Good morning everybody. I trust the snow is 'deep and crisp and even' where you are. I'm off to the annual conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English, held at this time at Gregynog, the beautiful stately home in Mid-Wales owned by the University of Wales. Coincidentally, exactly where the heaviest snow is forecast.
Being a spring conference, the weather has always been, well, variable: I've been there in heavy snow and in hot sunshine before. Last time, it was all daffodils, bluebells and cute little baa-lambs. I shall take my camera today for a compare-and-contrast set.
Anyway, it's great to get away for a few days. No mobile phone reception. No marking (the pile glares at me from the top of the filing cabinet). Just people I like talking seriously and interestingly about the things I like. I'll go for a walk around the estate, drink fine ale in the cellar bar and catch up on all the academic gossip. Or alternatively, hide in the corner trying not to catch anybody's eye. There's also the launch of the new Uncollected Poems of RS Thomas edited by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, and a new edition of Tony Brown's short biography of the poet. Tony supervised my MA so I'm biased, but here's my review: 2 thumbs up – a classic!
Meanwhile, did you see Question Time last night? This one called for an extra-large bag of the horse tranquillisers I now require to get through an edition of the show. It really was a barrel-scraping shocker, quite the worst episode in an already depressing series. The panel nowadays consists solely of predictable trolls picked (successfully) to cause outrage rather than to shine a light on pressing issues, while the audiences are getting more and more racist and reactionary. I strongly suspect local political parties have found some way to game the ticketing procedure. Last night featured Michael Gove, one of the most astoundingly arrogant and patronising politicians of recent years, Mark Littlewood (a think-tank lobbyist who combines the economics of Pinochet with the human warmth of a hungry Komodo dragon), Anthony Horowitz the writer who turned out to be an ideal potential press officer for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, Emily Thornberry of the Labour Party who struggled valiantly to get a word in edgeways, and Natalie Bennett of the Green Party who barely got to speak.
The lowlight of the show was Gove responding to a question about whether he ever listens to advice by interrupting Thornberry extremely rudely with the words 'yada yada' (from 47.45). He also repeatedly lied, particularly on job creation. He claimed (as the government always does) that 1 million new private sector jobs have been created. To my certain knowledge, over 180,000 of those are not 'new': they're FE academics who've been reclassified as private sector, despite still working for and being paid by state-run institutions. He also claimed that the recession was caused by state spending and not banks being over-leveraged in pursuit of unsustainable and frankly stupid financial instruments, leading to us having to bail them out, and a number of other direct lies. He said we were 'living beyond our means'. This is the same Michael Gove who 'flipped' his tax-payer funded home and charged us £7000 for a television.
And while I'm on the subject, this former Murdoch employee married to a current Murdoch employee managed to give a sterling and principled defence of press freedom without once referring to his former colleagues' use of press freedom: to hack the phone of a murdered teenage girl; to hack the phones of celebrities, their secretaries, their families and their friends in pursuit not of wrongdoing in the corridors of power, but to find out whether they were pregnant, or dating, or putting on weight, or losing weight; to set private detectives on hacking victims' lawyers and on Crimewatch presenters; to build up dossiers on political opponents and on and on ad infinitum. Did the Murdoch press uncover the parliamentary expenses scandal? No. Catch Jonathan Aitken or Jeffrey Archer? No. Expose Jimmy Savile? No. They bugged and burgled (to steal a phrase) across the world to monster the innocent and harvest ridiculous, pointless gossip. As far as I'm concerned, Michael Gove is merely on secondment from Murdoch. Or perhaps Alpha Centauri. We're just the mugs paying for him.
As an anecdote, here's a clip from The Brains Trust, a BBC Radio and then TV show from the 1940s onwards:
And to unite the two rants of the day's blogging, here's Anthony Hopkins playing Gwyn Thomas appearing on The Brains Trust in the dramatisation of his autobiography A Few Selected Exits: I wrote my PhD on Thomas.
Showing posts with label gwyn thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gwyn thomas. Show all posts
Friday, 22 March 2013
Friday, 19 August 2011
London: 'the place is a kind of miasma to me'
Here's a Parkinson interview with Gywn Thomas, a personal hero of mine, and one of the subjects of my PhD. It's weird finding that such an utterly forgotten author (though a play based on The Dark Philosophers is on at Edinburgh) was famous in the world of light entertainment, mainly through his appearances on discussion show The Brains Trust.
My work on him focussed on his 1930s/40s work - bitter, darkly humorous novels. But GT's appeal is obvious: hugely intelligent, open, astonishingly fluid linguistically. This is perhaps part of the postcolonial conditions: surrounded by Welsh but unable to speak it himself (he often expressed his distrust of the Welsh-language movement), he latched onto the subversive and poetic possibilities of English in a way very few English authors do ('words are indeed weapons', he says in this interview, and they explore the idea in the second part). See also those other Welshmen Dylan Thomas and Iain Sinclair.
This verbal facility is what attracted audiences, though it's also a function of English distrust of the Welsh as facile, and divided between surface charm and a darker interior. Actually, I don't know if this kind of feeling still exists, but it's all over 20th-century literature. Not that anti-Welsh hatred has disappeared: the Daily Mail called the language an "appalling and moribund monkey language" and goes on to suggest that
which sounds like the worst kind of racism to me, and the article is a revolting mishmash of half-truths and specious generalisations.
