Nick Bradley Four Seasons in Japan

 

This is a very well-conceived and structured book; it kept my attention throughout. Flo Dunthorpe living in Japan decides to translate an obscure though modern Japanese novel titled Sound of Water by Hibiki and pitches her material to a US publisher before she has completed the translation and before she tries to contact author and publisher for permission. The novel comprises her completed translation divided into sections each representing one of the four seasons. Sandwiched between and within sections are third person accounts of Flo’s troubled life, parts of which parallel the troubled lives of the main characters of the Japanese novel. A late section narrates the search to identify and find the reclusive author.

As I began reading I felt that the prose had been constructed deliberately to suggest a first draft (literal) translation of the novel; the prose was rather stilted and didn’t flow or transition easily - things which a re-draft would correct. But maybe it was meant to suggest something about Japanese formality and if so I think it succeeded.  However, I encountered prose choices which caused me unease

Flo Dunthorpe signs off in “Tokyo 2023” and the Hibiki novel appears to be set sometime after 1990 since the characters have smartphones; the Japanese LINE messaging app they are using dates from 2011. But the register of the novel often suggests an earlier period and even then some of the exclamations and idioms which characters use feel awkward. Some examples relating just to one of the three or four main characters, Ayako, the elderly and strict grandmother:.

“Put that blasted thing away …” said Ayako in reaction to her grandson consulting a Weather App. (p 118)

“Usually she [Ayako] would’ve made a cup of coffee for herself and sat down next to Sato for a decent chinwag” (p 125)

“Those were the kinds of stories Ayako used to like to overhear and snicker about …. Telling her the juicy news she so desperately wanted to hear” (p 223)

“Oh wow” said Ayako, in surprise (p 255)

“I kept going. I never gave up…. I was discovered by some Mountain Rescue guys who whisked me off to hospital” (p 267)

It suggests an author who is a non-native speaker who is looking online for idioms (a mixture of American and English ones) and not quite getting it right either for time or place.

I have other minor niggles; Nick Bradley uses “must’ve” and “would’ve” in authorial prose – see the example from page 125 above. I can’t remember the last time I saw ‘em used. They stick out.

Anna Reid A Nasty Little War - Review

 

There are people who reckon that war brings out the best in human beings; no one claims that for civil wars which unfailingly bring out the worst. Wars are orderly, conducted with etiquettes which often hold up, and historically they have usually been conducted intermittently as set-piece combats.  Civil war is unremittingly present and at its heart is always the fear and insecurity created by not being able to readily identify who around you can still be trusted and how close is the danger.

Anna Reid’s A Nasty Little War is a thoroughly researched, unsettling account of failed Western (Allied) intervention on the side of White forces in the Russian Civil War between 1917 and 1920 which ended in victory for the Red forces of the Bolshevik regime. A cover comment from Anne Applebaum that the book is “Witty and Elegant” seems misplaced; Reid quotes frequently from diaries and memoirs – usually American or British - which try to make light of things or are comically inept but they only add to the reader’s (or this reader’s) unease. The war was unspeakably cruel and merciless;  criminals and psychopaths, fanatics and sadists, had more or less unrestricted opportunity to loot, torture, rape (always including child rape) and murder – the victims casually and often mistakenly identified as enemies but sometimes systematically chosen, most obviously the Jews whose separate residential areas made it easy to conduct a pogrom.

The Romanovs who ruled Russia for three centuries were constantly enlarging their Empire by expanding the contiguous land mass they controlled; only Sakhalin and Alaska (plus some scattered islands) were sea crossings away unless you add northern California. To the west they expanded into what are now Finland, the three Baltic states, and half of Poland. To the east they not only went in a straight line to Vladivostok but occupied what are now the -stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan Uzbekistan). In addition, they pushed into Mongolia and northern China whenever possible and on the Pacific coast down to the border with Korea at Port Arthur (later Dairen, now Dalian). To the south there was all of what are now Ukraine and Moldova together with the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia) reaching the border with Persia. As territorial gain from the First World War, Nicholas the Second’s governments had their hopes set on Austrian Galicia, the northern coast of Turkey, and Constantinople. The Greek isthmus of Mont Athos also featured in their thoughts as did Afghanistan and the North West Frontier of British India. At the same time, and hardly surprisingly, the government in far-away St Petersburg felt permanently insecure about its borderlands but seems to have believed that by constantly expanding the extraordinary length of its borders they would gain security not lose it.

The relationship of St Petersburg to most of its Empire was essentially colonial ; ethnically and linguistically hugely diverse, the empire was ruled over by Russians who spoke Russian and would not contemplate any other language. In contrast, both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires accepted linguistic diversity; the early Soviet Union took the same approach. The Romanovs were intolerant of all religions other than the compliant Russian Orthodox and discrimination against Jews was legally enshrined long after it had been removed in other European countries. And, of course, serfdom was not abolished until 1861. As is usual with empires, the relation of centre to periphery was extractive; wealth was piled up at the centre.

The fabulously wealthy Tsarist regime was harsh, incompetent and unfeeling; the lives of this Leviathan’s oppressed native and colonial peoples  nasty, brutish and short. But in the end the awful Nicholas II was brought down not by the Bolsheviks but by a coalition of his own army officers and powerful commercial and industrial interests with a liberalising agenda. By the time of their downfall, the Romanovs inspired no love or loyalty; even the White armies which fought against the Bolsheviks did not propose the restoration of the Romanovs. They had to wait for  Tsar Putin and his puppet Rolex-wearing Orthodox church to rehabilitate them and their ambitions.

No sooner had the Allies achieved victory in the First World War and divided the territorial spoils, which their populations were supposed to regard as compensation for all the dead young men, than they embarked on - albeit modest – adventurous interventions in support of those forces seeking to bring down the Bolsheviks. Only Finland did not deserve support: the victorious side in its own civil war sided with Germany as it did its government in World War Two.  But those who got support hardly had their credentials checked, something which still happens whenever the West decides to “intervene” and finds itself tied to some crook, psychopath or simple incompetent who has no popular support. The dishonesty about who they were dealing with (the reality of  anti-Jewish pogroms routinely denied by all the intervention commanders) and why is recounted in disturbing detail by Anna Reid. I shan’t try to summarise it; it’s worth reading in its own right.

