Tag: poetry

passive-digressive

There are two kinds of people* – those who like forewords, introductions, prefaces, author’s notes, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, notes on the text, maps etc, and those who don’t. But we’ll get back to that shortly.

* there are more than two kinds of people. Possibly infinite kinds of people. Or maybe there’s only one kind; I’m never sure

A few times recently, I’ve come across the idea (which I think is mainly an American academic one, but I might be completely mistaken about that) that parentheses should only be used when you really have to (but when do you really have to?) because anything that is surplus to the requirements of the main thrust of one’s text is surplus to requirements full stop, and should be left out. But that’s wrong. The criticism can be and is extended to anything that interrupts the flow* of the writing. But that is also wrong. Unless you happen to be writing a manual or a set of directions or instructions, writing isn’t (or needn’t be) a purely utilitarian pursuit and the joy of reading (or of writing) isn’t in how quickly or efficiently (whatever that means in this context) you can do it. Aside from technical writing, the obvious example where economy just may be valuable is poetry – which however is different and should probably have been included in a footnote, because footnotes are useful for interrupting text without separating the point you’re making (in a minute) from the point you’re commenting on or adding to (a few sentences ago), without other, different stuff getting in the way.

*like this¹                                                                                                                                                                ¹but bear in mind that people don’t write footnotes by accident – the interruption is deliberate²                        ²and sometimes funny

Poly-Olbion – that’s how you write a title page to pull in the readers

I would argue (though the evidence of a lot of poetry itself perhaps argues against me – especially the Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion kind of poetry that I’m quite fond of) that a poem should be** the most economical or at least the most effective way of saying what you have to say – but who’s to say that economical and effective are the same thing anyway?)

** poets, ignore this; there is no should be

 

 

 

Clearly (yep), the above is a needlessly convoluted way of writing, and can be soul-achingly annoying to read; but – not that this is an effective defence – I do it on purpose. As anyone who’s read much here before will know, George Orwell is one of my all-time favourite writers, and people love to quote his six rules for writing, but while I would certainly follow them if writing a news story or article where brevity is crucial, otherwise I think it’s more sensible to pick and choose. So;

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Absolutely; although sometimes you would use them because they are familiar, if making a specific point, or being amusing. Most people, myself included, just do it by accident; because where does the dividing line fall? In this paragraph I have used “by accident” and “dividing line” which seem close to being commonly used figures of speech (but then so does “figure of speech”). But would “accidentally” or something like “do it without thinking” be better than “by accident?” Maybe.

Never use a long word where a short one will do. The key point here is will do. In any instance where a writer uses (for example) the word “miniscule” then “small” or “tiny” would probably “do”. But depending on what it is they are writing about, miniscule or microscopic might “do” even better. Go with the best word, not necessarily the shortest.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Note that Orwell wrote ‘always’ here where he could just have said If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out. Not everything is a haiku, George.

Never use the passive where you can use the active. Surely it depends what you’re writing? If you are trying, for instance, to pass the blame for an assault from a criminal on to their victim, you might want a headline that says “X stabbed after drug and alcohol binge” rather than “Celebrity kills X.” You kind of see Orwell’s point though.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Both agree and disagree; as a mostly monolingual person I agree, but some words and phrases (ironically, usually ones in French, a language I have never learned and feel uncomfortable trying to pronounce; raison d’etre or enfant terrible for example) just say things more quickly and easily (I can be utilitarian too) than having to really consider and take the time to say what you mean. They are a shorthand that people in general understand. Plus, in the age of smartphones, it really doesn’t do native English speakers any harm to have to look up the meanings of foreign words occasionally (I do this a lot). The other side of the coin (a phrase I’m used to seeing in print) is that with foreign phrases is it’s funny to say them in bad translations like “the Tour of France” (which I guess must be correct) or “piece of resistance” (which I am pretty sure isn’t) so as long as you are understood (assuming that you want to be understood) use them any way you like.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. It’s hard to guess what George Orwell would have considered outright barbarous (and anyway, couldn’t he have cut “outright”?) but anyone reading books from even 30, 50 or a hundred years ago quickly sees that language evolves along with culture, so that rules – even useful ones – rarely have the permanence of commandments.

So much for Orwell’s rules; I was more heartened to find that something I’ve instinctively done – or not done – is supported by Orwell elsewhere. That is, that I prefer, mostly in the name of cringe-avoidance, not to use slang that post-dates my own youth. Even terms that have become part of normal mainstream usage (the most recent one is probably “woke”) tend to appear with inverted commas if I feel like I must use them, because if it’s not something I would be happy to say out loud (I say “woke” with inverted commas too) then I’d prefer not to write it. There is no very logical reason for this and words that I do comfortably use are no less subject to the whims of fashion, but still; the language you use is part of who you are, and I think Orwell makes a very good case here, (fuller version far below somewhere because even though I have reservations about parts of it it ends very well):

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.”

Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read. (1945) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4. Penguin 1968, p.72 

the fold-out map in The Silmarillion is a thing of beauty

Back to those two kinds* of people: I am the kind of person that likes and reads forewords, introductions, prefaces, author’s notes, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, notes on the text, maps and all of those extras that make a book more interesting/informative/tedious.

 

*I know.

 

In one of my favourite films, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), the protagonist Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), says “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.” Well, that is not me; but I do love a good bit of criticism and analysis as well as a good novel. One of my favourite ever pieces of writing of any kind, which I could, but choose not to recite parts of by heart, is the late Anne Barton’s introduction to the 1980 New Penguin Shakespeare edition of Hamlet*. I love Hamlet, but I’ve read Barton’s introduction many more times than I’ve read the play itself, to the point where phrases and passages have become part of my mind’s furniture. It’s a fascinating piece of writing, because Professor Barton had a fascinating range and depth of knowledge, as well as a passion for her subject; but also and most importantly because she was an excellent writer. If someone is a good enough writer**, you don’t even have to be especially interested in the subject to enjoy what they write. Beyond the introduction/footnote but related in a way are the review and essay. Another of my favourite books – mentioned elsewhere I’m sure, as it’s one of the reasons that I have been working as a music writer for the past decade and a half, is Charles Shaar Murray’s Shots from the Hip, a collection of articles and reviews. The relevant point here is that more than half of its articles – including some of my favourites – are about musicians whose work I’m quite keen never to hear under any circumstances, if humanly possible. Similarly, though I find it harder to read Martin Amis’s novels than I used to (just changing taste, not because I think they are less good), I love the collections of his articles, especially The War Against Cliché and Visiting Mrs Nabokov. I already go on about Orwell too much, but as I must have said somewhere, though I am a fan of his novels, it’s the journalism and criticism that he probably thought of as ephemeral that appeals to me the most.

*All of the New Penguin Shakespeare introductions that I’ve read have been good, but that is in a different league. John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet (1935, though the edition I have mentions WW2 in the introduction, as I remember; I like the introduction) is sometimes easy to disagree with but it has a similar excitement-of-discovery tone as Anne Barton’s essay

** Good enough, schmood enough; what I really mean is if you like their writing enough. The world has always been full of good writers whose work leaves me cold

a scholarly approach to comics

All this may have started, as I now realise that lots of things seem to in my writing did, with Tolkien. From the first time I read his books myself, I loved that whatever part of Middle-Earth and its people you were interested in, there was always more to find out. Appendices, maps, whole books like The Silmarillion which extended the enjoyment and deepened the immersion in Tolkien’s imaginary world. And they were central to that world – for Tolkien, mapping Middle-Earth was less making stuff up than it was a detailed exploration of something he had already at least half imagined. Maybe because I always wanted to be a writer myself – and here I am, writing – whenever I’ve really connected with a book, I’ve always wanted to know more. I’ve always been curious about the writer, the background, the process. I’ve mentioned Tintin lots of times in the past too and my favourite Tintin books were, inevitably, the expanded editions which included Herge’s sketches and ideas, the pictures and objects and texts that inspired him. I first got one of those Tintin books when I was 9 or so, but as recently as the last few years I bought an in many ways similar expanded edition of one of my favourite books as an adult, JG Ballard’s Crash. It mirrors the Tintins pretty closely; explanatory essays, sketches, notes, ephemera, all kinds of related material. Now just imagine how amazing a graphic novel of Crash in the Belgian ligne claire style would be.*

*a bit like Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s fantastic-looking but not all that memorable Hard Boiled (1990-92) I guess, only with fewer robots-with-guns shenanigans and more Elizabeth Taylor

a scholarly approach to cautionary 1970s semi-pornography/horror: the expanded Crash

A good introduction or foreword is (I think) important for a collection of poems or a historical text of whatever kind. Background and context and, to a lesser extent, analysis expand the understanding and enjoyment of those kinds of things. An introduction for a modern novel though is a slightly different thing and different also from explanatory notes, appendices and footnotes and it’s probably not by chance that they mainly appear in translations or reprints of books that already enjoyed some kind of zeitgeisty success. When I first read Anne Barton’s introduction to Hamlet, I already knew what Hamlet was about, more or less. And while I don’t think “spoilers” are too much of an issue with fiction (except for whodunnits, which I have so far not managed to enjoy), do you really want to be told what to think of a book before you read it? But a really good introduction will never tell you that. If in doubt, read them afterwards!

Some authors, and many readers, see all of these extraneous things as excess baggage, surplus to requirements, which obviously they really are, and that’s fair enough. If the main text of a novel, a play or whatever, can’t stand on its own then no amount of post-production scaffolding will make it satisfactory.* And presumably, many readers pass their entire lives without finding out or caring why the author wrote what they wrote, or what a book’s place in the pantheon of literature (or just “books”) is. Even as unassailably best-selling an author as Stephen King tends to be a little apologetic about the author’s notes that end so many of his books, despite the fact that nobody who doesn’t read them will ever know that he’s apologetic. Still; I for one would like to assure his publisher that should they ever decide to put together all of those notes, introductions and prefaces in book form, I’ll buy it. But would Stephen King be tempted to write an introduction for it?

 

* though of course it could still be interesting, like Kafka’s Amerika, Jane Austen’s Sanditon or Tolkien and Hergé (them again) with Unfinished Tales or Tintin and Alph-Art

 

That Orwell passage in full(er):

“Clearly the young and middle aged ought to try to appreciate one another. But one ought also to recognise that one’s aesthetic judgement is only fully valid between fairly well-defined dates. Not to admit this is to throw away the advantage that one derives from being born into one’s own particular time. Among people now alive there are two very sharp dividing lines. One is between those who can and can’t remember the period before 1914; the other is between those who were adults before 1933 and those who were not.* Other things being equal, who is likely to have a truer vision at the moment, a person of twenty or a person of fifty? One can’t say, though on some points posterity may decide. Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.”

*nowadays, the people who can or can’t remember life before the internet and those who were adults before 9/11? Or the Trump presidency? Something like that seems right

 

 

the book even of my secret soul (about books, again)

I love books. I want books. Post-Christmas I’m in the enviable position of having – not money, but in a way even better, virtual money that can only be spent on books. What I don’t have though, is a lot of space for books. So, periodically pruning the library (too grand a word) or book collection (worse?) or “my books” (better) is a painful necessity. But what to prune, and why? So far, every single time I’ve put together a box of books and dispersed it to charity shops I’ve almost immediately ‘needed’ one of the books I purged. On a few occasions (see here) I’ve bought back books (not the same actual copy though; I’m not that bad, yet) that I got rid of. And I’ll probably do it again, but I’m trying not to.

Why is it painful to get rid of books? Pompously, because the books you own are a reflection of yourself; of skins shed and personalities outgrown and discarded, and in a way a direct line back to your (possibly alarming) former selves with their sometimes alien tastes and enthusiasms.* Less pompously, because in general, I want more books, not fewer. I can’t think of an occasion when I got rid of a book simply because I didn’t like or just didn’t want it, though I’m sure it’s happened. And so, for decades I still owned (and may still have somewhere) the little red Gideons Bible that was given out to pupils when starting high school (do they still do that?). Its bookplate (ex-libris? Both terms seem very archaic) hints strongly at the typical kind of 12 year old boy that it was given to: Name: William Pinfold Form: human. Similarly, I may still have the books given to me in the street by Hare Krishna followers, which seems not to happen now but was a frequent enough thing in the early 90s that I can still remember without checking** that they were credited to and/or consisted of teachings by “His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” They often had nice, pleasingly psychedelic cover paintings but were invariably disappointing to try to read because, even when they had amazing titles like Easy Journey to Other Planets, they were all about Krishna consciousness – who knew?. But these are books that would be impossible to replace (in a personal sense; easy enough to get hold of different copies of them). More complicatedly – and just annoyingly, with space at a premium, I have multiple copies of some favourite books and will probably buy even more copies of them, if I come across them with covers that I like but don’t have and if they are cheap.

*case in point; I had forgotten how much I liked Camille Paglia in the days before libertarianism was an essentially standard right-wing-asshole viewpoint and when her provocative/confrontational ideas didn’t yet include being disingenuously frivolous about child abuse

** I’m only human though; I spelled his name wrong until looking out a picture of the book, Possibly absorbing his teachings might have helped?

So yes, I have quite a lot of books; but although ‘book collectors’ exist, I don’t qualify as one. Collecting is deliberate and with presumably, a specific end point in view; a collection. Collecting things is fun up to a point, but ultimately a thankless and frustrating task without the required personality type. It (fleetingly) irritates me when an author I like has written four or five books and the publisher changes the cover design or size after the first few, so the mismatched chaos of a complete collection is not for me. Not to mention that there are writers – Michael Moorcock, in print since the 1950s and as far as I know still writing, is the obvious example for me – who have, over the course of decades, written a ridiculous number of books, which have appeared under countless imprints in myriad editions and countries and therefore offer an opportunity for an epic and soul-crushingly futile quest for the true completist. I am not that completist.

who wouldn’t want a beautiful Aubrey Beardsley ex-libris in all their books? But who would want to actually paste them into all their books?

