First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

A short trailer—in that, on Monday 3rd December, I will be blogging live for Prospect from the sell-out debate between Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton on “literature and terrorism” that’s taking place at the University of Manchester. It begins at 6.30pm from which time the wonders of Prospect technology will allow me to bring you every last mental blow and parry online.

That’s the plan, at least. If my mobile phone packs up, there’ll be light music instead…

Tom Chatfield

This week, I’ve been reading an advance copy of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Considering his stature, Wood has produced a pleasingly self-effacing volume: a civilised, intelligent book about the intimate processes of fiction. It’s a patient, lovingly nuanced study of beloved books, and one whose faith in the permanence of great art sits in strange tension—as its author knows only too well—with the void he has termed elsewhere, “the public space that might have been”: the realm in which it is normal and important to talk about literature as though it mattered, and as though aesthetic and moral concerns were inextricably entwined. I wish there were more books like this; I also wish there could be more books like this. James Wood is a vanishingly rare beast.

Mary Fitzgerald

American Pastoral by Philip Roth. My first engagement with the much-lauded giant of contemporary American literature has been, on the whole, a disappointment. It’s hard to tell whether his prose is deliberately overcooked—it is, after all, a “pastoral”—but too often this tragedy of the all-American prototype just feels utterly contrived. There are flashes of brilliance—a particularly beautifully-evoked scene or an insightful digression—but generally it feels as though the ideas have been done to death. Perhaps that’s the point.

David Goodhart

I do not read many literary biographies, least of all the lives of long dead poets. But I was forced to read Donne: The Reformed Soul, a biography of John Donne by the young writer John Stubbs, for an Irish literary prize (the Glen Dimplex prize) I was helping to judge. It was a revelation. The first half in particular was a thrilling historical page-turner, set amid the great political and religious upheavals of late 16th/early 17th-century England. At its centre is the charming and remarkably modern soul of the great love poet. Stubbs writes beautifully and weaves together the different layers—the life, the social and political context, the poetry—with novelistic skill. I confess that I had no idea that Donne was so close to the heart of late Elizabethan politics or that he was born a Catholic and converted to the reformed church (in an attractively undogmatic and pragmatic manner). He was even involved in the “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard” at Cadiz in 1596. Knowing so shamefully little about Donne I wondered whether the book may have had a disproportionate impact on me—but both my fellow judges (the book won the prize) and many learned reviewers who do know the poet and the period well were also impressed. Although Donne’s poetry is, of course, still read and studied, it is odd that his life is not better known—he ought to be a more iconic Englishman (and Londoner: perhaps Ken or Boris could adopt him) and it is high time someone made a film of his life.

John Kelly

I’ve been reading American Gangster: and other tales of New York, a collection of articles by Mark Jacobson mostly written in the 1970s for Village Voice, New York magazine and the New Yorker. The title piece forms the basis of the eponymous movie of the life and times of Frank Lucas, 1970s superbad Harlem mobster, who once laid fair claim to be the world’s most successful heroin dealer. Lucas notoriously formulated a cradle to grave supply chain by importing heroin directly from golden triangle warlords for cutting and bagging on to 116th St New York, smuggling the raw materials in the coffins of dead Vietnam GIs. Lucas was a natural sociopath who blew in from North Carolina, hit the streets and played a death-dealing role in the near-collapse of Harlem’s underclass. In another set of circumstances he could have been a Ford, Sloane or Carnegie. After a spell in the slammer and with his billion-dollar assets seized, the decrepit, defeated and semi-derelict superfly betrays hints of his former menace in the course of negotiations with Jacobson and Hollywood for the spectacularly corrosive and amoral story of his life and times. Other articles by this effortlessly talented writer - a funky Runyan - are deeply evocative of Manhattan’s rococo sleaze. All human life, and some forms yet to be classified, is there.

David Killen

Death-Devoted Heart – Sex and the sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde by Roger Scruton. Locating the Tristan legend within the medieval tradition of courtly love poetry, Scruton argues that the genre’s conventions grew out of a need to elevate the human sexual impulse from the mundane world of commodity to the transcendent realm of erotic love. Pre-dating Freud by decades, Wagner chose this mythical setting not out of pre-Raphaelite-style escapism but as an expression of the timeless truths of human existence.