Reading the book, it occurred to me that in civil wars everyday life does go on in the background of fighting and atrocities. Reid has something to say about this. In Russia from 1917 to 1920 various local and regional governments did function though only partially and never disinterestedly. If they received aid from well-meaning foreign relief organisations you could be sure that very little of it would reach the intended recipients; later, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration which operated in early Soviet Russia insisted on control over distribution by its own representatives.

One indicator of “everyday life” a hundred years ago is provided by the post: could you send a letter and would it be received? This index produces a startling result which indicates the weakness of the Bolshevik regime at the height of the civil war.  From 1 January 1919 to early June 1920, it was not possible to send a letter abroad from any part of Bolshevik-controlled Russia. The Bolsheviks had no access to ports or only to blockaded ports, had no official relations established with immediate or distant neighbours, and probably  had no foreign currency to pay third-party costs. Going round the clock, they did not control Archangel, Vladivostok, the Black Sea ports or any of the Baltic ports; Petrograd was at least partially blockaded. In addition, since a lot of mail going abroad would probably be written by hostile elements mail censorship would need to be in place and for the Bolsheviks that meant a centralised organisation in Moscow or Petrograd. When postal services were restored in June 1920, foreign mail was always routed via the centre except in the Far East where there was still a notionally independent government in Vladivostok (the Far Eastern Republic). A large censorship office was created, its activity readily identified by special cancellations with three triangles at the base. At the height of the civil war period, it was in any case unrealistic to route mail through to Moscow or Petrograd since the constantly shifting front line would mean that mail would be endlessly delayed and subject to capture by White forces who might be able to glean significant information from reading it.

The Whites could get mail abroad thanks principally to the good offices of the warships of Britain, France,  USA and other intervention countries which did not charge for carrying it though they might require that it be franked with whatever stamps were locally in use. At the time the most popular indoor hobby in Western Europe and the USA was stamp collecting and stamp dealers did a good trade in the ports of Archangel, Odessa, Riga, Tallinn, and Vladivostok exporting whatever stamps were being locally produced to replace Imperial Russian ones. In some cases, the dealers were involved in the production of the stamps themselves and their names remain associated with those stamps. In contrast, the Bolsheviks issued no stamps of their own until 1921; they used up old Imperial ones and reprinted them as necessary on inferior paper and generally without perforations - the machines were out of use.

*

A few picky points: The town of Valk /Walk  which straddles the Estonian/Latvian border is quite wrongly located on the Baltics map as inside Russia; page 228 “Bermondt-Avalov” was at the time, I think, more often referred to as “Avalov-Bermondt” though Wikipedia opts for the B-A order; transliteration rules change – at the time it was “General Wrangel” in both the UK and USA not the anachronistic “Vrangel” used by Reid; in the literature “Grigoriy Semyonov” is usually referred to  as “Ataman Semenov” though Wikipedia uses Reid’s version. The “Ataman” is a Cossack title he awarded himself.

Rebecca F Kuang Yellowface - Review

 

It’s nearly impossible to buy a new novel in a bookshop; unless it’s a Fitzcarraldo edition you have to buy a more-or-less lurid and ludicrous package. The packaging around Yellowface starts as it means to go on: “Addictive” is the first word you see (top left), predictable because lazy critics are addicted to the word. Turn to the back cover and a graduate of Instincts of the Herd 101 at Glamour magazine gives us “The book that everyone is talking about”, not quite A-grade because “that” is redundant. It does the job of making you feel you could be the one sitting out the dance.

But step inside the back cover and a standard-issue glamorous author pic is paired with an unusual set of credentials: a Master’s degree from Cambridge, ditto from Oxford, and a Ph D in progress at Yale. Rebecca F. Kuang is more than clever; she’s serious.

In the novel, she creates as first-person narrator a white woman in her twenties who has some talent but not quite enough to bring her major success in the world of modern fiction. This does create one problem which I don’t think is fully resolved: her narrator, June Hayward aka (at her publisher’s urging) Juniper Song, will undermine the identity Kuang needs for her character if this fictional narrator writes too well or is too funny in her own right. The tricky task is then to engage the reader and make them laugh or think by exploiting the gap which we know exists between the very talented author-creator Kuang and the novel’s lesser ranked narrator Hayward/Song. In other words, the task is to create ironic distance because no one really wants to read flat prose created to make a narrator credible. It does not always come off: there are some flat passages (bottom p 181, too many “I”’s) and there are a couple of occasions when a tone-deaf DumbDown App takes over (perhaps at the publisher’s instigation):

“I get my first Royalties statement … I’ve earned out. This means that I’ve sold enough copies to cover my already sizeable advance and that from here on out I get to keep a percentage of all future sales” (p 93) In this passage DumbDown directly addresses the ignorant reader and does so again here:

“The paperback edition just came out, which generates a nice sales bump – paperbacks are cheaper, so they sell a bit better” (p 193). Well, I never would have guessed.

And at page 63 the narrator offers a Wikipedia paragraph on what “sensitivity readers” do. I find it simpler to characterise them as Sunday School teachers who have missed their vocation of telling cross-legged children that Jesus doesn’t like it if you fart.

The plot is simple enough: White American June’s Korean friend Athena Liu – a much more successful writer - chokes to death while they are getting drunk together leaving behind the typescript of a nearly-completed novel which June steals and plagiarises to create her own best-seller. The thoroughly-researched story-line of that novel concerns the many thousands of Chinese workers who were shipped to act as (more-or-less indentured) labourers on the Western Front in World War One. So weighty stuff.  June does have to fill in some missing bits and mug up the history to make herself credible as the supposed author. Jointly with her editor they delete or soften passages which might not go down well in Disapprove-of-Everything-America-Online. It is here that Kuang has a lot of fun and makes us laugh though there is sufficient (and clever) ambiguity to allow opposing sides to laugh at the same gags.  I began to think reading these passages that Kuang has a fully-fledged essayist inside her just waiting for opportunities.

