, literature, art: the bookshop became my library. When Sanders promoted me to buyer of new books, I ordered from publishers whatever interested me. I believed that if I filled the shop with books I liked I would have no difficulty in selling them.

That is a pathetic fallacy (and who among us, who have worked in bookshops, has not fallen into it?) because, as Orwell recalls in 'Bookshop Memories' (published 1936):

...the thing that struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one.

Almost everything Orwell has to say in this essay is still relevant to bookselling today - though here his habitual pessimism and misanthropy seem to have failed him:

Also [bookselling] is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point.

It all depends, I suppose, which point you have in mind.

Big books

2010-03-15T01:37:00.006Z

Luath have recently published The Book That Changed My Life, a Scottish Book Trust project with contributions from the ubiquitous McCall Smith and Rankin, and the increasingly ubiquitous A.L. Kennedy and Brian Cox, plus a cast of, I think, 60-odd. It's one of those 'of-course' ideas: why hasn't someone done this before? Possibly someone has, but I don't recall ever coming across such a book in my years at Bastardstone's, and lit crit/essays was a section I kept a pretty close eye on.

I should really have proposed the idea myself, given that I compiled my own list of life-changing books some time ago, during one of my frequent mental recaps of what I've read; I've been meaning to post on it for ages and ageses. Here it is: four of 'em, caveat included: these are not necessarily the books which I would first recommend to other people: they simply made a huge impression at the time. In reverse order:

The Voice That Thunders by Alan Garner; at age 28.

"There are good writers, and there are great writers, and then there's Alan Garner."
- Catherine Lockerbie, introducing Garner at the 2004 Edinburgh Book Festival.

It seems odd now, but I can't recall any book with real grip in the four or five years prior to rediscovering Garner. I was certainly reading, and there were books I enjoyed, but none that seemed to me particularly important or resonant. (I read all of United States, and recognised its erudition, but didn't know enough to properly make sense of it.)

I came across The Voice That Thunders by accident. It belonged to my landlady, and I walked past it every day for the best part of a year before noticing or twigging that this was the same Alan Garner whose The Weirdstone of Brisingamen I'd enjoyed as a child, and piles of whose Elidor and The Owl Service lay on shelves at the back of room D in secondary school.

I can't adequately describe the relief, the sense of the door being opened, that I felt when I began reading this collection of essays and speeches by Garner. Here, finally, was...what? An extraordinary degree of intelligence, for a start, but not conveyed in a dry or academic or introverted or self-satisfied way: that was certainly part of it. He was speaking directly, intensely, with immediacy and dedication, and things in me were waking up which had either been laying dormant for far too long or had never been engaged in the first place. It was like being given a licence and the encouragement and the means to recommence my education; like being given one's head, a sensation I hadn't had since my A-levels. Pretty much everything I've read in the past ten years I have done so with the confidence that reading The Voice That Thunders gave me. I began to get aback of my own schooling. Garner's approach, his blend of the head and the heart seemed - and still seems - exactly right; his remarkable intellect, and the benefits of his classical and Oxford education, have been rigorously applied to his heimat of a corner of Cheshire where his family has lived for four hundred years, yet without compromising experience which is intuitively understood.

And what he uncovered! Myth and legend and craftsmanship and oral history and the numinous and psychoanalysis and inner time...it was a treasure chest. So many things I didn't know or knew very little about, but all presented in a way which made them not only relevant but essential. And, crucially, graspable. One didn't feel shut out - quite the reverse - one was pulled in. I was staying up nights to finish it, and yet trying to ration myself. I hadn't done that since:

The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison; age 18.

Which I really did read under the covers by night, with a torch, five entries per night. And again, it was the blend of the style and the substance which got me. Ellison is best known for screen/teleplays and short stories: the best of the former are, in my opinion, effective and good for their time, but not extraordinary; the short stories are, nine times out of ten, not good. (Then he goes and writes The Deathbird, or Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans, or "Repent, Harlequin!", which are of course brilliant and win prizes.) But he strikes his most consistent highs in essays, where his showmanship, his tremendous ability to tell an anecdote, his incandescent anger at what he perceives as stupidity and injustice, his humour and his skill as a writer all combine to excellent effect. He can make you laugh and curse and argue all at the same time, he can be frustrating but by God, he involves you. Some essayists will take your elbow, and others will invite you to be quiet and pay homage, and others will buttonhole you (Orwell), but Ellison will take you by the lapels and shake you. It's like being arrested by Popeye Doyle.

So much for the style. The substance of The Glass Teat is, nominally, television criticism. The pieces were written for the L.A. Free Press from 1968-70, and while they use the TV programmes of the day as a starting point, what they're really about is all the upheaval of those times in America: the anti-Vietnam protests, the counterculture, Nixon and Agnew and the forces of reaction, and the way TV itself both informs and stultifies - is used, in effect, as a pacifier: hence the title.

It was my first real introduction to the 1960s. We may now think ourselves over-informed about that decade, and therefore able to dismiss books like The Glass Teat as period pieces, but I think this is a real mistake. Oft-repeated TV footage does not constitute genuine knowledge: it's simply churnalism, reinforcing assumptions without provoking thought and reflection. (For more on this, see Ellison's essay The Song the Sixties Sang, which is in large part about how the '60s are misperceived and misrepresented - but of course, you can't, unless you have a copy of the Harlan Ellison Hornbook.) As Hanif Kureishi said, when people like Thatcher and Tebbit start banging on about how horrible the '60s were, you just know they must have been good. But even if it were the case that we know everything we need to know about the '60s, The Glass Teat would still be worth reading for its passion and commitment and righteous anger at the way those with power succeed in controlling and duping most of the public, and at how most of the public is lazy enough to let itself be duped and controlled.

The Lord of the Rings.

Which I received for my 12th birthday from my parents, per my request. Read it solidly for the first time over, I think, the next few months, and then again and again to a point close to obsession for the next two years. But, as Terry Pratchett says, if you don't think The Lord of the Rings is the greatest book ever written when you're 17, there's something wrong with you. (The corollary is that if you still think that when you're 35 - there's something wrong with you.)

The scale of the novel and the power of its narrative are well attested and, if not quite beyond question, beyond demolition. I won't comment on these aspects, other than to say that it's possible I've read novels which were just as involving, but none which were more involving, and certainly none which were so for such a length of time. What I will comment on is landscape: Tolkien is of course very taken up with it, and it's been noted (Pratchett again) that his landscapes have more character than his characters. The endless paragraphs of description drove my wife potty (she read it in her late 20s) but a 12 year-old has much more patience and will read through almost anything; anyway, for me, it worked beautifully. A kind of blurring or melding took place between the landscapes Tolkien was taking me through and the countryside of my own heimat on the south coast of the Moray Firth; I felt he was describing the hills and trees and moors and skies which I saw every day and, as a result, I felt I owned the book, that it belonged not just to my imagined but to my lived experience. (We'll leave aside the philosophical argument which can ensue from this.) If I think about the book not as a piece of literature or simply as a story but as a part of my own life, I cannot divorce it from a real place. The two are wedded; not blended, but tied.

It may be that this is one of the reasons I was disappointed by the films. Several times I heard people say, "It looked exactly how I imagined the book!", which led to gritted teeth and a held tongue on my part, and a reflection on not only how poor, but how generic, some people's imaginations must be; also, it proved once again how often, if you're going to do an adaptation, the pictures are better on radio.

