Balls: Divination

is the official title of the art happening I mentioned some time ago. It has now happened. This Saturday, in fact. It drew more people into Bromley House than would normally go in a week, which is an excellent thing: a crowd of, say, 100, with what seemed like 120 cameras.

The pantomime of preparing and anticipating and buzz went on about ten minutes longer than was comfortable, but the result was worth it. The ping-pong balls were luminous yellow, which I hadn't expected, and delivered by the artist, Phillip Henderson, from an adorable little lavender-blue suitcase. He declared himself more concerned about the sound than the appearance, so the librarian asked everyone not to clap; there was a few seconds' pause before we cracked. As it turns out, a hundred people applauding sounds very like 360 ping-pong balls descending a spiral staircase. I hope Mr Henderson enjoyed the echo.

Other people have blogged this first, of course. One also put a video on YouTube. Bless them.

Matthew Norman reveals his lead time

He must be delighted with the pay-off to his Independent media diary this week:

ALSO UNWONTEDLY reticent, finally, is Jonathan Pearce, the football commentator who appeared on BBC1's sadly doomed Grandstand recently to reveal exclusively that Alan Curbishley would be appointed as England coach in a tripartite arrangement involving Trevor Brooking and Stuart Pearce. Now that the job has been offered to Luiz Felipe Scolari, a public apology must be imminent.

It will be interesting to see how much reticence Mr Norman goes for next week.

My new favourite notice

was on a Transpeak bus from Nottingham to Cromford this morning:

UNIVERSITY OF DERBY

HIGH PEAK COLLEGE

Please note that smoking of any substance is not allowed on College Transport.

For better reasons to visit Cromford, see under Scarthin Books.

Today's major discovery

at least for me, is the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association's National Recording Project. You probably knew about it; it's been there for years, by the looks of things. It's a geographically arranged list of most of the public sculpture in "65% of the UK". It's wonderful. Best of all, many of the entries have photographs, so if you want to know what a real tourist trap looks like (description) or how all seaside railings should be (description), you can.

Today's minor irritation

is a sentence in most of the initial reports of the John Reid picoscandal, which presumably spawned from PA. It concerns Mr Reid's first wife, Cathy:

She died in 1998, and the couple had two sons.

How "and"? I didn't need that mental image. Neither do you.

Cocktail recipe

Combine the New York Times approach to sourcing and balance, a Finnish heavy-metal Eurovision entry, and a sense of humour, and on a good day you might get an sentence like this:

Some Finns say that Lordi is right at home and that the band's use of flaming dragon-encrusted swords and exploding baby dolls expresses the warrior spirit of the Vikings.

From here, via.

Service announcement

Paul Isaacs has a new blog. With embarrassing speed, it will be better than this one. But I told you first.

Things you don't hear very often

"I was to find that residing in a suburb adds a thrill and a zest to life. It is an experience in having no traditions to live up to." - early resident of Northwood Hills, on the Metropolitan line, quoted from another source (which probably quotes him from another source) in Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway.

[The Subterranean Railway, by Christian Wolmar, London, 2004. A good compromise between geekery and cheery anecdotage, with a surprising narrative drive. A bit of sentence editing would have helped, however.]

Worlds lost and found

The reason this blog has been dead again, I would like to pretend, is that I've been reading The History of The Times 1785-1841, and had vague things to say about it that seemed to require finishing it first, even though the system of cross-referencing in the text suggests that no one was ever meant to read it through. And it was heavy, and took up my book-carrying space, and got in the way of anything else. But now I'm free. Ha! And I can put over my crackpot theory about London in the late 18th Century as a model of our future media. Your turn to suffer now.

The first thing to say about The History of The Times 1785-1841 is that it's a monument to The Times in 1935, when it was "written, printed and published at the office of The Times, Printing House Square". It's anonymous and authoritative-sounding, handed down like the most elevated class of leading article. It's tremendously dignified in appearance, displaying the then-really-new Times New Roman to lapidary effect. At the same time, it's a gallery of show-off presswork, stuffed with tipped-in portraits and actual-size fold-out reproductions of documents leaked to the editor. Imagine the world's starchiest pop-up book. And it issues from an office that had come to see itself as eternal: scraps against long-forgotten gossip sheets (the True Sun, anyone? The World?) are covered with warm partisanship for the home side.

The second and bigger thing is that it argues, to this ignoramus convincingly, that all this imperturbable, ultraprofessional smugness, along with most of the other qualities that bloggers now denominate "mainstream media", descend from two men: John Walter II and Thomas Barnes.

Walter inherited from his father (John Walter I, oddly enough) a paper that was first meant to demonstrate a printing gimmick, and continued because it continued. The tax regime on newspapers was then, The Times argues, designed to stop you operating a mass-circulation daily, or any daily at all without accepting bribes. Paper was stamped and taxed. Advertising was stamped and taxed. Payments from political operators, and the "suppression" and "contradiction" fees journalists could extract by public blackmail, were available on relatively advantageous terms. Walter II stepped steadily out of these customary practices, and then bought the first steam-powered presses, which allowed him to produce enough papers quickly and cheaply for the bribeless office to pay.

An obviously bribe-free paper, among obviously bribed ones, is a powerful thing. It became a shockingly powerful one in the control of Thomas Barnes, its first proper editor, a crony of radical poets who became for thirty-odd years a Times-only man. He built up the reporting staff, fighting the Post Office to free his foreign correspondence, cultivating sources all over Britain, and extracting tip-offs from the great. He used all this to present a front of omniscience and infallibility. He took anonymity as far as he could. The first time his name appeared in his paper was a death notice:

On the 7th inst., at his house in Soho-square, Thomas Barnes, Esq., in the 56th year of his age.

And his paper's defensive approach to the apology makes today's Fleet Street look craven. We know the names of his Parliamentary staff because when the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell accused them of misquoting him, they published a signed letter in the paper declaring they would not report another word of his until he had apologised for the slur on their honour.

His opinion-writing was louder and ruder than today's Times would contemplate. One reform-era leader responds to a particularly outrageous suggestion (another slur on the honour of the paper) by a quarter-inch of blank space, and then:

We leave a space vacant, as the author of Tristram Shandy says, "for the reader to swear in, any oath he is accustomed to," only hoping it is an innocent one.

The leaders are composed on a principle of finding out what public opinion is - among the small middle-class then allowed to be the public - and then leading it by advocating a popular position as forcefully as possible. The readers of today's tabloids might recognise the approach, and the ruthless willingness to switch sides.

And that's the most important tradition, right there. Thomas Barnes shafted powerful sources. He would take information and even opinion steers from the likes of Henry Brougham - but when he concluded that Brougham could no longer carry the credit of his readers, he said so plainly. He had the power to get away with it.

What worries me most about the decline of the press, apart from the chance that I will have to find a proper job, is that soon we will have no journalists powerful enough to fuck over the influential; and that control of information is not going out to a more democratic world of volunteers and citizen investigators - great as they often are at mining data already in the public domain - but back to its previous owners, the great and the good and their small vindictive functionaries. Even Jeff Jarvis occasionally has such thoughts, on his way to something more uplifting.

Brougham had a press agent called Le Marchant. He doesn't make the index of The History of The Times. But until the Great Shafting, he is as much cited as a determinant of what appears in The Times as anyone apart from Barnes. His time is returning.

Thinking inside the box

A friend overseas forwards me this month-old gem. Couldn't happen to a nicer paper.

While we're on the subject of libraries...

This seems a splendid idea: the OED, a decent newspaper archive, and a shelf of other expensive reference works, from anywhere in Britain, for anyone with a library card. And I didn't notice it until the official responsible managed to get a letter in The Times. My local seems to have some similar system, but I'll definitely be asking them about this one.

Hot news

On a certain Saturday in May, 360 ping-pong balls will descend this spiral staircase. Because of art.

Knowing the Bromley House library's membership procedures - which are friendly and fairly open but not quick - you would probably need to apply now to see it as of right.

They'll equally probably let in guests. But if you live in Nottingham, read, and have any spare time in office hours, you'll want to join.

Rewards of reading on

TLS, March 10, 2006; "Learned Journals" roundup; final item; first sentence:

"Few academic journals can pull off two articles about farting in one issue, but Exemplaria does it with panache."

The writer is Bettina Bildhauer. The articles she mentions are by Valerie J. Allen and Peter W. Travis, on the place of breaking wind in grammatical/musical theories and "thirteen ways to interpret a fart, as exemplified by Chaucer's Summoner".

If you're feeling the doubts I felt, well, Exemplaria seems to exist: it has a website, at any rate. If you're tempted to subscribe, it's $50 a year individual outside US (not $85 - naughty Lit Supp), but bear in mind that it's "A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies" and Bettina Bildhauer says that means mostly late Medieval literature, mostly through deconstruction and psychoanalysis.

Oh, and if you're thinking of reading the rest of the article on the web, and you're not a TLS subscriber, you should give up: all you'll get is a few highlights and a broken link to a .pdf of the previous issue's contents page.

