On directing "the madness of crowds to unexamined targets of outrage"

While I certainly don't agree with everything in Gary Indiana's review of a new biography of William Burroughs (is it really necessary to disparage realism and coherent narrative in praising more experimental fiction? I think not), it is certainly a readable engagement with an author about whose work I know far too little.

In any case, I also liked these passages:

The radically anti-authoritarian, left-libertarian notions he espoused probably look like irresponsible nihilism (or ‘antinomian morality’, in Schjeldahl’s solecism) to many of those ensconced at their computer screens during most of their waking life, or bedazzled by mobiles and ubiquitous electronic signage in a society overloaded with information yet drained of authentic experience. It now seems almost logical that the insight Burroughs offers into the brain-scrambling technical synaesthesia spreading everywhere would be precisely what brands him a crackpot, rather than the silly religions and fatuous disciplines he so often became fascinated by. Still, I feel it’s necessary to say how stupid this inverted logic is.

On social media legions of isolated individuals, with the brainless malice of a concierge, spread ‘the real dirt’ on artists, writers, actors, musicians, athletes and others in the public eye. A tsunami of ugly feelings surges across the global clothesline at the mere mention of ‘Woody Allen’ or ‘Roman Polanski’ in the press; Burroughs, too, has an anti-claque of Torquemada wannabes, enraged over his accidental shooting of his wife in 1951. Social media can launch a witch hunt or pogrom just as readily as a ‘progressive’ uprising, and in either instance directs the madness of crowds to unexamined targets of outrage; the technology itself is probably as addictive as heroin, since it acts directly on neural synapses, and its instantaneous transmission eliminates any space for reflection or analysis between emotional impulse and action. 

It rather seriously overworks the biological analogy of the-internet-as-drug, but as a description of the ultimately frustrating nature of social media discussions these days (one wave of overheated tribal screaming after another...), it certainly struck a chord with me.

   

"The last gasp of romantic hatred of the twentieth century"

I happen to have been reading Philip Roth's 1990 novel Deception today (which is engrossing and quite interesting, though not at the top of my list of Roth-so-far), and as this passage seemed relevant to events today--25 years later--I thought I would place it here.

This is more, please note, to mark this personal coincidence (so that I might find it again) and as a contribution to the broader cultural debate about what's going on in European countries rather than as a comment on the complicated and horrifying Middle Eastern conflict that I've been watching news reports about since I was old enough to watch TV (so we're getting on nearly 40 years now) and having debates about since I was old enough to debate politics (so going on about 30 years now). 

So: keep your simplistic partisan sloganeering--from either side--to yourselves, please. That's not what I'm on about here.


For background: the passage (like much of the book), consists of a conversation between a pair who is conducting an affair, a male American author of Jewish background and an upper-middle-class Englishwoman.

The American author's question begins the exchange:  

"Why does everybody around here hate Israel so much? Can you explain that to me? I have an argument every time I go out now. And I come home in a fury and can't sleep all night. I am allied, in one way or another, with the planet's two greatest scourges, Israel and America. Let's grant that Israel is a terrible country—"

"But I won't."

"But let's grant it. Still, there are many countries that are far more terrible. Yet the hostility to Israel is almost universal among the people I meet."

"I have never been able to understand it myself. It seems to me one of the most curious freaks of modern history. Because it's just an article of faith among left and left of center, isn't it?"

"But why?"

"I simply don't understand it."

"Do you ever ask people?"

"Yes, often."

"And what do they say? Because of the way they treat Arabs. That is the greatest crime in all of human history."

"Oh, sure, that's what they say. I don't believe a word of it. I think it's one of the most extraordinary pieces of hypocrisy in human history."

"Do they know Arabs?"

"Of course they don't. In English high culture, you could say it's because of this Foreign Office fantasy about Arabs, and Lawrence of Arabia, all this, coupled with a serious knowledge of Arab interests, and families with all sorts of contacts with sheikhs and who still get watches for Christmas and all that rubbish. It's a kind of feudal thing which the British quite like. You know, our boys and their boys. But that's sort of establishment—the actual antagonism comes from the so-called intelligentsia of this country."

"And what do you think is at the root of it?"

"I don't think it's anti-Semitism."

"No?"

"Not in the main. no. It's just the fashionable left. They're very depressing. I can only come to the conclusion that some people are so wedded to certain unrealistic ideas of human justice and human rights that they can't make concessions to necessity of any kind. In other words, if you're an Israeli you must live by the highest standards and therefore you can't do anything really, just go back and turn the other cheek, like J.C. said. But also it seems to me an unspoken corollary that you criticize most harshly the people who actually behave best, or the least badly. It's quite banal, isn't it? These hotheaded people disapprove selectively and most strongly of the least reprehensible things. It's just unreal, isn't it? I think it has to do with the last gasp of romantic hatred of the twentieth century. But it's not really as strong in this country as you may think."

"You think not."

