tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81964334212047277432024-03-16T05:07:25.760-07:00Reading This Book, Cover to Cover ...Reviews of books I have read, cover to cover, interspersed with occasional essays and notes. Copies of my own books are available at Blackwells.co.uk searchable with "Trevor Pateman" or from the usual suspects. I do not have a Twitter / X account but do have an academia.edu page. My unique email is patemantrevor@gmail.comtrevor patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01843120497490896242noreply@blogger.comBlogger346125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-38692438432336412262024-03-09T12:15:00.000-08:002024-03-15T09:34:49.816-07:00Review: Peter Ackroyd The English Soul Faith of a Nation<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiartbizlBxU-2dO1ES9mZVTBZVZmx_iYR-IIXSlY9KhMLvxrBGYXPts5_Hz_m2RGukq6dhKzX4hejLVYJRg5KKTV7apj8Ax2mWfQ3xdVhKFGNnt_sr2J3ScyxbfTgS42gmdwxlIrFM3Vf50PKbF5UUP494cq_PnqxV1HsfrS6TMM1JmpFVJqT-5I118/s2856/ackroyd%20cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2856" data-original-width="2326" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiartbizlBxU-2dO1ES9mZVTBZVZmx_iYR-IIXSlY9KhMLvxrBGYXPts5_Hz_m2RGukq6dhKzX4hejLVYJRg5KKTV7apj8Ax2mWfQ3xdVhKFGNnt_sr2J3ScyxbfTgS42gmdwxlIrFM3Vf50PKbF5UUP494cq_PnqxV1HsfrS6TMM1JmpFVJqT-5I118/s320/ackroyd%20cover.jpg" width="261" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Reading this book was like
working through a cut and paste job. Peter Ackroyd acknowledges <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">the help of two research assistants (Thomas
Wright and Murrough O’Brien) </span>and I guess they provided the cuts pasted
into the potted Wikipedia-style biographies of divines and theologians which comprise
the bulk of the book. Those biographies record births, marriages and death-bed
scenes – in that order - though in contrast to Wikipedia nothing is footnoted.
As far as I can tell, not a single new fact <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">is reported; everything derives from secondary sources of which some are
listed as Further Reading. It’s rather dull and there’s no humour at all – perhaps to reflect the fact that Jesus never laughed (the
internet has long since gone viral on the subject). Occasionally, the book is
coy: was John Wesley a philanderer or not? The book suggests it but doesn’t
provide a clear answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I
found myself contrasting Ackroyd’s book with two recent works which are thoroughly
researched and lively and which light up English religious cultures: Anna
Keay’s study of Cromwellian England, <i>The Restless Republic</i> (2022) and
Daisy Hays’ <i>Dinner with Jospeh Johnson</i> which treats of late eighteenth
century radical and sceptical cultures in which William Blake figures (he gets
a chapter in Ackroyd’s book). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Some
discursive and slightly better essays appear later in the book but the last
chapter reverts to mini-biography, presenting CVs for three twentieth century
academic theologians with no attempt to discriminate. John Hick’s important <i>Evil
and the God of Love</i> is not elevated above lesser works and there is no
recognition of its core concern with solving the intractable theodicy problem:
<i>Since there is unmerited suffering in the world then either God is not all good
or not all powerful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Solve that one if
you can.</i> I am surprised that no editor was to hand to veto the inclusion of
this worse-than-weak last chapter.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">From
time to time the biographies are interrupted or concluded by strange one-liners
about “the English soul”. I quote a selection:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">On
Julian of Norwich: “The English soul was mediated through homely images.” (page
31)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">On
Thomas More: “The fight for the English soul had become earnest.” (70)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">And
again, “The burnings [of heretics] continued, shedding fitful light on the
English soul.” (73)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">On
Henry Barrow: “But his witness survived, and became a significant aspect of the
English soul.” (107)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">On
the Authorized Version: “It might even act as a mirror of Englishness itself,
and by extension the English soul” (140)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">On
George Herbert: “Little Gidding became, for Herbert, a vision of spirituality
in the world. It became a corner of the English soul.” (147)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">On
William Blake: “Yet in truth his vision has never been lost. It is integral to
the English soul.” (240)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">As
a response to Samuel Butler: “it is certainly true that the established
religion rested on what was comfortable and what was familiar. That has always
been the default position of the English soul.” (261)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">And
so it continues. Wrap up all your expositions with the same phrase and it reveals
itself as either trite or vacuous. Ackroyd nowhere tries to place the notion of <i>soul </i>in relation to, say<i>, heart </i>or <i>spirit. </i>There are those who are kind-hearted and</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> those who are mean-spirited; we use such terms to describe characters and make moral assessments. Is a <i>soul </i>in contrast something which can only be evaluated from a theological standpoint as saved or damned? But then it would be rather odd to have a theology which had a category of <i>English soul</i> as if there might be French ones or Russian ones or Japanese ones requiring separate theologies. And would those theologies acknowledge that there is more than one path to salvation? It hasn't really been part of the spirit of theologies to allow that.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Regardless of who is
responsible for what, this miscellany is in no sense an enlightening history of
Christianity in England or a successful evocation of the varied ways it has infused
the experience of some generic English soul. To have achieved anything
approaching such lofty ambitions would have required some informing sense of
history and structure. Should one be thinking of a Great Tradition
(Leavis-style) of lives and works or of a Simultaneous Order (T S Eliot-style)
of cultural monuments? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Or should one be looking
for the reflection of social changes in the way Christianity has been expressed
and lived (in the style of R H Tawney, Christopher Hill and the Hammonds)? The
English soul would then take different forms in different contexts:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>changing configurations and strategies of state
power; the distribution of literacy and access to knowledge; and, most
obviously, the changing ways in which the worlds of the rich and the poor have
been conjoined (“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made
them high and lowly and ordered their estate” – second verse, <i>All Things
Bright and Beautiful</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">*</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Peter Ackroyd was a
scholarship boy who studied at Clare College, Cambridge re-endowed (as Clare
Hall) in the fourteenth century by Lady Elizabeth de Clare. Part of her
endowment comprised land and the church benefice in the nearby village of
Litlington. Fellows of Clare regularly took the church living and then employed
a curate to do the actual work, making the usual profit on the deal. But the
Rev Dr William Webb, Master of Clare from 1815 to 1856 and vicar of Litlington
from 1816 to 1856 actually lived much of the time in its rectory and indeed
died there. This apparent devotion to clerical duty allowed him to pursue a
lifelong passion for agricultural improvement; he brought Enclosure to
Litlington in 1830. The consequences followed as they did everywhere. My
Pateman ancestors, for centuries Litlington agricultural labourers, were
scattered – some as far away as Australia by transportation or assisted
passage. Some remained but suffered again from the mid-Victorian agricultural
depression. Webb’s successor the Reverend Joseph Power (vicar from 1856 to
1866) may or may not have known about that suffering. His interests lay
elsewhere; he was University Librarian and also looked after the wine cellar at Clare
( the records are archived); as a mathematician he had
successfully explained the mechanical cause of one of the first fatal train
accidents in England. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In December 1863 my great
great grandfather James Pateman stole a bushel of beans from his master, a
local landowner, because his pregnant wife Susan was ill and their family
hungry; he paid the price with 14 days hard labour in January 1864. A daughter,
a little Emily, was born at the beginning of February but died before the month
was out after a private baptism at home – anyone could perform such an act but
it was probably done by a local dissenter; the Patemans had married in an
independent Meeting House in nearby Royston, a centre of lively dissent from
the time of the Civil War. In the 1870s after the early death of Susan who
had no more children, her teenage son John - my great grandfather –
became another of those who left the stricken village; he made his way to Brick
Lane in London’s East End and found work in the giant Truman Hanbury and Buxton
brewery which offered effective competition to the other opium of the people. By
this time it’s probable that the Patemans were no longer dissenters but simply
godless, which is how I experienced my Pateman grandparents. But none of them
transmitted orally or left anything in writing to reveal how they experienced
their lives; they can only appear to me as if bereav'd of light. As
the Hammonds put it in <i>The Village Labourer</i>, “this lost world has no
Member of Parliament, no press, it does not make literature or write history;
no diary or memoirs have kept alive for us the thoughts and cares of the
passing day” Their take on the English soul has to be guessed at.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">After a prefatory warning that you will find nothing here about Judaism or Islam or … but don’t be
offended etc….<i> </i>Ackroyd’s book starts with Bede when I would have expected
Augustine, sent to re-christianise an island abandoned by the Romans and Rome. Arriving
at the head of a large expedition funded by Pope Gregory and heading straight
to the Canterbury capital of the local secular power, Augustine’s first task
was to get Aethelberht on side and that he achieved. He got the protection and resources
in cash and kind without which no religious mission can put down roots, outspend
and defeat competitors<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aethelberht had his reward in this world: renewed
church power and old state power were going to march arm in arm and have done
so ever since. But I guess Augustine doesn’t make the cut because he wasn’t
English and, to boot, the agent of a foreign power. (And, yes I agree, that’s
an old English trope).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">As for lived experience
which touches the soul there is in Ackroyd’s book precious little about country
churchyards, church bells tolling for thee or me, organs belting out the tunes
which all the faithful come to sing. There is surprisingly little about parsons,
benefices, tithes, the Victorian clerical novel, Sunday and National schools, Nativity
plays (were you Mary or a donkey?), the cost of keeping up bishops’ palaces, cloister
intrigues, schoolboys beaten, choristers interfered with. Nor is it pressed
upon us that the lives of our ancestors since Augustine arrived have, for the
very most part, been nasty, brutish and very short, Christ or no risen Christ. We
too easily forget both infant mortality and how that experience affected
husband, wife and siblings. It is not surprising that we encounter so much
evidence of melancholia in those who did record their lives. The money spent on understanding the perils of childbirth and on laying-in wards was a minute fraction of that spent on steeples and spires. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Ackroyd sketches the
outer lives and inner struggles of his cast of mostly male characters. Some of
the choices are obvious ones, some less so. A chapter on three Atheists (Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, Richard Dawkins) included, as it were, to represent
the Other Side, simply ignores such details as the distinctness of not
believing in the existence of a God or any gods and not believing in any kind
of personal immortality (which I suppose knocks out one version of the Soul,
English or not). It does not treat secularism as a distinct belief cluster
which could be adhered to by theists and quite often is outside of a Church of
England which still clings fiercely to the secular privileges without which it
would now die. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ackroyd is silent on
agnosticism as distinct from indifference. He does not allow for those who
rather awkwardly feel that some form of unbelief is a moral obligation imposed by
the record of terrible crimes committed – and across millenia - in the names of
organised monotheisms. It’s for much the same reason that many have felt
obliged to renounce the more recent ideals of Communism. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I do share the hope that
everyone who lives long enough will come to feel that there is some Quest or other
that they must undertake before it is too late. Some discover very young, some
never. The English soul? This is Rudyard Kipling in <i>Kim</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.85pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: center;"><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“…we must find that River; it is so verree valuable
to us”</span></i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.85pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: center;"><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“But this is gross blasphemy!” cried the Church of England.</span></i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-83388636749066494582024-02-21T20:13:00.000-08:002024-02-23T23:10:03.857-08:00Harriette Wilson to John Adolphus 1825<p>These images show the extortion letter which I write about in the <i>Times Literary Supplement</i> 23 February 2024 under the title "Sly Intrigues". I have provided a transcription below the images.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_hAp3VpjBAUcAsm0OX2CKTLoexy1cdmVQpNRvT8MGFoNdsO_aDnqnOAw4M2y73fE63xwDhDfmLti5vtd_xgN6CQ78BgpRI4fNIR2ACGRi5BhhMfUdwLJTRfcjVQHqfghTX7X5qE7yyds77fsee1Jr20ujY5HGGnB8YcZPucg2UMXRkdF3_iiQLZniuK8/s1501/wilson%200.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1340" data-original-width="1501" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_hAp3VpjBAUcAsm0OX2CKTLoexy1cdmVQpNRvT8MGFoNdsO_aDnqnOAw4M2y73fE63xwDhDfmLti5vtd_xgN6CQ78BgpRI4fNIR2ACGRi5BhhMfUdwLJTRfcjVQHqfghTX7X5qE7yyds77fsee1Jr20ujY5HGGnB8YcZPucg2UMXRkdF3_iiQLZniuK8/s320/wilson%200.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3Kj0sro9c7LVcAflzTKRZDogkH7smizWRpETOuK3idUNU0_SMLDeXzK9vY_vKEB397QdMfjkUEw0nxrCfpJxfGCveWOZsToildI66FLHGQ2Q9wijGypJ7G_EeOfUaLJTd4uG6lqi3I5nbC0VY0Z6K9mzATqb7DOw4bTWt7WBYd2RhWrKTkYvVqcSzFQY/s2912/wilson%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2912" data-original-width="2171" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3Kj0sro9c7LVcAflzTKRZDogkH7smizWRpETOuK3idUNU0_SMLDeXzK9vY_vKEB397QdMfjkUEw0nxrCfpJxfGCveWOZsToildI66FLHGQ2Q9wijGypJ7G_EeOfUaLJTd4uG6lqi3I5nbC0VY0Z6K9mzATqb7DOw4bTWt7WBYd2RhWrKTkYvVqcSzFQY/s320/wilson%201.jpg" width="239" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyhMFjHQyZBShqJjEW6Gp-Jv5OStyUVjYx88FHK7bD09kk38c_wvHGtL-xS3fUysaPcBE1S_rj42J7hZOj2C4ckBNxVOQ0ig6pCvnKEGU3b2AMVyeUigdTmLvf9Vh2aIvfEafjbhFzHd588zruUlE9IYwV2WgOek6kc9dRBniIs7U9kfEm1CfNLWYTEjk/s2855/wilson%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2855" data-original-width="2185" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyhMFjHQyZBShqJjEW6Gp-Jv5OStyUVjYx88FHK7bD09kk38c_wvHGtL-xS3fUysaPcBE1S_rj42J7hZOj2C4ckBNxVOQ0ig6pCvnKEGU3b2AMVyeUigdTmLvf9Vh2aIvfEafjbhFzHd588zruUlE9IYwV2WgOek6kc9dRBniIs7U9kfEm1CfNLWYTEjk/s320/wilson%202.jpg" width="245" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0RS7m3HWGczjgQ9Vvm4r_g5yCXfAMXw_6nt1glYdwbAQPMRXL1yZOlGEO7ghhGONDD8YfRROxLYLujUCLqyPxwQ1YZrUjuXJw7bzVHe5ZRWr0XD1P2l5CpZJcWObHPh8XmPjN8B7JiHJSlb6f49e6_5UUk7DbqK84IeDg46VlgYLaPyro7fFKNftmi7c/s2926/wilson%203.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2926" data-original-width="2156" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0RS7m3HWGczjgQ9Vvm4r_g5yCXfAMXw_6nt1glYdwbAQPMRXL1yZOlGEO7ghhGONDD8YfRROxLYLujUCLqyPxwQ1YZrUjuXJw7bzVHe5ZRWr0XD1P2l5CpZJcWObHPh8XmPjN8B7JiHJSlb6f49e6_5UUk7DbqK84IeDg46VlgYLaPyro7fFKNftmi7c/s320/wilson%203.jpg" width="236" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Transcription,
underlining in the original <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Paris No
91 Grande Rue de Chaillot Champs Elys</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">es<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Sir<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Your Family are very low better not have them shewn up to
ridicule in Harriette Wilson’s memoirs with your neices [<i>sic</i>] affecting <u>love
letters </u>to the handsome young man <u>she seduced</u> and then applied to
him for means to destroy the infant in her bosom useless to deny this or cry
“fie” for I have the letters in my possession – as well be quiet and oblige a <u>lady
</u>you are growing <u>rich </u>I have
spent all my money in furnishing my home and paying my debts will you do an act
of Gallantry and send me 100 £? If you do I shall not be ungrateful – or you
may publish this letter like Edward Ellice but verily friend Adolphus we are none of us perfect
have all our little sly intrigues either in the neighbourhood of the new Road
or <u>elsewhere </u>and I might say to you in the words of Don Quixote to
Sancho – “verily friend Sancho the more thou
stireth it the more it will stink ---- once more will you be my
favourite and a noble <u>man</u>[?] of Gallantry –
if so forward me 100 £ trust to my gratitude – Brougham I am sure would say you
mig<u>ht</u> do so safely,, - & sign yourself <u>The Dauphin </u>for fun – but you must be quick about it Yours<u> truly</u> [?]-
because you are witty Henriette
Rochfort<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></blockquote><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-61615898192779368202024-01-20T03:16:00.000-08:002024-01-20T03:16:22.550-08:00CHARLOTTE REYNOLDS Circle of John Keats WRITES TO JOHN DOVASTON IN 1808<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP4lTkjAkfApcL8N5AoKimaECD06Hx3pth4_GpVLq0WNstgeoXGmmXiADWKw6g1tdhbMMLRuNRPy-Pa2LPRU6QP-GQ5ORijvtqJcgUEkbHA2gerZBm1FS9X_KiN0iB4U0Shk1ffl_Q8IYaKL65WgmKuUC-AgzEkVpaqYtWYzgkySnqsufowiXXpNVXLSk/s2843/charlotte%20reynolds%201.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2843" data-original-width="2240" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP4lTkjAkfApcL8N5AoKimaECD06Hx3pth4_GpVLq0WNstgeoXGmmXiADWKw6g1tdhbMMLRuNRPy-Pa2LPRU6QP-GQ5ORijvtqJcgUEkbHA2gerZBm1FS9X_KiN0iB4U0Shk1ffl_Q8IYaKL65WgmKuUC-AgzEkVpaqYtWYzgkySnqsufowiXXpNVXLSk/s320/charlotte%20reynolds%201.jpg" width="252" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirlcVLOs-MC1Y83zeAxmhz3W8hFbPsQk_sYdSJirHgXpcpXVdwcWTYRJbkGK3LOAra0sLr0JMLATy9w9vtJRW7lND9PwxYxZxGbJO9TE9FoLkobcF6wjdx8knmux2jECF8Lm8MbuO4XrZ1zFkLBPtBq9xqUXBo0WGqUAkHut0c1iBXS7MTBx_fPGw-lNw/s1797/charlotte%20reynolds%204.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="959" data-original-width="1797" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirlcVLOs-MC1Y83zeAxmhz3W8hFbPsQk_sYdSJirHgXpcpXVdwcWTYRJbkGK3LOAra0sLr0JMLATy9w9vtJRW7lND9PwxYxZxGbJO9TE9FoLkobcF6wjdx8knmux2jECF8Lm8MbuO4XrZ1zFkLBPtBq9xqUXBo0WGqUAkHut0c1iBXS7MTBx_fPGw-lNw/s320/charlotte%20reynolds%204.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This recently discovered
letter is not included in the volume <i>Letters from Lambeth</i>, edited by
Joanna Richardson and published for the Royal Society of Literature in 1981.and
which includes twenty-two letters from Charlotte Reynolds (1761-1848) to John Dovaston (1782 - 1854) It predates by three months the letters published in that book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In rhyming couplets over two sides
the writer appears to thank John [Freeman Milward] Dovaston both for the gift of
a poem and of a live goose which is going to be eaten. There was indeed a poem
which Dovaston published in 1811 with the title, “TO MRS. REYNOLDS, OF LAMBETH,
with a </span><span style="font-family: "Old English Text MT"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Goose.” </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It can be found
online.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">TRANSCRIPTION<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Charlotte Reynolds to John Dovaston Esq<sup>r</sup> Jun<sup>r
</sup>Jan/y 13<sup>th</sup> 1808<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To yourself my good friend, as well as your Muse<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I beg my best thanks for her verse, & your Goose<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">With both I am pleas’d, as they fully express<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Strong motives of kindness to say nothing less<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And proves, “out of sight, out of mind” not quite true<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An adage, of old, but not strengthnd in you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, this friend whom so pleasingly you introduce<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Is an uncommon pleasant agreeable Goose,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For as soon as she enterd, the intelligent Bird<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Began<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>xxx [?]