What may have started it

In the event anyone's reading this, it's probably because I got involved in a discussion between two infinitely better bloggers (this one and this one) on Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene. It's going on here and here. You may therefore be interested to read the bit of criticism Burgess says gave Greene a grudge against him. This seems to be "The Greene and the Red: Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene", reprinted in his 1968 journalism round-up Urgent Copy. Here's the relevant quote:

Of the English Catholic novelists, Graham Greene is by far the most interesting, since he is probably the least orthodox. The implied doctrines of his novels approach Jansenism, which has been repeatedly condemned by Rome. Cornelius Jansen, founder of the theological school whose most famous and brilliant adherent was Pascal, came too near to Calvinism to be orthodox: he found too much semi-Pelagianism in the 'laxist' Jesuits; he affirmed and re-affirmed the more 'rigorist' doctrines of St Augustine. In Jansen, original sin was not mere 'imputation': it expressed itself in the depravity of nature (whose order was, contrary to official teaching, distinct from the supernatural order), in appetite and in concupiscence. The horror of the natural world is one of the most fascinating aspects of Greene's fiction. Sin is not cool and intellectual matter for theological dissertations; sin is expressed in the joyless sex of Brighton Rock, with its broken toenails in the bed; the carious landscape of The Power and the Glory; the hell of Haiti in The Comedians.

Burgess goes on to suggest that this gives Greene some sympathy with communism on the grounds that it is more open about its materialist depravity.

"A place that seems to breathe sin is, paradoxically, spiritually healthier than an ascetic garden city," he says Greene thinks. Communism has the merit that "since in an evil community good can be brought about only by revolution... its techniques are apter for killing evil than are those of an affluent and settled democracy". I have omitted much subtlety and hedging.

I'm not up to assessing all this as lit-crit or theology. But I can see it's a sort of lecture on orthodoxy, and from someone who begins by declaring himself "of an old though not particularly distinguished Lancashire Catholic family, one that held to the faith through the Reformation and had its quota of undistinguished martyrs". That might smart.

(Incidentally, the reasons I'm coming up with so much Burgess and so little Greene are that Burgess is much apter to turn up in second-hand bookshops, and that Greene didn't reprint great gusts of fugitive work. Both factors speak well of Greene.)

You're a guest at the Somme

It is about 1917. Your tour guide is C.E. Montague, who was the chief leader-writer of the Manchester Guardian back when it was the only paper of weight in England consistently to oppose the Boer war. When the first world war broke out he dyed his grey hair black and volunteered for the trenches. After a few years they imposed an age limit on that; he has ended up as a censor and press officer. This account is from H.M. Tomlinson's introduction to Montague's posthumous A Writer's Notes on his Trade:

One night H.W. Massingham arrived at our chateau, on a brief visit. He was the editor of the Radical Nation, a weekly political and literary review which fought nonsense with such knowledge and persistence that for a time the Authorities declined to allow the soldiers to read it. Montague was a Radical. Probably the opinions of both of them about war approximated; they approached each other, at that time, even over that particular war. I am sure Massingham was not able to guess that. Montague made no sign. The next morning, early, the three of us set forth for Courcelette, on the Somme. It was bitterly cold, and Massingham, frail, and not then in the best of health, had had enough of it long before we reached the ruined town of Albert. This is not the place to do more than mention the fact that the battleground of the Somme was unattractive. I saw Massingham's eyes full of horror as he glanced over the landscape, at the point where Montague judged we had better leave our car. A leg bone with the boot still on it was sticking out of some rubbish beside us. Montague was beginning to look cheerful. The day was grey and the wind was north-east. Shells were falling into Devil's Wood, shells were falling on La Boisselle. Montague turned to our driver with instructions for him.

"We shall be back in about two hours. If they are shelling this road, don't come to us. We will come to you."

"Yessir."

Massingham overheard this item of local interest with deep curiosity. Had Montague but known it, he would have taken the driver aside and whispered it; but he really appeared to suppose that any man would value an opportunity such as now offered. On we went.

We came to what used to be the windmill, on the Pozières ridge. Nothing showed there but tumbled rubbish in the universal mud; but as we drew level with it four nine-inch howitzers and two six-inch naval guns went off together, and slightly lifted me from my feet. All in the work of such a day! But Massingham was not used to it, and he was visibly shaken. One would be, even without neuralgia, and he had some. Montague, however, was getting brighter and brighter. He had no eye for Massingham. His gaze ranged the horrid landscape for inspiriting signs that it might oblige us with a display of its common routine of eruption and disaster, for he desired to satisfy the interest of a brother Radical; therefore he never noticed that Massingham already was more than confirmed in all he had ever thought of battle.

We passed an aeroplane which had crashed, and beyond that the track rose again to a ridge; and over the ridge was the enemy. Montague stopped, and inspected Massingham, who was in a blue-serge suit and dark overcoat. Montague spoke. "On the top there," he said, "the enemy will be able to see us. He mightn't waste shells on three soldiers, but if he saw a civilian he would guess an important visit was being made, and he might hand us a bouquet. We'd better go back to the battery and borrow a khaki overcoat for you, before we go on."

"But," expostulated Massingham, "I don't want to go on. I've seen all I want to see."

Montague's disappointment was manifest. He was just beginning to enjoy himself. Could Massingham ever again have such a chance as this to see how very bad the worst could be? Why waste such a day?

It may add something to know these men were old colleagues, as well as fellow radicals. Massingham was editor of the liberal Daily Chronicle when the Boer war broke out. He opposed it. His proprietors told him to change his mind or resign. And when he resigned, he found refuge as a London and parliamentary correspondent for the Guardian.

[A Writer's Notes on his Trade, by C.E. Montague, London, 1930. Highly crafted craft essays, still full of valuable perception, but also illustrative of how different posh journalism was in his day. A capacity for instantly producing apposite quotes from Walter Scott will no longer help you get a job; he writes as if it does, both in style and content. Past notes on Montague here and here. ]

Figures of the (previous) day

Number of paragraphs in the Daily Mail's main story on the smoking ban before its first use of any variant on the word "nanny": 15

Total number of such uses: 1

Total uses of phrase "nanny state": 0

The Telegraph resists similarly; so, as far as I could be bothered to read, did the Express. They have plenty of fun pillorying the Labour party for U-turns, which also appears to be the Tory line, but the reluctance to quote or make a frontal attack is notable. Perhaps they really believe this is a popular policy. (The Guardian, in the way of these things, gave a front-page plug to a columnist arguing my expected Telegraph line.)

Heart of Darkness, as told by Wilkins Micawber

Just read David Copperfield for the first time and was left with an interesting question. Why on earth had I never read this before?

I decided to blame E.M. Forster.

You see, I loved Aspects of the Novel long before I read almost anything that it discussed. Most critics went in for fake precision. Forster had a calculated vagueness that seemed truer to real reading. And he was at ease in registers those other critics barely dared try: parody, fantasy, satirical attack. If they ever build a Tomb of the Unknown Humanities Undergraduate, his riff on pseudo-scholarship will serve excellently as an epitaph.

I remembered Aspects being somewhat sniffy about Dickens. Here, I thought, is where I bought my views, which Hard Times and Oliver Twist and Great Expectations up until the point when I realised my copy had 32 pages missing failed to shake. Then I looked Dickens up in the index, turned to page 78, and found an admittedly sniffy passage that anticipated much of what I wanted to say here:

Dickens's people are nearly all flat (Pip and David Copperfield attempt roundness, but so diffidently that they seem more like bubbles than solids). Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own. It is a conjuring trick; at any moment we may look at Mr Pickwick edgeways and find him no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view. Mr Pickwick is far too adroit and well trained. He always has the air of weighing something, and when he is put into the cupboard of the young ladies' school he seems as heavy as Falstaff in the buck-basket at Windsor. Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow. Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad. He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit.

Dickens's caricatures, or at least the David Copperfield ones, live in ways that a caricature of a caricature would not. They change, for a start. Sometimes it's a flip of the cardboard, like the self-pitying "lone, lorn" Mrs Gummidge when she discovers someone else merits the adjectives and becomes instantly unselfish. Sometimes it's a slow mounting up of the initial characteristics, like Uriah Heep. And the man trusts them. Is it not an extraordinary act of courage to speak one of the climaxes of your novel through someone who seems to be a joke, as Dickens does with Mr Micawber?

"Then it was that--HEEP--began to favour me with just so much of his confidence, as was necessary to the discharge of his infernal business. Then it was that I began, if I may so Shakespearianly express myself, to dwindle, peak, and pine..."

and so on, through half a dozen pages it would be even more of a spoiler to quote. "Adroit and well trained" and "conjuring trick" seem hardly to do justice to that kind of bravura, but they indicate an appreciation of it within the fashions of Forster's time. (C.E. Montague, who I expect to be going on about here again soon, also fights to reconcile loving Dickens and feeling he shouldn't like him. Heaven knows what bits of conventional wisdom I'm bending to, even when I think I'm thinking straight.)

[Aspects of the Novel, by E.M. Forster, 1927. Seductive account of how fiction works -- absolutely seductive when you're too ignorant, impressionable and thick to notice any blind spots he doesn't tell you about. Have resisted rereading it whole in case there are some. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, 1849-50. Worth several weeks of anyone's life, for reasons I haven't begun to describe.]

