The Paolo Review of Books

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

2011-09-08T21:42:00.000-04:00

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Thomas Allen 2011)

This is a story of the death of jazz at the dawn of Nazism in Germany. The name 'Half-Blood Blues' takes its inspiration from the book's hero and a jazz legend in the making Hieronymous 'Hiero' Falk is just nineteen when he starts playing with the 'Hot Time Swingers' alongside Charles 'Chip Jones and Sidney 'Sid' Griffiths, the narrator of the tale. The son of a German woman and a French African brought in to marshal the Rheinland after that part of Germany was ceded to France after the Treaty of Versailles. Hiero is a half-breed or 'mischling'.

The story is set both in the 1940s in Berlin and Paris as the Trio try to stay one step ahead of Hitler's ever advancing army but also in the 1990s in a newly reunited Germany at a concert in Hiero's honour. At the heart of the story is the secret Sid harbours as to how Hiero's fate was sealed.

I didn't expect to enjoy this book and it starts slowly but it is a tale that draws you in. Literary takes on music rarely seem to work but Edugyan is able to render the atmosphere of 1940s jazz, the language of the trio and banter between them feels authentic. The plot is a little weak to sustain the length and the potentially most interesting of the characters, Hiero, is the least well developed but by the end of the book they seem like minor complaints as is the rather random and quite pointless inclusion of Louis Armstrong who makes an appearance. A more major complaint on my behalf is that the list price for this trade paperback is $24.95 which seems like daylight robbery especially since the text is littered with typos and printing errors; if you're going to charge that much then at least earn it with some better proofreading. However I shall not hold the publisher's problems against the author.

4/5

The Testament of Jessie Lamb

2011-09-05T22:12:00.000-04:00

The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone Press 2011)

This is one of the more unlikely picks for the Booker prize longlist, published by a small publishing house in the highlands Scotland and extraordinarily difficult to purchase if you live in North America where this particular book has no distribution deal. Set not far in to the future a virus has spread affecting the entire world's population, some sort of cross between Aids and CJD, the effects of which are that any woman who gets pregnant soon develops a rather unfortunate Swiss cheese effect on her brain and dies before the infant can come to term.

In what could be described as a cross between Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' and Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' the novel is told by the eponymous sixteen year old Jessie Lamb, in part as a remembrance of events past and in part first person narrative of Jessie, locked up by her geneticist father for her decision to volunteer to be a 'sleeping beauty': a sacrificial lamb who accepts an unaffected frozen embryo and is put into a coma giving just enough time for proper gestation.

The book details a world falling apart millions of women perish and world faces the prospect of no new human life on the planet. Society fractures as religious, feminist, youth and animal rights groups try to force their agenda through ever more militant methods. It is a world in which future prospects are gloomy and any solutions no matter how extreme are considered.

As I mentioned above, this isn't typical Booker territory and you would be hard pushed to find anyone who would contend that this is one of the thirteen best eligible books of this year. The structure of the book is unfortunate as it essentially tells you how the book will end right from the beginning, the characters of Jessie's parents are poorly developed and the mood of the novel is unfalteringly dire, okay the last criticism could well be used against any dystopian literature. It is an interesting concept for a book but I'm afraid it's just not quite good enough for Booker material and I can't see it making the short list.

3/5

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

2011-08-31T23:18:00.000-04:00

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador 2011)

The Stranger's Child is a book about the way a literary reputation changes over the years as social mores about behaviour and sexual proclivity change and as biographers and critics become more cut-throat in getting to the juiciest of secrets that will bolster their own literary reputation.

The totemic event of the book is the visit of the upper-class gentleman Cecil Valance, already a budding poetic talent, to the home of his Cambridge schoolmate George Sawle at their family pile Two Acres. George and Cecil's rather close attentions are rather thwarted that weekend by the close attentions of George's younger sister Daphne who is never far away, whether during skinny-dipping antics by the lake or frolicking in the hammock.

Flash forward a few years and Cecil has died, perished in the Great War but his reputation now blossoming as those who were present at Two Acres during Cecil's visit are assembled as a family friend, the rather tame and friendly Sebastian Stokes, gathers the sources for his unchallenging and safe biography. But as the years go by we see different volumes of his life and his letters, what truly happened between Cecil, George and Daphne becomes more distant, the more it is analysed.

This is a truly beautiful book. Cecil Valance is a Rupert Brooke/Siegfried Sassoon type Edwardian poet, perhaps not a genius of style but the creator of memorable lines who finds a place at the heart of a Bloomsbury Group style of Britishness: repressed homosexuality and upper-class excess. The book is set in five sections and in each as they get further from the original event we are not just treated to different social settings, mores and nuances but each adds to the complexity of the whole.

I cannot imagine how much planning this novel took but Hollinghurst is a master of prose and creativity at the height of his powers. The Booker Prize can only now be between this and Barnes's 'The Sense of an Ending' and I'm glad it's not my decision.

5/5

A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvette Edwards

2011-08-24T22:30:00.001-04:00

A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvette Edwards (Oneworld Publications 2011)

Fourteen years ago Jinx witnesses the horrific murder of her mother in their flat in the Pemsbury Estate in Hackney, London. It's an event that will blight her future relationship with her future husband and child and force her into semi-obscurity, feeling most comfortable with the cadavers she tends at the mausoleum where she works.

One evening Lemon, an old friend of her mothers, turns up unannounced with news to break. But there's more, and over an weekend of alcohol, music and sumptuous Montserratian cuisine they revisit the events that led up to the fateful night.

Although set in and around my old stomping grounds in London around Hackney Downs and Dalston Kingsland I did not expect to like this book. For a start it is littered with ridiculous name: Jinx, Lemon and Red, names which proffer and unnecessary distraction. However as the book went on I found myself wanting to know where it was going and even enjoying the process. The descriptions of the male characters, especially Berris and Lemon are well developed and harken back to a timeless sense of style, and the descriptions of the food had me salivating.

It isn't in conventional booker territory so I would be surprised to see it going through to the shortlist but for a first time effort by Yvette Edwards, it isn't half bad.

4/5

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

2011-08-20T12:24:00.002-04:00

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (HarperCollins 2011)

Set in 1857 Jamrach's Menagerie tells the story of Jaffy, a poor but happy child who wanders the streets of the East End of London, through the mire and the open sewers bare footed without the least concern. When one day he encounters a tiger newly escaped from its captivity he brazenly walks up to pet its nose only to end up in the tiger's mouth. His rescue came in the form of the eponymous Jamrach, an exotic animal dealer who leaps atop the creature and forces its jaws apart. Jamrach's menagerie is a place of wonder filled with Tasmanian devils, all kinds of birds and primates and Jaffy takes a job there where he encounters Jamrach's assistant Tim Linver and Dan Rymer, the salty sea dog/animal tracker responsible for collecting some of Jamrach's more exotic products.

When one day a Mr Fledge comes in and asks that he be supplied a dragon (most likely a Komodo Dragon) Jaffy, Tim and Dan join the crew of one of Mr Fledge's whale boats and set out towards the South Seas in pursuit of their quarry. What follows is a somewhat harrowing tale of torture, starvation and whole lot of pain as things go from terrible to worse in a story partly inspired by the true tale of the Essex (a story which also partly inspired another infamous book of whaling ships, Moby Dick).

It is an intentionally difficult book to read as the author tries to put you into the mindset of the protagonists as they go through some pretty extreme torment and the result is that some chapters go by a great deal slower than the rest (reading a chapter about the doldrums is liable to send one into them oneself). It is a very evocative book and as Jaffy, Tim and Dan suffer, I could feel their pain.

The book is far from perfect. Some of the characters aren't developed well enough such as Skip whose madness is just accepted but never questioned or explained, or Tim who becomes incredibly two-dimensioned once they set foot aboard the whaling ship. Also the ending is a little too rose-coloured as things at last come together in an ending Disney would be proud of. However, these are comparatively minor complaints and I wouldn't be surprised to see this making the Booker Prize shortlist.

4/5

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

2011-08-13T18:15:00.001-04:00

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (House of Anansi Press 2011)

The narrator, Harri Opoku, is an 11 year old recent Ghanaian immigrant who moved over to England with his mother, aunt Sonia and sister Lydia. They live on the Dell Farm housing estate in South London. When a kid gets stabbed to death outside chicken restaurant, Harri and his CSI loving friend Dean decide that it's their duty to investigate and unearth the killer and on an estate where the Dell Farm Crew rule they are not short of suspects.

The title is something of a play on words referring both to the mixed Ghanaian and South London pidgin of the narrator (words and phrases like 'asweh', 'hutious' and 'advise yourself' abound) and because of his fascination with a wild pigeon who one day flew into their ninth floor flat and from then one believes is watching over him ready to poop on anyone who threatens him. In some of the most clawing and hackneyed passages we are treated the philosophical musings of the pigeon itself.

Reading the booker prize novels has taught me something about myself. Starting with Room last year and now Pigeon English I have learnt that I cannot stand to read narration written from the perspective of a child simply because I believe that a narrative is far too important to be left to such an undeveloped mindset. Harri's thought-processes are so frenetic and changeable one would imagine it giving the novel a certain pace but instead it is just becomes tiring.

Partly inspired by the stabbing of the Nigerian schoolboy Damiola Taylor in 2000 the book taps in on the prevalence of gang culture and knife crime in the council estates of London. Because it is one of few if any novels that attempts to deal with this issue, it is a novel that will do very well whether or not it is artistically merited. It wont be too long before this graces the syllabuses of the United Kingdom and the BBC have already commissioned an adaptation. I also expect it to make it through to the shortlist but sadly I don't think it merits it.

3/5

Snowdrops by A.D. Millers

2011-08-09T18:13:00.001-04:00

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller (HarperCollins 2010)

Set in Moscow in the mid-noughties, Snowdrops is the story of Nick Platt is a British Lawyer who when travelling home one night on metro fights off a would be mugger. His intended target is Masha and her younger sister Katya. As Masha and Nick begin to become involved he is introduced to their aunt Tatiana Vladimirovna and finds himself compelled to help out in the sale of her apartment. The other thread of the story is that of Nick's involvement in the financing of an oil project off the coast of Murmansk on the Barents Sea.

The eponymous snowdrops are not just the pretty bulbous early blooming flower - in Moscow slang it is a corpse that only unearth's itself in the thaw following the long Russian winter. As one of the characters of book says, 'in Russia there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories'. True or not, this is most certainly a crime story.'

Overall it is a pretty disappointing book. It is one that continues to promise action and intrigue but never actually delivers upon it. The plot is transparent and the ending easily forseen. The central character is so spineless and amoral that he simply isn't believable and the three threads of the story are essentially the same. Add to this a character called 'the Cossack' who could have stepped out of a cliché spy novel and characterisations of the Russians which verge on the racist mean that there is little good to be said of this book and once again I am left wondering how this made it into the Booker prize long list.

2/5

Far to Go by Alison Pick

2011-08-06T14:28:00.001-04:00

Far to Go by Alison Pick (House of Anansi Press 2010)

The Toronto based Alison Pick goes over somewhat familiar ground in her tale of a family of well-to-do Sudetenland jews and the events of their lives leading up to and following its annexation by Germany in 1948. At the heart of the story are the Bauers, Pavel who is a Jewish factory owner, his glamorous wife Annelies, their son Pepik and their maid Martha who narrates. Ultimately it is the story of the Kindertransport, for as the Bauers see that their options for escaping ever fiercer grip of Nazi rule diminish their only hope is to see Pepik out of the country safely.

The other aspect of the story is that of another Annelies, a holocaust researcher who is trying to track down Pavel in modern day Canada so that between them they can piece together the true story of what happened back in Czechoslovakia during the war.

This book suffers from the comparison to far greater books such as the immeasurably better Austerlitz by WG Sebald for all its haunting melancholic meta-fictional brilliance, or one can even look to last year's booker prize longlist for a more interesting holocaust novel in Simon Mawer's 'the Glass Room'. Alison Pick barely moves her narrative above the pedestrian and does nothing with her story that has not been done many times before.

Stylistically too the book has its flaws and one would never guess the author to be a poet because her symbolism and analogy are drab and obvious. Pick also hit against a pet peeve of mine by the pointless use of well-known foreign words to try and add an international flair, something usually the preserve of mediocre travel books.

Pick has clearly been inspired to tell the story of her own family history so I can understand why she has chosen to write it, but it's predictable conventionality means that it never lifts itself above the mediocre and I am at a loss as to explain how it made it into the Booker long list. I would be very disappointed to see it make the short list.

2/5

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2011-08-03T00:41:00.002-04:00

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Random House Canada 2011)

This is a novel of youthful friendship and relationships, budding pretensions, teenage angst and middle-aged memories, reverie and regret. The book is told by Tony Webster, a middle-of -the-road type character who can best describe himself as peaceable. The first half of the book centres on the schoolboy friendship with Adrian Finn, a more intelligent, Camus-reading fellow pupil at their sixth form in central London. After the two separate for university, Adrian going to Cambridge and Tony to Bristol, we follow Tony's relationship with Veronica a woman who remains an enigma to Tony and whose feelings for him seem to swing between care and contempt. His relationship with Veronica simpered out after a year and she then goes out with Adrian. The chapter ends with the news of Adrian's death by his own hands.

The second half of the novel is set after Tony has retired, his marriage with Margaret lasting much longer but ending in amicable divorce. He is suddenly forced to reassess his past when a letter from a solicitor turns up informing him that he has been bequeathed Adrian's diary by Veronica's mother but also the news that Veronica, whom Tony had edited out of his past in discussions with Margaret, is currently in possession of the diary and looks unlikely to pass it on.

At the heart of the novel is an almost Proustian analysis of memory and history and Tony is much more at home with the historical certainties of the Greeks and Romans than of the mess of uncertainty of the near past. The focus of his reminiscence is a disastrous trip he took with Veronica to spend a weekend in Kent at her home with her family and every nuance and uttering is re-evaluated with each new exchange with Veronica as he tries to prove to her for once and for all that he finally gets it.

This is a short volume coming in at 150 pages but every word packs its power. Only on looking back do you begin to realise the complexity of the story as you begin to wonder whether your memory of earlier events or his is the one which is correct. I haven't had a chance to reread the book but I'm sure it's one that would get even better on a second visit. It more than justifies its inclusion in the Booker long list and unless Alan Hollinghurst has pulled out a gem with 'the Stranger's Child' I believe this one could go all the way and bag the prize.

5/5

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

2011-08-01T21:25:00.002-04:00

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt (House of Anansi Press 2011)

And so the Booker reading begins. Set in 1851 right in the middle of the California gold rush, the novel tells the story of two infamous brothers Charlie and Eli Sisters who set out on a mission by the commodore from Oregon City to apprehend and kill Hermann Kermit Warm.

The chapters are short and the pace is brisk as the brothers drink, swear, trick and shoot their way west in pursuit of their quarry encountering a witch, an orphan and a prospector gone mad in the solitude of his work.

The narration of Eli Sisters is in a evocative cowboy patter and the description of the fairly frequent violence is vivid the effect being to put you in the saddle as they slaughter their way across the west toward California but it's not for the feint-hearted.

It's an entertaining yarn, the relationship between the younger Eli and the elder Charlie is an intelligent mix of admiration, jealousy and competition and the vivid prose is a real highlight. It is very light reading and I went through it in a couple of days without really trying. My judgement is that it's good but not booker good and I can't see this one getting through to the longlist.

3/5

The Booker Prize 2011 Challenge

2011-08-01T21:24:00.010-04:00

For the third year I am going to try and read as many of the Booker Prize longlist and hopefully all of the shortlist before the winner is announced. Last year my favoured book 'In a Strange Room' by Damon Galgut was beaten by what I think is the far inferior 'The Finkler Question' by Howard Jacobson. Perhaps this year my opinion and the judges will intersect, well stranger things have happened

This year's 'Bookers Dozen' are:

Julian Barne - The Sense of an Ending
Sebastian Barry - On Canaan's Side
Carol Birch - Jamrach's Menagerie
Patrick deWitt - The Sisters Brothers
Esi Edugyan - Half Blood Blues
Yvvette Edwards - A Cupboard Full of Coats
Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger's Child
Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English
Patrick McGuinness - The Last Hundred Days
AD Miller - Snowdrops
Alison Pick - Far to Go
Jane Rogers - The Testament of Jessie Lamb
DJ Taylor - Derby Day

Not all the books are available to buy or not yet released so it wont be the easiest job to read them through but wish me luck.

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga

2011-07-27T21:50:00.000-04:00

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (Doubleday Canada 2011)

I must admit that I only picked up this book in hopes of pre-empting the Booker judges long list selection and at first the book held no appeal. The concept of the book seemed archetypal possibly to point of cliché. A powerful and corrupt construction magnate named Dharmen Shah decides upon a spot to build what might be his last project, the Shanghai built in 'Gothic style, Rajput touch, Art Deco fountain'. On the site Shah has chosen to build stand Towers A & B of the Vishram Society housing co-operative in Vakola, near the airport in Mumbai, the next area of the city due for gentrification in the Indian economic boom. Offered a more than generous settlement to purchase the apartments from members (some 250% of their value) one man, Yogesh Murthy (Masterji) a retired teacher, alone holds out against Shah, the last man in tower as one by one his friends, neighbours and even his own family turn against him feared of losing their ticket out of the slums.

If it is a story that sounds familiar it should because it is a common premise, take 'batteries not included' or for a more recent example the recent animated feature film 'Up', all stories of plucky underdogs taking on the powerful corporations. However, this is where the similarities end and instead of a saccharine story of helpful little robot elves or of transcontinental building flight what we are offered is a sometimes very dark and almost deeply cynical view on Indian culture and the effect of its current economic prosperity.

My big criticism of the book is that it is bogged down by some highly visible and unsubtle symbolism. Chapters of the book are haunted by a lame and dying dog, we see a pair of fighting hawks and we see a mother crow have her nest and babies poked out from under her. If you throw in the Rubik's Cube that plays a more central role than necessary you can see that Adiga has employed far less that a light touch. Having said that, it is a highly readable book and although at the outset the book's plot would appear predictable, it doesn't quite follow the path you'd imagine and was still able to surprise an old cynic like me. Worth a read but I think the Booker judges have been wise to have left it out of the longlist.

3/5

David Lloyd George by Roy Hattersley

2011-07-27T00:14:00.001-04:00

David Lloyd George: The Great Outsider by Roy Hattersley (Little Brown 2010)

Last summer I spent a while researching whether there were any decent biographies of Lloyd George. I have his multi-volume War Diaries purchased in a moment of financial whim in a charity shop in Preston, Lancs but if you were looking for a comprehensive take on Lloyd George's life, then last summer there was not one to be found. This is interesting in itself, David Lloyd George was the man who lead Great Britain to victory in the Great War surely, as with Churchill, there should have been dozens of titles. Part of the reason for this one wonders may have to do with how the book came to be written. Roy Jenkins, the stalwart of British political Biography whose titles include Gladstone, Asquith, Baldwin and Churchill, suggested to Roy Hattersley that he write the biography because he disliked Lloyd George 'so heartily that he could not write the book himself'

Money played an important part in Lloyd George's life and it was probably the lack of it in childhood that made him so desirous of it in later life. Born in Manchester he spent most of his childhood in North Wales, the country with which he would be so closely associated with. His later financial dealings nearly ruined his career as with his disastrous gold mining operations in Argentina where he continued to solicit investment even after he was aware there was no gold, and the Marconi scandal where a number of cabinet ministers were involved in speculating in the share value prior to the awarding of a large government contract. It was the issue of money that finally ended his run as Prime Minister when the extent of his involvement in selling honours became known.

After receiving the reputation of being something of a womaniser (a reputation that later led to his nickname of 'the goat'), at the age of 21 Lloyd George realised that he needed a woman who could provide 'the stability of indomitable domesticity'. The woman was Margaret Lloyd George (nee Owen). They stayed together until her death in 1944 although he was hardly faithful. In 1910 he met Frances Stevenson when she was hired as the childrens' tutor. She became Lloyd George's mistress and was to remain with him until his death, becoming the second Mrs Lloyd George following Margaret's death in 1944.

I said that Lloyd George was the man who lead Great Britain to victory in the Great War but he should be remembered for far more than that. He was the man who essentially started the modern welfare state by introducing state pensions and employment insurance, the man who strengthened British democracy by forcing the House of Lords into breaking a constitutional convention which led to the Parliament Act 1911 that limited the power of the unelected Lords to a suspensory veto. He is also a man to be remembered for two wars. For his vehement opposition to the Boer War (that almost made him the most unpopular man in the country) to his stalwart leadership during the First World War. There is so much more to say about his achievements but my précis would be a poor substitution to reading the book itself.

Roy Jenkins book is an interesting one. He tries to be dispassionate about Lloyd George and I think like me he genuinely admires what he achieved but with each chapter you sense a growing dislike of the person. His treatment of his wife although mitigated by the fact that she refused to leave her native Leeds to join him in London, cannot be condoned. The book could have done with a concluding chapter just to sum up his thoughts on the man but sadly all we are given is half a paragraph. Otherwise this was a thoroughly interesting book on a very interesting period in British politics and I highly recommend it.

5/5

Contested Will by James Shapiro

2011-07-10T14:44:00.000-04:00

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare by James Shapiro (Simon and Schuster 2010)

I used to be what I guess you could call a casual Baconian. Without having read into the authorship debate in the slightest it was quite easy to pick up on casual references in the media. It was also a good flight of fancy to imagine the man who essentially invented the scientific method could also be the genuine source of what is the jewel in England's cultural crown. However, thanks to James Shapiro's book I am now pretty firmly of the belief that the glovers' son from Stratford was the true author of the plays.

