The Wonderful World of Oliver Tearle

My year in books, 2011

2011-12-19T05:32:00.000-08:00

There’s a good story – probably apocryphal, as all good stories are – about an Oxford professor who reached retirement. At his send-off party, he was asked how he planned to spend his retirement. He replied, ‘Read all the books I’ve reviewed.’ I’ve been engaged in the task of reviewing a fair few books recently, but unlike our professor I did read them all, which means I’ve had less time for other bibliophilic delights. However, I thought that now might be a good time to provide a sort of whistle-stop tour of some of the stand-out books from the crop I’ve read this year, complete with a brief review of each book and my reasons for recommending it. I’ll roughly treat this by subject –biographies, science, drama, and so on – just to give the thing at least a show of order.

Without doubt the outstanding work of biography I managed to get my peepers in this year was John Haffenden’s heroic two-volume biography of the poet-critic William Empson (1906-1984). Over 1,000 pages and two vast tomes, Haffenden charts Empson’s life and career, from his time as a student at Cambridge to his sudden expulsion from the university (when condoms were found in his possession), to his time in Japan, China, and then Sheffield (well, where else?), where he was Professor of English for eighteen years. Empson is a very colourful figure and many academics (and non-academics, of course) value him highly. He once stated that any literary criticism he wrote that bored him when he read it back ended up in the bin; it wasn’t right if it didn’t amuse him. (To make sure his work flowed freely and was more readable, he used to imbibe several pints of beer before writing; this helped get it ‘loose’, as he called it.)

Haffenden’s book(s) may be a tour de force in terms of biography, but The QI Book of the Dead is a marvellous work of biothanatography, focusing on famous and not-so-famous names of the past and bringing their dead or deadened stories to life. In this tome can be found the truth behind the ‘lady of the lamp’ who was Florence Nightingale, the ambition of the ‘other’ Victorian nurse Mary Seacole, the sex life of H. G. Wells, and a whole kaleidoscopic array of other luminaries and ... er, liminaries (a coinage I have reached for because I like the idea of being on the threshold, being liminal). I’d also strongly recommend The Second Book of General Ignorance, which kept me company during a cold, dark train journey and B&B night back in January. Talking of biography and thanatography and QI, I squoze in an autobiography as well, Stephen Fry’s autobiog part two, otherwise known as The Fry Chronicles. It’s a gripping read if you’re a pathetic devotee of 80s comedy and the 80s in general in fact (which I am), and Fry spins a yarn, or an anecdote, very well, as has oft been noted. I also read Fry’s Paperweight, a collection of his writings from the late 80s and early 90s, mostly bits and pieces he wrote for various newspapers. Also included are all the charmingly mad ‘Donald Trefusis’ monologues he wrote for Loose Ends back in the mid-1980s. Oh, and Latin!, the play he wrote at Cambridge, the story of whose composition can be found in the autobiography. I was a little thin on science this year, but I managed a corker or two. The best, for me, was Stephen Jay Gould’s collection of essays, Bully for Brontosaurus, which managed to be popular and accessible without being patronising or over-simplistic. Among the highlights are the considerable design faults behind the standard QWERTY keyboard we all use (and which my fingers are currently gliding across as I pen, or type, this, dear reader). These faults were deliberate, in order to force people to type more slowly; the typists were going too quickly with the previous, more ergonomic, keyboards, and as a result the typewriters were prone to continual jamming. There is also an illuminating little piece on the popularity of dinosaurs among children (written in the days before Jurassic Park, or at least before the film), and essays on the Voyager pictures sent back from Uranus. Gould was a great populariser of science, and this book demonstrates why repeatedly. In the field of language, I came across a charming little book in a bookshop (sorry, the bookshop, for there is only one) in St Davids, Wales: History of the English Language by Lincoln Barnett. Although published a while back (1962), the book doesn’t suffer from too much fustiness (though the pages, I’m pleased to say, are awash with the stuff), and there is a fund of fascinating facts. For instance, Sir Thomas Elyot, he whom his descendant T. S. Eliot was to name-check in his 1940 poem ‘East Coker’, coined the words ‘democracy’,‘encyclopedia’, and even ‘education’. It’s not quite so engagingly written as other books of its kind on the market – it has little of the eye for a witty story or humorous personality that Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue has, for instance – but it’s still got a fair few corking facts in there.

Talking of history, as I half-was there, and of Bryson, which I fully was, I found time to read At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bryson himself. A great read – 650 pages of quirky personalities, fascinating lives, and little gold nuggets of trivia, all woven onto the compelling narrative tapestry which Bryson has become so adept at embroidering (okay, so I know tapestries and embroideries are two different things, but you get the general needlework metaphor I’m going for here). People never married younger in the ‘olden days’, as is commonly believed – the stories of everyone being married by fifteen and dead by thirty are largely a misunderstanding, caused by Romeo and Juliet in the case of the former and by a misinterpretation of how mean averages work in the case of the latter. As with A Short History of Nearly Everything Bryson sings the praises of a few unsung or undersung heroes – John Snow, for instance, the man who worked out what caused cholera epidemics (which is putatively the origin of the tradition of saying ‘Good health’ when we raise a glass of booze, though Bryson doesn’t mention this).

What of my own metier, literary criticism? Well, I visited a few old friends again, and reread both The Force of Poetry and Essays in Appreciation, two Christopher Ricks works I would not be without. He is without doubt the greatest living critic. I also read his most recent book, True Friendship, which lacked some of his old magic, but still sparkled more brightly than everyone else. Parts of it read more like notes for an annotated edition of Geoffrey Hill’s poems, but then at least Ricks has the self-awareness and wit to point this out. I’m now reading his Allusion to the Poets, which glitters with the old magic. I also read The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar’s vast work in which, over 700 pages, they show how women writers of the nineteenth century worked with, within, and against male forms of writing which they inherited. It’s overlong and needed a good bit of editing in parts, but it stands as a monument of feminist literary criticism, immensely influential and endlessly readable, despite its occasional waffle.

I also read a fine book by John Sutherland, called Curiosities of Literature. This fun and hugely readable book is a great ‘dipping’ book, into which one can plunge for five minutes of interestingness whenever one has the time. Sutherland is the author of the three-books-in-one known as The Literary Detective, which is also a fantastic work – all about the little puzzles in fiction, particularly nineteenth-century novels, which we may have encountered but may not necessarily have stopped to think about. Curiosities is - curiously - organised by subject and contains some fine facts about the literary world – the authors of the longest and shortest ever plays, or writers who have had food named after them, and a host of other fine facts. A smorgasbord of delights, to be sure.

Another tome I read this year (which could double up as a weapon should the need arise) was Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets, a positively ridiculous 1,100 pages of dense biography covering as many poets who have written in English since Chaucer and Gower as Schmidt can fit in. He sifts out a fair few names from pre-1900 – Edward Lear only gets mentioned in a note to acknowledge that he’s been left out, if you see what I mean – yet nearly half the book is taken up by poets of the last 100 years or so. There are only so many Beat poets I can read about before I wish to beat somebody with a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s complete works, but if you can get through these dull and overlong chapters, it’s certainly worth reading. Schmidt has a habit, to which he falls prey continually, of quoting somebody’s opinion and then stating, ‘This is wrong.’ This in itself I find wrong, but again, it’s only a minor criticism.

Last Thursday the world lost the great and incomparable Christopher Hitchens. If you don’t know his work, go on Youtube after you’ve read this and search for one of the many videos of him uploaded there. (His appearance on Question Time defending his friend Salman Rushdie a few years ago has him arguably - another in-joke there, I fear - at his best and most clear-thinking and eloquent.) I read his fine polemical work, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything back on Hitch’s birthday (which he shared with Thomas Jefferson), 13 April this year. Again, a train journey was the excuse. I think I attracted a fair few funny looks from fellow passengers, but then given the choice between a book and a bomb, I know which I’d rather see someone carrying on a train. This book offers a cogently presented argument in which Hitchens deconstructs various religions and the arguments put forward by believers, arguing that reason and science are far nobler things to worship (although that is not the right word) than Bronze Age texts and deities for whom there is no evidence. His death last week robbed the world of one of the most powerful writers and speakers we have seen in recent years. As Pound said of T. S. Eliot, I have nothing to say except: read him.

Religion may not be a subject that’s packed with laughs (though there are many laughable aspects to it, undoubtedly), but two books I read this year treated lighter, more ‘fun’ subjects. The Naked Jape, by stand-up comic and ‘space hopper in a suit’ Jimmy Carr (and his friend Lucy Greeves), is a marvellous study of jokes, their meaning, their purpose, and their role in social interaction. Carr and Greeves pull off a masterstroke by including a joke literally on every page – in fact, at the bottom of every page. Intelligent, serious in its approach yet funny and entertaining to read, this book was one of the highlights of a cold winter for me. Oh, and the other great standout in the field of humorous works was Pop Goes the Weasel by Albert Jacks, which looked at the historical origins of all our favourite nursery rhymes, from Humpty Dumpty to Three Blind Mice and everything in between. I was disappointed in the lack of concrete evidence that materialised for just about everytheory Jacks put forward; the book is fascinating in terms of the light it sheds on various theories about the origins of nursery rhymes, but ultimately we’re left scratching our heads and feeling much as we did before, suspecting that we know nothing for sure about these funny little rhymes. Oh well. Still a nice enough read.

As for drama, well I well-nigh read my eyes out with that. Between January and May this year, I lectured at the University of Warwick (which, as every schoolchild knows, is not in Warwick at all, but Coventry), and on the train journeys between Loughborough and Godivaland I would read plays by any dramatist I could get my hands on. Aristophanes, Beckett, Bond, Brecht, Chekhov, Churchill, Ibsen, Lorca, Marlowe, Pirandello, Shaw, Terence, Wedekind... All were pretty much required reading for me. This is not least because that is what I was supposed to be teaching at Warwick (though inevitably poetry, art, science, religion, philosophy, graffiti, Come Dine with Me and other concerns all made an appearance at some time or another in seminars). Mostly I read Beckett from beginning to end, including all the short radio pieces and mini-masterpieces like ‘Breath’. I also enjoyed some of the plays I taught: I still have absolutely no idea what The Skriker by Churchill is about, but it all sounds impressive enough. Wedekind is a wonderful playwright, dark and different. Chekhov’s The Seagull is a little-known masterpiece. Hedda Gabler by Ibsen is stunningly good, his best after A Doll's House. If you can forgive Strindberg his misogynistic trespasses (and the matter is far from simple), then I’d recommend Miss Julie, which has some of the finest dialogue written for women in the whole naturalist movement. Brecht still leaves me cold. But then that’s what he wants, after all...

Novels were largely confined to the work arena. I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, and loved that. Many people, Anne’s sister Charlotte included, thought the novel not worth remembering, but I thought it a finely written book about a difficult subject (alcoholism, parenthood, domestic abuse, all are treated here with frankness and skill). I had to reread Wuthering Heights, a book I always have mixed feelings about, but the book does have a raw energy to it and the dialogue is practically unrivalled among nineteenth-century novels (Dickens’s eccentrics excepted, perhaps). I did find time to read a bit of non-work novelage. I also revisited David Gemmell’s Rigante quartet, something I started doing last year – I reread Stormrider, the finale to the tetralogy, and whatever criticisms people might throw at the late Gemmell, being a poor storyteller is certainly not one of them. If you’re looking for a fantasy author to read in the New Year, and you haven’t yet read Gemmell, seek out his books, beginning with Legend, his first and most popular novel.

Poetry largely eluded me this year, except for the occasional dip into old favourites like Larkin and Housman. I did, however, manage to do what I had never done before, and sit down and go through all of T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-62 in one sitting (well, two sittings really), when I had to travel on the train from Loughborough to Coventry on academic business. When I did so, I saw that Ricks was right when he said that when you read Eliot’s published poetry in order, you notice the way proper names disappear from the text. The poet who begins by offering us Prufrock, Sweeney, Phlebas, Madame Sosostris and all the rest leaves us with the Four Quartets, where people are seldom named. I also went through all of Auden’s Collected Poems. He was a damn sight more prolific than Eliot, and his complete works amounts to over 900 pages, and there’s a lot of weak stuff in there. He got rid of ‘September 1st, 1939’ but left The Age of Anxiety in? He pretty much lost it when he went to America, which isn’t saying anything new, just saying it again. There is the odd gem among the later work, though. ‘On the Circuit’ and ‘Doggerel by a Senior Citizen’ will always make me smile. I’d also recommend Simon Armitage’s most recent volume, Seeing Stars, a most considerable and considering volume (a joke for the star-gazers, or Latin scholars, there, I fear). This is a collection of tableaux written in a style which blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose.

And that’s about it! What joys await me in 2012, the annus olympus? I have two books to write (plus another two which are at the drawing-board stage at present), so I’ll be reading a fair bit of research for those. Plus I have articles planned on Aylmer Vance, Dickens, and Philip Larkin. All recommendations are welcome in the little box left for comments below – particularly when it comes to non-fiction writers in the fields of science or history. I have stacks of everything else still left on my shelves. So I will trundle off to read my Christmas choice for this year: it’s a Dickens book, of course. And it’s his earliest work, collected together in Sketches by Boz. So, a Merry Christmas one and all, and Godot bless us, everyone!

New book on critical-creative writing published

2011-07-12T03:19:00.000-07:00

Forgive me the shameless self-publicising, but I have a new book out, as of last month. I say 'I' have a new book out, but really the book is by everyone - it's an omnibook, if you like. I co-edited it with John Schad, who is at the forefront of the critical-creative crossover or interface, and has produced numerous works of experimental criticism, including the excellent novelistic work, Someone Called Derrida - a book all about memories, whether misremembered, remembered by someone else, or remembered by a self you no longer inhabit. (Sounds complicated? Well, the book cannot easily be paraphrased, so I'll merely echo Ezra Pound's injunction to people concerning T. S. Eliot: READ HIM.)

Anyway, the book we have edited together is called Crrritic! - though that is not its full title, which would occupy two whole lines were I to repeat it here. The book contains lots of pieces, some short, some long, some poetry, some prose - but all poetic. It includes a 'manifesto' of sorts by myself, among other pieces. It's also available in paperback, so it's cheap, as academic books go. If you have an interest in writing that pushes boundaries, or that shakes up literary criticism and questions and explores the role or identity of the modern university, then you should find some substantial morsels of food for thought. There are also some fine poems, too.

Here is a link to the paperback edition of the book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crrritic-Outbursts-Disasters-Resignation-Inventions/dp/1845193822

Enjoy.

Seven books of literary criticism everyone should read

2011-04-10T06:53:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, when nobody better qualified is about for them to ask, students of mine ask me how they can get better marks for their essays, and how they can learn to sharpen their essay-writing skills. My answer is always the same – ‘How did you get in here?’ Then, when I've recovered my aplomb, ‘Go and read these great people.’ And I send them off armed with one or more of the names listed below. This is, of course, an utterly perverse, wilful, and personal list; there are no women on it, for instance. This is not a reflection on female literary critics, but on my own personal ‘career trajectory’ thus far, and the books that have shaped my own writing. Critics such as Diane Elam, as well as Gilbert and Gubar, should be on this list as well; but that would have made it ‘nine books’ rather than seven, and anyway, I want to go and have a beer. So these seven will have to do, and feel free to leave disagreements and mildly abusive comments in the box provided underneath.

1. William Empson, Argufying Jonathan Bate, soon-to-be Master of Worcester College, Oxford, said that the three greatest critics of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were, respectively, Dr Johnson, William Hazlitt, and William Empson. These are the greatest, he says, ‘not least because they are the funniest.’ Empson is frequently funny. Humour is a rare thing in literary criticism, with many modern academics confounding moral seriousness with stylistic po-facery: a terrible confusion, if ever there was one. Though Empson is best-known for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (published in 1930 when he was 23, and completed after he was banished from Cambridge following the discovery of condoms in his college rooms), this collection of essays, published posthumously in 1987, are the best place to find the great man at work – whether it’s taking his colleagues to task over their critical blindnesses, or his marvellous suggestion that the slave-trade is an important ‘presence’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. A ‘rag-bag’ of delights that is well worth a read.

2. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny A large work of critical theory and literary criticism, this book, published in 2003 and frequently 'Derridean' in its approach, is essentially a collection of essays inspired by Freud’s celebrated essay on the ‘unheimlich’ or uncanny. Subjects range from being buried alive to such outré considerations as darkness, the double, sex, and the modern university. Funny, poetic, and a real page-turner.

3. Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation Sir Christopher Ricks is undoubtedly the greatest living successor to Empson. This collection from 1996 contains some of his best and most important work, whether it’s his suggestion that plague is an important context for Doctor Faustus (a reading itself partly inspired by Empson’s reading of the slave-trade and Coleridge), or his taking-to-task of literary theorists (Ricks reportedly left Cambridge in the 1980s following a series of disagreements with teachers of theory there). Ricks is a wonderfully close and acute reader of all sorts of ‘texts’ (a word he himself would hate being used of literature), and writes beautifully too. A must-read.

4. H. Coombes, Literature and Criticism While a little dated now, this little book fuses close readings of poetry with broader considerations of the importance of such things as tone, rhyme, and imagery in poems and how we should approach them when reading English poetry. A sort of 'introductory' book but one that every critic of poetry should at least have a look at. Heavily influenced by Leavis and Empson, Coombes is good at reading people like Hopkins and T. S. Eliot, and knows what he likes (and is vocal about what he doesn’t like, much as Leavis was).

5. Frederic Crews, The Pooh Perplex This 1960s book, along with its ‘sequel’, the 2000 work Postmodern Pooh, is a collection of hugely entertaining spoofs of popular schools of literary criticism, all presented as being genuine essays written by completely made-up literary critics. I’ve selected the earlier volume here – being a rather perverse so-and-so – which contains gentle (and not-so-gentle) piss-takes of (among others) psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and F. R. Leavis himself (who is present in this collection of mock essays as the fictional critic, Simon Lacerous). Perhaps the highlight is ‘A Complete Analysis of Winnie-the-Pooh’. Pants-pissingly funny (if you’re a geek).

6. John Carey, The Violent Effigy First published in 1973, this book – subtitled ‘a study of Dickens’ imagination’ – has been more or less in print ever since. (Not sure if it still is, but in these days of Amazon, ebay, and AbeBooks, it'll be available somewhere for the price of a pint.) Carey looks at a number of aspects of Dickens’s writing and relates them to the novelist’s childhood, as well as the broader Victorian culture of which Dickens was a part. Carey is one of the most incisive readers of Dickens, as this book will clearly demonstrate.

7. John Schad, Victorians in Theory An utterly ‘mad’ idea – take five Victorian poets and pair each of them with one of five Francophone post-structuralists, showing how the two thinkers' works overlap and, in the process, demonstrating how problematic our ideas about history, zeitgeists, and even ‘the Victorians’ really are. Browning partners off with Derrida, Arnold with Foucault, Hopkins with Lacan … the results are often surprising and Schad’s distinctive writing style and skills at close reading point up some interesting connections between these ‘writers’. This is a bold book, but a very rewarding one.

And, as I said, it is now time for me to have a beer in the sun. Happy reading and all that...

Five facts about sweets you probably didn't know

2011-02-27T02:36:00.001-08:00

To redress the lack of bloggage and bloggery for a while, I thought I'd write briefly about something utterly trivial and silly. (Not that I find sweets particularly trivial or silly: they are incredibly important, of course.) I know some of you will know one or some or all of these facts, but I'm sure you'll forgive me the brazenly offensive blog title, just this once.

1. J. M. Barrie gave Quality Street chocolates their name
The author of Peter Pan wrote rather a few plays, and one of them has been somewhat confined to the rubbish-bin of history. Or has it? The name endures. The playwright's 1901 play Quality Street was the inspiration for the brand of chocolates launched by Mackintosh's in 1936 - or at least the name was. The older readers of this blog (by which I actually mean anyone over eighteen) may even remember, as I do, the 'Major' and 'Miss' characters who appeared on the tins of Quality Street until 2000. These figures were based on characters from Barrie's play. Contrary to popular belief, Barrie never 'invented' the name Wendy: the name existed before Peter Pan, both as a surname and as a girls' name (a diminutive or 'pet' form of Gwendolyn). Barrie's 'Wendy' was coined as a clipping of the expression 'fwendy-wendy'. (That's enough to make you vomit up your Quality Streets by itself.)

2. Smarties don't contain crushed beetles. Or insects of any kind.
Until recently, the red Smarties were dyed red by using a food colouring called E120 (better known as cochineal). Cochineal is made from crushing bugs (which are, in entomological terms, insects which are capable of sucking things) rather than beetles. However, to make Smarties both kosher and suitable for vegetarians, red Smarties are now dyed using vegetable dyes rather than 'animal' ones. (Some sites claim that is was violet Smarties which were dyed using cochineal - this blogger has been unable to settle the matter either way as yet.) So now you know.... Don't you feel like a smartarse Smartie-pants?

3. Snickers bars were originally called Snickers, not Marathon.
While it is true that Snickers were formerly known as Marathon bars (or monkey shit, depending on whether you like peanuts or not) when they were originally marketed in the United Kingdom, the chocolate bar was first known as Snickers when it was launched in the United States. Bill Bryson tells us, in his (highly recommended) history of the 'American' language, Made in America, that Snickers bars, when launched by the Mars company in 1930, were named after a horse....

4. Skittles used to be made from the same stuff gramophone records were made of.
That is, shellac. We're back to bugs, again (this sucks, I know). The lac bug, found in India and Thailand, is the source of shellac, an edible resin which was used to make old '78s', gramophone records from the pre-rock 'n' roll days. This was also the stuff used to make the hard outer shells of Skittles, but we're informed that shellac is no longer used. Skittles are now, therefore, suitable for vegetarians.

5. Jelly Babies were known as 'Peace Babies' until the 1950s.
When they were originally launched in 1918, Jelly Babies went under the name Peace Babies, to mark the end of the First World War. (So this was the original and sweetest of all the post-war 'baby booms'.) Ironically, the sweets were not made during World War II because of wartime shortages.

So, now you know five facts about sweets that you (probably) didn't know before. Now, go in search of such sweeties and enjoy. I'm off to eat some Gummy Bears.

Another piece of pathetic poetry from the vault

2010-12-05T04:09:00.000-08:00

L & R

It is the sixteenth of October. The people of Oxford
gather to jeer, the sharp clear morning air
breathing on the buildings. And the keen, cold wind.

This is the last stand. But problems will occur
at the best-prepared-for martyrdoms, the flames
fanned in the wrong direction, the wind getting up,

the rain keeping the bundles sodden.
One candle, spoken of among the fire and heat,
helps you to keep face, tell left from right:

a metaphor dreamt up in advance, well, no doubt,
yet brought to life amongst the stench of flame
and frightening off all bodily pain. But the final stand

is here, within this ditch, this hell on earth,
thigh-deep in damp wood, praying for a speedy death.

A proposed book of literary delights

2010-11-02T15:11:00.001-07:00

I'd love to write a book debunking some of the popular myths about literature. Christopher Marlowe wasn't killed in a tavern brawl. Tennyson didn't invent the phrase ''Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' Shakespeare's play Hamlet had nothing to do with the death of his son, Hamnet. Lewis Carroll didn't come up with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or the word 'slithy'. J. K. Rowling doesn't even come close to being the inventor of the word 'muggle'. Oscar Wilde never died of syphilis, though he almost certainly suffered from that literarily-named affliction.

Or, twisting things the other way, there are the surprising and unusual gifts that writers have given us. Charles Dickens first wrote down the word 'boredom'. T. S. Eliot was the first person to use the word 'bullshit'. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as well as being author of a number of bad novels, gave Bovril its name without realising. Literature and the literary world is full of such gems. But it's not just about trivia, though I think that trivia is incredibly important in educating ourselves in any subject: trivia, to dangle a bon mot in your face, is anything but trivial. But it's more about the fact that many of us know so little of the vast undiscovered ocean of literary knowledge out there, being like Newton's child playing with a few little pebbles of bookish joy every now and then. Of course, maybe John Lloyd and the team of 'QI elves' are already working on 'The Book of General Literary Ignorance', but whether they are or they aren't I have a vision for a different kind of book: one which does for literature what Bill Bryson did for the history of American language and culture in Made in America, or again for scientists in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The walls of university campus Blackwell's all over the country are choc-a-bloc with introductions to literary this, and theorising literary that, but one of the chief things that English schools and departments all over Britain - and the US - really lack is a great introduction to the writers who gave us that thing called 'literature'. I'm not just talking about biographical quirks or etymological oddities, rather something that gives university freshers studying English in all its variegated and diverse forms an idea and shape of the thing they've walked into. And while knowing that Anthony Trollope hated himself for inventing the pillar box (and later died laughing) may not provide them with a framework for deconstructing Heart of Darkness or psychoanalysing Othello, it might provide a less immediately 'useful' but arguably more important role, namely welcoming them into the world of books and literary studies, warming their slippers by the fire for them, and in general acting as their first-semester 'fag'. I for one would buy such a fag, and puff away.

Tour of the South East: Hastings and Hever Castle

2010-11-02T03:49:00.000-07:00

Hastings

After we’d finished in Lewes it was already gone 2pm, and we were starving, having had nothing more than a Nutri-Grain bar all day. So we drove out to find somewhere to get a big, fat-filled, greasy meal, and, chancing upon a Little Chef, I ate my third Olympic Breakfast of the holiday. I honestly believe that, in the unlikely event that I ever find myself on Death Row somewhere in the Deep South of America and am told I must select my last meal, I could do worse than to opt for an Olympic Breakfast from the Little Chef. Would they fly me back over to Blighty to taste it in some roadside restaurant in the West Country, do you suppose? Or would they fly out one of the Little Chef … er, chefs to cook up my final feast in the dark, dingy prison itself? Maybe it’s like Blackadder and everyone has to have sausages. For my part, I’d like it if those sausages were served with beans and a fried egg or two.

We then headed to Hastings. I was excited about seeing the town in the sunshine, rather than the squalling rain through which we had driven the day before. The place was, if anything, somewhat disappointing given its important place in history. Mind you, I’m not so sure it quite deserves to be as famous as it is. For starters, the Battle of Hastings—surely its most resounding claim to fame—didn’t even happen in Hastings at all, but a few miles inland at a place which is, appropriately, named Battle. (I have it on reasonably good authority that the village was named after the battle, not that the conquering Normans came to a road-sign that read ‘Battle’ and thought, ‘How poetic! We’ll have our battle there.’) Battle’s other claim to fame—or rather infamy—is that it is the place where the pop group Keane hail from. Where are those bloodthirsty Normans when you really need them, eh?