Scenes from provincial life

'Twelve GCSEs!' said Minnie, marvelling.

'I thought it was thirteen?' said Zelda.

'Hang on,' said Israel. 'How did you know that?'

'It was in the paper,' said Minnie. 'Now tell me this: d'you really no' have hobbies and interests apart from reading? You must have some, eh, young fella like yourself?'

'What?'

'It was all in the paper.'

'What, my whole CV?'

'Yes. Of course,' said Minnie. 'People have the right to know about their new librarian. It's like public office. You were definitely the best candidate, wasn't he, Zelda?'

Zelda was looking Israel up and down in a manner that clearly indicated that she did not believe him to be the best at anything.

'Head an' shoulders,' continued Minnie.

'They published my CV in the local paper?' said Israel.

'Not just yours.'

All my favourite hacks seem to have started in on serial detective fiction. The gentle, old-fashioned sort.

First there was Andrew Martin, a former holder of the coveted "only good thing in the New Statesman" title, who has begun an Edwardian-set "Steam Detective" series -- well-chosen social history, leisurely but cleverly tightening pace, and just a bit too much technical railway information for the comfort of normal readers.

Now there's Ian Sansom, the really, really, really stylish book reviewer. He has begun a series set in present day rural Northern Ireland, under the group title "The Mobile Library", the first volume of which, The Case of the Missing Books, is quoted above. If you were lost, Israel is a north London nebbish, newly arrived as librarian for the town of Tumdrum to find the library is shut and the stock has all disappeared; Zelda and Minnie run what's now his local cafe. Without ever quite uncovering anything, he will reach a solution that allows him to stay in town for the next of the series.

All this must be a side-effect of Alexander McCall Smith. Suddenly there is an attractive and apparently saleable model for not-quite-big-name writers: you leave a mystery simmering in the corner, to satisfy the sales department, and then you go off and spend the next seven chapters writing what you wanted to in the first place. In time, the mystery readers will discover they prefer it.

Now, I'm in favour of any literary gimmick that keeps Ian Sansom solvent. And as should be evident from the quote, The Case of the Missing Books is funny. It's also all-in-one-sitting readable. It treads a fine line between gentleness and plotlessness, and I'm not sure it lands the right side, but perhaps that will improve as the series goes along. I shall be depressed if such a good comic writer turns out only to be saleable as an about-average producer of crime novels.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre

This phrase just occurred twice in half an hour or so on Radio Four; once in Brian Walden's Cooke substitute thing, and once in Any Questions, both times in relation to the Danish cartoons clusterbuggerup.

It's a nice cliche. I've used it myself. But what I failed to understand until a few years ago, and what I suspect may be more widely forgotten, is the full meaning of a shout of fire in a theatre before building regulations.

We're not talking about severe inconvenience or discomfort that's worse because it arises from malice; nor even about Walden's "behaving in a way that deliberately puts other people at personal risk". A man who falsely shouted fire in a Georgian London theatre could expect a stampede that killed half a dozen people. This happened quite a few times. Indeed, it was a technique for blackmailing producers. The restriction proposed may therefore be less severe than the phrase now suggests.

Unfortunately for this argument, the source of my revelation was a display in the basement gents' toilet of Sadlers' Wells theatre in 2003, which I now only dimly remember. Confirmation is beyond my Googling; corrections would be greatly welcomed.

Alternate test

Or if the below is not to your taste, there is Jenny Turner's sort-of-response, from a more recent Edinburgh Review:

If I were only Superman, I could just say my responsibility lay with Truth, Honor, Justice and the American Way of Life, believe it and have done with it.

Seriousness test for critics

Imagine writing this in a preface to your collected works, and meaning it, and not being either intolerable or unintentionally funny:

I see very little in my Reviews to alter or repent of: I always endeavoured to fight against evil, and what I thought evil then I think evil now.

The critic in question? Sydney Smith, official comic relief of the first Edinburgh Review. Clive James should be so lucky.

Aphorism for marketing people

If you want to see real hype, convince 50 journalists that you're a word-of-mouth success.

(Apropos of the obvious people, although they happen to deserve most of the hype. Anyone who can rhyme "Mondeo" with "say owt" is more than fine by me.)

Genres that, now you come to think about it, probably had to exist

Number 96: Vampire chick lit. It's a series: four so far, and I bet she's starting to wish she had a more flexible title format then "Undead and Un...".

Authority figures

Further to this, you can tell that you possess traditional journalistic authority if, when you set up comments sections, most of them start like this. Traditional journalistic authority could be defined as the power to consistently command the attention of people who despise you. Most bloggers can expect to experience such attention from time to time, but not all the time; when it's every day, it may have as much effect on your relations with readers as any imagined professional standing.

Sundries

First, from the Telegraph's "nursery national curriculum" piece, the children's minister, Beverley Hughes, with the disturbing non-denial denial of the day. My bold:

"We are not talking about sitting very young children in chairs and making them learn numbers and letters where that is inappropriate."

Second, a running story I must somehow have missed: "Venice's increasingly bitter clam wars." Setting aside the implication that this started as a bitterness-free war -- just good-natured and friendly violence -- there is plenty of relishable gothic detail here. I am particularly pleased with the warning that, if a clam is cheap and temptingly big, it's probably poisonous. A lesson for life.

Third, the Pride and Prejudice movie appears to have reached New York, and in one of Anthony Lane's weeks, rather than David Denby's. Good news for admirers of withering sarcasm. [Via.]

Fourth, I notice I have now exceeded 100 posts. In two years. That's really not very impressive, is it?

Fun with foreshadowing

This is how, in chapter two of Walter Mosley's The Man in My Basement, the narrator explains his habit of taunting a childhood friend:

I did some things better than Clarance. I was good at sports. But he wouldn't compete with me there. He said I was better than him but I couldn't get a scholarship or anything. And he was right. Like my uncle Brent was always happy to say, 'He could win the race, be he cain't beat the clock.'

So I tortured Clarance now and then, angry at him for my inadequacies.

And here, at the end of the same chapter, are his feelings about how he used to swear at the irritating uncle Brent and run away:

That night in my house, wandering completely naked through the half-dark rooms, I thought about how much fun it was to torture my mean old uncle.

In seventy pages' time, a visitor will ask this narrator to lock him in a steel cage. How do you think their relationship will develop?

[The Man in My Basement, by Walter Mosley, Serpent's Tail, 2004. In fact, the whole power of the novel is in Mosley's refusal to go off the implied deep end. He builds slowly to quieter power games. Still a diagram, as they say, rather than a painting, but the drawing is cool and deliberate.]

Berliner to Berliner

Le Monde has had a redesign; by two blokes from The Scotsman, it says here. The result is that it now looks less like a late 1950s edition of the New Statesman and more like a newspaper: specifically, the new-style Guardian. The great Plantu is kicked downpage to make way for keylineless photographs and oddly light headlines in a subtly wedged serif -- although the absence of a quater-page features blurb at the top does make them look stronger. Judging by the fronts in PDF and the inside pages in their advertising blurb, they're also aiming for a five-column grid: Chris Brooke may be disappointed. I must buy a physical copy and find out what it really looks like.

The art of precis

"Lowell, it turns out, was the guy you can see just behind Zelig's shoulder: He corresponded with Eliot, hung out with Jackie and Bobby K., and traveled around with Eugene McCarthy in '68. He also beat up his own father, had endless strange, possibly sexless extramarital affairs with innumerable young women, and endured terrible periods of psychosis, frequently accompanied by alarming rants about Hitler. In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of 'This is me!'" -- Nick Hornby condenses Ian Hamilton's biography of Robert Lowell in The Polysyllabic Spree. This is from the first essay, and representative.

[The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby, Believer Books, 2004. Puts its author next to Clive James on the list of people who ought to give up their lucrative careers pleasing millions and become full-time comic literary critics for an audience of a few thousand including, importantly, me. We're selfish, but we want you more.]

Not even the small print

American Airlines has had a campaign running in the newspapers for several weeks designed to suggest easy opulence through its choice of in-flight meals. It was only today, while resting a bowl of soup on it, that I noticed how bizarre the text is:

Obviously we don't think you should choose an airline based solely on the quality of its ice cream. But come on, Ben and Jerry's? A bowl of Vermont's finest for every Business Class passenger? And in First class we'll top it off with hot fudge sauce and sprinkle it with chopped nuts.

So, to recap: in order to get a bowl of ice cream, you have to pay several hundreds of pounds extra to fly business. If you want hot sauce and nuts on top, you have to pay many hundreds more to fly first. No first, no sauce. And this is American Airlines being nice. Must be some fudge.

New from the Tories: Bigger wristbands

"In a speech partly drafted by David Willetts, Mr Davis will champion social justice and will urge the Tories to embrace the so-called 'wristband generation' of young people who wear their social concerns literally on their sleeves." - Daily Telegraph, this morning. My bold.

And before you say, I know. But I'll bet you, oh, pennies, that they thought they were using the pedantic sense.

Man with MS dies of complications at 66? It's a curse, I tell you!