"I'm sure not."

"Well. I'd feel much better if that's true. About this country, and about you too."

Laughter.

Laughter being in such short supply these days, I'll just leave it there. 

[Text from Philip Roth, Deception (London: Vintage, 1990), 79-81.

Doris Lessing: still needed

While it is not really a surprise, it is saddening to hear of the death of Doris Lessing.

It made me recall a blog post by The Wife back in 2007, 'Why We Need Doris Lessing', commenting on Lessing's receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the ambivalent response that this award generated among some sections of Germany's literary intelligentsia.

To wit: 

Reich-Ranicki and Scheck, although at roughly opposite ends of the age spectrum, share membership in the vociferous anti-Lessing league, which always returns, with a persistence that borders on the obsessive, to the same hackneyed and unfounded prejudices from which its members seem to derive carte blanche to go around rubbishing her work at every available opportunity. These prejudices are:

a) Lessing is a bloody feminist.
b) Lessing is not Virginia Woolf.

Having said that, even those who celebrate Lessing seem determined to get her wrong. Among the more defensive responses was an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which opens with the following line: ‘But for a few weak books, Doris Lessing’s biography is flawless – it is all politically correct. The Nobel Prize for Literature appears to be standing in for the Nobel Peace Prize.’

Drivel like this confirms my sneaking suspicion that many journalists are simply not the sharpest tools in the shed. A politically correct biography!? Doris Lessing? A former Rhodesian Marxist who dumped her boring first husband for a German radical, abandoned two small children to go and live it up in London’s literary set and subsequently dabbled in Sufism and Sci-Fi only to spend most of the rest of her life railing against any form of political utopianism from feminism to Islamism?

She then turned to examining Lessing's 2001 novel  The Sweetest Dream, which we both read and enjoyed in 2007.

There is nothing utopian or politically correct about Lessing’s protagonist. Frances is Everywoman, trying to make do in a world of radically different individuals with conflicting interests and expectations, only to realize that, however hard one tries, there will always be plenty of loose ends left over. It’s those with the grand ideas that have it wrong: the café politicos and middle-class feminists wasting precious time making molehills into mountains. Consider Julie, Frances’s right-thinking journalist colleague at The Defender, a leftish daily modeled on The Guardian, who flies into

a fit of tearful rage when hearing on the radio that it was the female mosquito that is responsible for malaria. ‘The shits. The bloody fascist shits.’ When at last persuaded by Frances that this was a fact and not a slander invented by male scientists to put down the female sex – ‘Sorry, gender’ – she quietened into hysterical tears and said, ‘It’s all so bloody unfair’ (226).

Now, how many ‘politically correct’ feminist icons go around smacking the universal sisterhood upside the head with the more irrational bits of their creed? Like Lessing, Frances resists succumbing to ideology, although at the cost of being excluded from much of what is going on.

The rest is also worth your time. 

Farewell, Doris Lessing.

Somewhat belated late summer reading list

There were several things that contributed to the relaxation and enjoyment we shared during our recent holidays on the French and Belgian coasts. One of them was the complete absence of any internet connection and, in our second week, of any media source whatsoever.

Another key thing was doing a lot of reading, but, importantly, for the most part reading that had little or nothing to do with 'work'. Given the absence of any forms of multimedia distraction and the presence of either a quiet beach or an even quieter semi-remote farmhouse, it was a relief to rediscover that now all-too-rare commodity of deep focus. 

My reading list for those two weeks ended up being shorter than I had hoped, but I might have been a bit ambitious:

• Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (I had started this one before we left: given that it's a bit of a slog -- an interesting slog, yes, but still pretty heavy going -- I was happy to have plenty of time to race through the last few hundred pages) 
• Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
• Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Status System
• James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (first time, I must admit)
• James Salter, Light Years
• James Salter, All That Is
• and, more or less intermixed among them all, Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder.

As usual with holiday reading, I tend to mix in things I know and like quite well (Light Years, Class) with new things that are long-time entries on my meaning-to-read list (Brideshead) combined with a few random choices that more or less occur to me in the weeks before we leave (everything else).

I thought everything was worthwhile and absorbing, but the main reading joys of this journey were Judt and Snyder's collection of interviews on twentieth-century intellectual history and the novels by Salter.(And, I'd give an honourable mention, Paul Fussell's Class, which I've now read three times at different points in my life: while a bit dated in terms of some of its specifics -- it is, after all, now 30 years old -- it gets a vast amount fundamentally right. It's an unsettling experience, though, to have so many of your own family's class signifiers described in such unrelentingly perfect detail by a complete stranger.)

For an overview of several streams of twentieth-century thought (especially those having to do with Marxism, which, however you feel about it, is an essential part of understanding the twentieth century), I would highly recommend the Judt and Snyder book. It is, however, partly biographical and loosely structured around different phases in the life of Tony Judt, who -- very sadly -- died a few years ago at a far too young age. This mix might put some people off (especially if you're not familiar with Judt's other work). He had an interesting life, however, and as the book is about the intellectual development of various thinkers and interpreters of society, culture and history, the two streams in it tend to mix quite smoothly, I thought.

