It's often forgotten that Housman's blue-remembered hills were glimpsed by a narrator standing in Herefordshire, using the Shropshire hills on the horizon to reflect on lost - possibly homosexual - love.
Here's the Guardian's video about this beautiful (though Tory-infested) county's literary history, 'the nearest earthly place to Paradise', according to Wodehouse. I'd recommend small doses of Mary Webb, large ones of Lorna Sage (lived on the Welsh side of the border but educated in Shropshire). What the county lacks is true darkness - there's lots of rural romance but not a lot of grit. It's good to know that nasty Wycherley was from Shropshire though. And of course Philip Larkin's misanthropy was fuelled by a few years as librarian in Wellington.
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Monday, 2 July 2012
Monday, 25 June 2012
Literary Advice From The Proletarian Vanguard
It may surprise you to learn that the Communist Party, even in its most Stalinist period, took literature far more seriously than any of the mainstream groups. Perhaps Matthew Arnold was right: the aristocracy are more interested in hunting than reading. The Party went through agonies trying to decide whether pre-Revolutionary literature was corrupted by the society which generated it, or whether anything was salvageable (Marx wouldn't have been a book-banner: his work is shot through with literary references). Serious attempts were made to specify the qualities and characteristics of Proletarian, Socialist and Communist Literature, something of which I've made a study myself.
Here in the UK, the 1930s Party leadership, aware that many authors were at least sympathetic, tried to ride both horses: they encouraged the members to read Party-approved work and through their publishing house Lawrence and Wishart, disseminated 'Proletkult' fiction and non-fiction by workers which seemed to follow the party line (my PhD is partly about how Lewis Jones's Cwmardy is actually subversive, while appearing to be an orthodox Communist novel), at the same time proclaiming the genius of the rather more unruly (and bourgeois) fellow-travellers like Isherwood, Auden and many, many others whose beliefs and activities only occasionally coincided with that of the rather unlettered Party. The Party was actually rather conservative, as this excellent book describes (especially the chapter by Mike Waite): it led national campaigns against American comic books and pop music, claiming that industrial art is always inferior to 'authentic' folk culture. Hence all that finger-in-the-ear stuff in the 1950s.
I recently bought this delightful pamphlet, Books Against Barbarism from Left on the Shelf, one of my favourite bookshops, after seeing it on Cath Feely's Academia.edu page.. Some of the chapters could well be appreciated by my students, while others are redolent of a more innocent age.
Here in the UK, the 1930s Party leadership, aware that many authors were at least sympathetic, tried to ride both horses: they encouraged the members to read Party-approved work and through their publishing house Lawrence and Wishart, disseminated 'Proletkult' fiction and non-fiction by workers which seemed to follow the party line (my PhD is partly about how Lewis Jones's Cwmardy is actually subversive, while appearing to be an orthodox Communist novel), at the same time proclaiming the genius of the rather more unruly (and bourgeois) fellow-travellers like Isherwood, Auden and many, many others whose beliefs and activities only occasionally coincided with that of the rather unlettered Party. The Party was actually rather conservative, as this excellent book describes (especially the chapter by Mike Waite): it led national campaigns against American comic books and pop music, claiming that industrial art is always inferior to 'authentic' folk culture. Hence all that finger-in-the-ear stuff in the 1950s.
I recently bought this delightful pamphlet, Books Against Barbarism from Left on the Shelf, one of my favourite bookshops, after seeing it on Cath Feely's Academia.edu page.. Some of the chapters could well be appreciated by my students, while others are redolent of a more innocent age.
'The first essential is to make up your mind to read what Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin have themselves written… but then, also, draw up a list of subsidiary reading on the same theme, by other authors, bourgeois as well as Marxist'. Garman was a very interesting character - Party intellectual and literary editor. He shepherded Jones into print, though it's never been entirely clear how much meddling he did. I've heard that Nottingham University has some letters between them in the Garman archives, so I need to get over there for a look.
I'm not sure Lenin's tastes or opinions should guide anyone's reading habits. Krupskaya then reveals that Lenin was actually a big fan of the Russian classics, especially Pushkin, and a range of deeply tedious Soviet Realist propagandists.
Having spent the day reading emails about the university library's turn from holding books to disposing of them (they've clearly been watching Fahrenheit 451) and watching local authorities close libraries all over the place, this paragraph seems rather sweetly naive.
Finally, a Tom Gauld cartoon for all my friends who write short stories, and for those of us inspired to have another go at Ulysses after the BBC's wonderful dramatisation:
(And if you're really bored, I've posted the first 130 photos of my 7" single collection here. Only many thousands to go…).
Thursday, 7 June 2012
Literary meandering
I've read a few novels recently, some of which you might like. The first was David Lodge's 1965 comic novel The British Museum Is Falling Down. Its central character is a struggling PhD candidate who's simultaneously dreading his wife becoming pregnant again. As good Catholics, they find their life is pretty much ruined by the stress of counting the days in the Natural Rhythm then the suspense of working out whether their guilty sex will lead to further poverty… It's a period piece (no pun intended) now, of course, but it's an insight into the travails of ordinary decent Catholics who tried to stick to the rules. Now of course, most believers quietly ignore the rules set by the Vatican.
If Catholic guilt isn't your thing, there's a lot more to entertain you. The novel's set in a single day, like Ulysses, and each chapter is a beautiful parody or pastiche of a range of writers, Joyce included. It also has plenty to say about literature and academic study. Such as:
In the afterword, Lodge talks about another of his themes of the novel, The Anxiety of Influence, to use the term deployed by Bloom to describe the sense all authors get that they're merely repeating millennia of perfectly good extant literature. He quotes Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds (one of the greatest novels ever written) on the subject:
The other novel I read is China Miéville's rather magnificent Railsea, his speculative fiction retelling of Moby Dick, in which the oceans have been replaced by railway lines and the Captain obsessively seeks not whales but a giant feral mole. It's a rollicking story, but like Melville's novel, it's about narrative and meaning, though more explicitly so: the Captain refers to the Moldywarpe as 'that burrowing signifier', and the narrator's interventions are playful, postmodern takes on the process of story-telling. Highly recommended.
If Catholic guilt isn't your thing, there's a lot more to entertain you. The novel's set in a single day, like Ulysses, and each chapter is a beautiful parody or pastiche of a range of writers, Joyce included. It also has plenty to say about literature and academic study. Such as:
“Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around”and two characters play a game I also indulge in: dreaming up new laws for when they're in total charge and can abuse the legal system simply to annoy their enemies. With REF (the stupid government research assessment) and the consequent rush to publication, this one very much appealed:
Academic Publications Act: the government will undertake to subsidise the publication of a monthly periodical, about the size of a telephone directory and printed in columns on Bible paper, which will publish all scholarly articles, notes, correspondence etc. submitted to it, irrespective of merit or interest. All existing journals will be abolished. This will eliminate the element of invidious competition in academic appointments and promotions, which will be offered to candidates in alphabetical order.That rather appeals to me, as a feckless slackademic whose initials are almost as close to the start of the alphabet as our hero Adam Appleby.
In the afterword, Lodge talks about another of his themes of the novel, The Anxiety of Influence, to use the term deployed by Bloom to describe the sense all authors get that they're merely repeating millennia of perfectly good extant literature. He quotes Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds (one of the greatest novels ever written) on the subject:
The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before - usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effective preclude mountebanks upstarts, thimbleriggers, and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.Though one might say TS Eliot, Joyce and many others have already put this into practice. My students certainly would.
The other novel I read is China Miéville's rather magnificent Railsea, his speculative fiction retelling of Moby Dick, in which the oceans have been replaced by railway lines and the Captain obsessively seeks not whales but a giant feral mole. It's a rollicking story, but like Melville's novel, it's about narrative and meaning, though more explicitly so: the Captain refers to the Moldywarpe as 'that burrowing signifier', and the narrator's interventions are playful, postmodern takes on the process of story-telling. Highly recommended.
Monday, 28 May 2012
Fame is a fickle master
I just read this interesting piece in the New Yorker which has some fun with an early-twentieth century Guardian poll about which authors will remain popular in the future, and with early-bestseller lists.
The basic result is that popularity and longevity don't necessarily go together: don't forget that Dickens was outsold by several authors of whom nobody out there has every heard, such as Mrs. Craik. Others, such as her fellow Stoke native Arnold Bennett, have lingered on in academia while fading in the public consciousness. Bennett's an interesting author: a pro to-Modernist who had the misfortune to be named in a review by Virginia Woolf as a symbol of the old guard.
Woolf won this one: here's an Ngram of references to both authors (Woolf in red, Bennett in blue) throughout the twentieth-century:
Predicting future popularity is a mug's game, though I suspect children's books have a longer shelf-life than the average mass market adult novel - because parents and grandparents buy children the books they themselves loved, and because children feel nostalgic for books read to them. I know there are novels I hope live on, and plenty I hope don't - such as Jonathan Franzen's pseudo-literature. I have high hopes for Iain Sinclair, who I think will be seen as this century's Proust or Joyce: pulling traditional forms apart to create something suited for a confused and confusing age. In drama, again it's hard to tell - we tend to forget that Shakespeare was surrounded by equally if not more popular colleagues. Eugene O'Neill, Mark Ravenhill and Caryl Churchill will surely carry on, as will Beckett (now long dead of course) and Pinter. Further than that, who can tell?