If anyone out there is collecting evidence for the thesis that The Independent wants to be a sort of right-on Daily Mail, they should check out Exhibit A before it disappears behind the paywall.

Our exhibit describes a curse on those who tangle with Oetzi, that Stone Age corpse from the Italian Alps. Prolonged contact, we're told, leads to "strange, often accidental deaths". The toll is long-ish, but not dominated by strangness: it runs to two mountaineering accidents, a car crash in heavy traffic, one heart attack relatively young, a brain tumour and two deaths after long illnesses.

The long-term medical conditions have to be included, by the way. Dr Tom Loy, who had an hereditary blood-clotting problem, is the latest to die and the hook for the story. And Konrad Splindler, an Austrian archeologist who died at 66 from MS complications, provides the liveliest quote: "I think it's a load of rubbish. It is all a media hype. The next thing you will be saying I will be next."

Kathy Marks, who wrote this tosh, clearly wishes to be thought of as tongue-in-cheek. The nearest she comes to a named source arguing for the curse is "for others, the link between Mr Loy's death and that of other men associated with Oetzi is irresistible". And I will agree that a bit of amusing nonsense is a necessary part of the newspaper reader's diet. But when that amusement amounts to Fun With Cadavers, it becomes questionable. To quote Ms Marks's piece:

Academics, of course, pour scorn on such notions. Tom Loy's colleagues at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience refused to comment yesterday. But one university source said staff were deeply upset, not only by his death, but by all the speculation about a curse.

"They feel that it trivialises his death, and does not do justice to his life and work," said the source. "He was a brilliant academic, and that is how his colleagues want to remember him."

Cuts

Now available here: almost a year of new cuttings. I will try not to leave it so long next time.

You've got strife

Here's a nice streak of piss and vinegar from Peter Jenkins's The Battle of Downing Street, a venerable quickie book on the "In Place of Strife" controversy. We are operating from the point of view of the Prime Minster, Harold Wilson. It is June 1969, and we are attempting to get the TUC, newly led by Vic Feather, to create rules against unofficial strikes strong enough to save us from a doomed attempt to legislate against them. Lucky us:

One of the most effective weapons in the TUC's armoury is boredom. It has the capacity to deliver boredom by the megaton, the desolation it can inflict on the other side of a negotiation table can be terrible to behold. Many a rapacious capitalist had laid down his arms and put up his money at the rumbling of trade union leaders going nuclear. What a prospect for Prime Minister to awake to on a summer's morning with the birds singing in St. James's Park -- four hours with the General Council! The sight of them shuffling in, settling round the table in strict order of senility -- so many of them! Harold Wilson would struggle with matches and pipe trying to remember some of the dreary fellows' names -- who was that one, Alf, Bert or yet another Bill? Listening to them -- "speaking from long experience" (tendentious reminiscence); "plain words" (cliche); "making it quite clear" (unnecessary reptition); "brief intervention" (long-winded monologue); "point of information" (fatuous question); "expediting the proceedings" (wasting more time); "useful suggestion" (red herring); "summing up" (going over it all gain); "valuable progress" (hours wasted); "another meeting?" (Oh God!). "The TUC doesn't like rush", Feather had said. It was a war of attrition; the TUC's tactics: grind the enemy down, wear him to a standstill, bore him into submission.

The violence of the tone here is uncharacteristic: for the most part an ironic equanimity is maintained. And the portrait of Vic Feather is mostly admiring.

[The Battle of Donwning Street, by Peter Jenkins (Charles Knight & Co, 1970). Not exactly an enduring classic -- it's repititious in places, and prone to misprints even when not retouchtyped quickly by a blogger. On the other hand, refreshingly free of Thatcherite or Labour-movement's-big-missed-chance hindsight, which makes it easier to see how limited the measures in "In Place of Strife" were, and how farcical and contingent on tactics was their collapse. Probably my last trade union book for a while.]

Advice from the Windsors

"Never arrange to mate things within your own family." -- Prince Charles, in that Today programme interview. It was ages ago, but I had to wait until Pick of the Week before I was sure I'd heard right.

To be fair, he's talking about rare pigs; and his concern is prompted by his sister's boar ripping his sows' ears, rather than genetic disorders or hereditary porphyria or anything. Still, how unlike the home life of our own dear etc, etc.

The Unread Book Route

So, about that "One third of people buy books to show off" thing. Yes, I know I'm days late; the dog ate my excuse. And yes, I know it's a "funny poll" story, the lowest form of press-release journalism. But there are some interesting distinctions not being made.

In the first category, there are the books bought to show off with no intention of reading. This is what the poll-answerers appear to be confessing to; few if any of the crowd of commenters on the blog entry are joining them, perhaps because that would be genuinely shameful.

Then there are the heavy or trendy books bought with the intention of reading, on which we give up; most commenters are confessing to this, but it seems hardly a sin at all. If, as Q.D. Leavis approximately said, good reading means living beyond your intellectual means, then it's not surprising if good readers shoot the moon once in a while. Shows ambition.

And then there is a category one of the commenters did mention: the show-off books read without understanding. Five years ago, I "read" Anna Livia Plurabelle, the supposedly most crowd-pleasing section of Finnegans Wake; I followed the advice of someone cleverer and took it in one gulp, as a sort of abstract word-painting, rather than attempting to decode it line by line. I believed myself to be enjoying it. I even had a hazy, distant sense of comprehension. This is now entirely vanished, along with every single word. Someone has failed a test there, and I think it's me.

Deeper still, and stickier, is the distinction between reading to look good and reading to be good, in the sense Q.D. would want you to. In front of a sceptical pollster, attempting to confess to the second could be even more embarrassing.

Disappointingly non-scary

My god, there's an official Daily Mail Editor's Blog. This creates expectations. Just how cute are Paul Dacre's kittens? And can he prevent them spreading subversion?

We may never know, I'm afraid. The editor in question here is called "Stacey" and posts mainly about how wonderful her website's new features are.

You may also notice that the website in question is starting to plug RSS systematically. It has been, as Stacey would say, an overwhelming success, with the Bloglines subscriber base of the main news feed soaring from 18 to 20.

By way of reference, the somewhat anomalous Guardian front-page feed is on 9,277; the Telegraph front-page feed manages 190; and even the Independent one has 54 subscribers, despite a pig-ugly interface, a tendency to throw in financial stories at random, and a main heading that reads "Articles from the Indepentent".

How terribly British

"The Northern Light was one of the most militant strike bulletins, and its distributors were often arrested. A touch of generosity, which would have been unthinkable in most countries, entered into relations between police and strikers here in Durham. When Stephenson [the editor] was fined £2 with the option of fourteen days' imprisonment, he chose to go to prison, but asked the police not to call at his home on the day he was due to go inside. They agreed, and he met them at the railway station. When Stephenson asked how they knew that he would keep his word, the constable was surprised. 'Funny thing, nobody ever thought of that'." -- The General Strike, Julian Symons.

Even more British was the end of the strike: the anway reluctant TUC leaders appear to have taken vague reassurances of goodwill from Baldwin as a promise of no reprisals. They awoke to employers imposing wage cuts and legislation that would broadly have satisfied Thatcher. If Baldwin had implied -- stopping scrupulously short of saying -- that he would meet you at the railway station, you would have needed police around his house at once.

[The General Strike, by Julian Symons (Cresset Press, 1957). Doubtless completely superseded account of great trade-union disaster; lots of great narrative colour, but the overall effect is more GCSE history than Strange Death of Liberal England.]

For a list of literary lists

"Maps of towns and plains he sold, and other maps made to order. He would sell a young man a map that showed where a particular girl might be found at different hours of the day. He sold husband maps and wife maps. He sold maps to poets that showed where thoughts of power and clarity had come to other poets. He sold well-digging maps. He sold vision-and-miracle maps to holy men, sickness-and-accident maps to physicians, money-and-jewel maps to thieves, and thief maps to the police" -- Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz.

From the same book, but off-topic, here is an angry, misogynistic young man's view of cruise ship passengers:

The parents sat with the faces and necks of every day coming out of their holiday clothes, spongy backs and flabby arms of women in sun-back dresses, festive trousers on men with office feet. Girls displayed in the shops of their summer dresses the stock that had not moved all year, their mouths open with surrender, their eyes blurred with hope or sharp with arithmetic.

And here is the atmosphere in a mental hospital:

In the corridors a smell of cooking wandered like a minstrel of defeat.

[The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, by Russell Hoban (Cape, 1974). A middle aged cartographer runs away from his shop. His son sets an imaginary lion on him -- the real ones being extinct -- then follows in pursuit himself. They often near the border between the mythic and the stupid, but humour and bright, accurate description keep them mostly honest.]

Through the funny mirror

"The Tories' biggest problem is that, like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have a fully developed philosophy and program behind their Third Way." -- New Democrat wonk Bruce Reed, in Slate.

Many Tories, I imagine, would fancy living in a world where their biggest problem was Tony Blair's ruthless philosophical coherence.