As an aside, over-familiarity with the story and the text now means that I can't get anything more from reading the book, and this too worked against my enjoying the films. The bits which worked best were, on the whole, invented or augmented by the screenwriters. How much better it would have been to take a hammer to the whole edifice and to construct something tighter and more dramatic out of the pieces! Begin with Faramir's dream and the rivalry and resentment between him and his brother and father, for instance, and then follow Boromir and reveal the wonder and strangeness of Middle Earth through his discoveries. "Dreams and legends spring up out of the grass," says Eomer - but the problem with both book and films is that neither seem very wonderful to us, as they have been introduced as normal.

Winnie-the-Pooh. At age 5?

As I was given The House at Pooh Corner for my sixth birthday, I must have become familiar with Winnie-the-Pooh in the previous year at least, and was almost certainly reading it for myself. The first book I remember reading was Green Eggs and Ham; another was Wee Gillis, which informed much of my early impression of my own country (the family was at this time in Canada and I remembered nothing about Scotland). But it was Pooh who really first struck home. As with The Lord of the Rings, I didn't simply read these stories but lived through them. They were and are so totemic that when I opened one of the Pooh books out of curiosity just a few years ago, I quickly put it down after no more than a paragraph with a mild feeling of nausea, and a genuine quiver of fear. It was too close to home - like revisiting somewhere which should be left in memory. But then, I didn't really need to revisit the Pooh stories: they have been so thoroughly absorbed.

A strong part of the original experience was, once again, landscape. One tramps through the Hundred Aker Wood with Pooh and Piglet and climbs trees and discovers the North Pole (which is, brilliantly and perfectly, simply a very long walk away, further than one has ever been before - Milne's understanding of a child's perspective is absolute) and jumps in the sandy place with Roo. I'm convinced that the lucid reading one has as a child is down in part to the contribution one makes oneself to nuance and expression: the writing in the Pooh books is marvellously light and suggestive, and a child fixes his own invented detail to it quite naturally: one reads in as much as one reads out. Hence the feeling of ownership, I suppose.

A few years ago I was on a walk in Bowmont Forest in the Borders; coming to the southern edge of it, and a good view from the top of a rise, I thought of Galleons Lap. Which just goes to show.

My own children are now listening to the Pooh stories more or less happily, depending on mood, but the poems in When We Were Very Young, which are almost completely unknown to me, are a hit with all of us. It's wonderful to see the magic is still there in A. A. Milne's work.

Reports of early demise exaggerated

2009-12-03T12:11:00.005Z

Anyone who occasionally - regularly - God help you it should be obsessively - looks at anything I write here should please note the above. It's been a meat-grinder of a month or two. Yahweh allow it, things appear to be settling down a little.

In the meantime, please note that the location of the very fine WSER/Silver Eel Radio has shifted to 173.2.90.103:8000/listen.pls

I have bought a copy of Frederic Prokosch's The Asiatics on the advice of Ellison and Vidal but have not yet managed to get further east than Whitby. On the other hand, Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler is an effective wee thriller, his second novel, from 1937. There are no real surprises in it, but the moments of clunky writing are redeemed by others which are genuinely lyrical, and it all works and doesn't suffer from the sense of over-elaboration or artifice that I think undermines some of Ambler's other books: he just gets on with the story. Seemed to me it drew heavily on The 39 Steps, which in itself is no bad thing. What I find most intriguing is the degree to which it hasn't aged that much, either in literary technique and structure, or subject matter. Worth your time.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone...

2009-09-21T23:09:00.004+01:00

Clearing out my mailbox I noticed a week-old newsflash from The Bookseller on the forthcoming demise of Chambers, properly Chambers Harrap, and owned by Hachette since 1992. Basically the internet has kicked the feet out from underneath reference publishing and Hachette are cutting their losses. It's deeply ironic that Chambers' fortunes were made on providing cheap, accurate and accessible information to the masses; from Chambers' website:

Education, and making information available to as many people as possible, were always priorities for William and Robert. In 1832 they began to publish The Chambers's Journal. This was a weekly, 16-page journal containing articles - many of them written by Robert - on subjects such as history, religion, language and science. It was an immediate success; within a few years the weekly circulation had risen to 84 000 copies, and it put an end to their struggle to survive although they still had to work hard.

The Chambers's Journal was followed in 1834 by Chambers's Information for the People. This was a series of sheets on subjects such as science, maths, history, geography and literature, bound in sets. Eventually around 170 000 sets were sold, amounting to over 2 million individual sheets. This publication also saw some success abroad; a US edition was published, and it was translated into French (under the title Information pour le peuple) and - more surprisingly perhaps - into Welsh.

These publications were followed by an educational course, an encyclopedia and, in 1872, the Chambers Dictionary.

I must admit to not having supported Chambers on one occasion when I was a bookseller: I seem to recall the rep coming in and my deciding not to go for one of the larger Chambers titles. This was almost certainly based on sales figures, though undoubtedly if we'd been stocking the Chambers and Bloomsbury dictionaries at the same level as we did Collins and Oxford, they'd have been a good deal better. Well, I regret it now.

On the other hand, I always had the feeling that Chambers was a bit fusty, a bit old-fashioned, or (to be brutal) past it - though this was a superficial impression and I never made a detailed comparison between the actual content of a Chambers dictionary and that of its competitors. (I did compare the other three around 2003 and liked the Bloomsbury best on grounds of writing and layout.) While this may seem groundless, as a retailer I think you do get to have sense for books and publishers just as you do for people, and I wonder, given this wholly regrettable news, if there wasn't something in that. (See below.) Should Chambers not have been better prepared to weather the internet? Is it really altogether a case of asset-stripping by a big corporation? - though I never under-rate big corporations' innate capacity for greed and mendacity.

There's an interesting synchronicity between the content of Chambers' latest blog post, which refers to the practice of 'churnalism' - the replication of the text of a news item in multiple publications without any attempt on the part of hacks to reshape, expand or develop it - and an example of same in the reporting of the Chambers story: if you look at the pieces in the Scotsman, Herald, Bookseller and BBC you'll see they are almost exactly the same. Who wrote the original? Presumably it came from an agency.

In fact the timing of the blog post is so fitting that I can't imagine it isn't a subtle dig on the part of the poster, though I imagine it will be lost on the bean-counters at Hachette.

*

An earlier post comments on the redundant repetition of the the last word of an acronym, as in my pet hate, 'ISBN number'. On hearing it used, I regularly had to prevent myself from emitting a Morse-like snarl against the offender and pointing out that one does not speak of the CIA agency or the FBI bureau.

*

A more directly personal effect is that that's going to be 27 more book people out of a job - which of course I do not welcome in a general sense - and all applying for the same kind of positions as me. While I do have a job at the moment it's not going to last for much longer, and I dread being back on the dole. This is yet another reason why little of my online time is currently spent socialising, chasing intriguing literary-oriented stuff, or blogging - all of which I'd much rather be doing.

*

On YouTube, Orson Welles on cold reading: at around 2:00 he begins to explain how it is that one's surface impressions become more than that.

*

Seen on the wall of a library recently:

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
- Jo Godwin

Which in my sometime experience ought to carry underneath it the sign:

Library staff will be happy to help.

*

Recently read and recommended: Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios; Harlan Ellison, Spider Kiss. Not recommended: Ian McEwan, The Innocent; Eric Ambler, Journey into Fear; Honore de Balzac, The Vendetta. Not sure: G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday.

