Books Do Furnish A Room

That most tremendous tale of all

A very Happy Christmas to all!  I have had this poem by Betjeman before, I think, but do I care?  It is quite lovely, and perfect for the day, believer or not.  You have more important things to do than to read my blog, so I will say only that this is John Betjeman's On Christmas:

And is it true? And is it true?

The most tremendous tale of all.

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was Man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Gladwell two

More examples from the Gladwell essays, What the Dog Saw, to illustrate his range and the interest of his arguments - and in this post and the last, I'm only mentioning perhaps a third of the stimulating topics in this book. 

The first three essays are brilliant social observations of a changing America.  In The Pitchman, Gladwell traces the rise and decline of the door to door salesman, and his transformation into the salesman on the shopping channels – a decent product, brilliantly sold, making middle America envious then happy and a few men very rich.  The two different approaches to marketing women’s hair dye in True Colors in a world in which hair colour meant “Tart!”,  then gradually came to be a right – “because you’re worth it”.  And finally, a brilliant piece of writing in The Ketchup Conundrum in which Gladwell asks why there are a thousand mustards (and tells you how this happened) and only one ketchup, in spite of massive efforts to invent and sell more.  You may not think you’re interested in any of these issues, but you are!

On a more serious and significant note, three essays – Connecting the Dots, The Picture Problem, and Blowup – deal with well known problems in information analysis and military intelligence, with application to everything we do and don’t do, including going to war, avoiding terrosrist attack, and diagnosing breast cancer. We see what we are looking for, so the US Air Force in the first Iraq war knew, by direct observation, that it had destroyed 400 mobile missile launchers; in fact, it was wrong about the number – it had destroyed none at all!  And after the event, the pattern that led to disaster is obvious, so why didn’t we prevent the Challenger disaster, see Pearl Harbour coming, and avoid the destruction of the Twin Towers?  Because what are now the salient facts were then hidden in hundreds or thousands of very similar, sometimes identical facts, with no convenient labels saying “this one is true”, “this is not a false alarm”.  So, the men who decided to go ahead with the Challenger launch in spite of contractors’ advice to the contrary had some good reasons - they hadn’t objected to cold launches before, and O ring damage had not been associated with the cold before; the Israelis taken by surprise when Egypt and Syria invaded in 1973 had a warning, but they’d had many other warnings, by the same man, which had proved false; the US Navy had investigated several warnings of Japanese submarines off Pearl Harbour in the week prior to the infamous attack, and found nothing; and the FBI and the CIA didn’t heed the alleged telltale warning about the Twin Towers, perhaps because it was hidden in a morass of 68,000 other leads.

And finally, in Dangerous Minds, Gladwell destroys criminal profiling.  He starts with several entertaining pages in which he builds up the myth, quoting the famous “he’ll be wearing a double breasted suit buttoned.  And he was” story from the doyen of American profilers, James Brussel, and dealing with the techniques of the personality profilers.  Then he picks up research from Liverpool academics and the UK government, which demonstrates that personality profiling helped in just 2.7% of cases, and that under experimental conditions that police thought that - the profiling forecasts were amply substantiated by two utterly different and contradictory criminals.  He then exposes the techniques which make this hoax possible – exactly those used in astrological forecasts – and concludes that profiling “is not a triumph of forensic analysis.  It’s a party trick.”

In this post and the previous one, I have only touched on a few of the striking issues Malcolm Gladwell deals with in a single book.  I've not mentioned Enron, the inevitability of disaster (Taleb and his black swans), the history of the Pill, or the problems of identifying talent in a brief interview.  There’s much more – and there are other books.  He is well worth a read – intelligent, sceptical, enlightening, and beautifully written to at once amuse and educate.

 

More of Paddington's essential reading

 My good friend Paddington bear has been recommending books about Peru, and here are a couple more, this time by Peruvians. 

Maria Vargos Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero?  Vargos Llosa is a prolific writer in several genres, and I have read very little -  though I do remember a few years ago not really enjoying Captain Pantoja and the Special Service very much.  So, drawing a bow at a venture, I took this slim novel cum murder investigation out of the library.  It’s quite a raw affair, starting with a young boy, in the Peruvian Air Force, being murdered and indeed tortured in a pretty brutal way, and abandoned in the country in a scene reminiscent of Calvary.  The local police are put off investigating by the local Air Force big wigs, but there are powerful, more popular forces at work.  This may be a murder story, but it’s a political novel as well, and the local police are successful – though hardly politically correct in any sense – in finding both the guilty parties and the underlying causes.  Their reward is not to be believed by the general populace, which scents corruption in high places, and to be posted to remote and unattractive stations by their superiors.  Along the way, there is some pretty cutting satire on the state of politics and the economy in Peru at the time, and some fine, if fairly robust, writing about social relationships and the breakdown of many normal human relationships under extreme stress.