stling & cackling, in strains yet unheard,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Her master she said, in remembrance held dear<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The hours he had spent in much cheerfulness here<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of Friendship she prated, but seemd rather hoarse<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But that might arise from her journey of course.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Then good manners in every sense she expressd<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And no doubt she will charm, when once she is dress’d<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Oh so warmly, so wily, she chanted your praise<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And with such pride & pleasure, deliverd your
lays,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That George [<i>Reynolds, her husband</i>], &
myself, at once felt the charm,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of Friendship express’d, in language so warm.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But the best thing of all that we could discern<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">From her notes, were, that quickly you meant to
return.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For this welcome news – respect also to you,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I entreated her stay, t’was the least I could do <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">She graciously bow’d to my kind invitation<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And next Thursday at Table will fill up her station.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When to give her the meeting I mean to engage<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The serious, the witty, the young & the Sage.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">With mirth, song, & reason, to temper the jest <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To which good Madame Goose will no doubt give zest.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When your health shall be drunk at this little carouse<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But one thing will be wanting – oh – sweet Pinky [??]
House<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For what more can please than such music as thine<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Admir’d & enjoy’d, by a<s> family</s> circle like
mine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Our girls are all charm’d, our Boy is delighted <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Whenever they hear that friend Dov [<i>aston</i>] is
invited<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But I think it high time, I should make some excuse<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For say’g so little, in regard to your muse<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Who tho, I acknowledge, must needs be admir’d,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet, her praises on me are too high – too much fir’d.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In my life, I was never so finely bespather’d<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Tho a theme t’was, in which, I can bear to be flatterd<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But allow me to smile, that so late in the day <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My name should be sung as tho it were<u> May<o:p></o:p></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So good Lady Muse, let me, ere I adjourne<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Present my regards as a grateful return<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And that you may remain is my ardent Petition<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Clear [Chear?] as ye are – not in hobbling condition <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As my humble Muse<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>- who in rhyming or prose<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Cannot even earn Glasses to wear on her nose.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This premis’d I don’t find I have further to say<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Than our kindest remembrance to self, & to xx xxx<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In which Jane, John [<i>Hamilton Reynolds</i>], & Mary,
Eliza & Lot [<i>Charlotte Reynolds junior</i>]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Most earnestly beg, they may not be forgot<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Charlotte Reynolds<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All arriv’d safe and well & were excellent<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-61075950790433428432023-11-11T10:58:00.003-08:002023-12-10T23:08:09.259-08:00Review Angela Saini Inferior<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjn9KdBLEkn7V39cRG4xZJ4pkthXHdBLdJdz0LtiS201kPnNhJ4Glk2LJOqE3ebJDBkzsGIUib5oA_17CyZr6Wr1aBqaNSEiVNO5QdVLev1NJZ5kg8dGQQOQFDeKRMGC81i9_1l4dJg3hfF43UBOm7FaqZfDf9nmE2hP7McfZlCxl2dzUm3Ald4XEOFS0/s2354/saini.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2354" data-original-width="1533" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjn9KdBLEkn7V39cRG4xZJ4pkthXHdBLdJdz0LtiS201kPnNhJ4Glk2LJOqE3ebJDBkzsGIUib5oA_17CyZr6Wr1aBqaNSEiVNO5QdVLev1NJZ5kg8dGQQOQFDeKRMGC81i9_1l4dJg3hfF43UBOm7FaqZfDf9nmE2hP7McfZlCxl2dzUm3Ald4XEOFS0/s320/saini.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Angela Saini describes
herself as a science journalist and this 2017 book is a fine piece of
investigative journalism in which she goes out of her way to track down and
interview academic researchers who over the past few decades have contributed
significantly to the study of sex differences. They include experimental and developmental
psychologists, evolutionary biologists, primate ethologists, anthropologists,
and a few who might be characterised as cognitive scientists. She has read
their books and research papers but it is the quotations harvested from skilful
interviews which give this book much of its interest and accessibility.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I do have a general
problem which I will make central to this review. Saini is interviewing
researchers most of whom seek to model their work on an image of physical
science in which painstaking laboratory or field work will yield decisive
results. It ain’t gonna work. Decisive outcomes are the privilege of those who
can control all the variables which might affect the results. Outside a few
parts of physical or natural science it is, unfortunately, never possible to
close the system; there will always be uncontrolled variables at work. Thus,
for example, a much-cited study of newborns by Baron-Cohen and Connellan
eventually comes to be criticised because the field researcher (Connellan) knew
the sex of at least some of the babies she was interacting with in a situation
where, ideally, she should have not known (page 88). It was a variable which had not
been controlled for. Search hard enough and you will soon find others and you
will find them in (almost?) every experiment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Replication of someone
else’s experiments is a gold standard test of reliability in the hard sciences.
But in the fields with which Saini is concerned, replication is rarely possible
simply because the human world will have moved on and that is also an
omnipresent variable which cannot be controlled. You cannot replicate an
experiment done on 1973 Harvard undergraduates on 2023 Harvard undergraduates
because they are just going to be very different kinds of people and the cute
experiment of 1973 may just seem weird in 2023. The same problem of replication
confronts anthropological fieldwork among tribes comfortingly assumed to be
remote and untouched by history when, just like everyone else, they are not. If
they don’t have them this year, next year they will be carrying smartphones.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There are related
problems and most significantly the fact that the very categories in which
research is conducted and hypotheses formulated may be flawed by assumptions
(stereotypes acting as uncontrolled variables) which anticipate the results
even before the work has been done. Wilhelm Reich once nicely highlighted the
problem when he said that the question is not why hungry people steal food but
why they don’t. Scientists ask what they think are the right questions but what
they think is right may be infused by unexamined prejudice, as Saini repeatedly
demonstrates in the early chapters of her book. I mean, you can open almost any
“scientific” work written in English in the reign of Queen Victoria and
discover toe-curling prejudices which would make modern suburban table-talk
seem subtle and sophisticated.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In archaeology and
evolutionary biology Saini notes in a couple of paragraphs (pages 143 – 45) a
really interesting oversight which is actually a fundamental flaw. Everyone
knows that the archaeological record is very partial but we can only
hypothesise how partial. It’s possible to dig up flint tools, for example,
because they can go for millennia without degrading. But what about early
baskets, baby slings and digging sticks? They leave no trace. And suppose it
was women who invented and made those things and not the men who are always
supposed to have made the flint tools and who squat there in all those
cartoon-like drawings of prehistoric times? Without the baskets, the baby
slings and the digging sticks you have only half the story of early cultural
innovation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There is one problem
specific to work on child development. Though Saini indicates the limitations
of the “blank slates” approach (page 66) it remains true that very little
research tries to look at babies and young children as <i>agents </i>in their
own right, with minds and wills of their own, making choices and decisions and
agitating for their voice to be heard. In my own work (most recently <i>Culture
as Anarchy) </i>I try to keep in mind the question, <i>What is it like to be a
baby?</i> and am tempted to answer that it is rather like being a teenager. You
will get my point if you consider the question, <i>Why do babies hate
vegetables?</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Finally, and the elephant
in the room, career researchers can and do falsify or big up results on a scale
which is only now being acknowledged. In my youth, Hans Eysenck was reckoned a
leading research psychologist, most famous for his Personality Inventory. Now
his work is deemed “unsafe”. It’s a consequence of his personality flaws but also <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of the scientific rat race and of publish or
perish and more besides. And it’s happening now at scale.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">What is to be done? There
are very many millions of people who want to think about sex differences, talk
about them, read about them, research and write about them. The chatter isn’t
going to stop any time soon, at least not as long as I am alive. But to make
any progress much more attention has to be focussed on the core problems of
methodology. Routinised research papers which fit into a narrow, prescribed
paradigm are to all intents and purposes rarely worth the paper they are
printed on.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-62144819131827965752023-10-21T02:50:00.003-07:002023-10-21T02:53:53.182-07:00Review Anthony Trollope Barchester Towers - and the Victorian Novel<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieq_JHPRtXclK3NNIJ6xoro-yIonWH1jfg0s-q1UEIbOjst943AJ3NCdy-undIWbp8wCinC07YXvtHsrdNOdDc3oL0iK9TmM_uLUpa5lQcyUB4N5xBQ8929rsWnaRKXFBHsTZ58k3SIaflBMp6fyPa1wUPFFGUv-RxUBdG_zeb6LkPfqhzUkj97vyF5p4/s2298/trollope%20image.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2298" data-original-width="1550" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieq_JHPRtXclK3NNIJ6xoro-yIonWH1jfg0s-q1UEIbOjst943AJ3NCdy-undIWbp8wCinC07YXvtHsrdNOdDc3oL0iK9TmM_uLUpa5lQcyUB4N5xBQ8929rsWnaRKXFBHsTZ58k3SIaflBMp6fyPa1wUPFFGUv-RxUBdG_zeb6LkPfqhzUkj97vyF5p4/s320/trollope%20image.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Go back fifty years and
you will meet a young man who as a teenager had read a handful of Victorian novels
and been devastated by one (<i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i>) but who now had a
complete understanding of what was wrong with the genre. These were novels in
which an invisible but omniscient narrator created the trompe l’oeil illusion
of a real world, tricking us into tears and laughter which diverted us from the
temptation to engage in serious critical reflection on the moral and political
values for which those novels provided a vehicle. But now grown up, I had
learnt – and in three languages – what the alternative was. In Latin, <i>larvatus
prodeo</i> [I wear a mask] anchored the idea that if you are wearing a mask
then you should point to it as you advance on the stage, that you should make
clear that what you are engaged in is the product of artifice and an artificer.
In German, Brecht’s <i>Verfremdungseffekt </i>[alienation effect] was the means
by which playwright or author could avoid the crime of jerking (fake) tears and
laughter from audience or reader by simply emphasising (frequently) that this
is only pretend – a thought experiment, if you like - and you are meant to be
thinking not wiping away the tears. In Russian, Shklovsky’s </span><i><span lang="RU" style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: RU;">остранение</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> [defamiliarization] labelled the ways in which
a verbal artist could make the familiar strange and thereby prompt reflection
rather than emotional self- indulgence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Problem sorted. Farewell the Victorian novel. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Fifty years later and I am reading Anthony Trollope. I read <i>The
Warden</i> and enjoyed it and now I’ve just finished <i>Barchester Towers</i> (1857)
and enjoyed that too and no doubt in part because it provides so much grist for
my anti-clericalism. But what sticks out a mile [<i>larvatus prodeo]</i> is an
author who is all over the text, hopelessly intrusive, and very very funny. And
if I had to identify the style I would call it <i>High Camp</i> (which may well
pair with <i>High Church</i> which, if anything, is the religious value which
the novel defends). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Consider this passage (page 281 in my excellent Penguin edition) towards
the end of a fraught, intense, seat-edge clinging exchange between Eleanor Bold
[heroine] and a bungling but genuine suitor Mr Arabin [hero]:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">As she spoke she with difficulty restrained tears; but she did restrain
them. Had she given way and sobbed aloud, as in such cases a woman should do,
he would have melted at once, implored her pardon, perhaps knelt at her feet
and declared his love. Everything would have been explained, and Eleanor would
have gone back to Barchester with a contented mind. How easily would she have
forgiven and forgotten the archdeacon’s suspicions had she but heard the whole
truth from Mr Arabin. But then where would have been my novel?<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It's laugh out loud funny. And the tone of voice (which I can only render
with both hands spread open) is self-parodying camp. The reader is still in
volume two of what they know (according to the Victorian conventions) is to be
a three volume, triple-decker novel and will immediately understand the author’s
words. And when we do get to volume three we get (at page 415) this:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><i>But we must go back a little and it shall be but a little, for a difficulty
begins to make itself manifest in the necessity of disposing of all our friends
in the small remainder of this volume. Oh, that Mr Longman </i>[Trollope’s publisher]
<i>would allow me a fourth! It should transcend the other three as the seventh
heaven transcends all the lower stages of celestial bliss.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And that’s high camp. I rest my case.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-84937462712477287652023-10-05T02:00:00.005-07:002023-10-05T02:01:18.811-07:00Bargains at Blackwells on Trevor Pateman's Books<p><span style="font-size: large;">I see that my preferred bookseller <b>Blackwells </b>has massively reduced the online prices on my books, most of which they have in stock. Hurry, hurry while stocks last ....</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/author/Trevor%20Pateman</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-81714933404336820072023-09-24T02:33:00.005-07:002023-09-24T02:44:02.790-07:00Review: Sarah Ogilvie The Dictionary People
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZgEtX32OuclffOY8y7orpzsddRv0AMHwePbKBhMCn-u5Qe6LE71Ih-e0m1AjHeBoSD0ZOdR0jvaXN95eeA03jUVJBdQZy8poGSEsYiRTc4jFGifDXOJICUbAhhCT_doRgtcuNHDfgN5hvS1B2WSZ1s7w3bs5f8YlljODiy4UDnuQj8vs174Wk1Ub8Iyc/s2830/dictionary%20p.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2830" data-original-width="2161" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZgEtX32OuclffOY8y7orpzsddRv0AMHwePbKBhMCn-u5Qe6LE71Ih-e0m1AjHeBoSD0ZOdR0jvaXN95eeA03jUVJBdQZy8poGSEsYiRTc4jFGifDXOJICUbAhhCT_doRgtcuNHDfgN5hvS1B2WSZ1s7w3bs5f8YlljODiy4UDnuQj8vs174Wk1Ub8Iyc/s320/dictionary%20p.jpg" width="244" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Victorians were
terrific collectors of both the animate and the inanimate, often indiscriminately
and always excited by the rare and exotic. Each variety of collector had its
name, usually confected out of school Latin or Greek: there were the butterfly
collectors (lepidopterists), stamp collectors (philatelists), coin collectors
(numismatists), inscription hunters (epigraphers), book fiends (bibliophiles),
the magpie collectors of junk in general (antiquaries or antiquarians). The leading figures in each field were often obsessives
who neglected others and themselves – their personal hygiene could not be
relied upon – and, as in the notorious case of the bibliophile Sir Thomas
Phillips, they could rack up very large debts in pursuit of their hobbies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">As part of this cast of
thousands there were also the word collectors - the logophiles, philologists,
and lexicographers - who form the subject matter of Sarah Ogilvie’s wonderfully
researched, beautifully conceived and well-executed
book in which she narrates the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
was created in the period preceding the First World War when James Murray was
its long-term editor. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I have my doubts about
dictionaries and have never been a great user let alone reader. I possessed a
Shorter OED as an undergraduate but don’t have one now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Victorian
dictionary-makers claimed inspiration from the latest movements in German
philology which to the Victorians was really one word, <i>Germanphilology</i>. Ogilvie
alludes to Germanphilology but does not really tell us what its achievements
were or why we should be concerned with them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In dictionaries like the
OED the living and the dead - words we might use and words we never will - are
side by side, the living ones are supposedly illuminated by their history. Their
ancestors are to be found in written texts - there was no sound recording of
the past available to the Victorians - though the descendant language exists,
of course, in both speech and writing. The heart of the lexicographer’s work is
the tracking of the way words have been used through time, how their meanings
have changed and expanded.. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The OED was built very
largely on the voluntary efforts of thousands of readers who read not for
pleasure but to locate occurrences of words in print which could be dated from the
publication in which they occurred and which fairly clearly indicated the sense
in which they were being used. Just as stamp collectors hunt for the earliest
date on which a Penny Black was used so the OEDs readers tried to push back in
time the first occurrence in print of a word which – well, it may now be
completely obsolete just like the Penny Black. There are some complications
created by the fact that spellings change which are a small part of the
problems around treating a word which was used then as the ancestor of a word
which is used now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In the case of what came
to be called dialects it is almost exclusively in spoken form that they exist
or existed (that’s what got them called dialects in the first place) and before
the invention of sound recording they were hard to study unless some writer
decided to try their hand at that excruciating genre known as the dialect novel.
