top of the pile
The TLS always produces the best selection of Books of the Year. No one produces more erudite and cosmopolitan choices. Inspired, here is a selection of my favourites from their list, this year.
*Â ‘The combination of classical learning, lavish book production and a hint of scholarly controversy makes Il papiro di Artemidoro (LED: Eidizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, edited by Claudio Gallazzi, Barbel Kramer and Salvatore Settis, one of the most important books of the century so far.’ (Mary Beard).
* ‘… we need to remember that it is an indulgence to blame civilization for everything that is not civilized. Pascal Bruckner reminds us of that truth in his La Tyrannie de la penitence, which i read again this year, making notes between my notes. His central message is that while the whole world, including the West, dealt in slaves, only the West came up with the idea of setting them free.’ (Clive James)
* ‘I have been reading the ancient Chinese military classics…’ (Edward Luttwak)
* ‘The Broken Word (Cape), Adam Foulda’s brilliant long poem about the Mau-Mau, was snippily reviewed by Stephen Knight in the TLS by Stephen Knight. Knight was more fulsome to Michael Hofmann, writing favourably about his Selected Poems twice, main course here in the TLS, generous starter in the Independent on Sunday. A delicious double helping? Or thrift, Horatio? The cannnibalism of Hofmann’s Acrimony (Faber) …still famishes the craving.’ (Craig Raine)
* ‘The Ingeborg Bachmann-Paul Celan correspondence, Herzzeit (Suhrkamp) is almost unbearable in its private intensities… But little, indeed, since Keats’s letters are of comparative truthfulness.’ (George Steiner)
A popular poet: Seamus Heaney © John Minnion / Lebrecht Music & Arts
We have two pieces of a liteary bent new to our website this week: a review by the journalist Frieda Klotz of Dennis O’Driscoll’s book of interviews with Nobel-laureate Seamus Heaney, and an article by author Lesley Chamberlain exploring the life of the man who gave the world its first and most renowned thesaurus, Dr Peter Mark Roget. In each of these very different cases, the limits of the “biographical fallacy” are made plain. In five years of interviews with O’Driscoll, Heaney discusses almost everything in his life apart from his poetry, leaving that to speak for itself (and implicitly rejecting the idea that it might be explained by looking at his life experiences). Chamberlain, meanwhile, notes that Roget’s unhappy, neurotic and frequently dull life is hard to reconcile with the measured, fecund verbiage of his great work. As ever, let us know your own thoughts here.
A pan-European cussing card game: it's amazing what you can do with words…
As part of Prospect’s plans to make fuller use of our blog, we’re now posting some suitable morsels across from our print edition over the course of the month: one of which is my own column on words, etymologies, and whatever curiosities of language have caught my recent attention. Here, from our December edition, is one on slang and its deep place in our fascinations.
The word “slang,” first recorded in the mid-18th century, is of uncertain origin: suggestions include the old name for a convict’s fetters, the Old Norse verb “to sling,” slyngva, and the name of an 18th-century Dutchman, the Lord of Slangenburg. It’s an appropriate muddle. Slang initially meant the opaque private diction of criminals, only later expanding to its present sense of any very informal, non-standard language, and it remains a field in which meanings are hard to trace or pin down.
That’s not for want of trying, however. Around 1536, some 70 years before the first recognised English dictionary (Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall), a former apprentice of Caxton’s, Robert Copland, published a poem entitled The hye way to the spyttell hous. It consists of a dialogue between the author and a porter at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and deploys with relish the “thieves’ cant” of its day: a private vocabulary which included such delights as “pek my jere” (eat excrement), “docked the dell” (deflowered the girl) and “maimed nace” (helplessly drunk). Copland’s glossary of “canting words” was arguably Britain’s first glimpse of what an English dictionary might look like.
After Copland, it seems, the public could not get enough of cant. Guides to “low” speech proliferated throughout the 16th and 17th centuries—monuments to our delight in coining new words for those eternal human preoccupations: bodily functions, reproduction and intoxication. And those thinking that the increasingly comprehensive “proper” dictionaries of the last few centuries have defeated the demand for such things should think again. Look at the urban dictionary if you don’t believe me. In a digital world, it’s the authorities who are on the back foot. We’re heading back to Copland.
A very strange place
The Dubai sex pair, aka Vince Acors and Michelle Palmer, count themselves victorious. This week (Tuesday 25th November) a Dubai appeal court heard that their three-month jail sentence for engaging in sexual acts on a beach had been suspended and that they will be deported. They will arrive home this week. Their lawyer, Hassan Mattar, praised the justness of United Arab Emirates law.
