Zoo in the head

Monday morning Penguin: When life gives you lemons...

First Penguin edition, 1963.

From the back cover:

Anything could happen on a frontier planet, and Pyrrus was a shining example. Every form of non-human life, flora and fauna, mutation upon mutation, had combined with the impossible weather, the earthquakes, and the volcanoes to become a deadly weapon ... for the extermination of man. The Pyrran settlers had developed superhuman strength and reactions and had imported the most modern aids to warfare, but the odds were too heavy against them. Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, had allowed and even helped himself to get sucked into the fray without realizing that to relax your guard for a split second was one split second too many. Appalled by the conditions, he fought a single-handed war, not only with the planet but against its murder-minded people, to stop the carnage and bring peace to the war-torn outpost. To say it was hard would be a galactic understatement.

What Jason discovers is that the planet's life-forms have all evolved psi powers: their hostility and aggression only reflect the feelings of the humans they meet.

Q tip

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's last word on literary style:

For — believe me, Gentlemen — so far as Handel stands above Chopin, as Velasquez above Greuze, even so far stand the great masculine objective writers above all who appeal to you by parade of personality or private sentiment.

Mention of these great masculine "objective" writers brings me to my last word: which is, "Steep yourselves in them: habitually bring all to the test of them: for while you cannot escape the fate of all style, which is to be personal, the more of catholic manhood you inherit from thsoe great loins the more you will assuredly beget.

Mmm. Steep me in those manly catholic loins.

Notes: 1) It's pronounced "Cooch". 2) Q was his nom de plume. 3) From "On Style", the last in a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University, 1913-14, and collected as On the Art of Writing (1916).

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.)

 

Gold digging

I probably ought to mention that I'm one of the participants in a book seminar over at CrookedTimber, an honour I owe to the remarkable Maria Farrell. We're responding to Glen David Gold's Sunnyside, a book about which I had mixed, or rather chaotic, feelings: it takes in, among other things, American intervention in the Russian civil war, the birth and puppyhood of Rin-Tin-Tin, and Charlie Chaplin's rise to global celebrity. No argument about the brilliance of the parts; it's the whole I have my reservations about. My piece concentrated on Chaplin, a phenomenon who these days seems to be almost always underestimated and condescended to; Glen has understood more about his place in modern culture than most critics have. This was months ago, by the way: now, after almost a year with my whippet, I'd probably have more to say on the many dogs the book contains.

After all this time I'm unsure how well my bit stands up: I'm darn certain that the response to my turmoil Glen has written is more thoughtful and graceful than it merited. My fellow participants (seminarians?) are Stuart Evers and Adam McGovern, with CrookedTimber's John Holbo butting in unofficially: Maria introduces it all here. It might be helpful to look at Chaplin's film Sunnyside - one of his strangest and best - starting here; while you're at it, you may as well try A Dog's Life.

Wow. Just, wow.

Christopher Tayler offers 10 of the weirdest sentences in David Brooks's The Social Animal. The one with most relevance to this blog's areas of interest runs:

Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellent.

But every one of them has something - fallacy, solecism, outright meaninglessness - to marvel at.

Setting modesty aside...

...the latest issue of the London Review of Books includes my piece on Dennis Wheatley. Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription paywall, which means that non-subscribers have to go out and buy a copy.

Tom Lubbock is dead

Tom died at 2.15 yesterday afternoon. I don't know what to say about that fact, except that I'm sad. Today's Independent carries an obituary by Charles Darwent and a personal appreciation by Tom Sutcliffe; I gather an obituary by Kevin Jackson will be in tomorrow's Guardian. [UPDATE: Kevin's elegant, gentle obituary is here.]

Tom Sutcliffe mentions a weekly column Tom L. wrote purporting to be the diary of the administrator of a regional arts centre: when I was sub-editing on the Independent arts page, "Coales' Notes" - Tom's heteronym was Gordon Coales - was a highlight of my week; Cocklecarrot absurdity merged into real anguish as Gordon's marriage failed, his faith in art waned. Quite early on he wrote to Peter Brooke, just appointed secretary of state for National Heritage:

"As I understand it, you are someone who has previously had little connection with the world of the arts. I would strongly recommend that you keep it that way. The accepted formula for the relationship between government and the arts - 'arm's length' - does not come anywhere near to conveying the very great distance that a wise man should maintain between himself and the creative process. I would suggest then that you confine your activities to closing down theatres and facilitating the export of irreplaceable national treasures to any country that will have them. There will always be a warm welcome for you at the Wormwood Centre should you be in the area, when I hope we will be able to discuss matters of no cultural import whatsoever, such as cardboard, soil types, and the age of steam."

The column ran from some time in 1992 until early 1994, ending before the joke had run out of steam. It would be wonderful if some publisher issued an anthology of Tom's best writing, including Coales' Notes in its entirety; in the meantime, the Independent website carries a fair selection, as well as Tom's criticism. Si monumentum, and all that.                                                                                            

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?

On the mat: Madagascar

One of those rare, very special days when all the magazines this blog subscribes to - LRB, NYRB, TLS and New Yorker - tumble on to the mat at once.

The TLS letters page leads with this from Gwyn Campbell of McGill University, Montreal:

Sir, – Readers of the TLS unfamiliar with the field of historical scholarship on Madagascar may find themselves perplexed by the emotional tone of a recent letter from Pier M. Larson (April 2) regarding my review of Madagascar: A short history by Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis. Dr Larson is indeed, as he claims, a “leading historian of Madagascar”, but I would like to point out that in the English-speaking world, there are only three of us: Larson, Ellis and myself (for years, I have struggled to gain admittance for the former British ambassador, Mervyn Brown, on the basis of his excellent general history, but to no avail; witness Larson’s veiled attack on Brown by distinguishing himself as a “professional” historian). Both Larson and I are children of missionaries to the island (I was born there); Ellis and I met in Antananarivo in 1978, when we were both doing PhD research. Peer review being the essence of academic progress, we are all three continually called upon to comment on each other’s work. Ellis and Larson back each other up at every turn...

There is more: but what more do you want? The island upbringing, the missionary parents, the scholarly isolation of the field with only three people in it, the rivalry spread over 30 years; and there'd be lemurs. It's a novel, just waiting for you to write it. Come on. Can't you already smell that Booker?

One

Way too much "I, I, I" and "me, me, me" in recent posts - a sign of slack thinking more than egotism. Some posts have now been edited to remove this blemish; one hopes that in consequence they read better.