In the book Shapiro examines the arguments for two of the leading candidates in the authorship debate, Francis Bacon and Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Only when you study the arguments for these guys do you realise how nonsensical they are. Arguments that William Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him (authorship which had not been challenged until the late Eighteenth Century) are based on the assumption that to have written the plays the author must have been a nobleman, familiar with the law and life in the Elizabethan court, with a university education, attributes, from what the documentary evidence indicates, that certainly cannot be applied to the glovers' son from Stratford. This would only be true if in the writing the plays the author was being autobiographical and wrote from experience never mind the fact that Elizabethan autobiography essential didn't exist outside ecclesiastical writings.

Finally Shapiro makes the argument for Shakespeare himself, detailing references to Shakespeare by contemporary authors such as Ben Jonson and recent textual studies into co-authorship, including five of Shakespeare's last ten plays, which strongly undermines the Oxfordian case. When asked why the authorship question is important, because no matter who wrote them we still have the plays Shapiro makes the interesting point that it does matter because by searching for a more suitable author we do great injustice to Shakespeare's most powerful tool, his imagination.

This is the second book by Shapiro I've read, the first was the Samuel Johnson award winning '1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare' and as with this book the concept was really interesting but the execution was just a little bit too academic for popular appeal and it took me quite a while to get through this rather slim book. That said, the subject matter really is interesting and if you've every wondered about the Shakespeare authorship question then this is probably as balanced and even-handed a take on it as you'll ever find especially now that the Oxfordian movement goes from strength to strength.

4/5

On China by Henry Kissinger

2011-07-07T17:26:00.000-04:00

On China by Henry Kissinger (Allen Lane 2011)

Before 1969 the People's Republic of China and USSR were seen as one large Communist bloc whose power centre was in Moscow however as 1969 rolled around and Russian troops massed on the Chinese border, nuclear war between Russia and China appeared probable (so much so that Chinese leaders were dispersed from Beijing around the country). At this point President Nixon decided that Russia was the worse of the two evils which made possible a heretofore unlikely meeting with Chairman Mao in 1972 and a relatively stable period of peaceful co-existence has existed between the USA and China since.

Henry Kissinger was the National Security Advisor to Nixon and was a key figure in setting up the meeting between the unlikely bedfellows. His book charts the history of China from its ancient origins, commenting on the nature of Chinese society and its early belief in its own superiority in the world, not in a proselytizing or crusading manner as one thinks of the neo-con crusade for the democratisation of the third world, but through sheer confidence in ones cultural superiority. And this confidence was badly shaken following the opium wars with the UK with one embarrassing concession after another to host of Western nations on trade, diplomatic relations and even ownership of Chinese lands.

It deals with the civil war that led to the Communist victory (the nationalists escaping to settle what is now known as Taiwan) as well as successive Communist policy blunders such as the Great Leap Forward, an aim to increase industrial output rapidly to overtake the West in 15 years with goals so unrealistic that local officials faked their grain figures which were then relied upon as Mao sold off much of China's remaining grain to Russia in exchange for weapons triggering a famine that killed as many as 45 million people. There is also the Cultural Revolution, part of Mao's vision of continual revolution, an attempt to wipe out all traces of China's Confucian inspired civil service in which many senior mandarins were removed from their positions and sent to labour in the fields, including in their ranks the future leads of the country Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin and very nearly Mao's right hand man Zhao Enlai.

The book is a very useful grounding in modern Chinese political history and it is interesting to observe Chinese foreign policy from the viewpoint of a game of Wei Qi in which two players place down respectively black and white tiles, the object being to encircle ones enemy. Kissinger is at some times almost an apologist for Mao and whilst some of the worst excesses are noted, more effort is put into understanding his decisions in the framework of Chinese history. An explanation for the softer tone towards Mao could be to lesson the burden of being the man to have established relations with a man responsible for more that 45 million deaths.

Henry Kissinger is very much a Republican and top marks to American forgeign policy go to Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes. Clinton and Carter are both criticised as being too gun-ho about trying to spread and apply Western values in a Chinese context.

Whatever the problems with this book I would certainly recommend it as an introductory book on Modern China because it is one that will make you want to read more.

4/5

Smut by Alan Bennett

2011-07-07T16:26:00.000-04:00

Smut: Two Unseemly Stories by Alan Bennett (Faber & Faber/Profile Books 2011)

In this rather slight volumes sit two charming stories of unexpected sexuality. The first story is 'the Greening of Mrs Donaldson' and deals with a recently widowed middle-classed woman who to earn some extra income on the side takes a job at the local hospital as a part-time demonstrator helping medical students with their diagnosis technique by feigning different physical and mental conditions and at the same time catching the eye of their professor. As she takes in a couple of students as tenants she finds herself in an interesting predicament as the rent cheques begin to dry up there is an offer to pay the arrears in kind.

The Shielding of Mrs Forbes features another unorthadox sexual arrangement. Mrs Forbes has a handsome, eligible if not air-headed son called Graham and he is betrothed to a somewhat plain but extraordinarily intelligent woman. They would be set for a happy life if it weren't for the fact that Graham was a closeted homosexual whose extra-marital sexual encounters get him under the control of a blackmailing policeman.

Both stories are about people pretending to be whom they are not and failing miserably at the task. Both stories lead to rather unexpected conclusions and the brunt of the humour is rather directed not at the named protagonists themselves but at the people around who are in on the secret.

It's a slender volume and the stories are entertaining enough but it does leave me wondering if they were of sufficient calibre to justify individual publishing. I think Alan Bennett has reached the same level as Umberto Eco where anything he says or writes from now on will be snapped up and bound which is great if you're an avid fan eager for new material but it is no guarantor of continuing or consistent quality.

3/5

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

2011-06-05T00:28:00.002-04:00

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Pantheon 2009)

June 24th 1833 was the date when the word 'scientist' was arguably coined. At a meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, William Whewell was addressing the packed Senate House on the nature of science when the applause died down one sole figure remained standing, and to the surprise of everyone present, it was that of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He remarked of the members present in the room that the name they used for their profession was no longer appropriate, men knee deep in mud searching for fossils being called 'natural philosophers' didn't quite seem right and the other moniker 'men of science' hardly included the likes of Caroline Herschel; something better had to be devised. As an actual metaphysician himself Coleridge wanted a name that would more reflect the practical and hands-on nature of their work. Whewell's suggestion was that one could by analogy of art to artist go from science to scientist and thus the word was born.

This book deals with how we progressed from the pure philosophy of the inductive reasoning of Bacon and Newton and the rationalism and foundationalism of Descartes, through the independently wealthy and crown sponsored men of Royal Society to the more familiar profession of science of Whewhell, Charles Darwin and beyond. At the heart of this book are biographies of three of the guiding lights of Romantic science. The first is of Sir Joseph Banks whose botanical voyages in Tahiti with Captain Cook opened his eyes to a world of experience and adventure which, when he himself was crippled by gout and unable to travel, encouraged in others as the President of the Royal Society. The second is William Herschell and his redoubtable sister Caroline who brought skill, ingenuity and a complete thoroughness to the science of astrology through regular nightly sweeps of the sky and better telescopic technology that helped them discover Uranus and two of its moons as well as two moons of Saturn and a catalogue of over 500 new nebulae. Finally we meet Sir Humphry Davy and his experiments with gases and electricity that made him a veritable rock star.

Part of what makes this period so exciting is that the arts and sciences had an almost symbiotic existence. Erasmus Darwin and Humpry Davy both composed poetry whilst the likes of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelly wrote pamphlets on science and natural philosophy. It was a synthesis that was mutually beneficial which makes me think that Stephen Hawking was all the more wrong when in his most recent book 'The Grand Design' he made the pronouncement that 'philosophy is dead' a somewhat ironically self-defeating philosophical stance.

It was an exciting period in history, the exploration of Africa and the islands of the South Pacific. The advent of flight with the early experiments in Ballooning. There was also an exciting cast, not just the poets and triumvirate of scientists mentioned above but the likes of Michael Faraday, Thomas Beddoes, Mungo Park and the rest. Holmes infuses the narrative with his own sense of wonder and as the book ends with Charles Darwin heading off on the HMS Beagle he leaves us wanting to know what comes next.

5/5

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

2011-06-04T21:25:00.003-04:00

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (Spiegel & Grau 2009)

'We have nothing to envy in the world' go the lyrics to a song taught by Mi-Ran (she plays the accordion which is as we learn something that all teachers in North Korea are required to do because they are lightweight, cheap and music is a good tool for indoctrination) to a class of five and six year old children whom starvation has made look three or four and whose attendance numbers have ominously dropped down from fifty to fifteen.

'If you look at a satellite photo of the Far East at night, you'll see a splotch curiously lacking light' this Barbara Demick informs us is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. In this darkness Mi-Ran and Jun-Sang can avoid the eyes of nosy neighbours by walking down the pitch-black streets unseen. Mi-Ran is from the lowest caste in North Korean society (beulsun - literally tainted blood) , her father was a soldier from the South taken prisoner by the North during the Korean War and with no hope of repatriation his family are forever condemned to the bottom rung. Jun-Sang is of an impeccable background and his good marks in chemistry mean that he has a future at one of the military universities in Pyongyang, the showtown capital of North Korea and a union with a beulsun would ruin his prospects.

Demick follows the lives of six protagonists from the same town, Chongjin and through them we experience vignettes of life in a country that has become a virtual black hole of information. We hear of infrastructure shutting down as people are no longer paid for their work and where a much more productive use of time is foraging for food, first rations from the government, then dogs and cats in the neighbourhood, then rats and mice and finally whatever plants and roots that can be boiled and made edible. The scale of privation is sometimes overwhelming but the book offers light at the end of the tunnel as the six escape to tell their stories.Although not every escape story is a success and China is all to willing to hand escapees back over to the Pyongyang regime where labour-camps and worse await their return.

North Korea is often in the news for its sabre-rattling nuclear experimentation. What this book so brilliantly does is to pierce the veil of secrecy they have erected and give insight into the lives of everyday people and one has to wonder how life can still exist like this in a world of such plenty. Very compelling.

5/5

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

2011-06-04T14:44:00.004-04:00

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (Random House 1969)

Philip Roth's fourth book, Portnoy's Complaint was the one that made his reputation for the man who is now the newly crowned Booker International Prize winner and who has been long touted for the Nobel Prize for literature. The book is a flowing and humorous monologue by Alexander Portnoy to his virtually silent psychoanalyst. It is a venerable tour de force of New Jersey Jewish neurosis and guilt.

Portnoy's complaint is an odyssey of sexual addiction. His early onanistic habit kept him locked in the toilet so frequently that he had to invent diarrhoea as an excuse, for which his high-strung mother assumes is caused by his eating fries instead of coming home to a hearty meal and which in one scene his eternally constipated father, jealous of Alex's free-flowing bowels, hammers at the door demanding to see evidence in the toilet bowl (a very funny scene which is parodied in the Simpsons where a young Krusty the Clown is caught practising clowning in the toilet by his overbearing Rabbi father).

As Portnoy matures, well at least ages, we see a succession of girlfriends and ever more bizarre sexual antics. A full-bodied but flat chested woman he calls the pumpkin, an emotionally stilted but sexually adventurous woman he calls the monkey and finally a Jewish woman he meets in Israel who resembles his mother but whom finds him somewhat repugnant.

It could be very easy to dismiss this book as just literary pornography but Roth uses sex to examine deeper themes, history, culture, identity, family. Themes he continues to develop in his later works such as American Pastoral and the Plot Against America, all told from Jewish characters living in or around New Jersey. I'd say for this reason that he is almost an American Mordecai Richler just a damn site dirtier.

I said that the psychoanalyst was almost silent, he has one line, the last one: 'So [said the doctor]. Now vee may to perhaps begin. Yes?'. Funny but don't let anyone read it over your shoulder!

4/5

How to Live by Sarah Bakewell

2011-06-04T13:52:00.003-04:00

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers by Sarah Bakewell (Vintage 2011)

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533. His early education was entirely in Latin leaving him with little way to communicate with his family except through the shaky Latin of his father and conversational Latin of his servants. He lived in a tower overlooking his estate, was a magistrate and sometime mayor of Bordeaux. It is hard to see how lessons on life from this mediaeval French philosopher can be relevant to a modern audience and yet throughout the centuries many people have read the Essays and seem themselves in their pages for the simple reason that he is so brutally honest and open about his life that one begins to look on Montaigne as a friend. We learn about his bowel movements, his sexual exploits, what food he likes and about his relationship with his cat.

Montaigne was a true man of the Renaissance. Carved into the roof of his library were maxims of his Greek and Roman heroes, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil and Socrates et al. His philosophy melded the Hellenic schools of Scepticism, Epicurianism and Stoicism holding key the two key principles that unite them all, eudaimonia, the pursuit of a good life and that of ataraxia, having a tranquillity of the mind. This means not being overcome by extreme emotions, and preparing oneself mentally for all the pitfalls life can offer, meeting them with a level head.

Bakewell's unconventional approach to biography pays off as one can see how fond she is of her subject, a trait which is quite contagious. Whilst Montaigne's philosophy can appear to be cold and unemotional, you can see that he is trying to save us from emotional pain, perhaps of the kind he underwent himself when he lost the closest friend of his life, his soul mate Etienne de la Boetie to the plague. But the highest compliment that can be paid to this book is that it makes you want turn to its source, the Essays themselves and for that reason alone I feel I can highly recommend this book.

5/5

In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut

2010-09-30T19:54:00.001-04:00

In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (McClelland & Stewart 2010)

Set in three parts, 'In a Strange Room' is a work of meta-fiction mixing old fashioned story telling with travelogue in a way very reminiscent of WG Sebald. The stories see the narrator (also an author named Damon) travelling first in Lesotho then throughout central Africa and finally in India. We see him interacting with an unusual rather emotionless dark German figure called Reiner with whom he goes walking, then with a group of Europeans travelling north together through Africa and then with a unstable friend hell-bent on killing herself.

The book takes its title from the William Faulkner quotation "in a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep" and if there is a theme that connects the three stories it is the discomfort that quote speaks to, for the book is a disquisition on uneasiness. Whether it is the hint of unexpressed homosexual desire, the awkwardness involved in being in a group that one has no connection or history with or of facing a traumatic situation in a country that is not just foreign to you but whose social norms are so wildly different from those of the country you call your home. First published as three short stories in the magazine Paris Review you could be forgiven for worrying that the book would be disconnected but that is really not a problem as the themes that connect the stories are so strong. The character Damon doesn't just find himself in uncomfortable situations, he is a character who is ill at ease with the world forcing him to move from place to place.

It is a short novel coming in at only 180 pages and Galgut plays a bit fast and loose with his punctuation but this has been one of the best books I've read in a long while. It stands, in my opinion, easily heads and shoulders above the other Booker shortlist novels I've read so far. I'm not sure how to rate its chances for success because whilst this type of novel is particularly suited to my tastes, I'm not sure how widely popular it would be. All I can say is that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

5/5

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

2010-09-26T22:13:00.000-04:00

The Long Song by Andrea Levy (Hamish Hamilton 2010)

Set in the Jamaica of the early nineteenth century, the Long Song is the memoir of Miss July, a woman born into slavery on the Amity plantation. July is plucked from her mother as a young child by Caroline Mortimer, the sister of the master of the plantation, to be her attendant up at the house where she is renamed Marguerite. When rumour spreads that the King of England has freed all the slaves of Jamaica, the Baptist Revolt begins. Retribution from the plantation owners is swift and violent but the path to freedom is too far advanced.

When Caroline's brother dies, the English and devoutly religious Robert Goodwin comes into the fray. After falling in love (or in lust) for Miss July, he marries Caroline so he can keep July close and the love triangle begins. However, Robert's abolitionist principles are put sorely to the test when his interest change from humanitarian to business and one soon sees that the end of slavery only worked to move the black population of Jamaica from a legal bondage to an economic one.

The story is supposed to be one of a woman with a big character who overcomes some rather extreme adversity and passes plain spoken judgement on a rather dark period of history but I don't feel that July's character was developed well enough to bring about the requisite empathy required of the reader. Her escapades throughout the book make you cast doubt on her moral centre, and okay she is a slave with little or no education but how are you supposed to feel concern for a character that you aren't convinced enough to even like? There are moments of humour and moments of pretty graphic violence but the lack of connection with the main character makes you watch it all as a pretty disinterested observer.

3/5

Room by Emma Donoghue

2010-09-18T00:09:00.000-04:00

Room by Emma Donoghue (HarperCollins 2010)

Based roughly on the case of Josef Fritzl who incarcerated and repeatedly raped his daughter Elisabeth, Room tells the story of a woman, kidnapped at the age of 19 by Old Nick and held in captivity over a number of years. Told from the point of view of her five year old son Jack, 'Room' is essentially Jack's universe where everything that exists outside of the sphere of his physical experience is 'TV'. That is until one day 'Ma' learns that 'Old Nick' has been made redundant and she realises that the relative status quo of her past existence in 'Room' has the chance of coming to an abrupt end were the house to fall into foreclosure and so she has to escape one way or another.

Did I mention the fact that the narrative came from Jack, the five year old boy? If I repeat myself it's because that it is something that needs to be seriously driven home. No matter how intelligent or how wide the vocabulary of a child of five years, he is still only five and 300 pages is a long time to go in the mind, as it were, of a five year old. At first this narrative style annoyed me to the stage that my teeth ached and even after I grew somewhat accustomed to it as the book went on, I was glad to be finished. The concept of the book is pretty morbid but there is lots of scope there for examining the impact of such a traumatic life experience on the characters not to mention how one would go about child-rearing under such extreme circumstances so it is understandable that a novel has been written on the subject however the narrative is so important to any novel that it simply shouldn't be left to a five year old to carry all by themselves.

My first reaction to this book was a violent dislike and from working in a book shop I know that quite a few people have given up on this book early on, probably people who were equally put off by the childish voice introducing them to the world of Room. I started to warm to it as events unfolded (something I didn't forsee at the outset) and I will concede that this is quite an original book on a very difficult subject and told, and developed in an intelligent way (even if it would not be the way I'd do it). Room has also been subject of many laudatory reviews and is a front-runner for the Booker Prize. This is where I start to get a sense of deja vu; here we have a book I didn't particularly like but that was loved by the critics and is also favourite with the bookies. If it does go on to win this will be exactly what happened with Wolf Hall last year! Although whereas I wanted AS Byatt's 'Children's Book' to win last time round, there has been none of the short listed books leap out of the list at me as particularly worthy winners this year but as I'm only half way through the list I shall put off my wailing and lambasting the state of modern fiction, well, at least till I've read another one.

The narrative let it down for me:
3/5

C by Tom McCarthy

2010-09-12T20:09:00.000-04:00

C by Tom McCarthy (Knopf Canada 2010)

C is for Serge Carrefax who is, I guess, what passes for the hero in this tale of the son of a wealthy family whose patriarch runs a school that teaches deaf children how to speak. Set in the early 1900s the book is split into four sections that deal with his adolescence and his intense relationship with his sister, his teenage years at a spa in Central Europe to treat his unexplained build up of what historically would have been called black bile, his young adulthood as a spotter/navigator in the budding air force of the First World War and finally his life in Egypt as the representative of the murky Empire Wireless Chain scrambling to deal with an country in the throes of a struggle for independence.

If C is for Carrefax then it is also for communication as a strong theme that runs through the novel. As a child Serge is fascinated by CB radio, tracking the beeps and background noises he picks up on the waves. His father is also interested in communications and as he experiments with an ammeter he believes that the world reverberates to the echoes of past conversations and thoughts, what he believes makes up white noise and that if it was possible to isolate the individual strands of thought and expression then one might be able to listen to the words Jesus said on the cross.

Tom McCarthy is an unusual author whose own pretensions to avant-gardism and involvement in the semi-fictional (whatever that might mean) group the International Necronautical Society makes me think he is either an interesting and boundary pushing author or someone whose head has been sucked in by the vortex created in the general area of his backside. This is certainly not a book without flaws as the plotting is patchy and the last quarter is disappointing, ending on more of a whimper than a bang. However there are some interesting scenes such as one early on where Serge and his sister start playing an early version of Monopoly then take to making it a physical game played around their estate and finally one of the imagination directed from their bird's eye view of their grounds up in the attic of the house.

McCarthy has previously written about Tintin and aspects of C hearken back to Herge's creation but given the post-modern treatment. Serge's character whilst at school studying architecture has troubles drawing buildings with any perspective and so creates a portfolio made entirely of top-down plans and that is very reflective of a character who has little depth. As booker prize prospects go I would be tempted to put my money on this one to win (although my previous selection didn't even make it into the shortlist) as the strongest of the picks I've read so far despite the problems I've found with the book but there is the chance that the judges might think it too inaccessible generally to be a suitable pick.

Interesting if not flawed:
4/5

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

2010-09-05T23:34:00.001-04:00

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Random House 2010)

Parrot is the son of a journeyman printer and apprentice engraver whose master, Mr Watkins, appears to die in a fire set by the owner of a publishing house on the discovery by local officials that the particular skills of Watkins have been used in producing forged currency, a crime punishable by death. On the run he meets a one-armed Frenchman, the enigmatic and mysterious Tilbot, in whose services he travels first to Australia, then to France and finally to America to provide assistance to Olivier.