Commodity fiction tends not to survive: Louise Bagshawe (now Mensch's) rubbish will be wholly forgotten in twenty years, though the very best in the genre may linger on. Likewise crime and related fiction: because they reflect contemporary society so well, a select few will become the object of nostalgia, as Christie, Sayers and a few others do for the pre-war era, while the rest will be forgotten. I don't think misery memoirs will be much-read either, unless on university courses (which are what confer longevity on most texts).
What's interesting is the career of the big beasts: those (mostly men) lauded as the high points of contemporary literature. I think Pynchon will survive, and probably Roth and Updike. Angela Carter and Atwood too. Some Delillo and Auster, early McEwan. I'm hoping Amis will be quickly forgotten, and Thorpe will prosper. Hensher I can't tell. Poetry? Even harder to tell, as it's so far removed from the reading public. I bet Geoffrey Hill doesn't survive, but R S Thomas and a lot of the Irish poets will. Carol Ann Duffy might make it, but surely nobody's going to read Andrew Motion in ten years' time, let alone a hundred.
The problem is that what seems important to critics and reviewers right now is unlikely to be what seems significant to future generations. What we think of as the Victorian or Medieval period would be outlandish to people from those eras. The broad outlines of a culture can't be glimpsed from the inside (and probably not from the outside): the Victorians' vision of the Medieval is very different from our version, and the next age's version will be different yet. Criteria for judgement change too, which is why only fools and bloggers make predictions.
Sadly, I think a lot of the SF I read is unlikely to be reprinted, though of course the permanent availability of all texts electronically means that some texts which however good might have faded into obscurity will survive - especially small print-run texts from marginal publishers. If they're clever.
OK, comments are open: tell me who you think will and won't make it, and who deserves to (not the same thing at all).
The basic result is that popularity and longevity don't necessarily go together: don't forget that Dickens was outsold by several authors of whom nobody out there has every heard, such as Mrs. Craik. Others, such as her fellow Stoke native Arnold Bennett, have lingered on in academia while fading in the public consciousness. Bennett's an interesting author: a pro to-Modernist who had the misfortune to be named in a review by Virginia Woolf as a symbol of the old guard.
Mr. Bennett “has to admit that he has been concerning himself unduly with inessentials, that he has been worrying himself to achieve infantile realismbecause he cannot adapt to impressionism and modernism, which she later says appeared 'on or about December 1910' after Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition. You can read the whole wonderful essay, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown here.
Woolf won this one: here's an Ngram of references to both authors (Woolf in red, Bennett in blue) throughout the twentieth-century:
Predicting future popularity is a mug's game, though I suspect children's books have a longer shelf-life than the average mass market adult novel - because parents and grandparents buy children the books they themselves loved, and because children feel nostalgic for books read to them. I know there are novels I hope live on, and plenty I hope don't - such as Jonathan Franzen's pseudo-literature. I have high hopes for Iain Sinclair, who I think will be seen as this century's Proust or Joyce: pulling traditional forms apart to create something suited for a confused and confusing age. In drama, again it's hard to tell - we tend to forget that Shakespeare was surrounded by equally if not more popular colleagues. Eugene O'Neill, Mark Ravenhill and Caryl Churchill will surely carry on, as will Beckett (now long dead of course) and Pinter. Further than that, who can tell?
Commodity fiction tends not to survive: Louise Bagshawe (now Mensch's) rubbish will be wholly forgotten in twenty years, though the very best in the genre may linger on. Likewise crime and related fiction: because they reflect contemporary society so well, a select few will become the object of nostalgia, as Christie, Sayers and a few others do for the pre-war era, while the rest will be forgotten. I don't think misery memoirs will be much-read either, unless on university courses (which are what confer longevity on most texts).
What's interesting is the career of the big beasts: those (mostly men) lauded as the high points of contemporary literature. I think Pynchon will survive, and probably Roth and Updike. Angela Carter and Atwood too. Some Delillo and Auster, early McEwan. I'm hoping Amis will be quickly forgotten, and Thorpe will prosper. Hensher I can't tell. Poetry? Even harder to tell, as it's so far removed from the reading public. I bet Geoffrey Hill doesn't survive, but R S Thomas and a lot of the Irish poets will. Carol Ann Duffy might make it, but surely nobody's going to read Andrew Motion in ten years' time, let alone a hundred.
The problem is that what seems important to critics and reviewers right now is unlikely to be what seems significant to future generations. What we think of as the Victorian or Medieval period would be outlandish to people from those eras. The broad outlines of a culture can't be glimpsed from the inside (and probably not from the outside): the Victorians' vision of the Medieval is very different from our version, and the next age's version will be different yet. Criteria for judgement change too, which is why only fools and bloggers make predictions.
Sadly, I think a lot of the SF I read is unlikely to be reprinted, though of course the permanent availability of all texts electronically means that some texts which however good might have faded into obscurity will survive - especially small print-run texts from marginal publishers. If they're clever.
OK, comments are open: tell me who you think will and won't make it, and who deserves to (not the same thing at all).
Friday, 24 February 2012
Welcome to the Literary New Boring
A few weeks ago, a Guardian journalist wrote a scathing attack on the tidal wave of boring, pedestrian pop music out there. According to Peter Robinson, Adele, Mumford and Sons (I saw them: very good musicians, deeply tedious album) and Ed Sheeran are guilty of making beige music acceptable. Dull ballads, no stagecraft and earnest craft had, he said, replaced excitement, adventure and really wild things in music.
working for free gaining valuable work experience stacking supermarket shelves rather than getting high and changing the face of music while living on £67 per week.
However, you can discuss the Aural New Boring in plenty of other places. The concept has also been extended to TV: it's wall to wall agonising aristocrats at the moment, fictional or not: that's what you get for voting Tory. But I'm going to extend the concept to literature. As you may know, I teach English literature for a living, and I also read widely, not just English. I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the stuff being published is very much part of The New Boring.
So here we go - I'm going to annoy quite a lot of my literate readers with this one by nominating a few quite well-known authors for the Boring Tank. In my defence: many of them are amongst my favourites.
John McGahern. He gets on the list solely for That They May Face The Rising Sun. All his other novels - stunning. TTMFTRS: beautifully crafted, sensitive, morally and emotionally complex, culturally profound. And boring. Like an Everything But The Girl album. You can admire it, but you sure as hell don't want to read it twice. McGahern knows this: 'the ordinary is the most precious thing in life', he said. Maybe it is. But I've read - at a rough estimate - 400 novels which deal with the cultural wounds of rural Ireland/Wales/insert country of your choice coming to terms with modernity. That's why Flann O'Brien exists.
Colm Tóibín: used to write novels about the Irish abroad joyously having lots of gay sex, mostly to annoy the Irish Times. Now writes novels as though he were Henry James which means, as you might guess, being a literate, perhaps even sophisticated and - naturally - psychologically ambiguous member of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie, very long sentences during which you make make yourself a cup of tea, check Twitter, disinherit your children and get through that final volume of Remembrance of Things Past before you reach the last disappointing word of the sentence.
I note that I've started with a couple of Irish authors - and could add lots more. I have to say that there's a certain school of Irish writing which has taken the postcolonial ball and run with it: throw in equal amounts of tall stories, twilight gloom, emigration, post-Catholic guilt, ambiguous feelings about the decline of Dev's Ireland and the rise of shallow Celtic Tiger Ireland, pepper it with subtle references to the distant Troubles (a source of much head-shaking but little passion in the Republic), put it all through the head of a mute Irish Mammy or marginalised gay younger son and bingo: The Great Irish Novel. Bubbling under: Banville, Barry, Boylan, Donoghue, Hamilton. As I say, all authors for whom I have some enthusiasm and regard but please: a UFO. A murder. A Flashman. Let the rain stop occasionally, for feck's sake. Fewer cillíns, more killings.
OK, away from Ireland, who are the New Bores?
Obviously the Most Boring Author award goes in perpetuity to Ian McEwan for his constant superiority. OK Ian, you've done a lot of research and you liked the Iraq War. Bully for you. But could you stop being so damn pompous about it? Just for me? Remember the old days, when every single word of everything you wrote was perfect - like A Child In Time? Can we get back to that? And Chesil Beach: even Philip Larkin would think that a step too far in the commemoration of sexual inadequacy. We get it: people then were innocent and trapped in cultural mores. A shame. I take the point, but it's a brief moment - read some Chaucer or any of the late medieval plays: not much sexual repression there.
Iris Murdoch. Again, someone whose work I admire, but she is definitely the Queen of the New Boring - or it's grandmother. Every novel: posh Oxbridge types get terribly distressed as they face minor philosophical conundrums. Mute suffering (again). Grey clothes. Rain. No car chases at all.
Jonathan Safran Foer. Every sentence like a bag of spanners on a roller coaster. Uses 9/11 for a bloody father/son gush-fest. Very very precious. Very very long books. Very very boring.