Put your lips together and blow

2009-08-18T18:11:00.004+01:00

From Chapter 7, ' Putting Sounds on the Road', of A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess:

Another trick of utterance is not in the service of entertainment but concerned with serious communication. I refer to the whistled languages in use among the Mazateco Indians of Oaxaca in Mexico, the peasants of La Gomera (one of the Canary Islands) and certain Turks. [...]
[Whistling] is conceivably a medium of communication older than speech, and it relates man to birds, otters and guinea pigs. Taboos are attached to it. 'A whistling woman, a crowing hen/ Whistled the devil out of his den.' Witches whistle (thrice), also whores. [...]
In 1891 R. Verneau published a book called Cinq Ans aux Iles Canaries. He described how the peasants of La Gomera whistled at each other across the deep valleys or barrancos that cross the island radially.

The Wikipedia article on whistled language notes, as does Burgess, that this is far easier when the reference language (should that be referent?) is tonal.

*

Burgess's suggestion that whistling is an older form of communication than speech made me think of a story in which a man is perpetually plagued by a whistling which only he can hear, and which turns out to be form of communication. Questions: what message is the whistling imparting, and what sin has he committed to be so haunted? One can imagine a half-comic moment in which a child's guinea-pig whistles from its cage and he starts back in horror.

*

'I know all that, my angry little weasel,' the barbarian replied, tugging the Mouser back. 'And the idea of Fissif escaping displeases me. but putting my bare neck in a trap displeases me more. Remember, they whistled.'
'Tcha! They always whistle. They like to be mysterious. I know these thieves, Fafhrd. I know them well. And you yourself have twice entered Thieves' House and escaped. Come on!'

From the story 'Thieves' House' by Fritz Leiber.

*

Not quite at Disraeli's level ('Many thanks for your book: I shall lose no time in reading it'), but impressive nonetheless, an Evening Standard blurb on the cover of Lipstick Jungle:

Candace Bushnell is some sort of genius.

Supply your own adjective.

Eric Ambler - The Levanter

2009-07-11T13:45:00.002+01:00

Coming rather late to the online debate about Eric Ambler (see blog reviews here and here, and lengthy Guardian piece), I've just finished after some effort The Levanter, one of his later (1972) novels. Ambler is mainly known - to the extent he's known at all - for being a thriller writer of the '30s. I haven't read any of those, although Penguin Modern Classics have recently republished five of his novels to celebrate his centenary.

I first came across him thanks to a second-hand copy of The Intercom Conspiracy, which I bought about ten years ago and finally read about five years later: found it very good. The setting is Geneva; the protagonist is a hack who edits a specialist magazine which has no staff and is read by almost no-one, and then he begins to receive information, for publication, from sources about whom he's far from sure. Naturally this sparks the interest of other parties...I'm sure you can see how it goes from there. Apparently this trope of regular guy becomes piggy-in-the-middle for shadowy business and security organisations is a standard one for Ambler: certainly The Levanter follows that pattern.

What I admired about it was how thoroughly realistic it seemed. I'd worked in Brussels for an NGO (counting the commercial ones, there were estimated to be around ten thousand lobbying organisations in Brussels) and I was familiar with the milieu Ambler was describing of a city soaked in international politics, and of small publications and groups all trying to report on and influence decisions affecting their specialist field. The way that everything which appeared to be normal was slowly becoming subverted, undermined and threatened I found completely credible.

The Levanter, on the other hand, gave me problems. It has the same virtue of being a 'flat tire' thriller - while there is a plot, one doesn't feel that everything which takes place in the book is geared to driving it forwards. One feels that there is plenty of real life beyond the bounds of what is described and related, and that one could have an extended conversation with the protagonist about what happened, about all the things which are not told. No clunking of machinery here. That's no small achievement.

On the other hand, it could have done with another edit. It seems to take a long time to get to the meat of the story, as if Ambler was discovering the background as he wrote the first draft, and while this leaves the reader with a thorough grounding in Middle Eastern politics, business practices in the Levant and the character of the levanter himself, Michael Powell, there's simply too much of it. The realism weighs down the thrills. It pays off in the end, but as they sometimes say on Friday afternoons on fivelive, there's an awful lot of Shawshank before you get to the redemption. Granted, most of the story is told by Powell and he's a businessman and an engineer, as Ambler himself was, but...less, Larry. Less.

Here's an example:

Something had to be done quickly. The Howell reputation was at stake, and my own self-confidence had taken a beating. After an exceedingly unpleasant session with Hawa, I secured his agreement to my withdrawing all unsold stocks from the dealers. I also stopped production and did the quality-control research that I neglected to do before we started. Most of this work concerned the zinc containers. These were formed on jigs and had soldered seams. Obviously, faulty soldering would cause leaks, but the chief problem was with chemical impurities. For example, zinc sheeting of a quality that could be used for covering a roof would not necessarily do for battery production.

Etcetera, etcetera. There are people who lap up this kind of stuff - in fact Anthony Lane has said the reason it exists is to keep Americans of a Puritanical streak from feeling that they're wasting their time with frivolities like novels. (He quotes an instance of the narrative of one particular novel being interrupted thus: '[...] covering everything within a hundred feet (33 metres)') It has been done since, and better, in Smilla's Feeling for Snow, in which one learns quite a lot about ice floes and obscure jazz performances and diving and the techniques of spinal injection, although by the third or fourth time it would be nice to come across someone in the book who isn't a bloody expert on somedamnthing or other.

The other issue I have with The Levanter is foreshadowing statements, portents, warnings that things ain't gonna work out as they should. The only novel I've come across which uses them to the same extent and to an equal degree of teeth-grinding annoyance is The Book of the New Sun, which is incapable of closing a chapter without a gnomic utterance along the lines of, 'Of course, I was to break this, as well as many other confidences which had been entrusted me, in my time.'

Howell's part of the narrative opens:

On the fourteenth of May I was in Italy, and I wish to God I had stayed there.

Even an airport strike - if it had delayed me for twenty-four hours or so - would have helped. At least my ignorance would have been preserved a little longer. With luck I might even have escaped direct involvement. But no. I went back on the fifteenth and walked straight into trouble.

Which is not a bad opening, but I'm of the get-on-with-it school, and it irritates me. He's still at it in the penultimate chapter:

I had spent a long time thinking over what I was going to tell Captain Touzani and had rehearsed it carefully. Although I never supposed that he would swallow the story whole - that would have been too much - I had hoped that he would find it politic to pretend to do so. So I did my best to make it easy for him.

It was wasted effort.

And:

I should have worried more about that walkie-talkie, seen the danger it really represented and so been better prepared to counter it.

All of this may be true to character - and you do get a strong sense of Michael Howell as worldly-wise, shrewd, equivocal, wanting to control every last detail - but it has the effect of yanking you back just at the time you want to be moving forward. My wife read the book before I did, and I asked her how she found it; she replied that she found it irritating to read but you still wanted to find out what happened in the end, and that's it in a nutshell.

It still won the Gold Dagger, but I couldn't recommend it wholeheartedly unless you're on a serious Ambler streak, are a thriller devotee who wants something a little bit different, or a businessman in search of a decent read, in which case all the technical stuff is unlikely to slow you down as it did me.

Praiser of things present

2009-06-12T11:09:00.003+01:00

I like this post from Michael Gilleland very much, although I feel something of a hypocrite in recommending it. Being job-free (for the present) is not unlike feeling oneself popping back into one's natural shape, like Tom moments after he's been flattened by a dustbin lid or an ironing board.

The King's up against it

2009-06-08T11:21:00.004+01:00

"He can't fight with a crossbow hand-to-hand, son. A crossbow's a range weapon, not a melee weapon. Get him a sword."