Vargoa Llosa also wrote a great deal of fine non-fiction, mainly criticism and philosophical, literary or political essays; some of the best are gathered together in Touchstones.  Displaying the erudition, Europhilia and breadth of many South Americans - Borges par excellence - he writes on Balzac, Woolf, Conrad, Grass, Mann with equal ease, as well as varied essays on art and on politics and culture, especially in South America.  An impressive man and writer.

I wanted to read some Cesar Vallejo, but found it a bit hard to get a small, accessible collection.  I ended up with the depressingly entitled Complete Posthumous Poetry (an ambiguous title), and I found this hard.  A lot of it seems very dense in this translation, and occasionally jejune:

Until a day without two, / wife Tomb, / my ultimate iron makes the sound / of a sleeping viper, / father body mine....!

What on earth is that about?

Finally, I looked at Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, subtitled Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.  These are ramblings, reflections, not quite a sustained journal, of his filming in 1979.  Some of the descriptions are very evocative, and he has a rare turn for an anecdote, and the language - this is translated from the German by Krishna Winston - is often dreamlike and lyrical.  But I found it a book to browse in, not to read - to get lost in, rather than navigate confidently through.  But if you're interested in the film, I should think it very intriguing.

In addition, of course, I have maps, guides, a specialist and very heavy bird book, and a more general wildlife book.  A whole library, too, on my new Kindle!  More from Peru, and on my Peruvian reading, a little later.

Flowers in their hair

R S Thomas - second of my "Thomas brothers" - is quoted on the Poetry Archive website (a fine source of audio recording of poets) as saying:

"My chief aim is to make a poem.  You make it for yourself firstly, and then if other people want to join in, then there we are."

I think that's really interesting, hinting at the loneliness and isolation of the poem, if not of the poet; other people are necessary for the poem to have a complete existence, but are not the point during the agony or worry of creation.  And there is plenty of agony and loneliness in the creation described here, in R S Thomas' Forest Dwellers:

 

Men who have hardly uncurled

from their posture in the

womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not

in prayer, but in contemplation

of the earth they came from,

that suckled them on the brown

milk that builds bone not brain.

Who called them forth to walk

in the green light, their thoughts

on darkness? Their women,

who are not Madonnas, have babes

at the breast with the wise,

time-ridden faces of the Christ

child in a painting by a Florentine

master. The warriors prepare poison

with love’s care for the Sebastians

of their arrows. They have no

God, but follow the contradictions

of a ritual that says

life must die that life

may go on. They wear flowers in their hair.

Small Wars and other inconveniences

Christina Lamb is a fine travel and political journalist, whose books on Afghanistan (The Sewing Circles of Herat) and Zambia (Africa House) I enjoyed thoroughly.  The first is more a product of her journalism, the latter – an entrancing account of one family’s obsession with a house they had built in Africa as the continent moved from colonialism to truculent independence – is more a stand alone project, a piece of brilliantly exploited serendipity.

Small Wars Permitting is more of an anthology, and autobiography.  It follows Christina’s journey through journalism of a remarkable sort – foreign affairs at the sharp end.  It is not clear why she feels the need to put herself in danger so often, and over so long a period: she must surely have proved herself, and got enough good stories, enough by now, that she could ease off?  But no – when I first met her, she was on her way to Kandahar and then Helmand, in 2006, where she was ambushed by Taliban insurgents and in great danger for many hours – an event brilliantly recounted here – some twenty years after her first exploit, still going fast and furious, still looking for and getting great stories all around the world.

This is a great little book if you're interested in recent political history, journalism, the conflicts that have plagued the globe for the past thrity years - or if you just like a good read, a lively piece of autobiography.  Don't feel you need to read it through, though you could, but treat it like a series of pieces of extended journalism - which is where, of course, it all started.

Stewed oxtail

In the Dorset cottage recently, and without an Aga (yes, jokes about Aga sagas have been made), I decided to try the woodburning stove as a cooker, and stewed a dish of oxtail.  It worked very well, and the result was delicious - but temperature control is either very slow indeed or non-existent for all practical purposes.  Here is the oxtail bubbling happily away.  The marrow gives the sauce a wonderful richness and consistency, but do give it at least three hours, preferably more.