Olivier is essentially a re-imagining of the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, the son of a noble family who managed to avoid the guillotine during the reign of terror. On finding himself snubbed as the Bourbons return to the throne following the July Revolution, Olivier's father fears for his son's safety and so with Tilbot's help Olivier's mother arranges for him to travel to America ostensibly on behalf of the French government to undertake a survey of the American Penal system but what he writes is a book on the people and institutions of the budding democracy.

If any of this sounds complicated then I can assure you that this is very much a simplification of what is a sometimes irritatingly convoluted book. The narrative goes back and forwards between the two main protagonist as the old world invades the new and there are some very telling judgements made on the culture, political institutions and the nature and social etiquette of the people of the new democracy and as an Englishman living in Canada it has made think a lot about the differences of living in a nation that still has some notions of aristocratic entitlement as compared with a nation when essentially anyone can reach the heights that come with public office, especially when one has money to grease the wheels.

Peter Carey I think had a great theme for his novel and there is in evidence some first rate research and one can almost see the 18th century America through de Tocqueville's ever widening eyes however he didn't really seem to have thought up a story to match his vision and as the story meanders its way with little or no conclusion at the end one can't help but feel that the plot was made up on the fly, so to speak. There are some great set-pieces but they don't do enough to rescue the book from its faults. I don't think Parrot and Olivier in America deserves to be short-listed for the Booker and it is definitely not strong enough to win.

Great idea but the plot let it down

3/5

February by Lisa Moore

2010-08-28T01:46:00.002-04:00

February by Lisa Moore (House of Anansi Press 2010)

On 15th February 1982 an offshore rig, the Ocean Ranger, whilst drilling an exploration well off the east coast of Newfoundland, sank in bad weather killing all 84 crew aboard. Their mayday call was picked up by the back-up vessel the Seaforth Highlander who were ill-prepared to deal with a rescue in such weather conditions and in the end they were left to watch the crew in the water succumb to hypothermia and drown.

In February 1982 Cal, the husband of Helen the main and unlikely protagonist of the novel, is aboard the Ocean Ranger. Helen has three children and is pregnant with a fourth at the time of the accident and as the story bounces backwards and forwards in time one soon grasps that there are three narrative threads in play. The first is of Helen's grief, contemporaneous with the accident and in the decades that follow. How she has to raise four children by herself and how she tries to learn every little detail about the sinking of the rig; she likes to imagine Cal playing cards when the Ocean Ranger goes down, she doesn't like to think of him knowing too long before and have to suffer the panic. Helen is also persuaded by her sister to renovate her house and the stirring of her physical and emotional desires by the continuing presence of Barry, Helen's carpenter forms the second thread.

Finally her son John followed Cal's footsteps into the oil industry first by working in the pipelines looking for weaknesses that could lead to leaks. John soon moves into a job as an advisor to the industry whose main role is to increase efficiency by making recommendations to discard unnecessary or redundant safety procedures, many of which came into force following the sinking of the Ocean Ranger. John's work requires a substantial amount of international travel and on a work trip in Iceland he meets and unknowingly impregnates a fellow Canadian traveller bringing up questions of whether he wants to inflict the effect of an absent father onto another generation.

As you can imagine of a work where grief takes centre stage, this is a very sad book and it makes you fear ever having to be in the situation of losing such a close loved one so well before their rightful time. There are moments of comic relief as middle-aged spread meets Yoga head-on but the over-arching spirit of the book is sombre and introspective. It is undoubtedly well-written as Moore brilliantly examines the nuances of love and loss. Having said that, I don't see February making it through to the Booker shortlist and whilst these may be tired criticisms of Moore, February is perhaps a little too feminine and a little too Canadian to have a wide enough appeal that the Booker usually requires.

I don't think I was the target audience for this one.
3/5

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2010-08-24T13:10:00.002-04:00

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Knopf Canada 2010)

Jacob de Zoet is a clerk in the Dutch East Indies Company stationed in Dejima, a small trading post near Nagasaki in the closed and highly secretive Japan of the 18th century. The port is effectively Japan's only conduit to the outside world and the Westerners are treated with great suspicion, spies are everywhere and Christianity is forbidden. When Jacob falls in love with Orito, midwife and assistant to the grouchy Dr Marinus, he is pulled into the murk and mire that is the politics of a closed feudal society. Things take a turn for the worse when Orito is purchased by a darkly powerful Lord Abbot and emprisoned in his shrine at Mount Shiranui.

David Mitchell is known for playing around with narrative structure as with his excellent book Cloud Atlas and in this book he manages to create instantly distinguishable voices for the Dutch and the Japanese and when the British, who had been fighting on and off with the Dutch for a couple of centuries, finally arrive on the scene, their entrance is felt as that of an alien nation. His prose is, however, far from perfect and there are devices he uses which pop-up with annoying regularity. For instance Mitchell likes to describe two things at once almost as a way of creating a feel of momentum and so there are conversations that take place during a card game, during a game of billiards, during an execution and so on with alternating lines between the different narratives and it's repeated use began to irk me. Also Mitchell's prose verges on the poetic which is perfectly okay but when towards then end of the novel, a description of Japan descends into actual rhyme it is pretty painful.

The novel crosses the boundaries of style, it is a love story, it is partly adventure, partly disturbing fantasy and there is a great deal of mystery to it and the book takes a very dark turn which isn't foretold by the opening chapters. It is, however, at heart a historical fiction and very well researched at that and as with AS Byatt's Children's Book which made the shortlist last year, one can't tell whether the book idea gave rise to the research of whether the book itself became just a vessel for displaying the research. If I was in Britain I would put a tenner on Mitchell winning the booker not because I think it's going to be the best book of the bunch (I'm far too early into my reading to make that kind of estimation) but because I think having been nominated and lost twice already, the judges may feel it is time to reward Mitchell for his course of work rather than for this novel in particular.

It is an interesting book but I wouldn't call it a classic.

4/5

The Booker Prize 2010 Challenge

2010-08-24T11:23:00.009-04:00

Last year Kristine and I challenged ourselves to read the shortlist of the booker prize as way of prompting us to read more contemporary fiction. I read five of the six and whilst I didn't think I read anything that could ever achieve classic status it was a very interesting experiment to capture a snapshot of current literary trends so why not make it a yearly thing?

This year's longlist was announced on 27th July. The aptly named Booker's dozen are:

Peter Carey - Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Donoghue - Room
Helen Dunmore - The Betrayal
Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question
Andrea Levy - The Long Song
Tom McCarthy - C
David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Lisa Moore - February
Paul Murray - Skippy Dies
Rose Tremain - Trespass
Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap
Alan Warner - The Stars in the Bright Sky

My early hunch is that one of the usual suspects will win. Either the twice denied but greatly lauded David Mitchell will be rewarded for his course of work or Peter Carey will break the records and win a third Booker prize or perhaps, having just rewarded historical fiction last year with Hilary Mantel's Tudor tome Wolf Hall, they will take a look at the more avant garde Tom McCarthy.

I can't promise to read them all before the winner is announced but I will read as many titles as I can. Keep an eye out for the reviews.

Ulysses by James Joyce

2010-08-04T13:38:00.002-04:00

Ulysses: Annotated Students Edition by James Joyce (Penguin Classics 2000)

Last month saw an article in the Guardian regarding some comments made by Gabriel Josipovici, former professor of comparative literature at Oxford University. The thrust of his argument was that the works of the current batch of lauded English novelists are the hollow works of 'prep-school boys showing off'. To quote him in full he said "Reading Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his generation -- Martin Amis, McEwan -- leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language was at first so satisfying, the cynicism which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world'.

Josipovici argues that Lawrence Sterne is still far more avant garde than the current self-proclaimed avant garde are. 'An author like Salman Rushdie takes from Sterne all the tricks without recognising the darkness underneath. You feel Rushdie's just showing off rather than giving a sense of genuine exploration'. For all the knowledge of technique they produce books that follow established plot-lines and in the end leave us unaffected because at heart they really have nothing to say.

You can choose whether to agree with Josipovici and it probably wouldn't surprise you to hear that he has a book coming out and so would profit from some timely but controversial words however I will say that there is nothing around now that can challenge Joyce for his ingenuity or inventiveness. Take David Mitchell's much lauded 'Cloud Atlas' for instance, for all his quoting of Nietzsche, his episodic structure and his thin and ultimately trivial connections between the unconnected he cannot offer up the dish of intertextuality or inventiveness of the narrative form that takes place in Ulysses.

Joyce too was frustrated with the state of literature in Ireland at the time he wrote, so much so that it drove him to continental Europe, to Paris and Trieste. He left a country, the servant of two masters (England its colonial master and Italy, its spiritual master), a country trying to muster up some semblance of national pride with a rebirth of Celtic ideals; Joyce also saw the dangers of the new nationalism inspired by people like Yeats and Synge and these ideas are parodied throughout Ulysses.

It is interesting to note that in the current batch of books longlisted for the booker prize that there is no place for Amis or McEwan or Rushdie so perhaps Josipovici is correct but I will also bet you that within the Booker's dozen there will be no author who breaks ground like Joyce did and I think we are all the worse off for it.

5/5

Talking of Joyce by Umberto Eco and Liberato Santoro-Brienza

2010-07-19T23:52:00.002-04:00

Talking of Joyce by Umberto Eco and Liberato Santoro-Brienza (University College Dublin Press 1998)

As of now I am only a third of the way through my elephantine edition of Ulysses which stands at over 1,200 pages so I decided to fit in this small and rather interesting volume of literary criticism on the works of James Joyce.'Talking of Joyce' is a collection of lectures one by Umberto Eco on Joyce's search for the perfect language given at University College Dublin on 31st October 1991, on the anniversary of that institutions conferral upon Joyce of his Bachelor of Arts and one given four years later by Liberato Santoro-Brienza on Joyce's position in the Italian literary tradition.

Umberto Eco's lecture entitled 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Bachelor' argues that the unique seminal idea of Joyce's career was to pursue grammar as 'the primary science. The rest of his life was devoted to the invention of a new grammar, and his quest for artistic truth became the quest for a perfect language'. He draws upon the Book of Kells, an example of the labyrinthine Hisperic aesthetics, as an influence on Joyce. "The book is a luscious vegetation of interlace, of stylised animal forms, of small simian figures amidst impossible foliage that covers page after page...the book is the lucid vertigo of a language that is trying to redefine the world while redefining itself, with the full realisation that - in a dark and uncertain age - the key to the revelation of the world is not to be found in a straight line but rather within the labyrinth".

Umberto Eco suggests that, for Joyce, the key to his aesthetic theory is not trying to find some pre-Babelic language, the language with which Adam spoke to God but pursuing a language that delights in imperfect complexity. 'To understand that human languages are open, imperfect and capable of begetting that supreme imperfection that we call poetry, constitutes the only aim of any quest for perfection'.

Liberato Santoro-Brienza views Joyce's literary output as a dialogue between Joyce, Aquinas, Dante, Bruno, Vico and Svevo and he traces all the veiled and not so veiled references to these authors in his works, most interesting are the links to Vico and Svevo. Giambattista Vico, the Italian philosopher, traced historical development in his Scienzia Nuova as a series of cycles, the Divine, the Heroic and the Human.When Joyce wrote Finnegan's Wake he divided it into four cycles, three long and one short, three representing each of Vico's cycle and the fourth being a reflux that draws the book back to the beginning again. Finnegan's Wake is essentially a dialogue between Joyce and Vico and demonstrates 'Vico's and Joyce's treatment of language. Joyce was acutely aware of living in an age which had witnessed the abnihilsation of the etym and he believed it was the job of the artist to build a new world of language out of the ruins of the old'. And so when the Danish author Tom Kristensen needed help with Finnegan's wake, Joyce instructed him to first read Vico.

Joyce's relationship with the author Italo Svevo is enlightening when it comes to understanding the character Leopold Bloom from Ulysses. A 25 year old Joyce met the middle-aged Svevo when the latter required English lessons to help him with some business venture that had led him to open up shop in the UK. The Jewish Svevo had two published novels already but to little renown or praise and Joyce was able to use his connections in Trieste and Paris to greatly increase his reputation and Svevo was to remain Joyce's only true author/friend. The relationship between the two closely echoes the relationship between the mature Jewish Leopold Bloom and the naive, fresh from university Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses with 'Svevo's maturer, objective, peaceable temper reacting upon the young man's fiery mantle'.

The lectures are by two Italians in English about an Irish author who preferred speaking in Italian and speaking as someone with Italian heritage it was rather charming reading about Joyce's relationship with Italy by two people who with a sense of camaraderie refer to him as Jim. Reading Joyce is a mixture of pure joy at such ingenious structure in the face of chaos and frustration as one attempts to see the wood for the trees. Reading books like 'Talking of Joyce' both act to increase one's wonder at the genius of Joyce's creation and give me a keen sense of my own ignorance for all that I don't see in his works. However Joyce probably wouldn't be so hard on me because in recognising the complexity of his own text he said that to understand it fully you would need to be an 'ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia'.

This is a small book so don't expect to find all the answers to help you unlock the secrets of Joyce's labyrinthine texts but it will give you an italianate slant on the Irish hero.

Definitely worth a read.

4/5

Interpretation and Overinterpretation by Umberto Eco

2010-07-04T23:08:00.000-04:00

Interpretation and Overinterpretation by Umberto Eco with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose (Cambridge University Press 1992)

In 1990, Umberto Eco was invited by Cambridge University to give the annual Tanner Lecture. He chose for his topic the somewhat academically contentious area of literary interpretation or rather the question of whether one can set limits to the range of what a text can be said to mean. Over the course of three lectures Eco tries to establish that, whilst it may not be possible to prove which of any competing interpretations is correct, one may be able to point out those interpretations which are perhaps unfounded. Following the three lectures are responses by Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose with a final reply to his critics by Eco although in this review I shall focus upon Eco's lectures..

In his first lecture on 'interpretation and history' Eco traces the history of Hermetic tradition in interpretation dating back from the dialogues of Hermes Trismegistus (one of my favourite names from philosophy, Trismegistus meaning thrice wise). He shows how, if we accept Hermetic thought, interpretation is essentially endless. "A plant is not defined in terms of its morphological and functional characteristics but on the basis of its resemblance, albeit only partial, to another element in the cosmos. If it is vaguely like part of the human body, then it has meaning because it refers to the body. But that part of the body has meaning because it refers to a star, and the latter has meaning because it refers to a musical scale, and this in turn because it refers to a hierarchy of angels, and so on ad infinitum'. Essentially a text would never have meaning because each interpretation could lead to another leaving the text as a meaningless shell. If we reject this theory, he argues, we arrive at the conclusion that a text has meaning. We are "not entitled to say that the message can mean everything. It can mean many things, but there are senses which it would be preposterous to suggest". This is the theme he takes up in his second lecture.

Overinterpreting texts is the subject of the second lecture and Eco starts by listing the ways in which images or words can be connected, the very basis of semiosis, by similitude, by homonymy, by irony, by sign and so on. Similarity is important for interpretation because 'the interpreter has the right and the duty to suspect that what one believed to be the meaning of a sign is in fact the sign for a further meaning'. However, as Eco puts it, 'the passage from similarity to semiosis is not automatic'. In other words if a text suggests something to you by means of similarity does not mean to say that it is a valid or useful interpretation of the text. Eco shows how Gabriele Rossetti's attempt to interpret Dante in the light of Masonic-Rosicrucian symbolism is ill-fated as he goes in search of a pelican and a rose. "Rossetti, in his desperate and rather pathetic fowling, could find in the divine poem seven fowls and eleven birds and ascribe them all to the pelican family: but he would find them all far from the rose". Rossetti's interpretation had another pitfall to overcome, that he was looking for symbolism that was not conceived until after Dante had written his Divine Comedy.

In the third lecture Eco poses the question of whether 'we should still be concerned with the empirical author of a text', his rather surprising answer is not really. Taking an example from his own work The Name of the Rose, in the trial scene William is asked 'What terrifies you most in purity?' and he responds 'haste'. On the same page 'Bernard Gui, threatening the cellarer with torture, says 'Justice is not inspired by haste, as the Pseudo Apostles believe, and the justice of God has centuries at its disposal'. A reader asked Umberto Eco what connection he had meant to establish 'between the haste feared by William and the absence of haste extolled by Bernard. The answer was that the author had intended no connection but that the text had created its effects whether he wanted them or not.

The responses are interesting. Richard Rorty, ever the pragmatist argues that interpretations are essentially pointless and what is more important is how we use and enjoy literature. Jonathan Culler attacks Eco's notion of overinterpretation and takes up his example of Rossetti's Dante interpretation arguing that it is in fact underinterpretation as Rossetti had been following false leads rather than positing valid interpretations of the material that was actually there. Finally Christine Brooke-Rose rather side-steps the debate with a lecture on Palimpsest history.

It is certainly an interesting debate and Eco makes his arguments with his usual charm and good humour (I would love to see him talk). Sadly it appears that Eco's respondents were not supplied with his lectures in advance which meant that Rorty's response was to an earlier piece by Eco in which he put forward a different argument and Brooke-Rose was off-topic nearly altogether but the most interesting aspect of the book is Eco himself. His general principle is spot on, there definitely has to be scope for determining the degree to which any given interpretation is valid. He is also right in suggesting that once a text has been created that it takes upon a life independent of its empirical author therefore any appeal to the author for a 'correct interpretation' is not strictly valid.

I also agree with Jonathan Culler that this framework should not be used to discourage the search for meaning in texts. "At the beginning of his second lecture Umberto Eco linked overinterpretation to what he called an 'excess of wonder'...this deformation professionelle, which inclines critics to puzzle over element is a text, seems to me, on the contrary, the best source of insights into language and literature that we seek, a quality to be cultivated rather than shunned'. Basically I'm saying feel free to interpret texts any way you like but I reserve the right to say that you've overinterpretted.

In sum, the book would have been better if all speakers were singing from the same hymn sheet although what does get said is very interesting.

3/5

The White Rose by Inge Scholl

2010-06-30T12:10:00.004-04:00

The White Rose: Munich 1942-1943 by Inge Scholl (Wesleyan University Press 1983)

The White Rose was a group of intellectuals in Munich who began an ill-fated campaign of resistance against the Nazi authorities. Led by Hans and Sophie Scholl (brother and sister of the author) the group included fellow medical students Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst and their professor of philosophy Kurt Huber. Over a period of nine months between June 1942 and February 1943 they wrote, printed and scattered six leaflets advocating active resistance and sabotage and calling for an end to the mass slaughter of the Jews.

"Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be 'governed' without oppositions by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes - crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure - reaches the light of day".

Sophie and Hans Scholl, and Crisoph Probst were captured when distributing their sixth and final leaflet. Spotted by the custodian of the university they had targeted, the Gestapo were informed and the trio were quickly apprehended. At first they insisted upon their innocence but they soon, and independently of each other, tried to take the entire ownership of the whole enterprise to try and save as many of their collaborators as possible. Brought before the People's Court before the notorious judge Roland Freisler and charged with high treason they stood little chance. After being lectured by Judge Freisler all three were sentenced to death. Sophie was offered a deal that neither Hans nor Cristoph were, were she to recant her beliefs she would be spared the guillotine but she declined the offer, instead she was to be executed first as an act of kindness, the Gestapo officers knowing that at that stage the waiting was the worst part.

The book was written in 1947 aimed at children from thirteen to eighteen. Aimed at children who had grown up in the Hitler Youth, "children who at that time were asking their parents, 'How was it possible for you to be taken in by the Nazis? It was written also for those of their elders who were ready to face up to their past". As well as a description of the events, the book contains transcripts of all six leaflets, the indictment for the People's Court, court transcripts and the death sentences. The message of the book is that what these kids did was important. Their resistance was short lived and other than a small group in Hamburg who redistributed the materials of the White Rose, their deeds did not inspire the mass popular resistance they desired. What it did do was give people hope. The deeds of the White Rose were heard about in the concentration camps and on the Eastern Front. Thomas Mann on his German language radio station in the States talked about their deeds in 1943 and German prisoners of war held in Russia used their example and wrote leaflets of their own campaigning for a Germany free of Nazi oppression.

Clive James dedicated his book Cultural Amnesia to Sophie Scholl and much of his essay of Sophie goes in to something of a boyish crush on Natalie Portman (whom Clive James believes would be the perfect actress for Sophie were Hollywood ever to be trusted with telling the story). Talking about the bravery of Sophie he remarks "She was probably a saint. Certainly she was noble in her behaviour beyond any standard that we, in normal life, would feel bound to attain or even comfortable to encounter. Yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous woman from the same period."

The uncomfortable question the book asks is of us. It ask us whether we would be brave enough to do as Sophie Scholl did in the full knowledge that their efforts would lead their death. Sadly I think for most of us, the best we can do is admire the deeds of the White Rose with the knowledge that we wouldn't be able to equal them.

Very inspiring!

4/5

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

2010-06-21T23:57:00.002-04:00

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James (Picador 2007)

Growing up in Britain in the Eighties and Nineties I used to watch the Australian presenter interviewing celebrities on ITV in the Clive James show amongst other things. The show featured the bizarre Cuban singer Margarita Pracatan, whom I believe Clive James (CJ) discovered in a New York department shore, and who would give unbelievably tone-deaf and Hispanically inspired renditions of pop songs, not quite high culture. Nothing of that show led me to realise that CJ harboured a secret, that he was and still is an incredibly intelligent polymath.

Cultural Amnesia is the result of many, many years of wide reading and the scribbling of notes in the margins (as well as copious underlinings and end notes). Alphabetically ordered, the book deals with over 100 writers, poets, philosophers, film directors, musicians and talk-show hosts ranging from Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Josef Goebbels, a whole host of Manns (Golo, Heinrich, Michael and Thomas), Beatrix Potter, Ernesto Sabato to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Aleksandr Zinoviev. After an introductory biographic paragraph or two CJ takes a quote of suitably aphoric quality and uses that quote as the basis of an essay.