This is not the language in which one should talk to four year-olds, but it seems to be coming out of my mouth anyway. Once a gamer, always a gamer. Break out the d20. *Sigh*

God save me from my friends

2009-06-06T09:37:00.002+01:00

David Langford, winner of multiple Hugo awards for his fiction and fan/critical/review writing, is being interviewed by a local television station during an SF convention. He is being asked about the geeky/unwashed/weird/social-misfit thing, or about poor writing or silly covers or unpronounceable names. And he goes on to give a reasoned and articulate defence of science fiction, pointing to the fine writing of Le Guin and Leiber and Ellison and Aldiss and Ballard, the classics like 1984 and Brave New World and We which the gatekeepers won't acknowledge as SF, the way SF reflects the contemporary concerns of modern society and is the only branch of fiction really to get to grips with technology as the defining force of the 20th century. He points to the number of scientists now working in their field because of the inspiration they got from people like Asimov and Clarke and Pohl. And he is beginning to wind up by saying, with a slight chuckle, "I mean, you mustn't assume that we're all - "

- and at that exact moment, someone wearing a Darth Vader mask walks behind him, repeatedly pulling the trigger of one of those guns that fires ping-pong balls and shouting "Kill! Kill! Kill!"

At which point the interviewer, and the audience, assume that we are indeed all.

(With apologies to the original teller of this anecdote in Interzone.)

Bastardstone's part deux

2009-06-05T10:21:00.003+01:00

Something about an earlier post was bugging me so I've cut it back. Whereof one cannot speak without foaming at the mouth, therefore one must be silent. Anyone who hasn't been shouted at recently is welcome to email me on the subject. Earplugs will not be supplied.

Who?

2009-06-05T01:27:00.002+01:00

In defence of anonymity...

When I began this blog, or its predecessor, in 2005, it was as little more than a response to Joe's occasional pestering encouragement. I had no idea what blogs were and didn't really see the point in trying to write one, particularly as I didn't think that my opinion really counted for much.

Four - good grief - four years on, and I get the blogging thing, and I still just about manage to write one; I do so mainly to pass on something which I think is intriguing or entertaining to whoever might pass by, or to try to figure out what I think. In other words, for the usual reasons people write, in whatever medium.

I still don't think my opinion is worth much. That's my, my opinion, the person writing this. I really don't matter to anyone who doesn't know and care about me, and I don't want to. My life is my own, and small though it is, it ain't really any of anyone else's business. But the argument, the case, the choice of words, I believe matter a great deal, and they stand and fall on their own merits.

It's a question of the voice being important, not the speaker, and in a curious and intriguing way I find the voice of 'The Silver Eel' (the blog) has taken on a life of its own. If this seems like an abdication of responsibility I can only reply that I don't think it is. The (rather thin) anonymity puts the reader's and writer's focus on what is written, and therefore encourages a greater responsibility, a greater loyalty, to the text.

Medieval copyists left their work unsigned - they worked for the glory of God. Ideally, so should writers - no names, no covers, just works.

Of course, the above could all be horseshit; I have a rotten cold which is keeping me from sleeping, and possibly from thinking very clearly as well.

Alexander the Greedy

2009-06-03T22:42:00.003+01:00

Some years after having bought it, I am reading Michael Wood's In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great. I saw at least one episode of the TV series during its original run in 1997, and remember enjoying it. The book seems to have been worked up from Wood's TV notes; as travelogue it's pretty thin, but it seems a good introduction to the story and I'm happily eating it up. I am curious as to how Alexander beat the Persians three times - at the battles of Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela - with what to my untrained eye appears to have been exactly the same strategy: attack the right flank at its weakest point and then veer left into the body of the Persian forces. You'd have thought they'd get wise to it.

Free as a bird, poor as a mouse(r)

2009-06-02T23:16:00.005+01:00

It is no great revelation to say that I was, until very recently, working for Bastardstone's, which was one of the reasons I blog anonymously and the secondary reason I didn't blog about work stuff - the main reason being that, actually, it warn't all that interesting. I prefer to focus on the things that sustain rather than those that sap.

However, in the light of my redundancy, along with a whole lot of other booksellers across the country, I am at least now free to say this:

[The body of this post has been editorially eviscerated due to excess venting of spleen. Vitriol of this kind will not be permitted. Fluffy bunny stuff like the following paragraph is okay - Ed. 05/06/09]

I enjoyed working with the books, and with a lot of the staff, and actually got to enjoy working with the customers a lot of the time as well - there's a simple but fundamental pleasure to be had from helping people.

But it's pretty clear now that the gargoyles have not only taken over the cathedral but have started pissing on the congregation and defacing the stonework. [Guess I missed this bit. Ed.]

In fairness to Bastardstone's, they are still trading where Ottokar's and Thin's aren't. But I can't help thinking of Mother Courage.

*

One of the good things about working from home (and anyone who thinks looking for work isn't work in itself has either never done it, or isn't doing it hard enough) is that I've been listening to a lot more of WSER. It's bloody good.

Simple trumps subtle part deux

2009-04-23T23:36:00.003+01:00

From Conversations with Isaiah Berlin:

Of course, I think that professional philosophers are needed because if they are any good they do clarify ideas; they analyse words and concepts and the ordinary terms in which you and I think, and this makes a great deal of difference to the progress of thought. Perhaps freedom from thought would make us happier, but it is not attainable. Still, it is the basic difference between human beings and animals. Let me tell you a story which is merely an anecdote. The late Harold Macmillan told me that when he was a student at Oxford, before the First World War, he went to the lectures of a philosopher called J.A. Smith, a Hegelian metaphysician. In his first lecture to his audience of students, this professor spoke as follows: "All of you, gentlemen, will have different careers - some of you will be lawyers, some of you will be soldiers, some will be doctors or engineers, some will be government servants, some will be landowners or politicians. Let me tell you at once that nothing I say during these lectures will be of the slightest use to you in any of the fields in which you will attempt to exercise your skills. But one thing I can promise you: if you continue with this course of lectures to the end, you will always be able to know when men are talking rot." There is some validity in that remark. One of the effects of philosophy, if it is properly taught, is ability to see through political rhetoric, bad arguments, deception, fumisme, verbal fog, emotional blackmail and every kindof chicanery and disguise. It can sharpen the critical faculty a very great deal.

Now to follow, here's a story told to me by a colleague. The scene is an Edinburgh pub. Colleague and a friend of his are sitting at a table with the friend's father, a retired miner from Fife. They get talking to a couple of men at the next table who, it turns out, are Americans on vacation, and the conversation goes something like this:

Ex-miner: So what d'ye dae then?
Yank: We're philosophers.
Ex-miner: Oh, aye. Aye. [Pause] So...what is it ye dae?
Yank: We're philosophers. We study philosophy.
Ex-miner: Oh, right, right. [Pause] But what d'ye dae?
Yank: Well, we think about things, about some of the big questions in life.
Ex-miner: Oh aye. What like?
Yank: Well, like the difference between right and wrong.
Ex-miner: [after considering this] How old are you, son?
Yank: Thirty-two.
Ex-miner: So, tell me...you're thirty-two...and ye dinnae ken the difference between right and wrong?

I thank you.

*

Restored after much shameful delay, a link to WSER Silver Eel Radio, created and presented for your delight by the similarly Leiber-loyal mrdeadbob.

*

Saw the film version of Christ Stopped at Eboli, directed by Francesco Rosi. Sadly, however noble the film-makers' aims, and however accurately the film itself reflects the book, it'll mean nothing to you if you haven't actually read the book first, as so much of the drama is internal. The memoir is basically about stasis: unsurprisingly, this doesn't translate very well to film.

