Put your lips together and blow

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.

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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.

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'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.

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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

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

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

"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

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

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?

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

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)

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.

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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

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.

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

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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.