On the other hand, following the old stately home-library tradition of having a personalised ex-libris/bookplate/sticker thing, with its individualistic iconography always seems like a nice idea – even if it’s essentially just a picturesque way of writing your name in a book, which I would never do. It’s nice see a decorative ex-libris in an old book, but although the thought of having one’s own books personalised in that way is nice, the reality of actually sticking them in the books – fun for maybe the first ten or twenty, but after that too tedious to consider, is not so appealing. So, not a collector; but even not a true bibliophile either, at least in the sense that sometimes is written about. I do love books, but not all or any books, I don’t contemplate, like a wine taster, the smell of old books. There are of course books with distinctive odours, some pleasant (to me) like the dry and somehow slightly spicy smell (probably best to not think too much about) of old calf-bound volumes from the 18th century and earlier, others less so, like the peculiarly vomit-like bouquet of new children’s books. And though browsing through shelves and rooms of books can be and usually is an entirely pleasant pastime, after the excitement has faded there can be something a little depressing about looking through piles of chilly, mildewy, corrugated and fat-with-damp paperbacks in the bigger, more drafty and warehouse-like charity shops or auction rooms.

the uninspiring cover that inspired me to read beyond my taste, strangely

Still; books are artifacts in themselves and not just valuable for their contents. Though judging books by their covers is frowned on, that’s kind of what the covers are for. I’ve written about this stuff in several places before so won’t go on about it here, but there’s never been a time that I’ve read as hungrily or as indiscriminately as when I was a child, and until I found authors that were trustworthy – I will try to get onto the second part of that Robert Westall feature some time this year – covers were the thing that drew me in. I loved fantasy, history and sci-fi, so covers were what made books leap off the shelves of the local library or school library. And there were somehow never enough books to read, so that when, aged 12 – 14 or so, our English teacher required pupils to take books out of the school library every week, it was a perfect opportunity to branch out. After a fairly short time the kind of books I automatically wanted to read had been exhausted and it was necessary to try something else. It’s a strange thing, reading not-for-you books, kind of like trying on other people’s clothes, but I gave it a go, as I have a few times since then*. The book that stands out in my memory – or at least its cover does – is Desmond Bagley’s Bahama Crisis (1980). Being a newcomer to men’s thrillers (still an alien world mostly) I think I was expecting, without much excitement, James Bond (never a fan)-style action, but as I very hazily remember the book was mostly a soapy kind of story about the difficulties of running a hotel in the Bahamas.(??) I didn’t mind it, but although records tell me** that I got more Desmond Bagleys out of the library – I had to get something – none of them, or their titles or even their covers stick in my mind at all.

*reading not-for-me books, not trying on other peoples’ clothes                                                                             ** there’s a list in an old school jotter which I never threw away

It’s hard to imagine, as the world has become ever-more commercially driven, but it feels like publishers nowadays underestimate the seductive power of a good cover design (though what constitutes a good one is obviously subjective). There are several authors I liked as a young adult – Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan and Truman Capote spring to mind, but so (who would have thought it?) does Jean-Paul Sartre – who I might well never have read at all if I didn’t find the covers of their books so alluring. In retrospect the late 80s/early 90s seems like a golden age of book design to me, and don’t think it’s entirely because of the age I was when I first saw them. I was still only in my early 20s a few years later when book jackets became dominated by neon, acid colours and deliberately jarring designs and those left me cold at the time and look dated now. The covers I associate with that ‘golden age’ are entirely typical of the look that much literary fiction was going for at the time.

Milan Kundera’s books are actually about 50% better when read with these covers

Have there ever been cooler looking books than the 80s Faber & Faber or “King Penguin” (whatever happened to King Penguins?) Milan Kunderas? Or Russell Mills‘ genius covers for Picador’s Ian McEwans? Is it just a coincidence that they have a lot in common Dave McKean’s graphic novel designs of the time like Violent Cases and Arkham Asylum or Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters? And though Penguin Modern Classics still look good now have they ever looked better than the pale green spines and black and white photo covers of that period?

assorted Ian McEwans, graphic novels & Penguin Modern Classics
bilious mid-90s book design
Boris Vallejo good; John Norman bad

Of course covers can mislead too; much as Peruvian painter Boris Vallejo is some kind of genius, one quickly learned that his covers were no guarantee of quality. Everything about John Norman’s Gor series – the sub-Tolkien/Robert E Howard setting, the Vallejo (and Vallejo imitators – of whom there were many) artwork, the swords and sorcery and gratuitous violence and sex – were guaranteed to appeal to the male, teenage fantasy fan; and yet the books were bizarrely dull to read. Actually, to be fair to Norman, the sex in the Gor books is hardly gratuitous, since it’s basically the whole point of the series; but the endless, tedious essays about masculine power and the bondage fantasies that pepper his books; without the thrill of the quest or even an alleviating sense of humour, is definitely an acquired taste. It was good to read, years later, Micheal Moorcock – along with Tolkien my favourite fantasy author – writing about how boring and tacky the Gor books were. I didn’t think it could just be me. Of course, Moorcock attacked Tolkien too, but though his essay Epic Pooh is not only a good read, but also hard to argue with at times (Moorcock’s main point is that Tolkien is conservative in his worldview and reproduces the class outlook and prejudices of his generation in his fiction) somehow Tolkien’s books resist the criticism effortlessly, if you’re a fan. I think it’s because for Tolkien, the background and history and world-building (as I believe they say nowadays) was the main point of interest, whereas for most subsequent heroic fantasy authors, all that is just the window dressing, so that Middle Earth feels real and believable in a way that most fantasy “realms” don’t. I don’t think there’s any point in Lord of the Rings where the reader has a question that they feel Tolkien couldn’t answer satisfactorily. That said, I imagine sex-related questions would have made him uncomfortable, whereas John Norman might not be able to tell you the detailed history and folklore of Counter-Earth as Tolkien could with Middle Earth, but he could definitely tell you which ropes, gag or whips are favoured by which tribes.

So; looking through my books there are many different versions of myself; because you read books that reflect your interests but often you also get those interests from books themselves. From the age of 8 or so, the Fighting Fantasy role-playing game book series cut across many of my interests. But even then, those books appealed to the child-me in the first place because I loved history and mythology and legends and Asterix the Gaul. But I’ve written more about children’s books and related subjects here and here and here and here and probably elsewhere too, so will try not to repeat myself. It’s easy to think of books that had a big influence on my interests as a child – the version of me that wanted to be an archaeologist wasn’t just thanks to Indiana Jones; before I ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark I was already fascinated by the Aztecs and Incas because of Tintin and the Romans via Asterix – but also those things plus Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Normans, medieval history and knights etc via a big book called The History of the World that I got at a Primary School “Bring & Buy Sale” when I must have been 8 or so. That book had – still has in fact – painted illustrations that I remember vividly; ancient Sumerians, Julius Caesar being stabbed to death in the forum, ancient Greek ladies in strange clothes that exposed their breasts; mysteriously exciting even to an 8 year old, Genghis Khan on his horse, Viking raiders etc, etc. The me who loved space stuff was partly thanks to excitement about the space shuttle program (admittedly that cooled off after the Challenger disaster) and Star Wars, but also 2000 AD comic and the very badly-bound but beautiful reprints of old Dan Dare comics that Paper Tiger published in the early 80s)

But all this is getting away from the point, which is that book ownership is not just about reading. Books like the Bible or Easy Journey to Other Planets are not being kept to read, any more than E.W. Hildick’s Deadline for McGurk, a towering masterpiece as a kid but probably unreadable as an adult, or the different variants of The Fellowship of the Ring or JG Ballard’s Crash that take up valuable shelf space. Getting rid of them would feel wrong, at least unless there was a good cause or if more worthy books come along and the space must reluctantly be yielded to them. That’s the not-so-great thing about having book tokens to spend; the need to consider, plan and use them wisely. I probably won’t.

Book lover’s regrets – should have bought it but didn’t! Perhaps the greatest book cover of all time

jack told him about the thing – updating children’s books

 

There’s a strange moment near the beginning of the 1982 Puffin Books edition of Robert Westall’s Fathom Five (1979):

Dad never talked about Life and its Meanings; only fried bread and thrushes.
‘What’s got you up so early?’
Jack told him about the thing in the water.
‘It’ll be a mandolin, floated off a sunken ship mevve…’

Robert Westall, Fathom Five, Puffin Books, 1982, p.35

Strange that is, only because the hero of the book isn’t called Jack, he’s called Chas. I remember first reading this copy of Fathom Five as a child, being briefly puzzled, then moving on. It was only some time – possibly years – later that I read the blurb on the first page, before the title page:

Fathom Five (1978)

Robert Westall wrote this book straight after his best-selling The Machine Gunners, and it features many of the same characters that appear in the earlier novel. However, when the book was first published the names were changed. In this Puffin edition the original names have been restored.

I have always uncharitably assumed that what actually happened was that Fathom Five didn’t sell as well as Westall had hoped and was then rebranded by him as a sequel to The Machine Gunners in order to boost its sales, but I may be wrong. But it’s apposite at the moment anyway, because a range of children’s books are being altered, apparently for various other reasons, but really for that same one.

It isn’t obvious from the (generally hysterical) media coverage, but re-writing or tampering with “much-loved” (and that bit is important) children’s books, ostensibly to remove any possible offensiveness, has nothing to do with being PC or (sigh, eyeroll, etc, etc) “woke.” l reluctantly use the word because currently it is the word being used to talk about this issue by every moron who’s paid to have a (they would have you believe) popular, intolerant opinion. Right-wing tabloids love “woke” because it’s a single, easy-to-spell, easy-to-say syllable that takes up less space in a headline than “Political Correctness.” I think there are also people who like to use it because saying “Political Correctness” feels dry and snooty and even the abbreviation “PC” has a certain technical, academic quality; but using “woke” allows them to feel cool and in touch with the times. It’s the same kind of frisson that high school teachers get (or did “in my day”) from using teenage slang or mild swearwords in front of the kids; and the cringe factor is about the same too. Hearing someone with a public-school accent decrying “wokeness” is so milk-curdlingly wrong that it’s masochistically almost worth hearing, just to enjoy the uniquely peculiar and relatively rare sensation of having one’s actual flesh creep.

But anyway, the editing of children’s books – high profile examples (and significantly, there are only high profile examples) being of course Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and various works by Enid Blyton, has nothing to do with people’s supposedly delicate sensibilities, it’s to do with money. Parents aren’t lobbying publishers to have books edited; “woke” parents generally don’t really want their kids reading racist or offensive books at all. And every year, untold numbers of unfashionable books (like, for example Fathom Five itself, which is great, regardless of the characters’ names) quietly slip out of print without any fuss being made. What it is, is that the books of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton have made, and continue to make, a lot of money. Publishers realise that some of what they wrote is now embarrassingly out of date and rather than just print a possibly-off-putting disclaimer at the front of the book, they prefer to prevent any chance of damaging sales by seamlessly – well, it should be seamless, in the case of Matilda especially, it seems to be pretty clumsy – editing the book itself. In an ideal-for-the-publishers-world no-one would even notice that it had been done, columnists wouldn’t pick up on it and the kids could go on requesting the books and the parents and schools could supply them and nobody would be upset. But this is precisely the type of trivial issue the (here we go again) “anti-woke” lobby loves. It has no major impact on society, no major impact on children and it has nothing to do with any of the big issues facing the modern world, or even just the UK. It also puts them in the position they love, of being the honourable victims of modern degraded values, defending their beloved past – plus, in this case there’s even – uniquely I think – an opportunity for them to take what can be seen as the moral high ground without people with opposing political views automatically disagreeing with them. Even I slightly agree with them. My basic feeling is that if books are to be altered and edited, it should be by, or at least with the approval of, the author. But it’s never quite that simple.

The reason I only slightly agree is because the pretended outrage is just as meaningless as the revising of the texts itself. It’s not a governmental, Stalinist act, the new editions of Matilda etc only add to the mountain of existing Matildas, they don’t actually replace it. If the racist parent wants fully-leaded, stereotype-laden, unreconstructed imperialist nostalgia, it’s childishly simple to get it, without even leaving the comfort of their home. Better still, if they have the time and their love of the past stretches to more analogue pursuits, they can try browsing second hand bookshops and charity shops. It’s possible, even in 2023, to track down a copy of the original 1967 pre-movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or the most virulently offensive Enid Blyton books, not to mention long out-of-print goodies of the Biggles Exterminates the Foreigners type without too much difficulty. And in many cases one could do it as cheaply/expensively as by going into Waterstones or WH Smith and buying the latest, watered-down versions.

the big-format illustrated 1967 Charlie I knew as a child

But anyway, books, once owned, have a way of hanging around; I remember being mystified by Mel Stuart’s 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the second time I saw it, at some point in the early 80s. I had known the book well since I was very young and the first time I saw the film, at home, in black and white, I thought everybody looked and sounded wrong, especially Gene Wilder, but that was all. When I saw it again, a while later, in colour, I found to my bemusement that the Oompa-Loompas were orange.* This definitely seemed odd – but even so, it’s not exactly the kind of thing that burns away at you and so it was only this year, when the book caused its latest furore, that I discovered that, although my mother had read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to me in the late ‘70s and then I had read it myself in the early ‘80s, the edition I knew was the large-format 1967 UK hardback edition. This had Faith Jaques’s beautifully detailed illustrations – which is where all of my impressions of the characters came from – but more importantly, it had the original Oompa-Loompas. A pygmy tribe, “imported” from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle,” they were immediately controversial in the US, where the NAACP understandably took issue with them. Roald Dahl, who presumably wanted the book to sell as well in the US as it did elsewhere, agreed with them (he may have actually seen their point too, but given his character in general I don’t think it does him too much of a disservice to assume the money was the bigger issue) and changed the book. So, no problem there, even if Dahl’s solution – making the Oompa-Loompas a race of blonde, rosy-cheeked white little people, who still live some kind of life of indentured servitude in a chocolate factory – doesn’t seem super-un-problematic when you really think about it; but it was his decision and his book. The orange Oompa-Loompas were a more fantastical way around the problem, and one which enhanced the almost psychedelic edge of the film.