Essentially, I'm bored with what they call 'literary fiction'. I don't think much of it is very literary actually: very few of these books make me pay attention to the words they use, the references they make, the structures of their novels. Instead, they focus on the constricted social world of the élite university and the comfortable middle classes and their minor problems. Or they reproduce the same hackneyed, contrived situations, thinly disguised by - in McEwan's case, a medical condition (Enduring Love) or a self-consciously 'wacky' setting (hang your head Amis, you most tedious of men).
As with so much in the world, Amazon is here to solve our generic problems. Let's have a look at their Best Literary Fiction Sellers.
Julie Cantrell, Into The Free: A Novel.
Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph. Bourgeois appropriation of excluded ethnic/class energies to comment on the moral failures of the bourgeoisie. With added God. The fact that she needed to append A Novel (and she's not the only one on the list) to the title implies that the text doesn't actually qualify on literary grounds.
Kathryn Stockett, The Help: white people end racism by saying 'please' to the African-American women who do all the work. Offensive, but still Boring.
Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants. Redemptive love between a man, a woman and their elephant (and no, it's not as interesting as what you're thinking about). Elephants never forget, they say, but neither do they seem compelled to rehash the same tedious bloody plots ad infinitum. No thumbs, no cynical publishers looking to flog the film rights to the bastards responsible for that hideous abortion Eat Pray Love (watch, beg, killing spree).
In at No. 4 of course, is Execrably Loud and Incredibly Contrived by the aforesaid Foer. A man who should be incarcerated with only looped recordings of his own teenage diaries for company - though I suspect that he'd enjoy that hugely.
Darcie Chan, The Mill River Recluse.
Stewie has some advice for you: try not to write like this:
I think I'll abandon the Amazon Literary Fiction chart. Clearly they mean by the term 'novels about adults who haven't told anyone that daddy touched them down there but will on page 200 if the author can't think of anything more, y'know, symbolic of our times'. As far as I can see, 'literary fiction' means 'fiction without spies, car chases, brand names or inheritances from distant cousins of whom you'd never heard'. Emotion. Secrets. Quiet suffering. Yada yada yada.
A few more New Boring authors for you: Jodi Picoult ('a family torn apart'), Jeffrey Eugenides ('thinly disguised other New Boring Authors used as sock-puppets to attack dimly-understood literary theories'), Lionel Shriver (can we please stop talking about Kevin, for the love of God?), Lorrie Moore ('nice structure… wanna admire it with me?'), late Julian Barnes ('literature about literature you say? Yes please!'), Sebastian Faulks (and anyone else who thinks using a genocidal war as a useful backdrop for a Mills and Boon romance counts as 'profound'). Any novel which even mentions 'the school run', 'our weekend get-away'. Anything hailed as a 'sensitive evocation' of anything.
Seriously, there's nothing wrong with Creative Writing courses, per se. Loads of them are brilliant. It's just that many of the New Boring writers did the same few courses. Dudes, if I can name the course and work out your reading list from the first paragraph of your novel, you're not a writer.
What I'm trying to say is this: most of the authors I've mentioned above are very, very good. They know their readers, they have a polished literary style and sensitive ears. I read many of their books for pleasure. But there are just too damn many of them. They bleed into one another until I can't tell one author's exploration of a repressed family's dark secrets from another's sensitive revelation of transgressive love in a third-rate Oxford college. Taken individually, I've had a lot of pleasure from them. But don't you occasionally want to swap the literary equivalent of warm Chardonnay for a line of coke or some mushrooms?
If you haven't noticed, the world's falling down around our ears and these dull writers, all producing the same style of turgid prose, can't find anything to say about it. They are the Starbucks of literature when we need shots of literary gin: the people who can express the new dispensation. People who can do what Dos Passos and Steinbeck did in the last Depression, or writers who can wrench the world onto another track, like the wondrous Chris Adrian, Alan Moore, Angela Carter, Paul Murray, Kate Roberts, Fflur Dafydd, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, Gwyneth Jones, Pynchon, David Peace, Jeff Noon, Magnus Mills, Ballard, Jackie Kay, or China Miéville.
I want weird books by people who've read lots and lots of books across all the genres there are, not Boring Books by Boring People who've listened to some Boring Publisher telling him/her to 'write about what you know'. If all you know is a nice school, Oxbridge and a job in publishing/journalism/cupcake making or PR, you'll write Boring Books and be hailed by Boring Reviewers in Boring Papers. Then you'll be taught to Creative Writing students as an example of How To Write Literary Fiction and you'll be responsible for a whole new generation of New Boring Writers!
OK - comments very welcome!
It may seem odd that Sheeran is so desperate to lay claim to his lyrics when they include clunky disasters like "Suffolk sadly seems to sort of suffocate me", "I'm up an' coming like I'm fucking in an elevator" and the epic "I've never owned a Blu-ray, true say" but one thing is certain: when borepop princess Birdycovered The A-Team for Fearne Cotton's Live Lounge that five minutes of music stirred up a vortex of boredom – a boretex, if you will – whose anniversary will be solemnly remembered by generations to come.Now I'll put my hands up and say that the vast majority of my music collection is what people might claim is boring: minimalism, folk music, lads and lasses with guitars writing their own songs, but Robinson is on to something. Usually, depressions lead to interesting music - George Formby, punk, electro, but not this one: the kids are all
However, you can discuss the Aural New Boring in plenty of other places. The concept has also been extended to TV: it's wall to wall agonising aristocrats at the moment, fictional or not: that's what you get for voting Tory. But I'm going to extend the concept to literature. As you may know, I teach English literature for a living, and I also read widely, not just English. I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the stuff being published is very much part of The New Boring.
So here we go - I'm going to annoy quite a lot of my literate readers with this one by nominating a few quite well-known authors for the Boring Tank. In my defence: many of them are amongst my favourites.
John McGahern. He gets on the list solely for That They May Face The Rising Sun. All his other novels - stunning. TTMFTRS: beautifully crafted, sensitive, morally and emotionally complex, culturally profound. And boring. Like an Everything But The Girl album. You can admire it, but you sure as hell don't want to read it twice. McGahern knows this: 'the ordinary is the most precious thing in life', he said. Maybe it is. But I've read - at a rough estimate - 400 novels which deal with the cultural wounds of rural Ireland/Wales/insert country of your choice coming to terms with modernity. That's why Flann O'Brien exists.
Colm Tóibín: used to write novels about the Irish abroad joyously having lots of gay sex, mostly to annoy the Irish Times. Now writes novels as though he were Henry James which means, as you might guess, being a literate, perhaps even sophisticated and - naturally - psychologically ambiguous member of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie, very long sentences during which you make make yourself a cup of tea, check Twitter, disinherit your children and get through that final volume of Remembrance of Things Past before you reach the last disappointing word of the sentence.
I note that I've started with a couple of Irish authors - and could add lots more. I have to say that there's a certain school of Irish writing which has taken the postcolonial ball and run with it: throw in equal amounts of tall stories, twilight gloom, emigration, post-Catholic guilt, ambiguous feelings about the decline of Dev's Ireland and the rise of shallow Celtic Tiger Ireland, pepper it with subtle references to the distant Troubles (a source of much head-shaking but little passion in the Republic), put it all through the head of a mute Irish Mammy or marginalised gay younger son and bingo: The Great Irish Novel. Bubbling under: Banville, Barry, Boylan, Donoghue, Hamilton. As I say, all authors for whom I have some enthusiasm and regard but please: a UFO. A murder. A Flashman. Let the rain stop occasionally, for feck's sake. Fewer cillíns, more killings.
OK, away from Ireland, who are the New Bores?
Obviously the Most Boring Author award goes in perpetuity to Ian McEwan for his constant superiority. OK Ian, you've done a lot of research and you liked the Iraq War. Bully for you. But could you stop being so damn pompous about it? Just for me? Remember the old days, when every single word of everything you wrote was perfect - like A Child In Time? Can we get back to that? And Chesil Beach: even Philip Larkin would think that a step too far in the commemoration of sexual inadequacy. We get it: people then were innocent and trapped in cultural mores. A shame. I take the point, but it's a brief moment - read some Chaucer or any of the late medieval plays: not much sexual repression there.
Iris Murdoch. Again, someone whose work I admire, but she is definitely the Queen of the New Boring - or it's grandmother. Every novel: posh Oxbridge types get terribly distressed as they face minor philosophical conundrums. Mute suffering (again). Grey clothes. Rain. No car chases at all.
Jonathan Safran Foer. Every sentence like a bag of spanners on a roller coaster. Uses 9/11 for a bloody father/son gush-fest. Very very precious. Very very long books. Very very boring.
Essentially, I'm bored with what they call 'literary fiction'. I don't think much of it is very literary actually: very few of these books make me pay attention to the words they use, the references they make, the structures of their novels. Instead, they focus on the constricted social world of the élite university and the comfortable middle classes and their minor problems. Or they reproduce the same hackneyed, contrived situations, thinly disguised by - in McEwan's case, a medical condition (Enduring Love) or a self-consciously 'wacky' setting (hang your head Amis, you most tedious of men).
As with so much in the world, Amazon is here to solve our generic problems. Let's have a look at their Best Literary Fiction Sellers.
Julie Cantrell, Into The Free: A Novel.