I would still advise her to adopt my own lifestyle. I have a Nokia dumbphone never upgraded to a smartphone though the handset has had to be replaced a few times since 2000; I don’t always carry it. I use a desk computer for writing Blog posts like this and a laser printer so that I can do manual proofing sitting in an armchair.  Smartphones ruin lives; when their users are about to cross the street they feel a sudden compulsive urge to consult the screen.

One named reviewer whose take on Kuang’s gags is probably different to mine reads Yellowface as a “take on white privilege” which rather misses the irony that “Yellowface” white American narrator June is the creation of a Chinese-born author doing what I suppose for symmetry should be called a “Whiteface” job. But how can Ivy League-Kuang know what it’s like to be a less talented white woman?

Warning: The next paragraph reveals a further twist to the plot.

I enjoyed the book – and especially the earlier part -  though I did guess the first of the final two twists to the story as early as page 194 of the 319. June/Juniper is stuck for what to write next after both The Last Front and her subsequent Mother Witch are outed for thorough-going plagiarism of the late Athena Liu’s work. She gets anxious and depressed but then realises that the way out of the room is through the door of a full-on confession which turns into - you guessed it - Yellowface.

Review: Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini, What Is Cultural Criticism?

 

I read in the newspapers (and so betray my age) that we are in the middle of world-wide culture wars, fought on multiple fronts by many millions firing off tweets, some of which land on newspaper pages where I encounter them. The title of this book may lead some unsuspecting browsers to think that it will have something to say about those wars. It doesn’t; the bulk of the text was written before Twitter was invented in 2006 and comprises exchanges between Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini in which they praise and criticise each other in about equal proportions.

In What Is Cultural Criticism? Francis Mulhern provides the Marxist Super Ego. He thinks that there is no privileged position from which we can criticise; neither old-fashioned pre-1939 Kulturkritik (as he calls it, without italics) or more recent Stuart Hall-style Cultural Studies can provide a neutral metadiscourse about our culture. We should face up to this and embrace the truth that the only coherent interventions in cultural space are political ones and Cultural Politics the only viable option to discredited alternatives. We have to take the plunge: Mulhern’s latest book (2024) is thus appropriately titled Into the Mêlée. (The title includes two diacritical marks which Microsoft does not, in this case, supply automatically – I have had to insert them manually; it treats melee as an assimilated word (like hotel). Verso sticks with the traditional and Francophile-signalling version. The book could have been titled more simply Into the Fray.)

In relation to Mulhern’s Super Ego, Stefan Collini plays the part of persecuted Ego who patiently defends a practice of cultural criticism which, in relation to literary texts, attends closely to both words on the page and collateral information but doesn’t proceed on the assumption that the important thing is to assign the text to a box in some prior schematism, Marxist or otherwise. If this means you get to be accused of “liberalism”, so be it.

In this case, I think Collini’s fastidiousness wins. He has an outstanding record as diligent historical researcher and careful expositor and critic who writes lucid and vigorous prose. Those virtues are on display here. Mulhern I feel (and Collini uses the expression) over-theorises, as is the habit of punitive Super Egos. But as Collini observes, Mulhern’s own interventions in his other writings including some of those included in Into the Mêlée are not particularly schematic except insofar as he shows enthusiasm for chunking history so that Periods and Movements succeed each other rather like Modes of Production. But, in my view, Periods and Movements only exist so that academics can have Specialisms.

I have two criticisms and a bit of Id which needs to stage a fight.

I am getting older and have a habit now of repeating myself but surely not on the scale of Mulhern and Collini and even in this relatively short book.

More substantively – and this is especially in relation to Collini’s work – they are both rather too accepting of the inherited canon of authors about whom they are expected to have something to say. They don’t upset applecarts. The names of Matthew Arnold, T S Eliot, F R Leavis, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart appear repeatedly. Stuart Hall gets in briefly as originator of Cultural Studies as we now know it.

Where are the surprises? Who has been left out? There is a Penguin Classics edition of George Eliot’s splendid essays in cultural criticism but she is entirely absent. Queenie Leavis does not appear; it’s true her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) won’t be on the shelves of a local bookshop - you will need to go to Amazon for a Print on Demand copy. It may not be a very good book but it might be thought a precursor of what later in Birmingham came to be called Contemporary Cultural Studies.

And in relation to Matthew Arnold and F R Leavis, is it not time to move on and find someone else to write about, let alone promote in  stylish paperback? Culture and Anarchy is written in a daft style which invites lampoon; it’s hard to take seriously especially if, like me, you are a non-conformist tea-drinker. F R Leavis just announces Who’s Who in the Great Tradition and if you don’t make the cut (Laurence Sterne “trifler”; Charles Dickens “entertainer”) then, tough. And Leavis wasn’t even a nice man; he appalled me when as a naïve undergraduate I joined a group taking tea with him back in 1967. Asked a question about someone’s work he replied to the effect that he hadn’t read him for a long time but he was surely nasty now. An eyebrow went up. Is this cultural criticism?

That’s enough of the Id.

The Foyle's Bookshop Strike 1965

 Edited extract from a 2012 Blog post:

I was 17. After A levels in summer 1964 I travelled to Sweden to spend the summer working in a hotel and then went back to school for the Autumn Term to do Oxbridge Entrance (I already had a place but was after a Scholarship). After that, I  needed to work to raise funds to buy all the things on my Oxford college's required list - gown, mortar board, dark suit, white bow tie, laundry bag, that sort of thing.

Christina Foyle interviewed me, as she interviewed everyone (including the shop lifters). Here is my Contract of Employment which shows that I started work on 4 January 1965.



I was set to work in charge of Foyle's Postal Library, supplying romantic fiction to dowagers in rural areas and banned books to readers in the Republic of Ireland.



Foyle's sought to recruit people like me who were not going to stay and acquire employment rights. Many staff were recruited outside the UK. In those days, you needed work permits and Foyle's had a production line for obtaining them. Probably ninety percent of the staff were students or young people "in transit". Nowadays, that's true of most restaurants and bars in London but in 1965 it was not so common. At the time, I thought Foyle's was Dickensian. Now they look more like pioneers of the casualisation of labour.