It was the institutionalised creation of “the English language” which created the
dialects in the sense we now understand them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But though a living
language has the past in its DNA it has its meanings in the present, in the
current inter-relations of its words as part of active and always mobile
semantic fields many of them culturally reflected upon and policed to ensure
that we get it right and, among other things, do not cause offence. It is a
headache for the Office of Standards that nowadays so many <i>Advanced Warnings</i> are announced in bold letters and so many claims <i>refuted</i> daily in the newspapers<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Ogilvie discusses the
headaches which sexual words and swear words - she has nothing to say about
blasphemous words - caused the Victorian makers of the OED. Alongside what it
included there existed all that it excluded; despite the aspirations of its
makers to achieve inclusivity. The OED belonged to the cancel culture of its
time if only because Oxford University Press believed itself - as it still does
- a guardian of morals. (Surprisingly, perhaps, Ogilvie’s book is not published
by OUP but under the Chatto & Windus imprint of Penguin/Random House. But neither OUP or the University of Oxford come out of the story she tells in a particularly favourable light).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Propriety lasted well
past the Victorian era:<i> Lesbianism</i> did not appear in the dictionary
until 1976 before which time the entry for “<i>Lesbian:</i> of or pertaining to
the island of Lesbos” was designed to enlighten no one (see Ogilvie page 226). The
only concession to modernity was to provide an entry in English, not the Latin
once used to keep knowledge of sexual matters away from the lower orders.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Of course, there might
sometimes be a good reason for keeping a word out:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“Blandford wrote to him [James
Murray] that <i>aphrodisiomania</i>, an abnormal enthusiasm for sexual pleasure,
was a word coined by an Italian professor and ‘doubtful whether it can rank as
English’. (Murray did not put it in the Dictionary).” (page 161). After all,
since there was no abnormal enthusiasm for sexual pleasure anywhere in
Victorian England, there was no need for a word anyway. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The OED fosters an
illusion that there is such a thing as “the English language” which is more
than a social construct or matter of belief and aspiration. In relation to
vocabulary the longer you make the vocabulary list the more implausible it is to
suppose that what you are cataloguing is “a language”. What you are really
doing is attempting a cultural encyclopaedia from small fragments and with no
clear boundaries. Ogilvie notes many cases where a word entered into the OED
has just <i>one</i> known use (often in a novel or medical textbook) and seems
to be unperturbed by that. But to admit words with one known use is really to
admit that you are creating a bricabrac shop, a cabinet of curiosities mostly
covered in dust. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">If there was such a thing
as “the English language” at the level of words it would be a fairly simple
matter to decide if a word is in it or not. In printed text the presence of a word
thought foreign is often indicated by use of italics. Would that it were that
simple; loan words cause headaches for the typesetter: is “ennui” an English
word and therefore not needing italic? Does
a person’s possession of a “je ne sais quoi” require italic? (See on this site
my review of Richard Scholar’s <i>Émigrés</i> on 28 October 2020).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">If that is not enough,
consider the formation of words by analogy, a favourite of Germanphilologists and something which now excessively happens in
the case of <i>-philes</i> and -<i>phobes.</i> I doubt that anyone would
challenge the status of “Francophile” as a current English word nor give it italics.
But if I am a lover of Australia can I call myself as <i>Australophile</i> ? Or
just a lover of Australia? What gets a word into a (living) language is not
that some obscure or awkward squad author invents it for a one-off occasion of
use but that in some sense it catches on. Clearly, <i>-phobes</i> catch on more
easily than <i>-philes</i> – that tells you a lot about our culture, I suspect.
This morning, I read that Dmitry Peskov has been talking about <i>Russophobia</i>.
Smart move; no one wants to be thought a -phobe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But because we understand
the formation of words by analogy we don’t need a dictionary to know what
someone means when they declare themselves an Australophile or Christophobe. It
makes no sense to try to create a dictionary out of an indefinitely long list of
personal idiosyncracies, including those favoured by the forgotten inventors of
forgotten wheezes (see Ogilvie’s chapter on “Glossotypists”). This is the stuff
of antiquarianism not of authoritative language guides.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I guess that out there are
various answers to the question, How big a vocabulary do you need before you
can be counted a fluent speaker or writer of language X? A few hundred? A
couple of thousand? The contents of the Shorter version of the Longer
dictionary? You can be perfectly fluent in English without knowing what’s in the
OED though if you want to write like James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov it will
come in helpful when you want to bamboozle. Most often we identify non-native
speakers not by their lack of vocabulary – which may be larger than our own –
but by their accent which we can immediately and unreflectively identify as
foreign without having any knowledge at all of phonetics, phonology or prosody.
And in writing, it is small syntactic oddities not misuses of words which give
the game away. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Whatever the English
language might be (see footnote for my own answer), one might say that it is at least
as much about phonetics, phonology, prosody and syntax as it is about words and
their meanings.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Ogilvie
records a regret which James Murray had towards the end of his life as the OEDs
editor in chief: “If he had his time again, he said that he would have directed
his Readers [ those who sought out quotations for the OED] differently, with
the instructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do <i>not </i>strike
you as rare, peculiar, or peculiarly used’” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But looking for the rare
is exactly what all Victorian collectors/hobbyists did: they looked for rare
butterflies (until they rendered them extinct), rare stamps, and exotic curios.
They were uninterested in the ordinary, the everyday, things as common as
ditchwater. They often went to great lengths to track down the rare and the
exotic and that is what the makers of the OED did too. Like many or most
collectors, they were attracted by escapes from everyday life..<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Note<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Trevor Pateman, “What is English if Not a Language?”
in J. D. Johansen and H. Sonne, editors, <i>Pragmatics
and Linguistics. Festschrift for Jacob L Mey</i>, Odense University Press 1986,
pages 137-40.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Revised and
republished in Trevor Pateman, <i>Prose
Improvements,</i> degreezero 2017, pages 85-94.</span>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-13736237705165634202023-07-14T08:30:00.001-07:002023-07-14T08:33:48.267-07:00Trevor Pateman Culture as Anarchy<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimrKuVAm1HS8bZli7xtXZ8MVAd7iQ9VACfCIhVf9pBNRhvtoq2lVMUQM1sYjthN9_xcNt1DwTPM3pH89QGFEC5Cw0eDW-fNS7B4eFL6B1IMLFGruR5MHgXoK-d41uGJ2gsiz6Iw8kj42WdPQd0KkzKmJXInLXG3S8o-9zRAAdLOG26bxm-ha1gXtJxGsU/s1891/front%20cover%20ca.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1891" data-original-width="1322" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimrKuVAm1HS8bZli7xtXZ8MVAd7iQ9VACfCIhVf9pBNRhvtoq2lVMUQM1sYjthN9_xcNt1DwTPM3pH89QGFEC5Cw0eDW-fNS7B4eFL6B1IMLFGruR5MHgXoK-d41uGJ2gsiz6Iw8kj42WdPQd0KkzKmJXInLXG3S8o-9zRAAdLOG26bxm-ha1gXtJxGsU/s320/front%20cover%20ca.jpg" width="224" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My latest small book (64 pages) offers five inter-connected semi-academic/informal essays on the theme of cultural change. They develop ideas and arguments about Nature and Culture, Social Construction, Cultural Appropriation, and the inevitable failure of social controls (cultural policing) to check cultural change. Most of the references are to popular cultures and minor cultural forms; included are discussions of creoles and tribal practices.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I don't think many people now want to buy books when so much can be got for free on the internet so this limited edition (300 copies) book is being given away. Initial reception has been positive and I have received some nice emails about the style used to present my arguments.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">To obtain a copy you just need to write to me with your name and full postal address But since our Royal Mail no longer aims to provide affordable postage, especially for overseas shipping, I ask that you show you are serious by sending a letter or postcard to me rather than an email. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My postal address is Trevor Pateman, Unit 10, 91 Western Road, Brighton BN1 2NW, United Kingdom.</span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-71308135150146117882023-05-14T03:34:00.002-07:002023-05-14T22:00:45.441-07:00Granta Issue 163 Best of Young British Novelists<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Oh dear. Is this really
the best?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The current issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Granta</i> (number 163) showcases in 270
pages the work of Young British Novelists who appear on its “once in a decade
list of twenty of the most promising writers under forty living in the UK”
(page 12). Each author has posed for a publicity photograph taken by Alice Zoo.
More about that in a moment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">At some point in my
life I began to encounter debut novels and debut novelists. In a British
context that links semantically to the debutante, a well-endowed young woman of
impeccable breeding who was presented to Queen Elizabeth the Second wearing
virginal white dress before coming-out into a season of balls and parties where
she would seek to attract the attentions of well-endowed young men looking for
brood mares. The tradition had become sufficiently embarrassing for Elizabeth
to abolish it in 1958. Of course, some of the debutantes went on to do
non-debutantey type things, most notoriously Bridget Rose Dugdale who stole masterpiece
paintings for the IRA and married an IRA gunman in her Irish prison. But most
did their duty to reproduce the ancien regime.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">For their coming-out
photographs most of our debs of 2023 dress impeccably; they would not look out
of place in Harvey Nichols or Debenham and Freebody (I borrow those two class
indicators from Jean Rhys <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Good Morning,
Midnight </i>(1939)). Among those who don’t fit, K Patrick also contributes one
of the better pieces - edgy and tightly constructed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">For the most part, the
authors do not trouble us with obscenities, profanities or other breaches of
etiquette. They have been schooled by their agents and publishers and before
that their Creative Writing classes not to upset anyone. Lie back and think of the
book clubs! Maybe for this decade’s crop of debs sensitivity nurses have combed
through <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the texts, squashing any
lurking nits. It’s true, however, that Saba Sams’s prosaic low-life reportage
has been allowed in, perhaps as a lesson to us all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Eleanor Catton gets
into this collection with a restrained piece which did not remind me at all of
the confident, exuberant author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Rehearsal</i>, reviewed here on 6 January 2014 and reckoned “very,very good”.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Of course, you are
still allowed to howl but in that kind of restrained way which allows the
Creative Writing seminar to co-exist on the same corridor as its neighbour, the
Flower Arranging class. Yes, you can howl but of course not in the manner of
that ugly face in Mr Munch’s nasty painting. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The howling in these pieces is
first-person in small family settings usually against the backdrop of natural
scenery. In contrast, Isabel Hammad’s unusual piece is interesting because it
directly connects to what one might call a bigger picture and Tom Crewe’s
because it convincingly imagines how it feels to be one of the little people in
someone else’s bigger picture.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">But, overall, the picture is a modest watercolour or still life in oils. There is very little that jumps out of the page to demand attention or punches you in an unprepared gut or astonishes you with the virtuosity of its prose.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-33578641028416646262023-05-02T02:38:00.003-07:002023-05-02T12:31:40.324-07:00We Need to Talk about Diacritical Marks<p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">At school in the early
1960s we had a History textbook which devoted a chapter to the Reign of Lewis
XIV. My teenage self was scornful: He’s called Louis XIV. Why are you
removing useful information about how his name is actually spelt? I went on to
find fault with other “translations”: Rome when it should be Roma, Joan of Arc
when it should be Jeanne d’Arc and so on - but soon bumping up against the awkward
squad of names which required diacritical marks. But I persisted and felt that
such marks should be preserved too.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Now I’m having some
doubts, partly occasioned by the fact that it’s a pain to type or typeset many
or most letters which require diacritical marks, but partly for other reasons.
Recently, I bought and read a new translation of Marguerite Duras’s 1944 novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Vie Tranquille</i> (translated with some acknowledged
hesitation as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Easy Life </i>(2022)).
It’s very short and the publishers have typeset it rather elegantly with wide
spacing. There are just a handful of named characters and places, all French and
some requiring a diacritical mark (Clémence, Noël, Tiène, Ziès) and one which requires
two: Jérôme. That name is actually the first word in the novel. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">These accents are
carried over faithfully from the French original which I have in front of me.