 

Wider yet - round London again: 1 - Erith to Bexley

A year or so ago, I walked the Capital Ring around London, a kind of inner circle of 78 miles around the city, which I walked in 11 episodes, all recorded on this blog, ending at Richmond in

December 2007.  Two years later, a friend and I are taking on a bigger challenge - the 150 mile London Loop, which we plan to walk regularly, just doing a walk a month.  So the whole thing should take us until about May, June or July 2011! This is the walkers' M25, compared to the Ring, which is the North and South Circular - references which will be obscure to all but Londoners, but the point is that this walk is still within the London boundary, but very much on the outskirts, surprisingly green, very historical, and full of old towns and villages now swallowed by the metropolis, which has surrounded them but not succeeded in stifling their beauty and individuality.

  
 Roy and I started the London Loop at Erith in early December, on the south bank of the Thames at the eastern edge of the modern city, and started off clockwise, heading south and a little east to Bexley for our first outing, a mere 8.5 miles.  It was an unusual day, both very wild and very urban, on the wild edge of marsh and river, and on the edge, too, of even wilder recycling and waste industry on the outermost darkness of the City.  Once embarked on the Thames path, heading east, we gradually came close and closer to the graceful Queen Elizabeth II bridge at Dartford, turning inland along the Darent river just before reaching it.  The Darent is a deep and narrow creek, once the scene of substantial barge traffic, though we walked along at low tide, expanses of glistening mud between reeds and rough grasslands.  Lots of birds around – waders – dunlin, lapwings on the Thames – duck, swan, geese, kestrel and heron on the marsh, and a flock of vivid stonechat along the hedges of the noisiest of breaker’s yards.

 

We soon came to the confluence of the Darent and the Cray, and followed the smaller stream towards Crayford.  This was first reedy, then extremely smelly past a whole series of recycling yards, before we emerged in a rather sad suburbia, following a disconsolate Cray along the neglected backs of terraced houses.  We popped out unexpectedly into a small shopping centre in Crayford round a timid garden, and had an excellent and very cheap lunch at the cafe in the square, where the cheerful waiter told two 50 year old (and a little bit more) that it was “Good on you, lads!” which we found heartening on a number of counts.

Through Crayford on our only stretch of major road, before turning off to rejoin the Cray across playing fields – passing a very modern garage which preserved two columns from the canopy of, I guess, a 1930s cinema – the river now looking more relaxed and less neglected.  We detoured briefly and magically to look at Hall Place, two halves conjoined in an harmonious whole, close to major roads and the outer suburbs, but with a quiet all of its own.  There is a stone gothic house of the 1540s, with a brick seventeenth century wing, of equal size, attached.   The ensemble is pleasing, with pleasant courtyards, formal gardens and wilder ones, and the sense of time blessing what the purist planner or architect might censor.  Roy, still finishing his pamphlet on Tudor brickwork patterns of South London, was particularly delighted.  

Back to the river, skirted the grounds of Hall Place, along by Churchfield Wood, empty and a bit grey by now as the early sun had left us, into Old Bexley, with one or two fine houses, an idiosyncratic church, St Mary’s, with an octagonal cap on its otherwise conventional four-sided spire, and a row of pleasant almshouses.  Just at this point, the transition from the morning’s blazing sunshine was completed by the arrival of heavy rain, just as we caught a train home after nine interesting but not always picturesque miles.

Something to be contented with

A run of poems by Thomas now - Edward this week, RS next, and Dylan after Christmas.  This is a rural poem in form, but the real subject is the author's desire to have something in his life to value and make him content.  It might be a garden - or love - but the garden serves as image of contentment.  I love - and wish it were true - the inversion that suggests the farmer uses what the curlew does not need.  The picture is of a curlew, and is by Jill Pakenham of the British Trust for Ornithology, and this is Edward Thomas' For These:

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea,
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:

A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash-trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:

A garden I need never go beyond,
Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond:

For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
And also that something may be sent
To be contented with, I ask of fate.

First book of words

I recently received version 2 of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) in CD form – I have the last printed edition, from 1989, and very wonderful it is too.  But the CD version allows the mighty OED to be much more up to date, and it allows you to search and interrogate it intelligently.  This is the world’s greatest dictionary, in any language, and it was originally the work of a small team, led by one man, the erudite and dedicated Murray.  The history of the dictionary, and of one of its more unusual contributors, are well worth reading – Elisabeth Murray's biography of her grandfather, Caught In The Web of Words, and Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne.