If the intention of publishers in 2023 is to make Roald Dahl nice, they are not only wasting their time, they are killing what it is that kids like about his books in the first place. If children must still read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and I don’t see why they shouldn’t – they are reading a story so mean-spirited and spitefully funny – and so outdated in so many ways – that it doesn’t really bear fixing. Though it was written in the 60s, Charlie’s poverty-stricken childhood with his extended family feels like something from the pre-war era when Dahl was a non-poverty stricken child, as does the book’s Billy Bunter-esque excitement about and fascination with chocolate. Are kids even all that rabidly excited about chocolate these days? And is a man luring kids into a chocolate factory to judge them for their sins something that can or should be made nice? I don’t think that’s an entirely frivolous point; as a child I remember Willy Wonka had the same ambiguous quality as another great figure of children’s literature, Dr Seuss’s the Cat in the Hat; which is where Mel Stuart went wrong, title-wise at least. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is all well and good, but it’s Charlie – a poor, harmless, nice kid who wants some chocolate – that’s the hero, not Wonka, a rich, mischievous adult man whose motives can only be guessed at. And in fact Gene Wilder captures that slightly dangerous quality perfectly. Almost all of Roald Dahl’s books are similarly nasty; but that’s why kids like them. Where necessary, a disclaimer of the ‘this book contains outdated prejudices and stereotypes which may cause offence’ (but hopefully less awkwardly worded) type is surely all that’s necessary. And anyway, where do you stop? Sanitising Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is patronising and weakens the power of Dahl’s writing, but to sanitise The Twits would be to render the whole book pointless.

*I had a similar epiphany when as a young adult I discovered that Bagpuss was pink and not the relatively normal striped ginger cat I had assumed; the joys of growing up black & white in the colour age!

JJ Fortune’s Race Against Time series – good 80s fun

Anyway; the thing that really makes the updating of books pointless is that kids who like to read, tend to read and understand. As a child in the 1980s, I had plenty of entertaining, modern-at-the-time books to read, like the Fighting Fantasy series, the novels of Leon Garfield and Robert Westall or even JJ Fortune’s slightly silly and very cinematic Race Against Time novels, but I also loved books that were much older and felt much older. I loved Capt. WE Johns’ legendary fighter pilot Biggles – especially the WW1-set Biggles books and The Boy Biggles, about the pilot’s childhood adventures in India. I loved Richmal Crompton’s William series (I wonder if William the Dictator (1938), where William and his gang decide to be Nazis is still in print?) I loved Willard Price’s Adventure series, about American brothers travelling the world to capture animals for zoos and safari parks. I even liked boarding school stories, especially Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books. I remember very fondly a book called The One-Eyed Trapper by (will look it up) John Morgan Gray (1907-1978; got to love the internet) about (the title says it all). Years later at high school, some of the poems of Robert Frost immediately recalled to me the vivid, bracing outdoorsy atmosphere of The One-Eyed Trapper, though I don’t suppose Frost would have appreciated the comparison. I was never much of an Enid Blyton fan, but I did read a couple of her Famous Five and Secret Seven books. My favourite Blytons though were the series about her lesser-known, more awkwardly-named gang of nosy children, the Five Find-Outers (presumably it was because of that awkwardness that the names of their books were slightly anonymous things like The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage etc).

William the Dictator – good 1930s fun

These were books from the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s, that were set in those eras and written in outdated language and, as they say ‘reflected the values and attitudes of the time.’ Relatability is important in fiction up to a point, but it doesn’t need to be literal – children have imaginations. I didn’t want William or Jennings without their school caps, wearing trousers instead of shorts, I didn’t need Biggles to talk like a modern pilot (in fact the occasional glossaries of olden-days pilot talk made the books even more entertaining) or the one-eyed trapper to have two eyes and be kind to wildlife. My favourite member of the ‘Five Find-Outers’ was Fatty, which is probably not a name you would have given a lead character in a children’s book even in the 80s. The idea that changing “Fatty” to something more tactful, making him thinner or even just using his “real” first name, Frederick – would make the books more palatable or less damaging to the young readers of today is ridiculous and patronising. And possibly damaging in itself, to the books at least. Children’s books are mostly escapism, but they are also the most easily absorbed kind of education, and a story from the 1940s, set in a version of the 1940s where the kids look and speak more or less like the children of today and nobody is ever prejudiced against anyone else doesn’t tell children anything about the actual 1940s. I’m reminded of the recent movie adaptation of Stephen King’s IT. In the novel, one of its heroes, Mike Hanlon, who is black, is mercilessly bullied and abused by racist teens when he’s a kid. In the movie version he’s just as bullied, but without any racist abuse. I understand why it’s being done – more explicit racism onscreen is obviously not the solution to any of the world’s problems, especially in a story which only has one substantial black character – but at the same time, making fictional bullies and villains more egalitarian in their outlook doesn’t feel like the solution to anything. But even more to the point, there’s only so much altering you can do to a piece of writing without altering its essential character. There are many problems with the much-publicised passage in the latest edition of Roald Dahl’s Matilda where references to Kipling and so forth are replaced with references to Jane Austen etc, but the biggest one is that it doesn’t read like Roald Dahl anymore.

All of which is to say that, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, a third party “fixing” literature (or any art form for that matter) has its limitations. I remember reading an interview with the director of the British Board of Film Classification back in the early ‘90s, discussing John McNaughton’s notorious Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. He was concerned about the film – though he didn’t dismiss it as worthless trash – but his main worry was that it couldn’t be meaningfully cut to reduce its horrific elements because it was the movie’s tone, rather than its content that was worrisome. A few years earlier, the BBFC had unwittingly made Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop more brutal by editing a few seconds from the scene where the giant robot ED-209 shoots an executive for a ridiculously long time in a botched demonstration. In the original cut, the shooting goes on for so ludicrously long that it becomes pure black comedy; cut down a little it becomes a lot less funny and therefore far nastier and (negating the point of the edit) more traumatic for a young audience. There is a reasonable argument that seeing someone get shot to death by a giant robot should be traumatic, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the BBFC’s motive in making the cuts, since the movie was rated 18 and theoretically not to be seen by children anyway.

A children’s novel (or at least a novel given to children to read) that comes under fire for mostly understandable reasons in American schools is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But though the casual use of ‘the N word’ is possibly removable, what would removing it achieve? What people are objecting to isn’t really/hopefully just the language, it’s the era and the society that Mark Twain was writing about; how could you and why would you want to remove that context from the book? Making it into a story where African-Americans are, in the narrative, demonstrably second class citizens but no one ever refers to their status by using nasty names seems in a way more problematic than the racist language itself. Similarly, The Catcher in the Rye has been controversial for decades, but what difference would taking the offensive words out of it make? The only real solution, editing-wise for those who object to the ‘offensive’ material in the book would be to make it so that Holden Caulfield doesn’t get expelled from school, doesn’t hang around bars drinking while underage, doesn’t hire a prostitute and get threatened by her pimp, doesn’t continuously rant about everyone he meets; to make him happier in fact. Well, that’s all very nice and laudable in its way and it’s theoretically what Holden himself would want, but it’s not what JD Salinger would have wanted and whatever book came out of it wouldn’t be The Catcher in the Rye.

Fathom Five 80s rewrite – terrible cover, good book

But, since there is no Stalinist attempt to destroy the books of the past, it’s not all negative. To go back to the Fathom Five example; as a kid I thought there was something fascinating about the phantom “Jack” and had the internet existed at the time I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist trying to track down an un-revised edition of the book.  I still might – but would it be worth it? Well possibly; authors and artists tampering with their old work is always fascinating, but usually it’s the revised version that is less satisfying. In the preface to the 1928 edition of his then ten-year-old novel Tarr, Wyndham Lewis wrote;

turning back to [Tarr] I have always felt that as regards form it should not appear again as it stood, for it was written with extreme haste, during the first year of the War, during a period of illness and restless convalescence. Accordingly for the present edition I have throughout finished what was rough and given the narrative everywhere a greater precision.

Reading that, you already know that the 1918 text is better, and it is. Lewis was a restless reviser of his written works, but for every improvement he made – and he did make many – he lost some of the explosive quality that keeps his often over-elaborate writing alive. As with Lewis, William Wordsworth tampered with his The Prelude – Growth of a Poet’s Mind throughout his life. Like Lewis, some of the changes he made were less to do with the character of the poem than the evolving character of the man who wrote it. The Prelude is an autobiographical work and when Wordsworth first completed the poem in 1805, he was in his mid-30s, a successful youngish poet with some lingering radical tendencies. When he completed the final version, somewhere around 1840, he was a respected, conservative and establishment figure with very mixed feelings about his wilder youth. Both versions are equally valid in their different ways and if the later version doesn’t really eclipse the first – and has shades of the Oompa-Loompa redesign about it – the reader is glad to have both. The point with these examples is that all remain available; if Wyndham Lewis had managed to destroy all the copies of the 1918 Tarr or Wordsworth had somehow “taped over” the 1805 Prelude the world would be a poorer place. When it comes to reworking previous triumphs (or failures) literature is no different from the other arts. Some visual artists – Leonardo Da Vinci is the classic example – can never stop messing with their work, and the film industry (think of the phenomenon of the “Director’s cut”) and the music industry frequently have these moments too. In 1988, after 8 years of complaining about the cheap production of their debut album, Iron Maiden finally decided to re-record its opening track, “Prowler” with their then-current line-up and the expensive studios now available to them. Even if original singer Paul Di-Anno hadn’t sung the song better (but he did), “Prowler ’88,” oddly tired and flabby sounding, would still be vastly inferior to the basic-but-vital original; sometimes artists just aren’t the best judges of their own work. U2’s latest venture, essentially re-recording and reworking their greatest hits, has received mixed reviews; but though one has to accept in good faith that the band thinks it was a worthwhile exercise, it’s unlikely that they have enough confidence in the new versions to replace the originals on their actual Greatest Hits from here on in.

Lord of the Rings in drafts

A similar, but backwards version of the above has taken place with JRR Tolkien. A whole industry has been generated from his decades-long struggle with The Lord of the Rings, but the difference here is that the earlier material was only posthumously published. Tolkien himself probably wouldn’t have been hugely enamoured with the idea of the public reading about the adventures of Bingo Bolger-Baggins, “Trotter” et al, but as a fan it’s fascinating seeing the slow evolution of not only the book and its characters, but Middle Earth itself, with its re-drawn maps and growing sense of newly-uncovered history. In this case though, Tolkien was  the best judge of his work; The History of Middle Earth is vast, an even more, but very differently, epic journey than The Lord of the Rings, but the final draft has, unlike the 1928 Tarr, a sense of life and completeness missing from all of the previous drafts and half-drafts. Partly no doubt this was because – again unlike Tarr – The Lord of the Rings remained a work-in-progress and Tolkien’s main focus for many years – the characters and setting ‘grew in the telling’ (as Tolkien puts it) and reached a kind of three-dimensional quality that is missing from most epic fantasy novels, despite Tolkien’s reticence in so many areas, notably (but not only) sex.

Fiona Shaw’s superb Richard II (1995)

Alongside the concern/faux concern of “wokifying” children’s books, there’s a similar list of complaints from the usual people about the “wokifying” of TV and film adaptations of classic literature (or just literature), but here I think they are only wrong with nothing to redeem their wrongness. Firstly, because adaptations are always collaborations – and in a movie adaptation of, say, Barnaby Rudge, the artist isn’t Dickens, whose work is already complete, but those making the film. Adaptations are just that, they adapt, they don’t and can’t precisely transcribe from one art form into another. Early-Primary-School-me thought that Gene Wilder was the wrong guy to play Willy Wonka – adult me can see that in the most important way, the spirit-of-the-text way, he’s completely right. He just doesn’t look like the illustrations I knew or sound the way I thought he should sound. I would say the same (in the capturing-the-spirit sense) about Dev Patel’s David in The Personal History of David Copperfield and Fiona Shaw’s Richard II or the fact that Tilda Swinton could give a note-perfect performance as all the incarnations of the title character in Sally Potter’s Orlando. Colour and/or gender-blind casting (and all the variations thereof) can give directors and performers ways of finding the real heart of a story – or just revitalising something that has grown stale through familiarity – that conventional casting might not – and unlike replacing the word ‘fat’ with ‘stout’ or ‘large’ in a kid’s book, it keeps the work alive for a new audience, or even an old one.

Secondly (I think I wrote ‘firstly’ way back there somewhere), time, scholarship and cultural evolution give us a greater understanding of the context of a novel or play. It’s now clear that Britain, through the 20th century, back into Victorian and even medieval times and beyond, had a much broader ethnic and cultural mix than you might ever suspect from the country’s artistic record. And with that understanding, it becomes clear that characters that occasionally did appear in British fiction of the 19th century and earlier, whether Jewish, Chinese, Black, gay, whatever; tend to be represented stereotypes to stress their otherness, but in those stories that otherness has grown rather than lessened over the years as the real-life otherness diminishes. In addition, through the passage of time, the gradations of apparently homogenous British characters, even in relatively recent fiction, tend to blend into each other. Nowadays, Dickens seems to many of us to be full of rich and poor characters, but for Dickens’s audience the social differences between the upper, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, working and under-classes would seem far more marked than they do today and therefore even a caricature like Fagin in Oliver Twist would be part of a far richer tapestry of caricatures than now, when he stands out in ever more stark relief. We can’t, hopefully don’t want to and shouldn’t change the novels themselves – indeed, the idea of a modern writer being tasked with toning down the character of Fagin or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice highlights how ridiculous the treatment of children’s books is, as well as the devalued position they have in the pantheon of literature. But in adapting the works for the screen, the truer a picture we can paint of the society of the time when the works were written or are set, the more accurately we can capture what contemporary audiences would have experienced and perhaps gain more of an insight into the author’s world-view too.

Thirdly, and on a more trivial level; why not make adaptations more free and imaginative, not only to give a more accurate and nuanced picture of the past, or to ‘breathe new life’ etc, but just for the joyous, creative sake of it? The source material is untouched after all. Fairly recently, a comedian/actor that I had hitherto respected, complained online about the inclusion of actors of colour in an episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor travels back in time to London in some past era, on the grounds that it was ‘unrealistic.’ Well, if you can readily accept the time-travelling, gender-swapping Timelord from Gallifrey and its logic-defying time/space machine, but only for as long as olden days London is populated entirely by white people – as it probably wasn’t, from at least the Roman period onwards – then I don’t know what to tell you.

So maybe the answer is yes, change the books if you must; remove the old words and references, make them into something new and palatably bland as fashion dictates – but just don’t destroy the old ones and please, acknowledge the edits. Let the children of the future wonder about that strange note that says the book they are reading isn’t the same book it used to be, and maybe they will search out the old editions and be educated, shocked or amused in time; it’s all good. But until it happens to obscure books too, let’s not pretend the motives for ‘fixing’ them are entirely humanitarian.