The pages of that original are, of course, littered with diacritical marks of
which French is very fond though that fondness is decreasing and some are being
abandoned. But in the translation all of those are lost, except those attached
to proper names. The opening three paragraphs of my French copy rack up a total
of forty one diacritical marks; the English version has just eight, all
generated by the repetition of the single word<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Jérôme. And on the page they simply look intrusive. Could the
accents be left off so that we begin the novel reading about Jerome or would
that just recreate the horrors of Lewis for Louis?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Interestingly, perhaps,
I didn’t react adversely to Clémence or Noël and no doubt because acute accents
and what I call umlauts are quite freely used in English to such an extent that, though I am typing in English, Microsoft automatically supplies the accent for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">café </i>which is a thoroughly anglicised
usage. So part of what is at issue is how the page looks as one reads and my
experience when reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Easy Life</i>
was that Jérôme is obtrusive though not more than that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Now I turn to a novel I
have just finished reading, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Sister, The Serial Killer.</i> It’s a very good novel and I
recommend it. First published in Nigeria in 2017, it has become a best seller
in its US and UK editions, both published in 2019 and shortlisted for the Women’s
Prize for Fiction. It was written in English but contains a handful of short,
untranslated, passages in which a character speaks in Yoruba. If you think
written French is clotted with diacritical marks you’ve clearly never
encountered written Yoruba. At page 113, for example, one and a half lines are
occupied by nineteen or twenty words which rack up over twenty marks, one letter
attracting two marks - a mark above the letter and a mark below. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Is Braithwaite a
bi-lingual writer? No. In her Acknowledgments, she writes “Thank you to Ayobami
Adebayo for taking the time to add the accents to my Yoruba” (page 226). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I google the name and up comes Wikipedia with </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀</span></b><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 150%;">, </span><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">a Nigerian writer with seven accents around her Yoruba name
(five above and two below the o's). But Braithwaite in her Acknowledgments gives
up on the accents and substitutes an accentless, anglicised version. Should her
friend be offended? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The general
justification for diacritical marks is that they provide a pronunciation guide
though often enough we will know the pronunciation already: an English child
knows how to pronounce café before starting to read about such places. In the
past, such marks proliferated in the hands of (often colonial and missionary) linguists trying
to index in writing how native words were pronounced in everyday speech without having the benefit of a
tape recorder to illustrate them directly. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I am going to guess that the Yoruba accents we see in Braithwaite's book are the legacy of a colonial past. [ See now the footnote]. I am also going to guess that they are
sufficiently complicated to be usable only by quite highly educated people. And I assert more confidently
that they gave me absolutely no help in figuring out how to pronounce the
Yoruba passages; I don’t possess even the minimal expertise which I possess for
French and German marks. Ah! But should I try to acquire some minimal expertise in
written Yoruba? If I’m right, maybe such minimal expertise is not possible -
maybe I’m staring at a very complicated system when I look at the
words on Braithwaite’s pages, a system which will defy the average person’s
attempts to understand it and which did not derive from the work of people trying to make life easy for us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">So
what are the marks doing on her pages but missing in her Acknowledgments? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The options are not reassuring. They could be
virtue signalling - I care enough about my Nigerian heritage to get it right. Or they could
be adding exoticism to the Yoruba - and nowadays we might well regard that as
problematic. Yoruba is one language among thousands, but one which happens to be spoken by over fifty million people - so up there with, say, Italian. So why make it more distant from us by retaining the diacritical marks in a book aimed at English language readers very few of whom will understand the marks as something other than marks of Otherness?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The question becomes this: What would have been lost (and to whom) if Braithwaite
had offered us an accentless Yoruba? After all, when I read her Acknowledgments
I reckon I have a rough idea how to pronounce the name of Ayobami Adebayo. And
so I think do you. And then, to complete the questions, What would have been lost if </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 16px;">Jérôme</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> had become Jerome in my English Duras?</span></p><br /><p></p><div><i>Note</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Here is where to start: </div><div><br /></div><div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language</div>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-79942470888667610422023-04-03T05:29:00.011-07:002023-04-10T23:34:37.354-07:00Josephine Tey Miss Pym Disposes<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz3zy8tIegAzd_2iBOq27L93m51cIPZM4GIYy7eJPijLKOiQcT1_0cr_glE6Msno0PiSYgRdeKxv3FnBccwFWxJtzM4xaEXmVzMMiKk_4srXzYcMVEHMSLz2UgWWFeLKebDg5G2VMBieMDCQzsOOWTzyoROUMqAhujWwtT2MJo7HPyk-VzF56FvnB-/s2365/miss%20pym.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2365" data-original-width="1498" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz3zy8tIegAzd_2iBOq27L93m51cIPZM4GIYy7eJPijLKOiQcT1_0cr_glE6Msno0PiSYgRdeKxv3FnBccwFWxJtzM4xaEXmVzMMiKk_4srXzYcMVEHMSLz2UgWWFeLKebDg5G2VMBieMDCQzsOOWTzyoROUMqAhujWwtT2MJo7HPyk-VzF56FvnB-/s320/miss%20pym.jpg" width="203" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I suppose it was
commercial publishers who invented the genre novel as something which could be
packaged and sold as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crime, Mystery,
Horror, Romance</i> ….. That packaging created a handy distinction between
low-brow and high-brow literature. Those who regarded themselves as above Genre
novels could simply walk away from shop shelves labelled with those identifications. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bloomsbury</i> never
became a Genre section though it clearly is for many readers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The novelist Josephine
Tey (1896 - 1952)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- also known as the
playwright Gordon Daviot (author of<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
Richard of Bordeaux </i>1932) but rarely as <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the Miss Elizabeth Mackintosh of her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> obituary - was shelved as a Crime
writer rather as John le Carré was later assigned to Spy fiction. Josephine Tey
probably didn’t mind very much since she wrote, she said, for fun. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At page 178 of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miss Pym Disposes</i>, her friend Henrietta puts down Miss Pym - who
could well be taken as the alter ego of Josephine Tey - as having “an
extraordinarily impulsive and frivolous mind”. (Tey, incidentally, had just
pointed out to the reader that Henrietta has missed an allusion to Kipling’s</span><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 150%;"> “</span><span style="background: white; color: #4d5156; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Make me different from all other animals by five </span><span style="background: white; color: #4d5156; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">this </span><em><span style="background: white; color: #5f6368; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">afternoon</span></em><span style="background: white; color: #4d5156; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">”).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I read first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Franchise Affair</i> and now <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miss Pym Disposes</i> in both of which the
author has lots of fun. She can be eccentric, whimsical, acid, thoughtful…as
the mood takes her. And to that degree she doesn’t seem to care very much who is looking over her
shoulder. That seems quite admirable.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Most maybe all authors
have at least one or two people peering over their shoulders. The obvious one
is the combined double-headed figure of publisher and censor who will put a
stop to things currently disapproved of so there is no point in writing them
down now only to have them taken out later. At page 10 in my copy Miss Pym is
rudely awakened by unwanted noises and “said something that was neither civilised
nor cultured and sat up”. The trick here is to leave it to the reader’s
imagination and let them pick between “What the devil?" and “What the fuck?” Kipling uses
the same trick in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kim</i> as I previously
discussed elsewhere on this Blog. Leaving it to the reader<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>avoids the humiliation of the dashes which
litter Victorian novels, usually following the letter D, and the childishness
of those carefully calculated<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>modern
asterisks designed to allow you to retrieve the word intended. We are all so
adept at this now that in context (for example, as spoken by Boris Johnson) we
will know exactly what is intended by <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>****. But if we don’t already know the words
of Philip Larkin’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This Be The Verse </i>-
and American freshmen students often won’t - then the internet versions of the
poem available may well leave us puzzled as to what it is that your parents
do to you. That is not a good state to be in if you have an essay to write..<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But Josephine Tey is
not troubled by the more extensive and ever-expanding modern sensitivities
which authors now have to pre-empt. Fortunately, she has recently come out of
copyright and so the old Copyright holders (The National Trust) can no longer authorise or require bowdlerised versions of her novels.
I don’t propose to offer a list of things which some enterprising corporate publishing censor might now use as a
crib. It would be a long chore anyway, if nothing more. You have been
trigger-warned and that ought to be enough.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But the second person
at the shoulder is what for short might be called the author’s super ego: the
rather punitive figure on the look-out for guilty secrets, the search for
pleasure, shameful revelations and such like. Josephine Tey - who all the
sources say was a very private person - may have had a fairly active super
ego. I wait to read the biography by Jennifer Morag Henderson <i>[ See now the footnote to this Blog post]. </i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miss Pym Disposes</i> published in
1946 is set in an all-female establishment where live-in teenage girls learn
gymnastics, dancing, outdoor sports, massage therapies and more under the
supervision of a staff of live-in unmarried women. The scope for writing a
novel in the genre of Lesbian fiction or simply Erotic fiction is enormous and
modern super ego sensitivities would oppose not much of a bar to making use of
the opportunity, provided political correctness was maintained.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s true that the
tragic events which conclude the novel arise from the conjunction of two sets
of complex relationships: on one side the misplaced favouritism of the college
Principal for an unappealing and dishonest student; on the other the close relationship
between the most brilliant student Mary Innes and her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beau</i> Pamela Nash, nicknamed Beau Nash. They are planning to
celebrate their graduation by going off to Norway together. But what might seethe beneath the surface is left to the reader to infer or imagine. However, on the surface and in very marked contrast, the novel is open about the successful
heterosexual relationship which develops between an outsider<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brazilian student, the colourfully dressed
Desterro (who the college girls nickname <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Nut Tart</i>) and the very decent young mixed-ethnicity (Brazilian- English)
man Rick. Desterro has to live with the college girls calling
him her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gigolo</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The only erotically
explicit passage in the novel depicts at some length (pages 216-17) a solo dance
which Desterro performs to a public audience which includes Rick. At the end,
the audience clap “like children at a Wild West matinée” (217). And, Reader, at
page 245 she marries him. The novel ends at page 249.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">One might say that this
spoken love story provides a structural counterpart to unspoken repressed
desire which runs through the main narrative. But whether that is or isn’t a
reasonable way of putting the novel in context, I found the novel absorbing and
striking in its language, its metaphors and comparisons. An author who can
imagine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Nut Tart </i>as a nickname
which girls in a Physical Training establishment could pin on one of their
number must have something going for her.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><i>Footnote</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p>The biography is very thoroughly researched but for my taste is too prim and too defensive of its subject. It does show that the author was unusually keen to inform herself about the subjects about which she wrote and that clearly contributes to the interest which her prose is able to sustain in the reader. In relation to <i>Miss Pym Disposes </i>the primary research consists in the fact that Josephine Tey graduated from a Physical Training establishment very much like the one she describes in the novel.</o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-15224500438819065292023-03-31T09:34:00.002-07:002023-04-02T23:23:32.616-07:00Martin Wolf The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1HdkxTLG_ypXiwD5RuAzZM_mtlCmeuHAGYMX3DAUL1-DuA-qHnTbOYjJuZ4CFsbsDfb9CNsFFLx5Eqpmapw5jCrYhFZlLNfASTCenOncLHeXOIr2m7YF3NTvFaC56PRCNiT1CS3XUtpu9EP5pdgazPuxfnY3lCp6HQGLwHgTyfygq4vfpTENMwVcE/s2852/martin%20wolf.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2852" data-original-width="2289" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1HdkxTLG_ypXiwD5RuAzZM_mtlCmeuHAGYMX3DAUL1-DuA-qHnTbOYjJuZ4CFsbsDfb9CNsFFLx5Eqpmapw5jCrYhFZlLNfASTCenOncLHeXOIr2m7YF3NTvFaC56PRCNiT1CS3XUtpu9EP5pdgazPuxfnY3lCp6HQGLwHgTyfygq4vfpTENMwVcE/s320/martin%20wolf.jpg" width="257" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Martin Wolf was born in
London in 1946, the first son of war-time Austrian and Dutch Jewish refugees. His
is a powerful voice at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Financial
Times</i> where he is Chief Economics Commentator and one of the reasons why I
pay for an online subscription to the only daily newspaper of which I am a
regular reader. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">This is the sort of
book which invites the appellation “magisterial” - the small print footnotes
run to seventy pages - and the opening chapters provide a wide-ranging,
detailed but always readable account of the emergence of those hybrid forms of
societies and states in which market capitalism is combined with liberal
democratic government. The combination is really very recent, not much more
than a century on a generous interpretation, and though Wolf reckons it the
best form of society which flawed human beings can achieve, it is fragile.
Rapacious capitalists don’t like to be constrained by laws and taxation and
personality-disordered would-be tyrants don’t like to be constrained by elections
and parliaments. But such people do appeal to electorates which sometimes vote
for their own disenfranchisement. They did so <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in 1930s Germany, repeated the story in 2000s
Russia, and capped it in the USA by turning out for Donald Trump - who figures largely
in this book, held up as a warning to us all of the imminent peril in which we
all now live: the implosion of American democracy. England’s pitiful old people’s
vote to leave the European Union was provincial farce compared to these global tragedies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There are blind spots
in the narrative. The blindness of the victorious allies in framing the Treaty
of Versailles opened Hitler’s route to power; the Wild East Americans who
brought their brand of "freedom n mocracy" to Moscow in the 1990s paved the way
for the rise of Putin; the subordination of the Democratic Party to the imperatives
of Wall Street provided the plutocrat populist Donald Trump with a vast constituency
of disaffected poorer white Americans. The capitalist liberal democracies have
things to answer for - and I haven’t even mentioned their colonial adventures, also
sidelined here. But, still, I can’t now disagree with Martin Wolf that nothing
better than a social democrat version of capita</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">list liberal democracy is ever likely to be on successful offer. And the offers are often being rejected.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The first half of the book does a very good job and I was engrossed. But after that
I was less impressed. What follows is a very extended wish list of things which
if done would make our lives materially better and more secure. Now I am the same
age as Mr Wolf and I have been reading these wish lists since I was a teenager.
Probably he has too. If you took a course in British Politics at university (as
I am afraid I did) then you would read books about the “Reform of Parliament”
(The title of a once well -known 1964 book by Bernard Crick). Sixty years on, reformers
are still whistling in the wind. Voters don’t want reform of Parliament - they
turned down the chance of proportional representation when offered in a
referendum. MPs definitely don’t want reform of Parliament either, even
left-wing ones who often turn out to be as hidebound as the worst rural Tory
squire. Think Michael Martin, who became a true-blue reactionary Speaker and Dennis
Skinner who sat on his safe Bolsover seat for 49 years and to my knowledge achieved
nothing. ( He was very upset when an uninitiated new MP once took his reserved clubland seat on the front bench).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Of course, I was pleased
when I found things here which are also on my own wish list (see my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Best I Can Do</i> 2016). But many
of them rate no more than a sentence or short paragraph and I can’t see any powerful party or group mobilising around many or most of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>them. You might say that it is the achievement
(so far) of Sir Keir Starmer to realise that his scope for doing anything of
lasting significance if he leads his party to a General Election victory is
almost zero. He can aim to be competent, that's all. A dozen years of Conservative incompetence of which Dr Kwarteng’s
budget was the crowning glory ensures that there is little room for spending
(kiss goodbye once again to hopes of new infrastructure). And if Sir Keir
ventures into the culture wars then it will be a vote loser - the right-wing
press has secured that already even though the irony is that most Woke
policies (such as they are) are fairly reactionary, designed to secure the
comfort and lifestyle of very small sections of the population - Martin Wolf
briefly picks up on that in a critique of identity politics. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is very little which is progressive
about identity politics; politics is progressive when it advances progressive
values like equality of opportunity, not when it advances sectional zero-sum claims to the best that’s on offer. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">People bandy around words like “Representation”
without pausing to think what it might mean in many complex contexts; they
just think it means they should get the job. (Once you start putting fresh faces on
bank notes, you hit problems of
representation which are fairly intractable and end up being resolved in favour
of the most persistent lobbyists - see my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sample
Essays</i> (2020) for a discussion. The problem is perfectly general).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Nonetheless, it’s worth
reading through the wish lists just to remind oneself of how daunting is the
task anyone of goodwill and some influence would face. Martin Wolf can barely stop himself from saying that in the USA the
battle has already been lost; the productive union of market capitalism and
liberal democratic politics is already and irretrievably broken. The plutocrats
have mastered the art of securing the endorsement of those whose lives are
increasingly nasty, brutish and short but which won't get any better under plutocratic (and capricious) rule.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">As David Runciman observed
in a clear-headed review of Martin Wolf in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">London
Review of Books</i>, “this book leaves you feeling that what’s needed is a
miracle”.<o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-9290436554126102072023-02-22T23:13:00.002-08:002023-02-24T04:17:10.116-08:00Adolfo Kaminsky by Sarah Kaminsky<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKbN5-JnbCjgNu-VJPKjvtQyDTAJbbKD8E6TGViX4BIKA8APwiCmCNdRja06uc6Xiv4xzy_5-Bww5IGj171NWVoJRHbMiQBnkc4hJ4kmGTurpwjSdwYnFQ_1KD24i-Jd6TXXiagUkH98dG4iyx_vHSXYdbJbOxhIAgUrDsMQW4fdqkArJJnxZF9xrQ/s2089/kaminsky%20cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2089" data-original-width="1307" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKbN5-JnbCjgNu-VJPKjvtQyDTAJbbKD8E6TGViX4BIKA8APwiCmCNdRja06uc6Xiv4xzy_5-Bww5IGj171NWVoJRHbMiQBnkc4hJ4kmGTurpwjSdwYnFQ_1KD24i-Jd6TXXiagUkH98dG4iyx_vHSXYdbJbOxhIAgUrDsMQW4fdqkArJJnxZF9xrQ/s320/kaminsky%20cover.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">On the internet there
are numerous photographs which testify to the love Sarah Kaminsky felt for her
father, Adolfo Kaminsky, who died in January 2023 aged 97. Her biography was
published in France in 2018 and several translations have already been made.
