Zoo in the head

Resolution

Dr Johnson in The Idler, October 21, 1758: 

It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit: but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world; we do not so often endeavour or wish to impose on others as on ourselves; we resolve to do right, we hope to keep our resolutions, we declare them to confirm our own hope, and fix our own inconstancy by calling witnesses of our actions; but at last habit prevails, and those whom we invited to our triumph laugh at our defeat.

He said a number of things about resolutions, none encouraging, all woefully true to my own experience. Nor do I believe that calendars have magical powers, that because we've suddenly started giving a new name to the days we are living in, something has changed. But still the feeling is hard to shake, that New Year is a time to make resolutions. And so here I am, resolving to be a good little blogger this year, to try daily to say something or other, to create a bigger, brasher, brighter zoo in the head (oh dear: I think I'm bored with that name). Stay tuned!

The photo, of a sign at Wroclaw Zoo, is taken from Ilona Karwinska's Polish Cold War Neon.

I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving: having, from the earliest time almost that I can remember, been forming plans of a better life. I have done nothing. The need of doing, therefore, is pressing, since the time of doing is short. O GOD, grant me to resolve aright, and to keep my resolutions, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.

(One of Dr Johnson's prayers.)

 

Have you met Miss Jones?



In the Daily Mail, Liz Jones retraces Joanna Yeates' last steps and ponders her death's deeper meanings:

Leaving Jo’s flat, I return to my car. My satnav takes me to the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The theory is the killer took the long route from the flat to where he dumped the body to avoid the CCTV cameras. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid the 50p toll.

I don’t have 50p and try tossing 30p and a White Company button into the bucket. It doesn’t work.

There is now an angry queue behind me. Isn’t it interesting that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?

Finally, a man in a taxi jumps out, and runs to me brandishing a 50p piece.

‘Not all men are monsters,’ he says, grinning. Maybe not. But one monster is all it takes.

Poignant, sensitive, heart-breaking. Or, to take some of the milder remarks from the comments thread, "Shameful, inept, morbid, irrelevant, patronising", "insensitive, lazy, snobbish" and "unbelievably ill conceived".

Penguin: Money, Money, Money

If I had any sense of the topical I'd have done this two weeks ago, when the BBC dramatisation of Money was on the TV (also, I might still have a job on a newspaper. But then, I'm not convinced that would be a good thing except in terms of, you know, money). Anyway, Martin Amis's Money, first Penguin edition, 1985, reprinted 1987:

 

Not my original copy, by the way, which I remember buying in 1986. No designer credited: and who would want to put their name to this? Admittedly, the scan hasn't done the embossed silver lettering any favours, but the whole concept is feeble - too tame and unimaginative to work as either come-on or satire, pathetically unequal to the job of conveying the energy and grim delight of the novel. You wouldn't know the subtitle of this novel was "A Suicide Note".

All that applies a fortiori to the BBC version: John Self, as conceived by Amis, is a grizzly bear, all threat and appetite; Nick Frost, who got to play him on TV, is a teddy bear, keen to be loved, to justify himself. "I must have been very unhappy," he says in voiceover at one point: "It’s the only way I can explain my behaviour.” What's to explain? He wants, he grabs; you argue, he hits. This isn't a story in which the protagonist arrives at some deeper understanding of himself and thereby becomes a better person; it's a story in which the protagonist gets so thoroughly fucked over that good behaviour is the only option he's got left ("You can't be doing with fighting at my age"). But the TV version seemed to be caught in a constant cringe of apology, desperate to let viewers see that it wasn't endorsing any of the attitudes (sexism!) or practices (public smoking!) portrayed on screen. (Meanwhile, Fielding Goodney, Self's nemesis, was played by Vincent Kartheiser, known almost entirely for playing Pete Campbell in Mad Men: if there's one message to be derived from the popularity of that show, it's that modern audiences can swallow the bigotry and excess of the recent past without choking on it.) 

Amis himself, in an interview with Alison Flood on the Guardian website, was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the BBC version: "Nick Frost [...] is remarkable. I found him a joy to watch. He brought a lot of pain to the role, undemonstratively, holding it in, with not a hint of self pity. In my imagination Self was not long-haired and he didn't have a moustache, but Frost has taken over from that." Really? I would have thought watching your best novel traduced as this was would be like having teeth pulled, though Amis is the authority in that field. Perhaps he's just fed up with his grouchy public image; or perhaps once you've seen Dexter Fletcher play one of your leading men everyone else looks good. 

One positive note about the TV version: I had never got the joke of Lorne Guyland's name before (say it out loud). I'm such an idiot.