When I started my first professional job a few years back, on or around my payday I would take the tube over to Eustion Square Station and go down to the academic branch of Waterstones on Gower Street in London. Finally earning a professional salary I was excited that I could now buy interesting books. The boring and drab reading I had to do for work was rewarding me with the chance of becoming a polymath and I started to read voraciously into semiotics; Umberto Eco, Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure and so on. CJ echoes that excitement with a very catching love of and striving towards knowledge.

As I wrote about in my earlier post on polyglossia CJ can read in an astonishing eight different languages and he talks about and references writers of German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian languages that you either could not read in English or whose works would be better to have read in the original. This could be a serious downside of the book with CJ almost taunting you with an ambrosia that was out of reach if his love of languages and their learning was not so infective (an infection I have since caught).

As wise as he is I do take issue with some of the conclusions that CJ draws. For instance in his essay on Sartre (and in quite a few others too) he is rather unjustly grilled for making the most out of his time in the resistance as he only held meetings rather than actively resisted. CJ's persistence on this point feels somewhat tacky to me, a rather poor ploy to try and undermine him. Sartre is also criticised for his failure to critique the Soviet regime and one can't help but feel that CJ is more forgiving to those who stayed silent to the Nazi atrocities. CJ is generally pretty critical of those he describes as 'gauchist', Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, George Bernard Shaw are all, amongst others, judged somewhat harshly. The reason is that, as with George Orwell, Clive James wants to drive home the wrongs of the Communist regimes of Soviet Russia and Maoist China; socialism and liberal democracy do not seem to be able to live side by side in his mind.

There are some problems with the book, some essays are not long enough (the essay on Proust should be a lot longer) and some essays fall into somewhat mindless mental wanderings and asides such as the essay on Arthur Schnitzler which is mostly made up of a discussion of the movie 'Where Eagles Dare' or more specifically, Richard Burton's hair in the movie. However, this book has excited me like none other I have read in a long time. I feel enthused to reading, learning and languages and have an Amazon wishlist a mile long so I shall not be short of inspiration for something to read for a long time to come. Because of this excitement I can only give the book one rating.

5/5

Polyglossia

2010-06-16T12:57:00.004-04:00

Today I need to make a confession that will have a large impact on any claim I could have to my being anything close to being widely read: I have never read Dante. Over the years I have owned two different editions of the Divine Comedy, one a Penguin Classics in three volumes and the other I believe was a Wordsworth Classics in one volume. The reason, having owned two different versions, that I never read either is that one of them rhymed and the other did not so which of the copies should I read? The Italian language, because of the common vowel endings, lends itself to rhyme and in the original Italian the Divine Comedy was in rhyme however how much of the poetic language would be lost by struggling to fit the English translation into an English rhyming scheme? How much would be lost in translation?

There are some authors we are reliably informed who are so intrinsic to their language that they are rendered virtually unintelligible (in terms of their original poetic value) in any translated state. In German it is Goethe, in English it is Shakespeare and we are told that to enjoy Dante we simply must learn Italian first. This leaves a problem for anyone who, possessing only one language, wishes to become widely read amongst the greats of European literature.

Clive James's answer to this problem was to become a polyglot, at least in the sense of the written word. The cultural critic is able to read in eight different languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. His technique was to take a foreign language book, usually something non-fiction like a work of history or a book of essays and then sit with a dictionary and work his way through it looking up any words he doesn't understand. He is by no means fluent in these languages and I doubt he could have an in depth conversation with someone from Japan in their language, but he can read in them and once you have that skill you open yourself to that culture. You're not just opened to books which are supposedly intrinsic to their language but to all the rest of the works, both fiction and non-fiction, which remain untranslated (and the proportion of works that remain untranslated even of well known or classic authors is huge).

This idea excites me a lot. I doubt that this is an easy route into a language and I know it will take a few books before I'm comfortable with a language but I think I'm going to give this a try. The languages I want to learn are French, German and Italian and I'll keep this blog updated with my progress.

The Managed Economy of Books

2010-06-10T15:01:00.003-04:00

The Guardian Newspaper carried a rather interesting story last week. There has been a move to protect "part of Paris's intellectual soul". The cause of this move is the worrying decline in numbers of the 'librairies' in the Latin Quarter, a central hub of Paris's cultural and educational heart down from 231 to 127 from 2000 to 2008. The mayor of Paris has set out scouts in its fifth arrondissement to hunt down locations for possible bookshops or publishing houses and then ensuring that the premises are only available for those purposes. The French capital prides itself upon its host of independent retailers and does not wish its high streets to end up resembling those of its anglo-saxon counterparts.

How effective the Parisian measures will be will be told in time but it's an interesting step and something the British should take heed of because it is a country in which the high streets of its towns and cities suffer from a tiresome and boring ubiquity with the same chain stores gracing every city. Take Waterstones for instance who own 303 stores throughout the country many of which are in London and they will, other than in their strictly academic branches, have a stocking policy that is popularist rather than enlightening or niche.

The effect of Waterstones' success can be seen on Charring Cross Road, the historical home of London's independent book stores which are closing down and not being replaced with other book stores. Were the mayor to step in he could be taking steps to ensure that the road retained its place as the cultural and intellectual heart of the city but instead the shops will go and maybe some time down the line Waterstones will open their Charring Cross branch and we'll be thankful that whilst we can't buy any more Brecht or Akhmatova, we might settle for the new Jackie Collins novel.

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

2010-06-07T23:28:00.009-04:00

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (John C Winston Company 1925)

First published in 1886 in the magazine Young Folks, Kidnapped is essentially historical fiction loosely telling the story of James Annesley, the presumptive heir to titles in both England and Scotland who, tricked by a wicked uncle and kidnapped into being an indentured servant who somehow escapes many years later and fights his way back to lay claim to his lost fortune.

Set in Scotland and to the background of the Jacobite Rebellion (the attempt to put a Stuart back on the throne following the Glorious Revolution, that pit clan against clan in Scotland) Stevenson's story follows David (Davie) Balfour who, on his father's death is sent on a mysterious errand to his wicked uncle Ebeneezer who, with an eye on the titles of his brother arranges Davie's kidnapping aboard the Brig, the vessel of the malevolent Captain Hoseason.

Violence breaks out aboard the ship when Alan Breck Stewart is brought aboard and he teams up with Davie against the treacherous crew of the Brig. Thereon there is a shipwreck, a murder (the Appin murder, an actual historical event in which the real Alan Breck Stewart was supposedly complicit in) run ins with the British Red Coats and a return to seek just claims to his property.

I chose this book because I was going to the beach and if Treasure Island was anything to go by, kidnapped should have been a good adventure story for some semi-mindless reading however I found myself somewhat bored by the novel. For adventure stories there seems to be an ideal ratio in which events are drip fed to you at such a rate that you have just enough to get a sense of what's going on but little enough to keep you reading further (people like Grisham do this very well, it doesn't make for good books necessarily but it does help build a tempo which is how people read thousands of them a year and still devour more). Kidnapped doesn't seem to achieve this because nothing enough really happens. Where there is action it is exciting and the chapters around how Davie and Alan Breck meet and take on the crew of the Brig had me glued to the pages. Without the tempo you are left to dwell on the clumsy sentences and the painful dialogue and the somewhat indecipherable Scots dialect used intermittently.

Partly why I also read Kidnapped was because it was referenced in the biography I had just read of Gladstone in which he is said to have been so absorbed by the novel that he finished it in one day and was none to pleased with any interference to that reading. Gladstone's praise isn't without prestigious company as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and even Margaret Atwood list the book amongst their favourites which makes me feel as if I've missed something.

The story is interesting, the backdrop even more so I just wish a bit more action happened. Sadly I think you need to look to more renown Stevenson books if you want a good beach holiday book.

2/5

Gladstone by Roy Jenkins

2010-05-26T11:18:00.007-04:00

Gladstone by Roy Jenkins (Pan Books 1995)

Other than Queen Victoria herself, William Ewart Gladstone is probably the persons who defines the Victorian period. Four times Prime Minister (a record so far unmatched and very unlikely to be matched in the years to come) in a career spanning 1832-1895.

After the typical Prime Ministerial education of Eton and Oxford, Gladstone first made his mark on the world in a fiercely conservative tome 'The State in its Relationship with the Church' in which he argued that membership in the Church of England should be prerequisite for anyone who wished to serve in public life and that the aim of the nation should be to uphold the principles of the Church (it is something of an irony that Gladstone was the man to bring about the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and argued for the same in Scotland and Wales). Lord Attlee described Gladstone as being a 'frightful old prig' for his religiosity particularly in relationship to his proposal to his wife. 'Fancy' he said 'writing a letter proposing marriage including a sentence of 140 words all about the Almighty. He was a dreadful person'.

Gladstone was first elected as MP for Newark in a semi-rotten borough and supported by a local duke, hardly a democratic start. His first major oration in the House of Commons was rather surprisingly pro-slavery with a defence of the negro apprentice schemes on the West Indian plantations, talking for over two hours (a pretty standard length for a Gladstone oration). Gladstone had a pretty amazing career prior to taking the highest office serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer in successive governments effectively he was the man who made the job what it is today. Jenkins argues that 'Churchill would have been little more than a footnote to history had he died on the threshold of his premiership. This would certainly have been true of Salisbury had he gone in 1886, or of Macmillan had he done so in 1956...but such obscurity would not have been the fate of Gladstone had he died instead of becoming Prime Minister in 1868.

On being told that the Queen had requested Gladstone to form his first government he uttered the immortal phrase 'my mission is to pacify Ireland' and his Irish policy was to dominate all four of his premierships. In his first premiership Gladstone managed to enact legislation disestablishing the Church of Ireland, reforming land rights and access to the Irish universities however it was the decisive issue of Home Rule which thwarted his attempt to bring peace to that land and caused somewhat irreparable divisions within the Liberal party (which were later blown apart in the power struggle between Asquith and Lloyd George) as the Whigs deferred to the Conservatives in large numbers.

Gladstone was such a strange man. In his earlier years his passion was to rescue prostitutes, a pursuit to which he devoted a large amount of his time and energy spending many hours talking to these women about religion, even when he was in high office. Whilst these activities no doubt expressed some sexual repression for which Gladstone punished himself (an act his diary either noted as 'the scourge' or was annotated with mark that looked rather like a little whip) there is no reason to believe that his actions were nothing short of moral and charitable although one cannot imagine a politician today being able to act like this and rather speaks to a certain naivity of Gladstone's as well as a firm belief in his own moral rectitude. In later life the rescuing of prostitutes was replaced by an equally bizarre hobby of chopping down trees, a pursuit he encouraged his children to take part in.

Gladstone was a voracious reader and is said to have read some 40,000 volumes throughout his life although his favourites were always the Latin and Ancient Greek classics, Homer, Dante and Horace (his speeches were littered with untranslated Latin and Greek quotations). The sheer volume of books despite having worked the highest offices in Britain shows one of the key Gladstone characteristics which is that he believed himself at war with time and it was his duty to fit as much into a day as he possibly could.

The book is well written from a man who has had his own time as Chancellor of the Exchequer and also his own turn at dividing political parties (as when he fractured the Labour Party to create the short lived Social Democrat Party which eventually merged with the Gladstone's old Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrat Party). He rather glosses over a lot of the nitty gritty of the different Gladstone premierships however to go into that detail would probably require a book of some number of volumes that I most certainly would not have bought. The book also lacks a summary chapter which would have been nice to tie things up and not end upon the sad note of the Grand Old Man's death.

If you're interested in the politics of Victorian Britain then this book is a must buy.

4/5

On Snooker by Mordecai Richler

2010-05-12T16:19:00.008-04:00

On Snooker: The Game and the Characters who Play it by Mordecai Richler (Knopf Canada 2001)

This is a weird book, weird in the sense that two parts of life I always considered separate somehow manifest themselves into this one volume and I found it very hard reconciling my visions of Mordecai Richler as a working class Jewish, smoked meat sandwich eating hustler from St. Urbain Street in Montreal with the waistcoats, bow ties and bottled water that is the professional snooker circuit in Britain.

Richler's book details the origins of the game and the word itself and goes into the lives of some of the characters of the game. Alex Higgins man seemingly wrought on self-destruction, Jimmy White who seems to have done pretty well for himself despite his perennial loser tag, the successful but largely ignored Canadian Cliff Thorburn, the less successful but much more of a cause célèbre in Kirk Stevens. He, however, does not place his loyalty where the drama lies as it seems most fans do, he pins all his hopes on Stephen Hendry winning that one more world championship.

What is more interesting is why Richler is a fan himself. Richler tells us that 'North American literary men in general, and the Jewish writers among them in particular, have always been obsessed by sports. We acquire the enthusiasm as kids and carry it with us into middle age and beyond, adjudging it far more enjoyable than lots of other baggage we still lug around. Arguably we settled for writing, a sissy's game, because we couldn't "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee," pitch a curveball, catch, deke, score a touchdown.'

I want Richler's life. He spent half his year wintering in England living in an apartment in Chelsea (an was hence able to follow the snooker) and the other half in Canada spending his summers on Lake Memphremagog. I feel that we would have gotten on very well, Hendry was my favourite player, I also have an irrational dislike towards Stephen Lee. If you know snooker then this book won't tell you too much that you didn't already know but my image of Richler is now radically altered. I particularly like his reasons for why Snooker gave him hope and I shall end on that:

"Look at it this way: if Higgins could make a maximum, or David Cone pitch a perfect baseball game, then just maybe, against all odds, a flawless novel was possible. I can't speak for other writers, but I always start out pledged to a dream of perfection, a novel that will be free of clunky sentences or passages forced in the hothouse, but it's never the case. Each novel is a failure of sorts. No matter how many drafts I go through, there will always be compromises here and there, pages that will make me wince when I read them years later. But if Higgins could achieve perfection, maybe, next time out, I could too."

4/5

The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe

2010-05-08T00:56:00.006-04:00

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory by David Plouffe (Viking 2009)

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 looked to be the most amazing upset. As a young and vibrant black senator with negligible experience who would not only have to go in and carry all the states won by John Kerry back in the 2004 election but make inroads into traditionally red states Obama did not seem to have an obvious path to victory. This book shows how the impossible was achieved, not just defeating McCain but triumphing over the other must beat candidate, Hilary Clinton.

Beating Clinton was quite an achievement and nearly the first half of the book is dedicated to the first year spent almost entirely in Iowa building up a phenomenal grass roots base and putting Obama on the map. Winning Iowa would mean building up the momentum that, a long way down the line, finally brought him the nomination. His path to victory was built upon expanding the electorate, registering new voters, appealing to moderate republicans and campaigning in the counties and areas of the states which would maximise his delegate count and thus secure him the nomination.

The book shows Obama to be better organised, better prepared, better disciplined, better financed and running to a better strategy than either Clinton or McCain. There is a lot to admire in the way they fought these campaigns, the grass roots organisations they built up rather than relying on in-state old party king-makers, the use of new media to communicate with members and supporters and often to break news directly to the party first is all commendable. One cannot help but feel that they these are people who know the system and played to the system. Against Clinton the focus of the campaigning was winning the delegates and against McCain it was about playing the board making the best electoral college arithmetic and arrive at the magical number 270. At no point do you feel that winning the popular vote was a real concern and I guess that just means that they were smart but one cannot help but consider the efficacy of an electoral system that would allow the popular vote to be a secondary concern.

A very interesting dose of insight!

4/5

The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley

2010-04-23T14:47:00.007-04:00

The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley (Viking 2010)

The Servants of the People published in 2000 chronicled Labour's election and first term in power, this book details everything that has happened since. Rawnsley, political columnist for the Observer, quotes from quite an impressive array of sources as he writes the story of New Labour, 9/11 and the war on terror, the Iraq War and the dodgy dossier that got us there and the financial crisis. It also goes into deep details of the personalities and conflicts between the main protagonists.

Rawnsley comes across as quite Blairite and for him other than when he details the David Kelly affair in which is he quite vitriolic about Blair's involvement, he is portrayed almost as the man who can do no wrong and when things do not turn out as they should, the finger of blame is nearly always pointed at Brown and those in his team who push him into being more extreme than he would be on his own (all of Douglas Alexander, Ed Balls, Ed Milliband and Damian McBride do not come out of this book looking good). In a chapter entitled 'the long goodbye' he details what he sees as the highlights of TB's 13 years in power:

"generous investment in health and education which reversed years of neglect of the public realm. State-funded childcare was introduced alongside the minimum wage. There was considerable redistribution, mainly the work of Chancellor, from the affluent to the poor. Tax and benefit changes since 1997 broadly raise the incomes of the poorest fifth of society. This was not enough to entirely counteract the global forces which were stretching the inequalities and the super-rich continued to pull away from every one else...he left Britain wealtheir and more diverse, but not much happier than how he found it."

The book received a great deal of press pre-publication for the details of Gordon Brown's temper and the book paints him as palpably mad. He is seen as moody, sulking, petty and violent. The reason, it is made to look, that there was no real challenge to Brown for the Labour leadership is that he crushed any promising talent that might challenge what he viewed as his solemn right to govern Britain. He and his team are shown to continually brief and leak against Blair, the content of his budgets were rarely divulged up to a couple of hours before they were announced when they were already at the printers and he is shown to be the worst micro-manager possible.

The book is far from perfect and you are painfully aware that the author is still working with the people he is writing about and so tries to stay away from making personal judgement. However in an election year and despite whatever economic competence he portrays Brown as having you cannot but arrive at the conclusion that Gordon Brown is insane.

An interesting if not biased account.

4/5

My Struggle by Paul Merton

2010-03-03T13:03:00.005-05:00

My Struggle by Paul Merton (Boxtree 1995)

As with his much more recent book and accompanying television series on the heroes of silent comedy show Paul Merton has a real interest in the earlier forms of comedy and this book is no different in what is a spoof fictionalised 'autobiographical' account of an East End music hall performer.

Born to theatrical parents, the music hall act Bert and Mary (the Marvellettes) a water stirrer and a cough check girl who surprised a lot of people by marrying very quickly 'the ceremony lasted only eleven seconds', Paul was quite literally shot into fame via a vintage cannon, a rubberised nappy, an overhead smash that would have graced the centre court at Wimbledon and the safe hands of King George V. Baby Paul's early days in Hollywood involved acting in Western's before he could talk and throwing his rattle in a fight with a Sioux Indian. He returns to England in acrimony and life begins a series of ups and downs, entertaining the Germans during the second world war, radio comedy with Peter Sellers, game shows and children's entertainment alongside his faithful hippopotamus. There are of course several murders, a friendship with Prince Charles and a defining relationship with an agent with whom he communicates through the second-hand fridge section of the newspaper 'Dalton's Weekly'.

The jokes start, of course, with the title which needs translation into German for its effect. The book is a very nineties and a very English phenomenon so be prepared for some Bruce Forthsyth and Max Bygraves jokes. It is thoroughly sarcastic and incredibly tongue in cheek and I'd argue that it has also not aged well. There are some passages which made me laugh aloud but as the book goes on you get the feeling that he ran out of enthusiasm with the project and the narrative begins to meander. I am a fan of Paul Merton and his rather unique sense of humor and so have a soft spot for this book but I can't actually contend that it's any good.

I love it despite all its faults:

2/5

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

2010-02-22T13:29:00.009-05:00

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr (Macmillan 2009)

Written, as it were, as a prequel to his book and accompanying television series 'A History of Modern Britain' this book charts, as Andrew Marr puts it, England 'from Queen Victoria to V.E. Day'. The books illustrates the rise and fall of Edwardian Britain, the rise of the working classes, chartists, trade unions, suffragettes (and suffragists) and countless other groups. Britain ceased to be a country ruled from grand country estates and power passed to the people and Britain became a true democracy. In the process she underwent the Boer War as well as two World Wars and had approximately eleven different Prime Ministers, the death of the Liberal Party and the birth of the Labour Party.

Except during the world wars when the history is presented in a more linear order, Andrew Marr presents us with a television handy series of scenes or vignettes charting not just the political or military aspects of the history but the social scenes including some great sections on music hall, the birth of the motor industry and the early days of the BBC. When he does the political history Marr has a knack of cutting through to the heart of complicated sets of facts such as the manoeuvres that led to the passing of the Parliament Act ending the power of the House of Lords and propelling Lloyd George into prominence and the machinations that enabled Churchill to come back into the fold as Neville Chamberlain proved an ineffective war leader.

The book is very readable and Andrew Marr shows himself as a revisionist historian showing sympathy with the tactics of oft criticised generals such as Haig and Kitchener (they after all did not know then what we know now...although I'd like to venture that we don't quite know now what they knew then either), praising Chamberlain's preparations for war and criticising Churchill for all that he didn't accomplish trying to show that he was not the steadfast and power hungry man making every decision from the top. His book is also written from quite a leftist perspective, the heroes of the story are no doubt people like Seebohm Rowntree treading the streets of York chronicling dire cases of poverty, the Welsh railwaymen fighting to unionise, the new radicals as Lloyd George and Churchill were (although Churchill's radicalism came with not so much concern for civil liberties and a rampant thirst for risky military adventure) and growth of the Labour movement is lauded, the growth of right reviled.