Sarah Kaminsky is the youngest of his children, born when Adolfo was in his
fifties. Before then there were other children by other partners and then three
by his last and longest-term parrtner, Leïla Kaminsky. As I read this book I
lost track of how many partners and children there were in total but it’s clear
enough that many were neglected. As a young man of nineteen, Adolfo is a
handsome fellow in the photograph reproduced in the book; he remains handsome
and well-groomed in the internet photographs of old age.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Sarah Kaminsky’s book
is a monument to her father. It’s written as if by Adolfo, in the first person,
and in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prologue</i> there is a sketch
of what was involved in researching it: note-taking of conversations with her
father; interviews with others. I read the book as if listening to a reliable
narrator but then had doubts because the narrator built out of the research seems
to have such perfect recall; more or less every narrative has a beginning,
middle and end. Memory is just not that good. So it may be that the biography is
more romanesque than it presents itself as being. It’s certainly a fascinating
read and quite, quite different to another book by a forger previously reviewed
on this site, Shaun Greenhalgh’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Forger’s Tale </i>(reviewed 19 July 2018). The aims, motives, satisfactions
could not be more different except for the evident pride in technical
accomplishment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Another relevant book
for comparison would be with Marie Jalowicz Simon <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untergetaucht</i> [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Underground in
Berlin</i>] based on tape recordings made by her son towards the end of Marie’s
life and narrating the life of a young Jewish woman living underground in
Berlin during the War.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Adolfo Kaminsky was the
child of Russian-Jewish emigrés of the leftist kind who sought refuge from the
Bolsheviks in France, were expelled and made their way to Argentina (where
Kaminsky was born) and then made their way back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His parents reckoned they would be safe in
rural France even after the Germans arrived in 1940; they weren’t. His mother
was probably murdered by the Germans and the rest of the family ended up in
Drancy bound for Auschwitz and only got out thanks to an intervention by the
Argentinian consul - they still had Argentinian nationality.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Kaminsky began in his
teens a thirty year career as a forger of false documents and worked first in
the service of the French resistance, particularly those parts finding safe
houses or escape routes for Jews. Later, he worked briefly for the immediate
post-Liberation French security services and then for a long succession of
liberation movements, notably the Algerian FLN, and for those fleeing
repressive regimes. He retired from his always-unpaid work as forger in 1971
when he felt that he was about to be caught and go to prison. He produced false
documents in prodigious quantities, dozens or more at a time, and not only
French ones - forging Swiss passports was very satisfying because they were
supposed to be the most highly protected against forgery. But he would only
forge for those he believed to be morally and politically worthy of support. He tried to draw a firm line against organisations which used terrorist violence. That complicated his immediate post-war work for Zionist movements working
to drive the British out of Palestine. One remarkable story in the book (pages 125-28) sees him agree to make the timer for a Stern gang (Lehi) bomb which will kill the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He makes the timer but with one special feature; it won't work. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">One must remember that the
post-war France in which Kaminsky did most of his work was not a country of
liberty, equality or fraternity but a repressive state more like those headed
by Franco and Salazar and many of whose citizens were nostalgic for Vichy (and
remain so to this day). A great deal of repressive violence was deployed,
especially in Paris, where Maurice Papon became Chief of Police in 1958. He was
eventually tried and convicted of wartime crimes against humanity - but not
until 1998 when he was at the end of a highly successful police and political
career spanning fifty years during which time he was directly responsible for
the deaths of many innocent people, notably in the massacres of demonstrators
in 1961 and 1962. To this day, it is unclear how many dead there were. See Papon’s
Wkipedia entry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Writing that about
Paris, I remembered an occasion when I was invited to a private party (a small
one) where the front door was opened not by the host but by his Security. The
host, living in some Parisian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">banlieue,</i>
was from North Africa who even as late as 1971 might well receive unwelcome
visitors. I forget the details and it’s pointless to speculate who invited me
or why. Paris in 1971 is also the only place where I have ever been stopped and
asked to show my papers to a police officer. I was walking back to my room from
the cinema, late one evening. I was carrying my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Carte de Séjour</i> (it was obligatory to do so) and as he handed it back
to me the officer saluted. I guess it helped to be English not North African.<o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-50452744436405761822023-01-18T01:54:00.009-08:002023-01-19T06:21:32.509-08:00Do Good Books Get Published More by Luck than Judgment?<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I read two or three books each week, cover to
cover, of which maybe half are recently published and mostly from mainstream,
major publishers. That’s partly because I pick up leads to new books from
mainstream periodicals - principally <i>The Literary Review</i>, <i>The
London Review of Books</i>, and <i>The Times Literary Supplement. </i>The
first two are conservative in their review choices; the <i>TLS</i> has
become more adventurous under its current editor and notices a fair number of
books from small and foreign language publishers.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">For the past ten years I have posted reviews of
some of my recently read books on this blog. They do not offer reader
recommendations or puffs which a publisher might pick up for a paperback
edition; I only review when I have something to say. That does mean that some
books which I think are simply terrific don’t get a review. Most recently,
that’s true of Edward Wilson-Lee’s <i>A History of Water</i> (William
Collins 2022). I don’t have any of his expertise and I can’t see any way in
which I could better the craft which turned his research findings into a
fascinating tale.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I have read lots of good books and quite a few
duds, often from the same publisher, and begin to wonder about explanations,
especially for the bad ones. How do they get published? I can only speculate.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There are a very small number of books where at the
end (I rarely give up) I just want to ask who the author is sleeping with.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Then there are books which will have gone through
the VIP lane to get their contracts because the author is established in one
way or another and sells well every time, regardless. The VIP lane is the route
where you are simply waved through. I have a candidate for a bad book by a good
author which surely got published regardless. And even if I am wrong about
that, there are plenty of readers who will have experienced disappointment with
the latest from a favourite author. Few enthusiasts for Ian McEwan will be
enthusiastic about <i>Amsterdam</i> (Jonathan Cape 1998).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Most publishing is big business publishing.
Sometimes readers are clear beneficiaries: rows of black-backed Penguin
Classics on my shelves, cheap, carefully edited and reliable are evidence for
that. I am very grateful. But sometimes, and perhaps especially for academic or
semi-academic books where the print run will be small, a publisher can only
afford a limited budget - that means, limited time - to assess a potential
title. As a result, publishers are now in the habit of asking authors to fill
out questionnaires as long as those required by the United Kingdom’s Home Office
and if the authors game the questionnaire successfully then they are well on
the way to get their visa. They have done a lot of work which used to be a
publisher’s job. And if you are rubbish at filling up forms - and some of the
questions are pretty inane - you won't get published however good your book.
But if the paperwork is in order, you are well on your way.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Some years ago [5 March 2016] I responded here to
Gerald Steinacher’s generally well-received <i>Nazis on the Run</i> (Oxford
University Press 2011). The title alone would sell it, but the book is a mess.
And, given its subject matter, I wish it hadn’t been. After trying to set out
the historical context it is concerned with I ordered my criticisms:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">First, it is less like a book and
more like a notebook: lots of miscellaneous facts, disjointed, endlessly
repetitive, the chronology erratic. I find it hard to believe that anyone at
the English-language publisher, Oxford University Press, read the book before
agreeing to publish it. Read it cover to cover, as I have done, and it is like
reading the first draft of a Ph.D.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I then set out to show that it
failed to present its evidence in a way which was decisive enough to justify
the conclusions Steinacher drew or wanted to draw. To put the book right
would have taken a great deal of editorial labour. As it stands, the book
should not have been published.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But then there is the opposite
problem where a book has been spoilt by intrusive low-grade (and probably
low-paid) editing which makes the author look a fool. I was first alerted to
this problem when I read Tim Parks <i>Where I'm Reading From</i> reviewed
here 22 February 2015 who described the appalling treatment accorded one of his
books by an American publisher - I outline the problems he encountered. More
recently, I found an example which indicates that Parks' case was not a
one-off.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 9.0pt; margin: 9pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In 2020 Oxford University Press (USA) published a perfectly acceptable
academic monograph with an eighteenth century focus, Richard
Scholar’s <i>Émigrés. French Words That Turned English</i> though
clearly Émigrés didn’t because it is being given two accents not one
on the cover. Leave that aside (but it has potential….). I published a long
review [28 October 2020].</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 9.0pt; margin: 9pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">One of the things which troubled me was some dumbing down which could only
have been the responsibility of some dumbed-down copy-editor. Thus at page 114
I encountered this:</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 9.0pt; margin: 9pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> <b><i>The French-speaking Genevan thinker and writer Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-78) …..</i></b></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 9.0pt; margin: 9pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hang on a moment. This is a specialised monograph which will be read mainly
by specialists in eighteenth century French and English literature. Which ones
did the copy editor think would not know that M. Rousseau was French-speaking
or Genevan or a <i>thinker and writer</i>?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It’s not always easy to make the
right judgment call. But the copy editor who put their mark on this book
disappears when perhaps more needed. So at page 162, the title of a sequence of
poems is given in untranslated French with no gloss that the words are those
which the French-speaking painter and all-round bad boy Paul Gauguin (1848 -
1903) inscribed on perhaps his most famous painting. Now that might have been
rather more worthy of the editor’s skills. But how come it was missed? The
answer is this: there is no proper name in the immediate vicinity of the poem
to trigger the copy-editor’s little App which is limited to providing patter
around proper names. Am I exaggerating? I rest my case with the first use of
the App in the book, at page 80:</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> <b>playwrights
such as William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), for example, wrote
history plays…</b></span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It could have been worse. He could
have been <i>English-speaking</i>. But, still, Professor Scholar was
ill-served by his publisher. Had Professor Scholar added those glosses himself in a misguided attempt to make his book more accessible, an alert editor would have taken them out as out of keeping with the academic level of the book..</span></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-1920163584115878272023-01-17T02:40:00.003-08:002023-01-17T02:44:36.369-08:00Running Scared: Dashes, Asterisks, Scare Quotes, Bunny Ears Quotes, Sensitivity Readers<p> </p><p><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Editors and publishers
may not have lists but they know a word that they don’t want to see in print
when they see it. One dodge employed by writers is to place a sanctionable word
within what are usually called scare quotes. If challenged, they will say that
they are mentioning the word, or quoting it, or using it ironically. This will
sometimes save them from exclusion from polite society though at a price (I
will come to that). But some words have always been judged too offensive to be
safely contained within scare quotes and they just have to go or - at least -
seem to go. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Before the First World
War, an important role in novels was played by the dash giving us characters who
declared <i>Well, I’ll be d-------</i> which
satisfied the guardians of morals and left nothing to the imagination. In his <i>Kim</i>, published in 1901, Rudyard Kipling
tried to be a bit more inventive and after decades of dashes inventiveness was
sorely needed. <span style="background: white; color: #222222;">Addressing the
no-nonsense dowager Maharanee of Saharunpore, Kim declares <i>“Mother, I
owe my life to thee…..Ten thousands blessings upon thy house …”</i> only
to find his words indignantly rejected by the Maharanee because she wishes to
be thanked as by a son not a priest. Kipling gives the rejection thus: “<i>The
house be unblessed! (It is impossible to give exactly the old lady’s word)”.</i></span>
The beauty of this is that it is far from certain that <i>damned</i> would have been the exact word. The Maharanee is a feisty
character and, one suspects, could swear like a trooper and troopers - well, it
is impossible to give exactly their words.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Someone who may or may
not have been inventive gave us another dodge in the form of asterisks,
carefully counted out. Unfortunately, there is such a paucity of very naughty words
that asterisks are rarely more difficult to solve than kindergarten crossword
puzzles. I am not sure that any literary journal would allow me examples, even
one at the outer limits of complexity like m***********. The failure of
asterisks to protect children, let alone adults, generated a new dodge,
exemplified by <i>The C-word</i> and <i>The N-word </i>cleverly designed as occult
symbols about the meaning of which the uninitiated dare not ask.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Fortunately, some words
can safely be accommodated by scare quotes but that comes at a price,
especially in relation to irony. A writer can, of course, use a word ironically
without resorting to scarce quotes but some readers will not get the irony - a
hazard known about for centuries. In the past, it was thought that scare quotes
would rescue the writer from the risk of not being understood but, of course,
they do so only at the risk of irritating IQ positive readers who will feel
patronised. Worse, an unexpected invention has permanently damaged the value of
scare quotes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I refer to the visual
realisation of scare quotes as <i>air quotes</i>
or <i>bunny-ears quotes.</i> These are so
obviously heavy-handed that they can only be handled safely by celebrities and
Republican Party politicians: Google offers me images of Marjorie Taylor
Greene, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump. That alone is enough to cast a shadow over
regular scare quotes sometimes still used by writers. But I think scare quotes
will soon become extinct in serious writing if they are not so already. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Writers are better off
taking their chances that an irony will be missed and simply have to give a bit
more thought as to how to carry things off. The best approach is to stop thinking
about using individual words or short phrases ironically - which is all that Bunny
Ears people do. Instead, the writer needs to set up a whole context in which
irony can surface and break through into the reader’s understanding. Maybe
someone has had that idea before. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Many pressures weigh on
what can be expressed and what can’t declare its name. The pressures change
through time but always seem to leave us with a morality police of some kind
operating over all or part of literary space. In the very recent past, unemployed
ex-Sunday school teachers have found new roles as sensitivity readers who are
not fooled by scare quotes or contextualisation. Some of them work for literary consultancies - you have been warned. They can point straight at the
Word just as once upon a time they pointed at the boy in the front row who had
just farted.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">.</span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-15478698735152508332022-11-30T12:17:00.003-08:002022-11-30T12:18:22.693-08:00David Graeber and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8eO96nUnTdY_K9CBGXLaVLoVLrMrG8eeC2ckcnkWAjgufQNDvHHIq57_M1Yoc4qIWggfT_FeZWkMqj6tK5ucvnHxI8Ff2y0GJIAVgaYnAzMc2YzJtGoPkbj3DbUr1SZFEDABh1lyKjJxcUhw5j2-IPBF9DhUwMfHGX3NEE83L616zqXb2sG9-tyQ4/s2343/a%20graebr.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2343" data-original-width="1491" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8eO96nUnTdY_K9CBGXLaVLoVLrMrG8eeC2ckcnkWAjgufQNDvHHIq57_M1Yoc4qIWggfT_FeZWkMqj6tK5ucvnHxI8Ff2y0GJIAVgaYnAzMc2YzJtGoPkbj3DbUr1SZFEDABh1lyKjJxcUhw5j2-IPBF9DhUwMfHGX3NEE83L616zqXb2sG9-tyQ4/s320/a%20graebr.jpg" width="204" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ten years ago I reviewed David Graeber’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Debt</i> on this site and declared it my
Book of the Year, though that is a fact I had forgotten until I accessed what I
had written:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="https://www.readingthisbook.com/search?q=david+graeber">https://www.readingthisbook.com/search?q=david+graeber</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The book now under
review, jointly authored with the archaeologist David Wengrow, was completed a
few weeks before David Graeber’s sudden-onset illness and unexpected death in
2020. Like the earlier book it is enormously wide-ranging, disruptive of
settled notions, and engagingly written. I was impressed and greatly enjoyed it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A thumbnail will not do it justice so I will
not struggle to find the most apt one. It seeks to re-fashion how we think about
both the very distant past with which the archaeologist is concerned and the
scattered “left-over” presents which are the concern of cultural anthropologists.
Specifically, it tries to escape from the clutch of all those (teleological) approaches
which assume that their job must be to explain how we got from there to here.
At the same time, it suggests that despite lack of written evidence we should
not assume that pre-historic or tribal cultures were incapable of thinking
about the arrangements under which they lived and making use of that in
configuring and changing them. At a level of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>more detail, instead of going in search of “state
formation” starting from our current situation in which the world is carved up
into nation states we could usefully look at how at different times and places
three principles of domination are exercised, either alone or in combination: “call
them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma”
(page 365). This opens up a field normally dominated by thinking about monopoly
of force or private property rights and allows us to see past societies and
marginal societies in all their difference. The professors will soon tell us if
they think this is or isn’t an insightful way of developing a new approach within
social and political theory.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I offer only two small
comments. The authors make much of the fact that pre-historic and tribal
societies quite often live under different forms of government at different
times of year. In the hunting season, everyone may submit to a single leader
whose word is law; but in the off-season when people settle (back) into
village-like life, everyone may prove very reluctant to submit to anyone else
and indeed decision-making may be quite differently organised in terms of communal
discussion aimed at consensus. The mere fact of this seasonal difference opens
space for local reflection on which system is “best”. The authors seem to think
that this will come as a surprise to readers. But most of them will have had
recent experience of COVID lock-downs, some will have had experience of Martial
Law, and in my country many will know about the Emergency Powers which in World
War Two underpinned such things as the compulsory night-time blackout. In all
these cases, people don’t move around geographically but the rules under which
they live have been temporarily, but quite dramatically, changed. Except in the
case of Martial Law, compliance may depend a lot on the sense that “We’re all
in it together” as Britain’s former Prime Minister Mr Boris Johnson discovered
to his cost. He let it be discovered that in his view COVID rules were only for
the little people.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">As a second comment,
the authors frequently use concepts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">culture</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">civilisation</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">state </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">society</i> but I
miss<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> civil society.</i> Civil society is something
which is outside the private sphere of the family unit but also outside the
state and its bureaucracy. It is larger than what Habermas and others would
call <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the public sphere</i> construed as a
place for public debate and would include things like food banks which are
created by the voluntary efforts of (private) citizens. The scale of civil
society is variable - totalitarian regimes are deeply suspicious of it as a
site of potential opposition and will seek to incorporate most of its elements
into bureaucratically controlled state or quasi-state activities. In countries
like my own there is also perhaps an interesting question about its boundaries.