It happened that in a given week too many new workers might arrive or too many old ones fail to leave. And some people might be about to pass the six month period after which they acquired additional statutory employee rights

This is where Mr Ronald Batty entered the scene. He was the store manager and Christina Foyle's husband. He walked the shop floors sacking people. He inspired genuine fear and on Fridays there were always people in tears, many of them pretty girls.

I had never really seen pretty girls before and I became serially infatuated. I had absolutely no idea how to approach them or relate to them and I was terribly burdened by my own circumstances - on Boxing Day 1964, just a week before my start at Foyle's, my mother with whom I lived had been taken in an ambulance to a mental hospital. I made the 999 call from a call-box. It was snowing.

Technically, people held work permits that restricted them to employment with Foyle's. But even then I guess it was possible to work illegally. Nonetheless, I was affected by the girls in tears and I did not like the ruthless atmosphere.

Nor did other people. Some of them, inspired by a charismatic Australian, Marius Webb, had started a clandestine branch of the Union of Shop Distributive and Alled Workers (USDAW). It had to be secret because Foyle's did not recognise Unions and Mr Batty would simply have sacked you. I became responsible for collecting Union dues in the building which housed the postal library and wholesale order departments. There must have been meetings too but I don't really recall them; there were discussions in the toilets.

After a few months, I found myself another job in local government and nearer home and hospital. It was a stupid move which I have always regretted: at Foyle's, I was meeting the kind of people I should have been meeting at my age and with my aspirations. If I had stuck it out, I might even have got myself a girl friend.



Soon after I left, USDAW called an official strike at Foyle's for Union recognition, better pay and other things. It was wildly popular - all kinds of people came forward to say that they had once worked for Christina Foyle and could they please give a large donation to Strike funds. Private Eye did a lovely and very funny piece.

On Saturdays I used to go and join the picket line. And when it was all over in July The Daily Worker put two pretty girls on the front page - a tradition which nowadays only The Daily Telegraph keeps up.

Book Blogging since 2012: A Retrospective

 

My original reviews of books mentioned in this essay can be located by typing author and title into the search bar above.

 

I buy, read and review books, but not always in that order: sometimes I imagine a review then track down the book. I don’t hold library tickets so always have skin in the game, the unread books on my shelves failed investments.  The rewards are the pleasures (but also irritations) of reading and the more controllable pleasures of writing, to which is added such satisfaction as can be got from Google’s page view counter.

A review in a print journal might lead me to a book; as do footnote references and, latterly, a taste for reading and re-reading classics.  I browse in town centre bookshops but that challenges my sensibilities. It’s the wallpaper. The garish covers and lurid blurbs are the graphic design version of over-excited talk shows.  With exceptions (Penguin Classics and Modern Classics, Fitzcarraldo) the current state of book cover art is decidedly down market, comparing unfavourably with the stylish packaging of own brand goods in supermarkets

Blurbs are less reliable than small print food labels and not always to the advantage of the author. I have accumulated a selection of trade misdescriptions and reprise three here:

Faber published Alex Preston’s In Love and War (2017) and the reviewer at GQ made it onto cover telling us that it’s a book for the beach, “the perfect read to pair with that first sundowner”. I proceed to the novel: the hero Esmond dies horribly under Gestapo torture and his lover Ada dies in a concentration camp. Gin and Auschwitz? Really?

The 2018 Penguin paperback cover for Zadie Smith’s Swing Time quotes from a review in The Observer claiming that the novel “Has brilliant things to say about race, class and gender” which cuts Zadie Smith off at the ankles for a book in which dancing plays a leading part; it puts her on a level with Bernardine Evaristo. I did go to the original Observer review by Taiye Selasi, more subtle than the blurb extract, but if you want to sample the stunning prose of which Smith is capable - showing not saying - go to pages 321-30 of the paperback to find a beautifully structured and   emotionally-charged scene set in a small north London pizza joint.

In 2018 Penguin published Sally Vickers’ The Librarian and Adam Phillips was there on cover noting that “Vickers writes of relationships with undaunted clarity”. Well, I admire Adam Phillips and he sealed the purchase. The quote is actually from a review of another book by Vickers (Cousins) though as I started to read I could see how it worked for this one too:

“ ‘ What would you wish for, Sylvia?’ But he had stooped and was gathering her body to his, so she didn’t answer. “I have wanted to do that since I met you in the foundry”’

I felt like the victim of a Borat prank. Adam Phillips was writing tongue in cheek and I had bought a Mills & Swoon.

 

*

Most of us let that wonderful invention, Microsoft Word, run the writing show. There are hazards, especially for pedants.

In 2020 Princeton University Press published an academic monograph on loan words written by the British professor Richard Scholar. The cover of the book spells out its topic: ÉMIGRÉS French Words that Turned English. It’s a clever title because émigré is itself a loan word. But when I type it in lower case Microsoft automatically supplies two diacritical marks. That’s surely wrong. As an assimilated loan word emigré requires only that one diacritical mark to guide us to acceptable pronunciation: think café and naïve and compare with hotel which requires no guidance (those three words printed now as Microsoft delivered them).

Microsoft also obliges with an accent on capitalised CAFÉ though in French accents over capital letters are fairly optional. For proof, google photographs of “typical Parisian café”. In short, if someone asks whether written English uses diacritical marks, the correct answer is Yes, but sparingly, thank goodness. And in French, Yes, but the rules are a bit different for lower case and upper case. Don’t ask me to be more precise because life is short. But on such matters Microsoft can be plus royaliste que le roi. And Princeton University Press even more so with two accents on capitalised EMIGRES which do not appear when I type it. Dear Pedantic Reader, do you vote for two, one or no diacritical marks on the capitalised word made from the letters E M I G R E S?

There are real issues about the currently popular use of diacritical marks to render Roman alphabet versions of languages which don’t use the Roman alphabet. It’s a genuine question whether they undermine lazy colonialist mindsets or are themselves just a legacy of colonialism. There is a good basis for a case study in the rendering of spoken Yoruba in Oyinkan Braithwaite’s accomplished novel My Sister, The Serial Killer (2019).

But hold fire; there is an App now in common use by publishers, especially in the USA, which dumbs down texts, especially academic ones. The App may have a human incarnation as a copy editor following an inclusive rule book.