In the next seat

"On the third day, he had two pieces of luck. First, he met an entirely drunken man who told him about a church in Hammersmith that would give him food, and so he ate. Second, he trekked to the house of a friend in Neasden, north London, who lent him £100, which allowed him, among other things, to buy a one-week bus pass so that he could sleep on the night buses." -- No direction home, Nick Davies, Society Guardian, Wednesday, October 19.

I should have pointed to this days ago. I meant to. On the other hand, the Guardian should have had it on the front page of the main section (what else is that "Column Five" for?) rather than the front page of its local authority jobs section.

Signs I hadn't seen before

In Castle Street, Nottingham, between a pub that's turned into a bar and a bar that's turned into a ghost, there is a door with this on it:

CHRISTIAN DUPLICATING SERVICE

No other information. I suppose that if a ban on human cloning cannot be effectively enforced, the devil's technology must be turned to the Lord's purposes.

Why not write to your MP?

I walked around Oxford with a friend the other day; we ended up in a charity shop, looking through an old copy of The Universal Letter-Writer. There was nothing in it as good as this...

LETTER TO MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT UNSEATED AT GENERAL ELECTION

Dear Mr. Pobsby-Burford,

Though I am myself an ardent Tory, I cannot but rejoice in the crushing defeat you have just suffered in West Odgetown. There are moments when political conviction is overborne by personal sentiment; and this is one of them. Your loss of the seat that you held is the more striking by reason of the splendid manner in which the northern and eastern divisions of Odgetown have been wrested from the Liberal Party. The great bulk of the newspaper-reading public will be puzzled by your extinction in the midst of our party's triumph. But then, the great mass of the newspaper-reading public has not met you. I have. You will probably not remember me. You are the sort of man who would not remember anybody who might not be of some definite use to him. Such, at least, was one of the impressions you made on me when I met you last summer at a dinner given by our friends the Pelhams. Among the other things in you that struck me were the blatant pomposity of your manner, your appalling flow of cheap platitudes, and your hoggish lack of ideas. It is such men as you that lower the tone of public life. And I am sure that in writing to you thus I am but expressing what is felt, without distinction of party, by all who sat with you in the late Parliament.

The one person in whose behalf I regret your withdrawal into private life is your wife, whom I had the pleasure of taking in to the aforesaid dinner. It was evident to me that she was a woman whose spirit was well-nigh broken by her conjunction with you. Such remnants of cheerfuless as were in her I attributed to the Parliamentary duties which kept you out of her sight for so very many hours daily. I do not like to think of the fate to which the free and independent electors of West Odgetown have just condemned her. Only, remember this: chattel of yours though she is, and timid and humble, she despises you in her heart.

I am, dear Mr. Pobsby-Burford,

Yours very truly,

HAROLD THISTLAKE

--from "How Shall I Word It?", Max Beerbohm's attempt to add some less elevated letters to collections of the kind mention above, which is in And Even Now (Heinemann, 1920). Further praise ought by now to be superfluous. Surely someone could bring out a Selected Essays?

A sincerity test for classicists

Did you hate Gladiator? Will you say so?

But where's the margin in that?

David Foster Wallace has an extraordinary-formatted-even-for-him new thing in the current Atlantic. (It annoyed The Elegant Variation, is how I know.) If you don't have the .pdf power to see, it uses pastel blocks over phrases in the main text to link to notes on pastel blocks in a generous, and sometimes expanding, scholar's margin.

One obvious accusation is hyperlink-envy; the look is vaguely reminiscent of a children's encyclopedia circa 1996. Mr Wallace being Mr Wallace, he also makes quite clever use of the ability to emphasise blocks with his notes, rather than mere points -- he has been upgraded to Spanish punctuation.

But this design also embodies a preference for sidenotes that seems to crop up every time people try to rethink texts -- so much more graphic than footnotes, so much less hierarchical. (See also Gray, Alasdair, Prefaces, Book of, The.)

And so much less readable! If the notes append anything more than chapter and verse, you get competing vertical movements on the page, which makes concentrating on one thing harder, and keeping your place when jumping about harder still. The effect is exaggerated on screen -- especially if you are also having to cope with anti-aliased Linotype Didot -- but it is real on paper. There are reasons why footnotes won this historical battle, and they go beyond the simple desire to use all available space.

You want an opinion on the words? Strong. It's a sketch of a talk-radio host, and it puts back in the shabbiness and the marginal (yes, visual pun time) hourly-rate workers left out of more conventional, hyped exposes. Result is maybe an overcorrection -- too much of the pity, not enough of the power -- but the correction was necessary, and it's adroitly done.

Know your stereotypes

Here is Augusten Burroughs, moderately amusing serial autobiographer, in Dry, his second volume. He is talking to an Englishman called Hayden over breakfast at a rehab centre:

"These are delicious," he says of the reconstituted scrambled eggs, the same eggs that sit on my own plate, untouched.

So far I have lost almost ten pounds. Why do stars suddenly appear... "You're from London, what would you know?"

He laughs, "That's very true, actually. This is far better than anything my mother ever made."

I make a face. "Did you have that nasty, yeasty stuff they spread on toast, what's it called?"

His eyes brighten. "Vegemite! Oh yes, I love Vegemite."

"You'll enjoy dinner then," I promise him.

Now, I accept a bit of national caricature here and there, and this is a fairly affectionate case. The character would in real life probably go for Brit-in-New-York self-parody, so fine. But how difficult is it to get the details right? Australians like Vegemite. English people (some of them) like Marmite. It's an entirely different semi-repulsive yeast spread.

[Dry, by Augusten Burroughs (Atlantic, 2004). Memoir of an alcoholic young adman -- rehab to beer campaign -- and sequel to a memoir of traumatic-but-somehow-heartwarming childhood called Running with Scissors. Despite loud eccentricity, this feels more machine-finished than I would like; you can tell he's written screenplays.]

Two more pieces of unconnected pedantry

First thing: I note that the US edition of Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close has suffered a title change. Can you hear the splutters from Edinburgh's famous Royal Boulevard?

Second thing: A gentleman in the comments at Shot by Both Sides raised something I'd been wondering about myself -- how do Lea and Perrins, makers of the One True Worcestershire Sauce, feel about seeing a knock-off Worcester sauce involved in a ginormous food scare? I was wondering more specifically, however, about how their lawyers will feel about the use of "Worcestershire" here.

Descant on second thing: Perhaps being slightly finicky about names ("It's Worcestershire, always...") can be more dangerous than not fussing at all. My favourite example is in this review. Of course Alan Hollinghurst's characters must Hoover up, rather than hoover up, their cocaine; one hates to think of generic vacuum cleaners being implicated.

Discussion of and even quotation from books should resume shortly.

Spelling bee: creativity section

The challenge: How many ways can you spell 'Strindberg' in one paragraph? The number to beat: Three.

"Strinberg & Helium is a witty web cartoon that features August Stringberg and 'a joyous, floating friend created to brighten his day'. It is so popular that it tops anything by the Swedish writer on the all-important Google rankings. www.strindbergandhelium.com" -- Web Watch, Sean Dodson, Guardian, February 24.

Disclaimer: I understand that newspapers are written and edited under pressure, and that things like this will sometimes slip through. Unlike this site, however, newspapers are meant to be edited; there no prizes for catching my mistakes, as yet.

Flog it!

To appreciate the following, which is from S.N. Behrman's Duveen and quoted at slightly greater than normal length, you need to know that Duveen is Joseph Duveen, the greatest salesman in art history; Thompson is Joseph R. Thompson, the owner of a chain of restaurants; and "the Chicago dealer" is a lesser salesman who has run out of paintings expensive enough to sell Thompson and decided to throw him to the lion. The place is Duveen's New York gallery, the time somewhat before the great depression. Ready?

"Duveen led Thompson, as well as the Chicago dealer, into the lift, which bore them to sacrosanct upper regions. Duveen strode swiftly though a thickly carpeted, dimly lit room that contained six Old Masters reclining on easels. Thompson, in his way, was almost out of the room when, like Mrs. Lot, he looked back. He lingered; from the blur of the six pictures he got a quick impression of infinite desirability. He called the hurrying Duveen back. 'Here are some pictures,' he said. 'What about these?'

"Duveen took his arm. 'My dear Mr. Thompson,' he said gently, 'there is nothing in this room that would interest you in the least.'

"'Why not?' argued the new pupil. 'Of course they interest me. What would I be doing here if they didn't interest me?'

"'These pictures, my dear fellow, I am reserving, as a matter of fact, for a favourite client,' Duveen said. 'They will interest him far more than they could possibly interest you.'

"Thompson protested; he would yield to no one in acuteness of interest. 'Why do you think they wouldn't interest me?' he asked. 'I want you to know, Sir Joseph, that I own some pretty good pictures.'

"'I am sure you do,' Duveen said soothingly. 'And if you will just follow me, I am sure that I can add to your collection and, if I may say so, improve it. But not these. You are a busy man, and I don't want to waste your time. Not with these.'

"'Why not?' repeated Mr Thompson.

"Pushed to the wall, Duveen dropped all pretence of tact. He made it plain that he thought the pictures were over Thompson's head, both aesthetically and economically.