For example, food supermarkets might be located simply in the domain of capitalist
enterprises, driven by the aim of profit maximisation and so on. But for
whatever motives they do have aspects which link them to civil society: they
give away food which might go to waste; they stock shelves with “Value” and “Essential”
products which are cheaper and which increase in importance in periods of
inflation and recession; they articulate discontent with government - in my
country the Chairman of Tesco, a major supermarket chain, recently let it be
known that he despaired of the Conservative (and supposedly business-oriented) government and was looking forward to a new (Labour) one. I don’t want to be
starry-eyed but I do think there is something to look at there a bit more
closely. There is of course an enormous amount of guff pushed out about “socially
responsible business” but maybe it does a bit more than blur the line between ”the
Economy” and “Society”. I'm tempted to say that often enough it is civil society which mitigates the mistakes and oppression of nation state governments.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-77929861838659827752022-11-01T10:36:00.002-07:002022-11-17T01:50:08.367-08:00A Private Spy The Letters of John le Carré edited by Tim Cornwell<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1oq9CONI7G8yNbqz0gqJa5hdjhLUx3H52jQ6d5p8bhRHo7YNsUbNz_jac9KX1ek1uW386EcEChIAX3tzC1KBDm-l7W-WJPj5lYQU8aNR4TodxQG_h7OLdn0wa2lbcxdxF3qjeLnx3JqoyATNg-2xVQcQmT12UvsI08gKJ_MVT3Zqv1vL2TeFCe3AO/s2929/carre%20letters.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2929" data-original-width="2367" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1oq9CONI7G8yNbqz0gqJa5hdjhLUx3H52jQ6d5p8bhRHo7YNsUbNz_jac9KX1ek1uW386EcEChIAX3tzC1KBDm-l7W-WJPj5lYQU8aNR4TodxQG_h7OLdn0wa2lbcxdxF3qjeLnx3JqoyATNg-2xVQcQmT12UvsI08gKJ_MVT3Zqv1vL2TeFCe3AO/s320/carre%20letters.jpg" width="259" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Browsing a provincial
auction catalogue, some years ago, I noticed for sale an autograph letter
signed David Cornwell on notepaper headed John le Carré. I was reading lots of
le Carré at the time and, out of curiosity, bought the letter unseen. Forty
quid. He writes to Stacey [there was no envelope so I have no surname] who
appears to be laid up in hospital after an accident and asks for reading
suggestions. The writer obliges: start with P G Wodehouse (“the funniest man
ever”) and for fine writing head to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anna
Karenina</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vanity Fair</i>, and Ford
Maddox Ford’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Good Soldier</i>. As if
that’s not enough to be going on with, the writer then throws in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Three Musketeers</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prisoner of Zenda.</i> It’s all prefaced
by advance notice for his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mission
Song</i>, the galleys of which he is currently correcting. His full address in
Cornwall is written in by hand and the letter dated 19:v:06. I was impressed.
Stacey appeared to be a complete stranger who had written to a famous and
almost certainly very busy author and received back a thoughtful, handwritten two-page
reply. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In his Introduction to
this very well-crafted collection of his father’s letters, the late Tim
Cornwell indicates that his father was an (unusually) good correspondent, often
replying to unsolicited mail and promptly (pages xxii-xxiii). He generally
wrote by hand and often kept no copy. As a result, the le Carré archive in the
Bodleian Library, on which this collection of over 600 pages is fairly
dependent, will contain no trace of letters like that to Stacey and the deficit
could really only be reduced by buying up such originals as appear on the
internet, as they do. Sometimes the content will be of interest - as in the
letter I have summarised - but, perhaps as importantly, those letters suggest
what one could regard either as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">noblesse
oblige</i> or - and I incline to this - a rather democratic spirit. The latter
interpretation is supported by what to me is the heartening fact that David
Cornwell never accepted one of those tarnished medals handed out by our Monarch
and which Woke novelists now declare after their names to show that they are
Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It is not as if he
was opposed to all recognition:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he
accepted, for example, a Goethe Medal in 2011 and a D Litt from Oxford.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In the book under review, le Carré does give
reasons for refusing a CBE on the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher but the
letter (at pages 238-39) is written to the then Head of Britain’s Secret
Intelligence Service, Sir Dick Franks, and could be read as at least partly an
effort to deflect any accusation of disloyalty to the Establishment. Much
later, after le Carré has entertained the Russian Ambassador for a weekend at
his home in Cornwall, he follows up with a report on the weekend addressed to Alan
Judd, who has already been introduced in the editorial notes as a link-man into
MI6/SIS (pages 387-396). Le Carré<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>expresses
himself rather differently when writing to a friend, Sir John Margetson, in
2010: “PS. Did I tell you I passed on a K[knighthood]. All right for public
servants, not good for artists, writers & the like”. (He’s right; I was disappointed
when Kazuo Ishiguro accepted a K. Some way or other, it’s going to cramp your
style). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In my own reading of le
Carré’s novels I eventually got round to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Perfect Spy, </i>wonderful on first read, not least because the narrative drive
never lost out to a complex structure kept in place from start to finish. I was
impressed enough to re-read and began to pick out literary devices which were
being used but not pointed to. I found myself drawn to a one-liner attributed
to a main character, “Never mind, E Weber love you always” which is repeated three
times to great effect. I wrote a few hundred words about this and was quite
pleased with the result. It occurred to me that I had John le Carré’s home
address sitting in a file: I could send him what I’d written. It would be a bit
cheeky: I would be evading the person in charge of the paper shredder in some
literary agent’s office, employed to protect authors from crank letter-writers.
But I sent it anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">To my astonishment,
within a few days I had a handwritten reply (10<sup>th</sup> Feb 2017) in which
I am told, rather teasingly, that I have caught something of the real person
behind the character of E.Weber, “at her charming best”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Writers do depend on
encouragement, and I was encouraged to expand what I had written into a more
sustained reflection on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Perfect Spy</i>
for inclusion in a book I was working on. And then I thought I’d go for broke: I
wrote again to ask permission to include his letter in the body of my essay
and, if he was in principle agreeable, to give me the necessary contact details
for his agent etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Came the handwritten
reply (25<sup>th</sup> July 2017), “…no need to trouble my agent: please regard
this letter as consent enough”. And so the letter appears at pages 98-99 of my
completely unsuccessful book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prose Improvements</i>
(2017). I returned again to<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> A Perfect Spy
</i>in a 2018 review on this site<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><a href="https://www.readingthisbook.com/2018/07/john-le-carre-perfect-spy.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">https://www.readingthisbook.com/2018/07/john-le-carre-perfect-spy.html</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">
and, in contrast to my failed book, it’s one of the most popular pages here with
over a thousand visitors.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The letters offered in
the volume under review are to family, friends, lovers (though sparsely),
secret and diplomatic service colleagues, fellow writers, agents, and so on.
There are a handful addressed to what one might call members of the public: to
Mrs Betty Quail who thinks that George Smiley’s problems would be solved by
conversion to Catholicism (p 230); to a ten year old boy who wants to be a spy
(p 281) and another to an eleven year old (p 359); to attentive readers in the
Netherlands and Germany who have spotted plot impossibilities and
inconsistencies (p 336, p 354) - the first one a beauty in which the Emperor is
clearly caught with no clothes; le Carré is greatly amused and sends a signed
hardback as a prize. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But these letters feel
like curiosities alongside the more weighty correspondence, some of it
providing useful grist for those who want to study plot and character and
device in the novels. This is very obviously so in letters to Alec Guinness
where le Carré is clear and detailed about how he thinks George Smiley should be played
(notably pages 211-15).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">To my surprise, it was
easy to read this book rather than pick up, put down, and basically browse.. A
lot must be owing to the skills of the editor, le Carré’s son the late Tim
Cornwell, who structures the book around the major novels and provides helpful,
unassertive, notes of guidance. If there is a weakness it must (inevitably and
invisibly) rest in the fact that the compilation is a family affair, approved
by the family Estate, and appearing really very soon after le Carré’s death at
the end of 2020.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Like father like son. I
was struck by the similarities between father and son. Both display extraordinary
energy, are on the move constantly (though le Carré likes to describe himself
as a recluse in Cornwall - with a guest wing built to accommodate six …), and
are good at making friends and influencing people. The difference, of course,
is that Reggie was a career con-man criminal notching up jail sentences in
several countries (not many criminals achieve that distinction) and losing his
winnings every time, whereas le Carré amasses - and doesn’t lose, though
sometimes gives away chunks - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a large
fortune built entirely on his genius as a writer and the skill of his agents in
selling film and TV rights. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There is hardly a page
in the 630 pages of this collection of letters where the author is not busy,
whether writing, travelling to dangerous places to do background research for a novel,promoting a new novel, or co-operating with scriptwriters, directors,
producers. Both energy and achievement are extraordinary.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I will do my duty and
make copies of the letters I mentioned at the beginning and post them to the
archivist at the Bodleian. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-8528667398386062152022-10-28T23:49:00.004-07:002022-11-01T10:36:49.339-07:00Copyright in the Estate of William Shakespeare<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Works of William
Shakespeare remain part of living cultures at least partly because there is no
Estate of William Shakespeare. You can do what you like with Shakespeare and no
one will appear to tell you that it’s going to cost or that under no circumstances
may you cast a black actor as Hamlet. We are fortunate that Shakespeare was not
born more recently, in which case he would surely join the ranks of those whose
Estates are synonyms for rent extraction and cultural policing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Literary Estate
Problem can be traced back to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the American
Constitution “<span style="background: white; color: #202124; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries”. Well, that’s clear enough: a limited time is not an
unlimited time. But is a limited time seven years, seventy years, or (watch out
for Mr William Shakespeare’s lawful heirs & assigns) seven hundred years?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Theorists of intellectual property
rights would probably like to go for perpetuity: a house can pass from heir to
heir indefinitely and quite a number have done so ever since they were first
built; the standing and success of English aristocratic families can be
reckoned by how long they’ve not had to sell the house. If houses can pass on
indefinitely, why not likewise copyright in the works of any writers who may
have lived there? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The US Constitution implicitly
blocks that argument and we may be grateful, though the block has occasionally
been breached. The authors of the Constitution (who by the way claimed no
copyright on their work) were working in the opposite direction, trying to
create new rights where none or only very weak ones previously existed. So the
intellectual property theorist, unable to sustain “perpetuity”, can simply focus on
the interpretation of “limited times” and aim to make them long as possible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">How should one interpret "limited times"? One
could start by asking if all cases are alike; intuitively they are not. Many
technological developments (including pharmaceutical innovations) require
enormous investments which will now only be made if there is a guaranteed
period in which the exploitation of any successful innovation is protected by
copyright and patent law. In contrast, I doubt that anyone has ever written a
novel after careful assessment of local copyright law, and probably concluding,
“Nah, the period is too short to make the labour of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">War and Peace</i> worthwhile. But a little novella …”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Some, maybe many, writers aspire to
live by their pen (as John le Carré always liked to put it; he never typed so
he was being accurate) and the aspiration seems legitimate but usually only
realisable if there is some kind of copyright protection. An alternative model was
pioneered in the Soviet Union where writers might aspire to collect a salary
for their work rather than royalty payments, That’s what the Writers’ Union was
all about and I doubt it is a model which now appeals to anyone. It’s true, we
do pay writers salaries if they call themselves <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Academics</i> but at the same time allowing them to collect royalties
on what they write. Like NHS consultants, they end up working in both public
and private sectors. This is most obviously true for those who work in
university Creative Writing departments, the closest we get to the Soviet model.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The aspiration to make a living
from writing might seem to suggest a clear interpretation to “limited times”:
copyright protection would expire at death, when the writer can no longer
aspire to anything.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">But what about the widow? Or to
modernise the question, What about the surviving partner? Well, normally, if
there is a bread-winner then he or she is expected to make provision in their
lifetime for anyone who may survive them and which will supplement or replace
whatever state provision is on offer. Yes, but let’s be frank: writers rarely
make a lot of money. They barely manage to make ends meet. But if you allow
copyright to be inherited, a surviving partner at least gets something, though
how much is unpredictable. And then when they die, the copyright expires. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Ah, but what about the writer who
prefers to assign copyright to the dogs’ home? How long should it last then? In
the case of J M Barrie’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peter Pan</i> here
in the UK we have a special law, passed in Parliament, which grants Great Ormond
Street Hospital copyright<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> in perpetuity</i>.
But would you want to do that for your local dogs’ home? The trouble with the
Barrie law (introduced by a former Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan when
he had become Lord Callaghan) is that it sets a really bad precedent. Copyright
gives you the right not only to ask for money but to dictate how a play may or
may not be performed or a novel edited.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Except for that one case, then in current
English law copyright expires <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seventy
years after the death of the author</i>. I don’t think that’s anything <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>more than<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>a triumph for rent extracting agencies, for corporations and lawyers. Is there any justification at
all for it? I’m trying to think of some without much success. But let’s try.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">If copyright expires at death then
a publisher has less incentive to keep a work in print since anyone could now
bring out a rival edition at a lower price. That seems a feeble argument, undermined
by the fact that bookshops are full of cheap (and very well-edited) editions of the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Jane Austen … In many case, there are
indeed rival editions and an informed reader will know that some (Penguin Classics)
are usually better than others. Publishers manage to claw back a bit of
copyright protection by commissioning Introductions and Bibliographical
apparatuses. That doesn’t really undermine the general principle that other
editions of the core work are possible, no permission needed. The argument is
even more feeble if it is supposed to keep works in print for another seventy
years; it won’t. Most books simply go out of print for reasons entirely
unconnected to copyright law. They die from lack of interest, that’s all.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Keeping interest alive is a real
problem for publishers. It is partly solved by the happy accident that all
serious writers realise that they have an obligation to leave behind a room full
of juvenilia, unfinished works, and - best of all - hundreds and hundreds of Letters which have been carefully crafted (both ways: sender and receiver) to arouse
interest, ideally scandalised and prurient. He was anti-semitic. She was
lesbian. He beat his wife. She fucked everyone. A serious Literary Estate will
command enough resources to appoint researchers and editors who can convert this base metal into the gold of must-read hardbacks which, as an
additional benefit to the Estate, lead some readers to the original poems,
novels, and plays. How widely read would Bloomsbury’s authors be now without
the Letters?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">It’s a problem that the State is
not neutral about the desirability of all this. It has a stake in extended
copyright: governments collect tax on the income of Estates whose activities
contribute to overall GDP. It’s as if the writer is still busy writing after
death, generating income, jobs, and taxes. I hesitate to mention this benefit
to the State because someone at my local UK Treasury is now going to make the
case for creating an Estate of William Shakespeare: nationalising it and
collecting bucketloads of money on copyright permissions - as well as forbidding
any interpretations of Shakespeare which might imply criticism of the Ruling
Party (“To be Prime Minister, or not to be Prime Minister. That is this week’s
question”). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202124; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I’ll stop there (1282 words showing)
and conclude that it would be a progressive move to campaign for a
reduction in the standard period of literary copyright. In place of seventy
years I propose seven years - enough time to fund heirs and executors as they
set about tidying up the affairs of a deceased writer.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-48353749942729833522022-07-31T02:58:00.006-07:002022-08-01T02:29:35.774-07:00Editorial Oversight at Oxford University Press<p> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVv_zA18EpzpQvGBL-8aWUWa0Q7k4KWN_oPpgc9tQPCyTZJeTrf4W7qjJvv9_tfZXUVwP1U6gC4B1KrNbt68TAXRvrShJIj9SLcTMxNhIxXAZ02ZyZz0HRM6MoCiwbWfIRDGILIrss9lZegiWRAY_lM929F4mrrlJ6gNVEblxFt9ji46d-jwHu0sCa/s3248/hans%20christian%20anderson.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3248" data-original-width="2364" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVv_zA18EpzpQvGBL-8aWUWa0Q7k4KWN_oPpgc9tQPCyTZJeTrf4W7qjJvv9_tfZXUVwP1U6gC4B1KrNbt68TAXRvrShJIj9SLcTMxNhIxXAZ02ZyZz0HRM6MoCiwbWfIRDGILIrss9lZegiWRAY_lM929F4mrrlJ6gNVEblxFt9ji46d-jwHu0sCa/w312-h428/hans%20christian%20anderson.jpg" width="312" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>Clue: The Emperor's New Clothes</b></div><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-91013516206884509802022-05-03T00:43:00.000-07:002022-05-03T00:43:08.966-07:00Review: Gary Gerstle The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order<p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8RGfh-PqspVlUyKsPcJgRbm1gs9btVpE2V91wdZl9XU6A3ehWI36PCOEEUH0IzXABE2gTaU_HB7zxiOxEBKB41Dpg9246QD40Ym9FDsSaC6vPpnQ6cHgv-1XG8d5HbmE-iVqoGH1yFbs_ukNmQBeGN-kxupp06l4ArBWVlsGiGP1N_tnLwE7uWzKs/s2809/gerstle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2809" data-original-width="2169" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8RGfh-PqspVlUyKsPcJgRbm1gs9btVpE2V91wdZl9XU6A3ehWI36PCOEEUH0IzXABE2gTaU_HB7zxiOxEBKB41Dpg9246QD40Ym9FDsSaC6vPpnQ6cHgv-1XG8d5HbmE-iVqoGH1yFbs_ukNmQBeGN-kxupp06l4ArBWVlsGiGP1N_tnLwE7uWzKs/s320/gerstle.jpg" width="247" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This is an excellent
book. It starts from what seems to be a very simple and even simplified model of
American economic and political history in the past century and proceeds to
document the case for its explanatory value. What convinced me of the model’s
value was the realisation that it could be transferred to British history
of the same period and equally well-supported from evidence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Gerstle’s key concept
is that of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">political order</i>. This
captures the reality that in democratic polities with competing parties a
common ground can emerge which is sustained for long periods across changes in the
political complexion of governments. In the USA, Roosevelt’s originally
Democratic Party New Deal of the 1930s persisted and was even doubled down on
by the Republican administration of President Eisenhower. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the same way in Britain, the Labour Party’s
war time and post-1945 creation of a mixed economy and welfare state was sustained
by Conservative governments through to the administration of Edward Heath. Here
the common ground was locally identified in the expression <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Butskellism </i>built from the names of the Conservative politician RA
Butler and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Butskellism also embraced a
commitment to NATO and the Atlantic alliance.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Political orders fail
and are replaced for complex reasons not always understood at the time. The New
Deal and Butskell political orders were replaced by neoliberal orders which are
often characterised using the names of the leaders who drove through the initial
changes; thus we have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reaganomics</i> and
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thatcherism</i> which survived through
the Democratic administrations of Clinton and Obama in the USA and the Labour governments of Tony Blair in the UK.
