RosieBell

Gig - Sunday 1 March

From the flyer:- "Disagree with low wages, long hours and welfare reforms while the banks are given billions?  Then come to Rock Against the Work Ethic for a night of songs, laughs and stories with Freeloadin' Frank & Friends at the Forest Cafe on Sunday March 1st 7pm." Free.

The Forest Cafe is on Forrest Road, Edinburgh.  I'll be doing a few numbers.

Getting Ideas

Also from Salon while discussing chick lit Rebecca Traister links to George Eliot’s essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, which is superb – clever, witty and annihilating.

The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. . .

In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty. She is under stood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well.

Eliot could sometimes be elephantine in her humour, but here she is perfect, hitting the 180 each time.

When she moves from the absurdities of what she calls the “mind-and-millinery” school of novels (i.e. about the upper class with the church established) to the shortcomings of novels written to entertain young women from an evangelical Christian background, you can see how she is thinking:- that’s a missed opportunity, why can’t someone do it properly.

It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist, than in any other, gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of Evangelicalism - and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it -- lies among the middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the mighty? Why then, cannot our Evangelical lady novelists show us the operation of their religious views among people (there really are many such in the world) who keep no carriage, "not so much as a brassbound gig," who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in whose mouths the authoress's questionable English would be strictly consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's pictures of religious life among the negroes?

Which of course is what George Eliot went on to do in Felix Holt, in Adam Bede, in Silas Marner and in Middlemarch.

Women Writing

Article at Salon about an interesting sounding book by Elaine Showalter:-

"A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx." Billed as "the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000," "A Jury of Her Peers" has to negotiate the treacherous battlefield between the still-widespread, if fustian insistence on reverence for Great Writers and the pixelated theorizing of poststructuralists hellbent on overturning the very notion of "greatness."

Unquestionably erudite, she has always striven to communicate with nonacademic readers, and her prose is clear, cogent and frequently clever. She has insisted that themes central to women's lives -- marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations -- constitute subject matter as "serious" and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing "culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction," and she doesn't hesitate to describe some of the writers discussed in "A Jury of Her Peers" as artistically limited, if historically interesting.

I’ve always found Showalter a pleasure to read – she has sensibility; she has sense; and her theories are made from what she observes, rather than from what ought to be in a pre-conceived view of the world.

Why, for example, did Britain produce several women novelists of genius during the 19th century -- Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës, as well as accomplished lesser artists like Elizabeth Gaskell -- while America did not? That question could (and sometimes does) lead to a lot of speculation on the national characters of the English-speaking peoples, but Showalter mentions an equally plausible, practical cause: "While English women novelists, even those as poor as the Brontës, had servants, American women were expected to clean, cook and sew; even in the South, white women in slaveholding families were trained in domestic arts." Quite a few of the short biographical sketches she offers feature women complaining about being compelled by parents to learn to make pies or mend when they would rather write. In 1877, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps made the heroine of her novel, "The Story of Avis," fume, "I hate to make my bed, and I hate, hate to sew chemises, and I hate, hate, hate to go cooking round the kitchen."

The lack of domestic service is interesting.  While watching the series John Adams I had wondered at Abigail Adams’s constantly carrying out household and farming tasks, considering her husband’s position as a lawyer.  But it isn’t true of Emily Bronte, for instance, who used to make the bread while reading German – admittedly you can study while kneading bread and waiting for it to rise more easily than doing other sorts of cooking.  All right, I’ll concede that as a possible reason.

“They [American women] felt hemmed in by the need to observe a ladylike decorum and to disavow any great literary ambition.”

But American women were notably freer than Englishwomen during the nineteenth century – whenever there is an encounter between them in eg Little Women the easy Americans are compared to the stuffy, class conscious English.  Trollope observed how much freer an American young lady was, being able to go out independently and make friends with young men. So I don’t think that is right.