"'How much for the six?' Thompson demanded.

"'A million dollars, I am afraid,' said Duveen, as if pained at having to demonstrate the truth of an unflattering statement.

"Thompson was ready with an answer. 'I'll take them,' he said vindictively."

A virtuoso piece of dialogue construction, that, as well as salesmanship, with adverbs that do something. The aggravating "soothingly" is my favourite.

[Duveen, by S.N. Behrman, 1953. Jars and jars and jars of polish rubbed into a collection of stories pretty enough to stand it. Loose-ish overall structure because once a multi-part magazine profile, but elegantly tight within each chapter.]

His media

Andrew Collins has just made a fresh appearance in MediaGuardian's "My Media", possibly to celebrate the second anniversary of his previous one. Although to be fair to him, he has had two different books to plug. And to be fair to them, last time he was recruited for some internal Guardian Media Group squabbling; an additional chance to suck up probably made things feel better all round. Consider:

February 24, 2003 "The only newspaper I've ever read is the Guardian. In these times of trouble, we need it more than ever. But I have stopped taking the Observer since it came out as pro-war. I dislike the papers that eat up the government propaganda about terrorist attacks. I like reasoned coverage." [Read the rest, if you're registered.]

February 21, 2005 "The Guardian is the only newspaper I've ever had every day. MediaGuardian is my favourite bit, and I love Review. I'm an avid reader of the Bad Science column in Life because it annoys me so much. I'm not a great fan of the Evening Standard - I wish there was a better London paper that didn't so hate our mayor." [Ditto.]

Balance

"Many people would think safeguarding the future of Manchester United is frivolous compared with trying to save lives in Colombia in the longest-running civil war in the world... Being held up at roadblocks may seem exciting and people might think that what I do at Shareholders United is a step backwards from that but the thing that really gets my adrenalin going..." -- Oliver Houston, who by day works for the TUC on worthy stuff, and by other day runs the fans' group trying to stop a takeover of Manchester United by Malcolm Glazer, in conversation with The Times. "Many people" seems a pleasant understatement.

CV of the week

"Sir Henry Woods, KCVO, Lt RN; late Admiral and Pasha in the Imperial Ottoman Naval Service; Grand Cordon of the Medijeh and Osmanieh; Knight Commander of the Saxe-Coburg Order; Aide-de-Camp for some years to the late Sultan, Abdul Hamid" -- self-description of an 1870s Turkish correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, from the title page of his autobiography, Spunyarn; quoted in Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper, by David Ayerst.

To judge by what Ayerst says, much of the rest of Spunyarn consists of boasting about the lies Woods told various newspapers. Still, having government officials deceive your readers directly was probably cheaper than embedding.

[Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper, by David Ayerst (Collins, 1971). Read as part of this blog's continued stalking of C.E. Montague (last episode here), this turns out nonetheless to be more interesting than your average institutional biography -- and a hell of a lot more so than Changing Faces, the post-1956 follow-up volume. Is aided by fifty years of C.P. Scott, and an astonishing photograph of the crowds at his funeral procession in Manchester.]

Holmes and the hive

Michael Chabon, in one of the more ornate chapter openings of his Sherlock Holmes Versus The Nazis whatsit The Final Solution, explains elegantly why an elderly detective should keep bees. It's a lovely passage, but I suspect it's based on an anachronism. See if you can spot:

"The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The featureless drone, the sonic blank that others heard was to him a shifting narrative, rich, inflected, variable and distinct as the separate stones of a featureless grey shingle, and he moved along the sound, tending to his hives like a beachcomber, stooped and marvelling. It meant nothing, of course - he wasn't as batty as all that - but this did not imply, not at all, that the song had no meaning. It was the song of a city, a city as far from London as London was from heaven or Rangoon, a city in which all did precisely what they were supposed to do, in the way that had been prescribed by their most remote and venerable ancestors. A city in which gems, gold ingots, letters of credit, or secret naval plans were never stolen, in which long-lost second sons and ne'er-do-well first husbands did not turn up from the Wawoora Valley or the Rand with some clever backwoods trick for scaring an old moneybags out of his wits. No stabbings, garrotings, beating, shootings; almost no violence at all, apart from the occasional regicide. All of the death in the city of the bees had been scheduled, provided for, tens of millions of years ago; each death as it occurred was translated, efficiently and immediately, into more life for the hive.

"It was the sort of city in which a man who had earned his keep among murderers and ruffians might choose to pass the remainder of his days, listening to its song, as a young man fresh to Paris or New York or Rome (or even, as he still dimly recalled, London) stood on a balcony, at the window of a bed-sit, on the roof of a tenement house, listening to the rumble of traffic and the fanfare of horns, and feeling that he was hearing the music of his own mysterious destiny."

Now, the similitude tying those two paragraphs together is between the hum of bees and what less careful writers would call the 'roar' of traffic. Motor traffic roars, anyway. Do horses and carriages rumble? Probably. It's an intelligent way to evoke the noise of non-pneumatic wheels on cobbles rather than of engines. But was that the predominant noise? Is that what you would have heard, leaning out of a tenement window? I'd like someone to tell me 'yes', convincingly.

[The Final Solutiion, by Michael Chabon (Fourth Estate, 2005). Picked this up thinking it might be a disaster; it sounded like the winner of a New Statesman competition for most tastelessly titled detective story. It's much better than it needs to be, as the author might say -- the prose is antiqued, but still witty and vivid, and the collision between Holmes and the Holocaust is more sensitively managed than I thought it could be. Still slightly uneasy about it, though, and not in a good way.]

What the stars are reading

"By this time my left hand is almost numb despite its shooting mitten and, holding the heavy Tolley round the small of the stock with my now functional right hand, I attempt to revive the left by blowing on it, the resulting condensation, if anything, making it feel colder. For a moment or two, I forget about the geese in my efforts to restore feeling to my hands. 'Wink-wink, wink-wink' -- I look up to see two almost overhead. There is no time to stop the gun as the long brown barrels swing beyond the leader's head. A gout of orange flame, a cloud of grey smoke and burning fragments of the Daily Mail among the whins silence the remaining legions out in the estuary." -- Richard Shelton, The Longshoreman.

By this time, I already knew Shelton was a crusty old thing, naturally given to conservatism. So it shocked me somewhat to realise I'd like him better if he loaded his home-made cartridges with The Times, or even the Daily Telegraph. I am, it turns out, a snob.

[The Longshoreman: A Life at the Water's Edge, by Richard Shelton (Atlantic Books, 2004). Memoir of wildfowling -- that is, shooting wildfowl -- and top-level fisheries science, with a little light trainspotting near the start. The effect is the opposite of that you're led to expect in autobiographies. On people, human stories, the places he's been, Shelton could be any moderately entertaining buffer; but ask him to delineate the life cycle of the brown shrimp and he becomes precise and fascinating. Text is kerned too enthusiastically on punctuation -- a full stop followed by a capital T pretty much overlaps -- which seems to be the trend.]

Bagehot as Nostradamus

If Walt had been able to make these two passages from The English Constitution a little less clear, people might be making that comparison seriously:

The wartime career of Winston Churchill: "Under a cabinet constitution in a special emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion. it is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before the occasion. The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required -- are impediments -- in common times. A Lord Liverpool is better in everyday politics than a Chatham -- a Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon. By the structure of the world, we often want, at the sudden occurence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman -- to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm. In England we have had so few catastrophes since our constitution attained maturity, that we hardly appreciate this latent excellence." (This could also be a prediction of those endless Punch "Dropping The Pilot" cartoons.)

The end of the Bagehot's preferred order of things: "A deferential community in which the bulk of the people is ignorant, is therefore in a state of what is called in mechanics unstable equilibrium. If the equilibrium is once disturbed there is no tendency to return to it, but rather to depart from it. A cone balanced on its point is in unstable equilibrium, for if you push it ever so little it will depart farther and farther from its position and fall to the earth. So in communities where the masses are ignorant but respectful, if you once permit the ignorant class to begin to rule you may bid farewell to deference for ever. Their demagogues will inculcate, their newspapers will recount, that the rule of the existing dynasty (the people) is better than the rule of the fallen dynasty (the aristocracy). A people very rarely hears two sides of a subject in which it is interested; the popular organs take up the side which is acceptable, and none but the popular organs in fact reach the people. A people never hears censure of itself. No one wil tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs. A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced."

To get a sense of how unmodern the surrounding text is, bear in mind that "democracy" is meant as a mortal insult.

[The English Constitution, by Walter Bagehot, 1867. Incredibly clear and pleasurable to read; full of stuff that turns out to be still relevant; and, these days, coolly outrageous. None of the people who quote the idea of 'dignified' and 'effective' arms of government make it clear what a ruthless hypocrisy he has in mind: the one branch holds the people in awe while the other gets on with business. I suppose that's obvious, but I'd failed to realise it.]

Cover artists who read the book

"I have always had the wrong shape of head. It sticks out in awkward places, bulges whenever I think, is only sparsely covered with tufts of colourless hair, and collapses somewhere around the chin, scurrying for cover towards the collar. The ears reach out like large red satellite dishes, the cheeks are covered with lines and rashes caused by decades of overwork and overindulgence and if I dare to smile widely, it looks less like a friendly act than a record of bomb damage in the Blitz. Timothy Winters, teeth like splinters? The lad has nothing on me." -- Andrew Marr, My Trade.