Wagner saw the orchestra as fulfilling the role of the chorus in Greek theatre and Scruton demonstrates how it is the music itself that sets up, underscores and drives the drama in its inexorable progression from forbidden love towards sacrifice and redemption. He skilfully plots the development of the score, showing how the famous opening dissonance is not fully resolved until the opera’s final note and revealing the daring and original character of Wagner’s musical language. I particularly liked his reference to leitmotifs as being like “musical magnets,” around which meaning slowly accumulates in the course of the drama.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

Toronto-based doctor Vincent Lam’s debut short story collection, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won a major Canadian literary prize. As a fan of med lit, I tracked down a copy ahead of its British publication next year by Fourth Estate. Lam traces the fortunes of four doctors, Ming, Fitz, Sri and Chen, from their student days to their professional lives. Some of the interlinked stories were published separately before being combined in this volume, and the cracks show, with sudden, almost dizzying shifts in time, location and between characters. Yet this structure also proves to be one of the book’s strengths—when writers switch between first-person narrators, they often only end up making the (rather banal) point that people perceive the same events differently. Lam’s more haphazard approach serves to illuminate his characters, allowing the reader to understand and sympathise with them all.

Tom Nuttall

“Goodbye to All That,” in the Atlantic Monthly, by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan has been cheerleading for Barack Obama’s candidacy for months on his blog the Daily Dish. In this article he weaves together the various strands of his case for Obama—his ability to transcend America’s sclerotic baby boomer post-Vietnam culture wars, his confidence in combining a strong moral sense and religious faith with public expressions of doubt and scepticism, and the soft-power effect that having a mixed-race president who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia would have on those around the world who increasingly distrust America’s motives. At the time the article was published, Obama looked like a busted flush and Hillary Clinton’s path to the Democratic candidacy looked inevitable; now a series of assured public performances by Obama have opened up the race again in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses. As someone who finds Obama the most inspirational presidential candidate in years, I certainly wish him all the best (and not just because I’ve got a fair bit of cash riding on him).

William Skidelsky

I’m reading Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K Jerome. This extremely funny Victorian novella, published in 1889, tells the tale of an ill-fated outing on the Thames by three young middle-class men and a dog. The trip is full of mishaps, and the book is studded with rambling asides about such subjects as the time the narrator stunk out a train carriage carrying some cheeses to London. If your knowledge of 19th-century literature is largely confined to long, earnest novels about the upper classes, it is interesting to read something so raucous and informal; it seems very modern. And Jerome K Jerome was an attractive figure—an English Oblomov. He founded The Idler magazine (which still exists), and once quipped, “It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.” More on Jerome here.

As the Prospect postbag testifies, a 200-word article containing a misspelt proper noun can often generate more correspondence than a 5,000-word essay on tax, terrorism or cultural crises (to pick three fairly arbitrary “big” topics). Indeed, small problems are often a more passionate business than large ones—partly because worries like global warming inspire a more implacable dread than, say, typos in the Guardian. Psychologically and pragmatically, it’s more tolerable to be locally peeved than to fill a day with bottomless agonising.

There are also the questions of ownership and certainty. Things like political and environmental crises (especially when they are taking place, or are felt on a daily basis to be, “elsewhere”) are unlikely ever to be definitively articulated, and can never be said to the sole province of even the most excellent expert. A little research, however, may give us a comprehensive answer on a point of grammar or etymology—a nugget of certainty we can safely carry through the rest of our days, and which we can intermittently inflict on those around us.

In the spirit of such pleasures, here are a few examples from my favourite flavour of verbal error: spelling slips caused by mistaken etymologies.

“in the sticks” (i.e. the middle of nowhere) is sometimes given as “in the styx,” because people think the phrase refers to the mythological river Styx when, in fact, it’s an early 20th century American term which simply means out in the wooded countryside

“penchant” is sometimes given as “pendant,” because people know that it’s related to ideas of hanging or tending towards something. It does indeed originate from the Latin pendere, to hang—but because it came to English via old French pencher, it lost the “d” still retained in the English “pendant.”

“jejune” is sometimes given as “jejeune,” and pronounced in a French style (with soft rather than hard “j’s”) because people think it’s etymologically related to the French jeune, meaning a youth. Actually, the word comes to us directly from the Latin jejunus, meaning empty or barren.

“straitlaced” is sometimes given as “straight-laced,” because people (quite sensibly) assume it refers to the straightness of lacing. It does, but via the English term for a style of lacing on corsets that resembled a “strait” in the geographical sense, i.e. that was narrow and confining. Language being a thing of ceaseless motion, however, it seems almost certain that “straight” will take over eventually.