This then is not a first book of words “apple, bun, cake”, but the first book of words, a wordbook non-pareil.  Come and explore – at the risk of getting lost, of temporary insanity, of being word drunk.

·  The OED contains 5,507 quotations from the year of my birth;

·  .. but only two of the entries were for words with a Gujarati etymology;

·  3,143 entries quote a Portuguese etymology, including anchovy and arrack, as well as zamorin and zerumbet;

·  .. of which only 14 are later than 1900; over 1100 are from the C14th and C15th; and the same number from the C16th and C17th;

·  lindsayite is a word! It is an altered version of anorthite, but I expect you knew that;

·  cornflower contains no surprising definitions, but one word – nitid – which is new to me; it means bright, shining, glossy;

·  dictionary was first used in English in 1552, but the Latin dictionarius dates back to c 1225;

·  the OED contains 426 entries quoting a Gaelic source in their etymologies, from abthain to wood; 

·  there are 18 entries where the earliest reference is 2000 or later, including podcast, hacky-sack, and bling;

·  a word – the thing that is defined - is a lemma.

There you are; I could go on, and probably will in some future time when I have mastered the search function more fully.  But in the meantime, hours and days of time wasted awaits!  What a treasure trove for a bookworm, though the CD is not so enticing for the bibliophilic maggots as the twenty printed volumes.  If you are interested in dictionaries, look here.

By the way, the picture shows my OED “back-to-front”, with the lower volumes on the right, rising to the left.  This is the old, true way; it accepts that the volumes are not different books, but parts of a single massive book.  So they are on the shelf as if they were one book, so the last page, for example, of volume V is next to the first of volume VI – follis is next to follow - a sensible and orderly dispensation.

Read, then, if you think you're hard enough

My eye recently caught George Steiner’s On Difficulty and other essays on the shelf recently, and I have had it out to remind myself of some of his ideas.  He is a wonderfully stimulating essayist and speaker but I have not picked up the Steiner at all readily, mainly because he is – in an irony he would both have appreciated and protested about – very “difficult”.

We often say that modern music, modern poetry, modern painting is “difficult”, and it’s not always easy to grasp what we mean.  Often, we may mean no more than that they make us think, rather than taking us on an automatic, semi-anaesthetised journey.  Nick Jenkins’ father famously objected to books which made him think, a precept from which his son, and his son’s creator, can have taken little comfort.  Sometimes, we mean that they touch on complex questions which have no clear answers, and are ambiguous or incomplete – or that we do not like facing certain morally or judicially ambiguous challenges.  Sometimes, we mean that we do not have the intellectual equipment to understand – that we are not clever enough, or more likely, that we do not speak the language well enough, or cannot understand all the author’s references – a common concern for the young reader, or for any modern reader, of books which demand a working knowledge of a certain (admittedly restricted) canon of western thought and literature, including most obviously the Bible, Shakespeare and the classical authors.

But some difficulty is temperamental: we find it difficult to accept that a poem or a painting operates abstractly, merely because we are used to them acting literally and descriptively.  We do not complain that music or architecture or textile design or a piece of ceramic is abstract, that there is no narrative or no representation of the world.  So why cannot a painting or a poem be like that too?

Steiner distinguishes several types of difficulty, some flowing from the world, some from the author, and some from the reader.  I was particularly interested in his suggestion that difficulty may arise because the writer is forging a new language, or forcing words to mean things they have not meant before.  I think this is frequent in modern authors, but if they are successful, it may become easier to later audiences.  Contrariwise, some concepts which are easy to one generation may be hard for another: can we really understand the chivalric code of love, for example, or the exaggerated sense of personal honour of the insult and the duel?

Eliot says somewhere that in the modern age, all poetry must be difficult.  This is clearly not true at one level -  easy poetry can still be written – but I think he meant that poetry ought to be tackling the hardest, most difficult questions, and that (as he thought) language and culture were being debased and near collapse: so the challenge is to capture ever more demanding ideas with language the writer finds increasingly inadequate.  He captured this, in his own writing, about his own writing, in East Coker:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

This is a long way from Steiner. But I do recommend the essays, especially On Difficulty itself, The Distribution of Discourse, and After the Book?  This last is particularly fascinating: written in 1972, it is worried not about the rise of digital media, as we would expect the same title to be now, but about a decline in the social and intellectual status of the book.  But he is always realistic:

... it is worth stressing that the book has been a significant phenomenon only in certain areas and cultures, and during a relatively short span of history.  Being bookmen, we tend to forget the extremely special locale and circumstances of our addiction.