I’m sure that when they get back they will give an exclusive interview to a paper alleging that they were mishandled whilst in Dubai and that the charges should never have been brought. In fact they claim that they were just canoodling and not, in fact, having sex, although they do admit that they were both drunk at the time, also an offence in Dubai, which is a Muslim state.
I have little sympathy for them – whether or not they were getting jiggy, or in the pre-stages of getting jiggy – for two reasons. Firstly, if they had engaged in crude sexual behaviour here on a beach they would also have been charged – probably with the catch-all, “outraging public decencyâ€, which, incidentally, can carry a jail sentence of up to two years, far longer than the sentence that a Dubai court imposed on them originally. But the second reason is far, far more serious.
Read the rest of this entry »
Downtown Mumbai
There still seems to be some confusion about exactly what is happening in Mumbai this morning. At least ten attacks took place on landmarks in the city yesterday. The attacks appear to have been orchestrated by an little-known Islamic group. Meanwhile, the web is full of instant analysis: a comprehensive Wikipedia update, flickr pictures from the scene, along with minute by minute updates.
Of the various blogs, this, entitled “A night out on Mumbai,” caught my eye. It nicely captures how the attacks hit at the heart of the city, and in a way which may not be clear simply from reading the news. Visiting Mumbai last year I went to both the attacked hotels, ate breakfast daily in Leopold’s (a small local restaurant, also attacked), and spent afternoons working in the deli, mentioned in the extract below. Mumbai is an enormous city. But its downtown is tiny. Each of these places is 5 minutes’ walk from the other. And each is a landmark, in the sense that downtown Mumbai doesn’t actually have many other cafés, restaurants and upscale hotels to speak of. Equally, the area is difficult to leave. In rush hour it takes hours to move north out of the peninsula through clogged streets. The blogger writes:
A friend of mine had an opening of her art exhibition a few hours ago, so we ventured to South Bombay for that. We attended the exhibition, sipped the litchee juice, nibbled on party snacks, and then six of us headed out for dinner. First we tried Indigo Deli, which is a couple of hundred metres from the Taj. We were told there would be a 25-minute wait. So we headed to All Stir Fry, … as we did so, we heard gunshots, and saw people running towards us from the left side. That’s when we realised that this was much more than a random police encounter, or a couple of gunshots. We heard that terrorists with AK-47s had opened fire outside Leopold’s, the pub down the road…. We watched transfixed, and as the apparent scale of the incidents grew, we realised we couldn’t go home.
Read the rest of this entry »
Any outsourcers hiding inside?
What impact will the recession have on the long-running battle for public sector reform? Yesterday’s pre-budget report suggests its all rather up in the air. In the short-term public sector spending will be maintained, and go up in some areas - fueled by spending increases to stave off a slump. But, in the medium term, the government needs to claw the money back, with a mix of tax rises and efficiency savings. Meanwhile government welfare and PFI reforms, which rely heavily on private companies for funding and delivery, look less healthy as the corporate sector retrenches. What prospect, then, for reform?
In the latest Prospect David Walker, formerly an editor at the Guardian and now plying his trade at the Audit Commission, wrote “Out with the outsourcers?”, arguing that the recession may derail some cherished public service reforms. Today, replying to David, we are publishing a web exclusive from Andrew Haldenby of the independent (but free-market friendly) think tank, Reform. Haldenby thinks, contra Walker, that the recession could lead to a boom in out sourcing, as the need for new savings bites:
The point Walker’s piece failed to grasp, however, is that the credit crunch changes all of this. The government and the Bank of England are trying to stave off a recession. The pre-budget report cut VAT by 2.5%, and lowered other taxes on consumers in the short-term. But everyone knows this won’t work on its own. Borrowing will eventually have to be brought under control. The only way to do this will be to make public spending more efficient.The recession will ultimately re-focus Whitehall’s mind on the need to tackle the basic inflexibility in public services, in particular, the workforce agreements for public sector staff.
Read the article here, and, if you feel like it, reply to Andrew and David in the comments below.
Policeman settles out of court
Last month I wrote a piece in Prospect (“The Problem with pc PCs,” November 2008) about the ongoing racial rumblings in London’s metropolitan police. Today, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur’s settlement of his racism claim against the Met leaves the very strong feeling that both parties have seized the first possible excuse to get themselves out of a deeply embarrassing situation. The involuntary departure of Ghaffur’s boss, Sir Ian Blair, next week, was that excuse. But Ghaffur’s original claim of Met racism went far wider than Sir Ian; and today, in an interview with my newspaper The Evening Standard, you can almost hear the disappointment in the voice of Ali Dizaei, Ghaffur’s colleague in the Met Black Police Association, that a race reckoning has been avoided.