There is quite a big tourist trade in Hastings though; in fact, almost all of the place has a distinctively touristy tang. There are ice-cream huts, mini-golf courses, shops selling sticks of rock and postcards, and—inevitably—a chance to visit the castle. Unfortunately, we had arrived too late to do the castle, So we had a look round the shops and I bought a copy of five of Seneca’s plays for £1 in a lovely little bookshop that had books piled up all over the floor as well as on the shelves and on revolving stands. There’s something charming about such a bookshop, with its smell of musty, rotting paper and the chaos indicative—at least in my own tiny mind—of a stuffy old professor’s rooms in some medieval Oxford college like Balliol or Merton. It puts all branches Waterstone’s, with their clinical OCD-tastic laying out of the books and ‘3 for 2’ stickers, fully to shame. The owner of the bookshop had the facial hair and questionable taste in jumpers which marks the great eccentrics who always run such shops, and he was friendly enough as he served me. Feeling decidedly happier now I had pocketed a souvenir from Hastings which almost made up for the disappointment of missing out on the castle, I walked out into the evening sunshine ready to go in search of ice cream.

We then had a stroll along the parade, before taking on the cold water and harsh shingles of the beach and dipping our feet in the sea. It has to be done on any British holiday where the coast is in view: you could be staying in the height of the Highlands in mid-January, but if you find yourself on a beach, it’s British law that you have to divest yourself of shoes and socks and expose your lower extremities to the biting cold of the mighty ocean lapping around you. After that we had our ice cream, since the rest of our bodies, feet notwithstanding, was warm enough still at this point. After that, we left Hastings—after all, once you’ve done the tourist shops and missed the castle, you’ve pretty much seen all that the place has to throw at you.

Hever Castle

The next day it was time to head home, but we went via Hever Castle, on the Kent border. This was the home of the Boleyn (or Bullen, as many of the plaques and notices had it in the castle itself) family, the most famous scion of which was Anne, the woman who brought about a Reformation in England in the sixteenth century. The face that brought down a thousand monasteries, if you want to get silly about it. We wanted to have a look round the castle and gardens—and they are charming enough, believe me—but you really pay for the privilege. It was overpriced, over-hyped, and overrated—at £13 entry you expect something special—but the gardens were, I have to say, unutterably lovely if you like gravel paths and little ponds and statues of weird fish-creatures and the like. So the gardens were very pleasant, if nowhere near justifying the hefty entrance fee. I was expecting something special from the castle itself.

Hever Castle was—if you’ll excuse the overwrought pun—heaving. This was the height of the summer holidays, of course, and many parents seemed to be of the impression that this was a good place to bring very small children. I’m not questioning the desire to show your children a place of beauty in order to remind them of the wonderful creations of which our species is possible—no, not for a minute. But I did wonder how much the kids were getting out of it. Their most popular and enduring pastime seemed to be running about the place, but unfortunately the grounds weren’t quite that big, or the place anywhere near deserted enough, to make this a viable activity. So, we found ourselves becoming increasingly baffled by the strange urge that had made parents wake up that morning and decide to bring their toddlers and nine-year-olds to this place.

This may make me sound like an old dyed-in-the-tweed fogey, and if it does, well, I apologise. But it seems to be the same with a lot of kids these days. I don’t blame them for a moment, but I do sometimes feel like turning to the parents and asking them if I could quiz their offspring for a few minutes on their knowledge of Anne Boleyn or the Tudors or Hever Castle. Curiosity is supposed to be the great gift with which we humans are endowed, and it is supposed to be present in children more than at any other phase of life. And yet I worry that we have a generation of children coming through—just after my own generation, arguably—who are no longer as curious about the world as we were. I don’t say ‘They’re no longer curious about the world, full stop’, for that would be unfair and untrue. But I think curiosity, that spark of energy which prompts us to ask questions and want to find out about that which is around us, is not so popular as it once was. It’s partly down to schools, I suppose: education is so syllabus-driven and swamped with tests and exams and assessments, that most of the fun is sucked out of a subject. This has always been the case; it certainly was true when I was at school, ten or so years ago, and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve only since leaving school developed an abiding interest in science, through great books on the subject rather than great teachers. I also think that television, too, has played its part. Television is a great medium, don’t get me wrong—arguably my great love of British history was nurtured, if not directly inspired, by my watching of Blackadder and Maid Marian and Her Merry Men as a child of seven or eight. But there aren’t, let’s be fair, many factual programmes aimed at children, aside from the recent adaptations of the uproariously good Horrible Histories series of books. And aside from books like that, kids aren’t directed to the right books which would inspire them to take an interest in a subject—at least I wasn’t, I know. Anyway, maybe this is all rot and I need to shut up. I just think we don’t nurture curiosity enough in our kids, that’s all. But what do I know? I haven’t even got kids.

In short, Hever Castle is worth a visit, just about. But I think its inflated admittance fee probably puts off a few people. The castle itself contains many rooms containing similar things to the stuff contained in other rooms, and they do have a habit of making a big deal out of very small things while almost shushing into a corner some of the more promising artefacts. But anyway, I’ll let you decide, dearest of readers, should you ever go there yourself.

After Hever we continued our journey home. I had a bag full of books and lots of nerdy stuff about castles and the like to write up. Which I’ve done now—at long last, some three months after the holiday ended—and, in its way, I hope this hasn’t been too dull a travelogue. I’m off now to travel to the land of seventeenth-century Europe in the company of the great Jacobean dramatists. Till next time, then, fair reader, I wish you well on your travels.

A new poem (about a poet)

2010-10-24T03:34:00.000-07:00

Come Right Again

Larkin was edgy, ’cos he ‘fucked you up’,
his Anglo-Saxon worn like slashed blue jeans.
Such bold four-lettered nerve was too abrupt
to go unnoticed by us wayward teens.

It was good enough for Chaucer, FFS!
Old Geoff made use of quaint to pull a stunt
knowing his readers would all get the joke,
and end up not too far away from Kent.

But Larkin swerved, and that was all the magic:
beyond the guttural groans and lack of care
you got a sense of ‘what was really there’
in (say) ‘Afternoons’ and ‘Myxomatosis’ –

a void uncaptured by a mere kenosis,
the sliding of the teenage to the tragic.

Another poem from the vault

2010-10-24T03:28:00.001-07:00

Here's a poem I wrote (so my archives tell me) back in April 2007. It's a bit wry and a bit light, but I thought I'd try my hand at writing something with a comical twist. I probably misjudged it terribly and it's funny for all the wrong reasons, but here we are:

Disconnection

He mended your computer for you
and though you have no future
you had a relapse, and gave in

to all the little charms and quirks
that made a relationship work
once. Once the net was up

and working again, you spread
your own net over him, and reeled him
into your own web, world wide,

he was cut and dried
hung outside
after the deed was done, and you retired

to bed. You asked me if you have a future
since this bonding over such a
troublesome connection?

Now you’re asking: maybe it was he
who wielded the power, as he held the plug?
And maybe he

was glad to leave, knowing he still held the keys
to unlock your heart whenever he wanted, just by recourse
to the right strings. Or computer wires in this case.

Tour of the South East: Lewes

2010-08-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

The next day, we rose early and left the Travelodge with just a coffee and a Nutri-Grain for breakfast, as Rachel wanted to drive to Lewes so she could look at something in the East Sussex Records Office there. It was hot and sunny again, and although I’d ended up rather enjoying our atmospheric drive through the rain-ridden landscape of Folkestone and Hastings (Bexhill notwithstanding), I was pleased to see that splendid orb once more gracing the skies above us, bathing us in its golden warmth like … well, you get the idea. It was a nice day, and that was just the sort of day I wanted for looking around Lewes.

Mind you, the downside to the heat is the dehydration it brings, especially to a hydrophile like me. When we got there I was already quite thirsty and wanted a long, cool draught of Coke or Sprite or mineral water or cow’s piss or anything really, so long as it was sufficiently chilled and high in water content. So, as Rachel went off to the castle, beyond which was the records office, I set off to explore the charity shops and to seek out a place where I might make a purchase of some beverage or other.

My first impressions of Lewes were not favourable. I could only find one newsagents—a Martin’s—and they were offering lukewarm Lucozade at a rather inflated price. Still, I could feel the moisture seeping from my body like a dishcloth being rinsed out, so I reached into the shop’s chiller cabinet—whether it had ever been plugged in, or whether it had broken down years ago and nothing had been done about it, I couldn’t have said—and freed two bottles of original-flavoured Lucozade (whatever this original flavour actually is supposed to be: I’ve often wondered) from their moorings.

I took two, partly because I knew Rachel would want a drink later, partly because there was an offer on—two bottles for £400, I think it was—and partly because I was just that damn thirsty I could’ve drunk both of them, a whole litre of Lucozade, right there and then and not suffered any ill effects. (Well, no more than one normally suffers upon drinking this stuff.) Joining the queue of old ladies that had suddenly formed in front of me (the shop had been empty when I’d arrived), I waited, with my £400 in my hands, hoping I didn’t pass out or turn into a pile of chalky dust before I reached the front.

The queue eventually started to move a bit faster, and I was almost taken by surprise when I took my token step forward and found myself facing the woman behind the till.

‘Oh, hello,’ I said, amazed to find I still had a voice to speak with. ‘Just these two, please.’

The woman picked one of my lukewarm bottles up and examined it. ‘That offer is for the smaller bottles, not these ones. These are £600 each.’

‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly deciding to revise my staunch anti-theism and conclude that there was a God, and that he had been put in this universe just to play this sort of practical joke on me. ‘I’ll leave it then, thanks.’

And with great reluctance but a general feeling that it was the right thing to do, I retrieved the bottles from the counter and returned them to their (if anything) slightly warmer home.
So, despite the sweltering heat and my considerable thirst, I ended up without a drink. But I forged ahead, determined to make this place work for me and to coax the charity shops into turning my opinion around. From that moment on, I had success after success. I found a charming book called Forgotten English in a Cancer Research shop, which contained lots of rare words popular in centuries gone by but which have sadly, but in most cases understandably, fallen out of use. Among my favourites were ‘prickmedainty’, a sixteenth-century man-about-town who made a fuss of his hair; ‘sockdolager’, which denoted the climax or conclusion of a salesperson’s spiel; and ‘pilgarlick’, an old word for a bald head.

So, with my new purchase in my bag, and feeling glad in this heat that I didn’t have a pilgarlick (but trying not to be too much of a prickmedainty about my own pate), I headed over the river (which smelled unmistakably of vomit—really, there is no other way I can describe this unpalatable smell), to see what other shops there remained to delight me. I found a Horrible Histories book on the ‘cut-throat Celts’ for 10p in an Age Concern shop, which was just as well, as that’s the only change I had left on me. Seriously, these are great books. They’re always to be found in the kids’ section of charity shops, because they are kids’ books, but like Haribo and train sets and a woman’s breasts and other things nature designed with children in mind, a grown man can extract considerable pleasure from them. There’s even a TV series of the books now, and a series of spin-off science books. Anyway, enough about my childish obsessions.

When I left Age Concern, I strolled a little further down the road and found a Superdrug, where I purchased two bottles of 7up for £1.15 each, but since it was Buy One Get One Free, I got them both for that price. Not only were they reasonably priced, they were cold, and I gratefully devoured the contents of one of them, leaving the other for Rachel, before heading off to see what else Lewes had to offer.

Now I was suitably watered, or 7upped, I felt in a better frame of mind to appreciate Lewes. The place has a rich history, and is believed to have been the site of a Roman settlement and a Saxon town; indeed, it was the Saxons who gave the town its name. After the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror gave the town to his brother-in-law, William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey, who subsequently became a great landowner and one of the richest landowners ever to live at that; some historians reckon his fortune was worth a sum that would equate to £67 billion in our money. So this de Warenne was a sort of Bill Gates for his day, only without the computers or the dodgy hair. I was intrigued to see the castle, but for the time being I had shops on my mind.

I then found a record shop selling loads of great LPs for £1 each, so I bought a good copy of Seventh Sojourn by the Moody Blues, and Discovery by Mike Oldfield. I was surprised to learn, when I looked through the more expensive records that were individually priced (and could give those bottles of Lucozade in Martin’s a run for their money in terms of price at that), that a lot of the records in the £1 pile had been by older, more credible artists from the 60s and 70s, while the records being offered for £5 or £6 were the sort of thing I’d seen countless times in every charity shop and at every car-boot sale I’d ever been to. Weird. It was a great shop though, and I was feeling even more favourable towards Lewes now, so I stopped to chat to a friend of the proprietor for five minutes about the Moody Blues, to whom he’d been introduced at school in 1975 by his music teacher. That’s the sort of music teachers we need in schools, methinks. Seriously, if you don’t know the work of the Moody Blues at all, go on Youtube—or even better, Amazon, and spend a few quiz on one of their albums—and let yourself in for a real treat. On the Threshold of a Dream is perhaps their finest all-round album, but everyone knows their song ‘Nights in White Satin’, because it’s the only song anyone ever knows which contains a mellotron in it. They’re the best band of their time, far better than the Beatles and with a real experimental edge like so many bands of that time. They’re the best thing to come out of Birmingham after Cadbury’s chocolate—and, like Cadbury’s chocolate, no longer exist, sadly.

The record shop had been down a side-street coming off the main High Street, so I traipsed back up to the main road and resumed walking up the hill, away from Vomit River and towards the castle. The main street is on a hill, and it’s quite a steep incline—this was my second time climbing it, and even the new-found energy provided by the 7up was beginning to fade. So I walked to the toilets, which were down the market street, partly because I needed to answer a call for a spot of micturition and partly because I wanted to check out the lavatorial amenities of this town. Unfortunately, Market Street involved double-backing on myself a bit and heading down the hill again, down a small road running semi-parallel to the High Street. Still, the toilets were very clean, and it was a nice day for it. I stopped on my way back to the main road to take a look at the information boards on the wall (not in the toilets, but nearby) which told all about Tom Paine, he who wrote the Rights of Man, and his journey to America. Apparently he’d come to Lewes in the 1760s, though what he’d made of the toilets has apparently been lost in the mists of time.

I determined that I should have a look in at least one very expensive bookshop while I was here, so I sought out the fifteenth-century bookshop that presumably had sold copies of Chaucer and Gower and books on Troy and obscure Latin texts during the time of Henry VI. But after thirty seconds in there I realised I would have to win the Premium Bonds quite a few times before I could afford to buy anything in there, so I fled, feeling poor and unworthy. So I headed back to the castle, and while waiting outside the gift shop I spotted what I hadn’t noticed before—the castle shop was selling second-hand books! So in I went, and managed to pick up a copy of four medieval Morality plays (though written between 1400 and 1562) for £1.50. I could’ve spent even more in there, but was wary of being extravagant. Strange, the attitudes we have to money. We’ll blanch at spending more than £1 on a second-hand book that we can read and reread and cherish for the rest of our lives, and yet will think nothing of going out of a Friday night and spending £50 on beer, shots, entry to some vomit-flecked night club, and a kebab on the way home. And that’s to say nothing of paying some neckless gorilla £1 to mind our coat for us while we’re in there. (I’m happy to say I haven’t indulged in this sort of reckless profligacy for a few years now, although I’m still partial to the odd kebab.)

Still, it was a rather nice bookshop, not so much a shop as a little adjunct of the main room, like a cubby-hole. There were a few other medieval and classical texts, all reasonably priced, but I decided to exercise some self-restraint. They also had a copy of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which I’ve been after for years, but it was a modern translation, so I didn’t buy that as well. Call me a masochist, but I like to read Middle English as God, or at least William Langland, intended.

After that, it was time for us both to take a stroll around Lewes Castle. It was originally called Bray Castle for reasons which elude me right now, but what I do remember is that, like Lincoln Castle, it is unusual in having two mottes rather than the more customary one. (The motte is the mound on which the main keep is constructed, while the bailey is the bit on flat down beneath the motte, where the horses are kept and such.) There is a fourteenth-century Barbican (the castle gateway to you and me) which is well preserved and one of the first things you see when you approach the castle. After we’d looked inside the Barbican, we continued our ascent to the castle itself, which commands some spectacular views. Lewes is only a small market town, and you can see far, far beyond its limits from up there. I was mildly surprised we couldn’t see Hastings or Brighton from here, or the coast.

Still, you can see for some miles in all directions. There are some helpful information boards directing you to the part of town where the remains of the medieval priory stand, and the Martyrs’ Memorial which is situated among some houses on the outskirts of the town. The memorial is a stone obelisk that commemorates the seventeen Protestants who were burnt in Lewes in 1555-7, during the reign of Bloody Mary. Like so many of the two-hundred-odd men and women who were burned, their names are unknown to all but the most avid readers of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, but I did know that this memorial, like the one in Oxford, did not stand on the precise spot where the burnings had taken place, but some distance—in Lewes’s case, a considerable distance—away. Many of them were in fact burned in front of the Star Inn, in the town centre. The inn is now the Town Hall, but it’s in vain that you’ll look for a plaque on that building commemorating the martyrdoms. Unless you happened to know about the memorial in advance, or the information board happened to catch your eye while you looked around the castle tower, this little snippet of East Sussex history would pass you right by. Even in Maidstone they have a modest plaque in the town centre which marks the spot where seven people had been burned for their faith.

Still, we didn’t go out to have a look at the memorial, because, to be honest, I didn’t think there’d be much to see there. The fact that we knew it was there, and that Lewes’s history extended beyond the castle and its walls, was enough for me. And to think that our coming to Lewes might never have happened, had it not been for the records office!

On our way back to the car, I found another charity shop which contains books and LPs, and managed to pick up a copy of Days of Future Passed by The Moody Blues for £1. It was a good day.

Tour of the South East: Broadstairs and Dover

2010-08-18T03:24:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, we had a lazier day. It was raining heavily when we woke up—the first bad weather we’d had—and so we strolled over to the Little Chef where I had a second Olympic Breakfast and we checked our emails using the free Wi-Fi on offer there. I must say, I like this new ‘free Wi-Fi’ vogue that’s sweeping the nation in public spaces such as coffee houses and Little Chefs. It acknowledges that there are some people in the world who still don’t have iPhones and such.

So, after breakfast, we waved goodbye to Canterbury. Our plan was to head to Broadstairs first of all. I didn’t know much about Broadstairs, other than that it was the name of a place and that it was in Kent. So anything I learned beyond those two facts was going to be a considerable bonus.

It was while we were en route to Broadstairs that I first learned exactly what the Isle of Thanet is. Much like Broadstairs itself, it was just a name to me before this holiday began. Now, as I studied the road atlas and we hurtled along the road towards the east coast, I realised that, if you had left me in a room with a sheet of paper and some crayons for an hour and asked me to draw what I thought the Isle of Thanet might look like, I would never have drawn something that a) is not an island, and b) is in Kent. It’s hardly surprising really: the name appears to be a Latinisation of a Celtic name, more at home in the south of Ireland or somewhere around Aberystwyth than on the topmost part of Kent. (But then that just goes to show my vast geographical and linguistic ignorance of all things Kentish.) It is thought to come from a Welsh phrase meaning ‘high fire’, as beacons were possibly lit there in centuries past. I don’t know why we’d wish to set up landing lights for Viking invaders, but I’m sure there was a purpose behind it.

Soon after we arrived in Broadstairs, the weather picked up and the sun came out again. Broadstairs itself is an interesting place. It is known in some circles as the jewel in Thanet’s crown, which, when you consider that it has Margate as part of its competition, is hardly surprising. (Actually, I’m going to stop being so hard on Margate: I’ve recently found out there are some marvellous parts of that town, and have been reassured that the tower block on the coast is just a blip.) According to some semi-reliable internet sources, the town stretches from Poorhole Lane in the west, which is named for the mass graves—or ‘poor holes’ dug during the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century—to Kingsgate in the east, which is named after the Charles II, who landed there in 1683. I am pleased to learn that the name Broadstairs is not merely a corruption, but does refer to actual stairs, of sorts: originally called Bradstow, meaning ‘broad place’ in reference to the wideness of the bay, the town attained its present name thanks to the stairs which were dug into the side of the cliff to provide access from the bay up to a fourteenth-century chapel and shrine which stood at the top of the cliff.

We went to the Dickens House, which is just off the main marine parade and faces out to sea. It wasn’t actually Dickens’s house: it was the place where the real Betsey Trotwood lived, the woman whom Dickens based that character on, from David Copperfield. Dickens was, however, a regular visitor to the house for many years, and even wrote Copperfield at the nearby house called, aptly enough, Bleak House. (Slight digression from me here: the rubbish dump of my hometown, Milton Keynes, is named Bleak Hall in honour of Dickens’s Bleak House; the road leading to the dump is called Summerson road, after the heroine of that novel, and another road is named Chesney Wold, after the Lincolnshire residence of the Dedlocks in the same book.)

The house is small and mostly full of old Victorian dolls and old dresses. I can’t say that these excite my pulses in any great way, and the whole place had a slightly mouldy, Victorian smell (give me musty medieval stenches any day), but it is full of informative placards and boards on the walls which tell you all about the memorabilia on display. (They even tell you in the upstairs room about the memorabilia that isn’t on display: in one glass cabinet resides a list of all the display items, and several of them have a line through them with a note next to them, informing you that they are no longer in the museum. I’ve never seen that done before!)

It was a small house, and we went round the whole thing in considerably less than an hour, but it was only £1.80 to get in. It’s well worth it for that modest sum, and it was interesting, though slightly underwhelming after the millennium-old castles and cathedrals we’d already been round. Still worth a look, though. Afterwards, we went in search of a Mr Whippy ice cream, as we both wanted to have at least one 99 over the holiday. It was worth the wait, and I’m only semi-ashamed to admit that mine was devoured in minutes.

It had turned into a really bright and sunny day. We’d arrived in Broadstairs in the middle of the annual folk festival. This is a lively and rather jovial affair that’s been going on for nearly fifty years in the town, and the paths were filled with morris dancers and men playing accordions and other instruments I couldn’t even begin to recognise. We had a walk round the fair, which was full of rainbow-coloured knitted items and other hippy trinkets which you could buy for a small fortune. I didn’t buy anything, as buying clothes and other items of body-wear is considered a severe form of torture for me, but as we strolled back to the car we took a look in a musty-smelling bookshop and I found a copy of Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain for £2.50—the sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, the novel that inspired the Indiana Jones movie franchise. I’ve been looking for that for years, so I was really pleased to find it, especially as I like to get a souvenir in book form from most places I visit.

Dover

After Broadstairs, we drove south, through Sandwich, and then onwards to Dover. There were a number of places to see on the way: Ramsgate was top of our list, but in the end we realised that we had a huge portion of Kent and East Sussex to cover if we were to make it to Eastbourne before sundown, and so Ramsgate, alas, passed us by. We drove through Sandwich, which seemed a charming place, and one of the churches had a lovely little minaret on the top, which put me in mind somewhat of Iced Gems. We also let Deal whiz past our windows, which we were tempted to stop at (you could say our dilemma was ‘Deal or no Deal?’ but I already regret making that terrible pun). In the end, we kept on, until we arrived at Dover and decided to go and take a look at the legendary White Cliffs.

So we parked up and set off to have a look round. The wind was blowing quite keenly, and there were specks of rain in the air, so for the first time since—well, since that morning actually, when we’d legged it from the Travelodge to the car with all our luggage—we had to don our waterproofs. (I kept my shorts on though: it’s not easy to part me from my shorts when I’m on holiday. I could be on a tour of the Hebrides and I’d still be reluctant to change out of my knee-lengths.)

Now, I have to say that medieval castles and cathedrals take some beating for breathtaking views and creating a sense of awe in the beholder. But there is something fascinating about standing atop the White Cliffs of Dover (over which there will never be bluebirds, apparently, because bluebirds are not native to Britain and only appear in that famous song because of a vogue for bluebirds in songs of the 1940s) and watching the ferries going in and out of port. Standing nearer the edge of the cliffs (or as near to the edge as my vertigo would allow), you see the tangled and complex network of roads conveying lorries, vans, and occasionally cars to and from the coast. It’s oddly mesmerising.

It wasn’t a particularly clear day, otherwise we could almost certainly have made out the outline of the Calais coast over the water—it’s only twenty-two miles at this point, which is probably one reason why Matthew Arnold took his honeymoon in Dover in the 1850s and penned his famously doleful poem ‘Dover Beach’ while looking out of his hotel window. (Mrs Arnold must’ve had a whale of a time.) The light wasn’t gleaming and going on the French coast this day, but then it was two in the afternoon, so it’s hardly surprising. We strolled along the cliff for a while, still semi-transfixed by the sight of the P&O ferries and the remarkable feeling that you could almost be in another country here. England and France almost merge into one, partly because of all the French vehicles on the roads. It’s not the place to come for a walk if you’re a Europhobe. I loved it.

Although we only got within about half a mile of the castle, we had a good view of it and a nearby church. As we continued our walk, we came to a rather steep hill into which some very cursory muddy marks had been made, to serve as steps (of a sort). I suggested we climb up this near-vertical grassy mountain to see what was at the top. (We had to go this way anyway to get back up to the car.)

‘It’s quite steep, but I’m up for it,’ I said, determined to give it a go and plunge to my death on the top of some French lorry far below in the attempt.

It was unbelievably hard work getting to the top, but I found that the faster I climbed, the less chance there was of my plummeting to my premature end. Maybe it just gave me less time to think about plummeting to my premature end.

When we arrived at the top, it was to find that we had stumbled upon a visitors’ shop, and that I really needed a wee. Something about the bracing Dover air had produced this. The toilets, for those who are interested, were very nice—clean, fresh-smelling, and well-kept. After performing my necessary ablutions, I went to find Rachel, who was looking for souvenirs and presents for various people in the gift shop.

