RosieBell

Happy Pedant

Spring, and I was out in the garden planting seeds and clearing winter debris while listening to Radio 4's Saturday afternoon play An American Rose.  This slot is usually good, the play often based on some event in  history or an actual person.  Today's was about Rosemary Kennedy, the Kennedy daughter who had mental problems and was lobotomised, and her lively sister Kathleen, a war widow, who was killed in a flying accident.   It was well written and well acted, but I was happy to find two anachronisms.

Rose Kennedy scolds her daughters for lying on their beds wearing "designer gowns".  This is the 1930s - was "designer" used as an adjective then?  Wouldn't she have said "haute couture" or just "couture"?

Someone is described as a "commitmentphobe".   They certainly had the thing then, but the word?  That is very recent - appearing in the last 20 or 30 years I would have said.

Kathleen Kennedy

When I say I was "happy" to find two anachronisms, I'm remembering Hazlitt's remark:- "He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.' 

The bloke next door said I must be pleased to be gardening again since I missed last year, having been absent from my flat because of its half destruction by pipes bursting upstairs on Boxing Day 2010.  He cheered me up by saying last year had been a terrible gardening year.  It rained a good deal and courgettes rotted.

Unholy trinity

One way to get rhythm in a saying, sentence or paragraph, is to use words or concepts in threes.  Threes are very satisfactory, like "burn, pillage and rape" or "blood, sweat and tears."  Churchill originally said "blood, toil, tears and sweat", but the toil has been dropped by popular memory and the result sounds more satisfying.

So this is how the Observer film reviewer, Philip French, gave his paragraph a pleasant ring:- 

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

That's threes for you.  You make each word or concept seem of about equal weight. Blood=sweat=tears. So here Nazi invaders=oppressive communist regime=American criminal justice system. There's loads wrong with the American criminal justice system but it's not quite down there with Nazi persecution and communist oppression.

We now have life of persecution=flight=threat of incarceration.  The life of persecution and flight were the plight of the innocent victim, the threat of incarceration was for a criminal act - rape, in fact, with the girl being the victim. and Polanski in this case, with the misuse of his power as a Hollywood prince, being the Nazi persecutor and communist oppressor in his little domestic way.   

However, it seems a "newfound sense of freedom" led him to "transgression."  "Transgression" these days usually refers to edgy art, e.g. a sculpture of the Virgin Mary made out of used tampons and sanitary pads*. It's a wet word for crime.   Next time someone assaults Philip French and nicks his wallet, let's see if he'll call that "transgression". 

Also, if  a "new found sense of freedom" leads to such acts, shouldn't we start tightening up border controls against refugees and asylum seekers, especially the male ones?

If Polanski is making films then people can review them.  What I can't go along with is false equivalences of events that were done to him and actions he carried out, he being seen as a victim in one instance because he was a victim in two others.  Nor can I bear this kind of cod psychologising and this blurring of what wasn't a "transgression" but lust for nymphet flesh along with the piece of power and entitlement that are given to Hollywood's big shots.

* Any installation artist who nicks this idea had better give me some credit

Update:- I posted this as a comment on Philip French's article.  It has been removed.  By the look of the thread, a dozen other comments which took exception to this paragraph were removed as well.

Further update:- There's a discussion over at Crooked Timber among other Guardian Deleterati.

For those who can't remember the Great and Good's inconsistencies and double standards over the Polanski affair, read here.

Fact and Fiction

The Staggers, as in "staggering ever faster down an intellectual and moral slope", has this piece by Stephen Baxter about the Damascus Gay Girl blog, now known to be a hoax perpetrated by an American called Tom MacMaster.

The piece is sub-headed with one of those annoying questions:-

The "Gay Girl in Damascus" blog was a product of an American man's imagination. But does it matter?

YES IT ******** DOES!!!!   There's all the difference in the world between a real life Syrian activist being taken off by the security forces and some bloke wanking in Edinburgh as he knocks out lesbian porn scenes.  

MacMaster's blog may have been fictional, but he says it was rooted in fact. He wasn't there in Syria, seeing and experiencing the things his blogging persona claimed to be seeing and experiencing. He didn't have those feelings; he didn't have those thoughts. It must have taken a brilliant imagination to get Amina's story across. Does it matter that it was just that, a story, rather than a real first-hand account?

