Zoo in the head

Big swinging dicks of the avant-garde

Shaun Whiteside pointed me in the direction of this, after I had enthused about a radio programme on Frederic Rzewski. (The programme was an episode of Music by My Friends on Resonance FM.) The music is very good - echoes of Charles Ives and Bruce Hornby - but I was disturbed to see that it had been uploaded by someone called John11inch. The phallocentrism of the world of classical music is well known, but I didn't realize anybody took it quite that far. Apart from Pierre "Lick My" Boulez, obviously.

Potential T-shirt of the Day

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs" - G. K. Chesterton

What I did in the holidays

Being a complete list of all the secondhand books I bought during my summer holiday in Norfolk, with my "reasons" for buying them:

The Pattern of English by G. H. Vallins Pelican 1957
“The developments in the construction of the English prose sentence from the earliest times to the present day.” I’m unsure now why I thought this was worth buying, except to make up the numbers on a five-for-a-pound deal at a village fête.

Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place by Malcolm Lowry Penguin 1969
The cover has an attractive woodcut by George Tute; I like inscriptions: this one has the owner’s name, N. Ingpen, and the enigmatic note “(W.T.C. October 1970)”.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine, ed. with introduction by Isaac Kramnick Penguin American Library 1982
Nice cover: the Bennington Flag of 1776. You can’t have too many copies of Common Sense, and I only have two.

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Panther 1979
I’m writing about Hughes for the LRB, and needed a reading copy. This is an ugly commercial paperback; the main feature of interest is the jacket copy, which consists mainly of endorsements from Hugh Walpole, Cyril Connolly and Arnold Bennett - who, in 1979, gave a fig for their opinions?

Mario and the Magician and Other Stories  by Thomas Mann Penguin Modern Classics 1975
Cover badly creased but I wanted the opening story, “A Man and His Dog”, because I’m working with Tim Dee on a series for BBC Radio 4 about dogs in literature and life, to be broadcast late next year.

The Friendly Dog: An Anthology ed. J. Parson Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1912
See above

Potential T-shirt of the Day

"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority"

    - T. H. Huxley

Hyenas: I forgot

The letterbox extrudes a new issue of the London Review of Books, which contains the following letter:

Much as I enjoyed John Burnside’s poem ‘Hyena’, I must point out that he has his hyenas crossed. The ‘giggle’ and pack behaviour referred to in the final stanza suggests the spotted (or ‘laughing’) hyena, but the first stanza (white mane, grey face, bat ears) describes the striped hyena, a solitary animal which does not ‘laugh’.

Mikita Brottman
Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore

Which was the point that started me off on the poem, until I got distracted by falanoucs. Not much point doing zoology if you're not going to bother getting it right.

Poetry corner: Some feliforms

From the London Review of Books, 30 June, p. 16 - "Hyena", one of two poems by John Burnside

Like something out
of Brueghel, maned in white
and hungry
like the dark, the bat
ears pricked, the face
a grey

velour, more cat
than dog, less
caracal
than fanalouc
or civet ...

Whoa! I don't want to give away the ending; besides, it's less the poem that interests me - sorry, John Burnside - than the zoology.

To begin with, what kind of hyena are we talking about? There are three species, the spotted, the brown, and the striped: on the basis of the details Burnside gives ("maned in white", "bat ears", "face a grey velour"), it can't mean the spotted, which barely has a mane at all; he might mean the somewhat scraggy-looking brown, though the mane is less striking than the white ruff under the chin; but taking it all in all, the spotted is the best fit:

And then come some interesting taxonomic details. "More cat than dog" seems counterintuitive, what with the long muzzle and the habit of hanging around in packs, but Burnside is perfectly correct. Hyenas and dogs are both members of the order Carnivora, but hyenas sit alongside your actual felids (cats, such as caracals) in the suborder Feliformia. "[L]ess / caracal / than fanalouc / or civet" seems to imply that, within the Feliformia, they sit nearer the viverrids (genets and civets) and the euplerids (an exclusively Madagascan bunch of mongoose-like animals, of which the best-known is the fossa): again, the consensus is that that's how it is.

That "fanalouc" is a puzzle, though. He seems to have confused two different animals: the falanouc and the fanaloka - both euplerids, and closely related. Which one does Burnside have in mind? Here's a falanouc:

And here's a fanaloka:

Of the two, the fanaloka is, to my eyes, more hyena-like in appearance, and arguably in lifestyle. While the hyena is famous for the bone-splitting strength of its jaws, the falanouc's teeth, set in a narrow, shrewish head, are adapted for soft-bodied creatures, for worms, frogs, slugs. At least the fanaloka (also known as the Malagasy or striped civet) hunts something crunchy, even if it's only small mammals, birds and lizards.