I would say that in the nineteenth century British novelists both female and male outclassed the Americans.  Think of the substantial bodies of work by Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Trollope, Gissing, Stevenson and James, (an honorary Englishman) compared to Melville (okay, I can’t get through Moby Dick and Typhee is silly facetiousness) Twain (brilliant but limited in scope), Hawthorne (very slight) and Howells. 

Put it down to an older culture with an established literary tradition competing with a newer culture whose literary tradition is still in a raw state. 

The Cynic, the Lunatic

The Voice of Modern Hatred by Nicholas Fraser is a journalist’s view of the European far right.  Good British liberal that he is, the author spends a lot of time nauseated and vomiting after interviewing the likes of Faurisson and Le Pen.

In his cramped, book-filled Left Bank apartment, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet threw up his hands when I said that I was shocked by the fact that 15 per cent of the French electorate had voted for Le Pen  “Of course it’s awful,” he said.  “The man is either a cynic or a lunatic.  He believes the moon is made of green cheese.  And his triumph makes nonsense of our belief that man is a rational creature.”

Where did he get the idea that man is a rational creature? Reasonable, intelligent, civilised people find it hard to understand how the self-evident idiocy of fascism appeals to a sufficient number of people.

Words from the arch lunatic and arch cynic:-

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.  Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.  But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction.

The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotion of the masses, the more effective it will be.  And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.  The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.

Mein Kampf

Phoney Spring

So today it could have been April with blue skies, sun and breezy.  I went out on a cycle.  Crocuses were well out in the Meadows. 

My bicycle’s gears haven’t been working too well lately and on one change the cycle came to a dead stop.  So I investigated and found that the chain was clogged up with dried mud – in fact everything was clogged up with dried mud, and the chain hadn’t been oiled for months.  No wonder the gears had crunched and complained.  I cleared away the worst of it and continued to Newhailes House,  by Musselburgh, which once belonged to a grand family called the Dalrymples but now the National Trust looks after it, and there are streams, a half ruined grotto and today there were snowdrops in the woods.

 

This is the phoney spring, because there will be wind, sleet and snow to come before the real spring arrives, but it is on its way.

The present downturn/recession/Depression is phoney for me so far, since I still have a job.  The government though would like me to borrow money and spend.  This is totally against how I was brought up, which was if you knew times ahead were likely to be lean, you didn’t spend money you hadn’t got and might not get.  I bet Gordon Brown was brought up in the same way.

Strange Creatures

Last night watched:-

Phil Cunningham’s Grace Notes - a good programme about Scottish church music.  As I would have guessed the Calvinist sods cut the number of usable tunes down to twelve and you were only allowed to sing psalms, as they alone were God’s word.  So for hundreds of years the Kirk was not profaned by using the excellent Scottish folk tunes for sacred purpose nor were lyricists allowed to interpret God’s words there.  They really were the Taliban, that lot.

Iran and the West – last in an interesting series, with interviews with people like Khatami, former President, who came across as a thoroughly genial, likeable and sane human being.  Iran and the USA seemed to miss out on possible rapprochement because of ideological hard liners on both sides.  However, new days may be coming now with the Obama administration.

   

Heavenly Creatures - a favourite film of mine directed by Peter Jackson, utterly unlike Lord of the Rings.  It was Kate Winslet’s first part and she was okay as the prima donna Juliet Hume, but Melanie Lynskey who played the other member of their folie a deux, was brilliant, scowling, her hair springing with the fury of thwarted adolescence and her eyes cold with hatred. The scenes between the girls’ parents when the sophisticated Hulmes and the homely Riepers, met awkwardly in their class difference and in the lack of language for this disturbing love, worked well.  So quiet respectable Christchurch was the scene for a strange murder – one that outraged the world – Evelyn Waugh mentioned it, and when would Christchurch of New Zealand ever have come onto his radar?   The frightening joyousness and pitiless impracticality of the young which in other societies would take them into Hitler Youth or the Cultural Revolution.  Their murderous dreams.

Frighteningly Local

Horrible news in Edinburgh:-

A YOUNG woman was subjected to a rape ordeal lasting seven hours after she was dragged from a path near a busy supermarket by two men in the middle of the afternoon.