 

a portrait of the author as a young arse

 

 

 

early attempts at writing (and drawing)

Between the ages of 19 and 21, I wrote a series of notes (the longest is about a page, so somewhere between a sketch and a mini-essay I guess) that made up a kind of summary of my worldview at the time. At this point I don’t remember why I wrote them, but I’m sure it wasn’t for its own sake; they were probably things that were to be “boiled down” and processed and incorporated somehow into poetry, strange though that sounds. From an early age, I always wanted to write. The first things I remember voluntarily writing are simplified versions of the kind of fantasy gamebooks that were then hugely popular with kids. The Swords & Sorcery series (more about that by one of the other authors of the series here) emulated Steve Jackson and Ian Livinstone’s Fighting Fantasy single-player role-playing game books pretty shamelessly but were a lot of (complicated) fun to write, though few of them were actually finished. These were followed by (and/or parallel to) various short horror stories, but in the long adolescence that seems to have lasted in my case from 15 until 25 or so, I mostly wrote poetry. It’s fair to say that it was not good.
The notes though, are fun.

They cover a range of topics – politics, religion, aesthetics, social issues, ecology, the monarchy – and are exceptionally embarrassing to read. But interesting too, because although I do of course remember being 19-21, I otherwise only have the distorting mirror of my own memory to go by, and my own taste in music, books etc, which give a kind of connection to ur-me. But these notes are pretty much what I thought, expressed to the best of my ability (or thereabouts). They reveal some interesting things I had not realised about my younger self. Although I generally did fairly well in English at school, I now see that my spelling was quite erratic (especially on words ending in -itely, which I always wanted to make -ately, like ‘definately’) and that I must not have learned the it’s/its rule until later. The pieces are typed, on an actual typewriter as I didn’t own a computer at the time, which was not actually all that strange then. More to the point though, by that age my always-terrible handwriting had deteriorated to the point where I myself found it hard to read things I had written after any length of time had lapsed. The socio-political/geographical background to the notes was the bitter, tail end of the UK’s thousand year Tory Reich that I grew up in. Thatcher had by then gone, but the evolution/mutation into the Major era had made very little difference, except insofar as John Major himself was vastly inferior as a hate figure than Thatcher had been.

It’s funny; the arrogance and certainty of youth is well-known, but I am very surprised to find it in myself. I have rarely met anyone less sure of themselves or more reticent than my late-teens/early-20s self, but that doesn’t really come across at all, except in a few deliberately self-deprecating caveats, and there’s an infuriating cockiness to some of the writing that I not only don’t identify with, but really detest; what’s mortifying is that I was genuinely trying to think deeply about the issues I covered so shallowly. Oh well, I hope I wasn’t actually that obnoxious in everyday life, but who knows? (anyone who knew me). On the other hand, my actual views don’t seem to have changed as much as I would have expected. I was more of a libertarian, albeit a left-wing one then, perhaps a bit more pessimistic, but on the whole I would still find myself on the same side of most of the arguments I am making, which is reassuring.

I don’t intend to transcribe very much of the writing here because I can’t bear to, mostly, but here’s a synopsis of the contents of the documents and there will be a couple of more extended examples below that illustrate how much/little/comically times have changed since then (the mid-1990s)

I don’t know if these were ever in any order, but here’s what I have:

“Classic Myths” – examining, in very little depth or detail, how things become “classics.” It ends with the question (re. literature) “how many great works have disappeared into the mists of time due to personal taste or political, religeous [sic] or moral qualms on the part of the academics of the past?” At this point I was reading the long out-of-fashion (and out of print) poetry of Robert Southey which was, to be honest mostly pretty hard going – but I was determined to like his early, pro-revolutionary work from his ‘Pantisocracy’ days with Coleridge, and I did, when I could find it anywhere.

“The Eye of the Beholder – One” This was me complaining about how Hollywood/popular culture/fashion were making standards of beauty ever more bland in a diminishing returns/vicious circle kind of way. Its exceptionally snooty tone was coloured by the fact that I was discovering the movies of the silent and pre-Hays code era and my own personal objects of desire were people like Louise Brooks, Joan Blondell and Marlene Dietrich. Sample of tone: “Sadly this means that when a certain actor or actress is in a hit film, similar actors and actresses will appear in similar films and so on and on, to ever-diminishing effect, until a new trend (snowboarding and dark hair, perhaps) transforms the screen for a few months or weeks(…) this ever-growing supply and demand for something familiar makes it hard for original voices to be heard, or any kind of innovation or talent to gain an audience.” 😬


“Religion Crazy” – This is pretty much what you’d expect from an atheist teenager, full of such blinding revelations as “Religion has often looked to me like a cunning scheme invented by some ancient tyrant to keep the peasants in their place” and, even better, “intolerance of religion and the religious is a vice I magnanimously allow myself to indulge in.” My own lack of belief hasn’t changed in the slightest since the days when I used to look around the room during the morning recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at Primary School, to see who else had their eyes open. But I though I don’t necessarily disagree with him (and actually am him), I don’t really feel much kinship with the writer of these lines, or especially his tone, now: “Am I to believe in a petty, small-minded god who creates something only to punish and destroy it? Maybe in a bored or indifferent god, as is suggested by its (had to correct it, sorry) conspicuous absence in the last few centuries. Perhaps it is more interested in ants than people, and appears to them all the the time.”

“Sexuality and Children” Luckily I was aware even then that this was an alarming and “rather dodgy” title, but essentially it was about the debate then ongoing about gay parents adopting children. My attitude (as with many of my then-attitudes) was essentially a slightly shaky but very teenage libertarian one: who is entitled to tell other adults how to live their lives? “Aside from (fairly ridiculous) superstitious quibbles which can be disregarded at once, (by me anyway) there is no reason on Earth why it is the business of any but those directly involved.” I still think the same thing, more or less but again the tone is, to be kind, insufferably annoying.


“Not Winning isn’t Losing” – politics, kind of. Contains nuggets like “My ideal political situation is unworkable (…) (it) amounts to well behaved anarchy.” But again, I still believe parts of it, despite painfully naive bits, like “The impossibility of a left-wing political ideal does not mean it is hopeless – indeed the opposite is true. Because it can never be attained, there would always be a working towards it – the lack of destination would improve the journey. The effect of a constant working towards a state of freedom and equality would inevitably lead to and ever-improving state of more freedom and more equality – which can not be bad.”

“Books” – this is funny, so I’ll write about it in more depth later


“Power Crazed”  This is one single line, which I hope isn’t true: “There can never be a good Prime Minister, because Prime Ministers are people whose ambition is to rule the country.”

“Limits” – an excruciating piece about nationalism/patriotism and so forth, in which our author pompously concludes “As far as I’m concerned, I find it absolutely impossible to feel either proud or ashamed of anything that occurred completely beyond my control – race, sex (I guess I meant as in gender), sexuality – or where I was born.”

“Money” – a blindingly obvious revelation that the idea of money is, when you look at it, kind of silly. “Why is gold a valuable metal? Presumably because it looks nicer than other metals, and there is less of it.” etc, etc


“Tripping on the Catwalk” In which I make my ignorance about the fashion industry obvious, and which includes the bizarre statement that “its nearest relative is perhaps the academic world of the university. It is completely self supporting, untouched by recession, mainly due to the fact that it is run by bored rich people for bored rich people.” I am now fairly sure that this isn’t 100% true. I also predicted “an eighties-style big shoulders revival (though with a nineties twist of course) before the turn of the millennium.” I don’t remember if that happened or not, but it’s happened since then.

“Royalty at the End of the Millennium” – Oddly, this is one of the longer pieces. As it’s as topical in the new reign of Charles III as it was then (?) I’ll deal with it later

“Part(l)y Politics One” Despite the parenthetical ‘l’ this is pretty much about party politics. In short; the Conservative Party is contemptible (“I have to assume some right-wingers are intelligent, though I have seen little evidence of this”). But I also seem to be saying that because conservatism is based on the fear of change and the desire for stability, plus an array of standard human failings; ignorance, fear, confusion, greed etc, it will always appeal to a large part of the population.

I theorise, not entirely inaccurately, about a pattern that I hadn’t then seen in action and which I later saw parts of in action – because Conservative governments appeal to the worst in people, they REALLY have to mess up before they get voted out. So therefore, any prospective left-wing government will spend a good deal of time un-wrecking the country, with consequent hardships. The public and opposition will naturally blame those in charge for those hardships, the problem then becomes that a progressive party gets voted out, but the incumbent right wing party inherits a country on the mend, which they take credit for, before ruining everything again. That’s not exactly how Tories – Labour – Tories played out in our time but it still feels plausible and at least not untrue.

“interlude” – between the two “Part(l)y Politics” pieces there’s a short kind of non sequitur in which I claim that the politics of the left, taken to their furthest extreme (i.e. ideologically, rather than in real life) is “a nice, if unworkable idea based on equality and human rights” while the politics of the right taken to their furthest extreme is ”at best an extremely nasty and distressingly workable idea based on hatred, repression and manipulation.” Not sure I agree with either of those statements now, though I think my heart was in the right place.

“Part(l)y Politics Two” – in which I complain that the Labour Party (and by extension any party of “the workers” is hopelessly compromised by a system in which becoming an MP is an ordinary middle class career choice, rather than being a kind of glorified shop steward. This was the Neil Kinnock/John Smith/Margaret Beckett era and I complain about the same thing that every Labour-voter-by-default has complained about ever since: that Labour in opposition try too hard to be all things to all people, appeal to Tory voters, are middle-of-the-road and inoffensive rather than truly progressive etc. It’s all very pessimistic: “We can only hope that this [middle-of-the-road inoffensiveness] is a sort of ruse to gain power, whereupon the new and hopefully forceful, idea-led Labour Party will throw off its current greyness, the spectre of past success and failure and emerge as a strong socialist party for the twenty-first century (…) The conservatives ‘accuse’ the Labour Party of being the same old socialist party underneath. This seems sadly unlikely – we understand socialism to be a system based on fairer distribution of wealth and of equality etc etc – the Labour Party does not seem to be offering this. We will vote for them, because there is no one else to vote for.”

“Opposites Attract” – this is a self-pitying whine about how “the plain or ugly are naturally attracted to the good looking, the handsome, the beautiful. The good looking, the handsome and the beautiful are naturally attracted to the good looking, the handsome, the beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few beholders’ eyes will want to linger very long on the truly unattractive person.” I actually wrote this stuff down.

“Inhumanity” Here it is: “’Man’s inhumanity to man’ is a phrase used to describe acts which are definingly human. What other species would (or could) have had the atomic bomb, or the holocaust? It is a deceptive and cowardly phrase.” Well alright then.

“Food Philistine” – A strange and very silly short piece in which I discover that my attitude to food (though I had “no aversion to it”) was “the same as my attitude to sleep – if I could do without it, I would.” I don’t feel that way about either food or sleep now, really and until now I didn’t realise I had ever felt that way.

“Money, money, money” In short, class = wealth. The problem with Britain is (I seem to be saying) that the upper class control the wealth of the working class while the complacent middle class are indifferent as long as they are comfortable & therefore provide the upper class with a comfortable mattress to insulate them from the should-be-revolutionary consequences of their greed. It may be true?

“The Eye of the Beholder Two” – this time it’s all about how I prefer brutalist architecture to old churches etc and prefer the “drab emptiness” of municipal parks, deserted backstreets etc to epic, panoramic landscapes. Nowadays I like all of those things.

“Responsibility” A “pro choice” rant that, I’m glad but surprised to say, reads exactly like the social media posts of ‘pro choice’ people in the last few years – it begins “The anti-abortion lobby, for all their rhetoric about the sanctity of human life, seem to disregard entirely (and with great relish) the quality of human life. Indeed, they seem to enjoy inflicting misery wherever they go.” And it ends with the even more 2020s-ish: “To the anti-abortionist, the human being is only a human being until it is born. After that it is not their problem.” I was right then and still am now: yay me.

“Censored” In which I get on my high horse about the right to watch violent horror movies: “When I hear that a member of the British Board of Film Classification has embarked on an orgy of violence and mayhem using a chainsaw, I will begin to believe that film violence has an effect on the viewer (if it happens twice.)” I DO think it has an effect on the viewer – actually, I hope it does, or why even bother? Disturbing things should be disturbing. But my views on censorship (if no harm is done in the making of it then who has the right to say an adult shouldn’t watch it) are pretty much the same. I probably believe in ‘classification’ and parental responsibility more now than I did then though.

“A Fair Day’s Pay…” Manual workers should be at the top of the pay pyramid as their work is harder and more necessary, but pen pushers are in charge of wages etc so it’ll never happen, he seems to be saying.

“Animals” A very dubious piece in which I query the relative value of human beings and other animals, slightly in favour of other animals, or at least not in favour of us humans.

“Power Corrupts – Small time” “Power corrupts – this is an indisputable fact,” I say – but is it? Anyway, my premise is that dictators are bad and all, but for really corrupt power you have to look at school teachers and small-town police officers.

“Grown Men and Women” – Me, moaning about sport

“How to Spoke Proper” – In short,“speaking properly” (in the UK sense) is a classist fantasy based on the random fact that the BBC happened to be founded in the south of England. This may or may not be true.

“Rules of Attraction” – “Sexuality has nothing to do with morality,” he says, “I am attracted to members of the opposite sex because I was born this way – so if I saw a member of my own sex who looked like a member of the opposite sex in a way that I found attractive, I would naturally be attracted to them, for as long as they looked like an attractive female. I do not see how there can be anything wrong with this, or any variation of it.” This sounds like an argument with some lurking real-life subtext, but to the best of my knowledge now, it wasn’t.

“The Sea” – it’s about the sea, which I apparently felt very strongly about. I still love the sea but can’t imagine writing very emotionally about it.

“Philosophy” – As an atheist is there any more logical philosophy than to live a life of pure hedonism? I seem to conclude not, but for me at the time this was a purely hypothetical question

“Against Nature” –  Here it is in full: “Humankind is natural, as much a part of nature as anything else on the planet. Everything humankind does is natural. The worst it can do (selfishly speaking) is to kill itself off, which in a universal sense, would be no big loss.” I was in some ways a very standard teenager I guess. Joy Division was probably my favourite band at that point

So, here are the more extended bits.