Read Steiner: enjoy, be amazed, and wonder at his expertise and his insight.  But don’t expect it to be easy!

Books everywhere!

This fine article gives the details of Cornflower's latest wheeze to manage her "to be read" pile!

The crack in the tea cup

Another poem prompted by my recent visit to the British Library's T S Eliot exhibition, again read on a recording by the author.  This is very simple, especially at first, and can almost beguile you into thinking that it's not very serious poetry, just a sentimental lyric.  Be not deceived - this develops into a sombre domestic elegy for what might have been - the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead; love is lost, and work drives out our dreams.  There's some fine imagery, too, and some slightly chilling detail.  This is Hugh Wystan Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening:

As I walked out one evening,

   Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river

   I heard a lover sing

Under an arch of the railway:

   'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you

   Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

   And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean

   Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

   Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,

   For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

   And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city

   Began to whirr and chime:

'O let not Time deceive you,

   You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare

   Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

   And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry

   Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

   To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley

   Drifts the appalling snow;

Time breaks the threaded dances

   And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,

   Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

   And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

   The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

   A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

   And Jill goes down on her back..

'O look, look in the mirror,

   O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

   Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window

   As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

   With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,

   The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

   And the deep river ran on.

By the way, there's a very entertaining Michael Gilbert story with the same title as my post - and the poem is quoted there, in a thriller of small town corruption and a young lawyer who supports justice and gets his girl.

What the Dog Saw

A colleague at the London Wildlife Trust - the same man who recommended Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish  - also recommended Malcolm Gladwell.  By one of those odd coincidences, only two days later I saw his new book, What the Dog Saw - and other adventures, on the London Library's new acquisition shelves and immediately borrowed it.  This is gold, pure and easily mined.  Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist with an eclectic range of interests, a thorough approach to research, and a lively prose style which makes all his essays dynamic and exciting, as well as interesting and provoking. 

These essays – they were first published in New Yorker magazine – are long, serious pieces of discursive journalism, each looking at an issue with great freshness, originality and humour.  His style is immediately accessible, and he writes many of the essays with what in other circumstances you would call a strong plot, with a clear sense of climax and a nice feel for a punch line.  This may make them sound too trivial, too attention seeking, but that would be very unfair .. he just writes about (mainly) serious things without pomposity or fuss.

And what a range he writes about.  This collection – and he has published several others, including Outliers – covers the marketing of women’s hair dye in America, the impossibility of avoiding accidents in complex systems (like Challenger), dog behaviour, why we consistently prefer bad solutions to problems when good solutions are available, the misleading excellence of hindsight in pattern recognition (two telling military intelligence essays), the difficulty of spotting talent, the physiological difference between panicking and choking (in the sporting sense), and the uselessness of criminal profiling.

In each case, he takes a story from a slightly unusual angle, builds a case, and seeks appropriate evidence, sometimes knocking the case over as confidently as he had originally seemed to construct it, and sometimes building it into something new, fine and inspirational.  An example will illustrate the point.

In Million Dollar Murray, he looks at several different problems, the solving of which pose another quite different problem for society.  One is homelessness, and another is car exhaust pollution.  In both cases, there is a large population – of homeless people, or of all the cars in an area – of which a very small subset is responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the resultant problems.  In the case of homelessness, "only" 2500 of New Yorks' population is chronically homeless, out of 250,000 who were occasionally homeless, and in the case of cars, 5% of vehicles provide 55% of the pollution.  These are not normal distributions, they are power law distributions (similar to the so-called 80-20 rule), so perhaps our approach should recognise that?  So we try and deal with the big, vague problems, but as a society we are hamstrung; first, by lack of knowledge – originally, we may not have realised how much of the problem was caused by so few people / cars; then by inertia – the original solution, however inadequate, is in place; finally by perceptions of fairness and universality.  So we try – without success and without even the hope of success – to provide shelters for all the homeless, and programmes to get them back to work, into housing, or perhaps back with families; we may also need to deal with alcohol or other dependency, and crime to fund these addictions or resulting from them.  This doesn’t work, and we know it doesn’t work.  So maybe the answer is to do more?  But we just can’t, there aren’t the resources, and anyway there is nothing to make us think that more would actually be better. 