Modern myth-making

2009-03-25T21:51:00.007Z

From the introduction by Declan Kiberd to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses:

The human need to make myths is very deep-rooted, since myths are symbolic projections of the cultural and moral values of a society, figurings of its psychic state. The French Revolution, which purported to put an end to all myth-making, instituted the myth of modernity, the notion of perpetual renewal which animated spirits as diverse as those of Ezra Pound ('make it new') and Leon Trotsky ('permanent revolution').

Standing on the verge of modernity in 1800, Schlegel [...] foretold the emergence of a new mythology, which would be less a radical act of creation than a 'collaboration' between old and new. Ancient myths embodied people's immediate response to their physical experience and were not seen as fictive by their adherents; but the new mythology would be abstract and aware of its own fictive status.

There is much more in Prof Kiberd's introduction which I find both interesting and useful (and some which I find simply baffling), but this part struck me as an excellent description of Alan Garner's work in Strandloper and Thursbitch. Strandloper even has what seems to me to be a self-referential line where one of the characters foretells the writing of the book, with an oblique nod to Garner himself.

*

I don't feel the reading of Ulysses is going too badly - seven chapters out of the way, though that only comes to about 150 pages. The more I read of it, and around it, the more I think I'm getting out of it; nevertheless, it feels less that one is reading it, more that one has engaged with it - or that it's moved in. I feel a little like Deep Thought - irrevocably committed to thinking about the ultimate question and unable to deal with anything else until the answer's been found. I am certainly finding that it changes the way you think and perceive, though I'm not sure I can articulate in what way. A Joycean way, I suppose. Whatever else, it's certainly an excellent whetting stone for the faculties - I'm reading Bleak House for light relief and finding that an absolute doddle by comparison.

Admittedly Martin Amis poses a good question - who on earth reads Ulysses? Not researches it, studies it, consults it - who actually curls up with it in bed?

*

Ulysses came top of the 1998 Random House Modern Library board's list for the 100 best novels published since 1900. A little pointy-headed, you might say, and I'd agree, but still preferable to the readers' choice of Atlas Shrugged. And if that gars ye grue, the non-fiction list is positively frightening. That's your argument in defence of pointy-heads and gatekeepers right there.

Room at the Bottom

2009-03-04T22:34:00.002Z

We all know the joys of degradation. Perhaps I should rephrase that: We must all have lived through times when we discover it was pleasurable, even relaxing, to run ourselves down. […] Then we find ourselves in a place where we can wallow blissfully in our existence, our smell, our filth, our habits, the place where we can abandon all hope of self-improvement and stop trying to nurture optimistic thoughts about other human beings. This resting place is so comfortable that we cannot help feeling grateful for the anger and selfishness that has brought us to this moment of freedom and solitude.

From Chapter 36, ‘Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: the Joys of Degradation’, in Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk:

A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. A power, akin to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought his steps to rest. He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of the morgue and from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He saw the word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank heavy air.
- That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

From Chapter 2 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Simple trumps subtle

2009-02-23T23:37:00.002Z

From Philippe Sands' review of The Liberal Defence of Murder in the Guardian Review section, Saturday:

Who can say, after all, the real reason that President Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, or what truly motivated a particular individual to lend support.

From Generation Kill, p. 241:

[US Marine Sgt. Antonio] Espera believes the whole war is being fought for the same reason all others have for the past several hundred years. "White man's gotta rule the world," he says.

Gee, Philippe, how hard can it be?

Imagination leads, reality follows

2009-02-13T21:52:00.002Z

On page 119 of Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, we learn that according to Stanford archaeologist William Rathje's Garbage Project, contrary to what we might think, plastic accounts for less than 20% of buried waste by volume. The bulk of what is in landfills is construction debris and paper products. Newpapers, for example, don't biodegrade when hidden away from air and water. Researchers pull perfectly readable newspapers out of 1930s landfills. "They'll be down there for the next 10,000 years" says Rathje.

Now hear this:

Story-telling has its own kind of law and order, which can be in conflict with the emotional order of the storyteller. The tragedy of compulsive writers and bad authors is that they often put everything they have into their work but the work itself bears no trace of this. Writing was, after all, rather more complicated than it first seemed to me. This is fortunate. If it were not so, the world would have many more writers than it does today, and would drown in an avalanche of printed paper. Which may well be one of the ends that awaits it.

From 'How I Began', in the collection The Spirit of Prague by Ivan Klima.

The Spirit of Prague is rather mournful in tone - hardly surprising considering its author's life and times - and has a touch of "I told you so" towards its end, but it contains an awful lot which is inspiring, instructive and elegantly argued - and at 6.99 it's positively a steal.

However, the phrase "compulsive writers" strikes me as either ill-chosen or ill-translated. It's clear what Klima means, but anyone who writes does so out of compulsion - or delusion - be their output mean or profound.

Shakespeare Satori

2009-02-11T22:18:00.005Z

The most intensive period of study in my life - so far - was for my A-Levels. For English Literature I suppose we studied about 6-8 key texts, one of which was Hamlet, so the damn thing is in there for good. From time to time I find myself thinking about it or drawing on it, and today it came to me that Hamlet's very last line, "The rest is silence", which can be taken to mean that Hamlet is saying, 'here is the end of my life and there is nothing more to be said - everything has been acted out - make of it what you will', can be heard as "Th' arrest is silence"; in other words, death is the end of speech.

This obviously resonates with the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, and it struck me that although Hamlet is a play very much taken up with and informed by ideas of death, most of what Hamlet does is talk, an activity solely the preserve of the living. At the end of the play, when he's confronted with the actuality of what he's so far considered exclusively in theory, he finds, ironically, there is nothing to say.

I've always had a problem, as I suppose many people have, with Hamlet's inactivity. Four or four-and-a-half acts of doing bugger-all, and then he finally gets it together. Laertes, by contrast, learns of his father's death and immediately sets out with sword in hand. But the whole revenge and retribution thing is really only what George Saunders calls the Apparent Narrative Device, and what he calls the dirt, the thing the writer loves to do and which the reader only gradually realises is the thing that s/he actually came for, is this exploration of Hamlet's character; this growing-to-awareness is actually what the play's about.

If this seems obvious to the point of scarcely worth mentioning, I can only apologise and cop to being a bear of little brain, but it did solve for me a problem I've had for twenty years. I may have been able to articulate the above argument before now, and for all I know I have done, but I think this is the first time I've had a solid gut feeling about it.

I doubt if I'd have come to it if it hadn't been for reading Sara Paretsky's Writing in an Age of Silence, wherein she says something along the lines of, we write because not to do so is to give in to death, and to those who would control our lives through our silence. (I paraphrase greatly.)

Incidently, if you haven't read Saunder's essay on Huckleberry Finn in The Brain-Dead Megaphone, I commend it highly. I admit to not having read any of the rest of the book, so can't say what it's like overall.

*

Having read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man last year, and holding firmly onto Uncle Anthony's hand, I have begun Ulysses. On the advice of Marvin Exobrain, I started at Chapter 4, the Calypso episode, and have so far managed two and a half chapters. So far, it doesn't strike me as being beyond the capacity of the average reader, but by God you have to apply yourself to it, with full attention; also, I am gently tending toward the opinion of those who believe that Dubliners marked the high point of Joyce's achievement, with each subsequent book being more self-regarding and reader-unfriendly. I don't, so far, see anything which Joyce didn't tell us about ordinary lives in Dubliners, the advance (if one can call it that) being in technique. But I admit this is very early days and I am perfectly willing to be convinced otherwise.