Firstly, I’ve chosen “Books” because it is the one that most amusingly makes the 1990s seem like it was a million years ago. My main argument is that though people were (as they always seem to have been) predicting the death of the printed word, books are unlikely to be replaced by anything else. But let young Will explain it, as his Nostradamus-like powers of prediction don’t seem to have anticipated the Kindle. More strangely, he does not seem to be aware of laptops, didn’t they already exist in the mid-90s? Surely! To be fair to him though, “we” still prefer a book to a kindle or tablet which I can’t stand using unless it’s the only way to read something.

Anyway, the death of books will not happen, he says, because…
“They are convenient, we [he often calls himself ‘we’] cannot imagine taking even a small computer on a train or plane, or to the beach or on holiday in our suitcase – though this may be possible in the future. We like to go back a page and reread something, whilst[!] keeping our place on the page we have reached. We like the thought, whether we actually do it or not, of being able to read Wordsworth in the mountains of the Lake District – we feel that a keyboard and a screen would take away a rather large part of the romance of this.”

“Royalty at the End of the Millennium” is fun because it’s surprisingly still topical (up to a point) and begins by saying things, far more grumpily, that I probably still think. I’ll transcribe as much of it as I can bear, with the faulty punctuation and repetition intact because the tediousness is part of the fun. Still, it’s odd and a bit alarming to find a UKIP-ish tone intruding re. the funding of the Royal family, even if I thought I was playing Devil’s avocado (as I might have said) at the time.

“Why do (how can) people like the Royal Family? I don’t know. What is even stranger than this affection is the public liking one member of the family, and (apparently randomly) not another. ‘Fergie’ seems to be disliked for acting like any normal person suddenly coming into a huge amount of money i.e. spending it. People who claim to dislike her because of affairs etc seem to forget or dismiss the affairs of (practically all) other family members.
People liking (or even loving) Princess Diana is one of the biggest mysteries of our age. The myth of Diana as a beautiful woman started before the Royal Wedding and continue to this day. Are these people blind? Do they really believe it? Are they just trying to sell newspapers or cash in on Royal memorabilia? Who knows? The fact is that she is an average, ordinary-looking woman in her thirties with a large nose, large chin, and even larger amount of money to make the most of what she has with.*  (The reader may be forgiven for assuming that the writer of these words must be very handsome, to stand in judgement of other peoples looks – this is certainly not the case – but I do not have a media conspiracy trying to convince people that I am).
More seriously (and it is a serious matter when a country is in a serious[!] recession, and yet it’s people give millions of pounds a year to keep one family in, well, the lap of luxury would be a gross understatement – especially when this one family already has millions of pounds of inherited private wealth). What are the reasons for and against the Royal Family?

Well, the for argument usually falls into two compartments[?] – tradition, and (feebly) that the Royals are good for the economy via the tourist trade. The first of these is the stronger of the two and yet doesn’t really bear close inspection – is it necessarily good because it’s traditional? Yes, the family is descended from a long line of noble (i.e. rich) families – but they are not necessarily British families. They are Greek, they are German, but there is not an awful lot of British blood in there. As far as I am concerned, this would not matter, except that the arguments for usually draw attention to it being a great British tradition, or institution. I can only say that it’s not much of a native tradition that has the British public paying money to a European family to make them even richer.”

Some more highlights – this is just too tedious to write out in full:
“There are few things as irritating as hearing how hard the Queen works – give me a few million pounds a year and I will be glad to attend dinners, meet dignitaries and travel abroad – not many people would turn down an offer like this.”
“The arguments against are much easier to state – they don’t do anything, we pay for them for being related to people, they are a British tradition which involves few British people, they could exist in comfort without public money, they represent an outdated (and according to the Prime Minister) non-existant class system, they stagger from one scandal to another and in a country with an underfunded health service, underfunded system of education, a large homeless population and mentally ill people being turned out onto the streets** they are a mockery of and insult to our supposedly democratic society.”

So there we have it, an unexpected meeting with my apparently slightly intense, smart-assed but ridiculous younger self. Nice to catch up but I’m not sure I’d want to hang out with him!

*Yes, I genuinely wrote “to make the most of what she has with”

**I assume this has something to do with the “care in the community” scandal that seemed to be unfolding during the last few years of the Thatcher/Major era

 

 

 

church, going*

But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure.

Philip Larkin, Church Going (1954)

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky

Given that Christianity seemed to be – in the sense of being a kind of shared societal glue – on its way out in the 1950s, and was undermined further by the social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, it’s surprising in a way that churches are still standing at all. But what Larkin, for all of his humanist cynicism didn’t foresee, is what seems the obvious fate of churches in the 21st century: they won’t be allowed to peacefully moulder into dust and neglect like the menhirs and cairns of previous eras – they get sold instead.

At the time of writing, the Church of Scotland has seventeen churches for sale, among other kinds of properties and plots of land. The same thing isn’t happening with Catholic churches, Mosques, Synagogues or Mormon temples or whatever it is that Scientologists have – not because of anything inherently superior about those religions or the quality of their followers’ faith, but because, at the time when these churches were built – mostly in the 19th century, but some even earlier – the Church of Scotland was something you had to opt out of, not something you had to join. And therefore, in a way – although not of course a legally binding way – the Church of Scotland is selling off something which belongs to the people of Scotland.

 

 

The idea that money is more important to the Church of Scotland than the buildings that were at the centre of the spiritual and social lives of generations of people (and also, the place that God lived, I guess) seems grotesque, but there it is. It’s just bricks (or stone) and mortar, after all; or that, presumably is the logic, because God doesn’t actually live in a stone building but in either heaven or the hearts of believers etc, etc. And yet, if it’s just a building, how come people can only vandalise houses or schools or barns, but they can “desecrate” churches? “De-consecration” – what the church does in order to render its buildings saleable – is just a non-inflammatory way of saying desecration. De-consecrating the church doesn’t affect the material of the building, but it does remove its purpose – but what it can’t do is remove its history. So if you buy a church, what is it that are you actually buying? In a book I liked as a teenager, Terry Brooks’s Magic Kingdom For Sale – Sold! (1986), a depressed lawyer called Ben Holiday buys what turns out to be something like Narnia or Middle Earth, from a catalogue (nowadays it would be from a website). If Mr Holiday bought a church, he wouldn’t be mystically transported to an otherworldly realm, but he would – and the buyers of these buildings do – become the owner of a place where thousands of people were, in a meaningful way, transported to a place where, whatever the privations and terrors of their daily lives might be, things made some sort of black-and-white sense. Somewhere that virtue was rewarded with eternal paradise, vice  was punished with eternal damnation and the person in the pulpit had the correct answers to whatever questions life was throwing at you. You don’t have to believe in any of that to realise that it was (and to some extent I suppose still is) important.

Like, I’m sure, many convinced lifelong atheists (and I’m a very un-spiritual one at that), I love churches. The architecture, the fixtures and fittings, the solemn atmosphere. The idea of building on top of (Native American) Indian burial grounds was enough to fuel horror fiction and urban legend for a century; will turning churches into houses, flats and offices do something similar? Probably not; although some of the churches for sale do indeed still have graveyards attached, the churches themselves, whether used or not, are utterly familiar to the local people. Like the Indian burial grounds, they have, for these people, always been there, but unlike them, they have always been visible, and have far more mundane connotations. They aren’t, or weren’t just the places people got married or had funeral services, they are places where, very recently, a few times a year you trooped along with your primary school classmates to hear about the less commercial, less fun aspects of Easter or Christmas and to sing a few hymns. In short, even now churches aren’t, or are rarely “other” in the way that (to non-indigenous settlers and their descendants) Indian burial grounds are. But, after generations will they still be familiar in that way, or will they become just funny-shaped houses? Who knows, but it’s sad to think so.

However much one does or doesn’t believe in the mythology that put them there, churches, just as local landmarks, bear the weight of memory, just as schools, war memorials, statues and monuments do. Although a valuable and significant thing, it’s a personal, private and unknowable kind of value; nostalgia, in its original, Greek meaning of ‘homecoming pain’ can be evoked in all of its intense complexity by almost anything, and in your own private iconography a road sign or piece of weed-strewn wasteland is likely to be as potent as, or even more potent than the more obvious celestial symbolism of the heaven-pointed steeple and arched windows. But the fact remains that the hopes, beliefs, dreams, grief and pain of generations was directed towards the church like lightning towards the weather vane that surmounts it; there is a kind of power just in that.

So what should be done with churches? You can’t keep everything forever, after all, and the Church of Scotland is, strange though it is to say it, a business. The people used to belong to it; it never belonged to the people and its churches are not public property in anything but the spiritual sense. But perhaps they should be: granted, they only reflect one strand of what is now a multicultural (and what was always a multi-faith) nation, but it’s a strand that informs attitudes and ways of life that contribute, both negatively and positively to the character of the country and its culture to this day. And although I don’t personally believe in the idea that buildings and land absorb a kind of psychic residue that manifests itself in the ghosts, hauntings and folklore beloved of digital TV channels, I feel like they should.

Those fundamental life events; christenings, marriages, funerals, wars, disasters – all of those lost people and all of that vanished emotion, should have some kind of monument or repository – and what better place than a church? Still; maintaining empty buildings purely for the sake of their history is an expensive, ethically dubious business and hardly an indicator of cultural good health. Finding new uses for these kinds of buildings that somehow respects their history is no easy task either. Personally, I’d like the government to buy them and use them to display the large percentage of publicly owned art that is currently languishing in the storerooms of galleries and museums, fulfilling in some ways at least, the National Galleries of Scotland’s strategic plan: “we will make the national collection accessible to all and inspire curiosity across the world. We want to connect with our audiences and with each other in new, collaborative and involving ways.” It would be appropriate in a way; human beings create art as god is supposed to have created people after all, and people with or without gods make art; it expresses many of the same fundamental impulses and emotions as religion. But it’s hardly an idea that’s likely to capture the public imagination, except in the negative sense that ambitious government spending on the arts – not that there has been much of that – always invites manufactured outrage. Ah well, it’s probably best to just make them into flats.

* I realise the double meaning was already implied in the title of Larkin’s poem, but why not render it completely unsubtle with a comma?

 

ghost cities of cyberspace

 

Tell me now, I beg you, where
Flora is, that fair Roman;
Archippa, and Thaïs rare,
Who the fairer of the twain?
Echo too, whose voice each plain,
River, lake and valley bore;
Lovely these as springtime lane,
But where are they, the snows of yore?¹

François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis(1461)¹

My uncle died two years ago now, but his Instagram account is still there. How many dead people live on in their abandoned social media accounts? The future never seems to arrive, never really exists, but history never ends. For over a quarter of a century, social media has mirrored and shaped lives, always evolving, but leaving behind its detritus just like every other phase of civilisation. Where are the people we were sociable with on the forgotten single-community (bands, hobbies, comedy, whatever) forums and message boards of the 90s and 2000s², or the friends we made on MySpace in 2005? Some live on, ageing at an only slightly faster rate than their profile pictures (Dorian Gray would now age privately at home, his picture migrating untouched from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok etc), others lost, vanished, dead? But still partially living on, like those sunlit American families in the home movies of the 50s and 60s.

Club Kids 1992 – Keda, Kabuki Starshine, and Sacred Boy, Copyright Michael Fazakerley

Twenty-five years is a long, generation-spanning time, but, just as abstract expressionism essentially still lives on, in almost unaltered forms but no longer radical, long past the lifetimes of Rothko, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, so the (just) pre-internet countercultural modernity of the late 80s and early 90s, the shock-monster-gender-fluid-glam of Michael Alig and the Club Kids, still prevalent back in the Myspace era³, (captured brilliantly in the 1998 ‘shockumentary’ Party Monster and less brilliantly in the somewhat unsatisfactory 2003 movie Party Monster) lives on and still feels current on Instagram and Tiktok and reality TV and in whatever is left of the top 40. Bulimic pop culture eats reconstituted chunks of itself and just as the 60s haunted the early 90s, bringing genuine creativity (Andrew Weatherall, to pick a name at random) and feeble dayglo pastiche (Candy Flip, to deliberately target a heinous offender), a weird (if you were there) amalgam of the 1980s and 90s haunts the 2020s, informing both the shallow dreck that proliferates everywhere and some of the genuine creativity of today.

‘I’m ready now,’ Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. ‘Touch the spread with your left hand.’ Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper’s ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

entering cyberspace in William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) Grafton Books, p.105.

Alta Vista, 1999

Cyberspace, like any landscape which people have inhabited, has its lost cultures and ruins, becoming ever more remote and unknowable with the passing of years, but, like Macchu Picchu or the Broch of Gurness, retaining a sense that it all meant something significant once. The not-quite barren wastelands of Geocities and Xanga, the ruined palace of MySpace, a Rosetta stone partly effaced with dead links and half forgotten languages; photobucket, imageshack, tripod, what do these mean if you’re 15? Would the old, useable interface of MySpace seem as charmingly quaint and remote now as the penpal columns in the pages of ’80s music magazines do?

Looking for friends all over the world, Metal Forces magazine, 1987

But there was a time when Lycos, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves were peers of Google, and Bebo rivalled Facebook and Twitter, both now seemingly in senile phases of their development. Until very recently Facebook (Meta) and Twitter were brands that were seemingly unassailable, but empires do fall, albeit more slowly than bubbles burst.4  And meanwhile, the users of social networks age and die and give way to generations who remember them, just as the Incas and the Iron Age Orcadians are remembered by their monuments, if nothing else. Depressing, when you think about it; probably won’t write about history next time.

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.  JD Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye, Penguin, 1958, p.220

 

 

Geocities; this is what the future used to look like

¹ translated by Lewis Wharton in The Poems of François Villon, JM Dent & Sons, 1935, p54. Not reading French – I seem to go on about that a lot – this is my favourite translation I’ve come across, although apparently it’s a pretty free one, judging by the literal – but still quite nice – one here

² the continuing success of Reddit suggests that people never really grew discontented with the interface of the Kiss online fanclub c. 2005 (etc etc)

³It’s weird to note that the Club Kids would be considered – even without the murder etc – just as outrageous today as in the late 80s, even though their aesthetic was itself put together from a mix of Bowie, gore movies, Japanese pop culture etc etc. But then as I think I recently noted, there are people who still find the word fuck outrageous, after something like a millennium.