Before I even made it into the gift shop, I found my attention arrested by one of the most beautiful sights in the world. It was even more beautiful than the sight of the ferries in dock on the coast far below, and on a par with Canterbury Cathedral. It was a huge amount of books—some half a dozen boxes chock-full of books—which were there for the taking, on condition that a small donation be deposited in a donations box alongside the books. The amount was left to the bibliophile’s discretion, but unfortunately I had no money on me whatsoever. Rachel, when she emerged from the gift shop, very kindly went off to fetch the car and drive it along to this car park, so I could get my change from the car and deposit some in exchange for some books. This act of generosity meant that I was able to take the books I had found—and what books they were. I got four by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (or ‘Q’), the Cornish writer and literary critic who is now sadly largely forgotten. I also got another Rider Haggard book—one he co-wrote with fellow champion of fantasy or ‘romances’, Andrew Lang—called The World’s Desire, which appeared to be a re-telling of Homer’s Iliad. And I also got A Shortened History of England by G. M. Trevelyan, and Arthur Bryant’s Makers of the Realm, a gloriously appealing book about the early days of Britain through the Middle Ages. I deposited £3 into the donation box, and set off with my seven books, feeling splendidly happy.

Now I should say that, while the purchasing of books brings me immense pleasure, I’m not the sort of bibliomaniac who just collects books for the sake of it. I don’t think I’m a ‘collector’ at all. Collectors to me are people who buy things they have no intention of using for their traditional purpose: wine they have no intention of drinking, books they have no intention of reading, LPs they have no intention of playing. Every book I buy I plan to read one day. It’s just I seem to acquire books at a rate that far exceeds the speed at which I can read them. I’m not like Richard Heber (1773-1833), England’s most famous collector of books, who was known to travel three or four hundred miles at the drop of a hat, just to purchase a book he had no intention of reading. At the time of his death it was found he had bought houses in London, Shropshire, Oxford, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent, just as somewhere to store all the books he’d accrued. He had some half a million books, a collection which dwarfs even nineteenth-century Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone’s impressive library of thirty thousand books (most of which he’s known to have read because he annotated them).

The gift shop, when I finally made it inside, was good too. There were some nice cups with pictures of birds on them, some ammonites, crystals, quartz, novelty books, and all the other things you expect to find in good gift shops. There was also a nice teashop but we wanted to press on with our journey, so we got ready to bid farewell to Dover. I went for a second visit to those lovely toilets even though I didn’t really need to go again, and then went and took a look at the information board near the car park. It was there that I learned there is a beetle called the Bloody-Nosed Beetle, plus all manner of other interesting and amusingly-named flora and fauna in the Dover area. The impressive chalk cliffs that are such a feature of Dover’s coast are, after all, the product of millions of years of micro-organisms clubbing together to produce the calcareous substance of which the cliffs are composed.

So we left Dover. The rain had turned from light specks to a slightly heavier drizzle by now, and we drove westward through this drizzle along the south coast, through Folkestone and past the Channel Tunnel. It was eerie and atmospheric, driving past fields of sheep with the sea in sight just beyond, while Durutti Column’s ‘Conduct’ played on the CD player. That uncanny feeling of somehow being abroad returns when you drive through Folkestone. Maybe it was the rain falling, or the mist that lay over the place, but there was something about it that I found unutterably alien and yet weirdly beautiful. The signs leading to the Channel Tunnel undoubtedly help in this suggestion of foreignness, as if you’re constantly right on the cusp of—instead of, in reality, being thirty miles away from—some alien land.

We continued on, through Hastings, and on to Eastbourne and our Travelodge. Before we got to Eastbourne we had to pass through the unspeakably boring town of Bexhill-on-Sea. I don’t know what it is about this place—maybe it’s the fact that its name puts me in mind of those girls called Rebecca who insist on being known as ‘Bex’—but it really is a dull place to drive through. It could be a really lovely town, but the route through it from Hastings to Eastbourne certainly doesn’t give any indication of this. It’s just such a long and slow town to drive through. We seemed to pass through Folkestone in a femtosecond, by comparison. I was relieved when we finally arrived at our Travelodge, on the sea-front at Eastbourne, and we could make our way to our room, tired and hungry, and my feet dying to have the weight taken off them.

Tomorrow we would be doing Lewes and Hastings. This evening, though, we had a date with the television and a beef burger with jalapenos in it, which we could blessedly take up to our room to eat in comfort, and with BBC4 on in the background. After such a day, it’s the simple pleasures that really make a difference.

Tour of the South East: Margate

2010-08-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
(T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

After Canterbury we drove to Margate. I was looking forward to seeing Margate: it is the destination of the celebrated ‘jolly boys’ outing’ in the 1989 Christmas special of Only Fools and Horses, and—in my memory at least—seemed synonymous with merriment and high jinks.

Oh, but how wrong can a person be.

I was half-right, anyway: it was the town which served as the setting for the middle part of that famous Christmas feature-length outing for the Trotter brothers. But as for the merriment and high jinks, oh no. Oh no no no no no no no.

When you arrive in Margate you realise how run-down it is. That’s pretty much the first impression you arrive at. We drove along the seafront, desperately looking for somewhere to stop for the evening. We hadn’t eaten since Burger King, and that had been way back, before Canterbury Cathedral and even before St. Augustine’s Abbey. I wanted my fish and chips, at any cost. After ten minutes of driving along the marine parade, we found a parking sign and followed it to what appeared to be the most ill-designed row of car-parking spaces ever witnessed in Christendom. On a spot of land jutting out into the sea (which looked fine, by the way: the general shittiness of Margate could not diminish the loveliness of the waters that sloshed at its coast), a row of cars sat. Behind them was a stretch of ground leaving just enough room for the cars to reverse and drive off—and also enough room for the cars to reverse a little too zealously, and go dropping into the sea some ten feet below. Nobody else saw much of a problem with this, evidently; but we did, and decided to search for somewhere less waterborne at which to park up. As we left, we noticed a row of beach huts at the other end of the car park, and a sign which designated these as private parking spaces. Christ, I remember thinking. Somebody actually pays for this.

We kept looking, but it wasn’t easy to find anywhere, largely because, despite the lateness of the day and the general uninhabitability of the place, all the car parks seemed to be full to capacity. After some searching up various back-streets, we managed to find a car park that was, to our surprise, virtually empty. The only other inhabitants were a car with its driver’s door dented (as if by a wrecking ball), and several piles of smashed glass, which had presumably come into being when the wrecking ball had last swung through this way. As we headed over to the pay-and-display machine to deposit a sum, a group of rowdy teenagers passed through the car park, lending the place a further edge of classiness matched only by a Romford or Chatham. Apparently, since the decline in the town’s fortunes—caused by the rise in the number of tourists choosing holidays abroad or further along the coast—Margate has acquired a rather serious unemployment problem. It must be tough for young people, with no local college or university and not many job prospects in their hometown other than scooping ice cream into cones and scooping chips into bags. Now, thanks to the dropping off of tourism, they don’t even have those dizzy career heights to scale.

Returning our attention to the parking meter, we realised that none of our coins seemed to be having any effect on the machine. It was broken. And yet nobody was parking here. Hmm, we though. We shrugged our shoulders and left the car, at our peril.

It was a lovely evening to be strolling along a sea-front, taking in the bacterial seaweed smell of the ocean and the sound of the gulls’ cries. I tried to focus on the senses of smell and hearing because there wasn’t much to feed the sense of sight. Margate is known to many, from the days of the Cinque Ports, as the ‘limb’ of Dover, but several other body parts readily spring to mind too. A Victorian pier once stood on the coast there, but it was destroyed in 1978 in a violent storm. The air was calm tonight, and the sun warm on our faces, but even the favourable weather didn’t do much for the place.

A massive and incredibly ugly tower block stands right near the sea-front, built in that horrendously uncomely 1970s style that so many council flats are. I’d love to know which architect was responsible for these buildings. They litter the outskirts of London, so when you arrive in, say, North London on the train from Buckinghamshire or Northamptonshire or practically anywhere else, you notice a sharp and uncomfortable decline in the appearance of the houses. I know that virtually everything about the seventies which once appealed now strikes us as simply absurd: flared trousers, long floppy hair, anorexic women, the Bay City Rollers. But all of these can at least be understood in context to have held some vague sense of appeal, once. But this style of architecture is just baffling, because it is ugly and has always been ugly, and nowhere at any point in the future will it be anything other than horrific. Soot-grey and with horrid angles, this building would have lowered the tone of Margate had it been a glistening Shangri-La with stunning sea views. The fact that it still managed to lower the tone amongst the indifferent buildings which surrounded it is a testament to its awfulness.

It’s called Arlington House and its claim to fame, apart from being among the greatest—or worst, depending on how you look at it—eyesores of the country, is that it is mentioned in the Madness song, ‘One Better Day’: ‘Arlington house, address: no fixed abode’. If I lived there I wouldn’t want to admit it either.

In front of the tower block stands Dreamland, the old amusement park where Victor and Margaret Meldrew had their third anniversary in One Foot in the Grave. Say what you like about Margate, but the place has a rich comedic heritage. The place must’ve been there for years; whatever its past, the makers of our atlas seemed to think it worth a mention on the map, and it’s the only place in Margate worthy of historic mention, it would seem. It was all shut up but it was hard to tell whether that was because it was the evening or because it has simply lain that way for years. It wasn’t boarded up as such; but I wouldn’t have been surprised if no one had set foot inside for twenty years. A bit of research on the internet teaches me that the place is currently closed to the public, but is being redeveloped as an historic amusement park; it contains what appears to be the first rollercoaster in the United Kingdom, which I suppose is a claim to fame, albeit not a particularly ambitious one.

Whatever the historical significance of the Dreamland theme park, the whole town is still, it has to be said, seriously washed up and run down. After strolling along the promenade for a bit, we found what appeared to be a Wetherspoons. We toyed with going in and having a drink, but couldn’t face the prospect. What on earth would we find if we stepped inside? The pub had the admittedly rather interesting name of ‘The Mechanical Elephant’, but for all we knew the place might’ve been splattered from floor to ceiling in mechanical elephant dung. So we found a small and rather indifferent chip shop further along, had distinctly mediocre sausage and chips on the beach, fed the remains to some gulls, and left.

When we got back to the car after our tea, it was to find a car next to ours, full of angry-looking young men with shaved heads. Christ, I thought we were for it. When we got in the car and started up the engine, they did the same. Were we going to be harried along the Isle of Thanet halfway back to Canterbury, and be forced off the road where we would be ritually sacrificed and our skins put on by our vanquishers? The thought didn’t bear thinking about. As it was, they drove away when we did, and the evening passed without further incident.

They misunderestimated me

2010-08-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

Lots to get through this time around, so here goes with an inventory of Greek plays, weird tales, poetry, travel writing, children's history books, plays about dead saints, and ... a bit of George W. Bush.

Aeschylus, The Suppliants and Seven Against Thebes
The more I read Aeschylus, the more I'm convinced that his plays served as a sort of forerunner not to Eastenders or The Sopranos, but to Trisha or Jerry Springer. His plays are full of family strife and conflict, which is perhaps most apparent in his Oresteia trilogy. These two plays are less focused on familial squabbles, but Seven Against Thebes tells of the fratricidal conflict between the two sons of Oedipus - you know, the one who was a bit too much of a mummy's boy - and although Aeschylus' plays tend to be thin on plot, the way the characters unfold before our eyes makes for compelling reading. 8/9

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
Bryson's tour of Britain in the mid-1990s makes for entertaining reading, and this volume of travel writing, while not necessarily his most laugh-out-loud funniest, is still highly amusing and informative, and maintains a crafty balance between anecdote, interesting facts, and Bryson's general impressions of a place. Needless to say, with the UK being so chock-full of great places to visit, there are some notable absences - the section on London seems a little light, for instance - but then to do each place full justice would've entailed the writing of ten books, not one. 10

George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
Shaw's play about Joan of Arc is a masterpiece of characterisation. He paints Joan as a single-minded and fully-rounded figure, not necessarily one with whom we wholly sympathise; but then our sympathies, one feels, are meant to lie with the men making the difficult decision to execute Joan. In the end, nobody comes off as evil and nobody as particularly good - but that's not to say the play is a failure. Far from it. 10

Jacob Weisberg (ed.), George W. Bushisms
Don't ask me why I bought this book, but it was cheap, and light, and ... well, as easy as it may be to mock Bush's interesting use of the English language, it's still fun. 8

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Tales of Unease
Conan Doyle is one of the finest writers. Ever. That's my partisan opinion out the way. The man who gave us the master of rational deduction (or abduction), Sherlock Holmes, also spent the last decades of his life ardently believing in fairies. He's a hugely intriguing figure. Some of the stories collected here - in particular 'Playing with Fire' - reflect his interest in seances and spiritualism. Others, such as 'The Brown Hand', are masterly supernatural tales. 'The Brazilian Cat' should have everyone's pulses racing with genuine fear (it gave me at least one nightmare), and 'The Case of Lady Sannox' contains a shocking twist at the end. Also contained here is 'Lot No. 249', the story credited with originating the vogue for 'mummy horror' - no, we're not back to Oedipus again, but Brendan Fraser and Omid Djalili in Egypt. These are well worth reading, like all SACD. 10

John Betjeman, A Few Late Chrysanthemums
This 1954 volume continued Betjeman's view of England he'd already developed in the previous columes Old Lights for New Chancels (1940) and New Bats in Old Belfries (1945). The standout poem for me is 'Late-Flowering Lust', with its not-easily-forgotten image of two skeletons making out together. 9

Aristophanes, The Frogs
Another great comedy from Stoffy. This one features Euripides and our old friend Aeschylus, the two most celebrated tragedians of Athens, being brought from the underworld in order to have a contest to decide who is better. As ever, there's only one way to find out... FIGHT! 8

Terry Deary, Horrible Histories: The Groovy Greeks
I picked this up for 25p from my local library, as I was curious to find out what these little volumes, which I've heard so much about, were like. I was impressed, and have since acquired several others in the series. Deary writes with humour and a genuine passion for sharing interesting information, while the accompanying illustrations are hugely entertaining. 9

Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
This volume of literary criticism from 1977 is an insightful and well-written history of the ghost story, more literary history than cultural history (though the wonderful Andrew Smith is currently completing a cultural history of the ghost story, which I look forward to eagerly), but with some perceptive remarks about, in particular, the psychological ghost story (an understudied sub-section of the ghost story genre). Recommended for any enthusiast of the ghostly in literature, though you may have to seek it out on eBay or Amazon; I got this copy through my university library, but even then they had to borrow it from another library, so it's not necessarily easy to get hold of. 9

Next time, I hope to have more plays (I'm reading up on all the dramatists I can get my hands on, in preparation for a job I've got coming up in a couple of months), and more supernatural titles to bore you about. Till then, stay groovy. The overall average for this time around is a very creditable 9/11.

Travel Diary of the South East: Canterbury

2010-08-15T04:16:00.000-07:00

Waking up in a Travelodge is, generally speaking, a very pleasant thing to do. Some people may blanch at the uniformity of these places—the way every room, corridor, and reception area looks virtually the same, the fact that the windows only ever open half an inch lest the room’s occupants should be gripped by an irresistible impulse to throw themselves out at any given moment—but as chains of hotels go, give me a night in a Travelodge over that one Lenny Henry likes to stay in any time. A few years ago a media story reported that an elderly couple had spent 22 years living in Travelodges in the Nottinghamshire and Lincolshire area—as they put it, the price was probably about the same as it would be if they had a mortgage on a house, but they also got maid service thrown in for that. I wouldn’t want to live in one permanently, but Travelodges certainly make for a pleasant place to rest one’s head for a few days.

I woke early, because we were going to Canterbury and couldn’t afford to hang about. That said, I’d slept more or less solidly and easily got my designated eight hours. Well, I say I slept solidly, but that’s to fail to take into account the hour or so for which I lay utterly awake, between the dead time of around four to five o’clock in the morning. I’d love to know why, as soon as you hit eighteen, you’re not allowed to sleep right through of a night any more. I can see why people say they slept like a baby when they’ve passed a particularly good night: the age of infancy is the only time we ever seem to have an unbroken night’s sleep, and that’s not even counting the puking, crying, and pissing yourself. At least I didn’t do any of those in the Travelodge. (Not this time, anyway.)

We didn’t have time for a big breakfast, what with wanting to get into Canterbury before the morning had advanced itself too much. This didn’t matter too much. In a way I’d eaten my breakfast the night before: when we’d arrived at the Travelodge the previous evening, the first thing we’d done, once we’d dumped all our bags and cases in the room, was head across the car park to the Little Chef, where I’d introduced myself to a new experience: the celebrated ‘Olympic Breakfast’ offered by that particular chain of restaurants.

Little Chef restaurants are a strange feature of the British roadside. They’ve supposedly been given a new lease of life recently by TV chef Heston Blumenthal, he of the snail porridge, but they have a long and interesting history going back to before Heston was even in short trousers, or even a glint in Blumenthal Senior’s eye, for that matter. Founded in 1958, they were modelled on the roadside diners that are such a feature of the United States, and have been owned by a number of people over the years, including the Manchester-based television company Granada. The Olympic Breakfast has supposedly been revamped by Blumenthal, but when it arrived on the table in front of me I couldn’t see any snails. Mind you, there was a rather large black mushroom slowly staining the plate underneath it, which to my mind is comparable enough. I don’t know why anyone would want to eat mushrooms. Everything about them, the texture, the look, the shape, the taste—especially the taste—goes against any sane bodily instinct to pluck one from the ground and shove it in one’s mouth, or, more daring still, stick it on one’s plate next to one’s sausages. Fungi for me are off-limits. And I bet the same people who love to chomp on mushrooms complain to the supermarket when the bread they’ve bought has a layer of mould on it. Weird.

The large mushroom aside, the breakfast was everything I could ask for: a big plump juicy sausage, several rashers of bacon, a couple of fried eggs, two fried slices, a pair of half-tomatoes (so a whole tomato sliced in two, I suppose), a pile of sautéed potatoes, and a substantial pile of baked beans, served in a little pot, supposedly to avoid the bean-juice from mingling with the other ingredients. (Why they couldn’t have taken similar precautions with the mushroom I don’t know.) Oh, and some sachets of brown sauce. (Brown sauce with a fry-up is a must for me—it’s fair to say, I’m a fussy one when it comes to breakfast.) I devoured the lot, along with some extra bacon and bits of burger, before we retired to our Travelodge room for the night.

The Canterbury Travelodge lives up to its name, being not unlike a woodland lodge surrounded by trees, making it appear as a safe haven amongst the wild forests of the Isle of Thanet. It also makes it quite invisible when you arrive. It had only been down to a small arrow pointing into the trees and my girlfriend’s eagle eye that meant we didn’t end up bedding down in a leafy glade for the night.

Anyway, the next day we headed into Canterbury quite early, so Rachel could go and use the records office in the cathedral. I set off to look round Canterbury, intending to seek out all the bookshops and charity shops the fair city had to offer. Unfortunately I spent the first forty minutes or so walking past a parade of chain stores the like of which can be seen in every single city in the country. I suppose it was good of the council to shove them all together like this, as it meant that once I’d run the gauntlet I wouldn’t have to look at another Debenhams or New Look sign for the rest of my sojourn in the city; but it was annoying at the time, when all I wanted was a Scope or an RSPCA.

Thankfully, after taking the road less travelled by and opting for a side-street, I then came across two charity shops in one. One in particular, a British Red Cross, was particularly chock-full of gems, and as soon as I win £1 million on the Premium Bonds, I’ll doubtless go back and buy up all their books, before leaving a generous donation in the teddy-bear tin on the till on my way out. As it was, I spent £1.95 on Richard Fortey’s brilliantly titled Life: An Unauthorised Biography, and left. Still, I’d got my first souvenir of the holiday. (I collect books, rather than sticks of rock. You can’t eat them—well, you could, but it probably wouldn’t do your bowels much good—but books come in a wider variety of shapes, smells, colours, and subjects, and as far as I’m concerned, you can never have enough of the things.)

I didn’t buy any more books in Canterbury, but then it’s hardly surprising. Later on we found a charity shop which proudly proclaimed that it housed ‘the cheapest books in Canterbury’, priced at 95p. Where the hell are the bargain bins with 10p books on offer? I’d had a similar experience in Worcester: it seems that once you get to a certain point down south, all the charity shops up their prices tenfold.

But we had other, more Canterbury-themed things to do. So we went for lunch in a particularly pleasant Burger King (with very adequate toilets) before walking to St Augustine’s Abbey, which is a bit off the beaten track, but worth finding. The audio guides, which come free after you’ve paid the admission fee, were too quiet once you step outside to look round the remains of the abbey. So we discarded them and just wandered round, looking at the different parts of the abbey, which are well signposted.

St Augustine’s Abbey was founded at the end of the sixth century, when Augustine—not the one who hung out with Hippos and asked for chastity but not yet, but the one who came to Canterbury and converted the King of Kent to Christianity—was allowed to set up a monastery there and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. One of the campuses of Canterbury Christ Church University is near the site of the abbey, which must surely rival Oxford and Cambridge for universities surrounded with beautiful historic scenery. The remains of the abbey exert a calming influence over you, so as you wander round you find yourself quietly and gently subdued by fourteen centuries of history. At various points are the graves of old Kings of Kent and Archbishops of Canterbury, along with other dignitaries. There’s a not bad view of the cathedral, too.

So that is where we headed next. Canterbury Cathedral is steeped in history, and is perhaps surpassed only by the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey for the number of luminaries who are somehow connected with it. The cathedral has been there in some form since the time of Augustine, but the large and imposing structure which consistently inspires the awe of visitors in the twenty-first century is Norman, mostly the work of Lanfranc, the first Norman Archbishop. St Augustine’s Abbey may house the final resting places of some of the earliest Archbishops of Canterbury, but the cathedral houses many of the medieval and post-medieval incumbents of that post.

One of the things you notice as you walk round is how many of the previous incumbents of the post of Archbishop of Canterbury are noseless. A raft of dignitaries from the Middle Ages lie buried there in effigy, and not one of them has a nose. (How do they smell? Well, quite musty actually, since you ask.) The whole thing is awesome in the most literal sense: as with York Minster, all you have to do upon entering is tilt your head back and take in—or attempt to take in—the sheer scope of the ceiling far above you, to be humbled by your own insignificance, temporal in both the spiritual and scientific sense of that word. That, of course, was the idea. Of course, anyone with a passing interest in medieval history cannot, when surveying the vast arches and the detailed stained glass, help thinking also of the crippling poverty which must have helped to build the cathedral, how many ordinary people’s lives must have been miserably impecunious just so this towering edifice could come into being.

That said, you can’t help admiring the place. And it has some wonderful tombs, too: tombs to rival those in Westminster Abbey, surely. In a glass case hanging high on a wall, there are the funeral objects of the Black Prince, he who fought the French in the Hundred Years’ War and would have been king, had he not died a year before his dad, Edward III, did. The tomb of the Prince himself is a little further down in the cathedral. He even has his chain mail and armour on. He’s a legendary figure, although the sobriquet Black Prince (rather like another fourteenth-century anachronism, Black Death) appears not to have been used until much later—the sixteenth century is when it first appears in print. Nobody knows why he became known as the Black Prince, but the name has stuck. He appears in Conan Doyle’s excellent novel The White Company and in Bernard Cornwell’s equally brilliant Grail Quest trilogy. It was good to see his tomb, as I’m a sucker for all things medieval and Edward was such an intriguing figure.

The tomb of the Black Prince lies on one side of an empty space—there’s probably some fancy technical churchy term for it, but I don’t know what it is if there is one—and the joint tomb of Henry IV and his wife, Joan of Navarre, lies the other side. In the empty space a single candle sits on the floor, unadorned and constantly burning. It marks the spot where the shrine to Thomas Becket stood from the 1200s until the 1530s when Thomas Cromwell destroyed it. It is the shrine to which Chaucer’s pilgrims are travelling in The Canterbury Tales. I don’t know what the shrine looked like—nobody does, as it appears that no one bothered to make a record of its appearance before it was destroyed—but I’m prepared to stick my neck out and claim that, as modern tributes go, the candle is pretty fitting. It is beautiful and understated, with nothing but a brief and unobtrusive sign to tell tourists what it is burning for.

The shrine—or, rather, the candle—does not mark the spot where Becket was murdered. That area is down the steps, and in the east transept of the cathedral. During the afternoon of 29 December 1170, four knights murdered Archbishop Becket at the point now known (for reasons beyond my comprehension) as ‘the Martyrdom’. Three brown metal swords which look in serious need of a bit of polish seemingly hang suspended over the point where Beckett had his brains scooped out from his skull like egg from its shell. It’s a distinctly underwhelming experience, actually, and the candle—and maybe the shrine before it—carries far more of a punch in bringing home that distant event. And there was no secret passage to the nunnery either. If there had been, Becket may have escaped his doom, much as Edmund Blackadder did.

Fittingly enough, T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, about the killing of Becket, had its premiere in the cathedral in 1935.

We emerged from the cathedral, but the experience didn’t end there: when you look back and behold the place you’ve just been walking round, seeing it from the fresh perspective of out in the open air, you receive a renewed sense of just how tall, big, detailed, and bloody brilliant the place is. And it was in such a frame of mind, suitably humbled, and with aching feet, that we headed for the car to select our next destination.

Travel Diary of the South East: Rochester

2010-08-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

If the principal tower of Rochester Castle had suddenly walked from its foundation, and stationed itself opposite the coffee-room window, Mr Winkle’s surprise would have been as nothing compared with the profound astonishment with which he had heard this address.
(Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers)

For me the South East is a mixed place. On the one hand it seems so very, very familiar: I know where Dover is, that the Channel Tunnel is down there, that there are places called Rochester and Canterbury and these are all fine cities with cathedrals and plenty of history to go around. But I didn’t know about St Augustine’s Abbey or Rochester Castle or even that Rochester had a castle. (I suppose, if you’d put a gun to my head and given me a fifty-fifty chance of guessing, I’d have plumped for a yes, but I could have told you nothing about that hypothetical structure.) I knew there were places along the coast called Margate and Ramsgate. But what about Westgate and Kingsgate and any other ‘gates’ I might’ve missed? They were new and unknown to me. I knew that Peter Cushing and Alan Davies once lived in Whitstable, but was utterly surprised when I studied a map of the county to discover that that illustrious town was actually in Kent. (I think I thought it was in Essex, though I’m not sure why.) In short, the South East is a part of the country that, I think it’s fair to say, many Brits think they know quite well, but it’s full of surprises. Is there really actually a place called Sandwich? And is there a Subway restaurant there? And if not, what sort of a missed marketing opportunity is that? What’s the deal with the town of Deal? Does Broadstairs actually have lots of stairs, and are they really any broader than your average steps?

