War correspondents vs tipsters

Some newspaper-bashing for balance. This is a soldier's cogent explanation of why horse racing ceased during the First World War. Unfortunately, because of C.E. Montague's way with non-RP dialogue, it appears to be spoken by Dick Van Dyke:

The pipers done it. Want to get aht o' pyin' a fair wige to a taht for 'angin' abaht Noomawket 'Eath. It tikes a man o' skill to watch a maw'nin gallop. Not like war correspondin'. Naow use feedin' backers a bag of emowshnal bilge abaht 'eroes an' cheery wounded an' any old muck. A taht must know 'is job. An' wiges accordin'...

-- from "The First Blood Sweep", in Montague's short story collection Fiery Particles.

[Fiery Particles, by C.E. Montague, London, 1923. Scarcely better than the Montague Cockney is the Montague Irishman, distinguished by his fondness for apostrophes and anti-semitism. This collection gives you him at war and at peace. It still manages some penetrating writing, though. The best story is probably "Honours Easy", in which two privileged officers far from the front compete to collect medals. One hunts blue ribbons, the other red. Montague despises them both, but he would never go so far as to transcribe their accents phonetically.]

The Home Office vs the media

The Criminal Records Bureau will "make no apology for erring on the side of caution"; or, to put it another way, for giving 1,500 people the criminal records of those with vaguely similar names. A newspaper that made this kind of mistake -- sorry, "mismatch" -- would expect to grovel publicly and hand over thousands of pounds, perhaps tens of thousands if the namesake's crime was serious.

Now, you can argue that the CRB has a civic responsibility on these matters and the press does not. But the existence of libel exemptions for reports of court cases would suggest the law disagrees with you (look here and scroll down to "absolute privilege").

These exemptions do not, of course, cover accidentally besmirching the innocent. I'm not a lawyer; for all I know, the CRB may be luckier on that one. But it would be nice if they had any requirement to examine the facts and check them with rigour.

Premodifying for class

Language Log appear to have Mark Steyn bang (and bang and possibly bang) to rights on the question of unattributed inspiration from this post by Geoffrey K. Pullum.

But Mark Liberman's latest consideration of the matter raises a potential excuse for some of the apparent echoes in Mr Steyn's piece: that he got his idea from an editor at the Daily Telegraph, who may of course have lifted it first. In an update, Prof Liberman quotes a paragraph from the Telegraph's Sam Leith pointing to the omitted "the" in the first sentence of the Da Vinci Code ("Renowned curator Jacques Saunière" and so on) and says he

might have come up with this idea independently, or he might have gotten it from Pullum and thought it didn't rise to journalistic standards of sharing credit, or he might have gotten it from someone who got it from Pullum.

There's no heavy accusation against Leith -- Liberman goes on to call it "a small thing" -- but I'd like to suggest a reason why a Telegraph editor would be disposed to notice this point independently.

In British newspaper journalism, what Geoffrey Pullum calls the anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier isn't just a thing that crops up from time to time; it's a form with connotations -- in particular, one associated with more downmarket newspapers.

The Guardian's online style book specifically bans it (look here and scroll down to the entry for "the"), calling it "beloved of the tabloids" into the bargain. I can't find an equivalent proscription in the Times style guide, but a glance over the first seven pages of May 17's paper produced no AONPs and 30 forms doing the same job: premodifiers with "the" or a possessive pronoun, or job titles or affiliations given parenthetically between commas after names. I tried the same exercise for the Telegraph (seven broadsheet pages this time, rather than tabloid, but two of them adverts) and found four AONPs against 36 similar constructions.

The picture changes as you go downmarket. The Daily Mail, considered a midmarket tabloid, had 22 AONPs to 18 other constructions. (There's a particular rash of the parenthetical ones in a story about a prize for its sports columnist, which may support the idea of them as a "prestige" form.) The Daily Mirror, downmarket again, ran 37 to nine.

This is not enough to suggest the Telegraph actively discourages AONPs, but I do think they're a class signifier in British journalism, and style-conscious British journalists -- Sam Leith included -- may be expected to notice them.

That would get Mark Steyn off his first hook. Like Dave, however, I'm afraid I can't help him with the others.

The art of taking offence

Working on a regional paper changes the way you read. You begin to scan each text for references to your circulation area; and, although you probably try not to be conscious of it, you prefer the disparaging. Drawing your readers' attention to an insult and then loudly defending them from it promotes the togetherness on which local journalism thrives.

(This may be one reason why maligned and misunderstood places - shitholes, if you want to take the outsider's view - tend to nourish newspapers. Think of Wolverhampton and Dudley, with their paper bigger than the two Birmingham ones combined. Think of Aberdeen, with its two papers each larger than the prestigious Edinburgh equivalent.)

Also to be considered, especially if you're in a shithole, is the frisson of agreement some of your readers will feel at the insult. When I worked in Aberdeen for a few months, a friend told me to read Christopher Brookmyre's A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away, which gives the place several pages of full-on comic crying-down. I tried the local library, but all 23 copies were on loan.

There are five copies of Geoff Dyer's riff on DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, in all Nottingham and Nottinghamshire's libraries, and only two of them are in Eastwood. A shame, because his curses upon Eastwood and Notts are first-rate: "Lawrence country - north of Shakespeare's county, south of the Bronte country, bang in the middle of motorway country... there is no getting away from the fact that Eastwood is an ugly little town in an ugly little county".

Perhaps Dyer's whitewater-rafting version of the stream-of-consciousness narrative has kept Eastwoodians out. Perhaps it prevented filleting of the book by the people who would tell them to be offended. Or maybe the gatekeepers were distracted by the quality of the other jokes - this is a man who gathers momentum even as he describes depressed inactivity:

It went on for a couple of months. Laura went to work while I stayed home and did nothing. I read nothing and did nothing. I spent most of the time watching TV which may not sound so extreme but this was mornings and afternoons, it was Italian TV and - the clincher - the TV wasn't even turned on.

Something must be done. Do you think we could start a campaign to ban Out of Sheer Rage in Notts? I regret that I have come to the question so late, but the publicity would still surely bring others to the pleasures of this book. We might even get the libraries up to 23 copies.

But I only left it for a minute...

One word: Aaaargh.

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. ]