I recently criticised Peter Ackroyd for using popular historians as sources in a piece of popular history. Andrew Marr goes one step further and quotes from no sources whatsoever and the few endnotes he uses prove utterly useless because no page numbers are given in the notes section. He claims to have done the research entirely by himself and it shows as there are factual errors, and events are glossed over or generalised. Also if you've studied this period of history in any length (and in British schools the wars are covered many times) he presents no surprises. It is a book written to be televised and that tv series is a whole other kettle of fish (his impressions are excruciating). I wanted to dislike this book but Andrew Marr, despite his popularism and bombastic and journalistic style prose, comes across very amiably and it certainly doesn't hurt to be a leftist to read this book so for the first time I shall reward a book higher than 3/5.

It's a close call but it just makes it to:

4/5

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

2010-02-08T15:30:00.011-05:00

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Virago 2009).

Set in 1948, Dr Faraday is the son of working class stock who one evening is called out to the Hundreds Hall, the seat of the Ayres family, the estate where his mother worked when he was young as a nursemaid. This is just the beginning of his entanglement with the house and its family; Mrs Ayres the widowed matriarch and hangover from Edwardian society, her son Roddie, an injured and limping veteran of the war now master of the estate though not coping with the responsibility and Caroline, the intelligent but plain daughter who is often to be found wandering around the estate with her dog.

Things take a sinister turn as Roddie becomes convinced that he is being visited by a phantom with malicious intent who is leaving dark marks around his room and when the Ayres's dog attacks the young daughter of a nouveau riche family only new to area it begins his descent into what Faraday believes to be a severe nervous disorder.

The book is essentially a story of the end of the Edwardian dynasties and the break up of the estates of the landed gentry that followed the second world war and the election of Clement Atlee's Labour government. It is also a gothic-esque ghost story in the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe however I draw that similarity very loosely as it is at best a pastiche of that story telling. The book reminds me of peristalsis with its slow and steady pace building up a tension that releases itself not with a bang but with a wimper as any dramatic tension is dissolved with a disappointing last 100 pages. Dr Faraday proves an extremely boring narrator and as his affairs become increasingly entangled with those of the Ayres' it's hard to muster the requisite sympathy.

I have now read five of the six shortlisted books of the 2009 Booker Prize and I cannot say that I have been overly impressed by the quality. Hilary Mantel's' Wolf Hall' with its nauseating prose and unbelievable revisionist history, Adam Fould's rather insubstantial 'The Quickening Maze', Simon Mawer's screenplay of a novel in 'The Glass Room' and probably the best of the lot in AS Byatt's charming Middlemarch-esque tale of two Edwardian families in 'The Children's Book', none of these are books one can imagine recalling in ten years time, from this roster of historical fiction I do not see anything approaching classic status.

I am now fully aware that I have now reviewed three books and so far they have all been 3/5 and I'm afraid this shows the forgettable nature of them, 2 would seem too harsh and 4 unmerited therefore I'm afraid I shall have to do so again.

Probably better just wait for the movie:

3/5

The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand

2010-01-17T16:34:00.004-05:00

The invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand (Verso - 2009)

On May 14th 1948 the British Mandate of Palestine and the Jewish People's Council issued 'The Declarations of the Establishment of the State of Israel'. It reads as follows:

"The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept their faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and to hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom'.

This is a history I have never questioned, the people of Judea, later renamed Palestine by the Romans, were forced out of their lands, dispersed and lived in exile of thousands of years before their return and the founding of the state of Israel. Throughout the book Sand attempts to undermine some of the central tenets of Zionism and nationalistic right wing politicians in Israel. He attempts to show that the Jewish people aren't all the racially pure descendants of the Hebrews (the chosen people). That there was never a mass exodus of people during the Roman occupation of Judea, that although modern Judaism isn't quite the proselytizing religion now, the ranks of Jews throughout the middle east and the Mediterranean came (at least in part) through mass conversions and that the present day Palestinians (at least in part) do also descend from the ancient Hebrews who after the Arab invasion converted to Islam to reap the tax benefits.

I am no historian therefore I can't tell you about the veracity of the events as he states and whilst the arguments he makes are interesting there is quite a lot of dramatism and hyperbole in the way he makes them. What is more interesting than the book is perhaps the reception it received. Topping the best-selling lists in Israel when it was first published in Hebrew, it has won prizes in its French translation and it has brought itself a considerable reaction in the English translation. Many academics have questioned the author's credentials to write such a book (a history professor but not of Jewish history) and bloggers have been fiercely divided (the book is either essential reading or the work of a Stalinist anti-semite.

Sand's purpose seems to be twofold, to dispel the idea that Judaism is something more than a religion and to undermine the idea of their divine right to the land of Israel. His sights are firmly set on the Zionism and the right wing politicians of modern Israel. It feels as if he sets up a belief system that perhaps few genuinely follow and creates targets for himself that are easy to knock down. I was uneasy about carrying this book with me daily and the reaction of some being to call Sand an anti-semite make me think I do have reason to have felt that way. I feel that Sand's intentions have been honourable but his execution perhaps flawed. Interesting nonetheless.

3/5

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

2010-01-10T16:50:00.008-05:00

I read an awful lot of interesting books last year and I regret that I did not take the time to record them so here seems as good a place as any and if there are nice publishers out there who want to send me preview copies of their books then I'm a more than willing recipient.

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (Vintage - 2001)

After Peter Ackroyd finished writing this 800 page monster he suffered a heart attack and for Peter this was something quite appropriate of London as a city, an angry and violent place; a place that kills (although I might suggest that his portly stature belies a different truth). This is a history book without chronology which rather than following a standard narrative (Romans, Normans, Plague, Fire, Queen Vic, Empire and Blitz) is more a series of essays on London as Theatre, Crime and Punishment, Mobocracy and Violence etc... As disconnected as that sounds there are themes that penetrate the essays: London's innate theatricality or the continuities that exist and have throughout the centuries. Camberwell, for instance, as the home of disquiet was invaded by Wat Tyler during the peasants revolt, that the Chartist movement grew up there, that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were welcomed there first on their return from Botany Bay, that a revolutionary press was founded upon the green by the likes of Elanor Marx and that during his stay this press was used frequently by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that in the 90s the communist daily the Morning Star had its offices in the area and that now it is inhabited by the magazine for the homeless and unemployed, the Big Issue.

I've learnt some interesting details about events and people some of which leave me wondering how there has never been a film about them. The story of Jack Sheppherd is one such story. He was a criminal hero of london held at the infamous Newgate Prison which once stood where the Old Bailey stands today and who gained notoriety by escaping from confinement six times using his skills gained as a carpenter's apprentice.

The first time he was arrested he escaped within three hours by cutting open the roof and lowering himself to the ground using the sheets from his bed as a rope. The second time he was pinioned with links and fetters and managed to saw through the fetters, cut an iron restraint and bored through a wooden bar nine inches thick. While out he was recaptured by the notorious criminal taker Jonathan Wild and sentenced to death. Somehow he managed to smuggle in a spike with which he managed to carve an opening in the wall and with the help of friends on the outside was dragged out through it disappearing into the crowds of the Bartholemew Fair. Once again he was recaptured and brought back to Newgate and he was removed to the 'stone castle', chained to the floor, legs secured with irons and hands cuffed and kept under surveillance. Somehow he managed to slip out of the cuffs, loose a link from the chains on his legs, squeeze his body through the chains and then with a nail broke the locks of five doors on the way to his escape. During his freedom he stole some money, bought a suit and hired a coach and following on with the theme of London theatricality, drove the coach right through the front gates of Newgate Prison. This time he was recaptured within two weeks and sentenced to be hanged within the week. Sheppherd had one more escape planned but the pocket knife with which he wished to cut his noose was found upon his body and on the 16th November 1724 he was finally executed. It's a fantastic story with so much intrigue and showmanship, would be a wonderful film, I'm sure Johnny Depp's available.

Now for the confession, I didn't like this book. Peter Ackroyd's pretension strikes you from the off with the title 'The Biography' as if stating its place as the definitive book on London which it certainly is not. There is so much that annoys me, first is that he is a popular historian but his sources are of other popular historians (I can't count the number of times that Jenny Uglow is quoted for instance), there is little evidence of any actual academic historiography in view and in fact the book feels like an aggregation of other people's work. Quite often he uses literature when he's seeking to make a point which also annoys, I'm quite happy with quotations from literature but if you're trying to make a point about a characteristic of London history or people then surely the connections are better made with actual people or events? And speaking of events, some are so horribly glossed over (like the great plague) that you wonder how ever this book could be considered definitive. The interesting facts are too few and far between and the obscure points he makes could be made about any city and its relevance to London appear slim. I really did want to enjoy this book not least because it is about the city I live in and see about me every day but because I was going to be with it for 800 pages however Peter Ackroyd's pomp and arrogance were too much for me too overlook and I am confident that there are far better books on London history to be had out there.

To sum up, it's a bit disappointing.

3/5

The origins of mythology...possibly

2008-04-12T17:56:00.007-04:00

This image is one you will probably recognise if you've followed the news recently. She is Lali and was born in a village on the edge of Delhi with an exceedingly rare condition called Craniofacial Duplication meaning that she has been born with two sets of eyes, noses, mouths and so on. In her native town she has been feted as a miracle. Her father admitted to being scared but it didn't take long for the paternal instincts to take over which is quite commendable of him. One could imagine that in less enlightened times she would either be locked into an institution. The reactions of the general public are, according to the BBC article on the subject, less enlightened:

"Faced with something they are unable to comprehend, the villagers believe she is the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess. There's even talk of a temple being built in her honour.

Lali doesn't remind me of any Hindu goddess but then I don't know many of them. She does, however, remind me of the Roman God Janus. Wikipedia reliably informs me that Janus was (or is I suppose if you believe in him, and if you don't I guess that makes you an atheist like me) the God for gates, doorways, beginnings and endings. What he is or was is less interesting than the origins of the mythology. Would it be an outlandish theory to argue that the legend of Janus was inspired by an early example of Craniofacial Duplication? Without our understanding of biology or physiology one can't begin to imagine what the reaction of early people would be to a child born with two faces. Would they sacrifice it to their God or celebrate it as, well, a miracle and build temples in its honour? Of course this isn't something I could begin to prove but when you start thinking along these lines then other myths begin to appear to potentially have wholly natural origins.

This is Lakshmi Tatma and she was a pair of ischiopagus conjoined twins born in yet another village in India back in 2005. Her twins head atrophied in the womb due to underdevelopment and so it looked like she was one girl with four arms and four legs. She recently underwent 27 hour surgery to remove the extraneous limbs and will probably be back in hospital many more times in her life. According to yet another BBC article the reaction of the people of her village was to announce her birth as being the reincarnation of yet another Hindu God:

"The child has been hailed by some in her village in Bihar as the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi."

Lakshmi isn't the only Hindu God whose appearance that might have its origins in this particular form of conjoined twins. This is of course Vishnu, the God of preservation. I'm sure I've got you thinking now because it is possible. Let me give you another idea, this time from something that has its origins in the world of voodoo. Rabies is a viral zoonotic neuralinvasive disease which causes inflammation of the brain in mammals. It is nearly always lethal (in fact there are only six known cases where people have survived). Let me quote from wikipedia on the symptoms it involves:

"The period between infection and the first flu-like symptoms is normally two to twelve weeks, but can be as long as two years. Soon after, the symptoms expand to slight or partial paralysis, cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behavior, paranoia, terror, hallucinations, progressing to delirium.[citation needed] The production of large quantities of saliva and tears coupled with an inability to speak or swallow are typical during the later stages of the disease; this can result in "hydrophobia", where the victim has difficulty swallowing because the throat and jaw become slowly paralyzed, shows panic when presented with liquids to drink, and cannot quench his or her thirst. The disease itself was also once commonly known as hydrophobia, from this characteristic symptom. The patient "foams at the mouth" because they cannot swallow their own saliva for days and it gathers in the mouth until it overflows."

Just as interesting as the symptoms are the methods of transmission:

"The virus is usually present in the nerves and saliva of a symptomatic rabid animal. The route of infection is usually, but not necessarily, by a bite. In many cases the infected animal is exceptionally aggressive, may attack without provocation, and exhibits otherwise uncharacteristic behaviour."

Zombies, zombies, zombies...that's what I could have just been describing. Mythology has its origins wherever there are unexplained phenomena and from our desire to have an answer so that we think we know the truth about the world around us we latch on to those who purport to have the answers. Have you noticed that miracles don't happen so much these days...go figure.

Can you keep a secret?

2008-04-10T22:19:00.006-04:00

I'm tired and grouchy so what better vehicle for what little energy I have remaining than to take a moment aside to wax whingeful about a pet peeve of mine: PostSecret. For the origins of my distaste it is probably best to illustrate with an example. "When I see an airplane I watch it in case it crashes. So I can be a witness (on tv)". What utter drivel, I'm sorry but this really gets on my tits, this is no secret and it is certainly not worthy of dissemination, it is an awful transparent attempt at sounding deep and profound. Arse gravy of the highest order. I was impressed by Post Secret when it first gained notoriety and was shocked by the frank and disturbing admissions that you found scrawled anonymously on the postcards they featured but as with so many internet phenomena they have become the victims of their own success and being 'published' on their website, or in one of their many books has become something to be desired...even if you don't happen to actually have a secret.

This post for instance: "I like hopeful street art". Yup, I can see why you're keeping that one to yourself. Admitting that in certain parts of this town would be like admitting you were David Mellor or even worse, John Selwyn Gummer (I'm sorry if you don't know who these people are...hell I'm sorry I do). Anywho...yes...the point is that I really couldn't give one toss what mood of street art you like, your profundity has the depth of Peter Andre and commands about the same amount of my interest.

So to the producers of the unadulterated piffle, can you keep a secret? Please?

Unmoved by the unmoved mover

2008-03-31T17:46:00.002-04:00

It's funny how in philosophy everything seems to begin with Aristotle. Even the most basic philosophical distinction, that between physics and metaphysics or essentially between science and philosophy dates back to his book 'the Physics' -- everything that didn't make it into that book forms the basis of what we call metaphysics.

When it came to the origins of the universe Aristotle wasn't so advanced as to predict the big bang theory however he posited the idea of a first cause, a cause that was itself not the effect of a prior cause but a first cause. Aristotle argued that there is movement in the universe and this movement had an origin, this is the unmoved mover

“The rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be."

Thomas Aquinas took this argument further with his Quinquae viae or 'Five Ways' in his Summa Theologiae as he used this Aristotelian concept as an argument for the existence of God. The argument takes this format:

There is movement in the universe
Everything that moves is moved by a mover
It is impossible for there to be infinite regress
Therefore there must be a first mover, an unmoved mover from which all other movement is generated
We call this mover God

This is, of course, clearly bollocks. First of all there are very big and unprovable assumptions like 'everything that moves is moved by a mover' and 'it is impossible for there to be infinite regress'...why? But I'm feeling very generous so lets move beyond that to 'we call this mover God'. One of the most basic precepts of semiotics is that the naming of concepts is arbitrary so by calling anything 'God' what magic did Aquinas wish to impart? Why not call lamppost or how about Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel?

My generosity knows no bounds and lets even look past the arbitrary name relationship and call it, as Aquinas wished, God but what do we 'know' (and I emphasise know here in the platonic: justified true belief sense) about this God...well sod all actually, that he is a first movement and that's it. Even if you ignored the logical problems all this argument supports is a Thomas Paine type Deism where God features merely as a first cause and not as an all powerful hands on deity. But still one step further, lets assume that the God is an all powerful hands on God...why would that make him good? I think the good/bad dichotomy is drivel and a hangover of our binary underdeveloped brains, but lets suppose there is a God, and for all I know there might be as I can't disprove one in the way that I cannot disprove Russell's teapot or the flying spaghetti monster, but even if there is then what possible grounds could I have for believing him peaceful rather than malign because if it's the bible then Yahweh is not a God I wish to know.

Newspeak

2008-03-02T16:01:00.003-05:00

George Orwell was an intelligent man and seemed to have quite a good grasp of semiotics and the importance of language and its capacity to structure and regulate thought. In 1984 he created the concept of 'newspeak' which was a creation of the state with the aim of regulating how people think and exorcising thought which would be harmful to its interests:

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought, that is a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as it is dependent on words"

The word free, as in political freedom, became undesirable in Oceania and its use was restriced to a negative use, for instance the dog was free from lice. I could go on and list Newspeak words but Wikipedia does it better than I could so I suggest you check out the relevant article. What interests me more than the fictional world is how this principle is used in the here and now.

A good example of Newspeak is the political correctness campaign or the campaign for plain English and these are two campaigns I generally support. The former started off a campaign to make our use of language more gender neutral. For many, gone are the days of chairmen and manholecovers we now have chairperson and peopleholecovers. I'm generally supportive not because I think any one instance will offend either sex but because we have a language that belies a history of male dominance and reaffirms those positions by their constant use. The campaign for plain English works in a similar way by making the complicated langauge used in law for instance, or politics, accessible to the layman. In the law this has meant the irradication of much of the Latin used, terms like plaintiff and defendant are now replaced by claimant and respondent. They seem like small gestures but they are steps towards the breaking down of class and gender divisions.

More cynical attempts to control public perception with Newspeak are the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan those who fought against the invading coalition forces were not the resistance but they were enemy combatants, a position that denied them the basic Geneva Convention rights. In Iraq the term used was 'insurgents' but even this seems to be politically sensitive as it admits there is a problem and now the official term is concerned local nationals. Politics is rife with this sort of language, ways of circumventing truth by the careful choice of words and this is a major reason people are disillusioned by the process.

I'd always rather be won over by cunning argument than subverted by the 'right' words.

I've got two legs

2008-02-27T14:13:00.003-05:00

At work I operate with two monitors. I always wondered what sort of crazy people would do that and consigned it to pit of things done by graphic designers and software editors. I actually need to access enough documents simultaneously these days that I could probably do with another.

The number two is quite interesting because it's all around us, not just my visual display units but my eyes, ears, nostrils, nipples, legs, arms and other assorted extremities...ahem. There are two magnetic poles, two sexes, two terrestrial BBC channels, two premier league football teams in Manchester...okay the last two aren't so interesting. Early man would have associated with the number two as that was the number of large celestial light producing bodies in the sky visible with the naked eye, the Sun and the Moon. In fact much of our understanding of the world comes from contrasting things with their polar opposite; good from bad, dark from light, sweet from sour and so on. This is a key tenet of structural semiotics if anyone's interested.

So, two is quite interesting but that makes three even more so because in many early cultures it simply did not exist, counting schemes went one, two, lots. In early Mesopotamia they used the word 'es' for three but it didn't mean three it just meant plural, just as we would add an 's' on the end of words for pluralisation, it worked in the same way. Even better were the civilisations where numbers greater than two were counted in combinations of one and two. In Australia, for instance, the Aranda used 'ninta' for one and 'tara' for two, three became 'tara mi ninta' and four was 'tara ma tara', any more than four and they were back to 'lots'. There are similar examples from Ancient Egypt and China but I fear I'd only be getting repetitive.

I'm by no means ignorant of technology but computers generally baffle me. They have one great advantage over us in that they do not have to conceptualise numbers which we do if they are to 'mean' something to us. We're not so good at dealing with the abstract, and even then numbers greater than five or six become difficult to conceive. The fact that we see the world still with such binary vision leads me to the conclusion that we've not evolved as far as we give ourselves credit and strangely I find it comforting.

Barack Obama is a homosexual martian

2008-02-25T13:17:00.004-05:00

I also understand that he's a gypsy paedophile, a former member of the KGB and the love child of Fidel Castro and Michael Moore. He actually flew the first plane into the trade centre and is single-handedly responsible for most unsolved murders across America.

I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Hilary Clinton on taking campaign tips from Rupert Murdoch, it's about time sister.

The Age of Enlightenment -- Turning Back the Clock

2008-02-17T17:07:00.004-05:00

I've always been rather intrigued by the Enlightenment; I idolise people like David Hume and Sir Isaac Newton. Aristotle was a clever chap but his understanding was of his time. Theology grew as a means of adapting Aristotle to fit with Christian teaching, a job completed almost entirely by Thomas Aquinas and from that point on to challenge Aristotle was to challenge the church and those that did faced sever consequences -- one doesn't have to look much further that Galileo Galilee for evidence. Isaac Newton changed all of this, his empirical approach to understanding meant that knowledge could only be attained by experiment and with this science advanced and so came about the industrial revolution and it seems that we haven't looked back since...but I'm not so sure.

One of the recently unearthed and translated novels from the great author Alexandre Dumas is called 'One Thousand and One Ghosts'. Written at the height of the 1848 revolution it is a dark tale in which a group of diverse companions sit at dinner and tell what are ostensibly ghost stories. The guillotine is a good symbol of the Enlightenment, the scientifically designed, horrifically efficient machine for death. It represented all our new understanding of anatomy -- understanding that was hard to come by before the enlightenment as dissection was prohibited by church doctrine and as such inscribed into law. Dumas' ghost stories represent an adverse reaction to the Enlightenment, a return to spirituality and mysticism as an antidote to the science that brought about the reign of terror.

Richard Dawkins seems to be the champion of the new movement back to the enlightenment. I respect many of his beliefs; I am an atheist, I think astrology is a pile of nonsense, that psychics pray of the desperate hopes of the bereaved and so on and so forth but what he represents is something echoed around many universities -- that disciplines can only survive if they meet these 'scientific criteria'. This seems to signal the death-knell for many social sciences that cannot conform, my cherished subject of semiotics being one thereof.