Well yes it ***** does again.  Stephen Baxter answers his question that on the whole, it was bad because of the difficulty that this will cause to genuine anonymous bloggers in repressive regimes.   But he has to go through this path of questioning to take you where a 10 year old child could point you to at once – the difference between fact and fiction, between stories and lies, especially lies which bring other people to grief.

The sadness is that MacMaster is, to my mind at least, a talented writer. I think part of the reason why Amina's story garnered so much interest was the brilliance of the realistic detail, the humanity of the story, the tenderness and empathy with which Amina's life was depicted. Look back through Amina's blogposts and you can find poetry, political posts and perfectly paced stories about emotional issues like coming out. See it for what it is - fiction - and you can admire the literary creation of MacMaster. If only he had presented it that way in the first place. If only he had.

The blog's gone off the air so I can't provide links.   But here's some of the poetry:-

Beyond the sea I watch her roam
The distant place where is her home
Upon the surf itself she walks
And like a nightingale she talks
She is gentle clean and pure
She is one with the azure
Coming towards me with the Tide
Across the waters I watch her glide

For her, I know, I’d lay down my life
If that, someday, would make her my wife
For all my sickness, she is the cure
If only she could come ashore;
Too close to her and I would drown
Before ever I could touch her radiant crown
I cry because I understand
She’s the Sea and I the Land

MacMaster says that when he writes poetry in Arabic it is stilted, but he is less embarrassed by it in English.  However, he is not a man who is easily embarrassed.  
 
MacMaster's blog started off as a place to publish his extracts from a supposedly autobiographical novel about a gay Syrian Muslim brought up in the USA.  This work has evidently been influenced by Rubyfruit Jungle, a well known lesbian novel of the 1970s.  The protagonist's girlfriends are shadowy,  the dialogue lacks snap and point, and there are scenes of tenderly smiling sentimentality but there's enough exotic background, both Syrian and American, to make it quite readable.  The protagonist, Amina, is a bit too marvellous - ever beautiful, ever courageous, ever sexy, ever seductive, ever sensitive, aware, right on, full of attitude.  A novel with such a piece of perfection as its central character reads like a conceited piece of wish fulfilment – which is what this blog was. 

 In fiction, including some of the best (eg Jane Eyre), the author will take as a hero someone they themselves are in the eye of God – braver, more resourceful, their virtue acknowledged and rewarded.  There is a close relation between fiction and day dreaming.  A work of fiction can tell embarrassing tales about how the author imagines himself – in schlock fiction the guy who can do everything and who gets the girl. 

So MacMaster created his magnificent woman Amina who then wrote what was supposedly non-fiction, about what was happening in Syria.   Through her he could voice his opinions about the ignorance of the West about Islam and his thoughts on Syrian history, politics and sectarianism.   She was his mouthpiece and mask that gave him the chance to talk quite dirty, calling Israelis "The Chosen" and so on.

He got carried away, and his fantasy interacted with the real world – a world where less glamorous and outstandingly brave people are dragged away by real security forces to have real and horrible things done to them.  That is what stops this story from being hilarious farce.

Slipshods and pedants

Lovely piece by Martin Amis about his father, Kingsley Amis’s, posthumous book, The King’s English.  When he writes about language or about people close to him, Martin Amis is at his best.

The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.

Rather bluffly, perhaps, Kingsley draws up the battle lines as a conflict between Berks and Wankers:

Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops, and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

I don’t think that was an inspired coinage from K Amis.  M Amis comes up with a better one, “punks” and “fogeys”, as the identifiers of the slipshod and pedantic.  As for me, I’d just stick to “slipshods" and "pedants" - especially as both words are onomatopoeic in this context - you can slide and elide “slipshod” ("slusha") and “pedant” is a word you can really enunciate precisely.

I read The King’s English as I would a novel, just as when I was young I read Current English Usage, .and can happily browse through Fowler’s Modern English Usage.  They were just phasing out grammar when I went to school but they hadn’t got quite rid of Latin, so I picked up the idea that what we speak and write has a history and structure and that the words had particular names and functions.  I taught English at University level for a couple of terms to people a few years younger than I, and it was difficult to explain some of Chaucer’s use of words to students who didn’t know what a noun or verb was. 

I’m a wanker/fogey/pedant of course, unless I’m with those pseudo-pedants who go on about split infinitives and so on, when I turn into a super-pedant who has learned about the evolution of language.  I like understanding the difference between “masterful” and “masterly”.   I roll my eyes when I read my well educated colleagues’ emails about setting up a meeting for Mark and I, or Ruth and myself will be on this conference call.   The words “me” and “I” turning up with a partner throws them.