*

I first came across Joyce in a conversation being held (appropriately enough) in the toilets of the student theatre during my first year at university: I remember the name Stephen Daedalus being knocked back and forth, and someone saying that Joyce believed (or possibly that Joyce demonstrated) there was no such thing as a boring person, someone whose life wasn't worth examining. It was a pocket-sized idea which I carried away, though most of the discussion was completely lost on me, and eighteen years later, reading Dubliners, it seemed to me to be entirely justified.

Female Agents/Carve Her Name With Pride

2009-02-04T01:27:00.006Z

[This is a review I wrote back in August for laurahird.com. Unfortunately there was a delay in the latest online issue being published (it's just out now) and due to time constraints Laura decided to drop some of the film material.]

Female Agents is inspired - mark you - by a Times obituary spotted by director Jean-Paul Salomé in 2004. It celebrated the life and achievements of Lise Villameur, one of the few women Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents to have been honoured after the end of the war. “I wanted to pay them homage,” Salomé is quoted as saying. Now this counts as fair warning, twice over.

In the film Villameur is characterised as Louise Desfontaines, played by Sophie Marceau. With her brother, also an SOE agent, she is charged with assembling a crack team for a special mission. It is 1944: an English spy, a geologist who was gathering material vital to the success of D-Day, has been wounded and captured. The Germans holding him don’t know who he is or understand his importance – yet. He must be sprung. Desfontaines recruits two more servicewomen and a prostitute under a death-sentence for murder, none of whom has operational experience.

Cut to France: a rather dashing SS Intelligence Colonel believes, alone among his comrades, that the forthcoming Allied invasion will not be made at Calais but in Normandy. He needs proof, and knows the English geologist is there, somewhere...a report comes in of an unidentified man in a military hospital speaking English in his sleep, and the Colonel sets off to interrogate him. We should pause to note that one of the women in Desfontaines’ team left the Colonel standing at the altar two years ago in Paris.

Though the set-up is as ludicrous as the summary above suggests, there’s no reason to suppose, at this point, that Female Agents won’t at least entertain. Most of the film is taken up with the female agents’ increasingly frantic attempts to prevent Colonel Heindrich (yes) from reaching Rommel with the information he is gradually piecing together about D-Day, but the progression from one set-piece to another seldom generates any real tension or gives a clear sense of where, beyond resolving this McGuffin, the focus of the film lies. It looks, frankly, superb, but what appears on the screen far outweighs anything that happens there.

The incidental failings are numerous: a note which was begging to be burned, eaten or simply flung out of a window the moment it was written is left intact; the Gestapo torturers are surprisingly ineffective apart from the one time when the plot requires them not to be; four times a drawn pistol serves to remind backsliders of where their patriotic duty lies (none attempts to run at the next opportunity); the runaway bride, who freaks out at the suggestion of even seeing Colonel Heindrich again, is shortly afterwards attempting to date and kill him. When and how was she talked round? We don’t know.

Though the content is adult, the emotions are adolescent, save for those generated in a very few scenes by Marceau. Her character is determined to the point of being icy, and when her control breaks in moments of terror, fatigue or rage, she suggests what Female Agents could and should have provided: an understanding of what it must have been like to be squeezed between terrible necessities, and of the sacrifices people were prepared to make, voluntarily, without coercion and in full understanding of the circumstances and the stakes. Individual moral compromise is splashed all over, but that is not the same thing.

No such problem with Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), and no loop-holes of “inspiration”: we are told at the beginning that this is the story of Violette Szabo, and story – as opposed to spectacle - is what we get. London girl seeks French boy for the 14th July celebrations to appease her French mother; girl finds boy, a charming officer of the Foreign Legion. Will they...? Of course. This is straightforward, but pleasantly and effectively done, and provides the emotional background for what follows: recruitment by SOE, training and active service. It is clear that Szabo is fighting for home, liberty, honour, memory.

Curiously, while Carve Her Name is strong in all the areas where Female Agents is deficient (namely, character motivation, background and development; emotional involvement; a strong story arc) the film is so concerned to tell us who Szabo was that it doesn’t tell us much about what she did. Whatever else is said about them, the Female Agents do get up to a lot, though most of it closer to the A-Team than the reality of creating and organising networks, acting as couriers and collecting intelligence. Carve Her Name suggests all of this but never really explores it. More information, or simply screen time, would have been welcome. For instance, Szabo was in France for three months before her famous engagement with the Germans; in the film she has barely parachuted in. Similarly, we see her receiving codes and cyphers training, but she never actually sends a message. Barring its end, it seems an oddly inactive service and makes the story thin where it should be meaty.

Nevertheless, it is certainly a finished film in a way Female Agents isn’t. Virginia McKenna is proper and winning, with the early hints of strength shown to harden as her training progresses; the acting from the other leads, who include Paul Scofield, is good and often very good; the supporting characters support without need of formal introduction; the lighting is wonderful, especially in the interrogation sequence, craftily and movingly handled by image, suggestion and reaction; and the king-and-country coda is genuinely touching. The script does its job without really taking flight, which makes it overall a solid three- or four-star film, worth seeing without being essential.

On the other hand, if someone suggests watching Female Agents on DVD, resist.

*

Female Agents wasn’t helped by its English title, which in French was Les Femmes de l’Ombre (Women of the Shadows). This is clearly playing off L’Armée des Ombres (1969) by Jean-Pierre Melville, a flat, unglamorous portrayal of the French Resistance, much closer to the reality, filmed with a genuine artistic sensibility and now available on DVD.

Books: Carve Her Name With Pride by R.J. Minney continues to be in print; the latest (2006) edition is from Pen and Sword, price £8.99. A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE by Sarah Helm is published in paperback by Abacus (2006), price £8.99; Atkins ran the women agents of 'F' Section in SOE and appears frequently in Carve Her Name With Pride. Leo Marks, who also appears unnamed in the film, eventually had his memoir Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-45 approved for publication by the UK government in 1998 (latest edition Sutton, 2007, £8.99). He was the actual author of the poem “The Life That I Have”, which features in the film.

Old Rope Heated Over

2009-01-27T00:19:00.004Z

Skimming and dipping, I came across the following:

the impression one has of his personality is that of a reserved and unsociable man, self-absorbed and, for no apparent reason, unhappy.

The writer of this, um, material is Javier Marias, from his book Written Lives, and the writer he's talking about is Rudyard Kipling. That's Kipling who lost his daughter aged 6, and lost his son aged, oh, I don't know, 17 or 18, and who was almost certainly blighted his whole life by the legacy of his thoroughly miserable childhood exile in England (see the autobiographical story 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', one of his most powerful and affecting). I understand Marias is trying to be playful and irreverent and mischievous, but unless he's also being ironic beyond my capacity to perceive, this is not only untrue and unfunny, it's simply pointless. Moreover, what writer isn't self-absorbed?

Initially I wasn't sure I wasn't missing something, so I took a look at the chapter on RLS. Several pages on how much of a cow Fanny (his wife) was. Oh God, we're not back to this, surely? Contemporaries and biographers have wondered long and loudly what Louis was doing with this apparently charmless creature, and the only possible response can be drawn from one of the early Stevenson essays on falling in love: the state and circumstances which draw two people together are often incomprehensible to observers, even as they absorb the actors, and that's just the way of it. Stevenson crossed the Atlantic and the whole of America to get to Fanny, with little money, no certainty regarding his reception and in pretty poor health. That, surely, says enough.