That is, if you're interested in two historians talking about intellectuals. I happen to like that kind of thing. (Further commentary on the book in this brief piece at the New Yorker.)

The Salter novels are in a very different key. I had read Light Years a couple of years ago and enjoyed it very much. But reading these three novels was much more of a serious plunge into Salter's very unique style.

I can do no better than to point you to James Meek's recent LRB essay on Salter, which is actually what inspired me to re-read Light Years and to try out the other two.

This is the section that focuses on Light Years:

In Light Years, Salter’s mastery of time, his themes of nobility, ruthlessness and failure in the quest for love and glory, his interest in the erotic and the aesthetics of pleasure, achieve their richest realisation. To the portrayal of moments, seasons and years is added the portrayal of entire adult lives, Viri’s and Nedra’s, in a long marriage and its aftermath. [...]

But the story, what the book is ‘about’, matters less than what the book is: an extraordinary replication not of the experience of a marriage but of the memory of the experience of a marriage. For while we remember stories, memory is not a story. Salter strips out the narrative transitions and explanations and contextualisations, the novelistic linkages that don’t exist in our actual memories, to leave us with a set of remembered fragments, some bright, some ugly, some bafflingly trivial, that don’t easily connect and can’t be put together as a whole, except in the sense of chronology, and in the sense that they are all that remains. Over these surviving fragments of the past, where the distinction between the unique and the repeated is blurred, Salter sets the characters’ reflections hovering, in the way our present thoughts will flutter back to burnish and brood over, and find connections between, the same small set of memories we get to keep....

(I think it was this rather melancholic, fragmented sense of memory that made me think, while reading all three books, of the films of Terrence Malick, which I like very much and about which there was also recently a strikingly good LRB essay by Gilberto Perez.)

I think that Light Years remains my favourite of the three.   

We've actually been back for a few weeks, and the reading material has since been much more work-related.

Which is also interesting, though in a different way: one that I hope to get around to talking about here at some point.

But reader, I tell you: being offline for a few weeks was good for my soul.

There might be more periods like that in the future.

Waiting for my man

In a very fine LRB review of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and the first two series of the related television show Game of Thrones, John Lanchester refers to -- and then questions -- the resistance that many people have to reading fantasy literature:

When you ask people why they don’t read fantasy, they usually say something along the lines of, ‘because elves don’t exist’. This makes no sense as an objection. Huge swathes of imaginative literature concern things that don’t exist, and as it happens, things that don’t exist feature particularly prominently in the English literary tradition. We’re very good at things that don’t exist. The fantastic is central not just to the English canon – Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens – but also to our amazing parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There’s no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It’s as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to ‘off’. And it’s this that leads to the mayor of Des Moines syndrome, because part of the point of Stephenson’s remark isn’t just that people who don’t live there don’t know who the mayor is, they couldn’t care less. The information is of no use to them.

He also describes his own activities as a 'drug pusher' with regard to Martin's fabulous series of books (which I've read through twice, now):

This sense of unsafety and instability is at the heart of the books. I’ve been acting as a kind of low level pusher or drug dealer for the series, shoving recommendations and occasionally box sets in the direction of friends. I tell them to forge past their elves-don’t-exist resistance at least until the end of the first episode. And that, generally, is all it takes. After that initial act of drug-pushing, I follow up on my new clients to ask how they have got on with the series. Everyone is addicted, and everyone reports the same moment as being the one that got them hooked.  

I have to admit that I've played this role myself a couple of times.

And like the other addicts, I'm pretty eagerly waiting for The Winds of Winter.

I need a fix, man.

Bruce Sterling on 'prepper graveyards', death and a 'poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain'

At the Well, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky engage in this year's version of their now-traditional 'State of the World conversation/rantfest'.

It's a lengthy conversation (to which more than the two named hosts contribute), but, as in previous years, I find it one of the more readable contributions to the inevitable round of year-end musings.

Sterling, for example, cites a few of the groups that he sees as having had -- all in all -- a good year. You might be surprised (given other verdicts) to find that he includes the Tea Party among these.

I'm not sure that he's right, but I find his reasoning worth considering:

It's always "the worse, the better" with these Trotsky-style fanatics. Every failure, rejection and common-sense setback galvanizes them to new extremes of faith-based ideological weirdness. As someone who hangs out in Europe, I'm used to bizarre political movements, but the Tea Party is truly impressively strange by anybody's standards. Acidheads have had more coherent thinking than these Creationist Randite gold-bar-eating pro-coal zillionaire market fundie people. They lost the American election, but winning one and governing a superpower never seemed to be on their agenda. That hasn't discouraged them, though. They've got ladder notches and fallback positions all the way to the prepper graveyard.