Science does not have all the answers and Richard Dawkins would never claim that it does; it is a vehicle for attaining 'knowledge' and it presents a shifting understanding that adapts with new evidence and understanding but it never presents our full picture of culture or the human experience. As Dawkins states, we do have an amazing ability to find patterns in the random nature of universe, it's almost all we can do to separate our existence from that of the animals we eat or the insects we tread on it's the basis upon which we search for and 'find' meaning in life -- the question remains would you want a life without meaning. Perhaps ignorance can be bliss.

The functions of insurance or socialism for beginners

2008-02-14T15:20:00.004-05:00

I was recently reading a rather dull document, I wont reveal which one but it suffices to say that it was produced by the CII, the Chartered Insurance Institute. There is one passage in particular that I shall copy verbatim:

"the basic concept of insurance is that the losses of the few are met by the contributions of the many. The premiums paid by many insureds form a common pool of funds, from which valid claims are paid. For each premium paid, the insurer accepts the risk of a considerably larger claim being made against his funders, should misfortune strike the Insured."

It makes a lot of sense -- insurance is essentially a risk-transfer mechanism and the losses of the few are met by the contributions of the many. Now if I make a valid claim against my insurance company my fellow assureds are not going to accuse me of stealing their premium money but this is exactly what happens with welfare.

The concept of welfare works in the same way as insurance, let me take the NHS as an example. As a whole British society make a small contribution to the running of a health system so that the when people are sick, which will only be a small proportion of society at any one time, they can get treatment without any additional outlay. The very same risk-transfer systems are in place but for some reason this becomes much more contentious.

Neither system is perfect and it comes down to the issue of incentive; an insurance company has to make a profit in order to justify its existence and this striving for profit means that not all valid claims will be met and not all risks will be taken hence why in America sick people cannot get health insurance. The NHS's problem is the polar opposite in that it is so large that it becomes almost too expensive to work out what expenses are justified, in other words (following the analogy) many 'invalid claims' get paid.

I'm not going to try and convince you that there are no problems with a nationalised health service but if you view the expenditure of tax dollars as being theft then don't take out insurance either as they operate under the same principles. Taxes or premiums are essentially the same it is incentive which makes the two operate differently and for me the choice between the two systems isn't a hard one to make.

Vote for Paolo

2008-02-04T19:54:00.000-05:00

I was sorry when Edwards bowed out of the race for the Democratic nomination. Even though I knew he wouldn't win you still hold out to hope and now I could not choose between Clinton and Obama, in fact to be blunt I would vote for neither were they standing for election here in Britain but then my politics are slightly to left of mainstream America. Choosing a political party is always something of a compromise; you're never going to find a party that exactly matches your beliefs unless you start one yourself which got me thinking -- what would a Paolo Party do in America? Here is a manifesto of ten policies, five domestic and five international by which you can imagine. They are in no particular order:

Domestic

1. Nationalised healthcare. You have a healthcare system in which being ill makes it harder to get treatment...talk about putting the cart before the horse. I cannot imagine the resentment that must lie in poor neighbourhoods where people cannot afford medical insurance but see billions of dollars spent fighting wars overseas. I would also contemplate nationalising the pharmaceuticals too as a connected issue.

2. Political Funding. The funding of political parties should be done by the state. No longer should elections be fought on the basis of which party has the biggest fighting fund, nor should there be question marks over political decisions in which there are clear vested interests. Lobbying should also be replaced by active consultation -- it is only right that government decisions are informed, but not bought.

3. Liberalize - I've never quite understood the matching of economic liberalism and social conservatism in America, but yes, social liberty should be championed. Legalise gay marriage, marijuana (taxed of course), prostitution in brothels (properly regulated), stem cell research. I'm sure there is more to add in this section but they all relate to a fourth issue:

4. Decouple church and state: you're supposed to be a democracy not a theocracy and religious practice should never be made to seem a civic duty. This also ties into an international aim of giving aid to charities who promote birth control as a means of halting the progress of aids in Africa. Personally I'd rather save lives than 'souls'. This also ties into an important policy:

5. Separation of power: Politically appointed judges are an appalling breach of the principle of separation of the executive and judicial branches of power. Politically appointed or elected judges will always have the question hanging over their heads as to whether the decision they make in any given case is on political grounds. Judges should apply the law that is their only function and their appointment should be on the grounds of their legal competence by an independent panel.

Foreign

6. Torture - whether you do it yourselves or use extraordinary rendition to get someone else to do it for you it's never right and can be justified on no grounds, that is an absolute. This means closing down Guantanamo by the way.

7. No more chequebook diplomacy - Either aid is needed or it isn't, threatening to withdraw aid to swing a decision at the UN is wrong on so many grounds, not to mention the undermining of the entire international law system.

8. Get the troops home - Iraq needs to stand on it's own two feet, whilst the troops are there America will always seem a divisive force.

9. Come into the fold - on the build up to the first world war Britain held itself in what she called 'splendid isolation'. America's relationship with the rest of the world of recent years in respect of the middle east, climate change, African debt and so on, has appeared unilateral and isolationist. Lead through consensus not arrogance or self-interest.

10. Be a force for good - you don't need to look much further back than Roosevelt for inspiration on this one.

Ten ideas off the top of my head -- would I get elected? No, I doubt I'd get a single vote but that's what Paolo's America would look like.

Fragile minds, fragile music

2008-02-02T10:08:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when Tchaikovsky was conducting he would cradle a hand onto his head from the fear that it might drop off -- I'm rather fascinated by fragile and vulnerable musicians and pieces of music that, without being weak, feel like they exist on the edge of evaporation. This is a homage to three fragile musicians:

Tim Hardin

Peter Green

And finally Nick Drake

Things can only get worse!

2008-01-20T21:37:00.000-05:00

I'm quite envious when I watch the election process under way in America. It's not that I would want the saturation coverage that it must be getting because that is really a nightmare but there is an enthusiasm and a real feeling of change that I haven't known in England since 1997. After seven years of George W Bush, the hangover that just wouldn't go away, it doesn't really seem to matter (to an extent) who wins the election as things can only be an improvement. By 1997 we'd had 18 years of Conservative rule under the truly evil Maggie Thatcher and then the rather absurd grey little man John Major and people had had enough of political scandal and the mistreatment and underinvestment in public services; the desire for change was palpable and we had an anthem:

Looking back now it looks so cheesy but at the time it expressed what everyone felt, the Labour Party offered so much hope and after what had passed things could really only get better; this is where America is today. A general election wont happen in England until next year at the earliest and there are only two realistic results; 1) by some miracle Gordon Brown reverses his slump in the polls, develops a personality and wins. Would I celebrate? Even as a lifelong Labour supported, no I don't think I would. The last 11 years of Labour government have probably left me the most disillusioned with politics as I've ever been and that's not just about Iraq, I feel betrayed on many domestic fronts too. Option 2 is just as bad, the Tories get back in power under the cappuccino leadership of David Cameron (all froth and no coffee). He might try and put a smiley face on the Conservative Party but they are the same people as before, nothing has changed and if we see them in power expect tax cuts benefiting the rich and cuts in vital public services to pay for it as they go on to prove that they really are the party of vested interests.

America will have change, it's just a matter of seeing what form that takes but it makes for exciting times. In England change or none our prospects are bleak and getting worse and my only prediction for the next election is a low turnout.

This pessimism has been brought to you courtesy of insomnia.

Hello, My name's Paolo and I... or On Being

2008-01-15T17:28:00.000-05:00

I like the verb 'to be', to take an ontological turn. I am, you are, we are and so on and so forth. In Italian the verb is 'essere' and as is quite usually the case the Italian gives you and indication of etymology; the word 'essence' stems from the Ancient Greek 'esse' which brings us rather neatly back to the verb relating to our being. Ontology itself stems from 'ontos' which is the present participle of 'einai' which also originates from 'esse': to be. The verb is the one with which we define ourselves; it is the beginning of how we encapsulate ourselves to the world, it is a verb with so much promise but what comes next?

Let me place you in a hypothetical yet common place scenario, you are meeting someone for the first time and know nothing about them, they are non-descript so all you will learn from them and they of you will be discerned from you following conversation; how do you start. My guess is that it will be along the lines of 'Hello, my name's Bob and I'm a taxidermist'. Well perhaps not that exact phrase, you might even tailor it to fit your own circumstances by using your own name and job but that's the point I'm getting at: why do we define ourselves by what we do? So little of who I am is wrapped up in my job but my employment is one of the first things I will tell someone on an initial meeting.

Marx argued that factors of our economic condition acted to alienate us from our real needs associated with our humanity. Work acts to objectify us; if we work for our own ends or for sustenance we can get affirmation from our actions but working as a cog in a machine we are reduced to a utilitarian calculation, a resource to fill a task. Our relationship with our work runs along the same lines, we work as little or as much as is required that we purchase all the things we think we cannot live without which is the other side of alienation. Capitalism requires growth, growth requires consumption and consumption requires the idea of necessity -- every person selling a product wants you to think that you cannot live without it. But what do we really need to survive? Do you know? I'd say you probably don't because we have been alienated from our real needs to the extent that we do not know what we want from what we need.

I am not advocating economic reform, I'm more pragmatic, I want linguistic change starting with how we use the verb to be. Just try it for a week: Hello, my name's Paolo and I like the verb 'to be', or how about 'Hello, my name is Bob and I like cheese, but not as much as people think I like it, conversational asides are a hazardous thing to toss around without care', or perhaps you have a more relevant idea.

USA - Vote 2008 (Global Edition)

2008-01-04T16:32:00.000-05:00

This years elections in America are quite important, not just in terms of the US domestic political agenda but because of the effect the winner will have on the world stage; peace in the Middle East, poverty and aids in Africa, global climate. As the only superpower on the block the world has some serious vested interests in the outcome. In the spirit of democracy I might go as far as suggest that we all get to vote although there might be some complaints about that one so the best we can do is to attempt to influence from afar.

Now I'm going to assume that you're a democrat (Republicans can stop reading and find something else, perhaps a page on guns, you people like that kind of thing) and that you're about to, well over the next few months, select your new leader. You have a great opportunity ahead of you, Hilary Clinton, possibly the first female president in your countries history and with a political background that means there is a chance she will be nothing like Maggie Thatcher (although she has already tried to claim that mantle). The great thing about Hilary is that you vote for her and you get Bill too, he seems to be virtually running her campaign, the idea that will stop as soon as she's in the Whitehouse is a myth. Barak Obama, what a breath of fresh air and of course a chance to be the first African American in the Whitehouse -- but why is it that all I can think about is how he's managed to make so much money in such little time including taking lots of money from the medical insurance people?

I'm afraid in an election where there is so much possibility for an amazing first in American politics my backing (but alas not my vote) has to go to John Edwards. White, middle-classed and middle-aged but fortunately not middle-minded, he looks like everything I should hate about an American politician. Slick, shiny white teeth; you never see him anywhere without his wife or family in-tow you may as well stamp 'All American' to his forehead and lather him up for the patriots to drool over but he has a political zeal missing in either other candidate. His position on campaign donations show that he is not in the hands of the big corporations as do amazing statements like:

"I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy"

It is early days upon which to make a pronouncement but at this stage a vote for Clinton and perhaps for Obama, even though that if either are elected it will be a major first, seems to be a vote for the status quo. A vote for Edwards, a man like all the others who have held the office of president, looks like a vote for change.

I may be wrong, I often am, and you really can ignore me with impunity. I also don't think that Edwards has a chance in hell of winning the nomination but if he forms part of any new democratic government then I shall have renewed faith in American democracy.

Stephen Fry

2007-12-22T18:52:00.000-05:00

I quite like Stephen Fry for many reasons too many to enumerate or perhaps more accurately more than I can be bothered to discuss but he does have a handle on why people like him:

Anywho, I was recently talking to somebody, somebody elderly and the subject of Stephen Fry came up for whom I expressed my admiration. His response was 'Oh I don't like that Stephen Fry, no. Isn't he gay for a start?' I replied that I also believe he likes Wagner -- the joke, that one's tastes in partner is as relevant to me liking them is as their tastes in opera, was lost on him. I raised my eyes to another companion who later said to me 'forgive him for the gay thing, he's old'.

I do rather find it ironic how one's prejudices become more acceptable the longer they have been held.

Life immitating art...poorly

2007-11-28T16:39:00.000-05:00

That video is of 'Possente, possente ftha' from the first act of Aida by Giuseppe Verdi. It takes place at the temple of Vulcan where the high priestess performs a ritual dance in order to prepare Radames, recently chosen by the god Isis to lead the Egyptian army, for battle against the Ethiopian invaders. It is one of my favourite bits of the opera and for an opera that is so markedly in the Italian style, this seems the most Egyptian. In all probability the Ancient Egypt of Aida is not remotely close to reality as it fulfils our more Western fantasies of military conquest and sexual exploit. That's all rather uninterestingly obvious but what is more interesting is how it makes us to relate to Egypt today.

Gustave Flaubert died about ten years after Aida was first performed, the same year that the Suez Canal was opened which seems more than a mere coincidence considering who it was that commissioned the piece (the Khedive) but any link is denied. When he visited Egypt he commented that it 'seemed like an immense stage set made expressly for us'. I may be guilty of over-interpretation but I take that to mean he found Egypt to have the characteristics of a set, a caricature, over the top and just unreal. On the other hand the American music critic Gustav Kobbe saw Aida as the real deal saying that it was 'as distinctively Egyptian as if he [Verdi]...had unearthed examples of ancient Egyptian temple music'.

There is a wonderful book by the French author Joris-Karl Huysmans called 'Au Rebours' which roughly translates to 'Against Nature'. It centres on the life of this reclusive aesthete called Des Esseintes. In one of the most notable and amusing of the novel's episodes the protagonist decides to visit London so he studies the maps, and readies himself for the journey. When he reaches Calais he stops and has lunch in an English cafe along a quayside, he is served by English waitresses, drinks warm beer and eats pies. After this experience rather than go ahead with the journey he returns home, he feels he has experienced the best that England can offer and by actually going to London he would condemn himself to a bad time, it could only be a failure.

I don't want to go to Egpyt, I know that makes me sound as mad an aesthete as Des Esseintes but I prefer the Egypt of Verdi, the reality could only be a disappointment.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T13:40:00.000-05:00

I get a number of Americans visiting this website who have usually stumbled across the website while searching for something I've mentioned in passing or for something quite specific which google has taken keywords from a number of different articles and assumed that what I have to say is somehow pertinent for what has been searched for. Anywho I certainly don't have anything pertinent to say about thanksgiving as I simply know nothing about it except that it seems like Christmas part one but without the gifts.

Here is a parting thought for the season:

Train travel

2007-11-02T19:38:00.000-04:00

This evening I took the train from London up to the romantic Yorkshire town of Doncaster, and if you're not from England then please take the word romantic in it's most sarcastic sense. For years I've associated Doncaster with one thing, Thorpe Marsh power station. As you drive South down the A1 motorway you know you've reached Doncaster as you see the hideous row of six cooling towers visible for many miles around. The reason I was travelling is that I am spending the weekend with my father, a necessary chore due to the proximity of his birthday -- that is my story.

On the train I don't really like to be disturbed as it's a great chance for reflection. Reflection of a country you don't know, of the things that plague your thoughts and of your fellow passengers. At other times life goes on around you and you are so caught up in your own affairs that you give them no thought but on a train, or even better, on a plane you're all heading the same direction, for one moment in time you are a bit part in the plot of a story you don't know. I like to dwell on the possible stories of the people in my carriage; the eldely couple in the seat adjacent to my own could be on their way to spend a weekend with their grandchildren or perhaps escaping away to celebrate an anniversary; the young professional looking woman in front with the horrendously vibrant pink I-pod and the black attache case be off on a business trip to sell the idea of her new line in fluffy hippo shaped chamois monitor cleaners to the buyers of a Northern department store. Most likely, at 7pm on a Friday evening on a train leaving London they are commuters heading home after a hard day at work but then that's not my story so why make it theirs?

I got off at Doncaster as I mentioned before, but that was not the first stop, the previous one was Grantham. Marcel Proust liked to read train timetables, especially late at night if he could not sleep and thanks to his severe problems with asthma there were many nights when he could not sleep. He was even said to have enjoyed a train timetable more than a good book and to a certain extent I can see his point as when you have little more to go by than a name and a time you can't help but fill in the blanks yourself and there is little which has a greater aesthetic effect on you than that which you have helped create as nothing engages you more. Cumbria is a good place to start in England if you want romantic sounding names, try Aspatria, Whitehaven , Bassenthwaite, Appleby-in-Westmorland. I don't live in Cumbria, alas, and the only thing to fire my imagination is Grantham which sounds hard, industrial and bleak. I don't know anything about the place but I know I don't want to go there.

Deskilling society

2007-10-27T07:10:00.000-04:00

There will be many legacies of this Labour government in the UK and around the world whether that is a legacy of peace in Northern Ireland or war in the near and the middle east. On a more local level I would argue that there is a legacy of deskilling or deprofessionalising of key public service roles for what can only be economic reasons.

Deskilling is usually associated with the introduction of technology into a profession that usurps many of the skilled tasks rendering jobs simple tasks that can be performed by an unskilled or semi-skilled workforce. Deprofessionalisation works in a similar way in which skilled tasks are passed to semi-skilled workers because they cost far less and can be employed in greater numbers. In the UK the instances of deprofessionalisation have grown greatly under Labour. In schools we see the growing use of teaching assistants which by 2005 had grown in number to 95,460, twice the number as there were when Labour came to power, whereas the numbers of teachers has fallen. Teaching assistants are not trained teachers, they are paid considerably less and yet they cover teachers in periods of absence and have powers of discipline over students; they are teachers on the cheap, teachers lite if you will.

In the police we have 'community supports officers', that is to say members of the public working in uniformed roles. They don't have any powers of arrest over that which any member of the public has but they do have statutory powers of stop and search, to seize property, issue fixed penalty notices for traffic or public order offences. Once again they have a fraction of the training and receive far less money for their work. In healthcare we have the growth in the powers of nurses including their movement into the field of diagnosis. With the NHS direct phone service and the new NHS walk-in centres you see or speak to a nurse alone for a diagnostic session, there is the possibility to speak to a doctor further down the line and only if you get a referral from the nurse but most people are dealt with by someone who has had yet again a fraction of the training or medical knowledge, and of course receives a fraction of the pay of a fully qualified doctor.

This weekend has seen the story hit the news that nurses will be given the power to decide whether or not a patient should receive a resuscitation attempt. In a typical media way the story has been blown totally out of proportion and people are scared and confused which is what the news does best. That particular story is probably more of a power play between some doctors who would like to have complete medical control and NHS managers who are trying to bring down the costs of a debt-ridden health system but what is the bigger story is that it is endemic of a growing trend. I simply don't trust a nurse to properly diagnose me, a teaching assistant to properly educate a child or a community support officer to police a street and these are just examples because there are many more in the social services and pharmacology for instance. We are heading towards an age of profound mediocrity in which we are not willing to pay to have skilled public services.

No news is no news.

2007-10-18T14:28:00.000-04:00

I don't watch much television these days, my time away from work is too precious but in my time I've seen a lot of news programmes and I'm always struck by the redundancy exhibited, especially on rolling news station. Charlie Brooker can probably better tell you about the problems of rolling news including the paradox of live reporting in which the journalist on the scene knows less about what they're reporting on than the people in the studio:

Redundancy, that is something that gets up my nose and you see it all over the news. As an arbitrary example whenever a child of school age dies in a tragic circumstance we are told that they were very popular and that always struck me as odd and it's not because it's not true because it might be but it's said because that's what is said in these circumstances - it's lazy journalism and it adds nothing to our understanding of what has happened, it is verbal diarrhoea. This, I must admit, is a minor complaint when compared to pointlessness and news do that in spades. News about the royal family, about the lives of celebrities, pathetic "awww" stories like the skateboarding poodle who rescues a family of four from a house fire by smashing down the door with the help of a co-operative movement of farmyard animals -- okay I might have made that one up but you get the idea.

Things could be worse and Fox news shows why. In England at least the news shies away from opinionated and overtly politicised presentation of news but what agencies like Fox do is blend the lines between reporting and politics. Seeing the O'Reilly Factor is the most spine-chilling experience I've ever had and the thought that anyone would turn to him to inform them on what happens in the world is a scary thought. When news attempted to enter the sphere of entertainment it went wrong as there is the pressure to fill every hour with drama, gossip and scandal to keep people watching.

On Good Friday in 1930 something incredible happened -- nothing. In a BBC news bulletin it was announced that nothing newsworthy had happened that day so they played ten minutes of classical music instead. I want that, I want a news organisation unafraid to say that there really isn't anything worth talking about, who hire journalists capable of thinking and presenting the news in a balanced way -- would it be entertaining? I bloody well hope not.

Razors and detergents

2007-10-12T17:37:00.000-04:00

I think I've entered a stage of profound nihilism. I didn't begin that way, I mean who does? There aren't many newborns out there questioning whether they really are, as their parents (well, anyone remotely genetically linked to the thing) will undoubtedly put it, 'the prettiest child on the planet' ignoring the fact that they look like either Winston Churchill or Paul Daniels, or even worse some perverse hybrid of the two). No, life does this to you, it starts as malingering doubts, you hear that santa stuff isn't true, the bible stuff doesn't hold much water and you find yourself being manipulated from day one. Manipulated? 'Stories' on how to share toys with your friends, how to eat all your greens, all that arse gravy that is fed to children in the name of a bedtime story, if that's not a cynical ploy to manipulate behaviour through the medium of entertainment then I don't know what is.