Neoliberalism was a political order which transcended and survived political party
differences.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Gertsle concludes by documenting
how the neoliberal political order has fallen apart in the USA with Donald
Trump finding a constituency to vote for the destruction of at least its
internationalist aspects. The UK narrative would focus on Brexit and the ongoing
confusion within a Conservative Party whose neoliberals dressed in ethnonationalist
clothes have cut the UK out of its principal free trade area. The eventual outcome
is unclear. So far, all that we know is that the USA was weakened by Trump and
the UK weakened by the Brexiteers, to the satisfaction of Mr Putin if no one
else.<o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-21170396127037813732022-04-30T10:23:00.004-07:002022-07-16T22:04:33.609-07:00Review: Peter Salmon An Event Perhaps A Biography of Jacques Derrida<p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlHPf7-Dnn4rGX9lCbWkvl6zlu2r-Rx0AxqnzNH-NIHWrzbMqfePkdsSsirJDTRv13JrvwL83iFTwZ4ICgEJUB6tcAMtSwE0GcKcw3Y0oVxt8zrHSHFBIfPC4s8sumsdKGOgfDrXs9Dp9YvUvMRuE53vaFdzpKDzX39R761q8Erjktuk9UZuj3DrwZ/s2330/derrida%20cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2330" data-original-width="1570" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlHPf7-Dnn4rGX9lCbWkvl6zlu2r-Rx0AxqnzNH-NIHWrzbMqfePkdsSsirJDTRv13JrvwL83iFTwZ4ICgEJUB6tcAMtSwE0GcKcw3Y0oVxt8zrHSHFBIfPC4s8sumsdKGOgfDrXs9Dp9YvUvMRuE53vaFdzpKDzX39R761q8Erjktuk9UZuj3DrwZ/s320/derrida%20cover.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I am one of those people
who would rather read a book about Jacques Derrida than read a book by Derrida.
This one, though very well-written and diligent, isn’t going to change my mind.
Derrida is just not my cup of tea - a phrase which the late Richard Wollheim
used at the end of a superb essay on the work of Jacques Lacan which had
involved him in a great deal of diligent reading. Nonetheless, I must have
picked up something and not so long ago cheerfully titled an essay “Social
Construction Deconstructed”. But then there is a generic use of “deconstruction”
which is almost certainly not faithful to an original idea. To use the term doesn’t make me
one of the (dwindling) band of the Derrida faithful.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">When I arrived in Paris
for a year’s graduate work in the autumn of 1971 I promptly spent most of my
money on a pile of books by celebrity theorists of the time, intending to read
them all. I bought Derrida’s <i>De la Grammatologie</i>
and <i>L’Ecriture et la Différence</i>, both
published in 1967, and probably read half of each book - I don’t have the
physical books any more so I can’t be more precise. But the material seemed at a
distance from my more immediate concerns at the time and I didn’t finish them or do anything with them.
Nonetheless, I found my way to the Ecole Normale Superieure and sneaked into Derrida’s
(very sparsely attended) lectures in which he was offering a close reading of
Hegel on the family and marriage, and that was even less of concern to me. So I
stopped going. Salmon’s book (p. 166) tells me that those lectures were
the basis of his 1974 book <i>Glas</i>. It
was common practice in the Paris of the time for professors to use draft
chapters of next year’s book as their teaching material. I stuck with Foucault
for the whole year and he was working on his Pierre Rivière study and presented
work in progress in seminars. But his approach was different, and it was much
more of a teaching situation that he created, not least because he had dissuaded the tourists
from attending: at the Collège de France all teaching was supposed to be open
to anyone and Foucault devoted his first session grilling those present about
their motives for being there. The grilling was severe enough to reduce numbers
substantially at the second session. From Foucault, I got the idea of studying minor or parallel thinkers alongside major figures and a few years later writing about John Stuart Mill tried to show how part of his system of thought had been more fully fleshed out by the more or less forgotten Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Likewise, I sought to show how you could make sense of Rousseau's arguments in <i>Du Contrat Social</i> by putting them alongside Condorcet's work on probability theory and majority voting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Later, in the 1980s when teaching at the University of Sussex one of my colleagues was Geoff Bennington
who has now devoted a lifetime’s talent to promoting Derrida’s work, initially by translation and then in many other ways including direct collaboration with Derrida. There was an occasion when I complained
that Derrida was an<i> improvisatore </i>and Bennington replied “I think he’s the bee’s knees”. I had put Derrida into the same category as Lacan, whose “seminars” (attended by hundreds at Saint
Anne) were theatre in the tradition of Anton Mesmer and, by this stage in his career, more or less unintelligible.
He entered each week wearing a fur coat; a female assistant helped him take
it off and held on to it for the duration. In stark contrast, I greatly enjoyed
the patient and relaxed seminars offered by Roland Barthes, who was my director
of studies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I made one more attempt
to engage with Derrida’s work in 1997 at a <i>Colloque </i>held at Cérisy la Salle in Normandy devoted to Derrida and the topic
of <i>L’Animal Autobiographique</i>. Derrida
spoke at length, uninterrupted, and certainly for longer than Fidel Castro’s
record. I found it exasperating. Peter Salmon now tells me that Derrida “presented
a ten hour lecture” (p 273). It certainly felt like it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Unless you are very
stupid, then if you spend your life writing eighty books (Salmon’s figure for
Derrida) then you are more or less bound to say something interesting somewhere.
But I’m happy to leave it to others to discover where.</span> </p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-68261256406793479042022-03-13T10:16:00.004-07:002022-03-13T10:44:11.796-07:00Review: Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiL-6rR6ObNwRcfMbVfdeecYpM6uh5WgtXiLXs_3afqWSWeWTTRnJEHeQJ9owbHKC3UzCZU12VyJLsjjLbXR0Om2CtJzgfb9HezMwkbeD0u5vCcqSlG0xY9M7z00ba9hu_DWvEjh9BJ30MnIEbDOE8khjElcMoe_JXUwSa2q0JPXNIvISf7a9OlI9S4=s2698" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2698" data-original-width="1815" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiL-6rR6ObNwRcfMbVfdeecYpM6uh5WgtXiLXs_3afqWSWeWTTRnJEHeQJ9owbHKC3UzCZU12VyJLsjjLbXR0Om2CtJzgfb9HezMwkbeD0u5vCcqSlG0xY9M7z00ba9hu_DWvEjh9BJ30MnIEbDOE8khjElcMoe_JXUwSa2q0JPXNIvISf7a9OlI9S4=s320" width="215" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There are so many
universities in the world that we have only estimates of their number; an App
can’t track them because some don’t call themselves universities (MIT and many
others) and because some are bogus. But I’m fairly confident that spread across
those universities there are thousands of Departments which offer undergraduate
degrees in Literature, most commonly the Literature of the country in which
they are based or, at least, written in its national language.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I’m also fairly
confident that poems and novels are always taken as exemplary for Literature and that survey courses which introduce students to representative samples of
different periods and genres within the national literature are very common.
It’s for that reason that I can walk into my local bookshop and buy cheap,
well-edited editions of nineteenth century English language novels easily
identifiable by their black Penguin Classics spines. I benefit from the student
demand for these things.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Undergraduates are
expected to read the representative material assigned and quite often do. But
what else are they supposed to accomplish? For over a century now departments
of Literature have struggled to make their work - well, more disciplinary.
Various approaches have been proposed and almost certainly more approaches than
in the harder sciences where a textbook author can even dream of writing a book
which will be used world-wide - at school in the 1960s my textbook for
Economics was simply called “Samuelson” and probably got close to having world-wide
success outside the then Communist world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">To begin with, the new
Literature departments could trade off what was already an established way of
responding to poems and novels which could be found in pre-1914 European and
North American journals, reviews, and newspapers where Response often took the
form of assuming a moral high ground from which, in particular, immorality
could be seen for what it was. Literature was often immoral and readers needed
to be told that in their own interests. How else could they know which novels
to buy for themselves but keep from their servants (for whom a separate category
of improving literature was available -<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> The
Blind Washerwoman</i>, and such like). The new university departments could
easily accommodate to such disciplinary activity and still do though nowadays
there is much debate as to whether students are in the same category as
servants and to be protected from immorality. Remarkably, students can now be
found who will, in any case, demand protection, whereas In My Day ….<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Beyond moralising raps
on the knuckle the next most common form of Discipline was the demand that
students Pay Attention to the words on the page in such a way that they would
not attribute character traits or motives or moods or conclusions clearly
contradicted by words to be found at page 123 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">et seq</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">You could read Toril
Moi as urging the case for a more subtle and sophisticated version of that kind
of (elementary?) discipline, basing herself on the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein as mediated by Stanley Cavell in particular. Literature makes use
of ordinary language to do fairly extraordinary things and paying careful, engaged attention to it - and to one’s own responses - is the way in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But is the way in also
the goal and conclusion? When you’ve read something attentively is that
it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Toril Moi does not think so - she is
not trying to resurrect what was once called the New Criticism whose advocates
would tell you very firmly that if it wasn’t on the page you had no
business talking about it and that if you did talk you couldn’t expect an A or
even a B. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Rita Felski who uses the
“flat” ontology of Bruno Latour [see my review of Felski’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hooked</i> on this site, 24 February 2022 ],
Moi accepts that to fully appreciate (acknowledge) what the words on the page
are being used to do it may be entirely appropriate to draw attention to the
author’s biography, to the historical circumstances in which the book was
written, to the author’s assumptions about likely or desired readers, to the
author’s awareness of current censorship practices (an awareness which, in my
reading, for example, blights Oscar Wilde’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Picture of Dorian Gray</i>, this site 16 August 2021). She wants us to think of
poems and novels as forms of action or enactment connected to situated human
existence and not detached “texts” which could have dropped from the skies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But at the same time she wants to resist the
approaches of those who just want to put the “text” through a grinder -
Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Post-Colonial ….. basically in order to
demonstrate how the work Fails but, as just reward, enables the grinder-operator to get an A.
She is interested in keeping a mind which is at once open and informed so that
the “text” has a chance to lead us to new ways of looking at things which we
may otherwise take for granted. At page 211, for example, she separates Viktor Shklovsky
from other formalists and says that he got things right when he championed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">defamiliarization</i> as something rather
more than simple “technique”. I agree - and the idea itself can be found a
century earlier in Coleridge’s response to Wordsworth. The genuineness of
Shklovsky’s commitment is to be found in his memoir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Sentimental Journey</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">*</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Just now I used the
phrase “situated human existence”. Moi takes over from Wittgenstein the idea of
“forms of life” which is closely connected to the idea of agreement (often
unreflected) in our responses. I have a problem with this because I think that
Wittgenstein does not distinguish two different kinds of agreement and in so
doing opens himself to rival readings, which for short one might call
“naturalist” and “sociological”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">If you show
experimental subjects the two arrow-headed lines which comprise the Müller-Lyer
illusion they will all agree, independently of each other, that the arrows are
of unequal length. Even when told that they are not, the illusion persists.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The illusion reveals
something about how human vision works; that we agree in our responses is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">distributive</i> agreement which has nothing
to do with anything we have learnt, been taught, or discussed. Similarly, young
children (before the age of four or five) make drawings which develop in ways
and in a sequential order which is common across cultures and owes nothing to
the surrounding cultures of visual representation into which some children will
subsequently be inducted. The naïve child artists agree in the way they think
faces and figures are to be represented though no one has taught them this (or,
in Wittgenstein’s language, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trained</i>
them). Pile up such examples of distributive agreement (being frightened by a scary story…) and you can
then begin to think of agreement in responses as something<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> natural </i>and you can read some of the things Wittgenstein says as
supportive of that and you can make him into a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">naturalist </i>as did Colin McGinn in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wittgenstein on Meaning</i> (1984). Wittgenstein does not make it easy,
however, because he has very little to say about babies and infants and what he
does say seems bleakly conventional and uncomprehending.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But, of course, there
is another kind of agreement which can be called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">collective.</i> This does not require that we have voted or held
debates or even talked about it though sometimes we will have done so. We can
come to agree by various means but by those diverse means our form of life
comes to have a social or communal or conventional character as explored by philosophers
like David Lewis in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Convention </i>(1969)
and much subsequent literature including the work of Margaret Gilbert. We agree
collectively, not distributively, to drive on the left not the right, and so
on. Social constructionists think that everything (or nearly everything) has this character and they can find ways of reading
Wittgenstein which turns him into a sociologist of culture. They did a lot of
that in Oxford where Wittgenstein’s account of “following a rule” got construed
as “following <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> rule and don’t dare disobey”, as if the nature of language could be entirely understood via
the local dialect. This emphasis on the social is found most
clearly in the work of Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker in books such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Language, Sense and Nonsense</i> (1984). My
own view is that the Oxford Wittgensteinians fell into the trap which Dennis
Wrong once characterised as “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern
Sociology” (a 1977 article). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Toril Moi’s book covers
a lot of ground and is really the product of a life time of careful engagement.
It’s lucid and held together by the thread provided by Stanley Cavell’s work,
which is much more humane and resonant than anything the Oxonians came up with.
Whether Moi’s book will in practical terms solve or dissolve the problem of what kind of Discipline is best suited to deal with Literature is
another matter.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-46005807160154951002022-02-24T07:49:00.007-08:002022-02-26T23:23:52.363-08:00Review: Rita Felski Hooked<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGg12nMok0lpi0WiGRaRD_BgpScwa-MHsm5qxvlncbWqIGrxUO55bOR8Q-rg0SKL-LVTQxap8ccyaNC0c5ZcYsXH6MZSCPNJufA9DI_SuiuK3c23GW_ni7XNQKGpgD_NrJnJz3kABpsAH8swryU_Hv-WuF5P7vjb4cB6KQLy0IfwaE0gQ6dSoY2mz1=s2557" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2557" data-original-width="1680" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGg12nMok0lpi0WiGRaRD_BgpScwa-MHsm5qxvlncbWqIGrxUO55bOR8Q-rg0SKL-LVTQxap8ccyaNC0c5ZcYsXH6MZSCPNJufA9DI_SuiuK3c23GW_ni7XNQKGpgD_NrJnJz3kABpsAH8swryU_Hv-WuF5P7vjb4cB6KQLy0IfwaE0gQ6dSoY2mz1=s320" width="210" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I was introduced to
Rita Felski’s work in 2020 when I consulted what in England we call an Early Career Academic about an essay on </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">
that I was writing (now published as </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nabokov’s
Dream</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">); he suggested I read </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Limits
of Critique</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> (2015). In that book, Felski writes about the importance of the
pleasure we get from reading novels or looking at paintings, and so on. In this
new book she starts from a reflection on the often odd and idiosyncratic ways in
which we become attached, or attach ourselves, to a work - maybe re-reading it
frequently or humming the tune every day. (In another book I was reading recently,
an anecdote was told about the philosopher Gilbert Ryle who was once asked if
he read any fiction. </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh , yes. Jane
Austen. All of them, once a year).</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In Felski’s work there
is a background hum of unease with what has happened to the humanities during
her career and even before her career begun. Both institutional and broader cultural
pressures have turned teachers of the humanities into purveyors of artificially
narrowed pre-occupations often enough combined with a narrow-minded demand for
conformity, usually in favour of some politico-cultural orientation deemed
progressive but not always seen as such by outsiders. (So, for example, myself
I see <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the “critique” of cultural appropriation
as both a bit absurd - because opposing itself to what is probably the main dynamic
of all cultural change - and a bit backward-looking - which is to say,
reactionary). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Felski occupies a
prominent position in the academy and her own particular reservations (cultural appropriation
is not something she discusses in this book, I should add, though it often involves getting hooked on something) are expressed in a more nuanced way
than might be used by an outsider and perhaps some are not expressed at all.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Her response to claustrophobia
is to try to open up the field of what can and should be done under the rubrics
of “The Humanities” guided by a theoretical commitment to the Actor Network
Theory (ANT) pioneered by Bruno Latour - who I haven’t read. But it seems that
the slogan of ANT might well be, “Only connect!” Let me give an example of what
might be involved in an ANT-ish opening up. (This is my own example and will
show whether I have grasped the point or not).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Suppose we have
hitherto worked on the assumption that response to a painting begins at the point
when we stand before it (at an appropriate distance) on a gallery wall. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, how did we get to that Point? In the
immediate past, we ascended the steps of what is probably an architecturally impressive
building (that counts as an actor in ANT), passed through turnstiles and past security
guards and gallery attendants (there are people who want to steal paintings because
they are often worth a LOT of money and the guards remind us of that so they
are actors too). We have <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>side-stepped
other gallery-goers who may look older or younger than us, better dressed or worse,
unevenly distributed by sex and ethnicity in ways which we may note as placing
us in a majority or a minority. So many actors! Eventually, we get to the painting
only to discover that twenty seven people got there before us. (Tourist tip: If
you are thinking of visiting the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa…well, Forget It).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">All this contributes
towards the state of mind in which you at last (hopefully) look at your painting,
the identity of which you may now check against the gallery label (another
actor).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">All that has happened
since you climbed the steps has gone into creating the state of mind in which
you now stand before the painting. In addition, of course, there is all the
preparatory reading you may have done about the painter whose work you are now
looking at, or about the period or school within which they worked, and the title of the course requirement essay you have to write. What chance
some supposedly pure unmediated response to what is now in front of you?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">You might feel that
your chances of unmediated response are better when you walk down the street
listening to a new album through headphones until one song catches you and even
hooks you enough for you to spool back and listen again. And perhaps again. This scenario is also capable of being written up in the terms of Actor-Network Theory,though it might seem that a sudden epiphany, a break -out experience in which you suddenly and unexpectedly attach to something with delight is actually a breaking out from your usual networks. Epiphanies could be described as an unlearning experience. (See footnote) .</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Felski
is particularly interested in this kind of experience and it explains the title of her book.
