RosieBell

We’re Watching You

Watching sites are bizarre – the Christopher Hitchens one, the David Aaronovitch one.  They are the antithesis of the fan club, where you really admire someone’s work and are interested in everything they produce and the minutiae of their life.  But what a waste of time to read someone you dislike.  If I dislike someone’s work I read or listen to something else.  These sites are evidently loved by the contributors for their Three Minute Hate fests, which are like bitch fests at work about an unpopular colleague.  Nothing is so binding as a shared hate.

The Hitchens haters link to one John Dolan who spews out the most amazing ignorance about books,  British politics and well known British writers in order to make a thesis about books, British politics and well known British writers.  It’s fisking for beginners, and, as I dislike spending time reading dislikable stuff, I won’t go through the whole thing.  In fact when I read it, I had that kind of “where do I start” sense that you get at total wrong-headedness.

Martin learned the poison-pen trade at home, from his father [do you really think writers learn from their fathers like musicians?   And they differ greatly from each other as writers], novelist Kingsley Amis [you cribbed that from Eagleton, and that was one of the most idiotic remarks he ever made]. Like Hitchens, Kingsley started out by calling himself a leftist, but a leftist who hated almost everything about the left except that fact that it shared his hatred for his social superiors. Once his novel Lucky Jim became a hit and he joined the elite, Kingsley discovered that he had no further grudges with the Tories and spent the rest of his life vilifying women, non-whites, and anyone else who failed to meet his standards of Englishness. [Kingsley Amis stopped being left out of the common disillusionment with the Soviet Union and Stalin]. . .

Tory writers always go a little crazy when sex comes up.[Mind who you call crazy on that subject – you’re not that sane yourself.]  One of Amis' most distinguished predecessors in the use of sexual slander against the Left [the Left for Dolan equals Islamist suicide bombers]  is C.S. Lewis. Lewis knew very little about the modern world -- or women, or sex -- except that he was against the lot. [Against women?  Till We Have Faces is a novel with a feminist heroine] So rather than research the topic and risk learning something [no, he was too busy turning out novels and literary criticism and Christian apologetics – how do you research women and the modern world, by the way?], he resorted to novelistic technique, peopling his anti-modern science-fiction fables with homophobic caricatures [only one that I can think of, that plural is a cheat] like the sadistic nurse Hardcastle, a socialist monster [a high up in the police force] who delights in putting out her cigars on the heroine's breasts.

By the way, Dolan seems to think his villains;’ – Lewis’s and Paul Johnson’s – odd sex lives, have something to do with their work.  He doesn’t say anything about the effect that those heterosexual male champions’ enviable sex lives – Amis Junior and Senior and Hitchens – has on their work.

This article is total nonsense, and the Hitchens watchers link to it as being somehow a worthy analysis of their favourite hate figure.  But I suppose their hatred is a bit like a pig – it has an appetite for anything, whether nutritious, swill or garbage.

More Austen Stuff

Like me, David Baddiel is sick of dramatisations of the life of Jane Austen that stress her life as a woman in need of love over the artist.

When Austen gets into her stride, which she does very quickly with Sense and Sensibility, suddenly, you have all the key modern realist devices: ironic narration; controlled point of view; structural unity; transparency of focus; ensemble characterisation; fixed arenas of time and place; and, most importantly, the giving-up of the fantastical in favour of a notion that art should represent life as it is actually lived in all its wonderful ordinariness. She is the first person, as John Updike put it: “to give the mundane its beautiful due”, and her work leads to Updike as much as it does to George Eliot.

Excellent praise but what is "transparency of focus"?

Her quality was early recognised by a very different kind of writer - her vastly more popular contemporary but not much read these days.

READ again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of “Pride and Prejudice.” That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.—From “The Journal of Sir Walter Scott,” March, 1826.

The Debate Continues

I posted a piece at Shiraz Socialist about Verso turning down the book Does God Hate Women? on the grounds that it was critical to Islam. There was some debate and rude and offensive exchanges – great blog stuff in fact.

Jeremy Stangroom, the co-author of Does God Hate Women? – joined in with the debate, giving the reasons for Verso turning down the book, as were relayed to him by a Verso employee:-

“It was a matter of politics. Various strands to this: (a) Islam is wrong target - since Islamic fundamentalism is inextricably linked to American imperialism; (b) Islam is a buttress against American imperialism; (c) Link to “Islamaphobia” - and then the whole thing about racism. (Not that I agree about any of that stuff, but that was the thinking.)”