So it was with a distinct determination to find the answers to some of these questions, and to shake off any inherent smugness I might possess about what I thought I knew about the South, that I set off on a bright Sunday morning from Westfield Drive in Loughborough. With my girlfriend Rachel at the wheel of her new car, I climbed into the passenger seat, ensured my lanky legs had plenty of room to fidget about in the front, and then got ready for five days Down South. It was going to be an illuminating journey.

I took two books with me. One was Does Anything Eat Wasps? which I took partly because I like the title and partly because it’s full of interesting questions—and even more interesting answers—about … well, virtually anything really. And it’s great holiday reading, as you can pick it up and put it down at your leisure, rather than waiting for a convenient lull in the plot. The other book I took was Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, his account of his travels around Britain in the mid-1990s. It was from Bryson that I was taking my cue, and who has inspired this travel diary. Apologies, Bill, if you’re reading (not sure why you would be though). Blame him if you don’t like this diary. No, actually, blame me, but just don’t let me know you blame me.

Our first stopping-off place was actually Birchanger Services, near Stansted Airport, just south of Cambridge. It was conveniently placed more or less equidistant along our route between Loughborough and Rochester, making it an ideal place to stop off for a wee and a burger. Burger King tend to charge what they like at these places—I paid £45 for an eyeball-and-testicle-cake with a slice of cheese stuck in it, I think—but boy did I need it. After we were fed and watered, we continued our travels south and went over the bridge at the Dartford Crossing, paying the £1.50 toll.

Going over the Dartford Crossing is a strange experience. It almost feels as though you should be in another country, so alien is the sensation; though, of course, some people do this sort of journey every day, and to them it must be second nature. But it felt weird to us. The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge is vast, a towering structure of steel and concrete that puts one in mind of Sydney Harbour rather than Thurrock. The bridge was only opened in 1991, making it one of the more recent London bridges—though of course, technically, it’s outside of London. Mind you, the Bluewater Shopping Centre is near the bridge, which is eight years younger than the bridge, and is about the closest thing to a nearby landmark you’re going to get round here.
We arrived in Rochester early in the afternoon, and wasted no time in looking around the castle, which has its foundations in the twelfth century. John Forster records how Charles Dickens wanted to be buried in ‘the small graveyard under Rochester Castle wall’, but in the end his body ended up in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Poets’ Corner is a strange thing. Chaucer, arguably the first great poet in English, was buried there not for his poetry but for his ambassadorial work to the king, Richard II; and Dickens was buried there, despite the fact that he didn’t write poetry.

Dickens’s work is suffused with Rochester. He lived nearby, in Higham, at the famous Gad’s Hill Place, but Rochester seems always to have played a part in his life. In his first book, The Pickwick Papers (1837), Rochester is the first place where Pickwick and his companions stop off on their picaresque adventures. In his last book, the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), the city of Cloisterham serves as a fictional rendering of the city. But it was the real thing that we had come to see, and so we set off to set about seeing it.

The castle is rather high up, and after climbing some pretty steep stairs, we arrived at the top, overlooking most of the city of Rochester and taking in a pretty view of the cathedral, which stands just over the road. Looking over the side of the walls gave me a renewed sense of my acrophobia; but it was worth it. The stone keep is the tallest in the country; work on it began in 1127 when William de Corbeil, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was put in charge of the existing castle—which had been there in some form or other since the previous century. It was with the stone keep that the castle—as it now stands—really began life. Most of the keep remains to this day, and a pretty imposing sight it is too.

In 1215 the castle was besieged by King John and his supporters during the First Barons’ War, and he undermined the south-east tower of the castle by using pig-fat to set light to the mine. As a result, the south-east tower collapsed, and was rebuilt by Henry III a few years later with a slightly rounder design (this was because people had since realised that rounded edges helped to deflect arrows more successfully than square ones).

The castle has a cesspit which boasts an information board showing a drawing of a man squatting to defecate, which is all I need to make me fall in love with a place. Walking up and down all the winding spiral steps certainly tires you out, though, and I was more than a little in need of a cooling drink—it was a hot day, and castles seem to sap all my moisture from my body—when we left.

So we headed to a pub with the oldy-worldy name of Ye Arrow. The pub is situated perfectly between the castle and cathedral. Unfortunately, that is the only thing about it that is perfect. The view is perfect, of course, so long as you remember to look away from where you are, and over at the scenery. In a way, the place had been offending us since before we even stepped inside and ordered our drinks. The pub’s beer garden (if it can be called a garden, since not one inch of greenery was to be seen anywhere) had been belting out jazz music since our arrival at the castle, and the ensuing din had filled the entire area. It’s hardly the soundtrack you want when looking around a medieval castle. The castle may have been under siege from King John in 1215, but in 2010 it was under attack from four men with saxophones and drums and dodgy waistcoats.

But we were thirsty, and couldn’t see any other pubs within the vicinity. So in we went. We had an expensive drink served in the most disgusting glasses I’ve ever seen anywhere, having played Russian roulette with the chairs (over half of which appeared to be irreparably broken). Then, once we had found chairs that wouldn’t collapse underneath us, we sat down to enjoy our drinks. The pint of Old Speckled Hen that now passed my lips tasted distinctly watery, as if someone had plopped several ice cubes in there a number of hours ago and left them to melt in the ale. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t worth £4, which is what it cost, more or less. Still, the state our throats were in, we’d have probably supped a drink out of our sweaty socks if no pub had been there.

Then we headed over to the cathedral and had a good look round. The cathedral we see there today was largely the work of Gundulf, who, when he wasn’t hanging out with hobbits and picking fights with balrogs, was busy being Bishop of Rochester in the late eleventh century. Before he died he’d got as far as building the nave of the church, which is the oldest in England. The whole place is somewhat smaller than, say, Canterbury or York Minster, but it is nevertheless an impressive building. The monks’ dormitories are now public toilets, of which I can inform you that the gents are perfectly passable, if a bit cramped. God knows how the monks ever passed a decent night’s sleep there.

When we emerged from the cathedral we became aware of just how tiring all this castle- and cathedral-walking is. It’s not just physically tiring—walking up and down all those narrow stairwells does take its toll on the legs, though—but mentally draining. You’re bombarded with information—from little boards telling you what room in the castle this was, that this was where the servants made the beer or had a crap or got a beating from their lord for getting caught with their hand in the cow—and feel obliged to take as much of it in as you can, because you’ve paid for the experience and are aware that you won’t be here again for years, if at all. So it was that I headed back to the car with a head full of musty smells and vertiginous heights, and not much about the history of the places I’d been to. Bits of the day that I’d taken in somewhere and somehow later returned to me, as I lay in the Travelodge bed that night, but at the time it all rather fled from my mind.

Mind you, I swear I could almost hear my legs cry out in satisfaction as I climbed among the sheets. I didn’t dare tell them there’d be more walking tomorrow.

This was a Good Thing

2010-07-21T03:36:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I updated my 'week in books' blog; as it is, this newest entry is not so much a 'week in books' as a 'last five weeks in books'. I've been so busy with other stuff, I just haven't got around to inflicting my worthless views on what I've been reading. So here we are: a bumper edition, covering Greek drama, theatre of the absurd, contemporary poetry, travel writing, fantasy fiction, comic parody, and jokes. As ever, the scale runs from -4 (unpickupable) to 11 (truly worth reading).

W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That
This book, first published in 1930, is a masterpiece, a true one-off. For my money, anyway. Parodying all the history textbooks of yesteryear (that word, yesteryear, by the by, was coined by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in an attempt to translate a French term by the medieval poet Villon, I believe), it aims to provide the reader with what we can remember of history, rather than what actually happened. In doing so, it highlights the subjectivity of all interpretations of history, but in a light, often incredibly funny, way. I can't believe this sort of humour has dated that much. I've tried and tried to comb 'this slim volume' for suitable quotations to demonstrate just how good it is, but in the end you have to read the whole thing to get a proper feel for the humour. Just one piece of advice: read it! 11

Aristophanes, The Wasps and The Poet and the Women
Aristophanes (or Toffee, to his friends) is the most celebrated Ancient Greek comic playwright, and these two plays deal respectively with the political situation in Athens while Athens was at war with Sparta, and women's role in Athenian society. The second of these features a bit of cross-dressing that was there well before Monty Python or Little Britain, so if you like old geezers dressing up as women and going undercover to an all-woman gathering, you'll enjoy this play. They still have situations that possess comedic value, but it helps to read around a bit first, to get a feel for context. 8/9

Fred Saberhagen, Stonecutter's Story
This, the third volume in the eight-part Lost Swords series (what I like to call a 'mini-epic'), is by far and away the most enjoyable of the first three Lost Swords books (verdicts on the rest to follow when I've read them!). There's a character who, early on, reminds us of a feeble attempt to recreate Sherlock Holmes that's a bit embarrassing, but Saberhagen soon gets out of this habit and into his stride with the character. This series is a tough one for me because the characters who really shine are the Twelve Swords themselves, but as 'gadget fantasy' goes, it's all very entertaining. 8

Simon Armitage, Kid
The man who should have been Poet Laureate, Armitage can be seen as the natural successor to Larkin, though he also weaves in West Yorkshire speech patterns and voices that are more reminiscent of the great Tony Harrison. In this volume he gives us a mixed bag, but when he's on form, he's very good - as in the A-Level General Studies exam-inspired 'You May Turn Over and Begin...' or the poignant concluding poem, 'About His Person'. That was everything. 9

Various, More of The Two Ronnies
Another book of gags from the classic double-act, this contains some jokes that have aged well and others which fail to raise a titter, at least when reproduced in black and white without the comic talents of Barker and Corbett to read them out for you. Still good fun, though. 7

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party and The Room
Pinter's first two plays (I think), these can be seen as part of the Theatre of the Absurd, and already contain Pinter's trademark use of silence and pause to create menace and unsettle the audience. Both plays feature some mysterious visitors showing up (something which seemed to happen a lot in 1950s/1960s drama), and some fine lines (though I must say, Pinter is not as quotable in this respect as Stoppard). 8/8

Bill Bryson, Down Under
As you may have guessed from the title, this book details Bryson's travels across Australia. What has made Bryson such a popular travel writer is exactly what should make a good writer popular: warmth, humour, self-deprecation, a smattering (but no more than a smattering) of funny personal anecdotes, and lots and lots of interesting facts about the history of the country he's exploring. It's the sort of book you can happily read through in one go, but then want to go back and dip into again later, to rediscover the bits about Australia's most dangerous animals and all the other eye-catching stuff. Highly recommended. I'm reading Notes from a Small Island next. 10

Right, that's the lot for this time around. Next time (whenever that may be), I'll have more plays, more poetry, and some more supernatural titles. Watch this space.

Writing: fun, but hair-tuggingly frustrating

2010-07-19T08:02:00.000-07:00

Let me just confess to a pastime slightly more socially acceptable than dogging (though less social, it is true) and slightly less impressive than, say, making ice-sculptures or baking an impressive curry.

I like writing. Yes, I do. I do I do I do. I love it when a story takes off, when I'm not just running but positively flying with it, when the characters come alive, when the plot is exciting with each new chapter that unfolds.

Mind you, it's bloody hard to get going with it.

I can't remember when I started writing, and that's partly down to a poor memory of my own personal goings-on and partly because it was just so darned long ago. By the time I went to university, nine years ago, I'd churned out tons of stories and had had a bash at a few (horrifically bad and blessedly unfinished) novels. (Fantasy novels, by the way, like the one I'm currently writing.) Since then, I've actually managed to finish four novels and I'm now rigorously and vigorously involved in the penning of a fifth. And that's on top of trying to find the right last few thousand words to write to round off my doctoral thesis. Oh, and there are several hundred poems, too.

This is not a boast, though I am proud of what I've written - even the bad stuff, in a strange way, much as a parent can't help but unconditionally love an unruly child, I 'xpect. But I sometimes wonder if I've learned much in the process of writing the 2 million or so words I must've written over the last ten(-ish) years.

Well, let's see now. One of the things I have gradually been learning is that I'm not Aristotelian in my approach - that is, I don't place plot above character. Quite the reverse. Sorry, Aris. But then, what's wrong with that? Who cares that some bloke's got to get a magic sword and save the world with it if the bloke in question's such a boring arse? Who gives a flying toss whether the strong silent hero gets it on with the strong, anything-but-silent heroine when they're both so ludicrously cardboard cut-out that they make John Major appear a promising prospect for a fictional protagonist? (Actually, old John probably could carry a novel, given his fondness for - er, curry.) I think characterisation is the most important thing in a book - and so it's characters that I seek to build up, making them flawed, alive, interesting, distinctive, appealing... And all this, I've learnt, is bloody hard.

However, I'm happy to carry on trying to learn. What makes it worth the pursuit is all the great literature - and all the good, popular-but-not-great literature - that has gone before, showing how powerful a story can be once you have the right characters. Even the poorer offerings in the Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes oeuvre - the novels, and many of the later stories - are perfectly readable because we love the character so much, so he's with us for life. The same with the best fantasy: David Gemmell's heroic creations keep us reading because he makes them living, breathing people, and we want to see how they cope with whatever their author throws their way to deal with. Druss the Legend would be interesting emptying his swing-bin, not that I ever expected that scenario to crop up in one of the books, you understand.

Working on my PhD thesis, as I have been doing so alongside working on this new novel for the last few weeks, has showed me this once again: the best stories I'm looking at are those with characters we get a real feel for, and whom we may not particularly admire or want to emulate, but who strike us as well drawn and believable. That's why I've loved writing about Oliver Onions' ghost story 'The Beckoning Fair One' so much - because the protagonist, Paul Oleron, is such a weak, sensitive, pathetic, selfish, hopeful, ambitious, doomed sort of chap. And that is the key to the story (which I heartily recommend). That was one reason why I never got beyond the first Harry Potter book; though I am often (and, I believe, sincerely) reassured by people around me that the books get better as the series progresses, that first book failed in what for me is rule number one: making me like the characters. I don't mean 'like' here in the sense of 'approve of the moral philosophy of' or 'wish to go down the pub with', but merely 'identify with'. And I didn't identify. Sorry, any Potter fans reading this.

The other thing I've been trying to sort out is prose style. I don't want to fall into the trap of telling a story badly, which may sound a naive thing to say, but what I really mean is avoiding all those bad habits popular writers often exhibit. Much as I love old Robert E. Howard, his characters were forever expostulating and rebutting, Conan was always snorting and exhorting and shouting and bellowing. I refer to the thorny issue of the use of 'said' or its synonyms in the relating of dialogue, e.g.

'"I hate you," she said.'

Or, '"I hate you," she protested vehemently.'

Which of those do you prefer? To be honest, I'm trying to avoid both wherever possible. How about this? 'She folded her arms and looked at him. "I hate you."' That way the reader knows who's saying those words, 'I hate you', and we are also shown what this character is doing as she says them. It may be a cliche, but 'show, don't tell' really is a marvellous piece of advice for writers of fiction, I think. Some may hate this method and prefer the simple 'said' rule, while others may be gifted enough to create characters whose dialogue is so distinctive that a reader just knows who's speaking when a line of dialogue appears... But that way lies the all-too-tempting trap of giving your characters annoying mannerisms (everyone goes around saying 'my boy' or 'sonny Jim' or 'lass' or 'pet' in every single line of dialogue they utter).

I'm also avoiding planning at all costs. I've done it both ways. I've tried planning a novel out in minute detail before writing it, but for me that kills the story; once I've done the plan I've told the story and know what's going to happen, so why bother to fill in the gaps? But I prefer the other approach: as Gemmell once said, create a character you find interesting and worth following, then just stick him on a horse and ride him out of a forest. (Or her.) Then it's up to you to make what you want to happen, happen. I'm definitely a horse novelist rather than a planner. I need to have the same sense of not knowing what the hell's going to happen on the next page as the reader.

Of course, I've also been reading a fair bit. Since I'm writing a fantasy novel, I should really be reading lots of fantasy; but aside from one series I'm dipping into at the moment, I've largely stopped reading fantasy at the moment. I've read many of the greats - Gemmell, Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Tolkien, Moorcock, Howard - but right now I'm trying to take Michael Moorcock's advice and try to hoover up some inspiration from elsewhere - plays, ghost stories, horror fiction, poetry. Time will tell whether it's working or not. Mind you, that has got me thinking about the issue of reading. In the last few years I've marked rather a lot of undergraduate essays and the one thing that's struck me in 80% of cases they haven't picked up the mannerisms of writing literary criticism. No matter how many times I exhort them to pick up Christopher Ricks or William Empson or Nicholas Royle - close, insightful critics who also write very entertaining prose - I get the feeling my advice is falling on deaf ears. Maybe I'm wrong. That's not to say that what they write is bad; often, far from it. But just that you need to develop a feel for the style of writing before you can write it well yourself. Rant, rant, rant. Sorry.

In short, that's what I'm up to at the moment. I've been going on a bit, and I've been putting off the writing of the novel itself (oh, irony of ironies!), not to mention important thesis work, which will largely occupy me for the coming two weeks. But I still want to try to get the first draft of this novel done by the end of the month. Anyone else who's had similar experiences of writing, I'd love to hear from you. Or if you've had completely contrary experiences to the ones expressed here, then I'd also love to hear from you. Comments welcome as ever...

Poetry no thanks

2010-06-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

This sonnet (untitled) was written on 19 June 2002. That makes it eight years and two days old, by my reckoning.

Never again the satin-shrouded screen
that hides away through rosy, silken views
the light, quick-fading beauty night imbues
with loans of loveliness, which I have seen.

The view's divine, but is it real? The green,
rolling, inviting plains and vast grey hues,
of oceans yet uncrossed, like unworn shoes
that stand awaiting feet. The past has been

a serpent to beguile me, as they swear
it did one time before. So now I must
remove whatever was deceiving me.

For now I see whatever specs I wear
distort the view, as if defiled with dust,
and I must stop myself believing me.

'Back soon - Godot': My Week in Books 8

2010-06-17T10:34:00.000-07:00

Right, well you all know the rules so let's just get on with it, shall we?

H. P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories Volume One

This may not make me many friends in the weird world, but I found it unconscionably hard to get into Lovecraft. And I've not made it yet - to my mind he has neither the genius for neatly expressed ideas of Poe nor the wild exuberant madness of, say, M. P. Shiel. Machen gets a namecheck in several of the stories in this collection but that only served to remind me how considerably superior old AM is when it comes to narrative. I'm not saying these stories were bad; they may possibly be brilliant, but let's just say the veil has not yet been lifted away from my benighted ignorance. Call me a philistine (I am), and I will persevere with HPL, but I found these hard-going and, frequently, a bit dull. Having said all THAT - I did find some of the description breathtakingly rich and marvellous, almost literally fascinating in that it well-nigh seemed to cast some sort of lyrical spell over the reader. Greatly written, what is written is not great - at least not to this poor reader. Sorry, HPL devotees. 4

Various, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Bog Graffiti

I know, I know, from the sublime to the ridiculous - but these were a welcome bit of light relief after HP's brain-taxingly horrific excursions. One problem with this particular book - which I picked up for 10p from a bargain bin outside a charity shop on Tuesday - is that some of the wall scrawlings were repeated - sometimes even whole pages or 'walls', in fact, found themselves turning up again later in the book. But it's only a bit of fun, isn't it? Well, yes and no. Though many are understandably obsessed with sex ('Sex is very bad for one (but very good for two)', 'That the pill can stop unwanted pregnancy is a popular misconception', etc.), there are some which point to broader philosophical, political, and religious preoccupations. ('America has Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash. Britain has Margaret Thatcher, no hope and no cash.' That one's showing its age now, but it's still a fine observation!)This may help to make them funnier, but it also means that, when it comes to studying society at a given time, the writing is always on the wall. 10

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

Between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, Coventry-raised poet-librarian Philip Larkin wrote some of the best poems of the twentieth century. In three key collections, The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974), he made himself one of the most beloved poets of Britain, so much so that when his friend Betjeman died in 1984, he was asked to be Poet Laureate (an offer he declined). Like Morrissey's lyrics, I think a lot of people assume that Larkin's poetry is miserable: Larkin's a grumpy old man, an anti-social sod, the least cheery soul at the party. True: but he also produced, like Morrissey, words that speak to so many people because, while treating dark subjects such as death (repeatedly, most famously in 'Aubade'), ambulances (in 'Ambulances') and hospitals (in 'The Building'), rape ('Deceptions'), and work ('Toads' and 'Toads Revisited'), he is capable of being incredibly funny (the line 'A tuberous cock and balls' always makes me chuckle). He once said that a poem should encapsulate an experience peculiar to the poet, rather than try to express what it thinks everyone usually feels. This approach makes for very funny, very stylistically accomplished poems (his skill with verse forms, run-on lines, and syntax is unmatched by any other modern poet), but also very sincere ones. But there really is an embarrassment of riches here. Go and see for yourselves, if you're not familiar with Larkin. 11

Next week? Well, I've only gone and managed to pick myself up several great books this week. Saying no more for the time being. Reviews to follow.

Dowsonesque

2010-06-16T06:15:00.000-07:00

Or, another offering from the poetry vault (January 2002). Not so much carpe diem as copy Dowson:

Song

O take me, dearest, in your arms,
And banish from these days
All sweetened ills and cherished harms,
Before this flesh decays.

For lighting in the darkened west
Upon the blackened town
The sunlight falls that should be blest
But must away and down.

O come and take me, dearest love,
For I know all your ways,
And hold me while we're still above,
Before this flesh decays.

For from the grave come shouts of glee
That soon we shall be there;
Before you're there, there I shall be;
Then I shall be nowhere.

O time will have us put to bed
And death on us will gaze,
So cradle this forgotten head
Before this flesh decays.

'Your walls lay fallen, strewn along the earth': My Week in Books 7

2010-06-10T15:34:00.001-07:00

While the rest of the world (or seemingly the rest of the world) is off watching Big Brother Seventy-Nine, or else the World Cup, I'll be holed up reading dusty tomes and trashy paperbacks. Next week I'll have more poetry for you, but in the meantime it's 2,500 years of fiction, criticism, and drama, in 500 words:

Aeschylus, Oresteia (a long time ago)

Comprising three separate plays although believed to have originally been a tetralogy (the fourth work has sadly been lost forever), this is the only trilogy in Greek drama that has survived. Each of the three plays - Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides - takes a very simple scene and explores the conflicts between the characters, the specific focus here being family relationships, including matricide and marriage. Worth reading. Trivia: Aeschylus was allegedly killed by a falling tortoise. This story is almost certainly apocryphal, but still ... it's a good one. 9

Christopher Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words (1993)

Another work of criticism by the incomparable Ricks. I won't say too much here as I've reviewed Ricks' books in detail here over the last few weeks, but this is insightful, witty, and playful (sometimes too playful, as Ricks occasionally is). Still worth a read, although not the Ricks book I'd recommend to a newcomer. 8

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Although this novel - one of the first in English - dips a bit in the middle, it's a great work, a fantasy rendering of real-life explorer William Dampier's Voyages (1701, I think). Everyone knows the bit where the Lilliputians tie 'giant' Gulliver down; but there's much else here, including the horses with reason (I can't remember how you spell their name, and I can't be arsed to go and check - forgive my indolence). Trivia: the Yahoos, the human brutes in the final section (who live alongside the intelligent horses), gave us the word 'yahoo' meaning a 'lout', but also the search engine (etc.) of that name. Yahoo! 9

That's all for this week, folks. I have lots planned for the next week: I'll be dipping my toe in H. P. Lovecraft, and have also slowly started to work my way through all of Larkin's Collected Poems again (like the songs of The Smiths, their power increases, not diminishes, on each rediscovery). Still, it's bound to be a bit of a surprise even to me what makes the list next week.

'I have the Sword of Stealth!': My Week in Books 6

2010-06-03T02:36:00.000-07:00

This week's week in books is not quite as heavy on the supernatural as I'd hoped, though I did dabble with one of the twentieth-century masters of the weird. Quite a mix, altogether: a bit of fantasy, a bit of horror, a bit of poetry, a bit of criticism. Here we go...

Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation (1995)

You can learn a lot about literary criticism from reading Christopher Ricks (sorry, Sir Christopher, as of last year). This collection of essays, like his earlier The Force of Poetry (1984), is an assortment of writings on numerous writers and subjects, ranging from Marlowe to memoirs of Tennyson to literary theory (versus 'principles') to Jane Austen. Ricks's insightful readings are a joy to discover, and he writes with a wit and a sense of enjoyment which is, as I believe I remarked last week, rare. Highly recommended. 10

Fred Saberhagen, Sightblinder's Story (1987)

This is the second book of Saberhagen's eight-novel Lost Swords series, or the fifth book in the entire eleven-volume Swords series, more broadly. Plotwise it's more splayed and messy than the previous novel, which had one clear plotline driving it; here, several plotlines are more systematically interwoven. Hugely enjoyable. I look forward to the next novel (a review of which should be winging its way to you in a few weeks). 8

John Betjeman, New Bats in Old Belfries (1945)

Another great Betjeman volume, featuring such classics as 'A Subaltern's Love Song' (possibly Betjeman's most famous poem, along with 'Slough') and 'In a Bath Teashop'. Betjeman's a master writer of numerous forms of verse, and this can be seen throughout this, his fourth volume of poetry. As with the others, strongly recommended... 9

Algernon Blackwood, The Complete John Silence Stories (1908)

Well, more accurately this volume contains the five stories that appeared in the 1908 volume John Silence: Physician Extraordinary, plus an additional tale. They vary in quality, but when they're good they're really rather good. Blackwood's interest in the occult led him to create his 'psychic doctor', John Silence, a sort of Sherlock Holmes of the supernatural (and an influence on William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki and Alice and Claude Askew's Aylmer Vance), and these stories feature him investigating or listening to a number of tales involving supernatural agencies. Perhaps 'Ancient Sorceries' is the best in this collection; they suffer if read all in one go, so perhaps it's best to read one story at a time. 7

That's it for another week! Next week there'll be more supernatural stuff, and more criticism. Beyond that ... well, it'll be a surprise for you all, you lucky lucky people.