You may wonder how, after a description like that, Mr Marr ended up here. But look closer: the angle, the crop and the careful focus address everything he dislikes about his face. Well, everything except the resemblence to Vladimir Putin he disavows later in the chapter. But the photographer may not have read that far.

[My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, by Andrew Marr (Macmillan, 2004). Combines the more gossipy and less self-revelatory aspects of a memoir with the less strenuous aspects of popular scholarship. Taken as what it is, rather than what it says it is, great fun. But if you want the pop history of UK hackdom, it's still Matthew Engel's Tickle the Public that you need.]

Mission accomplished

You may already know this, but George Saunders has solved the problems of Iraq again. And I think I like this one better than the previous version.

Tongue, meet cheek

"Suddenly two hefty men armed to the teeth spring out of a white van and make their way down the steps to the platform. Their target is the humble leaf, more specifically those crushed on to the tracks. Their arsenal is a solution of orange extract, a steel brush and a tub of sand. Each has recently consumed a kebab and they mean business." -- Julia Stewart of The Independent heads out on the case of leaves on the line. The later revelation that Network Rail spends £10m a year on "vegetation management" makes it slightly less funny.

[Service message: There will now be a few weeks' moratorium on rail-related links. Wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea.]

Parallel world dept.

Every once in a while, something gets pushed at me that I cannot imagine having imagined. The usual portal is BBC Radio Four. On this occasion, that means its In Touch programme, and the issue is the eternal war between guide dogs and escalators.

Guide dogs, you see, are meant to be able to take you everywhere, and escalators are not meant to be walked with paws. In America and, by the looks of it, Australia, they train you to walk the dog up, in the belief that you'll do it anyway. In Britain they tell you to carry the dog, and concentrate on teaching you how to balance while holding something heavy and alive.

It's a Tube thing, apparently. New escalators will be dog-friendly, but given that old ones could hang around for decades -- see this wonderful piece for more on the subject -- that may not be much of a comfort.

The international style

"Cornflower blue are women's eyes by the mighty wine. Boy are they ever. Recently he beat her black and blue, see? And then her brother said, Now that guy is in for a big blue surprise, and gave him a good beating. Once again he got off lightly, with a black-and-blue eye. That's fine. But now let's hope Annemarie will stop pulling blue wool over her eyes about him. Even she can't be that blue-eyed." -- Christa Wolf, Associations in Blue, trans Jan van Heurck.

That reads as if it was impossible to translate (ever had a black-and-blue eye?). Fair enough, it also reads as if it was very good in German. But Christa Wolf has donated it to Telling Tales, a charity story anthology with acknowledgments to publishers not only in Britain, the US and Germany, but in Italy, France, China, Russia, Taiwan, Brazil, Greece and Hungary -- and also a shout-out to "all other publishing houses who are in the process of following suit." Perhaps she's trying to teach mere English readers (or mere Magyar readers) a lesson.

[Telling Tales, edited by Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury, 2004). Collection of stories raising money for AIDS treatment in southern Africa. Could be considered a sort of literary Live Aid -- there's a sentence in the introduction beginning "Musisicians have given their talents..." -- if only the performances weren't old and good and the setlist wasn't so unbelievably impressive. Don't let sour me put you off.]

Unintended consequences

"Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's as we know it, is not mentioned in Not on the Label or Shopped, in spite of his interest in the mass production of standardised french fries. But without the car there would be no McDonald's - and there would be no supermarkets. It isn't a coincidence that the publication of the Beeching Report on The Reshaping of British Railways in 1963 came between the opening of Tesco's first big store, in Leicester in 1961 (16,500 square feet), and Asda's first, in Nottingham in 1965 (70,000 square feet). Beeching accepted that cars and lorries had finished off the stopping train and the slow goods train (except for those carrying coal) as economic entities." -- Hugh Pennington, half-defending supermarkets, London Review of Books November 18. If you've done the sensible thing and subscribed, the actual piece is here.

This is an strong enough passage in itself. But my attention stopped dead three-quarters of the way through and started shouting: "You live in the birthplace of the British supermarket!" It took me a while to get back on track after that.

Oh, and there is one other interesting thing about supermarkets, in the context of this issue of the LRB. Unlike US policy in Guatemala, Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, the shortening of URLs or the lives of Anne Boleyn and Lord Cromer, they don't appear to have anything to do with the Iraq war. (Last two links subscriber again. Sorry.)

If this magazine is true...

Possibly first in a series. Possibly just a cheap gag.

Magazine: New York, November 15.

Proposition: According to page 78, there is at least one woman living somewhere near New York capable of starting a sentence: "Some of my A-list friends say..." If her tone is correctly represented, she is not being sarcastic.

Consequence: Standards of plausibility in fictional dialogue will have to be reassessed. Crap potboilers will prove to be documents of scary accuracy, in the manner of supermarket tabloids in the Men in Black movies.

Likelihood of truth: Depressingly high.

All work, no play

"That is the real curse of Adam; not the work in itself but the worry and doubt of ever getting it done; perhaps the doubt, also, whether, after all, it ought to be done, or done at the price. All your working year you chase some phantom moment at which you might fairly say 'Now I am there.' Then Easter comes; you sail your own boat through a night of dirty weather from the Mersey to the Isle of Man; and, as you lower sail in Douglas harbour, you are there; no phantom this time; the curse of Adam is taken clean off you, at any rate for that morning. Or those seeds that you sowed in the back garden on that thrilling Saturday evening amaze and exalt you by coming up, and you learn in your proper person what the joys of discovery and creaion are; you have, so far, succeeded in life and done what it piqued you to do in this world. All play, of course, and the victory tiny. Still, on its own scale and for its miniature lifetime, the little model is perfect; the humble muddler has come nearer than anything else is likely to bring him to feeling what the big triumphs of human power must taste like." -- The Right Place, by CE Montague

It's possible that, stripped of its stylistic brass band, this might be quite a commonplace commonplace. But isn't the brass band lovely?

[The Right Place, by CE Montague (Chatto and Windus, 1924). I have gone on about this gentleman before. Not much to add, except this is his book on what would now be called tourism (although he thinks you can do it at home, too) and seems prettier in patches but weaker overall than Disenchantment. Astonishing passage about the historical beauties of First World War battlefields, and the joy of being sent to them: the biographical details that make it piquant are still here.]

Best Library of Congress boilerplate ever

"1. Soccer fans -- Great Britain. 2. Hoodlums -- Great Britain. 3. Soccer -- Social Aspects -- Great Britain. I. Title." -- Bill Buford, Among the Thugs.

In aggravation (if that's the legal opposite of mitigation -- is it? Is there one?), my US copy also includes both a glossary explaining the terms "ground" and "Underground" and repeated uses of "stadium" and "subway".

[Among the Thugs, by Bill Buford (W.W. Norton, 1991). A distguished literary editor (here, here) descends into football hooliganism with the gusto of a writer who believes he is describing a new emotion. That feeling is the ecstasy of crowd violence, and descent and description are both frightening.]

Judge character the Jackie Chan way

"[Maggie] Cheung has been a fixture of Asian superstardom for 21 years and has won more acting awards in China than any other woman. She started out as Jackie Chan's long-suffering, slapsticky girlfriend, May, in the goofy action-oriented Police Story movies. (Chan said that when he first saw Cheung on Hong Kong TV, she struck him as someone who 'wouldn't mind me kicking her down a flight of stairs'.)" -- New York Times Magazine, November 14. Style slightly anglicised. Link, which in any case requires registration, will start to cost money soonish.

[The lack of posts for the last ten days or so is because I was on holiday. It is not to be confused with the long gaps in posting before then, which were because I am lazy.]

Sors Virgiliana, Nov 3

"Sometimes you meet, coming down the leafy path along which you are walking, a man dressed as Napoleon; as he talks to you you look at him with distrust, pity and amusement -- carefully do not look, rather. But as the two of you walk along, and people come up with wallpaper designs full of Imperial bees, rashly offer their condolences on the death of the duc d'Enghien, ask for a son's appointment as Assistant Quartermaster-General of the army being sent to the Peninsula, you realize that it is not he but his whole society that has 'lost touch with reality'" -- Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

[Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell (Faber, 1954). Exhaustingly witty academic and literary satire. You are never more than four sentences away from an epigram. Lots of interesting stuff on the difficulty of seeing other people as fully human; which points up, possibly deliberately, the not-quite-humanness of everybody here described.]

Any context would do

I suspect Zoe Williams has been waiting a while to use "like playing Monopoly with someone who eats the money". And if she hasn't, she could have.

New and old

James Marcus's Amazonia is meant, among other things, to evoke the extent of late-90s internet euphoria; but it also shows the euphoria's limits, which are less talked about.

This bit is about an appearance on CNN, just before the curve turns. Jeff = Amazon's Jeff Bezos, for whom Marcus was a justly glorified blurb-writer.