The Met has conceded some ground, agreeing a reported payment of £300,000. But that, it transpires, includes its “contractual obligations” to Ghaffur, and only a “contribution” to his legal costs. Reading between the lines, once Ghaffur has paid the rest of his lawyer’s bill it doesn’t sound as if he will come out of it much, if at all, better off than if he had simply left in the usual way. Ghaffur, meanwhile, has also been obliged to withdraw his claim of racism, and agree to a gagging order.
It was still a good deal for Ghaffur. His case never looked all that strong; as I said in Prospect, there are still strong suspicions that he only took it as far as he did thanks to pressure from Mr Dizaei, who faces his own serious disciplinary charges and may wish to present those as another manifestation of Met “racism.”
The Met is less racist than it used to be, but still has areas of racism; enough black officers and citizens’ experience problems to persuade me of that. But the cause of equal opportunities has been little advanced by this case. The festering problem of race remains one of the biggest issues for the Ian Blair’s replacement as Met Commissioner, whoever he or she may be.
Lets start over
The word is that Mike Huckabee has already started to campaign in Iowa. If that isn’t enough, the first chapter of his new book is none-too-subtly titled “I love Iowa.” Whatever could he be up to? But, four years out, so far it’s a more of a three-way race for the Republicans in 2012, between former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Alaska’s Sarah Palin and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (né Piyush Jindal), a clever young policy-wonk of Indian ancestry who claimed he and Louisiana were like curry and gumbo: a perfect match. A post-election Rasmussen poll makes Palin the frontrunner: 91 per cent of Republicans view her favourably. Presented with a list of all the candidates who ran in this cycle, nearly two thirds picked Palin. (Only one in ten plumped for either Mike Huckabee of Arkansas or Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.) Rupert Murdoch’s favourite conservative scribe Bill Kristol has even appointed himself Palin’s personal policy tutor. But it looks as if Newt will try to take over the party machine with a bid to become the new chairman of the Republican national committee. Jindal is biding his time. The likeable Cajun newcomer, the nearest thing the Republicans have to an Obama figure, is worth a flutter.
This post is taken from Prospect’s monthly Washington Watch, available in the magazine.
Is the writing on the wall for Sarah Palin?
So tickled were Prospect by a recent post on author, poet and all-round man-of-creative-media Julian Gough’s blog that we asked him to revisit the topic for our most recent issue. The result: an Opinion piece outlining the case for Sarah Palin as America’s next poet laureate. As Gough notes, “A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges. A great poet does not self-censor; Sarah Palin seems authentically innocent of what she is saying. She could be the most natural, visionary poet since William Blake.”
As Gough also notes, others got this bandwagon rolling a little while ago. But it deserves its press, not least because the results are eerily convincing as a certain kind of free, dimly political, associative writing. My personal favourite has to be this moving tribute to innocence and youth:
A Child
When you consider
what’s going on
in this world,
the most promising
and good ingredients
in this world
is a child.
The hope
that a child brings
and just understanding that.
Being near
and dear
to my heart.
But you can make up your own. And why not try it with other politicians and would-be world leaders? Who knows, an informal poetry competition could be just the thing politics needs to reinvigorate its relationship with language, truth, beauty, and all those other things we care about in books.
Some corner of a foreign westfield
I enter Europe’s largest shopping centre from the South, noting that they have been sensible enough to stick to basic euclidean geometry with their names and navigational aids. Should I have brought a compass? It would be reassuring to know that, so long as one walks in a straight line for long enough, one will eventually be back in society. One of the first indications of the Westfield Uncanny is the presence of a shopping centre. It’s called The Village, and apparently contains high-end clothing brands. They should have made this their advertising slogan - “Westfield shopping centre: so massive, it’s got a shopping centre in it.”
Indoors, I begin to bottle it, leading me to break one of the first rules of the flaneur (’thou shalt utilise all five senses wherever possible’). I fumble for my ipod, twiddle its wheel a few times, and find the reassuring rumble of Joy Division. Once ‘Twenty Four Hours’ has come on, and Ian Curtis’s threatening baritone is booming through my ears, I feel a little safer. “So this is permanence/love’s shattered pride.” So it would seem, Ian, so it would seem. Read the rest of this entry »
Recent Comments