Back to the covers. That first one comes from a period when Penguin had abandoned quaint notions of identity and taste in favour of the quick commercial grab. Within a few years, things settled down a little:

Cover photography by the Douglas Brothers; no date given in my copy, but from memory I would place it in the early Nineties (that, and the fact that the Douglas Brothers were all the rage back then). The orange flash around the title is more vivid than the scan shows.

This does convey the point that the book is about absence as much as excess - absence of meaning, absence of love. If anything, the empty suit and the dollar bill are too blatant: if I'd wanted a message I'd have asked for Western Union. Other problems: the GIRL sign isn't ideally placed, competing with title and author; and alongside the Douglas Brothers' other Amis covers from the same period, it isn't terribly distinctive. On the whole, though, I like its ghostly quality; we're definitely heading in the right direction.

And now we've arrived:

First appearance in Penguin Classics, 2000: perfect. For one thing, this is a point when Penguin had rediscovered some pride in the brand, putting the Modern Classics in particular into a handsome, somewhat austere uniform - that strip of silver-grey at the bottom, the discreet lettering, and almost always a photograph (here credited to "Images colour library"). For another thing - what a photograph. It would have been so easy to find an image that reeked of excess and the various brands of pornography, sexual, fiscal and otherwise, favoured by John Self. You can read the picture in several ways: it's about money, the high life, effortlessly hopping the Atlantic; or it's about rootlessness and emptiness; or it's about tranquillity. Tranquillity being about the only emotion the book never mentions or experiences, I'm tempted to conclude that it is the book's true subject.

By the way, interesting to read the quotes on the back of that first edition: "laughter in the dark, if I ever heard it," says one; another compares it to Lolita. I didn't know anything about Nabokov back then; but I'm pretty sure now that Amis had both those doomed protagonists in mind - Albinus, the patsy in Laughter in the Dark, and Humbert Humbert in Lolita, the Englishman touring his Old World cravings about the New.

PS: And let's not forget the Oedipal angle - Self is also One Fat Englishman.

"Mother, give me the whoopee-cushion."

From today's listings for Radio 3 in the Guardian:

9.15 Nightwaves. Philip Dodd reviews a new production of Ibsen's comedy Ghosts.

To be fair, they probably just assumed this was another of his Farrelly Brothers-style gross-out comedies - along the lines of John Gabriel Dorkman, The Wild *uck, An Enema of the People, and, of course, The Master Bator (love the ending, with him falling off the tower - slapstick heaven).

Bummer

The Book Design Review is "going on hiatus". Bastard. I don't share his tastes, but it was a thoughtful and well-written blog; he shouldn't do this to us.

Footnote: In his penultimate post, Joseph Sullivan links to a Guardian blogpost by Stuart Evers about the necessity of awful literature, because it makes you appreciate the good stuff. As an instance of awfulness, Evers mentions Low Alcohol by Charles Kennedy Scott. Until now I'd managed to blot that dreadful book from my memory, but it turns out that my review - a bit smart-arsed, I now think, but essentially correct - is preserved for posterity. Nothing now can ever be forgotten.

Mur-ree Puppens

Over at the New Republic, Christopher Orr presents his personal Oscars. He makes some interesting choices - Colin Firth as Best Actor for A Single Man, not released in the UK yet - and some funny ones: Worst Movie (Idiotic Remakes of Minor Classics Category) goes to The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. But I'm baffled that the award for Worst British Accent by an American Actor goes to Peter Saarsgard for An Education.

Orr evidently fancies himself as something of a judge of British accents: last October, in a review of The Damned United, he praised Michael Sheen, as Brian Clough, for pulling off "a smashing North Yorkshire accent". The phrasing suggests he doesn't know what he's talking about: Clough came from Middlesbrough, which is geographically in North Yorkshire, for sure, but in dialect terms could be a hundred miles away - it's a North Yorkshire accent in the same sense that Scouse is a West Lancashire accent; in any case, Clough's drawl was sui generis.

As for Saarsgard: I thought his accent was fine - sagged in a couple of places, maybe, but when you consider the way young British actors inflict their estuary vowels and swallowed consonants on dramas set in the Fifties and Sixties, he sounded pretty good. If Orr were right, and this really was as bad as American versions of British accents get, I'd be terrified - British film producers have always had a tendency to grab the nearest passable-looking American, on the assumption that they'll somehow help them break the international market; it's only the accent that keeps our brave acting boys and girls in employment.