Sterling, who lives in Belgrade, also raises some thoughtful points about what he sees as the differences between 'civil society' and 'social capital':

The Balkans has always been pretty low on "civil society," because most political decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms by angry drunk guys. But in terms of "social capital" they're quite keen on looking after one another. The populace is very polite and considerate, by American standards. Hold-ups, muggings, drive-bys, gang rapes, maniacal outbursts by guys with automatic weapons, they're all practically unheard-of.

The feeling on the streets of Belgrade is vastly calmer and cozier than, say, Los Angeles. By the standards of Belgrade, you'd think that LA was a para-militarized civil war zone, even though LA has got "civil society" like nobody's business.

He also makes some interesting points about death:

I lost a favorite uncle this holiday season. He was elderly and frail, and he had a good life -- a remarkably jolly character, really, the life of many a party -- so it's not a tragic loss, but I find that the grief touches everything I see.

Grief is a worldview all its own. Grief gives reality a lunar glow. It's healthy to be placed in touch with the tragic side of life, the losses that make life's value so clear. It's like winter daylight.

My uncle wouldn't want me to be all upset about his passing, and to tell the truth I'm not "upset," but I am diminished. Changes in the state of the world are marked by absences as well as by novelties. The year 2013 will be the first year of my life that does not contain my uncle.

It'll be different.

Finally, in the course of the discussion, someone brings up the idea of art as a (socially) transformative activity; Sterling admits admiring the 'very bohemian approach' and 'cool notion' of the artist as this 'the mental-liberationist Greek trickster figure who steals most of his material', but he sees it nevertheless as limiting, which inspires some thoughts on Montenegrin literature:

That's why I enjoy art such as Petar Njegos' epic of early Montenegrin literature, "The Mountain Wreath."
http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/umetnicka/njegos/mountain_wreath.html

Here we've got this very intelligent and determined hillbilly aristocrat, a poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain, out of a half-forgotten province of the Ottoman Empire. His people are pre-literate; he's one of the first to read and write his own language.

This poem, the "Mountain Wreath," is mostly about tribal patriarchs flying into a righteous rage and cutting each other's heads off. It's very like the Iliad in that way; it's full of noble perorations that are mostly along the line of, "Rascal, you've done something unbearable for years now, and I was constrained to get involved in this awful mess you've created; but this time it's personal. So, prepare yourself: I'm taking your head, your pistols, your horses and all your women, and I may even burn your farm." In the context of this artwork, it's certainly the right thing to do. It's the definitive thing to do; it's how you know you're alive.

Then you compare that artwork -- written by an aristocrat, an authority figure in deadly moral earnest -- to this kind of ontological-trickster writing, this kind of "What is Reality, Mr Njegos," postmodern gendankenexperiment, of which me and my sci-fi colleagues are so enduringly fond... Well, keen as I am to write that stuff, it can seem like pretty thin soup.'

And...

Brian Aldiss once told me that science fiction was full of guys who would write about Martians without ever visiting Indonesia. But visiting Indonesia is one thing -- if you actually *hang out* within Indonesia, you *become* Indonesian. You don't visit it, or steal it, you are it.

You have to get past the stark fact that Njegos is an Ottoman Christian-sect hillbilly on horseback who knocks people down with spiked clubs and cuts their heads off as trophies. He is, but he's also a great poet. Njegos even has a wry sense of humor; it's just not what Americans would consider "wry" or even "humor." When you understand his jokes, when you know they're genuinely funny, that's a bigger mental yoga-stretch than we're supposed to allow ourselves within the USA; it makes a "galaxy far far away" look like a Hollywood backlot in Southern California. Which is what it is, pretty much.

Science fiction triple feature

I've been in a science fiction state of mind recently, which is perhaps why I was particularly struck by a few things I ran across in the last day or so.

First, there was a lot in author Charles Stross's discussion of 'world building' (part of a series) that reminded me of my own efforts at 'past reconstructing': i.e. how closely related efforts to understand the past and predict the future can be. (Even if the problem of 'unknown unknowns' plays a rather different role in each case.) (Thanks to Chris W. for pointing me to Stross's excellent blog!)

Second, another 'future building' track brought me to SF author Bruce Sterling, some of whose novels I've liked for many years now (such as Islands in the Net or Holy Fire).

Sterling downplays both his blog and, by implication, his 'State of the World' discussions at The Well, as being 'rambling, open-ended, eclectic blather'.

Without being utterly inaccurate, however, this description does insufficient justice to Sterling's ability to write things that are well-phrased, insightful and funny all at the same time.

For instance, I like his summary (at the Well discussion) of what he sees as the key society-shaping factors of the coming century, i.e., demographics and climate change. The mid-century world, he quips, is going to be dominated by 'old people in big cities who are afraid of the sky.'

Or put another way: 'Futurity means metropolitan people with small families in a weather crisis.' Also quite good, but not nearly as memorable.