Just a girl. The only one strong enough to break the cycle.
In Depression-era Mississippi, Millie Reynolds longs to escape the madness that marks her world. With an abusive father and a "nothing mama," she struggles to find a place where she really belongs.
For answers, Millie turns to the Gypsies who caravan through town each spring. The travelers lead Millie to a key that unlocks generations of shocking family secrets. When tragedy strikes, the mysterious contents of the box give Millie the tools she needs to break her family's longstanding cycle of madness and abuse.
Through it all, Millie experiences the thrill of first love while fighting to trust the God she believes has abandoned her. With the power of forgiveness, can Millie finally make her way into the free?
Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph. Bourgeois appropriation of excluded ethnic/class energies to comment on the moral failures of the bourgeoisie. With added God. The fact that she needed to append A Novel (and she's not the only one on the list) to the title implies that the text doesn't actually qualify on literary grounds.
Kathryn Stockett, The Help: white people end racism by saying 'please' to the African-American women who do all the work. Offensive, but still Boring.
Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants. Redemptive love between a man, a woman and their elephant (and no, it's not as interesting as what you're thinking about). Elephants never forget, they say, but neither do they seem compelled to rehash the same tedious bloody plots ad infinitum. No thumbs, no cynical publishers looking to flog the film rights to the bastards responsible for that hideous abortion Eat Pray Love (watch, beg, killing spree).
In at No. 4 of course, is Execrably Loud and Incredibly Contrived by the aforesaid Foer. A man who should be incarcerated with only looped recordings of his own teenage diaries for company - though I suspect that he'd enjoy that hugely.
Darcie Chan, The Mill River Recluse.
Disfigured by the blow of an abusive husband, and suffering her entire life with severe social anxiety disorder, the widow Mary McAllister spends almost sixty years secluded in a white marble mansion overlooking the town of Mill River, Vermont. Her links to the outside world are few: the mail, the media, an elderly priest with a guilty habit of pilfering spoons, and a bedroom window with a view of the town below.Are there any phrases in that synopsis which you haven't read zillion times over? It's like some sadistic computational linguist has programmed an innocent Dell PC to condense the most over-used clichés in literary history into one Stratospherically Boring novel.
Most longtime residents of Mill River consider the marble house and its occupant peculiar, though insignificant, fixtures. An arsonist, a covetous nurse, and the endearing village idiot are among the few who have ever seen Mary. Newcomers to Mill River--a police officer and his daughter and a new fourth grade teacher--are also curious about the reclusive old woman. But only Father Michael O'Brien knows Mary and the secret she keeps--one that, once revealed, will change all of their lives forever.
The Mill River Recluse is a story of triumph over tragedy, one that reminds us of the value of friendship and the ability of love to come from the most unexpected of places.
Stewie has some advice for you: try not to write like this:
I think I'll abandon the Amazon Literary Fiction chart. Clearly they mean by the term 'novels about adults who haven't told anyone that daddy touched them down there but will on page 200 if the author can't think of anything more, y'know, symbolic of our times'. As far as I can see, 'literary fiction' means 'fiction without spies, car chases, brand names or inheritances from distant cousins of whom you'd never heard'. Emotion. Secrets. Quiet suffering. Yada yada yada.
A few more New Boring authors for you: Jodi Picoult ('a family torn apart'), Jeffrey Eugenides ('thinly disguised other New Boring Authors used as sock-puppets to attack dimly-understood literary theories'), Lionel Shriver (can we please stop talking about Kevin, for the love of God?), Lorrie Moore ('nice structure… wanna admire it with me?'), late Julian Barnes ('literature about literature you say? Yes please!'), Sebastian Faulks (and anyone else who thinks using a genocidal war as a useful backdrop for a Mills and Boon romance counts as 'profound'). Any novel which even mentions 'the school run', 'our weekend get-away'. Anything hailed as a 'sensitive evocation' of anything.
Seriously, there's nothing wrong with Creative Writing courses, per se. Loads of them are brilliant. It's just that many of the New Boring writers did the same few courses. Dudes, if I can name the course and work out your reading list from the first paragraph of your novel, you're not a writer.
What I'm trying to say is this: most of the authors I've mentioned above are very, very good. They know their readers, they have a polished literary style and sensitive ears. I read many of their books for pleasure. But there are just too damn many of them. They bleed into one another until I can't tell one author's exploration of a repressed family's dark secrets from another's sensitive revelation of transgressive love in a third-rate Oxford college. Taken individually, I've had a lot of pleasure from them. But don't you occasionally want to swap the literary equivalent of warm Chardonnay for a line of coke or some mushrooms?
If you haven't noticed, the world's falling down around our ears and these dull writers, all producing the same style of turgid prose, can't find anything to say about it. They are the Starbucks of literature when we need shots of literary gin: the people who can express the new dispensation. People who can do what Dos Passos and Steinbeck did in the last Depression, or writers who can wrench the world onto another track, like the wondrous Chris Adrian, Alan Moore, Angela Carter, Paul Murray, Kate Roberts, Fflur Dafydd, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, Gwyneth Jones, Pynchon, David Peace, Jeff Noon, Magnus Mills, Ballard, Jackie Kay, or China Miéville.
I want weird books by people who've read lots and lots of books across all the genres there are, not Boring Books by Boring People who've listened to some Boring Publisher telling him/her to 'write about what you know'. If all you know is a nice school, Oxbridge and a job in publishing/journalism/cupcake making or PR, you'll write Boring Books and be hailed by Boring Reviewers in Boring Papers. Then you'll be taught to Creative Writing students as an example of How To Write Literary Fiction and you'll be responsible for a whole new generation of New Boring Writers!
OK - comments very welcome!
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Take the sex test
VS Naipaul (not a writer I particularly rate) has made some headlines claiming to be able to spot a writer's sex immediately. He also claimed that there are no female writers at all up to his standard.
So try this Guardian quiz. I got 7 out of 10 right. How will you do?
What gives it away? I'm not sure. Many women writers don't dwell on female bodies in the drooling way a certain group of male ones do. I can tell the difference between Austen and Amis, for example, but a lot of it is period, class and subject matter. On similar grounds and generations, it's more difficult. There is linguistic research into gendered language use, but it's not my field at all.
So try this Guardian quiz. I got 7 out of 10 right. How will you do?
What gives it away? I'm not sure. Many women writers don't dwell on female bodies in the drooling way a certain group of male ones do. I can tell the difference between Austen and Amis, for example, but a lot of it is period, class and subject matter. On similar grounds and generations, it's more difficult. There is linguistic research into gendered language use, but it's not my field at all.
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Here come the Vargons
One of the things I do in my (cough) professional life is try to erase the gap between outmoded concepts of 'high' literature that's worth studying and 'low' literature that isn't. I'm not saying that there isn't bad literature - but I am saying that the grounds for deciding what's in and what's out are distinctly ideologically and socially loaded. For me, anything that's popular is of interest to the literary scholar per se, regardless of quality. See, mother? All that SF you tried to take off me has come in useful!
That's all background. Or defence - because I've just bought these cartoons by Tom Gauld of the Guardian, and they've just come back from the framer. They're going to occupy pride of place in my office. Click to enlarge.
That's all background. Or defence - because I've just bought these cartoons by Tom Gauld of the Guardian, and they've just come back from the framer. They're going to occupy pride of place in my office. Click to enlarge.
D H Lawrence fans and those with an interest in publishing should see this one (which I can't copy) and I also like this one about the perils of reading serious literature:
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
The Line of Beauty
I've just been to Raphael Selbourne's talk about his novel, Beauty, and run a seminar afterwards. Both were fascinating and stimulating. As an aside, embarrassing too: Raphael's mother has been reading yours truly and he 'outed' me in front of the whole class… So anyway, hello Raphael's mum. Always good to acquire new readers, as I'm sure your son agrees.
One of the great things to come out of the talk was how confident and intelligent this year's first-years are - they asked really interesting questions and aren't afraid to pass judgement. It helped that the novel is set in named places around this city. I was a bit disappointed that only one Asian student asked questions: the novel engages very directly and controversially in notions of Bengali femininity and cultural traditions - but perhaps the classroom reflects a Caucasian dominance that's hard to break.
Selbourne's use of dialect came up, and questions were asked in the same broad yam-yam. His position is that the kind of literary fiction he despises doesn't represent regional accents (Philip Pullman hated Beauty and claimed that everyone knows how regional accents sound so there's no need to recreate them on paper). It's a conundrum: get them wrong (as DH Lawrence sometimes did, and Howard Jacobson really does in the Hegemon-set Coming From Behind) and it's horribly patronising. Ignore them, and you're accused of tipp-exing out diversity.
Something that was refreshing about Selbourne's approach was his strong belief in the novel as intervention. I asked him if Beauty was a return to the 19th-century 'Condition of England' novel: he used the phrase 'state of the nation' but roughly agreed. Gaskell, Dickens, Disraeli and many others thought that one of the things fiction should do was do uncover the hidden injustices and oppressions at work in society, whereas modern fiction often doesn't (though the mythical Great American Novel tries to do it without the liberal-ish concern for social justice.