While the ghost of Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary Poppins has been laid, though, there are still plenty of misjudged British accents out there. I invite you to revel, first, in Anthony La Paglia in Frasier, playing Daphne's supposedly Mancunian brother:

And then indulge - why not? - in Keanu Reeves' Jonathan Harker, a long way from being the worst thing in Bram Stoker's Dracula:

According to rumour, the Holy Grail of poor British accents is John Travolta in a 1987 TV version of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter (directed by Robert Altman, of all people). Sadly, the production never made it over the Atlantic, and so far as I know hasn't been released on DVD. All I could find was this trailer, which lets you hear just enough to know Travolta had some work to do.

Doh! A deer!

Much fuss in the press over the case of a deer who wandered into the lion enclosure at the National Zoo in Washington DC, and elicited a predictable reaction from the lions. Strangely, several sources focused on the apparently happy outcome of the video above: the Daily Mail ran pictures under the headline "The moment baby deer leaps into lion enclosure at zoo ... and manages to survive"; the Sun had "Deer escapes lion's clutches". The Mail headline was later amended to reflect the more melancholy truth of what happened after the camera stopped rolling: "Tragic end for the zoo deer who leapt into a lion enclosure" - it was so badly hurt it had to be put down.

Zoo staff shooed the lions indoors and dispersed the crowds rooting for the deer: as Jack Landers says, a pointless reaction. Zoos are all about "enrichment" these days, making the animals' lives more interesting, very often by making them work for their food; and the crowds want to see nature red in tooth and claw, don't they? But when a genuinely enriching experience happens along, everybody gets embarrassed.

It's another demonstration that zoos are porous - nature gets out, nature gets in; as Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way." 

See also:

Butterfly mind

Going round the house, picking up the stuff I have left lying about, I realise that in the last 24 hours I have read portions of: Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stphen J. Dubner; Sallust's Catiline, in the old Penguin Classics translation by S. J. Handford; John Buchan's Napoleonic War-era adventure The Free Fishers; and Louis MacNeice's Selected Poems - this is in addition to the usual daily complement of magazines, newspapers and blogs. We're all for reading, of course, and we like to think of ourselves as eclectic; but I'm starting to think that this inability to settle on a single book - or even books with some vague linking theme - is less eclecticism than neurosis. I will now read a couple of chapters from Image of a Society, Roy Fuller's 1956 novel about goings-on in a building society, before getting straight down to work.

'Image as Language': A note from Tim Roberts

A few weeks ago, I wondered about the significance of transistors on the cover of Christopher Finch's Image as Language: Aspects of British Art 1950-68. My friend Tim Roberts explains it better than I ever could:

"You ask of the cover of Image as Language, 'what is the significance of the transistor?' which sparked off a few thoughts. Apart from the obvious reference to Paolozzi, the date of the book's publication - 1970 - was a time when the art world was going through a process of scientification.

Having largely abandoned craft skills as the basis for art production after the pop revolution, the visual arts went through - are still going through - a process of self-validation by grabbing hold of the coat-tails of whatever intellectual conceit was/is most fashionable.

At the time, art education was also changing from an indentured apprenticeship or trade skill to a professional/intellectual (that word again!)/educational qualification. Scientifism was the most fashionable coat-tail to grab at the time, just as Positivism was enjoying a final death rattle before the deconstructionists moved in. The metaphorical framework for art-making had shifted from 'revolutionary/proletarian' (cf: the arts workshop) to 'elite/intelligentsia' (the arts laboratory).

I was at Chelsea at the time working in the 'systems/structures' studios - art deriving from mathematical or other similar 'rule-governed' principles. A lot of this stuff morphed into minimalism as structuralism became the new kid on the block, elbowing out content in the process.

At the time, the transistor or circuit board was an exciting-looking thing for an art world increasingly fixated on surface - colour, shape, pattern all governed by an arcane and rigid external system of logic. It also carried ideas of scalability borrowed from chaos theory - another emerging theme around this time.

I was surprised Tim mentioned chaos theory, which I thought became fashionable much later; but Mandelbrot published "How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension" in 1967, so the idea was certainly in the ether.

You'll notice that Tim tactfully offers "circuit board" as an alternative to "transistor" - "circuit board" is what I should have said.

Why people read blogs

Typepad.com has an option that allows you, if you're this self-obsessed, to find out not only how many people are reading your blog, but what webpage referred them to it. Very often, the referring page is a Google search - for, say, "dead zebras"; the other day, more unnervingly than flatteringly, it was "Robert Hanks May 2009". But most often - more than everything else put together - people come to this blog via a Google image search for the Pokemon Bulbasaur, about whom I posted two months ago, using an image I found myself through Google. And these are searches from Google's homepages in Italy, Portugal, Austria and Denmark, among other places. By accident, I have become the world's leading purveyor of Bulbasaur imagery.

As always, the question is: how do I monetize?