Of course, there are other visions of futurity to be dealt with, such as those of right-wing talk radio hosts, the People's Republic of China and Cyberculture ('Smartphones! They make the Silicon Valley of the 1980s look like the railroads of the 1880s!').

In Sterling's summary of what he sees as the sorry state of 'fringe beliefs about the future', I am embarrassed to discover an apparently well-known fringe group of which I had never heard: the 'chemtrail' conspiracy theorists. (Sterling: ' These guys are pitiable loons, but they're interesting harbingers of a future when even scientific illiterates are deathly afraid of the sky.')

I have to admit more sympathy for two other fringe beliefs that Sterling observes seem to have disappeared a bit:

Space Travel people.  Visible mostly by their absence nowadays.  About the only ones left are nutcase one-percenters of a certain generation, with money to burn on their private space yachts.  This was such a huge narrative of the consensus future, for such a long time, that it's really interesting to see it die in public.   There's no popular understanding of why space cities don't work, though if you told them they'd have to spend the rest of their lives in the fuselage of a 747 at 30,000 feet, they'd be like "Gosh that's terrible."

Transcendant spiritual drug enthusiasts.  People consume unbelievable amounts of narcotics nowadays, but there used to be gentle, unworldly characters who genuinely thought this practice was good for you, and would give you marijuana and psychedelics because they were convinced they were doing you a big, life-changing favor.

You go into one of those medical marijuana dispensaries nowadays, they're like huckster chiropractors, basically.  The whole ethical-free-spirit surround of the psychedelic dreamtime is gone. It's like the tie-dyed guys toking up in the ashram have been replaced by the carcasses of 12,000 slaughtered Mexicans.

Finally, Sterling -- who spends a lot of time in Italy and Serbia -- offers two interesting perspectives of these countries' views of future change based upon his experiences in each.

With regard to the Italians' views of 'Europe':

The Italian version of "Europe" is different from other people's versions of "Europe," mostly because "Europe" is so much better-governed than Italy.  If Italy hadn't founded the European Union, Italy wouldn't be allowed into it now, because Italy's too decadent and ramshackle to live up to the standards.  So, every once in a while some kind of cold European economic/political breeze will ooze over the Alps; and Italians rarely complain; on the contrary, they're grateful for it and hope for better.  Like, maybe "Europe" will somehow dispell the "Crisis" without Italians having to do much of anything, and wow, that would be great.

With regard to the Serbians' views of Russia:

Serbia's fantasy version of Russia is like nobody else's conception of Russia; most everybody else thinks of Russia as some half-blind, yellow-fanged ursine creature bristling with rusty nuclear weapons, while for Serbia, Russia is a fluffy angelic-winged flying bear to be depicted in stained-glass windows in a cloud of Orthodox incense. Tremendous emotional energy is invested in imagining that Russia will somehow show up and set everything to rights someday,even though Russia has never really done that anywhere for anybody.

Third, and finally, at 21C magazine there is quite a good discussion of J. G. Ballard among Sterling, V. Vale and (our friend) Simon Sellars. (Who also has an essay in the Ballard collection I noted here recently.)

This is by no means new, but I failed to mention it at the time and ran across it quite by chance again yesterday. 

Sterling again:

You’re not suicidal if you understand J.G. Ballard. On the contrary,this guy’s a consummate survivor. Burroughs and his friends and the beatnik movement had a tremendous casualty list, whereas Ballard and his friends in the British New Wave movement and the Pop Art scene were actually fairly solid, well-balanced if unconventional individuals – people with jobs and children, they were not reedy figures. This is a towering oak tree of a writer, who wrote many volumes of consistently good, accomplished work.

This reminded me a little bit of some similar comments on this blog that we offered a few years ago now on the occasion of Ballard's death.

OK, enough 'open-ended eclectic blather for one evening, methinks.

Exploring the high frontier

One of the things I'm slowly working my way though is a gift that made it from my wishlist into my home last Christmas: the 'Cosmos' television series hosted (and co-written) by Carl Sagan.

I've mentioned Sagan here before, in 2006, in the context of the tenth anniversary of his death.  

I remember watching the series when it was first broadcast -- in 1980 -- though I'm struck by the fact that I remembered it less for the content and more for the atmosphere (the gentle ambient music, Sagan's soothing and distinctive voice and the walk-through model of the solar system) and the look of the thing (the now primitive-looking 'spaceship' set or Sagan's trademark red turtleneck and beige corduroy blazer).

He seemed a ubiquitous figure in my youth, in many ways the most visible public face of popular science (or is there someone else I'm forgetting?). He was also, though, always just that slight bit odd and dreamy, hardly the voice of cold reason and more a scientific romantic ('We are all starstuff', etc.).

Anyway, quite by chance today I ran across a list at Io9 on '10 Scientific and Technological Visionaries Who Experimented With Drugs' and who should I find there but...Carl Sagan!