Richard Scholar’s book is an academic monograph aimed at a small audience of readers familiar with French and English literature especially of the eighteenth century.  It severely tests my own knowledge. But at page 114 I read this, “The French-speaking Genevan thinker and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) ….”.

What has gone wrong? The App has spotted a proper name and provided an explanatory gloss. Give it “William Shakespeare” and it would hand back “The English-speaking Stratford-upon-Avon poet and playwright …” I guess the idea is to get the book into the hands of 101 readers; but it won’t when the book is not pitched at them. And for actual readers it is just bizarre and, when repeated, reads as standardised patter which cuts across whatever personal style the author may have. The App knows nothing of prosody and never reads aloud to itself.

I can offer a hand proof that this App really is at work in Scholar’s book. At page 162, the title of a sequence of poems is given in untranslated French with no gloss that the words are those which the French-speaking painter Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903) inscribed on his most famous painting. Now that would be useful 101 stuff. But how come the gloss isn’t there?  In the immediate vicinity of this bit of text there is no one’s name present to jolt the App into life.

*

Bad books get published; we all know that. But they are bad in different ways. There are the books which read like drafts of Ph.Ds. In a previous life, I was obliged to read such things; it’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. It’s exasperating to read a printed book where the work clearly hasn’t been done. In 2011 Oxford University Press published Gerald Steinacher’s Nazis on the Run - disjointed, repetitive, and inconclusive where it needs to be decisive. The last problem was undoubtedly connected to problems of access (#openthevaticanarchives) but it also involves care in choices between modal verbs and adverbs to ensure that the text does not become simply evasive. Better to state clearly what the important question is and record that in the present state of knowledge it cannot be answered.  In a Ph D, modality matters.

Rather different is the case of the student who has received criticism, records it, and then carries on as if nothing has happened. In Emma Dabiri’s interesting Don’t Touch My Hair (2018) it happens twice. There is a long rant about cultural appropriation (pages 178ff) at the end of which the reader is offered “[Fred] Astaire is certainly worth further consideration when discussing the important distinction between appropriation and borrowing, the latter undoubtedly the basis of evolving culture” (page 190). That is a tacked-on remark which goes nowhere, just passed off as if duty done. In the second case, someone is actually quoted taking issue. The search for “Roots” (forgive the pun) is problematic because it usually stops when satisfying ones are found. Dabiri’s Africa is characterised by “wholeness” (a word which belongs in a chain which goes down all the way to wholesome and wholegrain). There isn’t much local violence in the African past which interests her and none at all in the African present. Her history remains fairly firmly in the realms of Uplifting Story, which publishers like. But she then quotes an email from Ron Eglash who tries to draw her away from the Search for Roots toward something more structural:

 

“The temptation is to dive into the competition over ‘who discovered it first’. But that kind of competition is a framework created for Intellectual Property rights…. Reversal never works. ‘We discovered it first’ is not a rebuke of white supremacy, it is just adopting their tactics. That is what Audre Lorde meant when she said, ‘ the master’s tools will never tear down the master’s house’ (pages 216 - 17)

 

These words just sit there. And the reader will no doubt go on calling out cultural appropriation and searching for roots. I’m with Audre Lorde.

Then there are books which have clearly involved a lot of googling and maybe not much else. As someone who likes to sit at home, I cannot plausibly deny it. But it’s an art and you need to do it extremely well.  Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk make it work but we lesser artists easily fail.  This is true of Tiffany Watt Smith’s very short Schadenfreude (2018) which though it has a German loan word for its title comes up in the text with “The Genealogy of Morals written by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche”. (Sound familiar?). 

But now, as a standout example of modern internet-enabled prose we have Peter Ackroyd’s cut and paste The English Soul (2024), a sort of hardback Wikipedia into which Ackroyd’s contribution is concentrated as a string of one-liners; I quote four and if you don’t like them there are others quoted in the full review of the book

On Thomas More, “The burnings [of heretics] continued, shedding fitful light on the English soul.” (page 73)

On the Authorized Version: “It might even act as a mirror of Englishness itself, and by extension the English soul” (140)

On George Herbert: “Little Gidding became, for Herbert, a vision of spirituality in the world. It became a corner of the English soul.” (147)

On William Blake: “Yet in truth his vision has never been lost. It is integral to the English soul.” (240)

Well, bless my English soul. Trot it out often enough and it becomes trite or simply vacuous.

 

*

Finally, there are translations which I do read. Nearly sixty years ago I was given L’Etranger to help improve my schoolboy French. A girlfriend who went on to become a Professor of French wanted to level me up. I thought to speed the process by setting beside it a copy of Penguin’s The Outsider, baffled to discover that the two texts didn’t seem to match up. I was unaware that I had bought Stuart Gilbert’s Variations on a Theme by Albert Camus. I have been wary ever since and when I’m going to read a book translated from French I’ll usually buy the French to put alongside. In that way, I was able to confirm that a sentence in the English translation of Annie Ernaux’s The Years which made no sense does in fact invert the order of events in the French original.

But what can you do when reading translations from languages you don’t know? Well, it can be contextually obvious that all is not well. Ismail Kadare’s The Concert (1988) was translated by Barbara Bray from the French translation from the Albanian. Set in Communist Albania, the version I read is peopled by Home Secretaries and Foreign Secretaries and one is surprised not to find Whitehall in Tirana. What cultural blindness blocked the use of Ministers of the Interior and Foreign Ministers? Out of the same failure of imagination we find Albanian Communists under pressure giving vent to Phew! (page 137) What a ghastly day! (139) and expressing frustration over the whole blessed evening (170). Unless I’m missing something (it happens) the register is so obviously wrong that it casts doubt on the whole translation. (Is there an Albanian reader out there who can confirm or deny?)

 

 

 

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On Difficulty and Obfuscation

 

 

Parliamentarians of the English Civil War period expressed the hope that one day the laws of England might be compressed into “the bigness of a pocket book”. That still gets quoted because it expresses a common feeling that things which affect our lives ought to be intelligible to us. We don’t want to break a law because we don’t understand it and, equally, we do want to defend ourselves in language which is our own. Cromwellians thought that the heart of the problem was not failure to be clear and concise but that the powerful and their lawyers benefitted from obfuscation. I think they were at least half right.