*

I was interested to see that Virginia Woolf thought Kipling belonged quite comfortably in a list of "great writers" with the likes of Defoe, Austen, Hardy and Trollope. Today he seems almost on the margins, remembered primarily as a children's writer, and by those with an India fixation or a liking for tales of imperial derring-do. I agree with very little of Woolf's concluding paragraph, by the way.

*

Faber have reprinted Nicholas Rankin's book on Stevenson, Dead Man's Chest, which I heartily and thoroughly recommend. £14.99 is steep given the rotten print quality, but if it's that or oblivion, I choose memory and eye-strain.

Bastardquest

2008-12-07T23:22:00.005Z

No other way to put it - bloody awful news regarding The Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times this week. In brief: new editor-in-chief of all three titles, Donald Martin, has sacked the entire workforce, around 250 hacks, and told them to reapply for their jobs under new terms and conditions. Oh, and there will be 40 fewer jobs to apply for.

The owner of the titles since 2003 is Newsquest, a UK subsidiary of an American company called, unbelievably, Gannett. Newsquest owns 17 dailies, one Sunday (the Sunday Herald) and an absolute shedload of free weeklies; they also own the s1 series of websites. And the Exchange & Mart.

A bit of background: Scotland has what I'm told is a German model of newspaper production and reading - the main daily titles are strongly associated with the cities in which they're based. Glasgow has the Herald, Edinburgh the Scotsman, Dundee the Courier and Aberdeen the Press and Journal. Despite the claims of both the Herald and the Scotsman there is no national newspaper.

Since Newsquest took over there has, allegedly, been a marked decline in quality on all three Glasgow-based papers. (I say allegedly because I don't read the Herald, since it's a Glasgow paper.) Resources have been cut as well. In fact things got so bad in 2007 that the journalists went on strike; you can read a good account of it, as well as background, in a piece from the Independent.

It doesn't seem things got any better. Job cuts and new IT systems that didn't work have, unsurprisingly, led to over-stressed and under-motivated staff, according to a report by the NUJ. The Guardian covers the story here (28 Sep 2008).

Regarding the new editor-in-chief, it doesn't seem that he's done much of a job on the Evening Times. Contributors to this discussion board reckon he's driven readers away with front-page trivia and unquestioning support for Glasgow City Council, and then tried to win them back with bizarre giveaways. The discussion runs to two pages but it's mostly concise and well-written, and bang up-to-date.

It's deeply saddening and ironic, though not surprising, that the DTI report approving Gannett/Newsquest's acquisition of the papers made these key points:

1. The transfer is unlikely to adversely affect competition between newspapers in Scotland.

2. We do not expect the transfer to adversely to affect editorial freedom, the current editorial stance, content or quality of the SMG titles, accurate presentation of news or freedom of expression.

3. Nor do we expect the transfer to result in undue financial pressure on the titles acquired such as to reduce editorial quality.

Alex Salmond has said that he can imagine how The Herald would have covered the story if this had happened at another company in Scotland: in fact, they have. Google "herald" and "sackings" and you find this 2002 story about the Clyde & Forth Press Group sacking 11 editors and inviting them to apply for four new posts; also this one about SEPA sacking 600 staff who refused to sign a new contract.

The thing is, it simply does not make sense to treat staff in this way. The return you get from listening to and consulting staff and bringing them on board massively outweighs the expense, because a motivated workforce is more productive. I don't, I just don't understand why employers don't see this, unless it's the old story from Suetonius and The Twelve Caesars: people who are put in a position of power will abuse it. In other words, it's not because they have to - it's because they can.

NUJ.

Bufo bufo, bufo bufo

2008-12-03T23:03:00.004Z

I had the pleasure of going out for a drink with Joe fairly recently, which is to say a few months ago. The time-distortion effect of young children is not one which has ever made it into an episode of Star Trek, but I can assure you it exists. “Captain! The Borg have jumped back in time 500 years and changed something! Our present is unrecognisable!” “What’s your opinion, Mr Spock?” “Clearly we must follow them, Captain, even at the risk of being unable to return ourselves.” “No problem, Spock. I had Scotty lay in an extra kindergarten before we left dry-dock. Mr Sulu – set the parental-stress switch to maximum!” [Much more of this – Ed.]

As ever, I mused over Joe’s forced ejection from Wankerstone’s, nearly four years ago now, and through some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, have found a number of quasi-relevant quotations jumping out of recent reading.

First, and most lengthily, here is Vaclav Havel is considering the nature of what he calls the post-totalitarian system – according to the Wikipedia entry on Havel ‘a term used to describe the modern social and political order that enabled people to "live within a lie."’

No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism. For this reason, an individual’s desire for power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system.

[…]

If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual as an individual, then the moment he steps in to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system. That is, if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. It begins to function as the principal instrument of ritual communication within the system of power.

[…]

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these corrective disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.

From his essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978), published in Open Letters.

Now here is David Simon, from his ‘Post Mortem’ in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets:

Struck, Wooten, Alvarez, Zorzi, Littwin, Thompson, Lippman, Hyman - some of the best reporters the Baltimore Sun had were marginalized, then bought out, shipped out and replaced with twenty-four year-old acolytes, who, if they did nothing else, would never make the mistake of having an honest argument with newsroom management. In a time of growth, when the chance to truly enhance the institution was at hand, the new regime at the Sun hired about as much talent as they dispatched. And in the end, when the carpetbaggers finally departed, their mythology of heroic renewal intact, they had managed to achieve three Pulitzers in about a dozen years. During the previous dozen, the newspaper’s morning and evening editions achieved exactly that same number.

Listening to Garvey over drinks that day, I came to realize that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by – a police department or a newspaper, a political party or a church, Enron or Worldcom – you will eventually be betrayed.

It seemed very Greek the more I thought about it. The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional. In every sense, ours seems to be a world in which individual human beings – be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled eastern European sex workers – are destined to matter less and less.

Not long before, I’d read an interview with Hanna Segal in The Guardian:

[S]ince we tend to submit to the tyranny of our own groups, “speaking our minds takes courage, because groups do not like outspoken dissenters.” The battle now “is between insanity based on mutual projections and sanity based on truth”. And all we, as citizens, can do is “struggle to expose lies, and strive for the preservation of sane human values”.

Not that this is anything new. Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) lamented thus:

What vaileth trouth or by it to take payne
To stryve by stedfastnes for to attayne
To be iuste and true and fle from dowblenes
Sythens all alike where rueleth craftines
Rewarded is boeth fals and plain
Sonest he spedeth that moost can fain
True meaning hert is had in disdain
Against deceipte and dowblenes
What vaileth trouth

It should be noted of course that Joe did indeed vail, and Waterstone’s had to admit unfair dismissal. Finally here is Francis Bacon:

For these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious.

From the very first essay in the truly excellent Oxford Book of Essays, just reissued. Would that it outsells Clarkson this Christmas. One can, and should, hope.

*

Earlier in the same essay, 'On Truth', Bacon says that "it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt". One could take this to be an early description of foma, Kurt Vonnegut's term for those white lies which don't hurt anyone and make everyday life that little bit easier.

It's worse than you think

2008-11-29T23:39:00.001Z

Graffito seen in Edinburgh:

DON'T FIGHT EACH OTHER...FIGHT THE FILTHTH

I have considerable doubts about the police on all sorts of matters, but I'd never suspected them of being in league with Lovecraftian Elder Gods. Perhaps Hellboy should be informed.