It may be that this is a generally known fact, but I have to admit that it was new to me. 

It turns out he was not only an experimenter with but, indeed, a regular smoker (and advocate) of cannabis. He even wrote an essay in 1969 (under a pseudonym) on his own experiences, which, indeed, sound more productive than those of your average stoner:

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

This is something I'll have to keep in mind when dealing with my next bout of writer's block.

He concludes:

I hope that time [the legalisation of cannabis] isn’t too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

I knew that there was a reason why there was something so inexplicably groovy about 'Cosmos'.

Incidentally, Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan (one of the co-writers of 'Cosmos'), I also discovered, is on the board of directors at NORML, an organisation whose goals I have long supported.

Although on quite another track, I'm currently about half way through Robert Shea's and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, in which the convergence between drugs, science, cosmic weirdness and creativity is also a prominent theme (though with the addition of a great deal more sex, violence and conspiracy theorising than I have seen so far in 'Cosmos').

Which brings back recollections of many happy hours spent playing Illuminati in the context of my high school wargaming club. (Experiences I remembered here in commenting on the death of E. Gary Gygax.)

Taken together, all of the above adds up to an interesting...trip...down memory lane.

 

A brief note on literary violence and shady politics

We're just recently back from a week in snowy, snowy Davos (long story, largely very enjoyable*) and have been making the jarring transition from the holidays back to the workaday world.

But, two things made me very happy today.

First, my contributor copy of J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions was there waiting for me when I arrived at my office. It looks fabulous and is full of interesting essays on a wonderful and much-missed author. My own contribution (the only effort, as far as I know, that anyone has ever made to analyse Ballard's work from the perspective of Norbert Elias's 'civilising process') can be perused in draft form here. Some comments on the conference that spawned it are here and here.

Second, I learned a new and useful German word, halbseiden, which means 'dubious' or 'shady' (and, apparently, in older usage, 'homosexual'). I ran across it in the context of a story about the German president, Christian Wulff, who has gotten into a spot of bother about some (allegedly) questionable loans from friends and a couple of (allegedly) threatening phone calls to the press which has been eagerly reporting on them. (Any possible homosexuality has, so far as I know, remained unrevealed.)

Quite a profitable day, if I do say so myself.

-----

* We can, for example, very much recommend the sauna at this place. And if you feel up to it, a jog around the Davosersee can be very invigorating. And the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum has a small but very worthwhile collection. Skiing, you might have noted, is not really our thing....

Checking in and checking out ....*

"How I enjoy the thought of a Royal Personage being sea-sick in crossing the Channel!"

I don't know which historical event caused George Gissing to write this in his Commonplace Book, but it seems a timely comment - not so much because of a certain royal wedding over which Telegraph readers have been fretting for ages now, but rather because I'm halfway on my way to an academic event in which the author of the above quote plays a not insignificant role.

Toodlepip, everyone!

*Title refers to this song.

Bad Metaphor Day

You do come across odd metaphors sometimes:

The hounds of scepticism, criticism and fearless enquiry which Erasmus and the humanists had unleashed had begun to sink their teeth into the more vulnerable parts of western Christendom's anatomy.

Derek Wilson, Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man (London, 1996): 66.

Did they now? Whatever was Derek Wilson thinking when he wrote that sentence? And what was the editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson thinking, when he or she read it - and decided not to delete it? Sloppy stuff like this really spoils what otherwise is a rather good book.

I hate to say it, but this is almost as bad as something I came across during my Christmas reading of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's La Princesse et le Président - a sordid little fantasy about the amorous affair between a (fictional) French head of state and a (fictional) English princess (Patricia of Cardiff - of course you get the gist). Because in that novel, the princess gets to say the following during the protracted negotiations that precede her love affair with the president:

Et surtout, surtout, comme je vous l'ai dit, j'ai besoin qu'on m'aime. Pas d'eau tiède. Qu'on m'aime vraiment, comme une algue agrippée à un rocher.

[And especially, especially, as I have told you, I need to be loved. Nothing half-hearted. That one really loves me, like an alga gripping a rock.]

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, La Princesse et le Président (Paris, 2009): 92

Savour it: "Comme une algue agrippée à un rocher."

Maybe this is what Giscard d'Estaing considers erotic symbolism. I can hear sucking noises and faintly smell a fishy tang.

When the novel flopped, the publishing house immediately suggested that this was down to Giscard announcing (before publication) that the plot was entirely fictitious: "Public curiosity has been extinguished," editor Bernard de Fallois explained.

That, of course, was mere flattery. Because, really, as the above quote documents, the former president of La République Francaise is simply not a very good writer.

Mixed news

Félix Fénéon, bringing things to a fine point, around the turn of the last century: 

“There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who had mistaken the window for the door, is dead.” 

From Novels in Three Lines, described here.

(Via Blood & Treasure)

Notes from the phone booth at the end of the world

I've never read any of his novels, and I wouldn't say that I agree with all of his views.