Or another reason, we don’t want to look like we agree with Melanie “Frothy Lips” Phillips in any way whatsoever.

That is what I would have predicted.  Left wing publishers used to be reluctant to publish anything that criticised the Soviet Union on the grounds that: (a) however imperfect, socialism has a footing there and we should not decry what are probably teething problems with the socialist experiment; (b) the Soviet Union is a buttress against American imperialism; (c) this is all Red scare and Red hysteria and simple McCarthyism.

Or another reason, we don’t want to look like we agree some red faced type reading the Daily Telegraph in any way whatsoever.

As Orwell said, some things are true, even if the Daily Telegraph says they are.

Who ate all the pies (or burgers, or pasta)?

This was emailed to me by my sister in New Zealand:-

 

After a short visit to the United States, Michelangelo's David returns to Italy.

Tulips

I grow tulips in containers, lift and try to save the bulbs then plant them in the border, while getting a new lot for the containers.  They don’t last in the borders for more than a year.

May Flowers

In May it’s hard not to make a garden look beautiful.  The foliage is fresh and the bulbs are in flower.  Getting it to look colourful in July is more difficult. 

I planted honesty behind the trellis so that it would grow in the neighbour’s garden.  His gardening method is to get a mate to strim once a year, so I didn’t think he would mind if I slipped a few seeds in his border, to compete against the ground elder, docks and nettles that grow there.  The honesty has grown on my side of the trellis, it is tall and it is also scented, which I have never noticed before.

First Words, Last Words

I’ve just finished The Lost Orwell ed by Peter Davison, which came out in 2006.  It’s a supplement to the complete works, which I would love to get one day, when I can afford it.

From a letter by George Orwell to Malcolm Muggeridge
4 December 1948 

He is referring to Muggeridge’s disparaging book about Samuel Butler, whom Orwell admired.  Orwell and Butler had in common a plain style of writing, which is the progenitor of much blog writing.

I didn’t approve of your Butler book, though I enjoyed reading it, because I thought it would give a false impression to anyone who didn’t know Butler’s work already.  I think that in spite of a great deal of egoism and silliness, partly resulting from loneliness and failure, he was a much kindlier and more unassuming person than one would infer from your book.  I think this even comes out in his way of writing, a thing you didn’t mention.  He was very nearly the only writer of the later part of the nineteenth century who could write in a plain straightforward manner.  I know that you feel that people like Butler, who are disintegrators, prepare the way for dictatorship etc., and I can see the connection between Butler’s revolt against his parents and your experience in Moscow [visiting the USSR had disillusioned Muggeridge about communism].  But I do earnestly think you are wrong.  The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.   

Orwell was a pioneer in many things – studying pop culture, observing crimes against the English language – was he a pioneer in this as well?  Was that the first time someone said that, which is often said now?

Orwell did not mean “libertarian” in the “all taxes are theft” sense that it is used today.   He had gone from being a revolutionary socialist, stating that fascism and bourgeois democracy were tweedledum and tweedledee to being a social democrat, with a great hatred of totalitarianism because of its control of language and private and intellectual life. He was recognising himself as a political liberal, or rather, that political liberalism is essential for social democracy.

Football crazy, football mad

Two good posts about the Rangers' fans rioting in Manchester.  Some commenters like to interpret a load of large toddlers throwing bottles when their toy breaks as a vanguard of a proletarian revolution.  “Ah’ll revolution ye, yi wee balloon,” I hope their mas are saying when they’re back hame.

New football chant (to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell":-

The telly disnae work
The telly disnae work
I’m gonna be a jerk
Cos the telly disnae work.

The telly's on the blink
The telly's on the blink
We're gonna kick up stink
Cos the telly's on the blink.

The telly's blown a fuse
The telly's blown a fuse
We're gonna shout abuse
Cos the telly's blown a fuse.

The telly's broken doon
The telly's broken doon
We're gonna trash the toon
Cos the telly's broken doon.