The 24-year-old woman was sprayed in the face with a noxious substance that rendered her temporarily blind.

The men, who had Eastern European accents, then dragged her through scrub and undergrowth into a concealed, makeshift den 15 yards from a Lidl store where she was repeatedly raped until her release at 10pm on Monday.

Despite screaming loudly two or three times, the woman was unable to attract attention because the shelter was covered over, and screened from view by trees. On being released, she was able to run home and raise the alarm.

The woman, originally from Australia, was attacked at about 3pm as she walked home in Edinburgh. The two men struck as she walked out of the Telfer subway leading from the Fountainbridge leisure park to Orwell Terrace in Dalry.

How horrible.  How terrifying -  I've gone along this path hundreds of times, on cycle and on foot, always alone. 

Update:- When you go through the underpass from Fountainbridge you can turn left on a path which runs parallel with the Western Approach Road.  That goes by a playground and wasteland, and I thought it was there that the young woman must have been walking.  The underpass is usually busy, and the busker that plays there whistling to his guitar is a fixture.  But I usually go through there after 5pm, on my way to the swimming pool, when there are always people about. At 3pm in the afternoon it must have been quiet and the guys took their chances.  A couple of them have been charged.

A colleague who used to live in Dalry and I talked about it, agreeing that the area isn’t particularly rough and there’s none of the menacing feeling that you get in some housing estates.  I’ve walked around Edinburgh’s inner city streets alone late at night for years, so does another friend of mine, and have never been much bothered by it. This happening in the afternoon in daylight is a one-off, so should not make women fearful.

Another friend said that her colleagues were talking about it – one saying, “Faahking Portugese” (meaning Polish).

A couple of guys have been charged.

Blossom Dearie

Blossom Dearie
April 28 1924 to 7 February 2009

I have just found out that Blossom Dearie is dead.  It was quite a shock, as I hadn’t realised she was so old.  She was one of the great New York dames and I’d always had the dream that I would see her perform.

Her voice is girlish and a little coy and cute – it never seemed to go with the name “Blossom Dearie”.  She could do the sad songs and the humorous ones eg “I’m hip”.

According to Wikipedia:- “In 1974, Dearie established her own label, Daffodil Records, which allowed her to have full control of the recording and distribution of her albums.”  A pioneer in that?

So now she’s playing in the great supper club in the sky in front of an audience elegantly sipping Martinis and looking cool.

Blossom Dearie and Bob Dorough perform “Baby it’s Cold Outside” by Frank Loesser. From the album Needlepoint Magic recorded live at Reno Sweeney (the mp3 doesn't make a noise on my home PC but does on my work PC).

Respect or else

Over at Butterflies and Wheels there is a short discussion about tolerance and the “respect” the everyone is demanding these days.

“"I would love to respect your beliefs - but respect has to be earned."

“Respecting someone's right to hold a worldview, or just a view, does not imply that one should respect the view itself.”

"I respect you to hold a belief - but for me to respect that belief, it would have to be earned."

There are suggestions about turning these sentences into a bus slogan, but Ophelia Benson opines,

"It's really not bus slogan material. Not many ideas worth thinking about are."

Ophelia has earned my respect over the years but I think she’s wrong there:-

Fire in Australia

An email from my sister:-

After we left Tasmania, John and I had three nights back on the mainland before flying home to NZ. 

I wanted to see rural Victoria, so we rented a car, Tuesday Dec 17th.

We went to Craigieburn, Yarra Glen, Marysville, Healsville, Yarrawarra: passed cute place names like Badger's Creek and Cockatoo. Just exploring, finding cafes, then pubs for dinner.

In my diary: 'very pretty, affluent looking, farmland, vineyards, and several million eucalyptus trees'

Many of these places are no more: they burnt in the fires.

At Healsville, evening: 'our little motel unit backs onto the bush. Hoping to hear birdsong in the morning.'

Gallery here.