I have to admit that as GT became more of a media personality, the weird energy of his books decreased: from savage outsider's satire, they became rather too cosy performances of the comic Welshman. Read All Things Betray Thee, Sorrow For Thy Sons and The Dark Philosophers.
My work on him focussed on his 1930s/40s work - bitter, darkly humorous novels. But GT's appeal is obvious: hugely intelligent, open, astonishingly fluid linguistically. This is perhaps part of the postcolonial conditions: surrounded by Welsh but unable to speak it himself (he often expressed his distrust of the Welsh-language movement), he latched onto the subversive and poetic possibilities of English in a way very few English authors do ('words are indeed weapons', he says in this interview, and they explore the idea in the second part). See also those other Welshmen Dylan Thomas and Iain Sinclair.
This verbal facility is what attracted audiences, though it's also a function of English distrust of the Welsh as facile, and divided between surface charm and a darker interior. Actually, I don't know if this kind of feeling still exists, but it's all over 20th-century literature. Not that anti-Welsh hatred has disappeared: the Daily Mail called the language an "appalling and moribund monkey language" and goes on to suggest that
Not many people in full possession of their faculties would find it appealing or necessary to try to turn themselves into a ‘real Welshman’.
which sounds like the worst kind of racism to me, and the article is a revolting mishmash of half-truths and specious generalisations.
I have to admit that as GT became more of a media personality, the weird energy of his books decreased: from savage outsider's satire, they became rather too cosy performances of the comic Welshman. Read All Things Betray Thee, Sorrow For Thy Sons and The Dark Philosophers.
Monday, 11 April 2011
Buried in concrete once more
On Saturday night, after a long session of real ales and singing Welsh songs in the bar and calling someone 'an idiot savant disguised as Rolf Harris' (totally accurately), I was lulled to sleep by owls hooting and foxes slinking off to work. Last night I fell asleep to the sounds of sirens, breaking glass and vomit splattering my doorstep. Yes, back in the Dark Place.
I usually find conferences quite stressful, whether I'm presenting a paper or not (and this time it was 'not'). There's the unfamiliar place, large numbers of strangers all trying to network and establish themselves in the academic pecking order, and the sheer weight of learning. But this one was utterly delightful: large groups of friendly and interesting people, fascinating topics and a delightful setting. Over the course of the three days I variously wished I was a Romanticist, a translation expert, a poetry specialist and a whole range of other fields as speaker after speaker made their field sound like the summit of human endeavour: even the one who got us all to sing the Welsh-language version of the Marseillaise… (you can sample Tystion's hip-hop version here).
Anyway, amongst the many and expensive books I bought were a couple of lovely examples of book design: Bert Coombes's I Am A Miner (1939) which looks graphically very fresh, and Gwyn Thomas's first novel, Where Did I Put My Pity? (1946). Coombes was a Wolverhampton man who pretended not to be and wrote a memoir (These Poor Hands) about becoming a miner in Wales which turned out to be mostly fiction… James Frey is a very late entry to the field. Gwyn Thomas was a bitter, darkly comic genius who invented a literary style apparently from nowhere to express the plight of people like him: hugely intelligent, fluent, and trapped by capitalism. Later on he became a bit of a media darling and his books lost their bite, sadly, but his first few (The Alone to the Alone, The Dark Philosophers, Sorrow For Thy Sons) are astonishing and deserve to be famous.
I usually find conferences quite stressful, whether I'm presenting a paper or not (and this time it was 'not'). There's the unfamiliar place, large numbers of strangers all trying to network and establish themselves in the academic pecking order, and the sheer weight of learning. But this one was utterly delightful: large groups of friendly and interesting people, fascinating topics and a delightful setting. Over the course of the three days I variously wished I was a Romanticist, a translation expert, a poetry specialist and a whole range of other fields as speaker after speaker made their field sound like the summit of human endeavour: even the one who got us all to sing the Welsh-language version of the Marseillaise… (you can sample Tystion's hip-hop version here).
Anyway, amongst the many and expensive books I bought were a couple of lovely examples of book design: Bert Coombes's I Am A Miner (1939) which looks graphically very fresh, and Gwyn Thomas's first novel, Where Did I Put My Pity? (1946). Coombes was a Wolverhampton man who pretended not to be and wrote a memoir (These Poor Hands) about becoming a miner in Wales which turned out to be mostly fiction… James Frey is a very late entry to the field. Gwyn Thomas was a bitter, darkly comic genius who invented a literary style apparently from nowhere to express the plight of people like him: hugely intelligent, fluent, and trapped by capitalism. Later on he became a bit of a media darling and his books lost their bite, sadly, but his first few (The Alone to the Alone, The Dark Philosophers, Sorrow For Thy Sons) are astonishing and deserve to be famous.
GT hated the Welsh language movement, probably because he couldn't speak Welsh whereas his parents and older siblings could. For my own amusement, I've got the book in the same protective packet as my copy of nasty neo-fascist Saunders Lewis's pamphlet Is There an Anglo-Welsh Literature? (his answer: no).
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