'And give the H.P. sauce another shake': My Week in Books 5

2010-05-27T03:50:00.000-07:00

Blimey, five weeks already? Well, here is this week's rundown of the books I've read. One new feature has been implemented this week: I'm now going to offer my oh-so-meaningless rating for a book on what I call (with characteristic self-effacement) the 'Oli-scale'. This runs not from 1 to 10, but from -4 to 11; this is because sometimes 10 just isn't high enough to express one's admiration for a tome, and, conversely, sometimes 1 just isn't low enough for the dross one's forced oneself to read.

R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (1858)

This predates Treasure Island by some twenty-five years, and it's true it hasn't enjoyed the success of that book (though it was hugely popular in its day). It's basically Robinson Crusoe but with three jolly teenagers rather than one middle-aged man. It starts off better than it ends up, and drags on somewhat for nearly 400 pages, but it's readable. I hoped for better things from it, but if you're after something that's not too demanding and yet a little more 'classic' than a more modern 'young adult' book, then this might be a candidate for summer reading. Trivia: William Golding, who did not agree with the book, subverted its central idea of teenage boys stranded on a desert island in his masterpiece published nearly a century later. Lord of the Flies, o'course. Rating: 6

John Betjeman, Old Lights for New Chancels (1940)

I'm continuing to work my way through Betjeman's complete poems, and this volume was, on the whole, hugely readable and is typical Betjeman. The inclusion of everyday objects, especially trademarked brands of brown sauce, marmalade, and cakes, adds to the sense of something specific captured, something everyday and yet capable of making us feel it's extraordinary. The longer poem 'Sir John Piers' was the only slight letdown, but then you've got 'Myfanwy' and 'n Westminster Abbey', so you can't complain for long. Rating: 9

Christopher Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin (2003)

Christopher Ricks has a claim to being the greatest living literary critic. Like William Empson before him, Ricks's work is shot through with humour, astounding close insights into the meaning of a text, and many other things which shouldn't be, but sadly are, all too lacking in 99% of literary criticism. The question was: can the lyrics of a great songwriter be analysed in a similar (not identical) way to how one analyses poetry, without a sense of bathos or imbalance? The answer, as the book I reviewed a few weeks ago (Gavin Hopps' Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart) showed, is an enormous Yes, especially when the songwriter in question is literate, a word lover, and fond of making allusions to other writers. Ricks is in danger of perhaps ove-indulging in his own wordiness and punmanship here, more so than in earlier books; but then, as the saying goes, if you can, then why the hell not? Heartily recommended to fans of Bob Dylan or literary criticism. If you like both, then you'll pretty much swoon when you read this, I suspect. Rating: 10

For next week I'll be reading some more Gothic classics, some more Betjeman, and maybe even some more literary criticism. Might be a little slower, though, as I have lots of books to go and dip into for the PhD. But I'll have some tasty treats, I guarantee.

Key Phrases (yes, another poem)

2010-05-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Here is tonight's poem from the Tearle vault of vintage efforts. It was written, my records tell me, exactly three years ago this Wednesday. Enjoy.

Key Phrases

As one door opens, another closes. Life is no prison.
Locked out. Locked in. It sits to reason.

The world's my oyster, sickly, most
of it unpalatable, waste.

You were the apple of my eye, rotten to the core -
a peach, a stone for a heart. A real dead wire.

My thoughts are narrower now than the sky,
could fit inside a tumbler of whisky

or a bottle of meths. The world, a stage:
no one's who they say they are. I'm third stooge

from the right, my interval a mid-life crisis.
Play the game with me. It's noughts and crosses.

Some more doggerel from the poetry vault

2010-05-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

For some reason I thought this'd be a good time to share with you some more of my poor poetic efforts from years gone by. Well, maybe just one actually. Okay, so this isn't great, but then I'm not sharing it to get any false praise from anyone, but just because I like the idea of amateur poetry - there's something about the ethos of it, how reading other people's poetry they've written solely because of some deep-seated urge inspires you to take up a pen yourself. Maybe, I dunno. Anyway, without more ado...

Card Counting

Wrought within the mindless funeral bed
that's called a mind, the codes for cards were set
and so I learnt them. A young boy with a spade
became the Jack of Spades, a pile of soot

translated into the Seven of Spades, a can
became the Two of Clubs. Then, the next stage
was to transform these images, to break them,
and erase them from memory, as the cards

were dealt, were gone, were played. The Ace of Spades
- Death, the Grim Reaper - then became a dead
image of Death, the can was crushed, the heads
of the Jacks of Spades and Diamonds were unbodied.

Others were easier thanks to you and the hurt.
An Ace of Hearts became a broken heart.

'A book that has never been opened': My Week in Books 4

2010-05-19T03:45:00.000-07:00

Here we are, week four already! This week I've concluded my revisiting of T. S. Eliot's major poetic works, dabbled in fantasy, and spent an hour with lesbian vampires. How to top that next week...?

Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (1872)

This volume of short stories and novellas is hit and miss: it starts with the truly spectacular 'Green Tea', where a man named Jennings is harassed by an apelike figure for seemingly no good reason; the best horrors, it seems, happen to those who haven't done anything to deserve them. The next stories, 'The Familiar' and 'Mr Justice Harbottle' are slightly less chilling but still great examples of the ghost story. The 'Dragon Volant' novella is dull, but the volume ends with 'Carmilla', the novella that inspired Dracula, and so picks up again there. Recommended, but perhaps best read in chunks, one story/novella at a time. Trivia: Le Fanu's Dr Hesselius, who hears or investigates many of the tales related here, has been claimed as an influence on the later psychic doctors and detectives created by Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, and others.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943)

Eliot's final great work of poetry, it was originally to be called Kensington Quartets (true). The more I read these four poems, the more convinced I become that Eliot has that peculiar gift that Shakespeare had, for seeing the world of the future more clearly than anyone else of his time (and H. G. Wells was writing at the same time as Eliot). Maybe 'gift' is the wrong word; but so many phrases seem to echo with a peculiar contemporary significance, whether it be talk of the shores of Asia, the Edgware Road, 'twittering' (bad pun, but there we have it), or the rose-garden (Clegg and Cameron sadly, or perhaps it should be happily, absent). Okay, so Eliot is difficult and obscure in his allusions and imagery (especially here with the esoteric religious symbols), but there's no doubt that he is a great poet. Trivia: Eliot uses the word 'grimpen' to mean a mire or marsh; the word was actually a borrowing from The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Sherlock Holmes novel which contains a place named Grimpen Mire. The word has now found its way into the OED.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

I've been reading this novella (for the fourth time) as preparation for a tutorial I'm giving, both this week and next; what struck me this time, more than on previous readings (oh, how blind must I have been!), is how much like a mystery novel the narrative is framed. One of the things it's easy to gloss over about Stevenson's tale of dual personality is that, to original readers in the 1880s, the title gave nothing away about the twist - namely, that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. It was really the Fight Club of its day, only without Meat Loaf and his bitch tits. Trivia: Stevenson called the story Strange Case, because he thought the tale would sound stranger without that word 'strange' being prefaced by the word 'the'; it also makes the novella's title sound more like a newspaper headline. However, many editions (especially recent editions) of the story call it The Strange Case... Perhaps this is something that should be challenged, I don't know. A great example (or strange case) of authorial intention being ousted by Wimsattian intentional fallacy.

Fred Saberhagen, Woundhealer's Story (1986)

Otherwise known as The First Book of Lost Swords. Saberhagen (who was born eighty years ago yesterday, and whom we sadly lost three years ago) wrote eleven SF/fantasy novels about his Twelve Swords of Power, each of which has a different property (bringing good fortune to the wielder, shielding the wielder from view, etc.). The original trilogy, known as the Books of Swords, told the tale of the swords being forged and then scattered throughout the fantasy world Saberhagen created; each of the subsequent eight novels, of which this is the first, tells the story of one particular sword. This is a slow start to the second part of the epic series, and it's all very trashy, but there's something magical about it nonetheless. Sadly out of print, but available through Amazon and eBay. Recommended.

That's it for another week. Next week my 'week in books' will be coming to you on the usual day, Thursday. (Tomorrow I'll be on the train bound for Portsmouth, where I'm spouting my nonsense about Arthur Machen.) I hope, dear reader, you have a good week. See you next Thursday.

'I could not speak, and my eyes failed': My Week in Books 3

2010-05-13T01:29:00.000-07:00

This week it's been a mixture of poetic and supernatural volumes. I've shaken hands with the progenitor of the Gothic, danced with T. S. Eliot, flirted with Betjeman, and had a right good roll around with Henry James. Here's this Thursday's 'week in books'...

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)

When it was first published, this tale purported to be the translation of a newly discovered medieval manuscript; in fact, the thing was all the invention of Walpole. It invented the genre we now know as Gothic literature - Walpole was an enthusiast of Gothic architecture and led the Gothic revival in England (Strawberry Hill Gothic, I recently learned, was named after the Gothic mansion he built for his home). The book is short and the pages turn easily enough, and although the prose is a little overblown in parts and the characters are far too melodramatic to each other, it contains a charm all its own and is a pleasing diversion for a wet Sunday afternoon. Trivia: Walpole was the son of Robert Walpole, largely considered first Prime Minister of Great Britain (though that title was not used till the early twentieth century).

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Generally, you start off hating Eliot, then come to accept him, then you come to love him. Few, if any, forgive him. I've read this so many times, and every now and then I return to it to find what I've never noticed before. This poem is perhaps his masterpiece, and is a mixture of all sorts. First, poetic styles: free verse, rhyming couplets, quatrains; second, languages: English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek; third, high and low culture: music-hall songs, and allusions to Shakespeare, Spenser, Webster, Marvell, Kyd, Dante, Baudelaire, and many, many more. It's one of those poems everyone should read, and then promptly reread. Trivia: Eliot toyed with calling parts of the poem 'He Do the Police in Different Voices', after a line from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

Alice and Claude Askew, Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer

In the wake of Conan Doyle's hugely popular Sherlock Holmes stories (which appeared in the Strand magazine from 1891), and with the rise in psychical research and interest in spiritualism, numerous authors created their own Holmes-like detectives who investigated ghostly occurrences. Algernon Blackwood had John Silence, William Hope Hodgson had Carnacki (the 'Ghost-Finder'), and Alice and Claude Askew had Aylmer Vance, who is assisted by his own 'Watson' with clairvoyant powers, Dexter. These eight adventures are highly entertaining and heartily recommended to anyone with a penchant for the weird. Until this lovely and inexpensive Wordsworth edition it was not at all easy to find these stories, so go and treat yourself.

John Betjeman, Mount Zion (1931) and Continual Dew (1937)

The latter volume here contains one of Betjeman's most famous poems (or most infamous, if you happen to like Slough). The first, slim volume contains the popular 'Death in Leamington', and although these poems are, on the whole, not as profound as later ones, they demonstrate Betjeman's already-accomplished talent for poetry, and for the stylistic and metrical details that go towards making good poetry. Well worth a look.

Henry James, Ghost Stories of Henry James

This volume (again, from Wordsworth) contains all of James's most famous supernatural tales, including the novella The Turn of the Screw, and other gems such as 'The Friends of the Friends' and 'The Jolly Corner'. So far as the rest go, they range from good to mere mild diversions, and several of them, such as 'The Private Life' and 'The Third Person', are more society comedies than spine-tingling terror-inducers. But if you're a stranger to James, or find his novels a bit hard-going, these are a good place to go to, to dip your toe into the Jamesian water. Enjoy.

Right, I'm off. Next week my round-up will be on Wednesday, devoted readers, as I'm off down south to gabble about Arthur Machen on Thursday morning, and will be webless. Till then, then, fare ye well.

Me, My Shelf, I

2010-05-12T04:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, so while I'm putting off the last bits of tutorial prep I need to do for this afternoon, and before I go and heat up my oh-so-nutritious student lunch (curry Pot Noodle, methinks), a few words on aNobii, to which I was only introduced like a green, trembling novitiate a couple of days ago. For those who haven't heard of it, aNobii is a website that allows users to share information about the books they own, have read, plan to read, or want to own - sort of like a virtual bookshelf, I 'spose. (Indeed, your profile is referred to as your 'Shelf'.) Some may find this a pointless thing to do, but, though I may be an untidy soul at times, I do like to catalogue things like my bookshelf (though I stubbornly refuse to succumb to the impulse to alphabetise my LP and CD collection). So I spent some time yesterday (far too much time, I would add) uploading the books I own, the ones I've read, and some of the ones I plan to read in the near future.

I haven't even managed to complete the list yet, and severe risk of RSI and eye strain forced me away from the site eventually. I've got about halfway through my read books, maybe just a bit further, I'm not sure. A strange desire, to set your lands or at least your bookshelf in order; but I found it, like eating a slightly melted Rolo, oddly satisfying.

One of the questions it raised, though, was: am I well read? I don't think so. A glance at my real (forget for a moment my virtual) bookshelf reveals a number of books I feel I should have read, and that I really do want to read, but that I haven't, in all honesty, yet read. I'm on a bit of a reading spree at the moment, so hope to rectify this. But I wondered: who out there does consider her- or himself well read, and what counts, in your opinion, as being well read? I say this a someone who finds it impossible to lie about which books I have and haven't read - I struggled through North and South last year as I was teaching it, but if I'm completely honest, I didn't properly read it.

Dr Johnson famously said, 'A man should read as his fancy takes him, for what he reads as a chore will do him little good.' So, another question: what counts as 'reading' a book? Reading most of it, and then looking up the ending on Wikipedia? Skim-reading all of it? Or actually paying attention to every word? Hmmm, it's a strange issue.

Anyway, for anyone interested in aNobii, here is a link to my profile (riveting stuff): http://www.anobii.com/olivertearle/books

'I would meet you upon this honestly': My Week in Books 2

2010-05-06T01:42:00.002-07:00

This week I've been somewhat slower in my reading than last week, what with celebrating my birthday on Monday with Teachers whisky, and taking full advantage of post-lecture free wine at my English department last night; but nonetheless, I've been reading a few books, of somewhat different content from one another. Here's my analysis:

Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (1882)

Not one of Hardy's 'great' novels, not among the so-called 'Big Five' or even what we might call the 'Medium Five', this book is still a pleasing romance. I mean 'romance' not only in the sense of pink-covered, Barbara Cartlandesque books, but also in the sense of a pleasing diversion - and indeed, this novel is not as hard-hitting with its delineations of Victorian society as, say, Jude or Tess, which came later. The merging of science with literature is something I have a particular fondness for, and although this is by no means 'science fiction', the ways in which astronomy (the 'tower' of the title refers to an astronomical observatory, where a married woman and a young star-gazer meet and fall in love) bleeds into the prose of Hardy's writing more than makes up for the early occasional stilted dialogue between the star-crossed pair.

T. S. Eliot, Poems (1920)

This is not such an easy read as Eliot's previous volume, reviewed last week, and when your French is as rusty as mine it's hard to follow the four offerings of the twelve poems contained herein which are written in French. But the poems are still of the kind that make you want to go back and reread them immediately, if only to try to make head or tail of what they're all about. 'Gerontion', the lead poem here, contains some of Eliot's most resonant lines, and there are also a few lines elsewhere which helped to get Eliot charged with anti-Semitism (though After Strange Gods, a book Eliot wrote in the thirties, did the real damage there), so it remains for some a controversial book. I'll reread The Waste Land for next week.

Gavin Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart (2009)

In the wake of Christopher Ricks' 2004 book Dylan's Visions of Sin, other literary critics have rightly risen to the challenge of attempting to write a work of literary criticism that takes - as it central focus - the lyrics of a great songwriter. In Hopps' case it is Morrissey, for me as for many others the greatest songwriter in the whole of popular music. This book is a deftly written exploration of the themes of Morrissey's lyrics that approaches pageturnability - no mean feat in literary criticism, I know. Unlike many other writers on Morrissey's work, Hopps displays a conscious lack of egotism and instead lets Morrissey's persona and words speak for themselves, and he makes some surprising but on the whole convincing comparisons - between the lyrics and, for instance, the writings of Oscar Wilde and George Eliot's Middlemarch. Some may blanch at this marriage of literature and lyric, but when we recall that Morrissey treats Wilde almost like his 'religion', like 'carrying your rosary around with you' (quoted by Hopps on p. 74), and that the opening lines of 'How Soon Is Now?' allude to Middlemarch, suddenly Hopps' connections seem far from contrived. This is not to say that Hopps merely presents: he is a thoughtful and imaginative reader, but this does not mean he spills over into over-analysis or far-fetched readings. Indeed, when he suggests that 'The Boy with the Thorn in His Side' may have been inspired by Wilde's fairy tale 'The Nightingale and the Rose', that is precisely what he does, suggests it: he resists any lapidary interpretations, unlike many other monolithists of Morrissey's work. All in all, this is a lively and very interesting book, and one I'd recommend to all Morrissey fans, or to people who like to see literary criticism stretched at the seams a little.

Right, that's it for this week; next week I'll be reviewing a few supernatural titles, as I return my academic hat to my silly head, and plunge myself back into the thesis good and proper. Until then, dear readers, have a good week, and don't put all your feet in one sock.

My Week in Books 1

2010-04-29T02:18:00.000-07:00

Not that I want to turn this into a dusty, stuffy book blog, or any sort of book blog, but I thought I'd start keeping some sort of small record of what I've had my big nose in recently. So each week, or roughly each week, or whenever I get a moment, I'll jot down the titles of the books I've read, and give a sentence or two on what I enjoyed (or didn't enjoy) about it. Because I'll only include books which I've read in their entirety, a lot of skim-reading and odd-story-reading will have to be consigned to a postscript, or else the dustbin of the blog world (if we're not already in it). I should also point out that, although it may be a controversial point, I take 'book' here to mean any work which has been published by itself as a novel, short-story volume, play, volume of poetry, or work of non-fiction. Many may disagree that The Waste Land, for instance, is a book; but because its title is rendered in italics rather than quotation marks, and because it carries with it - like many of Eliot's major poems - the depth, breadth, and general stamp of a book, I'm going to include that. As I say, controversial. So anyway, here we go: what have I read, or finished reading, over the last week?

William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land (1912)

This was hard-going, but ultimately rewarding: if I were feeling flippant (and I usually am) I'd call it a sort of Pilgrim's Progress of the future, or else the horror-fantasy version of Ulysses, or maybe H. G. Wells after too many wine gums. None of this quite captures what it's about though: it's written in a rather laboured seventeenth-century style which the reader soon tires of, there is virtually no dialogue (in fact, there may be absolutely none, but I'd have to read it again, and bugger that), and not a lot happens, besides some telepathy and kinky sex stuff. Yet even this doesn't comprehensively impart what's going on in this bizarre work: it's a real tester, described as 'unreadable' by many, and yet you do feel you're a richer person for having read it. It's long, at nearly 600 pages, and it feels long. Interesting trivia: it was, along with Hodgson's tales of his 'ghost-finder', Carnacki, the book which introduced the term 'ab-human' into the language, and thus into horror fiction. Oh, and it is one of the earliest works to describe an arcology (a portmanteau of 'architectural' and 'ecology', defining essentially a huge metal pyramid in which whole civilisations can live). Heartily recommended, though maybe warm yourself up with the shorter, and more readable (though still difficult) The House on the Borderland.

P. G. Wodehouse, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974)

I reached for this Jeeves and Wooster outing as an antidote to the above-mentioned book: I needed something far lighter, and funnier, to cool my brain down after the experience of The Night Land. Wodehouse is, like Terry Pratchett, one of those writers worth reaching for when you want to escape to a world that is familiar in all senses and yet soothed with an (on the whole) reliable dose of humour (albeit with a glorious satirical edge in more recent Pratchett). I'm not sure what's inherently funny about cats, but whatever it is, it works here, and this was a fine book, though I sense there are better Wodehouse books out there (which I'll come to). Trivia: it was published in the US under the title The Cat-Nappers.

T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

These twelve poems contain some early gems - the even earlier stuff was collected in the Inventions of the March Hare book. 'Morning at the Window', a single Spenserian stanza given a modern (and modernist) twist, is a subtle but glorious example of what was to come, while the title poem, complete with its ingenious title, is of course one of the landmarks of modernist poetry. One of the most cryptic and resonant lines in all modernist poetry, 'And I wonder how they should have been together', is included in the closing poem. I'm not sure if anyone has yet performed a study on bits of paper in Eliot's poetry (they probably have), but they seem to crop up a fair bit. As with all of Eliot's poetic oeuvre, this comes recommended as essential reading for any poetry buff. Trivia: Faber and Faber, Eliot's publishing house, was run by just one Faber; it was formerly Faber and Gwyer, and a second Faber brother was dreamt up because it was felt that 'Faber' by itself wouldn't carry the same weight.

Rudyard Kipling, Strange Tales

These tales were of varying quality, but some, like 'My Own True Ghost Story', were hugely enjoyable. Others ramble on a bit, but on the whole they're rather readable. 'The Mark of the Beast', a tale of lycanthropy that caused shock horror when it first appeared in the 1880s, has lost some of its beastliness; but they're still well worth a look. It's probably a mistake to try to read too many in one go, as I did, because they become rather samey. Trivia? Kipling's dog was called Malachi, a name inspired by a line from Sir Thomas More: 'When Malachi wore a collar of gold' (I think that's the quotation anyway).

Arthur Machen, The Novel of the White Powder and Other Stories

This volume contains three novellas/tales by the Welsh master of weird writing: 'The Novel of the White Powder' (a short Jekyll and Hyde-inspired episode taken from the larger Stevenson-inspired work, The Three Impostors), the novella 'A Fragment of Life', and one of Machen's most famous works, The Great God Pan. When he's on form, as he often is here, Machen is very good, although we never fully escape the shadow of Robert Louis. While The Hill of Dreams is far superior to these more famous tales, these are still essential reading for anyone interested in fiction dealing with the occult. Interesting trivia: Machen is credited with originating the idea of the Holy Grail surviving into modern times. (So arguably, without him, we wouldn't have had The Da Vinci Code.)

So there we are. That's what I've been reading over the last seven days. I've embarked on a new reading odyssey already, and I'll write up that, and other excursions, some time next week. Happy reading to you all, kind blog-visitors.

University Challenge Grand Final

2010-04-04T03:12:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow night, as many of you fine people will know, is the Grand Final of series 39/16 (depending on whether you lump together the Paxman revival with the original Bambi series) of University Challenge. It's between an Oxford side and a Cambridge team - St John's and Emmanuel, respectively. The former has such glittering alumni as A. E. Housman, Philip Larkin, Endeavour Morse, Tony Blair, and Victoria Coren (I think), while the other ... well, it's given the world Alex Guttenplan, the impressive team captain of the Emmanuel team who's been causing such an internet and media splash over the last few weeks.

So, whom to support? Well, since Guttenmania took off, in such disparate places as Arsebook, Internet forums, and the Daily Mail, most people appear to be supporting Emmanuel. I think St John's will win. Now, I have had some inside knowledge as to former matches played in the first and second rounds, thanks to my own involvement in the show, but I have to say I've not heard a dickie bird about tomorrow's match. And, I have to say, it looks to all intents and purposes as though it'll be a close-fought match.

But then this is just in keeping with the series as a whole, which has seen three (to my recollection) tie-breakers, and many matches where the margin has been a matter of a single starter and set of bonuses (or 25 points, to those not that au fait with the show). My own two matches were won and lost respectively by Loughborough with a margin of 30 points; having beaten UCL in the first round with 205-175, we then lost to tomorrow's finalists, St John's Oxford, by 220-190 (just to squeeze an iota's worth more fame from the incident, I should add that that is the highest losing score of this series). The very next match to be recorded, and aired, after our match against St John's was between our first-round opponents, UCL, and Emmanuel Cambridge, who won that match and are the other finalists in tomorrow's show.

Last week's match, which saw Emmanuel beat a good Manchester team by 315-120, was (I think) the biggest score margin (195) of the whole series, which has had few categorical defeats (St John's rear their clever heads again here, having beaten Durham 270-90 in the first round). This is nothing on last series, which really separated the men from the boys: take the quarter-finals, for instance. Well-known and -remembered is Corpus Christi's record defeat of the Exeter team with a score of 350-15 - that is the second-highest score margin, I think, since Open University beat Charing Cross 415-65 in the 1997-8 series, and Exeter managed a record lowest score. But in fact just the week before that, Lincoln College, Oxford had played Queen's College, Cambridge (who gave us Stephen Fry and Erasmus) and trounced them 335-50, which was at that time the highest score margin for quite a few years. Lincoln were favourites for the final thereafter, only to meet Manchester in the semis, and get trounced themselves, 345-30. Scores like that make even last week's match between Emmanuel and Manchester look close-fought!

So, call me perverse (I am), but I'm backing St John's, because whatever happens tomorrow night, the match will be a close one. Guttenplan is an excellent player, and so are his teammates, but St John's seem to be perhaps the most cohesive and balanced team in the competition this year. So tomorrow's final is a bit like last year's between Manchester and Team Trimble, otherwise known as Corpus Christi, Oxford: a set of good all-rounders against a good team with one particularly outstanding player. Last year (excepting subsequent stripping of honours) Corpus Christi raced ahead in the last ten minutes to win the final. This year, I reckon the collegiate shoe will be on the other foot. Yes, yes, I could be wrong. But, as I said, I'm perverse, so I don't mind.

Writing to order - or disorder

2010-03-02T03:50:00.000-08:00

I have recently been writing a fair bit. Nothing new in that, no, but having spent much of 2009 sitting about thinking and reading for the most part, it's been interesting to spend so much of the first two months of this new decade slumped over a laptop, tapping away at the keys. And I have managed to produce a fair bit - 112,000 words by a pretty conservative estimate.

Most of this has been enforced by the alarming knowledge that in about six months' time (at the latest) I need to deliver an 80,000-word thesis to Loughborough University, and when I began 2010 I had probably just over a third of that word count. Now, thanks to diligent tapping at my laptop, I have well over two-thirds; and this means I can spend much of the next few months revising and rewriting what I have. This may sound like smug-faced laurel-resting, but actually the prospect of revision terrifies me almost as much. Doing a revision, as Isaac Asimov once remarked, is something like chewing used gum. The time and energy spent on reworking something you've already written could surely be better spent writing something new? That's far more exciting, and if you're blessed enough to have plenty of ideas, far easier, too.