So perhaps we should focus on those small percentages of really hard, desperate cases, and let the rest fend for themselves?  We could give them an apartment and intense counselling and support, and have a chance of taking them off the street and out of prison cells and emergency hospital wards.  It’s expensive, but it costs less than continually rescuing them from the street, and, where its being tried in Denver, it seems to work.  But it seems unfair – we reward poor behaviour, and we reward some people massively while others get nothing.  But it works.  Similarly, rather than test every car for exhaust emissions – expensive, time consuming, and an ineffective bureaucratic nightmare, diluting all the effort across all the cars, excellent, OK, and bad, and stimulating avoidance – we could roadside test just the bad ones, and take them off the road – removing, one expert estimates, 25,000 vehicles a year in a town like Denver, reducing smog by 40% in 5 years.  We may have to be unfair to be effective, we may have to accept that we can’t test every car, so some may get away with it, but we make a big impact on emissions.

... More Gladwell soon.

Women reading: December

The December painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Lady Tennyson on Afton Downs by Valentine Cameron Prinsep, a British artist who lived from 1838-1904, and was related to Tennyson's son through marriage.  Lady Tennyson, Emily, was the wife of poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and here she is seen walking by the sea on Afton Downs, on the south-western coast of the Isle of Wight (off the southern coast of England).  This is now a National Trust property, famous for its views and its butterflies; when Lady Tennyson was walking here, she and her husband lived nearby (though he had not been ennobled then).

  

Emily appears to be reading a letter, but perhaps her husband has given her a manuscript of one of his new poems?  They lived here in the 1850s and 60s, which would fit well with Idylls of the King, the first four books of which were published in 1859.  So she may be reading of Arthur's coming, and his winning of Guinevere, beautiful and faithless.  And he may be at home sitting for a friend of theirs, the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron - and one of her images is on the left.

 

 

Hawk In The Rain

Following my visit to the T S Eliot exhibition, I looked up this poem, of which there was a recording by Hughes himself.  This is strong, harsh poetry, contrasts the writer's loam clogged feet with the hawk's effortless aerial poise - but knowing, too, that the hawk must die and crash to the ground.  What fierce, bloody, stubborn power there is in Ted Hughes' Hawk In The Rain:

 

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs,
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner's endurance: And I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain to the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside-down,
Falls from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land.

T S Eliot, publisher

On a recent Sunday morning, to the TS Eliot exhibition at the British Library.  It's small, but very good, focusing on his work as a publisher, supporting poets such as MacNeice, Spender, Ted Hughes and many others, and the exhibition consists mostly of letters and photographs, with one or two interesting recordings.  Sadly, it finishes on 6 December, so it's almost too late to see it now.  But it's was a fascinating insight into his work as a director at Faber & Faber (there was only one Faber, but he thought two sounded better!).  His fellow directors were well aware of his value to the company, as author, icon and talent speaker, but they were not in awe of him, as this heading from an alphabetical catalogue shows:

E is for Eliot, a very stern man.

His prose is severe, and his poems don't scan.

But many of those younger writers that he brought to the company were very much overawed, including Ted Hughes.  He said meeting Eliot, a quiet and slightly stiff persona, was like watching the Queen Mary bear down on you, very slowly.  Eliot wrote a lot of letters himself, and both manuscripts and typescripts exist, exhorting this poet or that to greater efforts, or recommending that the firm take someone up.  One of his great contacts, of course, was Auden, who took the mickey about some of the people Eliot met when doing lecture tours in the US:

T S Eliot is quite at a loss

When clubwomen hustle across

 At literary teas

 And say: "What if you please

Do you mean by A Mill On The Floss"?

As well as letters and pictures, there were many recordings to enjoy as well - the great man himself, reading from his own poetry, (you can him ploughing through the wonderful Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock here) and Ted Hughes reading Hawk in the Rain, and Auden reading As I Walked Out One Evening.  One prose writer he enouraged was Djuna Barnes, whose Nightwood you will probably know, but I confess I didn't.  All in all, a rewarding hour with an unsung side of the greatest poet in English of the past hundred years.