Martin Amis ends his piece with tenderness:-

Two months before he died, Kingsley had a heavy fall after a good lunch ("At my age," as he used to say, "lunch is dinner") and banged his head on a stone step. Thereafter, by degrees, he became a pitiable and painfully disconcerting madcap. He kept trying, he tried and he tried, but he couldn't write; he couldn't read, or be read to; and his speech was like a mixture of The Cat in the Hat and Finnegans Wake. Aged 73, he had just finished a book on the King's English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

Plans for Kingsley's memorial service were quite far advanced when the typescript of the present book (then hardly more than a family rumour) was delivered to my door. I picked it up with a trepidation that the first few pages briskly dispersed. Here it was again, my father's voice – funny, resilient, erudite, with touches of very delicate feeling (see the entries under Brave and Gender), and, throughout, sublimely articulate. In truth, The King's English contains more concentrated artistic thrust than any of the five novels that followed his masterpiece of 1986, The Old Devils. The reason for this is, I think, clear enough. Love of life, like all human talents, weakens with age. But love of language, in his case, never did begin to fade.

Pendant's Coroner

Definition of Pendant's Coroner:- when someone corrects someone else’s grammar, punctuation, spelling or factual knowledge, and in the process makes a risible error or errors.   It derives from a thread on Harry’s Place when a commenter came to correct points of grammar, punctuation etc under the moniker (unintentional) of Pendant's Coroner.  

Here’s an example.  I bought The Observer on Sunday and leafing through the glossy magazine came across one of those “Lifestyle” i.e. wittering on about nothing much in particular pieces called Up Front.   A picture of the writer, a good-looking young woman, took up about one eighth of the page.

The young woman - nah, I mean the little fibbertigibbet -  had this to say (among other things):-

I like to think I'm a fairly tolerant person. I'm not, obviously, but I still like to think it. In truth, as I get older the list of things that disproportionately annoy me gets longer. Grammatical errors. Tourists who walk too slowly down busy London thoroughfares. Pregnant women who wear "Baby on board" badges when travelling on public transport. That kind of thing. By the time I'm 85, I'll doubtless be writing green ink letters in the nursing home, furiously muttering: "Different from, not different to" as Eastern European nurses try to spoon mushed-up apple through the gaps in my teeth.

The air of rueful self-deprecation is a common mark of this kind of writing.  The Pendant's Coroner moment came from this hater of grammatical errors getting cross with people saying “different to”.  “Different to“, “different from” are good English.  She is probably thinking of “different than”, which is not.

The stickler against sloppiness went on to say:-

Of course, in the same hotel room, there was a working radio. Why is the assumption that listening rather than watching is somehow less intrusive, less brain-rotting? I suspect it's because listening to the wireless is seen as an altogether more tasteful activity, one redolent of English period dramas where families gather round the fireplace to hear Winston Churchill declare war on Germany.

Oh dear.  She looks like she’s only just left school.  I thought World War II was something, in fact the only thing, they learned there these days.  She can’t have even been watching those English period dramas with much attention.

The Ogre's Drivel

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

W H Auden

H/t  Diamond Mine

Now a small group, a group of young people, who were given hallucinogenic pills, raided police stations here and there like rats, they raided barracks. They used relative safety and security that Libya enjoyed, and they raided some barracks and they also annulled their previous criminal records. But I don’t blame these youths. They are young people: sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. They are emulating what is happening in Tunisia. They are imitating what is happening in some cities, like they heard something about raid on a courts building and they say: “We shall do it in our city”. But there is a sick group that is giving money and pills, these hallucinogenic pills, to these young people, very young people, pushing them towards this side of war. The people who were killed are the members of the police and armed forces but not those who were behind them [presumably the killings]. They [those behind the killings] are in their houses  outside of the country, enjoying the safety and their families and children. And they are encouraging you and your children, giving them pills and we start slaughtering each other, encouraging to slaughter each other.

(Full speech here).

How does it feel?