To Selbourne, contemporary fiction is narcissistic: bourgeois middle-class people writing about their minor inconveniences as though they were in some way profound. It's a nice line with some truth in it, but there's a deeper divide. The Condition of England novelists were right to represent cruelty and oppression, and they chose the novel as a way of getting round humanity's abiity to ignore facts (when you read about massacres and famines in the newspapers, do you do anything about it? Of course not). They knew, instead, that giving faces and names to otherwise anonymous masses would appeal to your emotions, hence the millions crying over little Pip or young Cratchett. But: these novelists could do so because everyone believed in the novel's ability to represent something called reality. They had beginnings, middles and ends because we felt, somehow, that life was like that. It had purpose, direction and an Author - God perhaps.
That belief died, for two (perhaps more) reasons. With mechanisation, working-class lives became meaningless: they were even called 'hands', disembodied machines. Mechanisation led to the senseless slaughter of untold millions: the US Civil War, the first World War: it seemed like the old rhetorics of a Plan no longer counted. We're clearly all too willing to do terrible, destructive, stupid things to each other, and unfortunately no Sky Headmaster is going to come out into the playground and break it up.
The other major influence was psychology. All the characters in a George Eliot novel (one of my favourites) have clear motivations and rationales, whether they're stupid, wrong, clever or right. People were predictable, it was felt, and a good author could make them 'real'. However, when psychology emerges, it turns out that we don't know ourselves, and can't be known by others. An author can't justifiably direct his or her characters without a degree of self-consciousness and acknowledgement that characters aren't people in a real world. Once you've got ego, superego and unconscious, how can you ever know what another person is 'really' like or is likely to do? We become an unstable, twitching, untrustworthy and changeable bundle of nerves: interesting, but not knowable in any profound sense. We can't know ourselves, or other people, and so to create 'rounded' characters is a charade, according to the modernists, which is why you get Joyce and Woolf and all the others trying to present human experience as provisional and subjective above all other things.
Selbourne dismisses this. To him, the novel must be about real lives in real places, and he feels that the literary world has failed to remember this, retreating into a narrow space of individualism and narcissism. I'm torn: I think there are reasons for it, though I do agree that an awful lot of the stuff that gets reviewed in serious newspapers is self-regarding.
Related to this is Selbourne's defence of his engagement with foreign, Asian and female voices. Although he said that authorial experience is important to authenticity (he couldn't write about his years in Italy, he said, because he had nothing to say about them, hence his move to Wolverhampton to do some good - something which is just as bourgeois in a 19th-century way as the narcissism of bourgeois fiction, in my view), he justified representing the voice of a young Asian female on the grounds that 'we're all human' and we all want roughly the same things. I'm not sure - perhaps this is me being a wishy-washy bourgeois cultural relativist, but I wouldn't have the confidence to assume this. I wish we did have universal values, but I just don't think it's true. I admire Selbourne for his approach, but I have doubts (as I do about his diagnosis of Britain's ills). What I really admire is his determination to challenge the assumptions of the market and the literary audience.
I should probably add at this point that he's a very interesting speaker and the novel is much much funnier than I make it sound. And that's not just because his mum's reading this! Buy the book. It's worth it.
One of the great things to come out of the talk was how confident and intelligent this year's first-years are - they asked really interesting questions and aren't afraid to pass judgement. It helped that the novel is set in named places around this city. I was a bit disappointed that only one Asian student asked questions: the novel engages very directly and controversially in notions of Bengali femininity and cultural traditions - but perhaps the classroom reflects a Caucasian dominance that's hard to break.
Selbourne's use of dialect came up, and questions were asked in the same broad yam-yam. His position is that the kind of literary fiction he despises doesn't represent regional accents (Philip Pullman hated Beauty and claimed that everyone knows how regional accents sound so there's no need to recreate them on paper). It's a conundrum: get them wrong (as DH Lawrence sometimes did, and Howard Jacobson really does in the Hegemon-set Coming From Behind) and it's horribly patronising. Ignore them, and you're accused of tipp-exing out diversity.
Something that was refreshing about Selbourne's approach was his strong belief in the novel as intervention. I asked him if Beauty was a return to the 19th-century 'Condition of England' novel: he used the phrase 'state of the nation' but roughly agreed. Gaskell, Dickens, Disraeli and many others thought that one of the things fiction should do was do uncover the hidden injustices and oppressions at work in society, whereas modern fiction often doesn't (though the mythical Great American Novel tries to do it without the liberal-ish concern for social justice.
To Selbourne, contemporary fiction is narcissistic: bourgeois middle-class people writing about their minor inconveniences as though they were in some way profound. It's a nice line with some truth in it, but there's a deeper divide. The Condition of England novelists were right to represent cruelty and oppression, and they chose the novel as a way of getting round humanity's abiity to ignore facts (when you read about massacres and famines in the newspapers, do you do anything about it? Of course not). They knew, instead, that giving faces and names to otherwise anonymous masses would appeal to your emotions, hence the millions crying over little Pip or young Cratchett. But: these novelists could do so because everyone believed in the novel's ability to represent something called reality. They had beginnings, middles and ends because we felt, somehow, that life was like that. It had purpose, direction and an Author - God perhaps.
That belief died, for two (perhaps more) reasons. With mechanisation, working-class lives became meaningless: they were even called 'hands', disembodied machines. Mechanisation led to the senseless slaughter of untold millions: the US Civil War, the first World War: it seemed like the old rhetorics of a Plan no longer counted. We're clearly all too willing to do terrible, destructive, stupid things to each other, and unfortunately no Sky Headmaster is going to come out into the playground and break it up.
The other major influence was psychology. All the characters in a George Eliot novel (one of my favourites) have clear motivations and rationales, whether they're stupid, wrong, clever or right. People were predictable, it was felt, and a good author could make them 'real'. However, when psychology emerges, it turns out that we don't know ourselves, and can't be known by others. An author can't justifiably direct his or her characters without a degree of self-consciousness and acknowledgement that characters aren't people in a real world. Once you've got ego, superego and unconscious, how can you ever know what another person is 'really' like or is likely to do? We become an unstable, twitching, untrustworthy and changeable bundle of nerves: interesting, but not knowable in any profound sense. We can't know ourselves, or other people, and so to create 'rounded' characters is a charade, according to the modernists, which is why you get Joyce and Woolf and all the others trying to present human experience as provisional and subjective above all other things.
Selbourne dismisses this. To him, the novel must be about real lives in real places, and he feels that the literary world has failed to remember this, retreating into a narrow space of individualism and narcissism. I'm torn: I think there are reasons for it, though I do agree that an awful lot of the stuff that gets reviewed in serious newspapers is self-regarding.
Related to this is Selbourne's defence of his engagement with foreign, Asian and female voices. Although he said that authorial experience is important to authenticity (he couldn't write about his years in Italy, he said, because he had nothing to say about them, hence his move to Wolverhampton to do some good - something which is just as bourgeois in a 19th-century way as the narcissism of bourgeois fiction, in my view), he justified representing the voice of a young Asian female on the grounds that 'we're all human' and we all want roughly the same things. I'm not sure - perhaps this is me being a wishy-washy bourgeois cultural relativist, but I wouldn't have the confidence to assume this. I wish we did have universal values, but I just don't think it's true. I admire Selbourne for his approach, but I have doubts (as I do about his diagnosis of Britain's ills). What I really admire is his determination to challenge the assumptions of the market and the literary audience.
I should probably add at this point that he's a very interesting speaker and the novel is much much funnier than I make it sound. And that's not just because his mum's reading this! Buy the book. It's worth it.
Monday, 7 February 2011
On niceness
I don't like the word nice. In its original sense (neat), it's OK, but now it means a kind of shallow politeness or surface attractiveness. It's pretty dismissive.
However, it came to mind when I received a student complaint today. It's about Joanna Davies's Freshers (originally published as Ffreshars). The essence of the complaint is that books shouldn't be published if they contain swearing and immoral activity, particularly if it's set in Wales. (Oddly, the author seems to agree: the English version has 20,000 words extra, which she describes as adding the 'sauce').
Now, Matthew Arnold, critic and moralist, described culture as the 'best that is thought and known', and saw access to art as the solution to the bestiality of the underclass (he also thought the aristocracy was a degenerate flock of wastrels). But that was in the 19th Century.
So what do you think? Should I only be teaching 'nice' fiction that informs and uplifts the degenerate masses? What would that curriculum look like? Anne of Green Gables is out: the Pye family are horrible and there's a world war in the later books. Guns turn up in Blyton's Adventure series. Biggles is an appallingly violent man. William would earn as ASBO these days, as would Dennis the Menace. The Box of Delights features a scrounging machine for turning children into dogmeat, and it depicts the clergy in a very unflattering light. Come to think of it, all the good children's literature is deeply subversive (as Alison Lurie demonstrates).
What's left? Your suggestions please.
Meanwhile, if you prefer your Welsh literature with heroin, violence, resentment and crime, I refer you to the works of Niall Griffiths, especially Sheepshagger. It's an astonishingly brilliant piece of writing.
Oh yes: another thing occurred to me. If she doesn't like unpleasantness in literature, how does she cope in a world where governments torture and unspeakably evil acts go on every day? In particular, let's remind ourselves of the traditional Welsh medieval punishment, picked up from the Normans: gouging out each others' eyes, by hand.