And feel free to tell me if I’m wrong or ridiculous on any of these. My next favourite category is “common errors made in common corrections of common errors.”

England have lost on penalties at five of the nine last major international football championships. So here’s some interesting news for whoever picks up the poisoned chalice from Steve McLaren—after analysing hours of footage, a team of psychologists in Israel have discovered the optimum strategy for a goalkeeper facing a penalty: don’t move. The team found that keepers who stayed in the centre of the goalmouth saved roughly a third of the penalties they faced, while those jumping to the left or right saved no more than one in eight.

Yet in 94 per cent of the penalties watched by the researchers, the keeper chose to dive left or right. Why do so few choose to follow the optimal strategy? The researchers attribute the failing to a cognitive bias; specifically the well-known omission bias. The effect of the omission bias is that following some kind of negative outcome—like letting in a penalty—we feel worse if we did nothing to stop it happening than if we did something.

This has a superficial plausibility—the effects of cognitive biases on our behaviour can be very powerful, even in instances when they would seem to work against our interests. Yet we are not slaves to our biases, and when the dividend that would accrue from overcoming one—such as a goalkeeper more than doubling his chances of saving a penalty—is sufficiently high, one would expect the motivation to be there.

Perhaps the explanation has more to do with football’s traditional antipathy to stats-based analysis. In stark contrast to baseball, where some managers have managed to revolutionise their team’s performances by basing team selections and match tactics on particular statistics, football seems to have little time for number-crunchers. TV pundits and newspaper reports hurl statistics at us, but rarely make serious attempts to think through the tactical implications of the numbers they produce.

So in three years’ time in South Africa—assuming England make it through—let’s hope to see a little bit less movement from our keepers when they face the inevitable spot-kicks.

For the first time since completing our supplement on its beginnings, I returned to Wellcome Collection yesterday to see the preview of their second major exhibition, Sleeping & Dreaming, which opened today.

The topic is a fascinating one, in part because it rests on some of the most central physiological questions humanity has yet to answer: why do we sleep, why do we dream, and what do sleep and dreams signify? Faithful to its eclectic mission, Wellcome Collection doesn’t try to present any answers or firm conclusions. Instead, these topics are explored via five thematic sections that combine science and art to sometimes startling effect: “dead tired” (on sleep deprivation); “world without sleep” (on artificial light and technology); “elusive sleep” (on insomnia and those unable to sleep well or securely); “dream worlds” (on the challenges dreams pose to our rational understanding of the world); and “traces of sleep” (on those ideas linked to sleep in mythology and popular culture).

The setting is at once serene and unnerving: a bichromatic collection of spotlit narrow slabs racked against a dark background, designed by the German architect Nikolaus Hirsch. Strolling around was itself a dream-like experience, with exhibits drifting into and out of view between the pale panels and side-chambers. Among other delights, there’s an opportunity to watch all of Dali and Brunel’s seminal 1929 film Un chien Andalou—our senior editor, an Andalou ingénu, was wincing beside me within moments at its most famously grotesque moment—as well as to view art by Goya and to listen to an interview with a victim of sleep-deprivation interrogation. As you’d expect from Wellcome, there is also detailed information on the science of sleep and dreaming, with graphs of brain-activity during the different phases of sleep and examples of data fed live from sensors on a sleeping body.

The exhibition runs until the 9th March 2008, with a full programme of events alongside it; it is—like the collection itself—free to the general public.

Continuing today’s theme of religious hatred, Crooked Timber links to a list of the “nine most badass Bible verses.” Forty lashes for misnaming a teddy bear might sound harsh, but it’s a clip around the ear compared to this, from Numbers:

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Say to the assembly, ‘Move away from the tents of Korah, Dathan and Abiram’.…

As soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah’s men and all their possessions. They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community.

Concerning the English primary school teacher in Sudan accused of insulting Islam by naming a class teddy bear Mohamed, as reported by today’s Times:

As the demonstration on the campus [of Khartoum University] wound down, a group of young men huddled over a sheet of paper drafting an angry statement on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. Elsheikh El Nour, a veterinary scientist, summed up their position. “If she made an innocent mistake and did not mean Muhammad the Prophet there is no problem,” he said, sipping sweet tea. “But if she meant Muhammad the Prophet, this is a big problem for Muslims. She must die.”