Paddington's essential reading

Travelling again, and a really interesting list of books, all recommended by my good friend Paddington Bear.  Paddington and I have been friends for a long time – we share a passion for marmalade – but I have rather lost touch over recent years, and it was a surprise, as well as a joy, to see him the other hunched over one of the comfortable and secluded readers’ desks in the London Library.  He is as charming and amiable as ever, although a little more distrait and a little quieter (after all, he must be 60 now), and readily left his studies – he is working on a monograph on the spread of the Seville orange through Moorish Spain and eventually into the hands of the British traders and cooks - and with a little help from the catalogue and Helen in Readers’ Services, came up with this little collection of books about Peru:

Matthew Parris, Inca-Kola:  This was a very engaging, slightly wandering account of travelling in Peru about twenty years ago, by the ex-MP and Times columnist.  He is travelling with three friends, and you learn a lot about them and their foibles and adventures, and very little about Parris’ own, except at the end, where he goes on a long and hair-raising lorry journey by himself.  There is plenty of amusement, and delightful descriptions of the act of travelling and the incidental events of the road – the great sites, including Titicaca and Macchu Picchu are hardly described at all, certainly not in any “guide book” way – which is abslutely fine.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Three Letters from the Andes: I am enjoying this slight volume by the great travel writer; the letters are pretty informal, but very easy to read and very immediate.  There is a wonderful reading list from the mountaineering group , each of them having brought a book or two.  There’s no pap at all, as between them they have Balzac’s Illusions Perdues, Henry James' The Bostonians and Spoils of Poynton, Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow and Antic Hay, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Kim and Prescott’s Conquest of Peru!  There is also one of the most straight-faced but bizarre footnotes – after the word “Andrew” in the description of the companions meeting at the airport, a footnote offers the explanation “Duke of Devonshire MC”!  The accounts of the landscape, the people, and the struggles with hotels, are all most entertaining – especially of the hotel where the service at meals, and the provision of hot water, was utterly dismal: the food was inedible and the hot water non-existent; after a breakfast at which the eggs were “slimy”, there followed one in which they were like bullets, prompting one of the party to hurl it the length of the room at a mirror, where it exploded, scattering white and yolk shrapnel everywhere.  The management’s response was immediate and charming, and both food and hot water were thereafter beyond reproach!  But Leigh Fermor is also very good on the architecture and the sense of decay on abandoned Catholic churches, over-ornate and over-large, in remote areas, and other aperçus into a politically and socially very turbulent and tense modern Peru, while revolution was afoot in neighbouring Bolivia.

Christopher Isherwood, The Condor and the Cows: this is a travel book from around 1950, starting the United States (where Isherwood and Auden had spent the war, I think), and travelling through Venezuala, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru and eventually Bolivia and Argentina.  It's a very personal view, and a very entertaining one, with much more about politics and the state of the nation, though in a very anecdotal way.  He gently mocks American tourists, worried about money, security, and hygiene, and meets lots of interesting people - British and American expatriates, and Peruvian artists and writers; he doesn't seem very conscious that this is a rather privileged way of travelling, and that we could mock him for his distance from the real Peru just as much as he mocks others!  But he has a lovely touch - describing the difficulties of conversation in a language one has imperfectly mastered, he said it proceeded by statement alone, and gives an example:

"Peru is a very sad country".  "The best American poet is English and the best English poet is American".  "I once made love in the Vatican Library".

That final sentence passes you by, and then hits you like a sledgehammer.  What!?  How?  There is not a word of explanation.

... more Peruvian reading later.

 

 

Hello, possums!

T S Eliot is one of my very favourite poets; in The Waste Land he seems to have written the essential poem of despair and of cultural decay; in Four Quartets, he finds hope and understanding, though wholly without self deception.  But he comes down off his pedestal, and writes Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.  Choosing one is impossibly difficult - and there’s a solution for that, of course, but I am starting with the archetypal old ladies cat, fat and complacent, lazy, placid and sun-seeking, but with a secret do-gooding side.  This is T S Eliot’s The Old Gumbie Cat:

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;

Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.

All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat;

She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,

Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.

And when all the family's in bed and asleep,

She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep.

She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice -

Their behaviour's not good and their manners not nice;

So when she has got them lined up on the matting,

She teachs them music, crocheting and tatting.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;

Her equal would be hard to find, she likes the warm and sunny spots.

All day she sits beside the hearth or on the bed or on my hat:

She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,

Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.

As she finds that the mice will not ever keep quiet,

She is sure it is due to irregular diet;

And believing that nothing is done without trying,

She sets right to work with her baking and frying.

She makes them a mouse-cake of bread and dried peas,

And a beautiful fry of lean bacon and cheese.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;

The curtain-cord she likes to wind, and tie it into sailor-knots.

She sits upon the window-sill, or anything that's smooth and flat:

She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,

Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.