All of which leads me to conclude ... Well, nothing: I've been wasting your time here. If anybody can tell me what Brueghel Burnside had in mind, though, I'd be very grateful.

 

Barking

Over the years, many people whose opinions I respect have tried to convert me to the Dylan cause and Lord knows I've tried, but it just won't take. There are a number of individual songs I find perfectly tolerable; I can sit through Bringing It All Back Home or The Basement Tapes without chewing off my own tongue; Theme Time Radio Hour is a lark, even. Sometimes I'll read a Greil Marcus essay about how The Basement Tapes transformed human consciousness and I'll believe light is about to dawn; but in the end I'm stilling grub around in the dark for clues.

In last Friday's Independent, Andy Gill (a person whose opinions I certainly don't despise) listed "70 reasons why Bob Dylan is the most important figure in pop-culture history". A lot of these turn out to be restatements of the proposition rather than reasons for accepting it, and while No. 61 ("Because he created an entire industry of Dylanologist commentators and interpreters, way beyond the attention afforded any other songwriter or performer") is, I suppose, a reasonable supporting argument it makes me heavy with nausea.

But if you want a knock-down argument, take reason no. 60: "Because, if you turn the cover of John Wesley Harding upside-down and look at the bark of the tree, you'll see The Beatles (vinyl only) (drugs optional)." This sounds like one of those "I buried Paul"/"It's fun to smoke marijuana"-type myths, but further research suggests it may be true, and there is something odd going on at the top of that tree. Is the ability to have upside-down photographs of a well-known beat combo concealed on the covers of your records really a measure of cultural importance? If it is, I for one intend to give up on importance now: I will settle down in my rocking chair and dwindle out my days reading old paperback collections of Peanuts and listening to Val Doonican, as the light of poetry and imagination fades in the west. Please do not disturb this side of the Rapture.

Pants on fire

I've used the "Calm down dear" line on my wife, but would plead in mitigation that a) I've loved her dearly for twenty-some years, and b) in casting myself as Michael Winner I'm effectively evacuating the moral high ground and conceding the argument. I don't think this would be a fair characterisation of what David Cameron thought he was doing when he put down Angela Eagle last week. 

Still, the scandal lay not in the rudeness or possible sexism but in the indifference to ordinary fact. Cameron - irrelevantly, to score a cheap point - had said that the former Labour MP Howard Stoate had been defeated by a Conservative candidate at the general election; Eagle pointed out that Dr. Stoate had stood down; Cameron made a bad joke. Knowing that you have said something untrue and refusing to correct the mistake - isn't that lying? It's depressing that the media were so uninterested in that aspect of the affair.

The prime minister was showing a similarly relaxed attitude to truth this morning on Radio 4: John Humphrys, interviewing him on the Today programme, asked about supposed falsehoods in the "No to AV" campaign; jesting Cameron replied that the referendum campaign had been "robust", and that he was not personally responsible for the content Humphrys was talking about. I wonder: when Damian McBride talked about spreading a rumour that Cameron had venereal disease, would Cameron have settled for Gordon Brown waving the matter aside as "robust" campaigning? Or is it only some sorts of lie that we don't allow?

Hope at last

Last night I went to the London Review of Books Christmas party, which was nice. Two things in particular made it enjoyable for me: first, Tariq Ali didn't make an impromptu speech; and second, I had a long conversation with the novelist Tessa Hadley, who is Tim Dee's cousin. Her latest, The London Train, will be published in January: it turns out that one of the main characters resembles me in a number of implausibly specific ways. For years the possibility has loomed that I am a character in a derivative and poorly written sitcom - Terry and June, with the occasional gag plagiarised from Strindberg or Edward Albee - so it's a relief to find that I'm actually a character in a novel.

Here's Tessa writing in the Guardian earlier this year on the connection between writing and life:

...we imagine that in order to write with these bold strokes, this distinctive truthfulness, this writing personality strong as the flourish of a signature, the writer in her or his self must be full of personality, distinctive, bold.

Yet I don't think writing begins necessarily in strength of self. No doubt some writers are born, so to speak, fully formed – when they find their right voice in the written word, it's as an overflow for the self that's already there, forceful in talk, in sociability, in influence. But the preparation needed for good writing could just as well begin in an opposite place – in a weak and underdeveloped sense of self, a chaotic and incoherent personality.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

Lubbock: a postscript

I realised I ought to share this postcard with the world: Tom Lubbock pasted it together years ago, on a whim, and it's been sitting on my desk or my mantelpiece ever since, because it so closely reflects my own Weltanschauung.  Tom swore he'd found the sentiment in Nietzsche but he couldn't remember where, and all I can find on the web is some complaints about the effect of beer on the German soul, from Twilight of the Idols. Information gratefully received.