4Online and mainstream culture, even after this quarter century, remain mysteriously separate. Online news unfolds as it happens, but meanwhile in the daytime world, mainstream culture hangs on to husks even older than Geocities; publicly owned TV news shows don’t look to what’s happening now, but pore over the front pages of newspapers – yesterday’s news… today! – simultaneously being redundant and ensuring that newspaper owners’ views get publicity beyond their dwindling readership and therefore giving them an artificial sense of relevance. Which is really just about money, just as Google and Facebook are; the crumbling aristocracy of print media, its tendrils still entwined with the establishment, versus the new money, steadily buying its way in.

 

 

courbet’s birthday – the case for conscious iconoclasm

 

Gustave Courbet was born 101 years ago today, but although he remains one of the key figures in nineteenth century art and the roots of modernism, this isn’t about his painting.

During the Franco-Prussian war, Courbet, by then in his 50s and an elder statesman of French art, proposed that the Column erected in the Place Vendôme by Napoleon to commemorate his military victories be pulled down as a symbol of aggressive imperialism, and moved to a location that both neutralised and cast light on its true meaning; he suggested the military hospital, the Hotel des Invalides.

Place Vendôme, 1871

He also suggested that a new monument be made from melted down cannons and dedicated to the people, both French and German, and the peaceful federation of the two nations.
During the brief period of the Paris Commune the next year, the revolutionary government followed half of his advice and issued a decree that the Vendôme column should be demolished – and replaced by a figure representing the Commune itself.

It was duly pulled down, but the Commune was too short-lived for its replacement to be built, and the suggestion that the Place Vendôme column be moved elsewhere was ignored. Instead, when the Commune was overthrown and the government reinstated, Courbet was imprisoned (ironically, he had by then fallen out with the leaders of the Commune too, disagreeing with their more repressive measures) and after his release was charged with the expense of rebuilding the column (he fled France to avoid paying), which remains in the Place Vendôme to this day. Which is a shame. Had Courbet’s original suggestion been followed, the column would have been both a memorial to Napoleon and the might of his armies as it is now, but also to the real meaning of military glory; death, pain and horror.

Courbet and the Communards (not THE Communards; Jimmy Somerville was not present) with the ruins of the Vendôme column, 1871

In the past week, statues have been toppling (notably the statue of slave traders Edward Colston in Bristol and Robert Milligan in London; and it’s good I think; Britain is full of statues and memorials and it’s only right that, rather than seeing them simply as decoration, we should see them as history, and ask who they are and why they are there. And their removal is history too; and I hope that in removing the layers of time and dust and whitewash between us and the past, we can take into account that removing and ignoring parts of history that – for whatever reason – we don’t like, is and always has been part of the problem. A statue that glorifies one man while ignoring the countless, now unfortunately mostly nameless, people he exploited and whose lives he destroyed is an abomination and a symbol of so many things that are wrong with this country; so it should be used to educate and illuminate that sordid corner of history, and to ensure it isn’t forgotten.

Edward Colston’s statue – Ben Birchall/PA Wire/PA Images

I don’t know the best way to do that, but as a matter of course I think that – at the very least – the monuments that litter the country should be looked at, evaluated, explanations added that tell people what history really means. History is the lives of people, not something abstract, and not just those people who pleased the authorities or the populace enough to be celebrated and commemorated – what was the context? Why are we supposed to still care, where does that part of history fit in with where we are now? In a post-modern age it’s not too much to ask that our landscape becomes post-modern too. If statues and monuments of individuals are to mean anything more than personal glory for their subject it doesn’t seem too much to ask to have a basic overview in whatever form (plaque/recording/who knows?) – who is it/what did they do/why are they here* – and the latter two things may only be tenuously linked. In the case of (since he’s in the news) Edward Colston, a few lines can tell a story that I think is worth telling; Edward Colston (1636-1721)/businessman responsible for the slavery of an estimated 84,000 African men, women and children, 19,000 of whom died in transit to the West Indies, many of whom were sadistically branded with his company logo/statue erected as a reward for investing his fortune in British charities, churches and hospitals. The wording would be important and require more thought than I’ve given it here though. I don’t think this would condone anything, but it explains something about history, what the empire was, how it worked and why things are as they are now, in a way that a name and birth/death dates doesn’t.

*immediately you have to admit that this could become absurd; but it needn’t

A statue isn’t a museum, but I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t do the same job as one; not just preserving, but educating. There’s a parallel argument here too about museums and the repatriation of items stolen from different peoples; and it’s hard to see a good argument against repatriation in an age where the contents of a museum a thousand miles away is as easily accessible to most people as the contents of one a hundred, or fifty miles away. But that’s another discussion.

Importantly, this isn’t – to me at least – an argument for less public art, but for more. Heroines and heroes are not necessarily those people whose fame was great enough to warrant erecting statues of them within living memory. The heroes, as they were then considered, of the Napoleonic wars, or the British Empire, or of World War Two, may not be – and mostly shouldn’t be – our heroes now – but it’s never too late to remember other figures, who exemplify what we retrospectively see as the virtues of their age (deciding who you would memorialise is irresistible; was very glad to see Sylvia Pankhurst memorialised myself). And though some argue (such as Rachel Holmes in this article that I mostly agree with) that there are too many statues in the UK, I don’t think so. The more our history is clear to see and to question, the healthier it is. Hiding it, or limiting public memorials to people we all approve of (impossible) seems the worst kind of self censorship. That said, it gives me some kind of patriotic pride to note that, despite the number of memorials to forgotten military people and monarchs in my own capital city, the best-known statues there are to a writer (albeit one whose role in Scottish history is both illustrious and ambiguous, depending on your political point of view) and  and a dog (ideologically pretty okay).

Probably the Emperor Claudius, 1st century AD

But anyway; time and memory and history are complex, fluid things. There’s a life size bronze head, probably of the Emperor Claudius, in the British Museum which, for whatever reason was removed from its statue and thrown into the river Alde nearly 2000 years ago. The most attractive theory is that the statue was destroyed during Boudicca’s rebellion of native British tribes in AD 61 – and while we can never know if this is true, knowing that the statue existed and that it was dismembered tells us more about Imperialism, resistance and human history than if it had simply been melted down and erased from the world.

The year before Courbet’s birth, Shelley, like Courbet a socialist of sorts, published Ozymandias.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”.

 

 

yesterday was crazy; D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

 

Faith A. Pennick
D’Angelo’s Voodoo
33⅓ books

D’Angelo c.2000 by Mark Guthrie

This review may not be fair to writer/filmmaker Faith A. Pennick and her excellent book, not because I didn’t like it – it’s great – but because since I was sent the book (by now onsale), events that don’t need mentioning here have overtaken it a bit. On the plus side, probably more people have more time to read and listen to music than they have in living memory, so maybe it’s not all bad. And Pennick’s book, among other things, is an extended argument for really listening to an album as opposed to just letting it play while you do other things.

 

If you read my review of Glenn Hendler’s Diamond Dogs book you will probably have realised that I have quite a lot to say about Bowie (and in fact one of the few moments of pride in my writing career such as it is, is that I got to write an obituary for Bowie in an actual print magazine – and that, on reading it now I still agree with myself – which is not always the case!), whereas with D’Angelo’s Voodoo, the opposite is true; Hendler was adding to my knowledge of an artist I love, Pennick is telling me about someone who I previously knew almost nothing about. As I mentioned in that previous review, as a music journalist people are never shy about telling you what they essentially want is the music not the writing; but for me, most good writing has an element of Thomas Hardy’s dictum about poetry: “The ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own” and in the case of the music writer that means engaging you (or rather me) whether or not one has an interest in the music itself. Here Pennick scores very highly; the narrative of how she came to know and love Voodoo manages to remain direct and personal while also bringing in all of the cultural/historical and musical context necessary to be more than a kind of diary entry.

I came to the book thinking that I didn’t know anything by D’Angelo at all*, and while setting the scene, Pennick invokes a list of artists that is – to my taste in music – both encouraging (Erykah Badu, De La Soul, Angie Stone) and, though admittedly important,  offputting (Michael Jackson, Lauryn Hill). But as it turns out, the fact that I didn’t know D’Angelo’s ‘greatest hits’ is not all that surprising; a key point in Pennick’s book is about how D’Angelo’s career was defined, for better or worse, by the video for Untitled (2000) – but that single didn’t chart in the UK and if I was aware of him via osmosis at all, it would have been from the trio of singles from his previous album Brown Sugar, that made the Top 40 here five years earlier.

*in fact, I should have known that his vocals (and sometimes his musicianship) appear on records by people like Q-Tip and The Roots that are more my cup of tea than his own music.

DAngelo in Electric Lady Studios, where Voodoo was recorded

But by 2000, even if Untitled had been a hit here, the chances are I would never have seen that video. Like many people of my generation, I had a pretty good grip on what was in the top 40, whether I liked it or not (and usually I liked it not), up until the mid-90s, when Top of the Pops (TOTP), the UK’s Top 40 music TV show, was moved from its classic Thursday night slot to a Friday. This may seem a little thing, but for background, during my childhood there were only 4 (and pre-1982 only three) TV channels, which meant that, if a family watched TV at all, there was a pretty good chance that they were watching the same things as you were; and most people I knew watched TOTP – so all through school, what was at number one was common knowledge (to be fair it probably still is for school age kids). By the mid 90s (actually, any time after one’s own taste had formed), watching the show was largely a kind of empty ritual or habit but still; it did give, pre social media, a general sense of where pop music and pop culture were at at any given time.

In 2000, when Voodoo was released (I am surprised now to find that TOTP was still on at that time, albeit not in the classic slot and beginning its slow decline that ended in cancellation in 2006), aside from odd bits of experimental hip hop heard through my brother, like Kid Koala’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, classics like The Wu-Tang Clan’s The W and occasional forays into UK indie like Badly Drawn Boy, I was rarely listening to any music recorded after around 1975; Bowie, Funkadelic, Lou Reed, John Cale, early 70s funk, old blues and early Black Sabbath were [probably what I listened to the most. So D’Angelo passed me by; not that I think I would have liked Voodoo much at that time anyway.

But Faith A. Pennick is persuasive; I listened to Voodoo. And she is not wrong; despite lyrics that veer from great to obnoxious (just a personal preference, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song I liked for more than one listen whose theme is how great the performer of that song is), the album is meticulously put together, perfectly played with skill and heart – and to my surprise, with a beautifully organic sound – and in the end the only thing that puts me off of it – while in no way reducing its stature – is D’Angelo’s voice(s). It’s not that he isn’t a great singer, he clearly, demonstrably is; but the album coincides with/crystalises that period when R’n’B vocals tended to consist of multi-layered murmuring and crooning. I didn’t really like it then and it’s still not for me now – although the immediate and noticeable lack of autotune is incredibly refreshing. I used to love robot voices as a kid, but now that the slight whine of autotuned vocals is ubiquitous whenever you turn on the radio, it’s nice to hear someone who can sing, singing. In fact, for me, if you pared the vocals on Voodoo down to one main, direct voice and gave it the clarity of the drums and bass, I’d like the album a lot more; but it wouldn’t be the same album, and that’s my deficiency, not Voodoo’s.

For me, the main strength of D’Angelo’s Voodoo (the book) is in the way that Pennick weaves her own personal relationship with album and artist and the album’s cultural/socio-political background together. Voodoo wouldn’t sound the way it does without Prince or 60s and 70s funk and soul; but neither could it have come from someone without D’Angelo’s own personal background in gospel and the African-American church, and Pennick, as an African-American woman responds to the album in ways that would be inaccessible to a white, male writer in Scotland if not for her book. Why an album sounds the way it does is always personal to the artist, but also specific to the era and culture they come from, and how an audience – on a mass or individual level – responds to that album adds depth to the work and determines its stature. Pennick brings these strands together seamlessly; concise, informal and yet powerful, in its own quiet way the book is a virtuoso performance, just as Voodoo is.

 

“Ane doolie sessoun” covid-19 and the art of isolation

 

At some point in the late fifteenth century, the poet Robert Henryson (who lived in Dunfermline, not too far from where I’m writing now), began his Testament of Cresseid with one of my favourite openings of any poem:

Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte
Suld correspond and be equivalent.

Robert Henryson – The Testament of Cresseid and Other Poems, my edition Penguin Books, 1988, p. 19

I don’t think I knew, word for word, what he was saying when I first read it, but I did get the meaning: essentially that miserable/sad times (‘doolie’, which I guess would be ‘doleful’ a few hundred years later; not sure what it would be now) call for tragic/sad/grim (“cairfull”, literally ‘full-of-care’) poetry, and the words, with their mixture of strangeness and familiarity (people in Scotland have not talked like that for many centuries, but I think that being attuned to the accents and patterns of speech here still makes it easier to understand), stayed with me. The poet goes on to talk about the weather; apparently it was an unseasonable Lent in Fife that year, when “schouris of hail can fra the north discend/that scantlie fra the cauld I micht defend.” Despite impending climate disaster, Fife weather hasn’t changed beyond all recognition it seems; It was only two weeks ago – though it seems far longer now – that I was caught in a hailstorm myself.

my own photograph from April 2006

The season is still doolie however; not because of the weather, but because of the pandemic sweeping the world, one unlike any that Henryson would have known, but which probably wouldn’t have surprised him; one of the key elements he brought to the Troilus and Cressida story in The Testament of Cresseid is its heroine being struck down by leprosy and joining a leper colony.
the cover of my copy of his poems has a drawing from a medieval manuscript, of a figure which would have been familiar to most readers at the time; a leper with a bell begging for alms.

Maurice Utrillo

In fact, with dependable cosmic irony (or if you are less fatalistic, normal seasonal progress), the weather, since ‘stay home’ has been trending online and quarantine officially recommended, has been beautiful here. The streets are fairly, but not yet eerily, quiet. So this particular dyte (the old word that Henryson used referred to his poem but I think stems ultimately from the Latin dictum and can apply to any piece of writing) may not seem especially gloomy (and may in fact be quite sloppy), but it is certainly careful in the sense that Henryson intended. It’s quite easy – and I think reasonable – to be optimistic about the state of the world in April 2020, but not I hope possible for anybody with any sense of empathy to not be concerned about it.