But the successes of the natural sciences over recent centuries are inseparable from the development of languages which only a very small number of specialists can really expect to understand and deploy. We accept the difficulties of mathematics and scientific theories as a price we must pay for extraordinary achievements of engineering (in the broadest sense) from which everyone can in principle benefit. We accept that most of us do not have talent and will not have time to get inside what scientists understand. There are no short cuts; you just have to be very talented, willing to work hard and not envy the very occasional prodigy who seems to understand effortlessly.

But in relation to the world of lived experience - the Lebenswelt of the phenomenological tradition in philosophy – it’s still thought we should be able to understand that experience ourselves though perhaps occasionally accepting the help of those proficient in some theoretical knowledge of which we have only a vague understanding.  Sign up with a counsellor or analyst and you expect them to know something you don’t. Equally, you might well expect them to be able to make relevant parts of their thinking accessible to you in some way. How else could therapy work? It’s not supposed to be magical or mystical.

Donald Winnicott thought that making his thinking accessible was part of what would make it therapeutically effective. He gave radio talks and wrote essays which any moderately well-educated reader could understand. The contrast between, say, false self and real self lends itself to fairly ready understanding and can be illustrated with examples. Of course, some would now object that it encapsulates some kind of humanist myth or ideology. If so, that would also be true of Jacques Lacan’s early use of a parallel contrast between the empty word (parole vide) and the full word (parole pleine). Both sets of contrasts point towards interventions a practising therapist could deploy. But therapeutically useful ideas can, in fact, come from anywhere. The concept of gaslighting takes its name from a successful film (Gaslight 1944) the story line of which gives a very clear exemplification of a kind of psychological manipulation which the term accurately identifies.

But there are those who claim to illuminate the world of lived experience but do so in prose which is either difficult or obfuscating. And it is sometimes difficult to know which is the case. Roland Barthes wrote that clarity is the virtue of prose which is designed to persuade. But not everyone wants to persuade.

Some writing is more like musing or ruminating in which the author is primarily addressing themself; this is true of many passages in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. The reader’s task then becomes that of trying to work out what is the problem which has set off the rumination and where the musing might be headed.  Some will give up, thinking that the author is ducking the job a writer is supposed to undertake.

Other writers may just want to jolt you into thinking afresh and use whatever devices they reckon might yield that result. The danger is that we don’t get beyond their opening move. When Wittgenstein offers an (oracular?) “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” it’s easy just to stare at the words and sigh, “Such wisdom!” rather than asking, “How do you know that?”, “Why shouldn’t we understand a lion who could speak?” In fact, since Wittgenstein wrote there has been great progress in characterising the structure and functions of things like chimpanzee calls. Lions may just be less approachable. The case illustrates a general problem with much philosophy: if it tries to rule a priori (without the need for evidence) that certain things are impossible it may subsequently be upstaged by empirical evidence demonstrating the contrary. Early Wittgenstein-inspired academics writing about human language were remarkably naïve, supposing that languages were really all rather like their own, and backed up by some local equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. Then linguists started to look seriously at how creoles develop and that upset several applecarts.

Finally (at least for the length of this piece), there are the sad cases. Early on in life, academics working in the human sciences discover that a well-trodden route to fame lies in being allusive, difficult and downright obscure. Though novelists may have been the first to realise that there were bones you could throw to the professors, other writers and academics themselves have more than caught up. The later work of Jacques Lacan is something suitable only to be pored over in long, inconclusive seminars and unread research outputs; it does not connect to any obvious therapeutic practice.  If you invest so much time in what is really theological study, it is very hard to conclude that your god may not be all you’ve hoped for. Back in 1979, Richard Wollheim (the centenary of whose birth has recently been celebrated) wrote a long piece in the New York Review of Books after reading a great deal of Lacan’s work. At the end he simply remarked “It’s not really my cup of tea”. But no young academic who has just completed a Ph D on Lacan and now hoping for its publication can afford such dismissive disinvestment from very recent labours. 

Imitating rebarbative prose is not the same thing as deploying someone’s theories to advance understanding. That distinction may be a useful guide to separating the difficult from the obfuscating. A difficult or relatively difficult theorist - say, Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault – can inspire new work which extends the application of a theory to new fields and maybe in the course of doing that introduce some amendments into the original theory. In contrast, imitative writing does no more than add to the corpus of imitations of the Master. As with didactic novels, the reader yawns and forgets. 

Review Peter Ackroyd The English Soul

  

Reading this book was like working through a cut and paste job. Peter Ackroyd acknowledges the help of two research assistants (Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien) and I guess they provided the cuts pasted into the potted Wikipedia-style biographies of divines and theologians which comprise the bulk of the book. Those biographies record births, marriages and death-bed scenes – in that order - though in contrast to Wikipedia nothing is footnoted. As far as I can tell, not a single new fact is reported; everything derives from secondary sources of which some are listed as Further Reading. It’s rather dull and there’s no humour at all – perhaps to reflect the fact that Jesus never laughed (the internet has long since gone viral on the subject). Occasionally, the book is coy: was John Wesley a philanderer or not? The book suggests it but doesn’t provide a clear answer. 

I found myself contrasting Ackroyd’s book with two recent works which are thoroughly researched and lively and which light up English religious cultures: Anna Keay’s study of Cromwellian England, The Restless Republic (2022) and Daisy Hays’ Dinner with Jospeh Johnson which treats of late eighteenth century radical and sceptical cultures in which William Blake figures (he gets a chapter in Ackroyd’s book).

Some discursive and slightly better essays appear later in the book but the last chapter reverts to mini-biography, presenting CVs for three twentieth century academic theologians with no attempt to discriminate. John Hick’s important Evil and the God of Love is not elevated above lesser works and there is no recognition of its core concern with solving the intractable theodicy problem: Since there is unmerited suffering in the world then either God is not all good or not all powerful.  Solve that one if you can. I am surprised that no editor was to hand to veto the inclusion of this worse-than-weak last chapter.