Attack of the Castrati

2008-11-04T21:03:00.003Z

Why space opera? A question I'd never considered until I began reading this:

'Opera', to an audience in the 1720s, meant the Italian opera which had first appeared in London in 1705 and which had been much in vogue ever since. Songs, of course, had been common on the English stage since Tudor times, and by the latter part of the seventeenth century plays containing within them masque-scenes in which the dialogue was sung rather than spoken had become fashionable and were called operas. The Italian opera took this development further and eliminated spoken dialogue altogether, the passages between the various arias being carried on in recitative [...] no amount of ridicule could dent the popularity of the form - seventy-five years after its first appearance in England, Dr Johnson was to write resignedly of Italian opera as 'an exotick and irrational entertainment, which has always been combated and always has prevailed'.

Which is by way of introduction, though admittedly much space opera, especially on film, can be considered as trivial and absurd as contemporary issues of The Spectator thought the newly-arrived Italian opera. But here's the relevant part:

As well as being musically novel, the Italian operas [...] were remarkable for the sumptuousness of the costumes and the sophistication of the stage machinery. The libretto of Handel's very popular opera Rinaldo (1711), for example, requires the heroine to be carried through the air in Act I in a 'Chariot drawn by two huge Dragons, out of whose mouths issue Fire and Smoke', while Act II calls for waterfalls as well as 'Thunder, Lightning, and amazing Noises'. With so much spectacle to engage its attention, the audience at an opera was unlikely to concern itself greatly with the details of the plot, which was in nearly every case if not manifestly absurd at least considerably remote from the concerns of the everyday.

Was the newly-formed equivalent of ILM involved in creating the special effects? I'd guess so. Finally, as proof that the star system (forgive the pun) is nothing new:

It was not the plots but the spectacle and, above all, the singers that brought fashionable London to the Italian opera [...] In 1721 the great castrato Senesino was lured to London and in 1723 he was joined by the famous soprano Francesca Cuzzoni; both were paid what was in those days the fabulous sum of £2,000 for the season.

Though presumably the London audience never had the egregious Jar-Jar Binks inflicted on it. The extracts are from Bryan Loughrey and T.O. Treadwell's introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Beggar's Opera.

Politely, Frank Muir says Francis Urquhart

2008-10-30T20:54:00.007Z

Or possibly Felix Unger. Frank Muir was a writer, presenter and producer of comedy, satire and light entertainment programmes. In the early 1960s he was working for the BBC.

After a holiday abroad I returned to find a general election about to happen and the television schedules polluted with party political broadcasts. Incensed by these (and I take a bit of incensing) I wrote a letter to The Times, which they printed. I wrote:

Sir, when I was at school and we were coming up to the end-of-term exams I wrote a letter to my headmaster (in brown ink for some reason, which angered him) and gave it as my view that if the purpose of an exam was to test how much information and wisdom had penetrated our natural defences, then swotting to pass the exam was a form of cheating. The Head did not feel able to fall in with this theory, but I believe there is truth in it. By the same reasoning I believe that we should vote for a political party on its proven record not on wild promises for the future made in party political broadcasts which the party has a snowflake's chance in hell of fulfilling. Thus party political broadcasts are quite clearly only another form of cheating.

What I did not know, as I had just returned from abroad, was that a few days earlier the DG [Director General] had written a keynote letter to the papers saying how important party political broadcasts were to the political health of our democracy. What I also did not know, or had forgotten, was that BBC employees were strictly forbidden to write letters to newspapers expressing their personal views on television and political matters.

A memo emerged from the DG's office in Broadcasting House. The memo was kindly, mainly curious how I could ignore such an important rule as the one preventing staff from blabbing to the press. But the memo then descended from one management office to another, the file growing more threatening and larger as it went like a snowball rolling downhill. Eventually it landed with a thud on Huw Wheldon's desk. Huw passed the huge file on to me with a scribbled note attached saying:

You have an unusual contract but it states quite clearly that you will obey staff rules and regulations as laid down in the Staff Handbook, a copy of which you were given on joining. Full explanation, please. Immediately. (Or when you are not too busy.)

I replied:

Dear Huw,
I am so sorry to have wasted so many important people's time and I would certainly not have written to The Times had I known that it was forbidden so to do. The trouble is I did not read the Staff Handbook thoroughly and commit it to memeory as I should have done. In fact, I thought the rather slim booklet was my electric blanket guarantee and I filed it away at hiome under Domestic Items.
But I do think that you should get Mrs Mary Whitehouse to ban party political broadcasts. To this end could you not persuade the political parties to record their promises in the nude?

And that was the last I heard of the matter.

From A Kentish Lad, pp262-3.

Celebrity Deathmatch: White vs. King

2008-10-29T17:28:00.004Z

Might as well get straight into it...

Kenneth White (1936- ) is an expatriate Scottish writer, now very much at home in France. Much-lauded there too, but practically unknown in his native country.

I read the novel [Robinson Crusoe] as a youngster, but I've long since preferred the brute document. Here, summarised, is the account of Wood Roggers, the man who picked up Selkirk from the island:

[A brief account of how Selkirk was abandoned on his island and how he survived follows.]

It's all there in that blueprint - the rest is padding, and an encumbering of the mind.

As is probably obvious enough by this time, I prefer, by far, real islands to imaginary islands, just as I prefer prime documents to novelistic remakes. That's because the real is richer than the imagination. The real demands investigation and is an invitation to sensitive knowledge, whereas the imaginary is more often than not just a collection of stereotypes, a soup of cliches offering an infantile sort of satisfaction. Then, a relationship to the real and its resistance requires changes in thought, in ways of being, in ways of saying, it leads to a transformation of the self. Whereas imagination is nothing but compensation. There's even something horribly autistic about sitting in one spot and spinning out invention by the yard. How much more interesting an open and poetic process involving contemplation, study, movement, meditation and composition!

I don't see an absence but a heightening of reality in the fictional prose which I can point to and call art with confidence: Tarka, Dubliners, Davy, The Leopard, Red Shift, The Stone Book Quartet. White makes the pretty elementary mistake of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, something with which fantasy and SF fans are wearily familiar. Moreover, while I doubt that most fiction can claim to provide transformations of the self, any of it which is any good will provide transportations, which is no bad thing and no mean feat. None of the books I've listed deal in stereotypes - they deal in people, Tarka excepted. I have a theory that, once we're out of childhood, it's difficult for us to grasp or perceive anything new without having imagined it first. In that regard, fiction can be tremendously useful in breaking down stereotypes and other forms of preconception. I doubt that any of the terms in the final sentence could not be applied to Alan Garner's writing process - or even Barbara Cartland's.

Of course, it all depends how you read - whether you read to challenge your own opinion or confirm it. If, for example, you are locked into the French intellectual tradition which has given us the new novel and Derrida, you may well regard White as a savant of the first water; or you may see him as a self-regarding and rather self-satisfied pedlar of highbrow nonsense. In fairness, I think one of us has caught the other on a bad day.

The extract comes from 'Across Corsica', one of the chapters of Across the Territories, a collection of travel essays. He duly notes Napoleon, Paoli, Merimee and Boswell, all of whom belong to or are associated with the island, but he doesn't mention Dorothy Carrington, who wrote the definitive book on it, once.

In defence of imagination, Stephen King, who unlike White actually has some experience of being a novelist, has this to say:

I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the reader or viewer of intellect and maturity. When Coleridge spoke of 'the suspension of disbelief' in his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted with a clean jerk and held up by main force. [...] And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, ' I don't read fantasy or go to any of those movies; none of it's real,' I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

From Danse Macabre, pp120-121.