Not to mention this penetrating insight from the rector of the university:

Professor Eltyeb Hag Ateya, the director of the Khartoum University Peace Research Institute, said that the notion of naming a bear was alien to most Sudanese. “People are angry because the bear does not exist in Sudanese folklore,” he said. “It is not seen as a nice thing that children carry around. If you call someone a bear they will be angry, just as if you have called someone a camel in England.”

Thank goodness these people have stepped forward to explain it all. Now they can get on with the important business of convicting, lashing and imprisoning…

It’s 250 years today since the birth of the poet William Blake in Golden Square, London—in honour of which, among other things, the Guardian has published an excellent essay by Terry Eagleton on Blake’s radicalism. Blake is a visionary whose works have endured extraordinarily well, considering the esoteric nature of his mythologies: his call “to see the world in a grain of sand” is an apt description of their marriage of the particular and the universal; and, of course, the written and the seen, thanks to his prodigious gifts as an engraver and illustrator. Admirers can gorge themselves on all things Blakean here.

But how does one spot a visionary? The idea of praising Blake in the same breath as Milton would have been dismissed as absurd by almost the entire literary establishment during Blake’s lifetime—and while we may scoff at this today, the clarity of hindsight allows us to forget that innumerable other self-proclaimed visionaries have deservedly vanished into obscurity since 1757 (as, no doubt, some brilliant talents have undeservingly done). The truly original can be hard to identify—and its practitioners often refuse the worldly concessions that might win them early acceptance.

Eager contemporary visionary-spotters could certainly have done worse than listen to the Today programme this morning—which, in honour of Blake, saw poet and sometime Prospect contributor Michael Horovitz deliver a section from his own book-length work, A New Waste Land: a verse epic inspired by nothing less than the advice of William Blake’s ghost. Horovitz certainly got into the spirit of things, concluding his entreaties for the world to “reap the effect of new practical courses” with what can only be described as a feral howl of pure poetic intensity; albeit one pitched an octave or two above the norm for such overmastered outpourings.

You’ll find the whole thing about two-and-a-half hours into the Wednesday 28th edition here. But be warned—life may never be quite the same again.

Two more web exclusives for you today, in the aftermath of the Australian Labour party’s landslide victory on Saturday. Tim Soutphommasane, who worked on prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd’s campaign, attempts to give us some idea of what Rudd’s premiership might mean for Australia. And David Ritter explains how Labour was able to exploit popular discontent with the Howard government’s industrial relations laws to reunite its old electoral coalition of traditional labour and progressive, identity-based groups.

In this week’s New Yorker, Bill Buford has written an article about the revival of carnivore culture. It contains the following passage: “Meat comes from an animal—a banal connection that has been obscured by the way supermarkets prepare and present our food—and the animal has to be killed. If you fear the sight of a carcass, you shouldn’t be eating from it.” This logic has become virtually axiomatic among right-thinking carnivores, but I wonder if it really makes sense. I agree with the first part. We shouldn’t take the fact that we kill animals to eat lightly. If a society forgets (or pretends to forget) that meat comes from animals, then it is more likely to turn a blind eye to their mistreatment—as has undoubtedly happened.

But what about the second part of the above passage: the idea that for it to be justifiable for a person to eat meat, he or she should not “fear” the sight of a carcass? By this logic, there is a kind of hierarchy of entitlement to meat-eating, corollated to how unfearful one is. At the top would be those actually prepared to kill an animal themselves. Then would come those prepared to butcher a carcass. Then would be those prepared to at least stand the sight of a skinned animal hanging upside down in a butchers’ shop. And so on, all the way down to those who shrink from anything other than a processed sausage. But surely this is all so much romantic baloney. The reality of modern technology means that we are, to a large extent, detached from the sordid business of killing animals. We don’t live in caves any more. Why should we not be entitled to eat meat if we are squeamish about carcasses? Buford might claim that squeamishness about dead flesh suggests an unwillingness to confront the fact of death squarely in the face. Yet one might just as easily argue it the other way: a desire to chop up an animal could be taken as evidence of indifference to—even delight in—the fact of death. But in any case, does it really matter either way? Rather than basing entitlement to meat-eating on a somewhat arbitrary conscience-based yardstick, surely we should base our judgements solely on behaviour. And if we do this, then it seems to me that we can conclude little more than the following: it is better to eat meat from animals that have been raised humanely than from those that have been caused unnecessary suffering.