Among the many things that really piss me off is the “What did you feel about that?” question, the “that” being when you were gang-raped and mutilated,  your house and livelihood was destroyed by a flood or your child buried in rubble by an earthquake, asked by a journalist at some scene of disaster.  THE SAME AS YOU WOULD FEEL IN THE SAME CIRCUMSTANCES EVEN THOUGH YOU‘RE AN INSENSITIVE ARSEHOLE, would be the proper answer, but the victims and sufferers of outrages, catastrophes and bereavements usually answer with dignity and politeness.

I thought putting this stupid question dignified with too courteous an answer was a new phenomenon, but leafing through Doris Lessing’s The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (published 1972, a collection of short stories, some of which were first published in the 1960s) I found this in a Not a Very Nice Story.  The theme of this piece is love and adultery, the stuff of fiction for which Lessing demonstrates irritation and boredom.  But here’s her diatribe:-

Ah emotion, emotion, let us bathe in thee!

For instance, the television, that mirror of us all:

A man has crashed his car, and his wife and three children have burned to death.

“And what did you feel when this happened?” asks the bland, but humanly concerned, young interviewer.  “Tell us, what did you feel?”

Or, two astronauts have just survived thirty-six hours when every second might have meant their deaths.

“What did you feel?  Please tell us, what did you feel?”

Or, a woman’s two children have spent all night exposed on a mountain-top but were rescued alive.

“What did you feel?” cries the interviewer.  “What did you feel while you were waiting?”

An old woman has been rescued from a burning building by a passer-by, but for some minutes had every reason to think that her end had come.

“What did you feel?  You thought your number was up, you said that, didn’t you?  What did you feel when you thought that.”

What do you think I felt, you silly nit, what would you have felt in my place?  What does everybody watching this programme know perfectly well that I felt?  So why ask me when you know already?

Why, madam? - of course it is because feeling is our substitute for tortured slaves and dying gladiators.  We have to feel sad, anxious, worried, joyful, agonized, delighted.  I feel.  You feel.  They felt.  I felt.  We were feeling . . . If we don’t feel, then  how can we believe that anything is happening to us at all?

And since none of us feels as much as we have been trained to believe that we ought to feel in order to prove ourselves profound and sincere people, then luckily here is the television where we can see other people feeling for us.  So tell me, madam, what did you feel while you stood there, believing that you were going to be burned to death?  Meanwhile the viewers will be chanting our creed: We feel, therefore we are.

Blogging Limited

Throwing up line after line of text my hard drive died on Easter Sunday.  No resurrection for it, the PC doctor says.  So until I get a new computer, blogging here will be limited.

Today I went to the internet café round the corner from my work.  I thought being a café they’d sell me a sandwich and I’d be able to eat and surf the net.    However, an “internet café” means a place where you can access the internet, and not necessarily one that sells coffee and snacks. 

Apocalypse so twentieth century

I watched a TV adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, heard the word “parenting” and winced.  “Parenting” has become a common word since about the 1990s, but it wasn’t round much in the 1890s and it doesn’t occur in the text of The Turn of the Screw. It is a gender-neutral term that we need as our ideas of what constitutes a family have changed.   I started doubting the scriptwriter’s historical knowledge and her ear for language, and in fact the programme was a crude and sexed-up version of a famously ambiguous story.  

All right, you can end up being one of those bores who complains that a film about the Battle of Waterloo had the Kent Greys rather than the Suffolk Blues on the left flank, and the piping on their uniforms was white when it should have been yellow but there are only so many anomalies, impossibilities and anachronisms that a film or book can carry without collapsing.   Frederick Forsythe’s review of The English Patient is a classic summing up of a film getting so much so very wrong:-

We start (according to a flash-up on the screen) in October 1942 with a young man taking off somewhere in a howling wilderness of desert. Amazingly, he is flying an uncamouflaged, silver-painted Tiger Moth trainer with the registration number of a British flying club. (A minor skirmish called the Battle of El Alamein was in full flow that month in that place.)

A glamorous blonde seems to be asleep in the front seat. Within minutes he flies over the world's most isolated German machine-gun nest, a small foxhole without any life-support system, stuck in a sea of sand miles from anywhere. But these Krauts are real aces; though they can never have seen a Tiger Moth (there weren't any at Alamein), they recognise it at once and open up with heavy machineguns. In mid-air the bullets turn into cannon shells, leaving clusters of black flak over the blue sky. Disdaining to take evasive action, our hero is shot down.

(It’s an entertaining piece.  It may be unfair on The English Patient but I can’t say because every time I’ve tried watching it on the telly I’ve fallen asleep after 10 minutes).