Still, Michel Houellebecq certainly interviews well. (Via A&L Daily)

On what seem to be the enormous challenges of French childhood reading:

And then there was Pif le chien, a comic book published by Editions Vaillant and sponsored by the Communist Party. I realize now when I reread it that there was a Communist bent to many of Pif’s adventures. For example, a prehistoric man would bring down the local sorcerer in single combat and explain to the tribe that they didn’t need a sorcerer and that there was no need to fear thunder. The series was very innovative and of exceptional quality. I read Baudelaire oddly early, when I was about thirteen, but Pascal was the shock of my life. I was fifteen. I was on a class trip to Germany, my first trip abroad, and strangely I had brought the Pensées of Pascal. I was terrified by this passage: “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.” I think it affected me so deeply because I was raised by my grandparents. Suddenly I realized that they were going to die and probably soon. That’s when I discovered death.

Yes....and American parents are afraid of the damage that might be caused by Heather Has Two Mommies.

Anyway...

On visiting your neighbours:

The biggest consequence of The Elementary Particles, apart from the money and not having to work, is that I have become known internationally. I’ve stopped being a tourist, for example, because my book tours have satisfied any desire I might have to travel. And as a result there are countries I have visited that you wouldn’t ordinarily go to, like Germany.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you say that?

HOUELLEBECQ

Nobody does tourism in Germany. It doesn’t exist. But they’re wrong not to. It’s not so bad.

[Ahem: as pleased as I am with this glowing appraisal, it is apparent that some people -- well...at least from the Guardian -- do do tourism in Germany, and in our little corner of it, even.]

On inspiration:

INTERVIEWER

In your preface to The Possibility of an Island, you mentioned a journalist who inspired the idea for the novel. Can you explain?

HOUELLEBECQ

It was a pretty strange moment. I was in Berlin at a café on a lake, waiting to be interviewed. It was very quiet. It was ten o’clock in the morning. There was no one around. And this German journalist arrives and, it was very curious, she wasn’t behaving normally. She didn’t have a tape recorder and she wasn’t taking notes. And she said, “I had a dream that you were in a phone booth after the end of the world and you were speaking to all of humanity but without knowing whether anyone was listening.” It was like being in a zombie film.

I'm thinking of putting him on my to-read list, not least since he's written what sounds like an intriguing book about one of my favourite authors, H.P. Lovecraft.

Any views on the matter you might wish to share?

Brontës are go!

This is so brilliant:



(Via Faith in Honest Doubt)

Concentrating the mind. On...Middle Earth.

Quite apart from the issue of the rights and wrongs of capital punishment, I must confess to a strange fascination with how the condemned spend their last moments:

The meal included steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7-Up, all prepared and served at the Utah State Prison, where the execution took place, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City. After being moved to an observation cell on Wednesday night, Mr. Gardner spent his time sleeping, reading and watching the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the Utah Department of Corrections said on its Web site.

Now, I'm quite an admirer of both the book and film versions of The Lord of the Rings, but I'm trying to imagine what it would feel like to watch all three films knowing they were the last films I'd ever watch before dying in a hail of bullets.

I'm not sure there's a word for that feeling.

Even in German.

R.I.P. Alan Sillitoe

When I asked my students in one of my classes last week, not a single one had heard of, let alone read, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

This somewhat disillusioning classroom experience is made all the more poignant by Sillitoe's death. In turn, it also renders the statement by Sillitoe's son that "he hoped his father would be remembered for his contribution to literature" almost ironic. Maybe now I have a sacred duty to keep up the memory, who knows.

The film version of the novel (see update below) might be the best piece of memorabilia, especially as it adds an equally memorable Albert to the unforgettable Alan.



UPDATE: The silly Grauniad copyeditor calls Sillitoe an "author of kitchen sink dramas." So that's what they teach you at Oxbridge! Or are you all just too busy making up your mind whether to support Clegg or Cameron to mind such negligible details?

Pressing matters

Over at Grazerlei Frau Malzahn sings the praises of Austria's national newspapers. Her thoughts struck a chord - though in a syncopated kind of sense - and prompt me to disrupt my blog silence.

Because at the moment hardly a day goes by that I don't feel the visceral urge to loudly (and in the presence of others) bemoan the failings of the German national press, whose manifold weaknesses are multiplied in the über-sloppy editing of the online versions I tend to read, with their embarrassing grammatical mistakes and pseudo-racy headlines.

Consider, for instance, a certain liberal paper from Munich, which I always thought had wit, style and a certain mature balance. Not so. Said paper has increasingly become a disappointment to me, not only because of its flawed content, but also because its employees seem to stubbornly resist my didactic intervention.

A few years ago they insisted on illustrating an article about German-born writer and artist Judith Kerr with an photo of Germaine Greer (who is only 15 or so years younger than Kerr). Although I pestered them with Emails demanding the immediate righting of this faux-pas, Germaine stayed put and me frustrated.