There are some silver linings to the current situation (major caveat: so far); as well as, inevitably, bringing out the worst in some people, a crisis also brings out the best in many more. And a whole range of major and minor plus points, from a measure of environmental recovery to time to catch up with reading, have emerged. For me, one of the nicest things to come out of the crisis so far is – thanks to social media – the way that arts institutions, while physically almost empty, have begun to engage online with a wider range of people than those who are likely to, or physically able to visit the galleries themselves.

Algernon Newton – The Outskirts of Kensington

 

It has been said that Edward Hopper is the artist who has captured this particular moment, and it’s true that his vision of loneliness in the metropolis particularly mirrors our own age of social media and reality TV, in that it is voyeuristic* – we are not looking at ourselves, or at an absence of people, we are looking at other people whose isolation mirrors our own. If there’s something about this particular pandemic that sets it apart from the Spanish flu of 1918-19 or the great plague of 1665 or the Black Death of 1348-9, or any of the devastating outbreaks of disease that sweep the earth from time to time, it’s that online we are (a ridiculous generalisation perhaps, but if you’re reading this chances are you have internet access at least) sharing the experience of isolation; surely in itself a relatively new phenomenon, at least on this kind of a scale. When Daniel Defoe wrote in his fictional memoir of the 1665 plague (and it’s worth remembering that, although he was only five when the plague swept London, he would have had the testimony of many who had survived as adults as well as whatever shadowy memories he himself had of the period)

Passing through a Token-house Yard, in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, and a woman gave three violent screeches, and then cried “Oh! Death, Death, Death!”in a most inimitable tone, and which struck me with horror and a chilness in my very blood. There was nobody to be seen in the whole street, neither did any other window open; for people had no curiosity now in any case; nor could any body help one another

Daniel Defore, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, my copy published by Paul Elek Ltd, 1958, p. 79-80

he was depicting a situation which many people could no doubt relate to; after the fact. What we have now is a sense of shared helplessness in real time; this has never existed, quite in this way before. Assuming some kind of return to normality, we (not entirely sure who I mean exactly by ‘we’) will know each other better than we ever have; something to have mixed feelings about no doubt.

*not a criticism; visual art is voyeurism

Edward Hopper capturing the 2020 zeitgeist with 11 am (1926)

The current appeal of Edward Hopper’s paintings of lonely figures is humanistic and easy to explain. His art, with its depiction of strangers quietly sitting in anonymous places, people who paradoxically we can never know and never know much about, but who we can easily relate to, is profoundly empathetic.  It belongs to a long tradition of quiet loneliness or at least alone-ness that stretches back, in Western, art to the seventeenth century and the art of Vermeer (it’s easy to forget as the children of it, but the idea of art reflecting the individual for reasons other than wealth and status is an essentially Protestant one*) through artists like Arthur Devis (though I’m not sure he intended the quiet melancholy in his paintings) and Vilhelm Hammershoi (who did). In fact, Hammershoi’s beautiful turn-of-the (19th-20th)-century paintings are if anything even more relevant to stay-at-home culture than Hopper’s diner, bar and hotel-dwelling urbanites. With Hopper, we are often watching – spying on – his characters from the outside as if through a pair of binoculars, with Hammershoi we are shut in with them, like ghosts haunting their silent rooms.

*really the only ‘lonely’ figures in pre-Protestant European art are Christ himself  (think of the utter solitary misery of the crucified Jesus in Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece) and of course Judas, or those who like him, have separated themselves from Christianity. There is a terrifying solitary quality in some depictions of saints during martyrdom, but for their contemporary audience it was essential to bear in mind that they were not spiritually alone (note: this may be a completely false assertion)

Vilhelm Hammershoi – A room at home with the artist’s wife (1902)
voyeuristic Hopper: Night Windows (1928)

But if Hopper’s most discussed and shared works now are those where we seem to catch, as we do from a train window, a momentary glimpse of a life that is utterly separate from our own. It’s a feeling I associate with childhood and (very) specifically, with travelling through Edinburgh in the winter and seeing glimpses of people at windows and the high ceilings in Georgian houses in the new town when Christmas decorations were up. Who were all these people?

 

                                                                                             But there are Edward Hopper paintings too – including some of my favourites, like Early Sunday Morning (see below) – where the only human presence is the artist, or the viewer, where Hopper could claim (though I have no idea if he would have) like Christopher Isherwood, I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking.* But recording, for a human being, is thinking. And the picture of a place-without-people is rarely as simple as it seems; even in the case of an actual photograph; someone had to be there to photograph it, and had their human reasons for doing so. The tradition of landscape painting exemplifies this; landscapes may be mythical, romantic, realistic, but they have been recorded or edited or invented for a variety of complex human reasons. The landscape painting of earlier eras was often self-consciously beautiful, or psychologically charged (Caspar David Friedrich is the classic example; landscape as a personal, spiritual vision; in some ways in fact his work, with its isolated or dwarfed human figures, is kind of like a romantic-era Hopper), but the fact that the urban landscape is itself an artificial, human-constructed environment gives it a different, poignant (if you are me) dimension.

*Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye To Berlin, in The Berlin Novels, Minerva 1992, p. 243.

Edward Hopper – Early Sunday Morning (1930)

 

The appeal of the empty urban landscape in art is perhaps hard to explain to those who don’t see it, but I think it’s worth examining. There is a utopian tradition beginning with (or at least exemplified by) the ‘ideal cities’ produced in Italy in the late 15th century that is in a strange way misanthropic (or at least anthro-indifferent) in that the tranquil geometric perfection of the imaginary cities can only be made less harmonious by the introduction of human figures. But it’s also important to note that these cityscapes actually pre-date landscape painting for its own sake in western art by a few centuries. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that in the medieval and renaissance period, the urban landscape had a far greater claim to represent paradise than the natural one. The garden of Eden was a garden after all, not a wilderness, and even the word paradise denotes a walled enclosure in its original Persian meaning. We might think now of paradise existing beyond the realms of human habitation, but in ages where the landscape was mainly something perilous to be passed through as quickly as possible on your way to safety, the controlled human landscape had a lot to be said for it.

Ideal City c.1480s, previously attributed to Piero della Francesca

Like the Renaissance ‘ideal city’, the beautiful post-cubist-realist paintings of Charles Demuth have a sense of perfection, where the severe but harmonious geometry of his industrial buildings seems to preclude more organic shapes altogether.

Charles Demuth – My Egypt (1927)

But if Demuth shows an ideal world where human beings seem to have designed themselves out of their own environment, the ideal cities of the renaissance, with their impossibly perfect perspectives are something  more primal and dreamlike; prototypes in fact for the examinations of the inner landscape of the subconscious as practised by proto-surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and his actual-surrealist successors. De Chirico’s eerie ‘metaphysical’ cityscapes are essentially the ideal renaissance cities by twilight, and artists like Paul Delvaux used the extreme, telescoped perspectives of the early renaissance to create their own prescient sense of urban displacement. Why the kind of linear perspective that sucks the eye into the distance should so often be, or feel like, the geometry of dreams is mysterious – one plausible possibility is that it’s the point of view that first forms our perception of the world, the low child’s eye view that renders distances longer and verticals taller; we may be the hero (or at least main protagonist) in our dreams, but that definitely doesn’t mean we dominate them.

Paul Delvaux – Isolation (1955)

The use of isolated human figures, as in Delvaux and Hopper’s work, gives us a ‘way in’ to a picture, something human to either to relate or respond to (although Delvaux – like Magritte in Not To Be Reproduced (1937) – emphasises the loneliness and again the ultimate unknowable nature of human beings in Isolation by showing the figure only from behind), but the cityscape that is devoid of life, or which reduces the figures to ciphers, has a very different appeal.

Rene Magritte – Not To Be Reproduced (1937)

Whereas the unpopulated landscape may suggest a prelapsarian, primordial or mythical past, or an entirely alien realm altogether, empty streets are just that; empty. These are utilitarian environments designed specifically for human beings and their patterns reflect our needs. A meadow or hillside or mountain with no visible sign of human life may be ‘unspoiled’; towns and cities, by this definition, come ‘pre-spoiled’, and the absence of people raises questions where a natural landscape usually doesn’t; Where are the people? What has happened?

That said, nothing about Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, Algernon Newton’s paintings of Kensington (or Oguiss’s Paris, or indeed the beautiful photographs of the city in Masataka Nakano’s Tokyo Nobody (2000)) really suggests anything ominous or post-apocalyptic, but even so, the absence of life is the most noticeable thing about them. Whether intended or not, this gives a picture a psychological depth beyond that of a simple topographical study. As with the use of musical instruments within a still life painting (whether there to express the fleetingness of time, or the lute with a broken string to denote discord etc) the inclusion of something with a specific purpose (roads, paths, buildings) apparently not fulfilling that purpose, creates a response as complex as – though very different from – the feeling of looking at those lonely figures in Hopper and Hammershoi’s paintings. Not so different in fact, from the feeling of leaving your home in the spring of 2020 and walking down the deserted street outside.

Takanori Oguiss

These paintings can have a slightly uncanny quality reminiscent of (or vice versa) the eerie opening scenes (the best parts) of movies like The Omega Man (1971) and 28 Days Later (2002) or John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York (1981) where, emptied of people, any sign of life in the city becomes, not a sign of hope, but threatening and full of sinister power. Things will hopefully never reach that point in the current crisis, but as it is, avoiding people in the street is for now the new norm; for the first time I can remember, my natural reserve feels almost like a plus.

Algernon Newton – In Kensington (1922-3)

Those 15th century ‘ideal cities’ were part of the flowering of the renaissance, and, as with every other aspect of it, they were the product of people looking backwards as much as forwards. The actual, non-ideal cities that were lived in by the artists who painted the pictures were largely organic, messy, medieval conglomerations, regularly visited by outbreaks of disease. The ideal city’s emptiness is not only harmonious and logical, it’s clean. And like the classical sculptures, bleached white by time and weather, which were to prove so influential on that generation of artists, the aspiration is towards a kind of sterile perfection which never really existed until long after the culture that created the buildings and the art, had disappeared to leave a ghostly husk of its former self.

Algernon Newton – Spring Morning Camden Hill, 1940

The deserted city or townscape more or less disappears from art from the 15th century until the later years of the industrial revolution, when urban life itself became the subject for modern art. And it makes sense; the reversal in European culture which saw city life become perilous and the countryside as a means of escape was a slow one, and the solution (never more than a partial one) was in building programmes, urban renewal and harmonious town planning; Empire building and colonial expansion fuelled the growth of urbanisation and were fuelled by it; to imagine an empty city at the height of Empire was to imagine extinction. If the idea of empty streets, If there was any remaining collective memory of empty streets in the late 19th century, it was probably an echo of the kind of scenario that Defoe had written about*; less graced by the muses of harmony than haunted by the dead.

*or of natural disasters like drowned villages, or man made catastrophes like the Highland Clearances.

But by the late 19th century, in Europe, plague was less a current concern than it was gothic horror, the memory of a memory, and industrialisation had – for those with a measure of financial security – rendered the city (now with drains and public transport) and the country (now sans dangerous animals and medieval lawlessness) on something of an equal footing. For the generation of the impressionists, both city and country could be celebrated, and both (as has been true ever since) could mean escape. But that impressionist cliche, the ‘bustling metropolis’, defined by Baudelaire’s “fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis” – the hub of modernity, the engine of culture and progress, when the streets are empty, becomes something else, but it can never just be a collection of buildings.

Maurice Utrillo

 

Not surprisingly perhaps, it seems that to some degree, the art of the deserted street is a kind of declared outsider art; Maurice Utrillo was an alcoholic with mental health issues, and although literally at the centre of the Parisian art scene centred around Montmartre – because he was born there to an artist mother – he was nevertheless a marginal figure, and his paintings of his home town are heavy with melancholy and isolation.

Similarly, although far less gloomy, the Montmartre paintings of Maria Slavona, a foreigner – a German Impressionist painter living in Paris, are depictions of an urban landscape that, while not hostile, is enclosed and other and (to me) brings to mind the close of Philip Larkin’s Here: “Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” Whether that mood is inherent in the paintings, or only in the mind of the person looking at them, is not something I can answer.

Maria Slavona – Houses in Montmartre (1898)

The German artists of a later generation found a similar sense of alienation at home. The neue sachlichkeit (‘new objectivity’) movement of the Weimar Repulblic may have been a rejection of the extremes of Expressionism and romanticism, but in its embracing of modernity it was a specifically urban movement too. The teeming street scenes of George Grosz and Otto Dix reflected the sometimes chaotic street life of Germany’s big cities in the social and economic upheaval following that followed World War One much as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was to do in literature, but there were other views of the city too.

It was an era of political unrest, but if one thing united the political left and right it was the understanding that they were living in an essentially transitional period; that change would, and must come.

Hans Grundig was the epitome of the kind of artist hated by the Nazi party; politically a communist, he used his art to oppose the creeping rise of fascism but also to capture working class life in the city (in his case Dresden). But in Thunderstorm (Cold Night), 1928, it is the environment itself that condemns the society of the declining republic: the streets are empty and ghostly pale, the buildings, run down and near-derelict, offer little shelter and no comfort, and the people whose fate looked uncertain, are nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, a storm approached.

Hans Grundig Thunderstorn (Cold NIght), 1928

 

Carl Theodor Protzen – Lonely Street (1932)

Carl Theodor Protzen was, by contrast, an establishment figure; a member of the Association of Fine Artists and the German Society for Christian Art, he was to become a pillar of the Nazi art community. Urban landscapes were his speciality and his depictions of Nazi building projects were to make his name, but just prior to the NSDAP’s rise to power in 1933, he was painting pictures like Lonely Street (1932) that show those same urban landscapes, but without the excitement of progress. Less bleak and doom-laden than Grundig’s city, this is nevertheless an environment which does not embrace or protect humankind; the title reflects the child’s exclusion from the harshly geometric scene in which he finds himself and, although there is no sense of exaggeration, the perspective, as in surrealism, pushes the end of the road ever further into the distance.