However, it came to mind when I received a student complaint today. It's about Joanna Davies's Freshers (originally published as Ffreshars). The essence of the complaint is that books shouldn't be published if they contain swearing and immoral activity, particularly if it's set in Wales. (Oddly, the author seems to agree: the English version has 20,000 words extra, which she describes as adding the 'sauce').
Now, Matthew Arnold, critic and moralist, described culture as the 'best that is thought and known', and saw access to art as the solution to the bestiality of the underclass (he also thought the aristocracy was a degenerate flock of wastrels). But that was in the 19th Century.
So what do you think? Should I only be teaching 'nice' fiction that informs and uplifts the degenerate masses? What would that curriculum look like? Anne of Green Gables is out: the Pye family are horrible and there's a world war in the later books. Guns turn up in Blyton's Adventure series. Biggles is an appallingly violent man. William would earn as ASBO these days, as would Dennis the Menace. The Box of Delights features a scrounging machine for turning children into dogmeat, and it depicts the clergy in a very unflattering light. Come to think of it, all the good children's literature is deeply subversive (as Alison Lurie demonstrates).
What's left? Your suggestions please.
Meanwhile, if you prefer your Welsh literature with heroin, violence, resentment and crime, I refer you to the works of Niall Griffiths, especially Sheepshagger. It's an astonishingly brilliant piece of writing.
Oh yes: another thing occurred to me. If she doesn't like unpleasantness in literature, how does she cope in a world where governments torture and unspeakably evil acts go on every day? In particular, let's remind ourselves of the traditional Welsh medieval punishment, picked up from the Normans: gouging out each others' eyes, by hand.
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Shamelessly pirated Friday conundrum
Over at her place, Mrs. Litlove lists the fictional characters who she thinks would be good friends, or in a couple of instances, could do with a good friend. It's a great list.
It's such a good idea, that I'm stealing it. Contribute your fictional (not necessarily literary) favourites.
Mine.
Arthur Dent. He's bumbling, bewildered but sound on all the issues. He sees the universe as a giant plot to keep him on edge, which I think is a fair way of seeing it. He also gets Fenchurch, and has a neat line in dressing gowns.
Mark Corrigan. I'm like him, but I'm better than him in some ways. You always need inferior friends, they're good for self-esteem. All my friends are tall, thin and accomplished. The bastards. Fiction's where I'll find my posse.
Badger. Bright, tough, decisive, enjoys a roaring fire, a good pipe and a glass of something warming. Doesn't like Tory weasels.
Uncle Matthew from Anne of Green Gables. Keeps his mouth shut unless absolutely necessary, cleverer than anyone thinks.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. They're like Neal and Dan: ready for adventure and unconventional.
Viola from Twelfth Night. And Emma from, er, Emma. And possibly Hermione - resourceful, daring, highly intelligent and independent women who adapt the world to their requirements rather than the other way round.
Jerry Cornelius (from Michael Moorcock's books): wild, unpredictable, heroic, romantic, weird. Might be hard work.
The Moomins. Obviously.
Steve Bell's penguins. Fat, lazy, selfish, rude, iconoclastic, rebellious and untrustworthy. They'd be great. Though they'd shit all over your house.
Spock. No, McCoy. He's sardonic and I bet he carries a hip flask.
Tiffany Aching. Wise beyond her years, and cool with it. If I wanted a wilder wizard, it's got to be Merlin.
Any of John Wyndham's lantern-jawed heroes. They'd get you through a post-apocalyptic horror with grit and politeness. Chandler's Marlowe would be similarly good to have by your side when wise-cracking and a .38 are the order of the day. Smiley for the trickier moral conundrum.
Iago Prytherch - he'd puncture any pretensions you had. As would Nora and Dora from Angela Carter's Wise Children. They'd feed you gin and gossip.
I'm sure many more will occur to me, but over to you. Who would you least like to have around? For me, it's any of the hippies from On The Road, and the Famous Five etc.
It's such a good idea, that I'm stealing it. Contribute your fictional (not necessarily literary) favourites.
Mine.
Arthur Dent. He's bumbling, bewildered but sound on all the issues. He sees the universe as a giant plot to keep him on edge, which I think is a fair way of seeing it. He also gets Fenchurch, and has a neat line in dressing gowns.
Mark Corrigan. I'm like him, but I'm better than him in some ways. You always need inferior friends, they're good for self-esteem. All my friends are tall, thin and accomplished. The bastards. Fiction's where I'll find my posse.
Badger. Bright, tough, decisive, enjoys a roaring fire, a good pipe and a glass of something warming. Doesn't like Tory weasels.
Uncle Matthew from Anne of Green Gables. Keeps his mouth shut unless absolutely necessary, cleverer than anyone thinks.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. They're like Neal and Dan: ready for adventure and unconventional.
Viola from Twelfth Night. And Emma from, er, Emma. And possibly Hermione - resourceful, daring, highly intelligent and independent women who adapt the world to their requirements rather than the other way round.
Jerry Cornelius (from Michael Moorcock's books): wild, unpredictable, heroic, romantic, weird. Might be hard work.
The Moomins. Obviously.
Steve Bell's penguins. Fat, lazy, selfish, rude, iconoclastic, rebellious and untrustworthy. They'd be great. Though they'd shit all over your house.
Spock. No, McCoy. He's sardonic and I bet he carries a hip flask.
Tiffany Aching. Wise beyond her years, and cool with it. If I wanted a wilder wizard, it's got to be Merlin.
Any of John Wyndham's lantern-jawed heroes. They'd get you through a post-apocalyptic horror with grit and politeness. Chandler's Marlowe would be similarly good to have by your side when wise-cracking and a .38 are the order of the day. Smiley for the trickier moral conundrum.
Iago Prytherch - he'd puncture any pretensions you had. As would Nora and Dora from Angela Carter's Wise Children. They'd feed you gin and gossip.
I'm sure many more will occur to me, but over to you. Who would you least like to have around? For me, it's any of the hippies from On The Road, and the Famous Five etc.
Friday, 17 September 2010
The house of books rises higher
I read Karen Jankulak's very lucid new Writers of Wales critical biography of Geoffrey of Monmouth today - he's the guy who really got Arthur out of Wales and onto the European stage, and an early historian of pre-Saxon Britain, though his historical approach is to do as much diligent research as possible, then make the rest up. His work, especially Historia Brittonum, is therefore highly readable.
More books turned up today - all for work. Volume 1 of Caryl Churchill's plays, including Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, based on Gerrard Winstanley's Christian Communist efforts at land reform during the English Civil War period.
Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow, about the development in America of the divide between cultural activities - very useful for talking about Shakespeare, literature and class.
Out of a sense of completeness rather than joy, Deborah Devonshire's Wait for Me - she's the last (and least interesting) Mitford sister.
Also, some old Terry Eagleton essays, Against the Grain, mostly for his Land of Hope and Glory rewrite, 'The Ballad of English Literature"
More books turned up today - all for work. Volume 1 of Caryl Churchill's plays, including Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, based on Gerrard Winstanley's Christian Communist efforts at land reform during the English Civil War period.
Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow, about the development in America of the divide between cultural activities - very useful for talking about Shakespeare, literature and class.
Out of a sense of completeness rather than joy, Deborah Devonshire's Wait for Me - she's the last (and least interesting) Mitford sister.
Also, some old Terry Eagleton essays, Against the Grain, mostly for his Land of Hope and Glory rewrite, 'The Ballad of English Literature"
Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob
Marlowe was an elitist
Ben Jonson was much the same
Bunyan was a defeatist
Dryden played the game
There’s a sniff of reaction
About Alexander Pope
Sam Johnson was a Tory
And Walter Scott a dope
Coleridge was a right winger
Keats was lower middle class
Wordsworth was a cringer
But William Blake was a gas
Dickens was a reformist
Tennyson was a blue
Disraeli was mostly pissed
And nothing that Trollope said was true
Willy Yeats was a fascist
So were Eliot and Pound
Lawrence was a sexist
Virginia Woolf was unsound
There are only three names
To be plucked from this dismal set
Milton Blake and Shelley
Will smash the ruling class yet
Milton Blake and Shelley
Will smash the ruling class yet
Thursday, 24 June 2010
O Frabjous Day! etc
It's been a day of celebrations. Last night, I attended a farewell dinner for a fine colleague and close friend who's leaving The Hegemon. Apparently a rather senior manager remarked in a meeting, in tones of total shock that 'she's going to another job!'. This isn't a comment on my friend's abilities, but on The Hegemon's predilection for sacking large numbers of people.
Today, I went for a cup of tea with one of my wonderful graduands - a mature student who grabbed every opportunity going and has proved the value of education. She's worked hard, had a year abroad in a French university, then returned to submit a mighty fine thesis on Elizabeth Gaskell and, armed with a First Class degree, is off for postgraduate work at the prestigious Shakespeare Institute - and she's not the only one of this year's graduates to follow this route. It's been a brilliant year - lots of excellent students doing very well.