Then there was the publication of a photograph of Margaret Thatcher and a pubescently hirsute William Hague during the 1977 Tory party conference, which ran: "Margaret Thatcher and a [emphasis mine] high school student at an election rally."

Did they bother to change it after I tried to set matters right? Repeatedly. No.

Not that all this would matter to most German readers: These are minor details that irritate only crazy Anglophiles (though woe to an English paper that gets its Umlauts or German geography wrong) and could be ignored if they weren't part of a larger pattern that even impinges on genuinely German issues. Hence a few weeks ago, in said paper, the author of a thoughtful little column-filler (so thoughtful I can't tell you what it was about) used the beautiful term "Hybris" - the German equivalent of "hubris."

Only to spell it "Hypris."

Which - as any educated speaker of High German will tell you - sounds ... not so good.

I think I can explain this mistake. I'm pretty convinced that the author was a Franconian - i.e. from the impoverished and part-Protestant northern parts of Bavaria, where people famously can't pronounce p's and t's. Which is why there is the singular distinction between "hard b's" and "soft b's." And a tendency to comically overcompensate by those who want to sound really posh.

You want to know how to make a pretentious Franconian blush? Ask him or her to say the word "Anekdote."

But cultural differences are really no excuse. There must be standards! To have a Franconian write articles in a national newspaper may be considered a misfortune. To have her or his spelling checked by a Franconian copyeditor looks like carelessness.

Which pilfered witticism my brings me to today's journalistic clanger, where a picture-heavy piece on film adaptations of novels inspired by Oliver Parker's recent Dorian Gray opens with the following apodictic wisdom:

"Only a handful of books were written in 1890s England. And these are, again and again, turned into movies."

Only a handful of books? In which (Bavarian) University Department of Comparative Literature did you receive the degree that qualified you to write such nonsense, honey?

If a body catch a body coming through the rye

J. D. Salinger has apparently died.

It's difficult to say anything original about The Catcher in the Rye, and there is most likely nothing all too unique about saying that this novel made more of an impression on my teenage brain than just about any other book did.

It's apparently sold something in the range of 60 million copies. So, I suppose I'm far from alone in saying something like that.

I read it probably a dozen times between the ages of...I think...15 and 22. It set me off on a tour of reading anything else of Salinger's I could find. I liked his other texts (especially Franny and Zooey) but nothing ever quite hit me like Catcher.

Maybe it's time I took another look.

So long, J. D.

A way with...words?

It might just be me, but I find it a rather sad statement that Katie Price has managed to reach number 59 on the list of the 100 bestselling authors of the last decade.

That's £21.8 million in books.

I.e., what people are willing to shell out to read what Ms. Price has to say.

And that puts her 14 places behind Shakespeare.

There are moments when (just for a moment or two) I think that climate collapse/a giant asteroid collision/space invasion can't come soon enough to wipe this sorry species from the planet.

Though I may, I realise, be exaggerating.

Do thou the substance of my matter see

While we're on the topic of The Pilgrim's Progress: A student in one of my seminars, in which we're reading - among other things - John Bunyan's Puritan allegory, has pointed me towards a recent film version of the book.

The trailer confirms my worst fears: the film is an abominable piece of evangelical literalism run riot.



Could it be that transatlantic crossings do terrible things to your higher interpretive skills - such as annihilate the ability to distinguish allegory from realism (a genetic mutation subsequently passed onto your offspring home, home on the range)?

Even the semi-educated tinsmith Bunyan, in 1678, was aware of this distinction, which he was careful to refer to several times in The Pilgrim's Progress. Hence in the book, he tells us, he uses "types, shadows and metaphors", "figures and similitudes", "fancies", "dreams" and "parables" to bring across his deeper message.

This method not only has a Biblical precedent, as Bunyan points out, it also has a didactic effect - making things more plain to see:

I find that Holy Writ in many places
Hath semblance with this method, where the cases
Doth call for one thing to set forth another:
Use it I may then, and yet nothing smother
Truth's golden beams, nay, by this method may
Make it cast forth its rays as light as day.

So when, at the beginning of Book I of The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan describes his protagonist Christian as a man "with a great burden upon his back", he emphatically does not mean that he has a grimy heap of sackcloth tied across his shoulders, as the makers of this film do. He is simply, really, truly distressed about the sinfulness of the world.

How can this statement be sausaged into total absurdity? Wasn't the original text read, I wonder, prior to writing the script? Didn't people bother to heed the words of old-world Bishop Bunyan, who warns of exactly this simplistic one-to-one?

Put by the curtains, look within my veil;
Turn up my metaphors, and do not fail:
There if thou seekest them such things to find,
As will be helpful to an honest mind.

In utter despair of my fellow men, I leave the final word to John Bunyan's reputed descendant, Carnaby Street pop chick Vashti Bunyan (there is, I think, a family resemblance):