This perspective is seen too, in Volker Böhringer’s the Road to Waiblingen, painted in the year that the Nazis came to power. Böhringer, an anti-fascist painter, was later to become a surrealist, and the ominous (blood-stained?) road, stormy clouds and sinister trees suggest that this is  (with apologies to Waiblingen) not a road that he saw leading anywhere very pleasant.

Volker Böhringer – the Road to Waiblingen (1933)

Ever since I was a child, I’ve always loved to visualise (usually at night) a real place, say a nearby hilltop or field, as it is at that moment, with nobody except animals and birds there to see or experience it. It’s a strange kind of excitement that depends on not being able to experience the thing you’re excited about: psychology probably has a term for it – but at a time when people have never been more inescapable (not that one necessarily wants to escape them) there is something appealing about the complex landscapes we have created for our needs, but without the most complex element of all – ourselves – in them. Whether we enjoy the empty streets or not (and hopefully we don’t have to get too used to them), we should probably take the time to look at what is all around us; it’s a rare chance to see our world without us getting in the way.

Surrealist social distancing: Rue de la sante (1925) by Yves Tanguy

messages from the past for the future

 

Sitting down to write this, a month after breaking my leg and having to grapple with hitherto-unconsidered questions like ‘how do I usually sit on a toilet’? and one week before a General Election where my preferred of the apparently plausible outcomes is an unsatisfactory coalition government, it feels strange and maybe wrong to be looking backwards. But, disturbing and reassuring in more or less equal measures, I think it’s a good way to look forward to whatever happens next.

I remember as a child, looking at a stamp album that had belonged to (I think) my dad (or maybe his dad) when he was a child. Even for someone with no interest in stamps, and less interest in collecting them, it was a peculiar and fascinating book; unfamiliar places, people, even currencies. The thing that stands out the most in my memory though is a stamp from Bosnia, a name which at the time I hadn’t heard before and which sounded as unlikely and frankly made-up as countries like Syldavia and Borduria that I knew from Tintin books. That memory itself has a strange and silly quality now, but at the time (somewhere in the mid-80s would be my guess) Bosnia was as fantastical to a child (or me at least) as I expect the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia would be to Primary school pupils now.

classic cold war artefact: Iron Maiden behind the Iron Curtain laserdisc (1985)

30 years on from the series of revolutions that symbolically culminated in the destruction of the Berlin Wall (the free opening of the Brandenburg Gate itself happened 30 years ago last month) it’s perhaps only natural that those who remember those times should be thinking of them. If you grew up with the cold war in the background (that is, any time really from the years after world war two up until the end of the 80s), the war itself may have constantly ebbed and flowed, but the communist eastern bloc was, monolithically (technically at least duolithically, but that’s not a thing) omnipresent in a way that now seems as unlikely and distant as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was there at school (we had to learn about “East Germany” (the GDR or DDR), “West Germany” (FRG or BRD) and the differences between the two, the USSR /CCCP, the space race, the arms race, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ etc etc etc), it was there in sports (especially the Olympics, but “West Germany” was quite a big deal during the ten minutes that I liked football) and in entertainment. Usually this meant sinister, emotionless and robot-like communists being the bad guys in endless numbers of films and TV shows (classic example; Rocky IV, but see also Red Dawn, Red Heat ad infinitum – it was interesting, in a depressing kind of way to see this old view of ‘reds’ adopted, without irony in the third, inferior season of Stranger Things this year), but it wasn’t all bad – sometimes bands made a point of playing behind the Iron Curtain and talked about how great the audiences were; I remember Iron Maiden played in Poland, Hungary etc in the mid-80s which presumably was a logistical nightmare, but nice for their fans who mostly would only have been able to hear their music through unofficial or even (the same thing really) illegal channels.

A few things have brought that period, and specifically the GDR, back to me recently; Tim Mohr’s superb book Burning Down The Haus – Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Dialogue Books, 2019), the work of the German photographers Ute and Werner Mahler and the Ostkreuz photography group, interviewed by Kate Simpson in issue 90 of Aesthetica Magazine (August/September 2019), the TV shows Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86 which I just watched, somewhat belatedly and a series of John le Carré’s classic spy thrillers, notably A Small Town In Germany (1968).
The central realities of all of these things is pretty much the same; in East Germany, the state (specifically the secret police, the notorious Stasi) was watching you, and not only did they not care if you knew it, they wanted you to assume you were being watched.

East Berlin punks at Planterwald, approx. 1981 by Harald Hauswald (Ostkreuz Agency)

One of the most chilling things in Tim Mohr’s book is the way that, from the beginning of the 80s until its end (punk seems to have had an extended lifespan in the GDR, partly because fashions were slower to take root and spread where the majority of the media was under state control, but also because it remained – from the music to the image – genuinely oppositional and rebellious, rather than being absorbed into mainstream pop culture) the punks were, as often as not arrested because of informants from their own families or even the bands themselves. Nevertheless, after a slow start, the bands multiplied, but in a planned economy with full employment its slogans were something like the opposite of the UK’s punk bands; Too Much Future being the classic East German punk statement; more info here. As Mohr notes, long before the advent of GDR punk, informing for the government was something like an epidemic. In fact, by 1952 – that is, just four years from the official founding of the nation – the Stasi had already recruited 30,000 informants (Burning Down The Haus, p.2), and that figure would rise exponentially throughout the decades. This was the reality that artists like photographer Ute Mahler were working in;

“Everyone knew that people were spying for state security. But nobody knew who. It could be anyone. We lived and breathed with this knowledge. In 1980, I stood at a May Day demonstration just below the grandstand. The demonstrators cheered at the government, which was on a podium above me. I got the impression that all the attendees were in agreement and were happy about it. Whilst editing the pictures, I discovered other faces in the crowd. That confirmed to me that you must look closely for what might be hidden.”

Ute Mahler, interviewed in Aesthetica, issue 90, p. 128

Action Force SAS figure, 1982: this creepy thing was one of the ‘good guys’

From a child in the UK’s point of view, the activities of the CND, the Greenham Common protestors, WarGames, Raymond Briggs’s When The Wind Blows and even silly things like the Frankie Goes To Hollywood Two Tribes video strengthened rather than diluted the sense that, beyond ‘the west’ there was a huge, sinister and implacable enemy. That video – bad lookalikes of Reagan and Chernenko wrestling – was absurd but actually made child me more aware of the seriousness of the global situation. For a start, I remember thinking the actors were bad lookalikes, but I knew approximately who they were meant to be and what it represented. Actually, although I was very familiar with Reagan I doubt whether I knew Chernenko by name; even now I had to look it up to write this as my only memories of a pre-Gorbachev Soviet leader relate to Andropov, for the simple reason that his name was funny. I vaguely remember him in association with a joking remark (when he died??) that “his hand dropped off”, but whether that was purely from the playground or from TV I don’t know. Even toys contributed to the doomladen atmosphere. The initial run of Action Force (the European release of GI Joe, although initially there was no back story or characters, just – as with the older UK Action Man – a lot of more-or-less accurate contemporary military equipment, including sinister SAS paratroopers with gas masks etc. As I was typing this, I remembered that I used to have a fairly extensive knowledge of the weaponry favoured by the Warsaw Pact vs. NATO troops, which is fun for kids. As far as I remember, although children’s entertainment in the UK wasn’t by and large as propagandist as Hollywood, there wasn’t anything much to counter the idea of the brainwashed, robotlike communist hordes, programmed by the state from birth. And, at no point before 1989 did it feel like that situation was about to change.

That feeling was as strong, or even stronger, inside the Eastern bloc, as Ute and Werner Mahler explain;

“The generations after us might find it hard to understand the complex workings of the GDR, as memory begins to move into the past. These new generations perhaps cannot imagine how one could live in such a country, where one could not officially say what we thought. … When we took pictures in the 1970s and 1980s, we would never have imagined that one day the GDR would not exist. At that time, we wanted to show life as we experienced it – just as it was. Today, the images act as documents from a vanished country. In this way, they are given a renewed sense of purpose.”

Ute & Werner Mahler, interviewed in Aesthetica, issue 90, p.124

Even, as Mohr explains, the day after the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi were making arrests in something like the usual way, although the state quickly descended into chaos. But maybe everything feels permanent when you live through it; I remember when, what felt like 1000 years or so into Margaret Thatcher’s reich, we had had the Miner’s Strike, the Falklands war, there were millions of unemployed and it seemed like I had never met anyone who liked Thatcher, or anyone who voted for the Conservative Party and yet, come election time they still won. Maybe it’s more significant that I don’t remember anyone I knew being especially keen on Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock? But anyway; my memory is that by 1988, there was no feeling that the cold war was going anywhere; by 1990 it was over. Until I was 23 my only conscious experience was of a Britain run by a Conservative government, and then that was over.

symbol from an 80s
cold war childhood
Bob Light and John Houston’s satirical Gone With The Wind poster, c.1981 – vividly brings back the era to me

One of the stranger things to find, looking back on the phantom communist enemy of my childhood is that, contrary to what appeared to be the case on TV at the time, the people of East Germany, discontented though they obviously were, did not necessarily want to become westerners. As depicted vividly in Deutschland 83 and even more so in Deutschland 86, Communism as practised through the GDR’s dictatorship was a failed ideal, but it remained for many, something like an ideal. The bands documented in Burning Down The Haus, like the immediately post-Communist East German club scene that Mohr experienced himself, were ‘radically egalitarian’. These were, after all, people raised in a system which preached the power of the people, and even enshrined in law the freedom of expression, although in practice it didn’t allow either of those things. Often bands or musicians – people who were routinely arrested, beaten by the authorities, held in prison awaiting trial for months and so on – had opportunities to flee to the west (or were even encouraged to by the authorities who couldn’t cope with them) but chose to stay and work for change. Fascism and consumerism were seen, not just by the authorities, but by the punks, as the enemies of freedom, and even when the punk revolt happened it was often aided by (which seems odd but makes a kind of logical sense) the Lutheran church, which had an uneasy but respectable existence within the state. This meant that not only the punks (who tended towards anarchism in the 19th century sense politically), but also environmentalists, peace activists and other dissidents the church protected and to a degree nurtured, were working under the auspices of an institution which also had essentially anti-capitalist principles at its heart.

Rebelling against a de facto egalitarian state in itself creates a strange situation, as Ute Mahler recalls;

“In the GDR, when the collective was praised as an ideal, we were all lone fighters. In this new society where individuality is so important to so many people – coming together is the key”  quoted in Aesthetica, issue 90, p.124-7

And this is not really a paradox, even to an individualist; if the contrasting but ultimately similar oppressions of the 20th century, whether Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Communist China etc – have taught us anything, it’s that totalitarian power structures, of whatever political hue value conformity above individuality; but also that political progress requires subjected peoples to firstly insist on their individuality, but also to act in concert with each other, to combine their voices in order to be heard.

Perhaps because a general election is looming as I write this, reading about the lost world of the eastern bloc and its failures (mostly the same failures as capitalism to be fair; poverty, starvation, oppression etc etc) begs the question; what is the country that you believe in, if not a reflection of yourself and what you want? The Eastern punks were patriotic in the sense that they wanted the freedom to be themselves, in an East Germany that recognised the right to have dissenting voices and views, to improve the experience of East German citizenship for all. But, like everyone else, they shared their country with the other by-their-own-admission patriots who believed in a completely different country. If you consider yourself a patriot, you are probably living in a country with lots of other patriots whose country has the same name as yours, but whose beliefs and ideals are not the same as yours. Those who fought and died for [name a country] in [name a war] and those who fought and died for [name an opposing country] in [the same war] were fighting for the same thing, but they were also not fighting for the same thing. The people who fought for Britain against the Nazis and the people who fought for Britain against the Zulus both were and were not fighting for the same country, though on an individual level the end result – their deaths, and the deaths of their enemies – was much the same.
Somewhere in a previous, equally muddled* article I mentioned the poet Edward Thomas. Against the WW1 poetry of super-patriot Rupert Brooke, or the “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” humanism of Wilfred Owen, you have to balance the entirely personal patriotism of Edward Thomas;

 At the age of thirty-six there was no strong pressure on him to enlist, but in August 1915 he finally made up his mind… When his friend Eleanor Farjeon asked him why, he scooped up a handful of earth and said, ‘For this.’
Andrew Motion, ‘An Imaginary Life’, in Ways of Life, Faber & Faber 2008, p.102.

And no doubt that was true. But what he fought for doesn’t change the fact that what he was injured for (he survived the war, minus an arm) was the global ambitions of the small group of people then running the British Empire. In the end his patriotism and theirs amounted to the same thing; but they were not the same thing.

Thomas’s kind of patriotism is the one that I think most matches my own; despite being a lefty internationalist I am quite a patriotic person. I love Scotland and value it not because it’s the ‘greatest country in the world’ (not that I’m saying it isn’t; just that the concept itself is utterly meaningless I think) and not because it’s beautiful – which it undoubtedly is, but so is every country I’ve been to – but because it is uniquely itself. It’s the big picture and the details; the texture and the atmosphere, the things I like and the things I don’t like. What I’m really saying I suppose is just that it’s the country I know best, the one where all of my responses to the world were shaped – which is of course not something to run up a flagpole and if one somehow did there’s no reason that anyone else in the world should want to salute it. But it is patriotism nonetheless. One of the many ironies of our particularly irony-ridden times is that on the whole, the conservative/nationalist parties of whom there are suddenly it seems very many indeed, are by and large those least committed to any kind of environmental/green policies. Strange because if, like the Conservatives nominally are, you are all about pride in your culture and your country and your history, but aren’t really concerned about the welfare of the actual, physical country as a piece of land then what do you even think you stand for?

So anyway; in the world of 1988, the world of 1990 seemed unthinkable, but it happened anyway, because people wanted it. I know that as 2019 draws to an end the world is full of people, in Chile, in Hong Kong, in Iran and Sudan, in the USA and the UK; in every country, who want thoughtful, compassionate, democratic government and not repression, corruption and leaders who are quasi- or actual dictators. Who want to be represented, not ruled. And it’s not impossible.

* when I read my writing it makes me think of that episode of Peep Show where a disgruntled lapdancer says “If you can’t sum up all the aims in the first line then they’re too diffuse.” I think my writing tends to be a bit diffuse.**

**See?