The Matrix had me wondering that if you are making this elaborate scam against humanity so as to use their bodies’ heat as a power source, why choose humans out of all the mammals?  They take nine months to gestate and they grow up very slowly.  Why not use rats, which, can have five litters a year and grow to maturity in eleven weeks?  However, the film really seemed about having people jump from building to building looking cool in long black coats.

So when I caught The Road the other night, I was distracted by a statement at the beginning that some disaster – evidently natural as there are earthquakes – has killed every animal except for human beings.  Not a rat or a mouse is left.   Cockroaches would die in such cold weather, but what about the parents of the maggots that ate all the corpses that leave the skeletons that the two main characters stumble over? But they don’t come across any flies, nor mosquitoes in the pools.  Nor do they have fleas or lice in the rags they wear.  Presumably the bacteria in their digestive tracts and the mites that eat our dead cells haven’t been wiped out otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted the nine years that they have so far.  They come across one beetle, and that is meant to be a little ray of hope in an otherwise bleak world.

Anyway, The Road is Samuel Beckett meets horror films.   The Father and the Son walk from place to place scavenging, visiting the kind of houses that you know from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would be best avoided and poking round cellars which every slasher movie warns you that you should give a wide berth.  (Those bits did have me on the edge of my seat, as the Hallowe’en films do, when you know something horrible is going to happen).  Other people represent an extreme form of stranger danger, since they are likely to be rapists, murderers or cannibals.  Everyone’s clothes and skin are filthy.

Now, it’s reasonable that the Father and the Son should be filthy, as they are vagabonds.  When they get a chance they heat up water and have a wash and hair cut.  But the cannibal groups they find, who lead more settled lives, are also filthy.  These are Americans, whose culture worships the bathroom and who despise foreign countries’ showers and plumbing.  There is no shortage of fuel – the whole terrain is covered with dead trees and felled forests.  There is no shortage of water – it’s always raining when it isn’t snowing.  They have time on their hands except when they're hunting and torturing other human beings so why can’t they heat up some water and have a wash?  It’s not true that just because people are cannibals they don’t have standards.  There have been cannibal societies that produced fine art and oratory.

Well, on they trudge through the wasteland scavenging away, and it’s reasonably compelling, waiting for the next brief and nasty encounter with other people. There are dramatic landscapes of deserted flyovers, drunken power poles and beached ships, in every shade of grey. It’s watchable, has some effective moments of real scariness and doesn’t go on too long. Viggo Mortensen ( the Father) is good at being serious and noble, as he was as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is fine as well.  But all the while you know that the makers want you to think that they are dealing with elemental questions about humanity, morality, survival, fatherhood and so on.  It’s the cheap portentuousness that you get in stories set in concentration camps (eg Sophie’s Choice).

I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s book that the film was based on, so can’t compare the two.  Steven Poole has fun with its attempts at not sounding horror-cheesy here. The world as presented on the film is a rubbish-dump without seagulls shrieking or the smallest weed growing, or any glimpse of regenerating nature that has happened after the worst catastrophes in the history of our planet.  I did think that maybe McCarthy didn’t want to make the kind of post-apocalypse world where nature burgeons and the few remaining human beings live the simple grow-your-own life in small groups which can look attractive to the Green in many of us. The gang of kids in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome who live in an oasis and have evolved their own religion and language are having a great time, much more enjoyable than being an office drone paying the mortgage.  The destroyed world in The Road is a place where you live in fear and misery, chased by thugs and haunted by memories of happier times.  It looks like he wanted a place of hopelessness and despair but that’s a hard thing to create without falling into easy nihilism.  The film ends on a slight note of upbeat – the Boy goes with strangers and they turn out to be friends after all.  They also have a dog, the only one left in the solar system.  How it survived when there aren’t packs of cross-breeds roaming the stricken land, we are not told.

More Pedantry

I couldn't remember my password so clicked the link which said Forgotten password?  I got this reply:-

Your email should be arriving momentarily.

Software designer - momentarily does not mean "in a minute" or "shortly".  What you've said is that my email will appear for a few moments and then disappear again, like that bloke with a knife in the Hallowe'en series of films.  Actually if you had said "in a minute" or "shortly" you'd have been wrong as it took 15 minutes or so - a long time in computer-waiting time - and by then I'd clicked my forgotten password link repeatedly until another message told me I should stop.