She thinks we are often coy about admitting that something has hooked us, and
especially so in a college classroom where to admit to such enthusiasms might
seem out of place - a bit childish, perhaps; a bit down-market; a bit
politically incorrect - there are now many readers, female and male, coy
about owning up to enthusiasm for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i>,
novel or films.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There’s not much to
argue with in what Felski argues. But the danger - which she seeks to address -
is that in place of scholarly narrowness and puritan exclusion we end up with seminar discussions
of marshmallow softness, lectures which are
hopelessly idiosyncratic (…if I may digress for a moment, I recall Bob Marley and the Wailers ... You what? Yes, it was their first UK tour (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Awed silence</i>).Yes, it was in 1972…. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">long digression</i>)), and books which though interesting don’t close
in on any claims which might exclude other claims. And I’m not sure about
claims which do not exclude other claims but rather seek to bundle them all up
into a narrative which nods to every interested party. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I'm also doubtful that the dynamics of places like university seminars can actually accommodate every interested party: in my experience (and it may have been my fault) they tended to gravitate towards vicarage tea parties in which the tutor has fingers crossed that no one will say <i>Fuck </i>or take their clothes off (the latter once, the former more frequently). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I enjoyed
reading Felski’s book. She has an especial talent for incorporating references
to the literature - and there are many - into the flow of her writing, so that
you are never confronted with Tombstone Quotes which always lead me to the
thought that they might be skippable.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">*</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">(Helen Thaventhiran
writes an interesting review of Felski’s book in </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">London Review of Books</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">, 27
January 2022 and Rita Felski has a Letter in reply on 24 February).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">*</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p><i>Footnote:</i> This is how I characterise them in an essay "Lifelong Unlearning" included in Duncan Barford, editor, <i>The Ship of Thought</i> (2002) and in a revised version in my <i>Silence Is So Accurate</i> (2017)</o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-30193069177888882682022-02-22T02:29:00.010-08:002022-03-05T05:50:02.761-08:00 Benjamin J B Lipscomb The Women are Up to Something.<p> </p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtAdAcrOoSvpZEx4ibaOb31u0EPyXJgzc6sK4-eSWAubzca5nQ32IU6IOPyMRl4xxIuAKU8q6kXadef-7Trc1yf1NdxJJZ-KdusyU67el-PUu18eyV8nSrzXLbzJwHNGwQPiTN0lc-45fBAke509O83pqcgggLpJuIGExvIpzeWQiazh6ZfJQadb3Z=s2550" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2550" data-original-width="1983" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtAdAcrOoSvpZEx4ibaOb31u0EPyXJgzc6sK4-eSWAubzca5nQ32IU6IOPyMRl4xxIuAKU8q6kXadef-7Trc1yf1NdxJJZ-KdusyU67el-PUu18eyV8nSrzXLbzJwHNGwQPiTN0lc-45fBAke509O83pqcgggLpJuIGExvIpzeWQiazh6ZfJQadb3Z=s320" width="249" /></a></div><br /><br /> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">This book is better than its rather desperate American titling - it's published by Oxford University Press America rather than OUP Oxford and that is relevant. It’s fluently written and readable, making no great intellectual demands. But it will also help, I suspect, if as reader you are </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">rather over-awed by OXFORD, a place you would
never dream of calling Oggsford or Oxfraud.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">For his American
audience, Lipscomb provides an accurate, lucid guide to how the University is
organised - the collegiate structure, the tutorial system, methods of
examination in Arts subjects, character of the degree courses, and so on. But
he doesn’t see that many of these things have their downsides nor does he see
through the mysteries. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The college system, for
example, has always allowed for the creation of backwaters of one kind or
another where students may get a poor deal, academically, though the
accommodation and the food and the team sports may be good. The colleges have been clublands and their Fellows often enough people -
historically, all male and until recently bachelors - only too happy to settle down to a
life-time of boarding school existence with the usual private languages, arcane
rituals, insider dealing, and hysterical feuds - the latest 21<sup>st</sup>
century one at Christ Church, very obscure and lasting several years, has used up a great deal
of money from its supposedly charitable funds and diverted the energy of
Fellows from their proper work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Lipscomb makes sustained early reference to the use of unseen written examinations as the basis on which
scholarships, prizes, and degree classifications are awarded and is clearly
awed by the thought of how brilliant the scripts must sometimes have been. He is not
the only one: Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett seeking to explain (many years
after the 1941 event) how Elizabeth Anscombe got a First Class degree in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Literae Humaniores</i> (Classical Studies)
despite History papers which were indifferent or bad says to an interviewer,
“her philosophy papers must have been astonishing” (p 73). The truth is, we
can’t know whether they were or not because all those unseen hand-written
examination papers, scribbled under invigilated time pressure in the Examination
Schools, were burnt very soon after the event. And until recently, no external
examiner would have had a chance to look at them before bonfire night since OXFORD saw no need for
external examiners. From the nineteenth century on it provided them to
upstart <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">provincial </i>universities who, of course, needed to be policed. (By the way, Oxford is not in London; it’s in heartland Church & King provincial England, but don’t mention that …). Anyway, we can’t know how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">astonishing</i> some of this student scribbling was; none of it was ever
published to show what a Model Essay might look like. In Anscombe’s case, all
it took for her to get a First Class degree - against the norm that to do that you had to
show some merit in all your papers - was for the Philosophers to outvote the
Historians on the Examination Board and leave them to grumble later over the
port. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I discovered about the
burning in 1967. I had sat for a university-wide undergraduate prize in Economics awarded on the
basis of the usual timed examinations, answering previously unseen questions.
One paper required that just one question should be answered in the three hour
time allocation. I wrote an answer to the question, “Is Economic Growth a Good
Thing?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- precisely the kind of
“general” question in which Oxford specialises and about which Lipscomb writes
several times. I was pleased with what I had written - it must have run to
three or five thousand words. So when I got the letter telling me I had been
awarded the prize (worth about twenty percent on top of my total annual income)
I wrote asking if I could have my script back because I thought I could work on
it and improve it. Back came the reply: It’s already been burnt. So no one will
ever know how astonishing (or not) it was and don’t ask me because I don’t know
either. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">(Imagine an Art College where the drawings and paintings submitted for your Degree Show were assessed and then burnt).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">You might say that the mysteries of Oxford are those of a literate culture
which has never placed high value on the written word, and preferred oral debate, oral traditions, and gossip in the cloisters. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Lipscomb is good when
he situates the formation and rise of his selected Quartet of female
philosophers in the context of the Second World War. Though the four have been
selected as a friendship group all born in 1919 - thus completely excluding
their near contemporary, Mary Warnock, born in 1924 and also a noted Oxford moral
philosopher - the four were part of a war-time cohort of female students who
benefitted from the sudden disappearance of all the young men sent off to war.
Only the men who were old, infirm, or claimed to be especially devoted to doing
God’s work, remained. As a result, the proportion of female students increased
to the extent that they were no longer a marginal presence, living in
out-of-town poor colleges where the food and the wine cellar had never been up
to much. But the women's colleges were probably more meritocratic than the men's - where birth and private school attended counted for more - with Somerville possibly the most meritocratic and Lady Margaret Hall the least among the women's colleges. But I don't have data and I don't know if they exist, though schools attended are probably reconstructible for many cohorts from even the distant past.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The war time female students got better tuition than normal since there were underemployed college
tutors all over Oxford. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lipscomb
documents their access to well-above-average tutors, notably Donald MacKinnon.
He was a talented and charismatic figure and female students who had the hots
for him could and did disguise their infatuation as enthusiasm to join him in a religious
Quest. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much more exciting than having an
affair with a married man. (Lipscomb documents it in the case of Iris Murdoch
but is less cynical about it all than MacKinnon’s wife was, or I am).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s because they are all
dead that Lipscomb can write about such things and include the scurrilous
anecdotes, notably those which feature the eccentric Miss Anscombe, mother of
seven children by her husband, Peter Geach. Anscombe and Geach were Roman Catholic
converts of the More Papist than the Pope kind - some of it really quite inhuman. The message got through to
their children, at least according to the one anecdote I recall from my time in
Oxford (oh, it’s apocryphal and false, of course, of course): A new babysitter had
gone to the house one evening to look after the children; left alone with her,
they lined up to declare: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You can’t tell
us what to do. We are the Anscombe - Geach children.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Pulling rank was not the preserve of children and it did happen too among marginalised female philosophers. But the men were
clearly worse and Lipscomb shows the Great Men of the time behaving badly,
though not necessarily atrociously so and not always without provocation: J L
Austin, A J Ayer, R M Hare, Gilbert Ryle …. The way I look at it some of
these figures, both male and female, were indeed <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>important cultural figures whose work has been
influential and will continue to be read in different cultures. Austin and his
colleague H P Grice (who doesn’t figure in Lipscomb’s narrative) were the inspiration for a whole new world-wide scientific approach to language,
language pragmatics, and are read as such now. So their work eclipses their time, their personal weaknesses, and their eccentricities.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But some of them were simply
big fish in a pond smaller than they imagined. Oxford in the past was<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a small university, reflecting the fact that
only a very small fraction of each age group in Great Britain proceeded to
university education, maybe 3 to 5% - it was 5% as late as the early 1960s as
far as I can establish. In the sciences both Cambridge and Oxford were world
leaders from early in the twentieth century. But in the Humanities the
stand-out figures are few, the most obvious being Wittgenstein who though
eventually a Cambridge professor was an institutionally marginal figure.
Anscombe succeeded to the same university chair and kept up the tradition of personal eccentricity and obnoxiousness. But though a significant figure in
twentieth century British philosophy with three volumes of Collected Papers published in the 1980s, is she more than that? And as a Roman
Catholic thinker?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196433421204727743.post-20909630645999524692022-02-04T23:42:00.002-08:002023-02-11T00:27:25.405-08:00Review: Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh719rLpBU2VI2-U_7tD7N-qAqH_PwVGh7J-DPXMQlR4i6eQlqJsHVsK-6VpqM7hXbNpty-pWmUcj3SRGsEqzUHei8FwFAEYuOuxAEhO4paVnK4NxADyUziCDOlhiRcOWzmYhLeCKDnxr-iRBB30WSFSvbJaVCVVyW8wMwwdSg7SfKQIB73yQxYOLHp=s2307" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2307" data-original-width="1552" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh719rLpBU2VI2-U_7tD7N-qAqH_PwVGh7J-DPXMQlR4i6eQlqJsHVsK-6VpqM7hXbNpty-pWmUcj3SRGsEqzUHei8FwFAEYuOuxAEhO4paVnK4NxADyUziCDOlhiRcOWzmYhLeCKDnxr-iRBB30WSFSvbJaVCVVyW8wMwwdSg7SfKQIB73yQxYOLHp=s320" width="215" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I think of Jean Rhys as an
Expressionist writer whose short sentences are like bold brushstrokes in startling, unpredictable colours. It’s the kind of writing facilitated by
having a bottle of wine or whisky or both beside you, and provides fresh supporting
evidence for the old claim that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in vino
veritas.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In her writing, Rhys has to get
past both internal inhibition and external censorship. In real life, she does
things like taking money for sex which place her outside polite society <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and into the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">demi-monde</i> and she takes as husbands and lovers men who are
accidental or professional criminals - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>criminal enough to go to jail. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The alcohol helps her evade
inhibition but the external censorship is evaded by literary crafting of a
character sometimes described as obsessive. Whether the crafting was done drunk
or sober I don’t know; either way, Rhys is a great stylist.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Good
Morning, Midnight</span></i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> published in 1939 and set mostly in Paris of
the period contains significant material written in French, not just in
passages of spoken dialogue but in narratorial sentences written in a mix of
English and French. Sometimes the French is left untranslated even (and
especially) when the words are not ones which would have been learnt at school,
like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">maquereau</i> [pimp] at page 72.
It’s not glossed though the context at least half-way enables a guess as to its
meaning, “What she wants is three hundred francs to give to her maquereau. Will
I give her three hundred francs for her maquereau?” Sometimes it is glossed but
with a delay. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In one long passage which
extends over pages 42 - 53 and is then picked up again at page 149, much is
made of a contrast in register which could not in 1939 have been clarified with
accurate English translations; the censor would have intervened.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus, a tall English girl who
“speaks French very well” (page 38) looks at the narrator sitting in a café and
exclaims, “Et qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, maintenant?” (page 39). The
dictionaries, even supposedly modern ones, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are coy but this could be translated as, “What
the fuck is she doing here, now?”, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fout</i>
being in the same register<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as that in
the common expression, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Foutez-nous la paix!</i> [Fuck off and leave us alone!]. Things change over time, and in the
1930s, maybe less forceful translations would be in order: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What the hell is she doing …? Piss off.../Clear off …</i> Rhys does not
translate but instead writes, half a page later, “But what language!
Considering the general get-up what you should have said was, ‘Qu’est-ce
qu’elle fiche ici?’ Considering the general get-up, surely that’s what you
should have said. What language, what language! What would Debenham &
Freebody say, and what Harvey Nichols?” [These are the names of middle-class/upper middle-class London department stores<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> where most of the shoppers would have been female].</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But nothing has been translated
at this point; the reader may be able to work out that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ficher</i> is less coarse / vulgar/ offensive than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fouter</i> but even though “Qu’est-ce qu’ elle fiche ici?” could have
been glossed as, say, “What on earth is she doing here?” without troubling the
censor, it has not been done.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The narrator returns to the
language issue at page 41 when she speculates that the girl said<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> fout,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“partly because she didn’t like the look of me and partly because she
wanted to show how well she spoke French and partly because….” But though no
translation has yet been provided, the narrator then pulls herself up for her obsessional
behaviour, “…why get in a state about it? (page 41). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But the theme is continued at
page 42, where she adds an implied thought to the original and at last provides
a translation, but a censored one:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la
vieille? What the devil (translating it politely) is she doing here, that old woman?
…. I quite agree….I am asking myself all the time what the devil I am doing
here”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">That’s at top of page 42;
bottom of page 43 the theme is again reprised:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“Now it’s getting dark. Now the
gates are shutting. (Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vieille?)”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The play with language then
shifts at pages 44 -47 to simple repetitions in the key of Shakespeare. She
starts with a half-allusion (“tomorrow, tomorrow…”) and then runs through
“Back, back, back…”, “Hours and hours and hours”, “Courage, courage”, “Jesus, Jesus….Mother,
Mother”, “Chloroform, chloroform”, “Back, back, back …” and several<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>more.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> fouter / ficher</i> gets another outing at page 53, when a male
acquaintance describes a friend he wants her to meet and sums up in
untranslated French, “Mais au fond, vous savez, il s’en fiche de tout, il s’en
fiche de tout le monde”. And the narrator then takes one line to comment, “He
sounds fine” which in the context of all that has gone before ought to raise a
smile.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">At page 149 (the novel is 157
pages in my edition) we get one last throw of the dice:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“The damned room, grinning at
me. The clock ticking. Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vieille?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Microsoft has had a field day with
green and red squiggles all over this. I guess it struggles with many
novelists. They do things differently.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Trevor Patemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01734478357185117445noreply@blogger.com1