Finally, the real celebration will be later this afternoon. After a mere 5 months of asking, begging, pleading, appealing and praying to higher management and enlisting the support of various bosses and colleagues, our office has been awarded a new printer cartridge of our very own. I've sought this prize with more dedication and hard work than CERN seeks the Higgs Boson.
I'd like to thank God, my family, my friends, my line manager, my colleagues, the bureaucrats and of course all my fans. It's been an emotional and spiritual journey which I'm proud to have shared with all you wonderful people. At last, we can all move forward. Thank you so, so much.
If anyone would like to witness the unveiling and installation of this magnificent bauble, the ceremony commences at 2.00 after I collect it from the administrators.
Why else should we celebrate? It's iPhone 4 day: my friend Christine queued for 3 hours and couldn't buy one, and Australia has a new, Welsh, Labor Party Prime Minister. I liked Kevin Rudd, but he arsed things up fairly spectacularly, and the Aussies don't mess around in politics. I bet Brown wishes he'd been able to defenestrate Blair this easily.
Meanwhile, here's a 1911 Labour poster which sums up the new regime's budget to perfection.
Today, I went for a cup of tea with one of my wonderful graduands - a mature student who grabbed every opportunity going and has proved the value of education. She's worked hard, had a year abroad in a French university, then returned to submit a mighty fine thesis on Elizabeth Gaskell and, armed with a First Class degree, is off for postgraduate work at the prestigious Shakespeare Institute - and she's not the only one of this year's graduates to follow this route. It's been a brilliant year - lots of excellent students doing very well.
Finally, the real celebration will be later this afternoon. After a mere 5 months of asking, begging, pleading, appealing and praying to higher management and enlisting the support of various bosses and colleagues, our office has been awarded a new printer cartridge of our very own. I've sought this prize with more dedication and hard work than CERN seeks the Higgs Boson.
I'd like to thank God, my family, my friends, my line manager, my colleagues, the bureaucrats and of course all my fans. It's been an emotional and spiritual journey which I'm proud to have shared with all you wonderful people. At last, we can all move forward. Thank you so, so much.
If anyone would like to witness the unveiling and installation of this magnificent bauble, the ceremony commences at 2.00 after I collect it from the administrators.
Why else should we celebrate? It's iPhone 4 day: my friend Christine queued for 3 hours and couldn't buy one, and Australia has a new, Welsh, Labor Party Prime Minister. I liked Kevin Rudd, but he arsed things up fairly spectacularly, and the Aussies don't mess around in politics. I bet Brown wishes he'd been able to defenestrate Blair this easily.
Meanwhile, here's a 1911 Labour poster which sums up the new regime's budget to perfection.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
More pages rustled
Only two books in the post today: 'The Complete Edition' of Alastair Campbell's Diaries: Volume One; Prelude to Power and a free inspection copy of Suman Gupta's Globalization and Literature (or, as the cover has it, suman gupta's globalization and literature).
The complicated title of Campbell's memoir is because he lost power a few years before New Labour did. Needing a large injection of cash, he wrote a censored version so that he could profit without sticking the knife into his party comrades too hard. Like a fool, I bought it. Now that Labour's out of government, Campbell can spin away to his heart's content and not worry about turning the public away from the party. Still, now I have both, there's a comparative critical discourse analysis project waiting to happen. I would like my money back after buying the first version though.
The other book is, under the new regime I live-blogged last night, destined to be contraband because it considers literature within a social, cultural and political context. Going by what I heard yesterday, we're meant to be telling students that they are 'singularities' who shouldn't see themselves as part of ethnic, racial, political, gendered or sexual categories at all. Never mind that many of my students are only just discovering that there are real reasons for their social positions, rather than luck: they're now to be treated as floating points in time - existing in a world of Twitter feeds and status updates, in NOW - rather than as part of humanity.
Basically, a privileged white academic from an imperialist nation is going to tell my students that they need to get over being black/white/Islamic/atheist/Christian/poor/gay/straight because 'identity' turns you into a victim scared to experience new things. Which is utter, utter bollocks, isn't it children? I recommend Dyer's White as corrective reading.
As a colleague points out, Orwell spotted this as elitist manipulation a long time ago: the proles in 1984 are refused a past, a history and therefore an identity. Gupta's book looks like a really good primer in the ways that literary texts have dealt with globalization in its many forms. It also suggests that there are potentially rich rewards to be had from cross-fertilising globalization studies and literary studies. I look forward to getting to grips with it.
The complicated title of Campbell's memoir is because he lost power a few years before New Labour did. Needing a large injection of cash, he wrote a censored version so that he could profit without sticking the knife into his party comrades too hard. Like a fool, I bought it. Now that Labour's out of government, Campbell can spin away to his heart's content and not worry about turning the public away from the party. Still, now I have both, there's a comparative critical discourse analysis project waiting to happen. I would like my money back after buying the first version though.
The other book is, under the new regime I live-blogged last night, destined to be contraband because it considers literature within a social, cultural and political context. Going by what I heard yesterday, we're meant to be telling students that they are 'singularities' who shouldn't see themselves as part of ethnic, racial, political, gendered or sexual categories at all. Never mind that many of my students are only just discovering that there are real reasons for their social positions, rather than luck: they're now to be treated as floating points in time - existing in a world of Twitter feeds and status updates, in NOW - rather than as part of humanity.
Basically, a privileged white academic from an imperialist nation is going to tell my students that they need to get over being black/white/Islamic/atheist/Christian/poor/gay/straight because 'identity' turns you into a victim scared to experience new things. Which is utter, utter bollocks, isn't it children? I recommend Dyer's White as corrective reading.
As a colleague points out, Orwell spotted this as elitist manipulation a long time ago: the proles in 1984 are refused a past, a history and therefore an identity. Gupta's book looks like a really good primer in the ways that literary texts have dealt with globalization in its many forms. It also suggests that there are potentially rich rewards to be had from cross-fertilising globalization studies and literary studies. I look forward to getting to grips with it.
Monday, 24 May 2010
Victory is mine
At last, I'm a winner.
10/10 on the Guardian's literary quiz (about poverty), without looking anything up!
A bright spot in an otherwise depressing day - although lunch with Darek, Steve and Christine is always fun. I tend to listen to their learned discourse in awed silence.
Talking of being a winner: Heathrow 3rd runway and Stansted 2nd runway cancelled! There wasn't much choice - all the parties except Labour were opposed, and no doubt they'll try to expand capacity elsewhere rather than allowing greener transport to replace flying, but for now, savour the clean(ish) air.
10/10 on the Guardian's literary quiz (about poverty), without looking anything up!
A bright spot in an otherwise depressing day - although lunch with Darek, Steve and Christine is always fun. I tend to listen to their learned discourse in awed silence.
Talking of being a winner: Heathrow 3rd runway and Stansted 2nd runway cancelled! There wasn't much choice - all the parties except Labour were opposed, and no doubt they'll try to expand capacity elsewhere rather than allowing greener transport to replace flying, but for now, savour the clean(ish) air.
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
The uncommercial traveller
I'm rather enjoying the superficial symbolism the party leaders employed in giving their election addresses.
Blairishly (must get that into circulation), David Cameron gathered his admirers on the banks of the Thames, reminding me of King Canute (though that gentleman was rather intelligent), the idiotic charm of Three Men in a Boat, and prompting me to adapt the bitter and misogynistic words of the Roman poet, Catullus (poem 70):
sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti
in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua
'what a Conservative says… should be written in wind and running water'.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown went to a supermarket in Rochester. Oh dear, oh dear, what terrible semiotics. Firstly, when you're asking the country to make an informed choice, don't pose in a supermarket. The illusion of choice, the massive range of calculations to be made combined with the manipulative tactics of the marketers lead us to paralysis or desperation, grabbing the shiniest tin or flashiest label.
Secondly, Rochester? I'd have thought that the name would be anathema to poor old Gordon. Mr. Rochester is a violent bully in Jane Eyre - Brown already compared himself to Rochester in a rather unfortunate interview two years ago and was soundly mocked in the press. Furthermore, a Dickensian character should avoid anywhere with gloomy Dickens associations (Great Expectations, Mrs. Havisham's house, Dullborough in The Uncommercial Traveller), and it's a stop on the route taken by the doomed old men in Graham Swift's booze-regret-and-death novel Last Orders. All sounds rather final, doesn't it?
The Liberal Democrat leader probably did something too. Meh, as t'internet kids say.
Blairishly (must get that into circulation), David Cameron gathered his admirers on the banks of the Thames, reminding me of King Canute (though that gentleman was rather intelligent), the idiotic charm of Three Men in a Boat, and prompting me to adapt the bitter and misogynistic words of the Roman poet, Catullus (poem 70):
sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti
in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua
'what a Conservative says… should be written in wind and running water'.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown went to a supermarket in Rochester. Oh dear, oh dear, what terrible semiotics. Firstly, when you're asking the country to make an informed choice, don't pose in a supermarket. The illusion of choice, the massive range of calculations to be made combined with the manipulative tactics of the marketers lead us to paralysis or desperation, grabbing the shiniest tin or flashiest label.