I make no secret of this. Revising bores me. It's always bored me. It's necessary, but only up to a point. So, during the coming months I plan to spend plenty of time reading up on stuff and chasing up stray references for the thesis, but I also plan to write something new as well. I'm not sure what it'll be yet: fiction or non-fiction, article or note, story or novel, shopping list or blog. All suggestions are welcome - on the back of a matchbox or, failing that, in comment form at the bottom of this little blog.

The big Christmas language quiz

2009-12-29T09:28:00.001-08:00

Okay, so it's got very little to do with Christmas, but here goes anyway with my QI-style language quiz. It's multiple choice, and I'm not going to post the answers just yet, so if you want to know how you've done before I get round to doing that, feel free to leave your answers as a comment underneath the quiz. Right, here goes:

1. What did the word 'alphabet' first mean?

a) Alpha and beta
b) Alf and Betty
c) Ox and house

2. What's the correct plural of 'octopus'?

a) Octopuses
b) Octopus
c) Octopi

3. Which writer first used the word 'muggle'?

a) JK Rowling
b) Nancy Stouffer
c) Layamon

4. Who gave us the word 'slithy'?

a) W. Whateley
b) W. Shakespeare
c) L. Carroll

5. Which writer is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with creating the most neologisms?

a) William Shakespeare
b) Geoffrey Chaucer
c) Thomas Browne

6. And which single work is cited most often in the OED?

a) Hamlet
b) The Bible
c) Cursor Mundi

7. How many words in the English language end in 'dous'?

a) Just four
b) Just five
c) Nearly forty

8. What does the word 'tribadism' denote?

a) Tribal mating customs
b) Lesbian lovemaking that simulates heterosexual intercourse
c) Things being three times as bad as they previously were

9. What does 'DVD' stand for?

a) Digital Video Disc
b) Digital Versatile Disc
c) Nothing

10. Why is Chicago known as 'the Windy City'?

a) It's windy there
b) The river that runs through Chicago is long and winding
c) The politicians speak a lot of hot air

11. Who was the first person with the given name 'Gary'?

a) Garibaldi
b) Gary Cooper
c) Gary Sparrow

12. Where does the word 'posh' come from?

a) Acronym (Port Out Starboard Home)
b) A Victorian poet's gay regard for a boatman
c) Nobody knows

13. Parapraxis is better known as what?

a) A spoonerism
b) A Freudian slip
c) Forgetting a word

14. Who gave us the name for the subatomic particle the 'quark'?

a) Richard Feynman
b) Stephen Hawking
c) James Joyce

15. Who compiled the first ever dictionary of the English language?

a) Dr Johnson
b) Robert Cawdrey
c) James Murray

16. Who gave us the words 'chortle' and 'galumph'?

a) Lewis Carroll
b) William Shakespeare
c) Jonathan Swift

17. The moon of Uranus, Ariel, is named after a character from one of which writer's works?

a) William Shakespeare
b) Alexander Pope
c) Lewis Carroll

18. Which novelist coined the phrase 'dark horse'?

a) Charles Dickens
b) Benjamin Disraeli
c) William Makepeace Thackeray

19. How did sirloin steak get its name?

a) Henry VIII knighted it
b) Elizabeth I knighted it
c) It's French

20. Where does the name Jessica first appear?

a) The Bible
b) The Merchant of Venice
c) The Odyssey

Well done! You've reached the end of the quiz. If you would like your quiz marked, or if you would like to point out any errors you see in any of the questions, then I'd love to hear from you. And if anybody scores 20/20 I will personally visit them with a surprise prize. Of course I will. Now, would I lie to you?

Twitter and all things Twittertastic

2009-12-22T02:54:00.001-08:00

'Not here / Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.' Thus wrote T. S. Eliot, that best-known anagram of toilets, in his 1935 poem 'Burnt Norton'. Of course, Old Tom could little have known that, nearly seventy-five years thence, a micro-blogging site called Twitter would be the new big thing in the world of the Internet, following hot on the heels of the success of Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, and all of the other more or less universally known sites the World Wide Web has produced. But here it is, and 2009 has undoubtedly been the year of the Twitter.

Whether 2010 will build on its success, or whether the Twittersphere will implode under the weight of its own cultural importance, nobody can predict. But since I'm an arrogant prognosticating penishead who likes to do that sort of thing anyway, a sort of cut-price prophet, I think 2010 will be a very exciting year for Twitter. More and more people are joining every day, and at a cumulative, geometric rate, it would seem: one need only check the followers list of a popular tweeter like Mr Stephen Fry to see that. Where he once had ten thousand new followers a day, he now seems to get double that number, and it can't all be attributed to the new series of QI. But the Twittersphere must watch out: for every person who joins Twitter and becomes a regular and enthusiastic tweeter, there must be ten (I haven't done the maths, forgive) who join and never (or hardly ever) tweet (again).

So, is Twitter a fad? Of course it is. Look at Myspace: who but the most unpulsefingering musicians actually still use their Myspace, or even own one? Not I, said the Walrus. And Facebook? Well, people may still have an Arsebook page, but why go on there and effectively 'tweet' your goings-on to fifty or a hundred 'followers' (your 'friends'), when you can (if you're me, which I'm sure you're thankful you're not) go on Twitter and tell a thousand people what you're doing (as I now can)? Okay, so many of them won't even see my tweets, let alone read them, much less respond to 'em. But that's the great thing about Twitter, and it's what made Myspace always a million times better than Arsebook (whose success and popularity I've always, I must confess, been rather baffled by): the potential, the potential to meet new people and to expand your social horizons. Facebook was never one for random 'friend' adds. And that was its major limitation: after all, if I want to email someone, I'll email them; if I want to get in touch with them urgently, I'll text them. But anyway, enough anti-Facebookery. Where was I?

Undoubtedly this has all been said before, by sorts wiser and more eloquent than I. But just to finish, here are a few reasons why it could be argued Twitter is better than Facebook or Myspace, not to mention Bebo (which I never even bothered to have an account with):

-It's not just about meeting new people, it's about sharing information. As a student of the weird (in literature, that is), this was one of the appeals for me: I knew there were ways of my finding people I would not otherwise have ever had contact with, who had a similar interest in the out-of-the-way writers I like, and of picking their brains about certain books and writers who might even have been too out-of-the-way to have come into my line of view yet. This is still one of the major appeals of Twitter for me.

-It cuts out all the bullshit that made Facebook so clunky and awkward: profile information, friends, silly invitations to join their Farm, or poke them in the nether regions, or give them a cormorant as a gift, and other random and completely pointless ventures. Instead, it's just 'What's happening?' in 140 characters, 20 fewer than a text message (formerly 'What are you doing?'). The success of Twitter is pretty obvious: it's caused Facebook to introduce their tagging system, where you can tag people in your status updates, and the commenting system, whereby people can comment directly below your updates. Does this sound familiar to any Twitter users? Of course it does. And Twitter was there first.

-Finally, but most importantly, none of it matters. It is all perfectly pointless. It's a diversion, it's a way of killing five minutes before dinner, or rewarding yourself after writing 500 words towards your thesis, or whatever. None of it actually matters one way or another: the people you commune with on there, followers and followees, are not your 'friends' - some of them may be in real life, of course, but most people will doubtless be random people you'll never encounter outside of Twitter. If you read a tweet or don't read a tweet, it's not, to borrow the words of dear Mr Toots from Dombey and Son, of any consequence; it's just a way of churning out little nuggets of information to the world.

So there we have it. Time for me to stop blogging and get tweeting. And a big thank you to my 1,000 followers, and let's make 2010 an even livelier, lovelier, and more interesting year for the Twittersphere. Don't put all your feet into one stocking,

O.T.

University Challenge

2009-11-15T05:05:00.001-08:00

Just a few prefatory remarks about University Challenge, on which I appear as the captain of Loughborough University tomorrow night. It was recently described as 'the poshest pub quiz in the country' (or words to that effect) by one former contestant, and with its mixture of quick-fire questions, conferring, and music and picture rounds, this is about right. Most people who appear on University Challenge, however, leave without any sort of prize. Even the winners. To be fair, even the series champions don't actually 'win' something individually, and even their institution gets to keep the coveted trophy (sorry, excuse the trite phrase) only for a year. So, what's the appeal of going on University Challenge?

Well, I know it sounds like a sort of fake answer, but I think it is true to some extent that any person who appears on the show has some small degree of pride in their home institution. Maybe not a massive amount, but a little. For myself (excuse these self-important ramblings for a sec) I think it was a mixture of institutional pride and a desire to prove that Loughborough was about more than it is usually known for. So it was part pro-Loughborough, and part anti-, or at least anti-the-stereotypical-view-of-Loughborough (people running about in shorts a lot, blowing whistles, kicking balls, and so on). Maybe it's simpler than that: for years I've been at Loughborough (it's well over eight now), and in all that time I hadn't had an opportunity to represent my university in any capacity. Being gangling, malcoordinated, and utterly untalented when it comes to anything vaguely sporty (I even struggle with darts), there was no way I was ever going to be running around a field flying the flag for my institution. But with University Challenge, suddenly here was a chance: here was an opportunity to try to make my university proud.

Winning the first-round match was a bonus. I didn't go on to win it. None of us did, I don't think; as captain, I was happy enough to be sitting behind one of those coveted desks (sorry, that adjective again), with three other lovely Loughborough people, ready to take part in the toughest quiz on television (with the exception of Only Connect, I freely admit). When the gong went and we'd won our first-round match, I can't help feeling rather surprised. Was this allowed? Weren't we breaking some sort of regulation? Surely there was something in the rulebook about a university like Loughborough not being able to win something like this. After all, we hadn't been on the programme since 1984 (a fact that, when I mentioned it at our auditions, may have helped us to make it onto the programme: I'm surmising, though). Was this the place for Loughborough?

Although I hadn't really thought about it in this much detail, perhaps our appearance on the show back in July helped to refashion and remould a few assumptions and prejudices people had about Loughborough. Those who had written the university off as a sports institution (not helped by the fact that all of our most famous alumni are famous for their sports achievements) perhaps were forced to reconsider this, especially when they saw that not one of the students Loughborough had put forward for the team were studying anything remotely sporty (Chemistry, Engineering, English, and Fine Art). Maybe the fact that we won made them think, 'Oh, maybe a few people at Loughborough know a few things.' Not a massive moral or philosophical U-Turn, I'll grant thee, but enough to sway those prejudices just a tad. After all, it's only a general knowledge quiz. A pub quiz, on the telly, and open only to students. Nobody's going to write a novel, or paint a picture, or record an album, or invent a cure for cancer. It's half an hour of trivia. But if our appearance made some people revisit their assumptions about Loughborough (if they had any), then that's a bonus too.

So, tomorrow's match is really a bonus to the bonus. It's another chance to represent our university for another half-hour, and, one hopes, not to bring our university into any disrepute. In a way, it's all by-the-by. I hope those of you who watch the match enjoy it, and remember that, whatever small difference our appearance on the show will have made, there is a world of far greater importance beyond the show. People with big egos like myself need to remember this sort of thing, from time to time.

Poetry: a stroll down amnesia lane

2009-11-13T05:41:00.000-08:00

Christ, but I was a portentous and pretentious sod when I was eighteen.

The Party

As the late-sipped glasses passing to and fro
obscure the vision from across the room
to meet with some unlooked-for hands, to show
that guests are getting merrier as midnights loom,
I catch your eyes held in some coyness, low

as if the eyelids were weighed down with lead,
all blackened by mascara, hid by space,
all for a fleeting moment; then, a head
comes right in front of where I stand; the face
turns away to someone else. I tread

across the gaudy carpet, to the beer
and pour myself another, trying to
forget the thing that has just happened here,
as all around me kissing, dancing too,
fills the music-haunted room. I veer

away from where the people fill the floor,
left wondering by you if it were chance
that then we had noticed one another, or
if it were different from another glance
which happened by coincidence and nothing more.

#showsaturday

2009-11-07T05:02:00.000-08:00

Regular tweeters and twitterers (I am still unsure of the correct noun, if there is one) will be familiar with #followfriday, whereby users can tweet their suggestions for people they are following whom others in turn might like to follow. This is a great way for others to blow your trumpet for you, and for you in turn to blow other people's. This is what Twitter should be about, in my 'umble opinion: people sharing information and opinions on things. You know, like, stuff.

Of course, what makes Friday special is that it's, well, Friday. Usually. End of the week, that relief and excitement, that 'Friday feeling'. But what about Saturday? This is why I have proposed we do something similar on Saturday. If the founding principle of Twitter was to tell people, in 140 characters or fewer, 'what you are doing', then perhaps the distinguishing ethos behind #showsaturday should be to 'show' people things: that is, via the picture services that Twitter can be linked to. Think of it as 'show and tell' day, but without the 'tell' bit (which is already what Twitter is principally about anyway). After all, a lot of people head out and do interesting things on Saturdays, it seems; so why not show us where you are, what you're doing, &c?

I know, I know, you're probably wondering: well, how the hell is this any different from what twitterers are doing already? If they want to post a picture of something, they'll jolly well do it. Twitter isn't stopping them. I'm not proposing that this change the face of Twitter or anything; after all, there was nobody stopping people from recommending potential followees to others before #followfriday came along. But if a topic or idea starts trending, then it can become more and more popular as people think: that's a simple idea, but I've never thought to do it before.

Or maybe others have better ideas? There must be many out there. Do please let me know if you have any. (And, if #showsaturday were to take off, I hereby absolve myself of the blame for any unsuitable or disgusting images people choose to upload. There. I've absolved myself. That's a performative, it's legally binding. Prob'ly.)

Knowledge: some general knowledge questions

2009-11-06T06:04:00.000-08:00

How do you measure knowledge? Do you do it by sticking people together in a dingy pub and asking them about everything from butterflies to butteries, from bowlers hats to Camilla Parker-Bowles, from World Cup finals to Miss World cup sizes? Perhaps. I think the starting-point for these somewhat abstract musings on the abstruse was last night's BBC2 programme, Wonderland: I Won University Challenge. No, that's not quite it: it's hearing (or overhearing, to be brutally honest) two builders this morning, discussing last night's BBC2 programme, Wonderland: I Won University Challenge.

Another question: What was the programme about? For those who didn't see the programme, what follows is in no way a review of the programme, which was for the most part an unremarkable documentary made remarkable only by the eccentricities and other outsiderish qualities evinced by those who took part, all of whom had been part of a winning team on University Challenge over the last forty-seven years. In my opinion, it was not an altogether successful programme in terms of its execution, simply because it chose to focus exclusively on those ex-contestants of the most outre variety, although 'variety' is perhaps a hugely inappropriate word here. True, some of those who took part in the programme were extremely interesting and shed some fleeting insights into what it's like to be of above-average intelligence (in some cases bordering on, if not quite inhabiting, the realms of genius), but not enough time was spent analysing why they are the way they are, and why they chose to lose themselves in drink, or isolation, or their work, or a mixture of the three. However, a programme featuring the most boring and run-of-the-mill winners of years gone by would not have made for a very appealing show. Still, grumble over. Forgive me, those who disagree. As I said, I have not set out with the intention of providing a TV review here. (Shudders at thought.) No, I wanted to discuss one particular clip from the show, which I overheard those two builders discussing this morning.

Paxman asks the starter question about the smallest number which is the sum of two cubes. Immediately, I'm thinking, '1729.' 1729 is a somewhat special number, as any mathematician worth his or her salt will readily tell you: it frequently turns up in interesting ways in the Matt Groening-created show Futurama, where there is at least one mathematician on the writing team. One of our star subjects (a rather shy but fascinating chap who is now a Classics Fellow at Oxbridge) then buzzes in and tells Paxman the answer. Paxman can hardly believe it. He looks genuinely incredulous, as though he'd just been presented with simple but comprehensive proof that God did not exist. But, hang about, I'm not a genius, and I've never won University Challenge, and yet I knew the answer to that question (I even got it a second before the chap buzzed in on University Challenge, if I want to be super-annoyingly smug about it, which, let's face it, I do). Yet those who I was sitting with watching the programme were equally astonished that the star subject had managed to answer this question, and yet had dismissed my knowledge of it, for some reason, with a shrug. But why?

Well, why? I think this goes back to an old thorny issue which I recently discussed briefly on this very blog with another University Challenge contestant, who, like me, is working in the arts rather than the sciences. It's obvious to anyone who regularly watches University Challenge that in the vast majority of instances when Paxman enthusiastically greets the giving of a correct answer to a starter question, it's a science question rather than an arts-based one. When was the last time you heard him utter a 'Well done!' to a question on Shakespeare, or Housman, or Philip Larkin? (All writers, I might add, who have been the subject of questions on this current series so far which have not been answered correctly by any of the eight contestants.) I find this imbalance intriguing. And hearing one of these builders this morning telling his friend about this particular question brought this sharply into focus for me. This is what the builder said:

'Paxman asked this question, something like what is this number multiplied by this number if you take away this number,' and this guy buzzed in before Paxman had even finished the question and said, '1758.' Paxman was like, 'What? Well done!'

Two things about this little speech. First, I'd like to draw your attention to the selective memory of the builder (imagine me pompously waving a lecturer's pointer at an imaginary projector screen): he remembered the question as distinctly being a calculation rather than the simple recall of a fact. Second, I will point out (as you, dear reader, in your percipience will have already noticed) that the builder in fact got the answer wrong. Contrast this case with, say, the following question: 'Which poet wrote the words, "Why sholuld I let the toad work squat on my life?"' (answer: Philip Larkin). If that question had been asked on University Challenge (indeed, it has, and recently), and someone had got it right (nobody did), would builders and other people (I apologise for singling out one particular profession here; but please, do bear in mind I'm basing this on a genuine experience) be talking about it, in tones of barely suppressed awe, the next day? I doubt it. And yet there is no real fundamental difference between the ways in which the answer to the first question and the second would be reached.

But isn't science knowledge valuable? Of course sometimes the praise is well deserved. Sometimes it's important to see medical students have their knowledge of diseases put to the test. And it is, after all, far harder to dabble in biochemistry than it is in Balzac; or maybe it's just that fewer people would choose to do so, because more people read literature for pleasure or as a diversion than pick up a book on enzymes. Isaac Asimov may have been a renowned biochemist, but more people know him as the author of the Foundation novels than The Chemicals of Life. But I think in the case of the '1729' question, it was simply misunderstanding. Most people don't understand mathematics; therefore most people don't bother to try to understand how a contestant could have worked out the answer to the question in just a few seconds. But it doesn't take too much imagination to perceive that it's one of those things that some people just know. I'm not a mathematician and my knowledge of all things mathematical pretty much ended when I collected my Maths A Level eight years ago, but I still knew it. In other words, many people (Paxman himself included, I'd suspect) just assumed that the contestant had worked out what the smallest number was that was the sum of two cubes. Have you tried doing that? Want to go and fetch a pen and paper and try to work it out now? Go on, I'll give you five minutes. But, bear in mind that you can't use a calculator and the student on University Challenge got the answer in about five seconds.

Another starter for ten for you? Okay. Or, look at it another way: if Paxman asked, 'What is the only word in the English language which ends with the letters mt?' and someone had buzzed in within the space of a few seconds and said, 'Dreamt', would Paxman, or the viewers at home, have suddenly intaken their breath and looked at each other, bemused and possibly bewitched? Would anyone assume that the contestant in question had the entire vocabulary of the English language memorised in his head, and had gone through this mental dictionary in a few seconds and located the correct answer? No, of course not. We'd just assume it was one of those things he (or she, sorry ladies for using the exclusive 'his' just now) happened to know. Pub trivia. The same is true of a lot of science knowledge. And, before we forget, let us remind ourselves that it was a Classics student who answered that Maths question.

I suppose the point of this little rambling essay is that, while I don't have much patience for the sort of people who see University Challenge as a yardstick by which the intellect of the entire student population can be measured, I do think this discrepancy between arts and science students, and the way these are respectively perceived by people around the country, is something that demands further attention. I certainly don't happen to think that the answers, right or wrong, that contestants give (in what is essentially a televised pub quiz) can have any bearing on that student's individual knowledge or intellect, much less be a reflection on the collective intellect of his or her institution. But I do think that the arts-science divide is, in a word, fascinating. Anyone else agree? Or have I just been talking nonsense again (which is always possible)?

Perversity; or, why I like The Black Adder

2009-10-24T06:15:00.000-07:00

It may not be a terribly fashionable thing to say, but I LIKE the first series of Blackadder.

I don't just find it watchable, or an okay way to pass half an hour (or 33-odd minutes) of my time. I really like it. I admire it. No, no, I adore it.

It's always been the outcast son, the pariah, the black sheep of the Blackadder clan; people write it off as 'too big', or else they say they don't like the voice that Rowan Atkinson gives his character in that initial series, or else they just say, 'Well, it's just not as funny as the other series, is it?'

True. I'll second that. It isn't as funny as the second series, or the third series, and definitely nowhere near as ball-crunchingly hilarious as the fourth and final series. (But then, what is?) But then lots of comedies are well liked - indeed, loved - when they are not particularly funny. Friends, for example. Oh, how I've tried and tried to come to terms with Friends. I've tried to like it, I really have. I've sat down with others and watched entire episodes in the hope that I would find something funny, or like the characters, or like the absurd situations in which the characters find themselves ... anything, a foot in the door, a way in to discovering what it is about it that other people obviously love so much. But I've failed. I know, I'm rubbish. Evidently I am. But that's just the way it is. I cannot make myself like Friends, or The Mighty Boosh, or Russell Howard, or Russell Brand, or Russell Kane, or Russell Gekko, or whoever the new twenty-something unfunny lad from Essex or Dorset or Surrey or wherever whose name is Russell happens to be. Just as I cannot convince most people I know - even diehard Blackadder fans - to like the first series of one of the most celebrated sitcoms ever produced.

Hardly surprising. I'm not even sure I could convince myself of why I love it so much. Perhaps it's the thirteen-year-old boy in me (hold those lame paedophile-cum-catamite jokes right there please), who sat down having bought his first ever video one day in 1996, and who discovered six whole episodes of a series of his favourite comedy which he'd never seen before, no, not so much as a five-second clip (this was, of course, the days before Youtube, and even the days before clip shows and Top 100 countdown compilation programmes became popular). Maybe it's just nostalgia, a return to the native land of pain (what 'nostalgia' literally means, sort of). Maybe. Or maybe it's something slightly perverse in me, akin to George Bernard Shaw's slightly twisted admiration for All's Well That Ends Well (hardly a classic Shakespeare play).

So perhaps that's it. Perhaps The Black Adder (1983) is my All's Well That Ends Well. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

But whatever it is, something about it charms me. I like the Middle Ages, and I like the 1980s, and that slightly outdated 80s charm of the studio set trying to recreate a fifteenth-century castle. Perhaps it's the lines that still crack me up, and which, like Shakespeare for the English language as a whole, have entered the common currency of my language: 'Well, splendid!', 'I thought we all were', 'This enormous nonsense' (a personal personal favourite), and so on. I'll leave it with you, dear reader.

Does anyone else out there love this first series? I'm not even saying I like it more than the other series. Or maybe I am. Hmm... I suppose the best way I can think of framing it right now is that while I know it isn't the best series of the four, it's my favourite.

I think. I don't know. I surmise. But I still love The Black Adder. Yes. I do. And I'm not ashamed.

Victorian limericks

2009-09-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

Here's how I while away my listless afternoons. I've composed twelve, but no doubt there'll be more as the names of nineteenth-century authors pop into my head. Co-author'd with the delectable Ms Rachel Adcock, who knows a good poem when she sees one.

There once was a fellow named Hardy
Who ordered a triple Bacardi.
He knocked it right back,
Got as drunk as a sack,
And arrived home that night rather tardy.

There once was a writer named Thackeray
Who ordered a raspberry daiquiri.
The lime made him smart
(For it was rather tart)
And his face ended up somewhat lacquery.

There once was a fellow named Trollope
Who gave his old Dickens a whallop.
One day it fell off
And now, if he cough,
His semen comes out in a dollop.

There once was a fellow named Tennyson
Who liked to canoodle with anyone.
He’d had Arthur Clough
Below and above
The table he kept his old pennies on.

There once was a woman named Gaskell
Whose dislike of Ian McGaskill
Reached the end of its tether
When he read out the weather
And she called him a right little rascal.

There once was a poet named Browning
Whose wife was perpetually frowning.He bought her a clean
And new trampoline
And now she is upping and downing.

There once was a fellow named Dickens
Who kept some remarkable chickens.
The size of his cock
Did come as a shock
To his wife when she gave it a lickins.

There was a young writer named Wilde
Who was very unique as a child.
While the kiddies played Catch
From a window he’d watch
And dream of them being defiled.

There was a young writer named Poe
Whose penis was ever on show.
When asked, ‘Why’s it buzzin’?’
He’d answer, ‘My cousin,’
Or, ‘Wouldn’t you just like to know?’

A young man they called Conan Doyle
Was always found covered in oil.
When old Joseph Bell
Once exclaimed, ‘What the hell…?’
He replied, ‘Let me come to the boil.’

There was a strange writer named Swinburne
Whose shaving technique made his chin burn.
When he once grew a beard
All his family jeered,
And he went off and shagged his new in-turn.

There was a young writer named Wells
Whose clothing was full of strange smells.
When writing his sci-fi
He kept his old tie dry
By shouting, ‘Get drier, or else!’

If you like that sort of thing, then check out W. H. Auden's 'Academic Graffiti'. Simultaneously cultured and silly, pointless and pleasing, they always make me chuckle. But then maybe that's just me...

One foot in the very grave...

2009-09-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

Something that has interested me for a long time is the presence of allusions to the works of Edgar Allan Poe in the popular BBC situation comedy series One Foot in the Grave. Not only are there episodes with the titles 'Descent into the Maelstrom' and 'The Pit and the Pendulum' - the titles, also, of two Poe stories - but other titles include 'We Have Put Her Living in the Tomb', a direct quotation from 'The Fall of the House of Usher' as well as a knowing nod to another of Poe's celebrated tales, 'The Premature Burial'. What Freud identified as the unheimlich, or 'uncanny', is seen frequently in David Renwick's dark suburban sitcom, and the potential for uncanny goings-on is made all the more piquant by the everyday, anytown, just-outside-of-London setting of the show.