From time to time the biographies are interrupted or concluded by strange one-liners about “the English soul”. I quote a selection:

On Julian of Norwich: “The English soul was mediated through homely images.” (page 31)

On Thomas More: “The fight for the English soul had become earnest.” (70)

And again, “The burnings [of heretics] continued, shedding fitful light on the English soul.” (73)

On Henry Barrow: “But his witness survived, and became a significant aspect of the English soul.” (107)

On the Authorized Version: “It might even act as a mirror of Englishness itself, and by extension the English soul” (140)

On George Herbert: “Little Gidding became, for Herbert, a vision of spirituality in the world. It became a corner of the English soul.” (147)

On William Blake: “Yet in truth his vision has never been lost. It is integral to the English soul.” (240)

As a response to Samuel Butler: “it is certainly true that the established religion rested on what was comfortable and what was familiar. That has always been the default position of the English soul.” (261)

And so it continues. Wrap up all your expositions with the same phrase and it reveals itself as either trite or vacuous. Ackroyd nowhere tries to place the notion of soul in relation to, say, heart or spirit. There are those who are kind-hearted and those who are mean-spirited; we use such terms to describe characters and make moral assessments.  Is a soul in contrast something which can only be evaluated from a theological standpoint as saved or damned? But then it would be rather odd to have a theology which had a category of English soul as if there might be French ones or Russian ones or Japanese ones requiring  separate theologies. And would those theologies acknowledge that there is more than one path to salvation? It hasn't really been part of the spirit of theologies to allow that.

Regardless of who is responsible for what, this miscellany is in no sense an enlightening history of Christianity in England or a successful evocation of the varied ways it has infused the experience of some generic English soul. To have achieved anything approaching such lofty ambitions would have required some informing sense of history and structure. Should one be thinking of a Great Tradition (Leavis-style) of lives and works or of a Simultaneous Order (T S Eliot-style) of cultural monuments?

Or should one be looking for the reflection of social changes in the way Christianity has been expressed and lived (in the style of R H Tawney, Christopher Hill and the Hammonds)? The English soul would then take different forms in different contexts:  changing configurations and strategies of state power; the distribution of literacy and access to knowledge; and, most obviously, the changing ways in which the worlds of the rich and the poor have been conjoined (“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate” – second verse, All Things Bright and Beautiful).

*

Peter Ackroyd was a scholarship boy who studied at Clare College, Cambridge re-endowed (as Clare Hall) in the fourteenth century by Lady Elizabeth de Clare. Part of her endowment comprised land and the church benefice in the nearby village of Litlington. Fellows of Clare regularly took the church living and then employed a curate to do the actual work, making the usual profit on the deal. But the Rev Dr William Webb, Master of Clare from 1815 to 1856 and vicar of Litlington from 1816 to 1856 actually lived much of the time in its rectory and indeed died there. This apparent devotion to clerical duty allowed him to pursue a lifelong passion for agricultural improvement; he brought Enclosure to Litlington in 1830. The consequences followed as they did everywhere. My Pateman ancestors, for centuries Litlington agricultural labourers, were scattered – some as far away as Australia by transportation or assisted passage. Some remained but suffered again from the mid-Victorian agricultural depression. Despite that depression, promptly after his death Dr Webb’s executors auctioned his crops growing at Litlington  for £405. 

Webb's  successor the Reverend Joseph Power (vicar from 1856 to 1866) may or may not have known much about his parish. His interests lay elsewhere; he was University Librarian and also looked after the wine cellar at Clare ( the records are archived); as a mathematician he had successfully explained the mechanical cause of one of the first fatal train accidents in England. But in August 1864 he was able to sell the barley growing on his  four Litlington acres for £23. The year is significant for my history.

In December 1863 my great great grandfather James Pateman stole a bushel of beans from his master, a local landowner, because his pregnant wife Susan was ill and their family hungry; he paid the price with 14 days hard labour in January 1864. A daughter, a little Emily, was born at the beginning of February but died before the month was out after a private baptism at home – anyone could perform such an act but it was probably done by a local dissenter; the Patemans had married in an independent Meeting House in nearby Royston, a centre of lively dissent from the time of the Civil War. In the 1870s after the early death of Susan who had no more children, her teenage son John - my great grandfather – became another of those who left the stricken village; he made his way to Brick Lane in London’s East End and found work in the giant Truman Hanbury and Buxton brewery which offered effective competition to the other opium of the people. By this time it’s probable that the Patemans were no longer dissenters but simply godless, which is how I experienced my Pateman grandparents. But none of them transmitted orally or left anything in writing to reveal how they experienced their lives;  they can only appear to me as if bereav'd of light. As the Hammonds put it in The Village Labourer, “this lost world has no Member of Parliament, no press, it does not make literature or write history; no diary or memoirs have kept alive for us the thoughts and cares of the passing day” Their take on the English soul has to be guessed at.

*

 

After a  prefatory warning  that you will find nothing here about Judaism or Islam or … but don’t be offended etc…. Ackroyd’s book starts with Bede when I would have expected Augustine, sent to re-christianise an island abandoned by the Romans and Rome. Arriving at the head of a large expedition funded by Pope Gregory and heading straight to the Canterbury capital of the local secular power, Augustine’s first task was to get Aethelberht on side and that he achieved. He got the protection and resources in cash and kind without which no religious mission can put down roots, outspend and defeat competitors   Aethelberht had his reward in this world: renewed church power and old state power were going to march arm in arm and have done so ever since. But I guess Augustine doesn’t make the cut because he wasn’t English and, to boot, the agent of a foreign power. (And, yes I agree, that’s an old English trope).

As for lived experience which touches the soul there is in Ackroyd’s book precious little about country churchyards, church bells tolling for thee or me, organs belting out the tunes which all the faithful come to sing. There is surprisingly little about parsons, benefices, tithes, the Victorian clerical novel, Sunday and National schools, Nativity plays (were you Mary or a donkey?), the cost of keeping up bishops’ palaces, cloister intrigues, schoolboys beaten, choristers interfered with. Nor is it pressed upon us that the lives of our ancestors since Augustine arrived have, for the very most part, been nasty, brutish and very short, Christ or no risen Christ. We too easily forget both infant mortality and how that experience affected husband, wife and siblings. It is not surprising that we encounter so much evidence of melancholia in those who did record their lives. The money spent on understanding the perils of childbirth and on laying-in wards was a minute fraction of that spent on steeples and spires. 