Anywho, I digress, as tautologous as it sounds life lead to cynicism and that is the surest path to nihilism where all 'knowledge' seems unfathomable because nothing is ever as it seems. Now to the subject in hand, razors and detergents. I dislike shaving, show me someone who doesn't (okay, other than a xyrophiliac -- smart arse) but there is a holy grail in the razor world which is the 'close shave' in which after shaving it appears as if the continuity of your skin has yet to be breached by the merest nanometre of hair. For a number of years I used the Gillette 'Sensor Excel' which when it came out was 'the closest shave a man can get'. Since this product hit the market there has been the 'Mach 3', the 'Mach 3 Turbo', the 'Mach 3 Power', the 'Fusion', the 'Fusion Power' and most recently the 'Fusion Power Stealth' which still claims to give the closest shave a man can get -- why on earth should we believe them? Compare:

With:

With soap powder it is the same, the key message is that they shall get your clothes the whitest white. Well if that is true why would there ever be the need for any other product? If the pinnacle in dirt removal has been achieved where else can you go? I do not deny that products get better but in claiming that whatever they sell at any given point as being the closest thing there is to perfection they make any future product seem redundant or make any future claim of a similar kind seem untrue. Also compare:

with:

Language is a strange beast, 26 characters, hundreds of thousands of possible words, frillions of new and conceivable ideas and yet we see the same ridiculous verbal detritus rehashed in some new form with every new product selling an idea they know is false and we know is false. We live a life of mutual bullshit -- this is why I am a nihilist, or am I?

Threads

2007-05-22T21:48:00.000-04:00

If you have ever wondered what the fallout would be, so to speak, of a nuclear weapon on a urban area then you must watch this film. Despite being over twenty years old it is chilling and certainly puts Britain's recent decision to renew Trident into some sort of context.

Hilbert's Hotel

2007-05-04T19:04:00.000-04:00

I've written about a few eccentrics on this blog and David Hilbert is another one. Hilbert was a German mathematician and geometrician and heavily involved in number theory. One of his students committed suicide after struggling with a problem set by Hilbert and he was invited to speak at the student's funeral. At the side of the grave he addressed the crowd and explained that the problem he set was actually quite simple, the student simply looked at it the wrong way. Hilbert's Hotel or Hotel Infinity was an illustration created by the mathematician to highlight the problems created by dealing with infinity as a number and I shall try and describe it to the best of my abilities.

Imagine, though don't worry if you can't, an infinite hotel with an infinite number of rooms numbered 1,2,3,4... and so on ad infinitum, and when you get there to check-in you find out that it's full despite the fact that the neon 'rooms available' sign is flashing outside. So you call for the manager and he reassures you that despite being full, he can still accommodate you all that is required is that the guest in room 1 moves to room 2, the guest from room 2 moves to room 3 and so on leaving everyone with a room and room 1 vacant for you. An infinite hotel is quite impressive so using the wireless internet in your room you log onto myspace or facebook and spread the word. The next day a thousand people arrive at reception eager to see this amazing hotel and again the manager has no problem in fitting everyone in. Everyone is shifted a thousand rooms, so you in room 1 are now moved into room 1001.

The next day an unexpected party arrives, an infinite number of holiday makers stop off at the hotel on their way to Legoland Windsor, it is frightfully popular. To fit this rather large number of new guests, the manager moves the person from room 1 to room 2, room 2 to room 4 and room 3 to room six and so on leaving an infinite amount of odd numbered rooms available for the infinite number of new arrivals. Now can you imagine staying at an infinite hotel, the queues for the lifts are, well infinite, room service is lamentable and you are sharing the bandwidth of the wireless broadband with an infinite number of other computers so you can appreciate that many guests are rather disgruntled and the next day all the guests in the even numbered rooms pack their bags and leave though despite going down to 50% capacity, the hotel still has infinite guests.

The last twist of the plot is that the chain who own the hotel close down an infinite number of infinite hotels and send all their guests to the Hotel infinity for accommodation. The manager becomes desperate for a solution, how do you accommodate an infinite number of infinite numbers of guests? So he asks his guests for some help, since you've observed everything that has gone on from the beginning you propose a solution. Remembering that you've only got people staying in the odd numbered rooms you move them into the even rooms, then the first person from the first hotel goes into the first empty room, room 1, the second person from the first hotel and the first person from the second hotel get the next two empty rooms, rooms 3 and 5 and the third person from the first hotel, the second person from the second hotel and the first person from the third hotel get the next three empty rooms and so on until everyone has a room.

Despite having 100% capacity in an infinite hotel with infinite turnover, costs are infinite and despite the accountant's good work at securing a low rate of tax, the liability is still infinite. The manager brings in his accountant to explain the situation and comes away reassured because even paying infinite costs and an infinite tax bills, he'll still be left over with infinite profits. David Hilbert's illustration leaves you with the question of whether there is an infinity which is bigger than another infinity. The answer to this question came from another German mathematician, Georg Cantor whose diagonal theorem apparently proves the existence of larger infinities but you can research that one for yourself. The Open University did a film of Hilbert's Hotel with Susannah Doyle (the scary black haired one from 'Drop the Dead Donkey') as the lead and it is well worth watching if you ever get the chance.

The Golden Ratio

2007-05-02T22:38:00.000-04:00

When I studied Philosophy at A-Level we were given a talk by a composer and he brought the golden ratio to my attention and it is one of those things, like pi for instance, that just blow your mind away. The ratio, 1:1.61803, is not just a mathematical constant but is a ratio that can be found in nature and art with such frequency that the Romans titled it 'sectio divina' or 'the divine section' and it is one of the supposed proofs put forwards for the teleological argument for the existence of God (otherwise known as the argument from design).

The golden ratio, also known as phi after the Ancient Greek mathematician who seems to have discovered it and applied it in the construction of the Parthenon, can be found everywhere. Take your fingers for instance, the ratio from the largest bone to the middle bone is phi, so is the ratio between the middle bone and the smallest bone. You also find phi in the arrangement of branches on the stem of a plant, in the growing points in a plant (the distance the shoot grows before it is strong enough to support another branch), in the replication of patterns in leaves, it has been found in the proportions of chemical compounds in crystals. It has even been found as the proportion of drones to the population of bees in a beehive.

The reason it was a composer who lectured on this subject was because phi has been found in Mozart. His piano sonatas which are often conveniently split into two parts can be found to contain phi in the proportion from from one movement to the other. Phi can also be found in the ratio between key changes in Debussy's 'Image, Reflections in Water'. More recently Shostakovich applied the golden ration to his music though from memory it seems to have not produced that pleasant a piece. Leonardo da Vinci incorporated phi into his work, the Mona Lisa being being a prime example of its exercise. The golden ratio, for many, is the key to beauty. Leon Battista Alberti, the fifteenth century Italian architect, believed that beauty was a matter of proportion and that if a body was divided up into 600 parts beauty would be ‘a Harmony of all the Parts, in whatsoever Subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse’. The proportion which he believed would secure a harmony of all the parts was phi.

We humans have an incredible ability to see patterns everywhere, phi really could just be another example of this talent at making order of chaos or it could be one of the keys to unlocking our understanding of the universe. As an aside, Pythagoras was evidently spooked by the discovery of the golden ratio because he worked to keep it secret, its discovery was punishable by death.

Irrepressible.info

2007-05-02T17:15:00.000-04:00

I haven't written any especially political entries on this blog partially so that I don't alienate any potential readers but also simply because there are enough political blogs on the net at the moment that adding another doesn't seem a worthwhile exercise. Nevertheless I feel it is important to highlight the joint campaign by the Amnesty International and the Observer Newspaper against censorship on the internet. I've been aware of this campaign for some time now but the reason I've decided to blog on it now is because I was particularly incensed to learn the news last month about Youtube banning videos that mocked the King of Thailand. Lèse majesté laws are of themselves a shocking abuse of power and are the last resort of pathetic despots and egomaniac dictators, but that Youtube acted to support them is particularly atrocious.

You can join the campaign by doing any or all of three things. You can sign the petition at the Irrepressible.info website, you can also publish fragments of censored information onto your website or blog as I have done on the right hand side of this blog, or you can blog on the subject of internet censorship and highlight the campaign. I'm sorry if that sounds preachy.

Pythagoras

2007-04-30T21:38:00.000-04:00

Like millions of children the world over I was forced into studying Pythagoras and his familiar theorem of Euclidean geometry which states that in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the two opposite sides. Pythagoras' influence in the field of mathematics is undoubted and given my ineptitude in that particular field I shall say little more about it, what interests me about this ancient philosopher is how he inspired a form of mysticism as bizarre and influential as the Homeric poems. Quite little is known of his early life other than to say that he was born on the island of Samos around 532 B.C. and lived under the despotic rule of the tyrant Polycrates. He was a genuinely odd chap, Bertrand Russell described him as 'a combination of Einstein and Mrs Eddy'.

Pythagoras wrote on a number of fields from Mathematics and logic through to metaphysics and religion. It is important to remember that he came a couple of hundred years before Aristotle, the man who was responsible for the categorisation of different spheres of thought, physics, metaphysics and politics. Therefore the early, pre-Socratic philosophers wrote on anything and everything, they truly lived up to the etymology of the word; philo sophia, the love of knowledge.

Pythagoras was the St. Francis of his time in that he preached to the animals which is quite understandable when you understand that one of the central tenets of his religion (yes he began a religion) was the concept of the transmigration of souls, or metempsychosis for those of you who are familiar with Joyce's Ulysses. In his time Pythagoras' religion exerted considerable authority and became responsible for unusual rules, for instance:

One must always abstain from beans (not even Aristotle could understand this one, he mused that perhaps the reason Pythagoras ban their eating was that they looked like genitals.
One must not break bread or eat from a whole loaf.
One must not let Swallows share one's roof.
One must never look in a mirror besides a light (probably a sign of the general mathematicians fear of the concept of infinity).
On rising from bed one must smooth out the imprint that the body has left, etc...

There were some more progressive sides to his religion, for instance in his society men and women were considered equals. Property was held in common (Plato wrote a book on Pythagoras, now lost, perhaps he was inspiration for 'the Republic') and the advances made by that society were considered as a result of collective rather than individual achievement, I like him all the more already. Mathematics provide axiomatic truths and form the basis of our understanding of ourselves and the external world. There are elements in Newton's Principa mathematica which can be directly traced back to Pythagoras so he is one of the giants upon whose shoulders modern science stands, the fact that he was something of a loon makes him all the more endearing.

All That's Left

2007-04-29T16:51:00.000-04:00

I promised (or should I say threatened) in a previous post that I would discuss the word sinister and it is certainly a word that merits consideration. Anyone who has studied basic Italian will know that the Italian word 'sinistra' means 'left' and that belies the Latin origins of the word. Sinister, meaning 'giving the impression that something harmful or evil is happening or will happen' appeared with its current meaning in 'late Middle English' but it came from the Old French word 'sinistre' and the Latin word before it 'sinister' and as I hinted, it simply meant 'left', as in the direction.

The word took on its modern meaning in the Middle Ages and came about from the idea that the left side was unlucky and it is an idea that pervaded most cultures. When you spill salt you throw it with your right hand over your left shoulder and that came from the belief that you would blind the devil who perched there. There is also the superstition that if one gazes too long in the mirror that the Devil will appear, again on your left shoulder. In some different Arab cultures the left hand is the unclean hand and its use is forbidden for many practices. Also, let us not forget that in the Bible that God's favourites sit on his right hand, not his left.

In case there are any right-wing people out there who'd like to use this to deride your left-wing antagonists then I hate to disappoint but the left/right division in politics has a different etymology. It dates back to the French Revolution where the more liberal parliamentarians sat on the left side of the assembly chamber and the conservative members sat on the right; a tradition I understand which is still upheld in the French National Assembly. Whilst I'm on the Subject of French politics, vote Ségolène Royal on the 6th of May.

The Plants of Shakespeare

2007-04-27T08:44:00.000-04:00

In the book 'Mouse or Rat?: Translation as Negotiation', Umberto Eco conducts an experiment to expose the shortcomings of Alta Vista's automatic translation tool, Babelfish. He took a phrase then, using Babelfish, translated it into Italian and then took the results and translated them back into English. For instance, the phrase 'The works of Shakespeare' becomes 'Gli impianiti di Shakespeare' which, when translated back into English became 'The plants of Shakespeare' (at least that was the result Umberto Eco got, I actually got 'The systems of Shakespeare').

The problem faced by such translation tools is that they cannot discern context. When you have a language such as English which is full of homonyms, context becomes essential for identifying meaning, therefore, when Babelfish conducts its lexicon comparing exercise quite often the wrong meanings are applied to homonyms and this is exaggerated further when additional languages are introduced, leading to some humorous results. Umberto Eco used a chapter from Genesis to prove his point, but to reserve some semblance of originality, I shall use a different text and shall instead give it the rather difficult challenge of the opening paragraph to James Joyce's Ulysses:

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare dei. Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely: Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!"

I'll save you from the proceeding steps except to say that I first translated it from English to Dutch, from Dutch to French, from French to Greek and finally from Greek back into English and this was the result:

"Stately, myeloejde's Buck Mulligan they have come out stairhead that bol is reported foams in that they put a mirror and one crisscross scheermes. Dressinggown yellow, ungirdled, has been supported softly behind by generous air of morning. It has kept in the cover bol and intoned: The notice you raise the contralto National Electrical Company van Introibo. Orders, below stairs that I wrap sombre and grof it has detected it has called: Bol in the cover, Kinch! Bol in the cover, you horrible jesuit!"

For one last piece of online editing I put it through the fantastic Pornolize tool (which you can see at work in all its glory here on the official biography page for Tony Blair, watch out for the foul language though):

"Stately, myeloejde's Buck "Muffdiver" Mulligan they have come out stairhead that bol is reported foams in that they put a mirror and one crisscross scheermes. Dressinggown yellow, smacked, has been supported softly behind by gebangs air of cocksucking. It has kept in the cover bol and intoned: The notice you raise the contralto National "Bastard" Electrical Company van Introibo. Unclefucks, below thrusts that I wrap sombre and grof it has gangbanged it has blowed: Bol in the sex fighting cover, Kinch! Bol in the fingering cover, you horrible jesuit!"

The exercise certainly shows that Babelfish is no replacement for the careful and considered negotiation between a skilled translator and the original text, where faithfulness to the text does not require an exact word for word translation. But it also shows you how adept one can be to the art of procrastination.

Did Plato invent Communism?

2007-04-26T16:57:00.000-04:00

I first read Plato's 'Republic' back in 2002 after being prompted by this wonderful person called Yasmin. Two things struck me about the book, the first was the Socratic dialogues at the beginning which blow the mind, the way he makes you question the basis upon which we rest our most deeply held beliefs is incredible and you can appreciate why someone who asked such penetrating questions would make enemies. The other is the question of communism.

I shall start, as I often do, by examining the etymology. The word 'communism' first appeared in the middle of the 19th Century in France in the form communisme and that probably came from the Old French word commun (meaning common) and from the Latin before it with communis. I think I'm right in saying that there is no equivalent word in Ancient Greek so if Plato did invent the concept of communism, he certainly did not create the word. Since we are talking about a utopian belief, that is a word which is also worth considering, especially since Sir Thomas More's treatise 'Utopia' is also touted as a possible birth of communism. Thomas More's usage of the word utopia seems to be the first in English and it comes from Late Latin and from the Greek words before it, ou + topos, literally meaning 'no place' which seems rather apt given the subject.

So, word histories aside, you might be wondering what is it that makes me draw the comparison. In the 'Republic', Plato argued for a Commonwealth, a society in which the community would take responsibility over many of the social aspects of life, from the provision of education and healthcare to the ownership and distribution of property. Almost everything was to be held in communal ownership, including children (who were to be taken away from their parents and cared for and educated by guardians) and women (although I'm not too sure I understand the specifics about the communal ownership of women so it's probably best to gloss over that aspect of his philosophy).

There are, however, some caveats to examine. Plato's utopia of community ownership did not apply to everyone in his society, but was reserved to his 'guardian class'. There is another, almost sinister (now, the word sinister has a fascinating history but I shall write about that some other time as I can see eyes begin to droop) aspect to Plato's philosophy. It is clear from his words that his political philosophy was not one that he believed the masses would necessarily choose, and that didn't particularly bother him. Plato believed in the idea of a elite ruling class. He envisioned philosopher-kings who would be enlightened rulers and act in the interests of his people, even if they did not agree that their actions would be in their interests. In other words, Plato's social system would be enforced on its populous and his guardians would be the police force which has to be the precursor to despotism and authoritarian rule.

I don't know enough about early Ancient Greek scholars to argue conclusively that Plato did invent the concept of communism, but it is certainly true to say that some of the ideas that exist in his 'Republic' have helped form that school of political philosophy. Plato seems to be a great example of someone who has exhibited such an extreme belief that he is neither communist nor fascist, but displays elements of both and it is true; when you go so far off one end of the spectrum, you end up on the opposite side.

Diarrhoea

2007-04-18T18:20:00.000-04:00

Today I have decided to talk about Diarrhoea , well not the unfortunate phenomenon that is a rather unpleasant bowel movement but rather the word. Diarrhoea in British English, or diarrhea in America English (well, they do always like to be contrary) is a lovely, almost onomatopoeic word. As you would imagine its etymology is Ancient Greek and literally meant through-flowing. The Germans have a fantastic word for that particular anal effluence which is 'durchwahl' which literally translates to throughfull. From the original Greek word you get the suffix 'rhein' which entered archaic German as 'Rhine' after which the river is named, a name which means that which flows.

There is something lego-esque about Ancient Greek in that words are all made up of their component prefixes and suffixes, if you understand the basic components; the language's atoms if you will, then the molecule-like words become intelligible to you even if you have never come across them. Understanding the ancient languages is like cracking the genome of modern language, surely a worthwhile exercise.

Jeremy Bentham

2007-01-26T18:20:00.000-05:00

If you've read any of my other posts on this blog you will probably have noticed that it is the quirkier sides of philosophy that I enjoy discussing and there are few philosophers quirkier than Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was the proverbial renaissance man, he wrote masses and masses of volumes (not all of which have been published yet although UCL are working on it) on a wide variety subjects from writings on jurisprudence, economics and social theory. He designed a jail called the panopticon (you can see a picture of this in Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish'...or you can just google it, the choice is very much yours) which has influenced their design to this day. He is probably most famous as being the father of utilitarianism a philosophy which I doubt needs any introduction. If it was not for Bentham then arguably we would not have had John Stuart Mill or John Austin.

Bentham is one of those eccentrics that only England seem able to produce, Marx labelled him as a "purely English phenomenon". He had a pet pig who would sleep on the end of his bed. He had a teapot called 'Dick' (or 'Dickey') and two walking-sticks called 'Dapple' and 'Dobbin'. He was said by J.S. Mill to have been frustrating company as he always had to be right, no matter what. In a rather macabre fashion Bentham petitioned London City Council for permission to replace the shrubbery that ran along his driveway with mummified cadavers arguing that dead bodies are "far more aesthetic than flowers". The irony is that embalming was to be a striking feature of his legacy.

Jeremy Bentham was influential in the creation of University College London. Before I go on I must issue the familiar warning that the stories I'm about to tell are apocryphal and sadly in this case there is a great chance that they are untrue. The picture is of what is known as the "auto-icon", it is Bentham's embalmed body with a wax head and glass eyes. The reason that a waxed head is used is that there was an error in the embalming process leaving his face without much feature and for a while his head sat between his legs on display, this much is true and you can visit him the next time you're in London. The stories go that when the university's college council meets, that is body is wheeled in and that his attendance is marked in the minutes as "present but not voting". Another story goes that the 'Auto-Icon' proved too much temptation for students at UCL and on one occasion he was found in a locker at the railway station in Aberdeen.

Personally I don't like the hedonistic style of Bentham's utilitarianism or the positivist jurisprudence he espoused but one cannot escape the fact that he was massively influential in the Enlightenment and beyond and the fact that he was such a character makes him quite endearing. I must also mention here that I quoted Bentham in my university application form because for some reason I was harping on about 'natural rights' which Bentham had occasion to call "rhetorical nonsense upon stilts". That verbosity is something which is characteristic of his prose and makes him an entertaining read.

Room 101

2007-01-05T11:47:00.000-05:00

Room 101 was George Orwell's proverbial 'hell on earth'. In Nineteen Eighty-Four it was a facility utilised by the totalitarian state to expose the citizens to their worst nightmares, a torturous punishment used to deter resistance and break morale. For Winston, Orwell's protagonist, his greatest fear was to have his face gnawed by rats.

"'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is the worst thing in the world.'"

It is understood that Orwell took his inspiration for Room 101 from his time at the BBC in the 1940's. Broadcasting House at Portland Place in London contained a room 101 which served as a conference room, however there are suggestions that it did more than that. The BBC was a national broadcaster and this was during the Second World War. The BBC were rather sensitive about those who worked for them during this time and kept files on their staff, supposedly in Room 101. It has also been suggested that the Personnel Department would bring prospective staff to Room 101 to interview them as to their political beliefs. One can begin to see how the rather sinister history of the room acted to inspire Orwell's creation.

Orwell was a generally unpleasant person, anti-Semitic, homophobic and apparently anti-Catholic, his redeeming quality seemed to be that he was a democratic-socialist who championed liberal governance, he even fought alongside the republicans in the Spanish Civil War against Franco's fascist forces (you have to love a little alliteration). His less desirable personal traits aside, it is the betrayal of that last principle that disturbs me the most. In the late 1940's George Orwell took a job with the Foreign Office for a department known as the Information Research Department. His job was to provide a list of people whom he thought to have communist leanings. Orwell duly provided notebooks containing eighty-six names, mostly fellow journalists but also included the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. For me, at least, it seems a betrayal of the message of his work.