Renwick, it goes without saying, must be a fan. In the episode titled 'Tales of Terror' - another case of allusive gesturing towards the American grandmaster of horror fiction, since the 1962 film adaptation of four of Poe's stories, Tales of Terror, is undoubtedly what the title adverts to - Nick Swainey, perennially cheery neighbour of the Meldrews (from the second series onwards), even announces (when Victor notices the Latex model of a severed head drying on the washing line) that his amateur dramatic society are putting on a stage production of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', Poe's Dupin story (largely credited with being the true genesis of the detective story).

Sorry, that was far too many brackets. Pathetically parenthetical, one might say. But perhaps the matter of Poe in One Foot in the Grave is just a side-issue, a topic worthy of a brief comment and one explanation for the dark material that often turns up in the sitcom. Perhaps it's more than that. It has been said that Poe pares down the essential apparatus of the Gothic horror novel - the subterranean space, the old castle, the cast of stock characters such as the heroine, brave hero, old bastard, etc. - to just a few homely items in, for instance, his short masterpiece 'The Tell-Tale Heart' (which, even if you haven't read it, some people are no doubt familiar with thanks to The Simpsons: another series, by the by, that has drawn on Poe's writing on more than one occasion). In that story, the subterranean chamber is just the space under the floorboards, the cast of characters is reduced to just two, and the Gothic castle has become just one room in which the 'action' takes place. In a way, Renwick's gestural allusions towards Poe form a natural progression from the Gothic novel to Poe's tales to this modern incarnation of the 'Gothic'. One Foot in the Grave is homely, suburban, familiar; and yet these strange, dark turns which the plot frequently takes (such as finding a dead cat in the freezer, which might remind Poe fans of his short, gruesome tale 'The Black Cat', in which a mutilated cat returns to haunt the man who brutally attacked it) might remind us, in a sort of third-hand way to be sure, but remind us nonetheless, of the Gothic tradition that lies somewhere behind it all. Perhaps not. Perhaps I'm talking absolute donkey droppings.

Take the two titles of episodes of the sitcom which (at least to my knowledge, but there may be more) share their titles with Poe stories. 'Descent into the Maelstrom' is not set somewhere on the Baltic sea, but instead refers to a waste disposal unit in a kitchen sink: you couldn't really get much more homely and modern and everyday. And 'The Pit and the Pendulum' alludes to a hole dug in the Meldrews' back garden (in which Victor ends up buried by an evolutionary throwback of a builder) and an old grandfather clock which comes into the Meldrews' possession after Margaret's mother dies. See my point? No? Then I probably AM talking donkey droppings. Sorry about that.

Be that as it may, one of the reasons I - and undoubtedly countless others - continue to find such joy in One Foot in the Grave (as well as Victor's stands against the injustices he encounters, o' course) is that this dark, sometimes positively black (I was going to write positively negative there, but thought better of it, thank God) streak that keeps cropping up makes it unlike any other suburban sitcom I can think of, at least pre-League of Gentlemen and Psychoville and what have you (and even then, The League of Gentlemen is hardly suburban, and its setting inside a small village is central to explaining the characters and activities found therein). Consider the denouement to 'Tales of Terror', that episode already alluded to, where Victor and Margaret discover that Mildred, one of their friends who is (like Mr Swainey) always cheerful, has hanged herself, and it turns out that she had been suffering from depression for many years. What is more grim and unexpected to find in a sitcom than that, and yet more natural and everyday? Isn't depression the commonest illness in Britain, or at least the most oft-treated by the medical profession? And, like all great entertainment, all great fiction, these dark moments lend a greater gravitas to the comedy (I mean 'comedy' in the sense of both 'humour' and 'comedy series').

Right, I think I've bored you for long enough. Thanks for reading. I could have mentioned Renwick's evident fondness for another great master of the short story, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as evinced by the title of the last episode of the first series, 'The Return of the Speckled Band' (anyone who knows their Sherlock Holmes will know that the 'speckled band' turns out to be a snake, as it does in One Foot). But I will leave it there...

What's so weird about it?

2009-09-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

Dear. Dear, oh dear, oh dear oh dear oh dear. I seem to be saying that a lot recently, which means either the world has become more sigh-inducing, or I am becoming more world-weary. It's probably the latter - I'm aware that I'm one of those who are undoubtedly 'old before their time'. As a toddler I was probably 'One of those children who seem born old', as I think Cyril Connolly once described his schoolchum Eric Arthur Blair. But sometimes I just feel like chucking my hands up in the air and saying, 'Oh, for Crumbs' sake!' And it's all because I made the decision to appear on the telly, innit.

When I appeared on University Challenge a couple of months ago, I had, of course, to introduce myself. This has been described as the most nerve-wracking part of the whole experience - and you have only to watch the programme, week upon week, to see the stumbling students and bungled introductions, as they fumble and bumble and other rhyming 'umble' words while trying to introduce themselves, 'so very 'umbly'. 'I'm Bob, I'm from Walton-on-the-Naze, and I'm studying - er - um - History.' (To take a fictional example.) When I heard I was going to appear on the programme, like all contestants, I had the minor but nonetheless necessary step to take of deciding what to say when the camera first panned across to me. How was I to summarise my studies, my PhD that works in the disciplines of literature, criticism, psychology, psychoanalysis, and history, in just a few words? I had to cut a few corners. So I announced that I was reading for 'a PhD in weird fiction.' Not a bad summary, but of course all introductions by PhD students appearing on the programme are perforce going to be a little short on detail. Because it's not like studying English, or History, or Advanced Woodwork, or Elementary Dressmaking, or any other degree subject; after all, if it were, what would be the point of doing it? A PhD is necessarily a narrowing down of a field of inquiry - in my case, English - and a detailed and thorough examination of a specific area of that field, in order (at least in theory) to throw out new ideas for future research. A number of people who wrote about Loughborough's appearance on University Challenge - the university's first such appearance in twenty-five years - evidently never learned that's what a PhD is. Christ, if that's journalism, then it's really gone to the - but no, I must resist the urge to generalise about a whole discipline just because of a few individuals.

So, what is 'a PhD in weird fiction'? Well, I hope I've amply defined what the term 'PhD' generally means (albeit in a very crude way), and you need go no further than Wikipedia for one fair definition of what 'weird fiction' is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_fiction. Or you could even be so kind and benevolently charitable as to buy my book, The Curtained Room, when it is finally published. But, please - next time Loughborough (and I) appear on the programme, do these things before turning your nose up at something you've not even bothered to understand.

Right, rant over. Bile settling. Time for a drink and a thumb through a few volumes of M. P. Shiel ...

Conference tomorrow

2009-06-26T09:44:00.001-07:00

My paper is finished on time, just - barely hours to spare. Not relishing the idea of getting up at 4.30 tomorrow morning to go and deliver it, mind. Lancaster seems such a long way away... I will no doubt be on here in the fulness of time to offer a full account of the proceedings of the day as soon as I've got back and reflected, chin in hand, upon all the performances and papers. I may have overdone the toilet material, and the swearing, but then it's an integral part of the whole.

If anybody would like to attend the conference and fancies a last-minute trip to Lancaster on the morrow, here is a link for the website containing all the details ye need to know:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/events/as_conference.html

A quick update

2009-06-22T06:44:00.001-07:00

Cheesus. Am looking forward to a time in the future when I'll be able to plonk myself down at the computer and offer you, my devoted acolytes, more meditations upon stuffanothing. At the moment, though, I fear I am recovering from last weekend's excitements (going to Granada in Manchester on Saturday for University Challenge filming, and meeting the wonderful Mr Paxman) while trying to write my conference paper for next weekend, when I shall be off to Lancaster to talk about Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot.

Off to the British Library this Wednesday though, so I'm hoping hoping that will prove productive and useful... Essays all marked now, too - a big fat pile of 45 of them. If I never read another word on the 'timelessness' of literature, I'll consider myself a very fortunate rabbit, and the happiest of bummy bunnies.

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

2009-06-19T04:58:00.001-07:00

Well this is it. Tomorrow we're off to Granada Studios, Manchester for our first (and I hope, not our last) intellectual skirmish against an as-yet unknown academic institution. Beginning to fret and doubt about being team captain: what if I say 'nipples' or 'gusset' or something worse? (If there is anything worse to say on national television than 'gusset'.)

University Challenge is, like fish and chips or moaning about the weather, undeniably a national institution. I am proud to be a part of it, and I'm determined to enjoy tomorrow's pleasant but demanding jaunt through the vasty field of general knowledge. Just as long as I don't say 'thighs'...

Language matters

2009-06-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

Language can be fascinating. Where do words come from? Where did ‘posh’ come from? Which writer came up with the word ‘muggle’? In which century did the word ‘input’ first get used? What’s the plural of ‘octopus’, or what is the most common vowel sound in the English language? What does DVD stand for, or RIP for that matter? Or what does the girls’ name Rose literally mean? Sometimes there are no definite answers; there are some corners and nooks of language that remain, and will perhaps forever remain, a mystery. Often language can surprise us.

For instance, did you have J. K. Rowling in your head for the ‘muggle’ question? Wrong. Or perhaps the twentieth century for the ‘input’ one? Or the nineteenth? Wrong again. Or ‘octopi’, or ‘e’ for the commonest vowel sound, or ‘Digital Versatile Disc’? Wrong, wrong, wrong. And so on, ad infinitum. Arse.

Many things about language are misunderstood, and one of the misunderstood things is that language is boring. Somehow uninteresting, merely functional, mundane, perfunctory, existing purely for us to communicate. Well, how boring. What sort of person genuinely believes this? Usually it’s the kind of people who also go around saying that sex and reproduction are the only reasons we were put on this earth, which is a little bit like saying that the only reason for wearing a watch is so that every now and then you can change its batteries, or that the sole reason for having a mobile phone is that every few days you get to charge it up and see that little battery symbol pop up on the display. Arse. Wank. Bollocks. Language is obviously the best communicative tool we have, and the chief reason we are able to create such complex things: buildings, committees, parliaments (crooked MPs with their arsepapery expenses notwithstanding), books, schools, universities, life-saving medicine and surgery, sewage systems, the telephone, the computer, the flush toilet, and so on. But with that function, that ability to talk to each other and to share complex bits of information, comes something else: the capacity to impress other people with our use of language, the right choice of the right words in the right order. (‘Where you been all my life, darling’ was probably a big hit when it was first used by our distant ancestors, as undoubtedly was ‘Do you come to this swamp often?’ and ‘Fancy a bowl of hippopotamus soup back at my cave?’) With language we can seduce, persuade, delight, injure, cause people to cry with tears of joy, laughter, pain, relief, grief, wonder…. You get the point I’m trying to make.

After all, the same is true of non-verbal language, too: we may be able to use our right arm to indicate, while cycling on a busy road, that we intend to turn right at the next junction, but we can also use the middle finger on the end of our right arm (or our left, for that matter) to tell someone in not so many words (or in fact no words at all) that it would be best if they were to quit our sight forthwith, as we have found something displeasing about their conduct and behaviour. Similarly, there’s all that stuff about women playing with their hair while on a date, or touching their knee, pointing their feet inward, licking their right thumb three times while simultaneously fingering their left breast … well, you get the idea with that. Body language is far from being merely something we use for communicative purposes, and there is a whole range of signs, gestures, and unconscious signals which we might deploy or give off without even being aware of it. (Sometimes they may be perfectly innocent, of course: a woman might keep touching her hair because she has itchy hair because she’s a tramp and only washes it once every fortnight, or she might be touching her knee because she’s got a paranoid fear that her knees will disappear any moment. You never know, is all I’m saying.)

All this is something I’ve been aware of for many years, and having taught language as a subject at University for the last couple of years, I have come to realise just how many people see language as merely something we use, like a stapler or a tin-opener or a teaspoon or a toothbrush. Students who come to University often view it thus. And who can blame them? Looking about it’s not difficult to see why you might come to the conclusion that language is merely something to be deployed like a cheese-grater or a kitchen knife. We use language as much as we ever have done before: text messages, email, online Messenger services, post-its…. And then there’s the human voice, the far-voice of the tele-phone; only now we can talk even more on the phone thanks to cheaper rates (owing to competitive phone companies), answer machines and voicemail services, and the like. And yet the language we use in such situations is often functional: I’m running late, where shall we meet, what time are you heading to the pub, and so on, et Peter cetera. I’d like to think there are other strange types out there who compose poems via text message, but I suspect we’re a minority. Then there are all the complaints from so-called purists that language is being ‘dumbed down’, that this new technology is destroying our beloved mother tongue, that children are illiterate and can only speak in txt, n that ant gr8, that sux cos l8r in life they wnt b able 2 right proper. Right? Perhaps these armchair moralisers have a point, in a way: what’s certainly true is that most of us are using language differently from how we used it fifteen or even ten years ago. But language is ever changing and that’s the point: that’s what makes it exciting. And, ironically, it is first and foremost the fact that language is functional that makes it exciting, because as the uses of language change, so language itself changes, warps, develops.

Think of a paintbrush, for instance. What do you see? Do you see a thick, broad-bristled, hefty item for dipping in a large pot of Dulux and plastering the wall in a bright, glossy shade of Apple White or Distressed Egg? Or do you see a thin, delicate instrument for dabbing at an easel with, preparatory to bringing the fine bristles of the brush into contact with the smooth, as yet unmarked canvas? In other words, do you see something functional, or something artistic? Language is a bit like that paintbrush. You can look at it either way, or perhaps both ways depending on the situation, whom you’re conversing with, and so on. That’s the beauty of it all. Twenty years ago, who had heard of a modem, or the world wide web? Well, nobody, because the world wide web had only just been invented, and even then, Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t yet invented that name for it. Or let’s go back a bit further: two hundred years ago, if you’d talked about the boredom you were feeling, people would’ve looked at you as though you’d just said sprenge my dongcock, or rump my blumberpuss. That word hadn’t been invented yet: it would not be until 1852, and Dickens’s novel Bleak House, that that word would finally join the language. The same is true of chortle, a word it is easy to take for granted; but in 1809 people wouldn’t have chortled, or done anything much except stare at you for some kind of weirdo, if you’d dropped that word into after-dinner conversation. It simply didn’t exist. It would not be until 1871 and the appearance of Lewis Carroll’s great nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’ that chortle would join the ranks of English words. (It’s a ‘portmanteau word’, or blend, of ‘chuckle’ and ‘snort’, by the by.) Similarly, if Gary Barlow of Take That fame, or Gary Glitter (perish the thought) showed up in 1909 they would be greeted with wry looks and bemused faces, for ‘Gary’ was nobody’s name a hundred years ago, and it would not be until a man named Frank Cooper adopted it as his showbiz sobriquet a few decades later that it would suddenly become a very popular boys’ name. Or think of a girls’ name we perhaps take for granted now: Wendy. In 1890s society you’d be looked upon as a weird sort if you had the name Wendy, and not just if you were a man. It wasn’t until J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan appeared, near the beginning of the following century, that that name would become so well known.

And then, of course, there’s a girls’ name with supposedly flowery connotations: Rose. A popular name for many years, it became even more common in the nineteenth century thanks to a vogue for feminine forenames with a horticultural flavour: Daisy, Violet, and so on. But Rose did not come from the flower; it would appear that’s a misunderstanding. The origin of the girls’ name Rose is the Germanic hros, which is interestingly enough the source of our modern word for a gramnivorous quadruped (to allude to Bitzer in Dickens’s Hard Times). Yes, hros gave us ‘horse’, but it also gave us ‘Rose’. So, next time you’re watching a rerun of Billie Piper in Doctor Who, don’t think red flowers and thorns, but long faces and big horsy willies.

The origins of words can be fascinating. Who could fail to love a language where the words for something you paint on, something that politicians do before every election, and something you smoke to get high, are all etymologically linked? (I refer, but of course, to canvas, canvassing, and cannabis. I could also have thrown hemp in there.) The Middle English poet Layamon was the first writer (at least on record) to use the word ‘muggle’, in the 1270s, long before J. K. Rowling used it in her Harry Potter series. Posh does not come from ‘Port Out Starboard Home’, as is often claimed, but possibly has its origins in a nineteenth-century fisherman whose manly physique was much admired by Edward Fitzgerald, the poet who translated the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The truth is, nobody knows for sure. It’s a mystery. The word ‘input’ was first used in the fourteenth century, when John Wyclif included it in his translation of the Bible, long before computers had come along.

To return flittingly to those other questions I so tantalisingly teased you with in that opening paragraph, the commonest vowel sound in the English language is the schwa, the name for the unvoiced vowel sound that abounds in English words (it is the first sound in the word ‘abound’, the first in ‘about’, and the first, third, and fourth syllables in the word ‘presentable’). It’s a sort of … uh sound. And yes, the plural of ‘octopus’ is ‘octopuses’, not ‘octopi’, because it’s of Greek rather than Latin origin (so fungus, cactus, locus, and other Latin words get the ‘i’ treatment, but ‘octopus’ doesn’t). DVD officially stands for nothing, according to the people who developed the technology, and RIP stands for requiescat in pace, a Latin phrase meaning ‘may he or she rest in peace’. A slight difference from ‘Rest in Peace’, but an important one, mefeels.

So why, if language is so vibrant, so fertile and so fascinating, do we so often find ourselves at a loss for words?

‘Talking in bed ought to be easiest,’ as Philip Larkin once wrote. ‘Lying together there goes back so far.’ ‘Lying’ is meant to hit us with its full ambiguous force, of course, old horse. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where words just aren’t enough, where they seem insufficient to express how you are feeling? Never? Well, lucky you, you smug, verbally dextrous and linguistically well endowed so-and-so. But not so for me—and I say this as one who can talk and talk and talk—because every now and then I’ll find myself feeling the inadequacy of language to represent fully what I feel. Words are not enough, as those great philosophers, Steps, once sang. Or maybe that’s arrogance on my part: what I probably really mean is my own inadequacy with language. But, as Blackadder reminds us, too often too late it is one thinks of what one should have said. But one fact remains true: language is the best tool we have for affecting those around us, and it’s a bloody good one.

Take poetry, for instance. Take these lines from Antony and Cleopatra:

It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
Ah, soldier!

These lines come right near the end of the play, just after Cleopatra has killed herself with the deadly asp. They are spoken by Charmian, Cleopatra’s friend and attendant, directly before she herself dies, having followed her queen’s example and applied the asp to herself. Soldiers have burst in, and, seeing the dead body of Cleopatra, one of them has asked Charmian, ‘Is this well done?’ Charmian’s response is what I just quoted above. There is nothing particularly striking about the words: as dying words in Shakespeare they’re hardly up there with Hamlet’s ‘the rest is silence’ or Othello’s ‘I kissed thee ere I killed thee’. And nor should they be, necessarily: Cleopatra, as title character, is given the best lines (her aposiopesis-tastic ‘What should I stay—’), with her attendant being given what seem to be rather perfunctory dying words: ‘It is well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings.’ The first four words merely echo the soldier’s question (‘Is this well done?’) while the rest make some platitudinous remark about Cleopatra’s royal ancestry. But it is those last two words, right before she dies, that are interesting: ‘Ah, soldier!’ As T. S. Eliot once remarked (he was a rather big fan of these lines himself), there is nothing particularly dramatic or poetic about those two words, but there is yet something in them, something that goes beyond what they seem to be saying. What does ‘Ah, soldier!’ mean, anyway? Is Charmian crying out in pain, because she can feel the poison going to work on her? Is she crying out at the hopelessness of love and the human spirit? Or is it merely a cry of resignation, because she is now ready to die? Who can say? But there is something within those two words, and they add far more to the scene than can ever be (sufficiently) put into words by yours truly. That was Shakespeare’s gift with language.

I s’pose I cannot leave off with this blog without spending a few moments contemplating fuck and other words. Swearing is indissolubly and inextricably a part of language. This fact is ingrained within the expressions we hear so many folk use: Mind your language, don’t use language like that, and so on, and so on. People who object to swearing in itself are an odd bunch. Usually they’re not entirely sure why they object to it. ‘Don’t use a word like that,’ our elders would say to us. ‘But why not? It’s only a part of language.’ ‘Because I don’t like it.’ ‘But why?’ ‘I just don’t.’ Well, glad that’s sorted then. Invariably these people have no grasp of the history or real connotation of the words they so inexplicably and arbitrarily object to. For instance, they’ll object to cunt, a word that was for many centuries a harmless term for the female pudenda, while condoning—indeed, often positively espousing—the word vagina, a word which literally means ‘sword sheath’, from the Latin. What makes this linguistic ignorance so much worse is that it is usually women who raise whiny objections to ‘the C-word’ for the female part. Well, that’s okay then. You don’t want us to use the word cunt because it’s offensive, but you’re happy to see your genitals as nothing more than the place for a man to stick his weapon. Feminism is alive and well!

The same is true of the word I used just then to try to refer politely to a woman’s ‘part’: the female pudenda. It comes from a Latin word meaning literally ‘shame’ or ‘shameful’, and is linked to the word ‘impudent’ (which means literally ‘without shame’). Okay, so you women should be ashamed of what you have between your legs (or don’t have: after all, a notorious slang term for the female genitals in Shakespeare’s day was ‘nothing’, which also says a lot about past attitudes to women and female sexuality). Good, good, doubleplusgood. Well done. I don’t mean this to sound like a directionless—or all too directed—rant about women in general, for my intentions could not be further from that. But there is a certain class of person—and it is, it would seem, usually a lady person—who objects to sexual swear words, in some misguided attempt to show ‘standards’ or ‘moral compasses’, or some other arsywank no-nonsense nonsense. Nuff said.

But that’s the point, I know: language changes, the force and power that words are charged with changes. Vagina has lost its sheathy connotations, just as cunt has somehow acquired some distasteful overtones. The same is true of terms for the act of sex: many people object to fuck, whereas few would object to swive, although in Chaucer’s day, and for many centuries thereafter, it was far more offensive to the average lady (and as I’ve already said, it is mostly women, I find, who voice their ‘offendedness’ at so-called ‘bad’ language). And I use the word ‘offensive’ with a quiet deliberateness: people are always ‘offended’ by swearing. Never hurt, or scared, or upset: no, no real feelings except being ‘offended’. Well—so fucking what?

Swearing can be a remarkable way of adding expression and flavour and force to what you’re saying. And I’m not just talking about ‘yobs’ and ‘hoodies’ and other mysterious figures on the streets of a Saturday night, where ‘fucking’ has to be inserted between every other pair of words. Take the legendary moment when Sid Vicious (late lamented guitarist with the Sex Pistols) was asked whether, when he made his music, he thought about the man in the street. Sid answered, ‘No. I’ve met the man in the street: he’s a cunt.’ Substitute any other word—a word less monosyllabic, less harsh in its consonants, less Anglo-Saxon—for ‘cunt’, and it wouldn’t be as witty an epigram as it is. ‘No. I’ve met the man in the street: he’s a damnable fellow.’ No, somehow that’s not going to have me quoting it endlessly in conversation as one of my favourite things I’ve ever heard. So, anyone who says swearing is a sign of a lack of vocabulary or verbal dexterity is, well, just a See You Next Tuesday (a synt, presumably: how come the people who invented that euphemistic substitute, presumably because they saw the expletive itself as a sign of poor linguistic skill, have such a poor grasp of spelling and acronyms themselves?).

So, language is never really merely functional. There is so much to the way we use it: intonation, pitch, speed, pauses, silence, loudness, quietness, and—lest we forget—the words themselves, the words we choose to use. One book which I would recommend to any amateur of all things linguistic, or to anyone who would like to learn many fascinating things about the English language, is Mario Pei’s The Story of Language. But there is also the wonderful book by Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue, which I would also heartily recommend. If you’re up for teaching yourself about the English language in a full-on academic way, no holds barred, then I have to recommend Rob Penhallurick’s Studying the English Language, which is written in a lively, engaging, and genuinely witty style, which puts my own poor attempts at humour here to shame.

Enjoy language. Go, let the words drip from your tongue like Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Mmm.… You know you want to.

More to follow...

2009-05-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

More articleage will follow. Never fear. I have been busy busy recently - busily busy will all manner and matter of businesses. University Challenge regionals now over, I await the verdict of the producers, which should follow shortly. In the meantime, I've been left with various papers, emails, and errands to sort in my capacity as team captain (or should that be cat-pain?). I have been posting semi-regular updates of the goings-on up on my Facebook, so anybody unlucky enough to be my friend on there may know the reasons for the slowness of new bloggery. But I'll get round to writing a longer and more in-depth essay on something in the near future, I promise you all, you happy, happy followers.

Till then, here's an enjoyable article for your readerly eye to be cast over:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/may/07/alan-bennett-birthday-writing

The name and nature of A. E. Housman

2009-05-16T06:18:00.000-07:00

Every true lover of poetry probably has one. Auden, Shakespeare, Larkin, Heaney, Duffy, Armitage: a poet whose work they studied at A-Level, or chanced upon in the school library one rainy afternoon as they hid there while their athletic, more aesthetically pleasing peers were busy sucking face under cover of the bike sheds or (more daringly) over the road outside the local offy. It might just have been one poem which did it, or (simpler still) that first, striking, opening line, that initial cascade of words that chime together as if to speak direct to us: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.’ ‘Love again: wanking a ten-past three’ (that’s Larkin again, but it’s one of my favourite opening lines of all time so I just had to throw it in). It could have been any poem, any line. It just caught you at the right time, in the right mood. But from that moment on, from the first time your eyes scanned that first line, or that final stanza, you were there. You’d found poetry.