Ackroyd sketches the outer lives and inner struggles of his cast of mostly male characters. Some of the choices are obvious ones, some less so. A chapter on three Atheists (Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, Richard Dawkins) included, as it were, to represent the Other Side, simply ignores such details as the distinctness of not believing in the existence of a God or any gods and not believing in any kind of personal immortality (which I suppose knocks out one version of the Soul, English or not). It does not treat secularism as a distinct belief cluster which could be adhered to by theists and quite often is outside of a Church of England which still clings fiercely to the secular privileges without which it would now die.  Ackroyd is silent on agnosticism as distinct from indifference. He does not allow for those who rather awkwardly feel that some form of unbelief is a moral obligation imposed by the record of terrible crimes committed – and across millenia - in the names of organised monotheisms. It’s for much the same reason that many have felt obliged to renounce the more recent ideals of Communism.

*

I do share the hope that everyone who lives long enough will come to feel that there is some Quest or other that they must undertake before it is too late. Some discover very young, some never. The English soul? This is Rudyard Kipling in Kim:

“…we must find that River; it is so verree valuable to us”

“But this is gross blasphemy!” cried the Church of England.

  Reposted 27 April 2024 because of glitch in Google indexing of the original post 

Review David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu Who Owns This Sentence?

 

This is an important book not published by a major non-fiction house. It provides for three countries (France, Britain, USA) a detailed history of the complicated, uneven and often confused development of what we now call intellectual property law. The detail is fascinating and fully documented. But the book then turns to the hot button topic of the threat to intellectual and artistic activity  now posed by large corporate enterprises, heavy with lawyers, which are actively removing creative work (especially music and images) from what we call the public domain and in effect seeking to create corporate copyright in perpetuity.

In my country, there are houses which have been passed down through generations of the same family for several hundred years There are no laws in England or, really, in any country which set a fixed term to the period during which physical property can be passed down   Houses, land, jewellery, paintings, books – those can all be inherited though in many times and places tax has been due on inheritance.

In contrast, copyrights and other creator rights in intellectual property have always been restricted to fixed terms and subject to some other restrictions. The length has generally increased over time and now normally stands at seventy years after the death of the creator. Limited rights to “fair dealing” use in reviews and academic work are recognised, as is the right to parody. But “adaptations” are a very tricky area unless you are adapting Shakespeare over whose work no Heirs and Assigns now hover. But over the works of Samuel Beckett and T S Eliot they hover with a vengeance. Everyone enjoys hating these “Literary Estates” and those who manage them courtesy of the long property after-life of dead authors. That afterlife creates other frustrations too: Bellos and Montagu devote a chapter to “Orphan Works”, those pieces of property which are still in copyright but over which no known person or organisation claims the rights, either because they don’t know they own them or can’t be bothered to let it be known that they are the lawful proprietors. There must be many grand-children of dead minor or prolific writers and painters who simply don’t know what they own.

But the bigger problem is the corporations who think they do know. I will give an extended example of the kind of hazards we now face.

In 1808 Charlotte Reynolds (1761-1848), a minor figure in the circle of John Keats, wrote a poem about a goose and posted it to John Dovaston (1782-1854). It was never published though Dovaston published a poem, also about a goose, with which it is twinned. The dates of death of the two people involved clearly indicate that both poems are out of copyright. So when I found Charlotte's poem in 2023 in a batch of old letters sold in a provincial auction, I was free to publish both an image of the letter and a transcription of the poem and did so on this Blog on 20 January 2024. I also own the physical letter but plan to sell it; in her collection of Charlotte’s letters to Dovaston Letters from Lambeth (1981), Joanna Richardson indicates that the batch of letters she acquired  became available because of a house clearance, the commonest way in which old stuff comes onto the market. My letter was not in her batch – it predates those she obtained – but ended up in auction in 2023 no doubt in the latest of  a chain of previous auctions. It was sold for what was on the outside not the inside, at which probably no one had looked for a very long time. Physical stuff circulates through auctions, charity shops, garage sales, and so on and sometimes interesting things turn up. (Think Antiques Roadshow).

I own the letter but I don’t own any copyright on the text of the poem which I have placed in the public (internet) domain where anyone can read it and a surprisingly large number of people appear to have done so already.

What’s not to like? I scanned the letter and published an image along with a transcription of the text of the poem. In some jurisdictions I might be able to claim copyright on the image as recompense for the trouble I took in making it. But I did not place beside it a little label reading © PatemanImages and have no intention of doing so. I do have automatic copyright in the text I wrote to accompany the image, and (possibly?) in the transcription which took a lot of time. But I have no interest in either copyright. I am not preparing a daily-updated  list of everything I have ever written and published  to pass to my Heirs and Assigns.

But it is quite possible that some bot or corporate employee will come along, scrape the image off the internet, and offer it for “licensing” to anyone who wants to use it -  say, a literary periodical publishing a piece about Charlotte Reynolds. The fees will be variable but do not include future ownership of the image which is only available for rent – the key word which identifies the claim to ownership as analogous to the claim to a house or piece of land.

If you go to literary and art world periodicals you will find many illustrations which are accompanied by a © sign and the name of some well-known image shop. Many and maybe most of those images will feature works long out of copyright. One should ask, Where did the image-renter get the image? Did they despatch a photographer, or buy the original work,  or did they simply copy an existing public domain image? Did they scrape it off the internet? And having done so, can they then come back to you ( or me) and tell you (me) to take down the image to which they now own the copyright? That thought places me in a bind: should I now place a copyright notice beside my image to prevent someone else doing so?

If  you can create a new  copyright in any of  the above ways it’s clear that you can create indefinite copyright. After the requisite number of years you simply copy again the original image and claim a new copyright on the new copy. Bellos and Montagu do discuss similar cases where what is usually reckoned to be at stake is whether anyone has engaged in any fresh “creative” or “intellectual” work to produce something worthy of a new lease of copyright

You have been warned; Bellos and Montagu encapsulate the warning by using as a preface to their work an old English rhyme:

The law doth punish man or woman

That steals the goose from off the common

But lets the greqter felon loose

Who steals the common from the goose.