A provincial hack's commonplace book
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.
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.
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.
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.
Paul Isaacs has a new blog. With embarrassing speed, it will be better than this one. But I told you first.
"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.]
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.
A friend overseas forwards me this month-old gem. Couldn't happen to a nicer paper.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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. ]
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.)
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.]
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