The BBC have taken light of the history of room 101 with a show by the same name hosted by the wonderful Paul Merton. The idea is that celebrities will come on the show and list the things they dislike with the aim of having them consigned to Room 101. Things put into R00m 101 include Okra, Spike Milligan's House (at the request of Spike Milligan), 1975 and Portsmouth (again at the request of Spike Milligan). What would you have put into Room 101?

Diogenes

2006-12-28T21:49:00.000-05:00

People refuse to believe me when I tell them that there is great humour to be derived from the study of philosophy, but it is true. David Hume in his 'Dialogues concerning Natural Religion' said 'whether your scepticism be as sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: we shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window: and whether you really doubt if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall". In other words it is all well and good to have extreme or unorthodox philosophical beliefs, such as doubt in the existence of the laws of physics, no matter how logically argued, you will still approach your life with a little more pragmatism, something the philosophers call 'naive realism'. The life of Diogenes shows that Hume was not completely correct in that assertion.

Diogenes of Sinope, to give him his full name (well, one wouldn't want to confuse him with Diogenes Laertius or Diogenes the Stoic now would we?) was a member of the school of cynical philosophy and like Socrates it seems that he didn't write anything down himself, so what is known of him is gathered from the work of his followers. The etymology of the word 'cynic' is really rather appropriate when considering Diogenes. Its origins lie in the Ancient Greek word kunikos meaning 'dog-like'. Diogenes believed in the ultimate absurdity of social values and institution, culture and society were cause of greater evils then the ones they purported to cure so he yearned for man to be more in touch with its true, natural, animal self and these were beliefs he lived by.

Plato described Diogenes as 'A Socrates gone mad' and that makes for a good comparison. Socrates was short, bearded, bald and somewhat rotund. He wore the same cloak year in and year out and never wore shoes, even his most friendly acquaintances were short on tact when it came to describing his appearance. He also was known to wander the streets asking blunt questions of strangers whom he passed, often undermining their entire belief systems. Diogenes on the other hand was known to defecate in the streets. For a time he lived in a discarded tub by a temple; he masturbated in market places and urinated on a man with whom he had a disagreement.

The philosophers of Ancient Greece were the rock & roll stars of their time; on an encounter with Alexander the Great, Alexander was so thrilled to have met Diogenes that he was supposed to have said 'If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes'. He obviously could have been somebody with power and influence, had he wanted it but that was not his philosophy. He lived in profound poverty in the manner he thought was best and one, whilst not being wholly enamoured (if not a little amused) by the way he lived, can but respect him. I'm not sure the world would be a better place if everyone acted out the principles they claim for themselves -- there are some sick and twisted people out there, but there is no greater challenge to a philosophy than to live it.

Spoonerisms

2006-12-23T21:44:00.000-05:00

It has been a little while since I last wrote an entry, partly because I've been quite busy and partly because I couldn't think of anything to write so don't expect any insightful prose from me today. Spoonerisms seem to run in my family. If you don't know already a Spoonerism is a slip of the tongue in which the initial sounds or letters of two or more words are transposed to humorous effect. I am often known park my car in a 'par cark' or in a fit literary snobbery, mock readers of 'Happy Rotter'. Spoonerisms take their name from an Oxford scholar, the Reverend W.A. Spooner who is reputed to have made some wonderful examples of this. I do warn you that the stories are apocryphal and like most good historical anecdotes, most likely untrue, or at least a matter of historical probability rather than certitude.

My favourite of his has to be this one:

"The Lord is a shoving leopard"

Amongst the others attributed to him are 'You hissed all the mystery lectures', 'Let's raise our glasses to the queer old Dean' and this great one 'you'll soon be had as a matter of course'. Okay, I should go and shake a tower because I'm a bowel feast with mad banners. Enjoy the holiday period my dear readers...if you're out there , and remember wave the sails.

Mind Experiments

2006-12-13T21:21:00.000-05:00

It is something quintessentially characteristic of me that I desire to talk about or indeed write about the things that I happen to learn and the lateral thoughts which sprout, this is going to be one of those posts. I make no claim at interestingness so feel free to jump ship, as it were, at this stage with due impunity.

John Rawls in his book 'A Theory of Justice' conducts what can only be described as a mind experiment. He wanted to ascertain what were the basic principles that people would agree on if they were completely unaware of their status. In this hypothetical forum people would be under a 'veil of ignorance' without knowledge of themselves, anything that would lead them to distort their principles so that they would not work only to serve their own ends. Ignorance would extend to their age, sex, class, colour, religion, where they lived or the status of their society, ignorant even of the degree of their own intelligence. Rawls reasoned that with all these restraints on their knowledge that the agreements they would come to, their conceptions of justice if you will, would protect the least advantaged in society because under that veil of ignorance, one could never know if that were a position in society reserved for oneself. This was Rawls' 'basic position' and one could sit and pick holes both in his method and his conclusion but that's for another time, it got me to thinking about the other 'mind experiments' philosophers are prone to.

Descartes, in his 'Meditations on First Philosophy', conducts what he calls a 'project of pure enquiry' and invokes the notion of a malign being, the devil if you are of a Judeo-Christian bent, who could be tricking him into believing in his own existence. Following on with the theme of philosophical scepticism Bertrand Russell asks whether we are not a brain in a jar in some mad scientist's experiment with the 'knowledge' we have of ourselves and the world around us, beamed directly into our brain.

Bertrand Russell had other unusual mind experiments which he used as philosophical tools, one was a teapot. Russell is what you can call a teapot atheist, he noted that many people believed in God because they had not been shown enough evidence to refute his existence. Russell argued that there was perhaps a teapot orbiting the earth, a small teapot, too small to be picked up by the most powerful of telescopes. Whilst you cannot prove the existence of the teapot you also cannot prove that it doesn't exist. There has been an updating of the teapot argument and that is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the argument works just the same but the imagery is that bit funnier. When I studied philosophy at a-level my tutor used an argument along these lines but she argued for the existence of a perfect pizza chef, it was an ontological argument of sorts. a) I have an idea of a perfect pizza chef in my head, b) it is more perfect to exist than not exist, c)for my pizza chef to be perfect he must exist, c) my pizza chef is perfect therefore exists. The argument is flawed for all the same reasons the ontological argument is flawed but it made me laugh.

When you challenge the dictates of common-sense as philosophers are prone to do, things like belief in one's own existence, you place yourself in the awkward position of coming up with other ideas and solutions. The result is a body of work rich enough mental imagery to compete with the most abstract fantasy novel. I'm not saying that if you dig manga then you should go pick up Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics because the chances are you will be disappointed. But if you enjoy journeying within your mind; philosophy could be a discipline for you -- consult your nearest philosopher for advice.

Aesthetic Relativism

2006-12-09T23:13:00.000-05:00

In his book 'On Beauty' Umberto Eco asks the question 'what would a traveller from the future who came to our time identify as our aesthetic ideal?'. His answer was that "he will have to surrender before the orgy of tolerance, total snycretism and the absolute unstoppable polytheism of beauty". Such is the legacy of aesthetic relativism, a theory of beauty that can be explained by two succinct quotations. The first is the Shakespearean proverb 'beauty is bought by the judgement of the eye' and the second is from Immanuel Kant who said that aesthetic judgements are one's 'whose determining ground can be no other than subjective'. In other words beauty is a concept that is relative to individuals or indeed cultures or periods in time. Aesthetic relativism sounds rather sensible but it has the potential to create a crazy, confused and ultimately ugly world as complete freedom and chaos are inextricably linked.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the Viscount Bangor and his wife the Lady Anne Bligh, both people who were passionate about architecture, decided to have a house built -- the only problem was that they were unable to agree on the style and the result was the most hideous compromise.

The photo is the front elevation of Castle Ward in Northern Ireland, built to the specifications of the Viscount Bangor. As you can probably tell, the Viscount was a 'Classicist' favouring Doric columns, palladian proportions and triangular consoled pediments. The classical style wasn't limited to the front elevation, it was continued into the front half of the house which was complete with the appropriate friezes and yes, more and more columns. Now this is where things go slightly crazy and you begin to see the flaws in the principals of aesthetic relativism. Lady Anne Bligh was not remotely impressed with the classical style instead favouring the newly popular Gothic style.

This second photo is the rear elevation of Castle Ward designed to the Gothic specifications of Anne. Again the Gothic details were not limited to the pointed windows and quatrefoils of the rear elevation, the back half of rooms included such features as vaulted ceilings that fit in with the style. I hope you agree that this is more than simple compromise it is lunacy. But how do reconcile the two diametrically opposing ideas of beauty? I'm sure we all have an opinion as to whether the Viscount Bangor or the Lady Anne had a better vision of beauty but it is the tyranny of relativism which dictates that we are incapable of asserting that our beliefs are correct.

Without assertion of belief there can be no discussion let alone argument. If we are all right, who could possibly dare challenge our opinions? Thankfully compromises between individuals rarely lead to the extreme idiocy that led to the creation of Castle Ward but our built up environments are by and large ugly, without the ability to assert this nothing will ever change. So what am I saying? Have an opinion and don't feel afraid to express it because, well, some people's ideas of beauty are just plain wrong.

Proust and the Dreyfus Affair

2006-12-03T19:57:00.000-05:00

Whilst ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ by Marcel Proust is a work of fiction there are some characters and indeed events depicted within which are real. There is a thread that pervades the novel, I do not think that there is a volume in which it is not mentioned, that is the Dreyfus Affair and it has given me cause to consider what Proust is implying in the frequent references he makes to it.

The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which rocked France in the late 1890's and early 1900's which had the consequence of exposing the rampant anti-Semitism of the French establishment. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a young Jewish artillery officer who was accused and subsequently convicted of the treasonous act of selling military secrets to the Germans. On his conviction he was sent to a French penal colony on 'Devil's Island'. I would go into the details of why his conviction was wrongful but they are unimportant, it is sufficient to say that the evidence was substantially flawed and the court-marshal itself was notable for numerous procedural errors. Someone who testified on behalf of Dreyfus was even convicted for his efforts.

Dreyfus' conviction divided public opinion between the 'Dreyfussards' who demanded a retrial, people who wanted to see that justice was done, and the ultra-nationalist and anti-semetic anti-dreyfussards. For many, including the press, the Dreyfus case was a means by which to express the growing hatred of the Jews in France. Proust was certainly not the first author to deal with the subject, Emile Zola wrote of it in his book 'J'accuse'. On its publication, Zola was forced to flee to England as he was tried and found guilty of 'besmirching the reputation of the army'.

So why did Proust deal with it? Well the first and seemingly obvious answer was that Proust himself was Jewish, it is possible he was trying to defend his people from the tirade of abuse they faced. In writing about the 1890's Proust makes a telling statement on the case "the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder". Proust doesn't refer to his own origins in the novel but there are two characters who are both Jewish and Dreyfussards, Alfred Bloch and Charles Swann. As Charles Swann becomes unwell late on in Sodom & Gomorrah he is more and more isolated from the Parisian salon society for his Dreyfussard stance and it was the cynical reaction of people such as the crass Madame Verdurin, that Swann held on to his Dreyfussard beliefs as he was Jewish and well, those people stick together, a vulgar argument.

Another argument could be made that Proust was simply a champion of civil liberties. We have a man who has been wrongfully convicted of a crime he did not commit. But then why write about it? Proust was already helping out Dreyfus' lawyers surely that was enough for him to satisfy his conscience. Personally I believe that the frequent references to the Dreyfus case are to make a point about suffering; to draw a distinction between physiological and emotional suffering (a type that afflict many of his characters) and suffering of another kind of which there is perhaps some redress. Proust himself seems to hint at this in a letter he wrote to a friend in 1906, the year Dreyfuss was finally exonerated:

"I shall become more and more ill...more and more I shall miss the ones I have lost and all that I dreamed of in my life will be farther and farther beyond my reach. But for Dreyfus and for Piquart [the gentleman convicted for testifying on Dreyfus' behalf] it is not so. For them life has been 'providential' after the fashion of fairy tales and thrillers. That is because our suffering was founded on fact -- on truths -- physiological truths, human and emotional truths. For them, suffering was founded on error. Fortunate indeed are those who are victims of error -- judicial or otherwise! They are human beings for whom there are redress and restitution".

Marcel knew physiological suffering; throughout his life he was troubled with a severe case of asthma and his weakness was echoed in the narrator of his novel. Perhaps dealing with the Dreyfus case brought him to the realisation that there are some fates that, even with a country full of people baying for your blood, you can escape but some things in life that one can never escape from.

How to be alone

2006-11-27T20:55:00.000-05:00

The title of my blog comes from a quote from the fantastic philosopher Michel de Montaigne so it is only right that I devote an entry to him but before I go on with the topic I must give my two favourite quotes of his.

"Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses"

The other quote deals with a pretty similar theme:

"Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies"

Montaigne was a man who believed that you can live a virtuous life even if you speak no ancient Greek, fart and not know the ancient philosophers, but as long as you strive towards wisdom (even if you never stray too far from folly). He spent a large amount of his life in isolation, locked up in the most wonderful library atop a tower in his estate in Perigord, France. He was not only surrounded by his amassed book collection but by sixty or so maxims from ancient Greek and Roman scholars (including the likes of Cicero, Seneca, Virgil and Socrates) carved into the wooden beams.

As you can imagine from Montaigne's style of life, he was not afraid to live alone, he was in fact keen to make the most of it:

"Now since we are undertaking to live, without companions, by ourselves, let us make our happiness depend on ourselves; let us loose ourselves from the bonds which tie us to others; let us gain power over ourselves to live really and truly alone -- and of doing so in contentment"

His first piece of advice seems almost intuitive, to keep occupied though to tailor that occupation the best way to suit one's humour. Unusquisque sua noverit ire via -- let each man choose the road he should take. But, nothing should be done to excess:

"Whether we are running our homes or studying or hunting or following any sport, we should go to the very boundaries of pleasure but take good care not be involved beyond the point where it begins to be mingled with pain".

Montaigne and I share a method of occupation and he singled it out for a special mention:

"Books give pleasure: but if frequenting them eventually leads to loss of our finest accomplishments, joy and health, then give up your books."

His second piece of advice is not to expect too much from your time alone. He baulks at the ideas of Pliny the Younger and of Cicero, ideas of attaining glory for 'ambition is the humour most contrary to seclusion'.

"We must do like the beasts and scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs...withdraw into yourself, but first prepare yourself to welcome you there"

Okay, I'd be the first person to admit that Montaigne's ideas for how to be alone are, well, pretty naff and if you asked Montaigne himself whether one should be alone he would in all probability say no but learning to be alone will always be an important thing to learn because it is an inevitability in life that we will spend time with only ourselves as companions.

"We should have wives, children, property and, above all good health...if we can: but we should not become so attached to them that our happiness depends on them...so that when the occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new experience to do without them"

So how should we be alone? Montaigne seems to say that's really up to you, find out what works and then do it, just not to excess. It's not a way of living that he would suggest we chose, but one we learn to accommodate. Life can throw up the most unexpected incidents, we may lose our families, be thrown in jail, in essence we are a slave to fortune. The most telling quote from his essay 'on solitude' comes from the founder of the school of cynical philosophy, Antisthenes, 'man ought to provide himself with unsinkable goods, which could float out of a shipwreck with him'. Learning how to be alone is Montaigne's unsinkable good.

Marx on the lash

2006-11-25T11:13:00.000-05:00

I have the uncanny ability to remember random trivia and anecdotes and yet forget important things like what day it is or what I should be doing in an hour. That said, I still manage to keep myself entertained if not the people who have to listen to my stories. La Rochefoucauld in his maxims asked the pertinent question 'Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?' So if you have heard this one before then I apologise profusely.

Karl Marx spent a great deal of his life living in exile mostly due to the inflammatory rhetoric that characterised his journalism and his general work. Starting off in Prussia he set up or joined left-wing periodicals which led to his expulsion from Prussia itself, followed by Paris and then Brussels, he finally ended up in London in 1849 where he stayed until his death in 1883. The image we are presented of his time in England is that of a man living in the direst poverty undergoing the most horrific personal catastrophes (namely the loss of successive children) yet working every hour he could in the British Library writing the great epic, darkly gothic and frustratingly impenetrable 'Das Kapital' but it is quite reassuring to find out that life wasn't all poverty and politics.

At some point in the 1870's, I have not been able to ascertain the exact date, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht went on what can only be described as a legendary pub crawl. They started off in central London and went down Tottenham Court Road through to Hampstead having a glass of beer in each of the eighteen pubs they passed. As they stumbled home Marx picked up some stones and smashed four of five street lamps before the Police gave chase. It was said by Marx's friend Liebknecht, that in evading capture "Marx showed an agility I could not have attributed to him".

Opinions of Marx will always been polarised and I don't think that an anecdote of 'drunk and disorderly' will act to change anyones' opinions but it is wonderful to hear the personal side to someone who, for better or worse, certainly shaped much of the twentieth century for a large proportion of the world's population.

Goethe the Murderer

2006-11-19T19:46:00.000-05:00

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is a particular hero of mine, anyone who can lead a literary movement known as the 'Sturm und Drang' movement has to be deserving of one's respect It was the wonderful book 'the Sorrows of Young Werther' that shot him to literary fame virtually overnight. The philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both big fans and Napoleon Bonaparte was said to have carried a copy of this book when he went on his military campaigns. The story of Werther, as the name suggests, is not a happy tale. It is the story of Werther's unrequited love for Lotte whom is betrothed to another, Albert. The story follows his descent into depression and indeed obsession before in a fit of torment he finally ends it all. As I've said, this book proved incredibly popular and following it being published there was a veritable 'Werthermaina'. To prove the power of literature it is thought that somewhere in the region of two thousand readers were thought to have killed themselves in what can only be described as 'copycat-suicides'.

In 1933 a Hungarian by the name Rezso Seress wrote the song 'Gloomy Sunday' after breaking up with his girlfriend. In an attempt at reconciliation he played her that song -- two days later she was dead. She left a two-word suicide note, the words being "gloomy sunday". On the release of the song it was thought that approximately one hundred suicides were directly as a response to hearing this song and it took on the rather macabre moniker 'the Hungarian Suicide Song'. There is a reported incident in which a beggar was playing this song as a gentleman passed, on hearing it he promptly gave him all his property and then threw himself out of the window of his apartment. So seriously is this song taken that until as recently as 2002 the BBC had banned it from being played on any of its channels.

This is the song but before you follow that link I'd like you to think happy thoughts and know that if you need an appropriate antidote there is always one available here. It is an interesting contrast between the two. Goethe wrote 'the Sorrows of Young Werther' back in the 1770's and it is easy to dismiss those who reacted to his work as being people of their time, perhaps not as well-rounded and intelligent as we like to think ourselves but the Hungarian Suicide song shatters that illusion as it shows that even (relatively) modern audiences can be so affected. Is Goethe a murderer? That's a difficult question, personally I'd like to think he isn't and applying a somewhat Kantian ethical analyses one could back up that belief. Though how far should one go absolve authors from the effects of their work?

I'd like to end on an even more macabre note (if that's possible) and ask the question what piece of music or indeed literary work do you find the most suicide-inspiring?

Proust and Women

2006-11-17T21:10:00.000-05:00

As I struggle along with the reading of ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ by Marcel Proust I came across something he wrote in ‘The Captive’ which brought me to consider Marcel’s attitude to women.

“Albertine has developed to an astonishing degree. This was a matter of complete indifference to me, a woman’s intellectual qualities having always interested me so little that if I pointed them out to some woman or other it was solely out of politeness.”

Women know your place – or at least it could be interpreted in that way. In real life Proust had an interesting relationship with women. In a rather blunt letter to his grandfather which he wrote aged sixteen Marcel describes the cure for a pastime that might otherwise have sent him blind:

“I so badly needed to see a woman in order to stop my bad habits of masturbating that papa gave me 10 francs to go to the brothel. But, 1^st in my excitement, I broke the chamber pot, 3 francs, 2^nd in this same excitement, I wasn’t able to have sex. So now I’m back to square one, constantly waiting for another 10 francs to empty myself and 3 francs more for that pot”.

Perhaps Marcel had a good reason why he was incapable of achieving détente. The character Albertine was thought to have been based on the relationship he had with his chauffer, Alfred Agostinelli whom he was said to have known well (yes, I do mean in the biblical sense). But perhaps too there is another reason:

“If prostitutes…attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain.”

I hate to think that my selection of quotes will act to leave a bad impression of him and to be fair to him one must always remember to place him in his historical context and you must also place them within a literary context in that his characters are not necessarily deployed as a mouthpiece of his philosophical outlook.

Bearing all that in mind, I think for Marcel the essence of life, or at least one’s enjoyment thereof, lies in anticipation. A theme that is repeated throughout his novel is that the male characters (Swann, Saint-Loup, de Charlus and indeed the narrator himself) only begin to appreciate the charms of their women (and in some occasions men) once the threat of infidelity hangs over them. The worst thing that can befall a relationship is that it becomes a creature of habit and for Marcel’s characters it seems that only on anticipating some infidelity do they seem to reawaken an interest. Is Proust suggesting that the threat of infidelity is a necessity in a successful relationship – I don’t think so, but perhaps it takes outside influences to make you appreciate what you have:

“When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.”

If you conduct a relationship along the lines of any that take place within ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ then I can assure you that you shall be miserable. However if you remember that one can keep a relationship fresh and exciting without the threat if infidelity inspiring panicked response to an upsurge of jealous rage, then there is hope for you yet.