She thinks that the cockroaches just need employment

To prevent them from idle and wanton destroyment.

So she's formed, from that lot of disorderly louts,

A troop of well-disciplined helpful boy-scouts,

With a purpose in life and a good deed to do -

And she's even created a Beetles' Tattoo.

So for Old Gumbie Cats let us now give three cheers -

On whom well-ordered households depend, it appears.

802,701 AD

I went to bed the other evening without enough to read, and lazily restricted my choice of extra material to those books which were within reach while remaining under the duvet.  This limited my choice to a small group of science books and novels from U – Z.  I chose, on a whim, H G Wells' The Time Machine, which in my ancient Penguin edition is collected together with a number of other shorter stories.  The Time Machine is by far the longest, and the other stories are very short by comparison – the most well-known being The Man Who Could Work Miracles. 

In his day, and even in my youth, H G Wells was a great figure and a great favourite with the boys in my school, though I suspect the girls found him much less interesting.  So, on this return, I was a little disappointed.  Like The War of the Worlds, which I read a few months ago, the imagination is tremendous, and the story is powerfully told and carried through with great force; but the language now seems very old fashioned, and the science, so powerfully imagined, now seems childish and vague, with lots of rather robotic social relations and rather clunky and didactic dialogue.

The hero of The Time Machine leaps forward thousands of years, to the date in the title of the post, where lots of rather sad eugenically inspired evolution stuff explains the physical and mental deterioration of the human race(s) – I would have been more interested if Wells had had a shot at what might have been 200 or 500 years into the future, although that would not have been so impressive a leap of the imagination, but it might have been more involving.  A great classic, but a little past its read-by date.

Some of the shorter stories are rather more fun – the story of The Man who could do Miracles, for example, is amusing and cleverly constructed, and The Hammerpond Park Burglary and The Stolen Bacillus are pithy, well constructed and amusing - and they remind us of Wells' range of voices and material, which was huge.

 

Grave Doubts

John Moss is a Canadian writer who wrote to me recently asking me to look at one of his books, murder mysteries which are not well known over here, although he tells me he is often seen as writing in a rather English tradition.  He kindly sent me Grave Doubts, a Toronto murder mystery – and rather more – featuring a duo of detectives who are partners at work in the City murder squad, but whose friendship is as much more than that as it can be without them being partners in another sense.

I thought it was actually quite interesting, although I didn’t think it was really very English in style, although the concentration on Canadian (Toronto) history naturally led you away from that.  What I did think, was that it was decidedly not American, which you might assume if you didn’t know how much that irritates most Canadians!  The story starts very intriguingly, with a pair of bodies discovered in an old house, mummified by having been concealed behind a wall which made the space both airless and dry.  They are in a loving embrace, but they lack their heads.  The detectives – Miranda Quin and David Morgan – visit the site out of interest, and find various archaeological investigations under way.  The heads appear, in a loving kiss, nearby in the same building.  Predictably, the ancient bodies turn out to be modern, cleverly faked up, which means that the old building features which concealed them were faked too.

This naturally limits the number of people involved, and it rapidly becomes clear that the likely perpetrators are among the group of people they met when they visited the site of the immurals – the archaeologists, the pathologist, and the buildings expert and, unbelievably, the policewoman on duty.  This cramps the novel slightly, but it remains engaging, although Grant can be a slight bore with his showing off and unlikely intellectual musings.  At this point, the novel took an unlikely turn to my mind, though I quite enjoyed it in a detached sort of way.  The perpetrators – because that’s obvious what they were – then engaged in a complex game of leaving clues for the detectives with increasing bravado in the name of a disinterested interest in perfect fakery, with no personal motives for the two original murders or the several others later discovered.  The culmination comes in a James Bond style cliffhanger at the end, with a race against time to prevent one of the detectives being killed in a gruesome and macabre scene.

I enjoyed this as a narrative which kept me interested, and it was full of surprises, though often in an unsurprising way – that is, the plot has several unexpected twists and turns, but the original set up was so constrained, you knew the killer or killers came from a vary narrow group of people with an odd set of motives.  But Moss manages to throw in a mild lesbian fling, a lot of Canadian history, some pretty evocative writing about the Canadian landscape and townscape, and some rather self-consciously aware social observations.  Not, in my view, a great thriller/mystery, but a perfectly acceptable one, and one with a lot of unusual features.  I’ll read another if John Moss succeeds in getting them into British bookshops!