Secondly, Rochester? I'd have thought that the name would be anathema to poor old Gordon. Mr. Rochester is a violent bully in Jane Eyre - Brown already compared himself to Rochester in a rather unfortunate interview two years ago and was soundly mocked in the press. Furthermore, a Dickensian character should avoid anywhere with gloomy Dickens associations (Great Expectations, Mrs. Havisham's house, Dullborough in The Uncommercial Traveller), and it's a stop on the route taken by the doomed old men in Graham Swift's booze-regret-and-death novel Last Orders. All sounds rather final, doesn't it?
The Liberal Democrat leader probably did something too. Meh, as t'internet kids say.
The Republic of Letters
This is how academic life should be: stunning modern architecture (I'll post some pictures later), serious and interesting discussions which reveal how fascinating things can be even if you've never given them a moment's thought previously, and no managers.
I've learned about Francophone-First Nations literature, about Robertson Davies's politics (weirdly, I started a campus novel by him this very morning) and about the cultural complexities of the Toronto Book Awards. Next up (after a very agreeable lunch spent talking to Robyn Morris, who specialises in Asian-Canadian literature) is her paper and two on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake including one by Fiona Tolan, author of Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, which is excellent value at £48. Atwood's liberalism, the acculturated self and John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is at the core of this paper. The other, by Heidi Butler, examines the commodification of women under capitalism in Atwood's speculative fiction. An s-f dimension opens…
Update: three fascinating papers on speculative fictions (Atwood's and poet Larissa Lai's rebel take on Rachel in Blade Runner) and constructions of women. Hardly any questions: I asked a couple of dumb ones simply because I was surprised by the lack of response. Perhaps it's because the papers were so comprehensive. Whatever, I've learned more about one of my favourite authors and intend to read Lai's work.
No mention of Due South yet though. I'll remedy that next year…
Talking of books I've read, don't bother with Michael Dobbs' House of Cards. It's a political thriller which was adapted very successfully for television, set in the upper echelons of the post-Thatcher Tory Party. I couldn't buy it new because that would mean giving money to a Tory, but I now resent the 25p I spent on the used copy. It is rubbish. Every sentence contains things like 'he said, menacingly'. Character seems to consist of assuming that all men want power and all career women are driven by emotional inadequacy. Reader, it is rubbish. Even if you're looking for an easy read (which I was), this isn't it, because every sentence is unreadable and politically objectionable. I don't know why Tory politicians think they can write novels (Currie, Hurd et al.), but every time they do, it demonstrates how little they understand of human nature. Which is no surprise to me. Tory Scum.
I've learned about Francophone-First Nations literature, about Robertson Davies's politics (weirdly, I started a campus novel by him this very morning) and about the cultural complexities of the Toronto Book Awards. Next up (after a very agreeable lunch spent talking to Robyn Morris, who specialises in Asian-Canadian literature) is her paper and two on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake including one by Fiona Tolan, author of Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, which is excellent value at £48. Atwood's liberalism, the acculturated self and John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is at the core of this paper. The other, by Heidi Butler, examines the commodification of women under capitalism in Atwood's speculative fiction. An s-f dimension opens…
Update: three fascinating papers on speculative fictions (Atwood's and poet Larissa Lai's rebel take on Rachel in Blade Runner) and constructions of women. Hardly any questions: I asked a couple of dumb ones simply because I was surprised by the lack of response. Perhaps it's because the papers were so comprehensive. Whatever, I've learned more about one of my favourite authors and intend to read Lai's work.
No mention of Due South yet though. I'll remedy that next year…
Talking of books I've read, don't bother with Michael Dobbs' House of Cards. It's a political thriller which was adapted very successfully for television, set in the upper echelons of the post-Thatcher Tory Party. I couldn't buy it new because that would mean giving money to a Tory, but I now resent the 25p I spent on the used copy. It is rubbish. Every sentence contains things like 'he said, menacingly'. Character seems to consist of assuming that all men want power and all career women are driven by emotional inadequacy. Reader, it is rubbish. Even if you're looking for an easy read (which I was), this isn't it, because every sentence is unreadable and politically objectionable. I don't know why Tory politicians think they can write novels (Currie, Hurd et al.), but every time they do, it demonstrates how little they understand of human nature. Which is no surprise to me. Tory Scum.
And we're off…
No sooner am I cloistered in academic conclave (the British Association of Canadian Studies conference) than a general election's announced. My attention will be unhappily divided between the polite rivalries of academic life and the rather less civilised discourse of a political world bereft of ideological values but replete with ambition, greed and hatred.
Now the election's upon us, my feelings are clear: I'd like a hung parliament with Labour depending on the votes of actual socialists to remain in government: a coalition with the Greens (if Caroline Lucas is elected), Plaid Cymru and the SNP. Labour on its own is tired and hopelessly compromised. The Conservative Party remains despicable, run by jolly toffs who, not far underneath, are less than jolly. They'll screw the poor, the black, the foreign, the young and the old. They aren't honest, or a breath of fresh air. Cameron is a US-style 'minimal government' freak with the conference that comes with Eton and £30 millions in the bank. He and his colleagues have never queued for benefits, looked for out-of-date food, faced a job interview with worry, used the NHS, attended a state school, been afraid of the bank manager or landlord, depended on a library or faced any problem which can't be solved with a credit card. This is why they should be stopped. Their world is not ours; their interests are not ours; their purposes are not ours.
I'll be online occasionally to update you on the latest in literary thinking on Canadianness and related matters (there are lots of other disciplines here, and I'll find it difficult to resist the politics panels. Right now, I'm listening to a fascinating paper on Canadian/Balkan literature and Orpheus by Milena Marinkova from Leeds: interesting texts and a much firmer grasp of theory than I could manage…
Now the election's upon us, my feelings are clear: I'd like a hung parliament with Labour depending on the votes of actual socialists to remain in government: a coalition with the Greens (if Caroline Lucas is elected), Plaid Cymru and the SNP. Labour on its own is tired and hopelessly compromised. The Conservative Party remains despicable, run by jolly toffs who, not far underneath, are less than jolly. They'll screw the poor, the black, the foreign, the young and the old. They aren't honest, or a breath of fresh air. Cameron is a US-style 'minimal government' freak with the conference that comes with Eton and £30 millions in the bank. He and his colleagues have never queued for benefits, looked for out-of-date food, faced a job interview with worry, used the NHS, attended a state school, been afraid of the bank manager or landlord, depended on a library or faced any problem which can't be solved with a credit card. This is why they should be stopped. Their world is not ours; their interests are not ours; their purposes are not ours.
I'll be online occasionally to update you on the latest in literary thinking on Canadianness and related matters (there are lots of other disciplines here, and I'll find it difficult to resist the politics panels. Right now, I'm listening to a fascinating paper on Canadian/Balkan literature and Orpheus by Milena Marinkova from Leeds: interesting texts and a much firmer grasp of theory than I could manage…
Monday, 15 March 2010
Star of stage and lecture hall
My friend (and former Hegemon inmate) brilliantly introduces Bram Stoker's Dracula as a 'taster' for World Book Day.
Admire the erudition, but don't apply to her institution. We need your fees here at The Hegemon. I'll just nick her ideas so you don't miss out.
Admire the erudition, but don't apply to her institution. We need your fees here at The Hegemon. I'll just nick her ideas so you don't miss out.
Monday, 30 November 2009
"A loose sally of the mind"
I meant to post this essay on essays by Zadie Smith a couple of weeks ago, to give a sense of perspective to my students slaving over essays - particularly the first-years who may not quite see the point.
Essays are creative works: they draw your attention to, then trace the development of, interesting features of texts, ones which people may not have noticed. Meaning, we say, is created in the space between a text and its reader: the essay is your chance to transform understanding of that text.
Smith's essay is really a defence of fiction and an assessment of literary essays, but it's worth reading if you're struggling with Introduction to Poetry, Communications Studies or Shakespeare's Culture essays anyway.
A few choice quotations (the Johnson one fits blogging very well too):
Essays are creative works: they draw your attention to, then trace the development of, interesting features of texts, ones which people may not have noticed. Meaning, we say, is created in the space between a text and its reader: the essay is your chance to transform understanding of that text.
Smith's essay is really a defence of fiction and an assessment of literary essays, but it's worth reading if you're struggling with Introduction to Poetry, Communications Studies or Shakespeare's Culture essays anyway.
A few choice quotations (the Johnson one fits blogging very well too):
For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: "A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition." And if this looks to us like one of Johnson's lexical eccentricities, we're chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement ("The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays") and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft.
In "The Modern Essay" Virginia Woolf is more astute on the subject, and far more frank. "There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay," she writes. "The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter." Well, yes, that's just it. An essay, she writes, "can be polished till every atom of its surface shines" – yes, that's it, again. There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.
In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay".
I call on Woolf again as witness for the defence. "Literal truth-telling," she writes, "is out of place in an essay." Yes, that's it again. The literal truth is something you expect, or hope for, in a news article. But an essay is an act of imagination, even if it is a piece of memoir. It is, or should be, "a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking", but it still takes quite as much art as fiction.
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Welcome to the Blogosphere: you'll never leave
My former PhD supervisor is an expert on e-learning, and will be blogging regularly on the Higher Education Academy's site about the joys of e-learning in an English literature context: catch it here.
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