"My cue was approaching. I had rehearsed my lines and knew exactly what I was going to say to the boy-and-girl anchor team in Atlanta. Moments before I went live, however, I heard some excited crosstalk in my earpiece: Jeff had been anointed [Time magazine] Person of the Year! They would be making the announcement in just a few minutes! At once it dawned on me that this little segment, which would allow me to preach the gospel of books to my biggest audience ever, was simply an appetizer for the main event: a lengthy celebration of my employer. Well, he had earned it."

In a book on the high-season web, that is, a magazine and an appearance on cable TV generate some of the greatest excitement, and offer the biggest audience. I don't think he's trying to do hindsight, either.

[Amazonia, by James Marcus (New Press, 2004). Humanist version of the rich-and-then-not story. Style nods occasionally -- the subtitle is "Five years at the epicenter of the dot.com juggernaut", which was almost enough to make me put it down straight away -- but in general it's rather good.]

Phrase of the week

"Honey laundering."

This is the business of attempting to smuggle possibly antibiotic-tainted Chinese honey into the EU via third countries, and was described on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme. In the event that you're here in time to listen again to the programme, do: it also has a wonderfully enthusiastic interview with a pollen expert, of a kind I find hard to imagine occurring anywhere else.

Compulsory irony

"'The Chauci --' How old was he then? Twenty-four? It was his first campaign. He began again. 'The Chauci, I remember, dwelt on high wooden platforms to escape the treacherous tides of that region. They gathered mud with their bare hands, which they dried in the freezing north wind, and burnt for fuel. To drink they consumed only rainwater, which they collected in tanks at the front of their houses -- a sure sign of their lack of civilisation. Miserable bloody bastards, the Chauci.' He paused. 'Leave that last bit out.'" -- Pliny the Elder dictates, in Robert Harris's Pompeii.

It's not quite fair to call this bit the compulsory irony: that comes a couple of hundred pages earlier, when the villain tells the hero there is no investment sounder than property in Pompeii. But it does send two messages vital for the modern historical novelist:

i) I have done my research. Lots of it.

ii) Don't worry. I'm not going to take it seriously.

Harris is far more competent at this game than most people who attempt it, but it still feels faintly cynical.

[Pompeii, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, 2003). Romance and thrills among the falling pumice, naturally, but also a surprising amount of engineering. If that is the sort of thing you like, this will be the sort of thing you love.]

The Brits have a word for it

If you live in the UK and feel superior to US political culture, it may interest you to know that in Washington, chugging appears to be a nameless novelty.

[This is the start of a plan to post occasional stray thoughts here, and journalistic quotations, as well as bits of books. I am still likely to read more than I think, however.]

A teenage girl's view of Rome

"To me, the thought of Rome -- a city adorned with genitalia rather than vinyl siding and stucco -- seemed improbable. I had to see this place. In the weeks leading up to the trip's charter airline departure, I kept waiting for a TV studio buzzer to sound, for an audience to shriek at me, telling me that it was all a big prank." -- Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby.

A work colleague of mine has just set off for a holiday in Rome. It took me a worrying amount of effort not to quote that at her.

[Eleanor Rigby, by Douglas Coupland (Fourth Estate, 2004). May be considered a more satisfactory answer to a friend of mine's question about Douglas Coupland characters and ageing; more satisfactory altogether, in fact, than many of his recent novels, despite the standard slide into fantasy.]

Form burial

"Beginning on the second day, whenever a patient appeared to be moribund, a piece of paper with his name on it was fastened to his clothing. The corpse detail carried the bodies outside, placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses, burned them, put some of the ashes in envelopes intended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the envelopes with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly and respectfully, in stacks in the main office. In a few days, the envelopes filled one whole side of the impromptu shrine" -- John Hersey, Hiroshima.

The second day is the second day after the bomb. If you look at the lines immediately above, this passage is about a reassertion of respectability: "Disposal of the dead," the line goes, "by decent ceremony and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living." It seems chilling in a way that set-up doesn't point to, however.

[Hiroshima, by John Hersey (Penguin, 1946). I read the Mary McCarthy attack on this thing (quoted somewhere downpage here; it's in this book) long before I read the thing itself. The journalistic stiff-neckedness she twits him for is real, but proves in some way a strength: if you aren't Dante, better not to try to interview the dead.]

Zeugmatic

"The city itself was a revelation and a hope for this skinny little light-brown kid crossing the river on the train, passing through the slums of Herne Hill and Brixton from the suburbs. It was intimidating, a grand imperial metropolis full of massive statues: blank-faced men covered in bird-shit and medals, who had commanded armies and ruled nations. That was the Empire for me: decline, and these relics." -- Hanif Kureishi, My Ear at His Heart.

Zeugma, for the non-littish, is the governing of incompatible nouns by a single verb. In English, with so many verbs to choose from, it tends to be contrived and therefore comic -- "She left in tears and a sedan chair"; Flanders and Swann; The Rape of the Lock. Here, however, it isn't, and serves to do interesting damage to the meaning of "medals".

[My Ear at his Heart, by Hanif Kureishi (Faber and Faber, 2004). H.K. reads the manuscripts of his father's novels, using them to place dad's "semi-broken existence" in relation to his own, more successful life. A middle-aged book: there's lots about turning 50, and revelations include that there used to be more second-hand bookshops, that London's avant-gardes were less cliquey in the 70s, and that there were once lots of good songs on the radio.]

Class action

"Since Titus had come to Great Mop Laura had seen little of Mrs. Leak. Mrs. Leak knew what good manners were; she had not been a housemaid at Lazzard Court for nothing. Taken separately, either Titus or his aunt might be human beings, but in conjunction they became gentry. Mrs. Leak remembered her position and withdrew to it, firmly." --Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes.

Of course, when you become a witch -- as Laura has just done -- being gentry ceases to matter as much. Mrs. Leak will be inviting her to covens in no time.

[Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Chatto & Windus, 1926). Middle-aged woman sells soul to devil rather than spend the rest of her life as a favourite aunt. Tonally a bit uneven -- the devil's jokes, when he appears, seem to belong in a broader comedy -- it nonetheless casts a spell.]

The (fantasy) lives of animals

"Some thought seemed to be striking Moretobello every now and again; it had had a dream, that night, which was why it had left the stall and felt lost to the world that morning: a dream of forgotten things which seemed to come from another life; of wide grassy plains filled with cows, endless cows, coming lowing towards it. And it had seen itself, there in the middle of them, running about in the herd of cows as if looking for something." -- Italo Calvino, in the story 'Father to Son', in Adam, One Afternoon. Moretobello is an ox, in a valley where mules do most of the lifting.

"The old mule went on putting down its hoofs uncertainly on the surface pitted with flints and new holes; its skin was stretched tight with the impression on it; it had suffered so much in its life that nothing could make any impression on it any more. It was walking along with its muzzle bent down, and its eyes, limited by the black blinkers, were noticing all sorts of things; snails, broken by the shelling, spilling an iridescent slime on the stones: ant-hills ripped open and the black and white ants hurrying hither and thither with eggs; torn-up grasses showing strange hairy roots like trees." -- The same, in the same book, in the story 'Hunger at Bevera'.

These passages were written before (I think) Calvino became declaredly a fantasist; you are in the middle of some politically loaded slice of peasant life, and suddenly the animals are seeing more vividly, and feeling more deeply, than the rural proletarians who own them. It's an odd effect. I'm glad I don't have to guess what it signifies.

[Adam, One Afternoon, and other stories, by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright (Collins, 1957; but before that Einaudi, 1949). Short short stories of the working-class during and after WW2. It's not just self-willed beasties that upset things -- the amoral little boys may be even spookier.]

Obvious reasons

"Philip met her eyes, and smiled quickly. After which he looked away, and said something she could not possibly have been anticipating. '"What is the name of your goldfish?"'

"Lois frowned. 'I beg your pardon?'

"'"What is the name of your goldfish?" That was the first thing I ever said to you. Do you remember?'

"'No -- when was this?'

"'Twenty-nine years ago. I was round at your parents' house. They threw a dinner party, for my Mum and Dad. You were wearing an incredibly low-cut dress. I couldn't take my eyes off your cleavage.'

"'I don't remember that at all,' Lois said. 'Anyway, I never even had a goldfish.'

"'I know. You were talking to my dad about Colditz, the television programme...'" -- Jonathan Coe, The Closed Circle.

The problem with linking two novels -- this one and The Rotters' Club, in which you can read 'live' the conversation discussed above -- over a gap of 30-something years is that your characters have to keep telling one another their back stories. The advantage is that 'Do you remember?' conversations really happen, and feel less awkward when represented in a double-book.

[The Closed Circle, by Jonathan Coe (Viking, 2004). Second part of The Rotters' Club -- preplanned, so it's unfair to call it a sequel -- set 1999-2003. The less attractive end of the pantomime horse; strong on middle-aged defeat, but weak on Blairism, of which it's in part a satire. The first book's little Thatcherite is now a new Labour MP. Thing is, when he's meant to have been reading Milton Friedman in bed, most future newLabourites were far-left chisellers at the NUS.]