For the Folk

Article on Peter Seeger, the great American left-wing folkie and William F. Buckley, the American conservative commentator.  There are no equivalent figures of such stature on the British scene – perhaps figures of stature are magnified by the size of the stage they stand on, and since the 1940’s the British stage has diminished.    Ewan MacColl was a great British folkie and married Peter Seeger’s daughter Peggy (First Time Ever I Saw Your Face) but did he loom so large nationally?  I doubt it.

Think of a political folkie, and you think, “left” but . .

The American folk revival was not, however, the exclusive province of the left. In Europe, folk collecting and the promotion of traditional arts had long been emblematic of nationalist patriotism. In the U.S., an early promoter of folk music was the inveterate reactionary Henry Ford, who saw the music as unsullied by the immigrant and urban cultures he despised and the salaciousness he associated with jazz and vaudeville. American folk music and dance . .

For leftists, too, folk music was free of corruption, but that meant free of Ford-style mass production, which was, in their view, oppressive in a way that Soviet mass production was not. Old songs and tunes—which some of today’s folkies still imagine being handed down from time immemorial in backcountry communities—seemed to embody the inherently cooperative spirit of the people, a natural sense of union. To them, radio pop seemed aesthetically vapid and socially regressive.

Yet most of the music heard in homes in the southern backcountry actually had roots in commercial pop—the medicine and minstrel shows, Tin Pan Alley, Victorian parlor sheet music, ragtime and jazz, and, by the 1930s, downmarket “race” and “hillbilly” seventy-eight-rpm recordings and clear-channel broadcasts of “barn dance” radio shows. The genius of people living in neglected parts of country often lay in adapting pop music to cheap, sometimes handmade instruments and whooping it up.

Seeger wrote the songs that he thought the folk should sing, if they were proper folk.  He put his musical talent into service of the Communist party, becoming a New Dealer when that was the Party line, sang peace songs during the era of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and then war songs when the Soviet Union was allied with the USA.  His doctrines were bad and later he was embarrassed by them but the kind of impulse that led him into adopting those doctrines also led him into a self-sacrificing and useful life e.g. organising unions and civil rights activism and “he bravely risked jail by refusing to answer some of HUAC’s questions; he was blacklisted, his career ruined for a long time."   Last time I heard of Pete Seeger he was hosting country outings for urban kids. He never had to undergo the misery of having his prayers for a communist state in the USA answered.

Update:-  Nick Cohen has an article on Brecht here.  About Mother Courage:-

the oddity of Brecht - the refugee from Nazism, the leading enemy of fascism in the theatre of the Thirties - writing an anti-war play in 1939 when Britain, France and Poland were preparing for a war to the death against Hitler. Is it significant, they might ask, that while Brecht and one of his many abused and unacknowledged women collaborators were at work, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and agreed to divide Poland between them? As a part of the deal, the Soviet Union instructed the world's communists to stop criticising Nazism and embrace the cause of "peace" instead. Brecht, predictably, made no public objection. Coincidentally or not, Mother Courage embraced the cause of peace.

Mother Courage is the great anti-war play as Pete Seeger's Where have all the Flowers Gone? is one of the most famous anti-war songs.

History's Repetitions

The Freethinker interviews Ophelia Benson of Butterflies and Wheels:-

FT: Is it true that your upcoming book, Does God Hate Women?, was turned down by the first publisher because in was too critical of Islam?

OB: Yes, a publisher did turn it down for that compelling reason. It wasn’t exactly the first publisher since it never actually accepted it, but it was very interested, got Jeremy [Stangroom, the co-author] in to have a chat etc (I live six thousand miles away or I would have gone along for the chat too, whether they’d invited me or not) - then said they’d decided no because one mustn’t criticize Islam.

FT: How did you feel about that at the time?

OB: A mix of amusement and disgust, I think - amusement at the docile predictability, disgust at the crawling. I also felt even more convinced that the book was needed, precisely because a publisher would turn it down for such a reason. What publisher, you wonder? Verso.

Verso, the great left wing publisher (self-description:- "Books with a critical edge").  Here is one book they published guaranteed to be uncritical of Islam:-

The should remember how editors and publishers used to be sensitive about putting out books that might be offensive to Stalin or the Soviet Union.  Orwell had problems getting Animal Farm  published for that reason.  Those publishers and editors look bad now.

This post also appears on Shiraz Socialist.