For me, one man will forever take the laurels (or the blame) for being the one who utterly, unutterably and irrevocably, made me a convert to the ways of this strange thing called poetry. Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) is, for many, not an attractive figure, either as a poet or as a man: a strict bachelor (apart from several flings in Venice with comely young gondoliers, if rumours are to be believed), a repressed homosexual in just about every possible conceivable sense, scathing and acerbic towards those who he found deserving of his acid tongue, and (for some, most unacceptably of all, especially since Housman’s own verse was so popular among soldiers and is peppered with references to soldiering sorts) rather dismissive of the young men who fought and died in the First World War. That’s just the ‘man’ side of it: as a poet he was sparse, making Philip Larkin’s meagre output look positively prolific by comparison; narrow in the themes and moods he treats and addresses, most of the poems being about unhappy love affairs, love unreturned, or love curtailed by the death of a loved one. Love, very much, is a theme. But to an adolescent boy, particularly one who did hide out in the library while others were making out in the bike shed (or outside the offy, at any rate), Housman’s slim volume of Collected Poems spoke volumes. It’s been a while since I returned to the poems, and taking down my own battered and torn copy of the Collected Poems—256 pages in total, including Introduction and Indices—I had forgotten what poor shape it was in. The cover and first half-dozen pages pretty much just come away from the rest, and the sellotape that I once clumsily used to reattach them to the others has long since come unstuck. Inside, on the first ‘recto’ (ooh er) is the only inscription (to my knowledge) that I have ever been compelled to make in any of the myriad books I own: ‘Oliver Tearle, Feb. 2001’. For some reason, I thought and sought to memorialise the month and year that I acquired the poems, as if marking the entry of a loved one into my life. I suppose in many ways that’s precisely what I was doing.

But anyway, what about the poems themselves, I hear you cry? Cut the wanky reminiscing stuff, let’s hear some of this verse you loved to pore over so much as a spotty teenage twerp.

It was one poem, if I remember aright, that leapt off the page and hit me right between the eyes (as people like to say so much; I wish I could invent a better, more original metaphor than that, but right now I can’t, so that’ll have to do). Just four stanzas long, the average length for a Housman poem, it seemed to say everything it wanted to say and everything that might ever need to be said about love:

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
‘Good-bye’, said you, ‘forget me.’
‘I will, no fear’, said I.

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.

So simple, no dressing up or overly ornate language. It said what it meant, and (I now know) meant what it said. As one who was in a similar place at the time, I found the poem ‘spoke’ to me like that rarest of friends, one who says what you feel but says it in such a way as to skirt platitudes, to avoid truisms. (I can’t help recalling H. L. Mencken’s useful definition of a platitude: ‘A statement a) that everyone accepts to be true, and b) that is not true.’) Being a rather gauche, naïve seventeen year-old when I encountered this poem, I completely failed to spot the two most striking and important things concerning the poem: first, that it was written by a man to another man; and second, that the speaker was already dead. Two quite large, hefty oversights, I know, but it didn’t matter to me at the time. Something connected inside me with the poet’s words. Heck, I didn’t even know what ‘trefoiled’ meant (if I’m honest, I’m still not entirely sure.)

Later, I learned of Housman’s homosexuality and his unrequited love for a man he met at Oxford while studying Classics, an athlete named Moses Jackson, for whom AEH (as people like to refer to him) harboured a lifelong affection. It was a love so deep that, after Jackson’s death in the 1920s, Housman wrote no more poetry. When Housman learned of Jackson’s failing health, he went through a period of poetic creativity he hadn’t experienced in nearly thirty years, and hastily compiled and published his second volume of poems, which he wanted to publish before Jackson’s death, so that Jackson could read thme. The volume was titled, tellingly, Last Poems.

My passion for Housman developed during my years at university, and I even wrote the bulk of my dissertation for my English degree on his poetry. When I was nineteen or twenty I could have happily recited from memory all but about a dozen of the poems, something George Orwell claimed he could do as a young man (although, to be fair, when Orwell was a young man the posthumously published verse, collected in More Poems and Additional Poems, was yet to appear, so he had less to remember than I did). The more I read the more I realised that the criticism so often directed at AEH—that everything in his poetry was just there, everything was explicit and nothing implicit—wasn’t the whole truth. Sure, there was usually a clear message and the poetry was simple, but for me it sometimes seemed deceptively simple, with darker undercurrents even than were suggested on first reading:

Oh fair enough are sky and plain,
But I know fairer far:
Those are as beautiful again
That in the water are;

The pools and rivers wash so clean
The trees and clouds and air,
The like on earth was never seen,
And oh that I were there.

These are the thoughts I often think
As I stand gazing down
In act upon the cressy brink
To strip and dive and drown;

But in the golden-sanded brooks
And azure meres I spy
A silly lad that longs and looks
And wishes he were I.

I must say, I missed the sinister connotations of ‘drown’ the first time I read that. And the second, and the third, and probably for many readings after that. Then suddenly I saw that ‘drown’—so close to, and yet so far from, ‘down’—meant exactly what it said: drown. Not just to drench oneself in water, to escape from the world on dry land for a while, to swim; but to escape the world completely, by drowning oneself in the water. The speaker was a Narcissus figure, a male Ophelia, desiring death by water and an escape not just from the world, but from himself. The fact that it is only the sight of himself in reflection in the water that saves him seems to suggest far more than it actually says, compacting a multitude of possible readings in a very short space. (To muse upon just one, does the speaker think better of drowning himself? Or is he addressing us from the grave, as in the other poem? Only the ‘But’ suggests he walks away, but—and it’s a big but—the poem breaks off before we have a chance to discover what the lad decides on. No finality, no definitive message, no wrapping up and tying up of loose ends: it’s left to us and our own sensibilities.)

Or there is this stanza from a poem beginning ‘White in the moon the long road lies’:

Still hangs the hedge without a gust,
Still, still the shadows stay:
My feet upon the moonlit dust
Pursue the ceaseless way.

How should we read ‘Still’? And not just a ‘Still’ but three of the buggers. ‘Still hangs the hedge without a gust’: does ‘Still’ here mean ‘motionless’ or ‘yet’? It’s impossible to tell for sure, despite the ‘without a gust’ suggesting the hedge hangs ‘Still’ as in ‘motionless’. Despite that (or, if you like, still), the suggestion of ‘yet’ remains. And what about in the next line? Is good old AEH having a bit of fun with us there? ‘Still, still the shadows stay’: is ‘Still’ there repeated to emphasise this double meaning? That’s the thing though: we don’t know and are never going to know. Truth and certainty are just forever out of reach. After all, ‘moonlit dust’ is so close and yet so far from being ‘moon dust’, magic, wonder, fancy. It’s just dust on the path lit by the pale moon.

Yet despite this, there is something refreshingly simple and direct about Housman’s poetry, relatively speaking. There is none of the obscure political ranting of Auden, none of the abstruse references to Anglican prayer or mottoes for dead monks in Somerset villages that you encounter in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Housman will say how he feels, even while saying it’s better if he doesn’t say how he feels:

Ask me no more, for fear I should reply;
Others have held their tongues, and so can I;
Hundreds have died, and told no tale before:
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply –

How one was true and one was clean of stain
And one was braver than the heavens are high,
And one was fond of me: and all are slain.
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply.

There’s something special about the way that initial line comes back to us, first at the end of the first stanza and then again at the end of the poem as a whole.

Or there is this:

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

That long and cumbersome word, ‘Ensanguining’, works so well in describing a sunset because it immediately suggests the blood-red nature of a sunset while also ironically suggesting hope (‘sanguine’ as in optimistic about something). Ironic, of course, because of the word ‘hopeless’ that appears in that penultimate line.

The more you grow to like a poet’s words, often the more you want to know about them, about the person who wrote the words, why they wrote them. One paragraph of writing told me more about Housman’s personality than anything else outside of his poetry, but it was a paragraph written by someone else, namely T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia, no less):

There was my craving to be liked—so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another. The terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink from trying; besides, there was the standard; for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply, in the same language, after the same method, for the same reasons.

These words come from Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In the margin of his copy, next to these words, Housman wrote simply, ‘This is me.’

Much more could I write on the joys of AEH, but it would all amount to the same thing, more or less: sentimental reflections on why the poetry means so much to me. It’s one reason why I haven’t written professionally on his poetry since my dissertation, five years ago. Somehow it would feel like a betrayal, a transgression of something deeply private and personal. But to some of us he can mean far more than Shakespeare, and we carry him around wherever we go. Occasionally a line might just drop into our heads as we’re going about our daily business (I can’t watch the sun set without recalling the above lines, for instance), or we’ll be solitarily reflecting upon life and the world and suddenly feel an overwhelming desire to reach for the Collected Poems again and flick through it, opening the floodgates of memory. There really is a wonderful simplicity to Housman, my few niggles aside. It’s there for everyone to enjoy, if they have the inclination. As he put it himself so well:

They say my verse is sad: no wonder;
Its narrow measure spans
Tears of eternity, and sorrow,
Not mine, but man’s.

This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble
And I am not.

Fellows and fillies, lads and lasses, whether from Shropshire or otherwise: people all over the world can read Housman and find something they like. Go and try some. You might like it. And be sure to let me know what you think.

Your lilbits

2009-04-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

I am asking you for your chicken nuggets of wisdom. I'm currently trying to accrue as much random knowledge as I can - anything from the history of the Anglo-Saxon monarchies to how to roll up socks - in an effort to ensure that I don't make an arse of myself (well, not too big an arse anyway) when I represent Loughborough in this year's University Challenge competition. Last year, a number of people, among them my fellow tutors and researchers, as well as my students, helpfully sent me little bits of wisdom - 'factoids' or 'lilbits' as I've so tweely and disgustingly decided to call them. This year, I am in need of more of the same - sports statistics ('Interesting reading,' as Mr Strickland said in Back to the Future Part II), the person who holds the record for the world's stickiest bogey, that sort of stuff. If you have anything like this, any fact you are proud to harbour in your massive and beautiful brain, please do send it on over to me for my perusal and due digestion. In the meantime, I'm off to acquaint myself with the more intimate parts of Oscar Wilde (his oeuvre, that is: I speak metonymically, mais oui).

The persistence of memory

2009-04-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

There is a word which always makes me chuckle, although I understand I am almost certainly alone in the world in this. It doesn't reduce me to guffaws of boyish, screaming, apoplectic howls of laughter, but it does make me smile inwardly - the worst kind of murky, smirkish laugh, the silent one, which Dickens (understandably) hated so much. The word - brace yourself, and hold onto your hats and glasses - is 'lethologica'.

That's it. L-E-T-H-O-L-O-G-I-C-A. It's not exactly going to top any polls for funniest word in the entire world lexicon. Heck, it's not even up there with the likes of trousers or windsock, and certainly not fit to rub verbal shoulders with the likes of stopcock. But it makes me laugh. And it is for one very simple reason. Lethologica might be defined as 'a psychological disorder that inhabits an individual's ability to articulate his or her thoughts by temporarily forgetting key words, phrases or names in conversation' - indeed, it has been defined using those very words, on that ever-trusty electronic mine of information, Wikipedia. It is, in a very crude and general summary, the state of forgetting words. And yet the Oxford English Dictionary forgets to define it. In its online incarnation, there is no result found if you type in 'lethologica' as a search term (go ahead, try it right now if you have access to the online OED: I'll wait for you). The Oxford English Dictionary, it would seem, has forgetten about 'lethologica'.

Presumably, you're not at this minute falling off your chair in lexicographically induced hysterics. Nor was I when I first stumbled across this fact in my own empirical, serendipitous way. But I found it interesting, given the thousands and thousands of words that can be found defined in the pages - and the online pages - of the OED, that benchmark for English language information for over a hundred years. Memory, and forgetting, is fascinating. This little anecdote (which, in my waffly way turned out to be anything but 'little', and doubtless not very anecdotal either) is by way of a preamble to a discussion of memory, and the power of memory.

Specifically, I wanted to write about remembering, or perhaps even more accurately, memorising. That is, consciously remembering something, committing it to memory. It's a field that has interested me for several years now. How often have you heard someone say, 'Oh, I'll never remember that, my memory is terrible?' Or, 'I'm useless at remembering names.' Or (even more popular, and much in need of updating), 'I've a mind like a sieve.' Most probably you've uttered one or all of them yourself at some point - and don't think I'm coming the high and mighty, hoity-toity, lah-de-dah-de-lah-de-dah with you, for I can remember myself having uttered such platitudes on numerous occasions. But recently I've tried to cut back on saying such things, for a very simple but oft-overlooked reason: they're simply not true.

We do, in fact, all have first-class memories. Our minds are palimpsests on which we are constantly plastering new words, new images, new names and new faces, but what is beneath remains there. The problem is that, like the OED, most of us just don't make the effort to remember. Well, more fool us, for we are in possession of a vast, beautiful computer that is capable of making more connexions than there are known atoms in the universe. (That's quite a few, but I won't lengthen an already overlong blog by writing down the number here.) So, why don't we do this computer, our wonderful brain, the justice it deserves and use it? Why don't we remember more?

Well, most of us don't know how to. That's mainly the problem. We've all known someone, no doubt, who's said to us at some point, 'I have an almost photographic memory, you know.' Inevitably they'll have been some kind of horrible geek, some nerdy swat with a face plastered in acne whom we've tolerated more than we've actually liked, and whom we've listened to patiently before uttering, silently to ourselves, 'Yeah, and I'm Demis Roussos.' Most of the time these awful folk won't ever be called upon to prove their snapshot accuracy with recalling things, so they can go about making claims as to their extraordinary memories without worrying about being found out as Charlotte-Anns, which 99% of them will inevitably turn out to be. I must say I personally have a sour distaste for this sort of person, because they're merely stating (in exaggerated terms) what all of us can do, if we just make the effort: it's the intellectual equivalent of saying to someone, 'I can eat three Shredded Wheat in a row, while balancing a cat on my head.' Well, so can I, Lord Arsebook of Cheese, but I just never have. Anyone could do that, after all - with the possible exception of someone with a wheat intolerance or an allergy to cat fur (actually, now I think of it, that counts me out).

The basic point I am roundaboutly making is that we all have superb memories; we just haven't realised it yet. We all possess the ability to memorise things. You could, if you wanted, head to the shops tomorrow without a shopping list, and emerge from Morrisons with every single one of the items you needed - by carrying the list with you in your head. You could remember every single No. 1 single since UK charts began in 1952, or the capital city of every single country, island group, US state, Australian or Canadian territory, or other weird 'states' that seem to be popping into existence every few days in the South Pacific - indeed, I've done that one myself. And here's the good news: it won't take too much work.

Another anecdote, I fear, before I proceed. A couple of years ago, a man I know was in the pub with another man I know, and the first man said to the second, 'Write down twenty random words. Anything you like, from a colour to an object to someone's name to an abstract idea.' The second man did it, calling out twenty words which were duly written down on a sheet of paper. The first man then announced to the second, 'Time me for two minutes. After two minutes have elapsed, I'll be able to tell you every single one of those twenty words you just came out with. And not just that, I'll be able to tell you them in order.' (He probably didn't talk quite like that, but there you go.) The second man agreed and duly began timing his friend, who pored over the list for a moment. After forty seconds, he threw the sheet of paper across the table and said, 'I've got them. I've memorised them all.' The second man was, understandably, a little incredulous. How could his friend have possibly memorised twenty words which he'd only just heard, in forty seconds, and even more remarkably, how could he have memorised them in order? Well, the first man rose to the challenge, and I'm happy to say he managed to recall every single one of the twenty words, and in order too. And I should know, because I, smartarse that I am, was the man I have just described. My friend was rather impressed and has mentioned that event to me and several other people quite a few times since. He remembered my remembering, if you like (sorry, that was trying to be too clever by arf).

How did I do it? Of course, some of you may already know exactly how I did it, in which case, do feel free to ignore this and I apologise for having rambled on for so long. But in fact the technique was very simple. It didn't require a great deal of practice to master, and really only requires a half-decent imagination, which I was lucky enough already to have been in possession of. The technique is, in fact, so breathtakingly simple that I fear that mentioning it here will be a bit of an anti-climax, but nevertheless, here goes nothing:

Imagine you're given a list that begins something like this:

Tomato
Typewriter
Love

And so on, you get the idea. Twenty random words really can be anything, but those three will suffice as being, in my experience of bothering friends and acquaintances with this particular party trick, typical enough. How do you remember those first three words? Well, start by getting an image of the first word in your head. That shouldn't be too difficult: we all know what a tomato is, what it looks like and so on. So get that tomato fixed in your mind, but make it bigger and bolder and brighter than any tomato you've ever seen before. In short, make it memorable. Now, for the work (thankfully not too much): the next task is to link tomato to typewriter. How on earth could you do such a thing? Surely it can't be performed by the human brain?! Well, all you really need is a vivid and unusual image that combines those two things, tomatoes and typewriters, in lovely cartoonish unison. How about this? Your big tomato (now with arms and legs) sits at a desk and taps away at an old, rusty typewriter. No? Can't get that? Well then, try this: a typewriter where each of the keys is a squidgy tomato, and every time you press a key, that horrid gunk you get in those small fiddly tomatoes shoots up and squirts you in the eye with its seed-riddled disgustingness. (It really depends on your own feeling: getting your emotions involved is always a good idea, since we all know that it's far easier to remember something if it has some emotional impact on us.)

Your next task is the hardest of all thus far: you now have tomato and typewriter nicely linked in your mind, but what about typewriter and the next word, love? How the hell do you picture 'love'? As anyone devoted or bored enough will know from a previous blog of mine, I personally consider it hard enough to define love without trying to picture the damn thing. Well, let's stick with the clichaic, then: a big red heart? The sort you see on (pah!) Valentine's Day cards or in dodgy women's flats decked out on their sofas by way of large, novelty cushions. That's okay, isn't it? Love = a big red heart. Now, to link your typewriter to this image. But how? Well, by now you'll have sufficiently got the hang of this, I trust, to be able to come up with something yourself. My own suggestion would be your typewriter being thrown at a huge billboard image of the heart (which is no doubt up there to promote some garish, tacky Valentine's Day promotion in mid-December), and passing right through the image, tearing a huge hole through the heart. (To borrow from the wonderful Philip Larkin, I can't help adding, 'Now Fight Cancer is there.') So now you have the first three words on the list all nicely memorised, and ready to be recalled: say them with me now, tomato, typewriter, Geoffrey. Oh dear, I've gone wrong somewhere. But you get the idea with that.

My advice would be to try it. Grab a pen and a blank sheet of paper and go and har'ass (never harass') a brother or sister, a mother or aunt (do people even have aunts any more?), a friend or a lover, and badger them until they agree to give you twenty random words. Then see how long it takes you to memorise them all, in order. You might be pleasantly surprised. And the lovely news is, they'll almost certainly be astounded.

One final, useful application of this technique is, as I hinted earlier, that I've never needed to take a shopping list with me to the supermarket. Most of the time I don't even write a list. I just look around the flat and see what I'm running out of, and fix an image of each product in my head: milk, bread, apples, Kit Kat Chunkies, bananas, orange juice, pasta, Kit Kat Chunkies, whisky, squash, and did I mention Kit Kat Chunkies? I can't remember now.

I use another technique for 'writing' my shopping list, but I'm aware that I've already waffled on for far too long and it's time for me to make like a tree and get out of here, to quote the great Biff Tannen. But my advice to anyone reading this (you poor reader, you poor, poor reader) is to seek out the works of those better qualified and better at explaining things than I am, if you're interested in enhancing your memory and learning how to remember. A couple of very strong recommendations from my own bookshelf are Harry Lorayne's Page-a-Minute Memory Book and Dominic O'Brien's Learn to Remember.

Most importantly of all, have fun with this! And I wish you pleasant dreams about typewriter-using tomatoes for your sleepybyes tonight.

Well, I'm back, he said

2009-04-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

After a short while away from this blog, and indeed from my adopted hometown of Loughborough, I'm now back and have about a million things to do - but then don't we all, Shitey McPherson?

I'm currently involved in a project that will lead to the co-editing of a book of writings by the great and the good of the literary and critical world, and this is something that excites me even if I am in terra (read: terror) incognita, having never undertaken this sort of thing before. The conference which will lead to the book promises to be a thoroughly interesting and unusual day, part conventional academic fare and part ... anything but. (At least that's what I'm hoping for.) It's all about new ways of viewing the role of the literary critic, but of course it also has relevance for anyone interested in innovative writing, unconventional literature, and mad ideas.

If you're interested in attending the conference, details can be found on the following webbe-syte:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/events/as_conference.html

University Challenge - an update

2009-04-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

Well, it happened again, didn't it? I and three unfortunate others have been elected to represent Loughborough University on the small screen. Actually, it's quite an exciting experience, albeit one that I have enjoyed before, namely last year. Let's hope we can go one further than Birmingham, which is where we sadly disbarked from the competition bus last year, and that we actually get a chance to plaster our smug, simpering mugs all over the screens of England this year.

As team captain, I have the unenviable task of making sure we all get to where we're supposed to be getting to, and that we all know what we're supposed to do once we're there. It's a brave new world for me, who have been on the telly before but nothing quite so exhilarating as this. So, Loughborough friends and well-wishers, let us join our collective hands and cross our communal fingers, and hope for good things for Loughborough this year.

O tell me the truth about love

2009-04-04T03:37:00.000-07:00

'In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love', Tennyson wrote. Well, spring has sprung, and I thought I might turn my thoughts (and my newly resurrected blog) to a consideration of that most elusive of all beasts.

Sorry, I'm aware that was a blatant, flagrant, arse-in-your-face pompous way to begin a blog post. I do apologise.

So, what is love, as Howard Jones and Haddaway once asked? (That's better: quoting half-forgotten 80s pop stars with funny hair is somewhat less pretentious.) Well, I dunno. But it's something we probably all ask ourselves at some point in our existence, much as we wonder why coffee always smells nicer when it's being made for someone else, or why when you're walking towards someone on a narrow pavement, your paths always have to cross at the precise moment where there's a great big sodding lamppost. These are perhaps no less crucial epistemological questions, but the love one always tends to be what people are most interested in. All we can do, I suppose, is draw on our own sorry experiences and try to translate them into clear, coherent thoughts. (All this is by way of a proviso, in case what follows sounds like wanky drivel written by an idiot, signifying nothing.)

So, how can I sketch out what love is, what it 'does', what it feels like and what its far-reaching consequences are? Should I instead reach for the coffee question? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I should just make it clear, for anyone in any doubt (and this is one of the problems of 'love', with its polyvalent, multi-faceted semantic connotations - sorry, I'm lapsing into wankspeak again), that when I talk about 'love' here, I mean love for another - romantic love, sexual love, that sort of thing. Not love of chocolate or the surface of a nice vinyl record or the aroma and taste of a good single malt Scotch whisky. But Love. The big one. And love for a person - one who is your god or goddess on earth, your fallen angel (sorry, lapsing into pretentious bottom waffle again, forgive me), but at any rate your Alpha and Omega, your Genesis and Revelations, your aardvark and zygote. The beginning and end of who you are, or at least who you've ended up as.

Some scientists, particularly those with an evolutionist bent, see love as a way of ensuring the survival of very young children: nature wants us to propagate and sow our seed, to go forth and multiply and all that, but nature also wants to ensure we have the conditions whereby the children we beget can be protected from the harsh ravagings of the lion-riddled savannah, or Loughborough Town Centre on a Saturday night. Love is one way of ensuring men and women stay together long enough for their little poppets to grow up into big, self-reliant poppets, rather than ending up as some cheetah's dindins. (Sorry, I'm crudely summarising the basic idea there.) That's one theory, and it sounds plausible, on paper. But what if we don't believe that, what if we believe there is something within our rational minds that is to answer for love, that is the cause of it all? Is love, after all, rational?

What happens? What is the force that pulls, the compulsion that drives, where does that feeling come from? Why does coffee always smell so much nicer when you're not the one bloody drinking it?

Given these (at least for me) unanswerable questions, it's perhaps easier to talk about what happens after the action of falling, after love's gravity has pulled you down into the deep heart's core, and you're gone, lost, found, arrived ... in LOVE.

We've all been there, undoubtedly. Maybe at around the age of fifteen or sixteen, when you just see that special someone who is, as far as you're concerned, the most important person ever to have lightly skipped across the face of the earth. Your Alpha and Omega. Your aardvark and zygote.

We fall in love. We become depressed, we don’t know where to turn or whom to turn to. We’re lost - lost to the world, but strangely never less lost to ourselves. We come sharply into focus to ourselves for the first time, and we start to get a measure of the sort of person we really are. Miserable? Yes. Tediously stuck in a mindset we cannot escape? Helpless, hopeless, weak? Perhaps. Drearily and slowly boring our friends to death with talk of how we feel, how there's this one person, right, who is like, just, wow, so amazing, and the most beautiful person ever to have existed, yeah? In some cases. But it’s us, everything that goes to make us, our ‘heart of hearts’, to borrow Hamlet’s words. Or what was it his near-contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, that great good chap, said? ‘From all the world, her heart is then his room, / Where well he knows, no man to him can come.’ But it’s us: it’s undeniably us. We’re truly miserable, yes; but at least we know we are (miserably) true.

And, in time, we turn all our depression, all our sleepless nights and our pointless imaginings, into inspiration, and into the desire to inspire others. We devote our time and in some rare cases our lives to creating great and moving works of poetry, or paintings, or feats of architecture, or pieces of music that will be sung and played long after we’ve become powdered, chalky dust in a dark hole somewhere. And we do all this for one reason: in the hope that the person we so hopelessly love will hear a strain of our music, or read the words they caused us to write, or see the building that our love built. And then, then they will see us as we saw ourselves and as we saw them, and they will revise their opinion and love us back. But here’s the thing: not one single word we write, not one note of music we compose, will ever change a thing. That person we love will never love us back, and a few nice poems aren’t going to change that. And we know that deep down. But still we do it, because the alternative is to live out a life uncoloured by any greatness. And greatness, while a poor second to love, is the only second there is.

Undoubtedly you disagree with some or all of that. That's the nature of love: unpindownable to any one facet or concise definition. Heck, it's probably made more than one lexicographer go off his nut. How do you define 'love'?

All of which makes me feel that Eliot somehow had it right when he wrote what he wrote in 'Little Gidding':

Who then devised this torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wave
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

Welcome, weary traveller...

2009-04-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

Welcome, whoever, wherever, and however you may be. Thanks for taking the time and trouble (or having merely the serendipitous good fortune) to stumble upon this as yet arid, cracked landscape of rants, reviews, and reminiscences.

Currently I'm battling with insomnia (onset and terminal, according to the Good Book Wikipedia), writer's block, reader's block, essay-marking business, and other fascinating things which are too mind-blowingly interesting to write here. So I will say, for now, happy travelling, and I'll try to write something more substantial and juicy later on.

Till then, bold wanderer, I bid you farewell.

O