Author Archive for Susan Greenberg

Prospect reading group goes to town

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on September 4, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and What we're reading
. 0 Comments

Last summer I introduced the Prospect reading group to these web pages, and started posting regular reports of our discussions. They stopped when I got distracted by illness in November, but now another reading group member, Roger Grimshaw, has filled the gap with this report on a special outing…

“The Hayward Gallery on a Friday night: not the usual setting for our reading group, but August is the time of year when we let our hair down. Some 10 members caught the show ‘Psycho-Buildings’ on the South Bank in London, discussing it in a wine bar afterwards. Two books had been suggested for background reading: Jane Rendell’s Art and Architecture: A place between, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

The Rendell book looks at a wide range of recent site-specific art, all stimulated by encounters with places, and discusses the significance of artistic montage and allegory in highlighting the non-obvious. For example, drawings of archaeological rubbish pits scored into the landscaped slabs of a shopping centre may serve to expose historical and contemporary ‘consumerism’.

While many of the works reviewed in the book seem grounded enough, the underlying theory appeared dauntingly abstract and conceptual. Would the Hayward exhibition be as opaque? In the event, the buildings there included a variety of constructions, de-structions and dis-assemblings, each more or less ready to disclose its magic and mystery.

Among the ‘destructive’ pieces was an interior seemingly being blasted into pieces, with the moment held as if in freeze frame by ceiling wires attached to every fragment of wall and furniture. Another consisted of two miniature houses in collision, one Korean and one American in design and content, reflecting a clash of cultures. And there was a savage but realistic interior of walls gouged by holes as if by a giant creature searching for an escape.

The gallery’s exterior was used to display three constructions. A geodesic dome made of plastic towered over us as we entered; the walled flat roof terrace was filled with water to create a boating pool ‘in the sky’; and elsewhere a film theatre, held together by crazy scaffolding, showed art features.

The most conventionally ‘enchanting’ work was by the British  artist Rachel Whiteread, who gave us a whole village of dolls’ houses, cast in darkness, but with each tiny twinkling house lit from inside. There was a charming quality too about walking up a sharply angled aluminium tunnel, lit from an opening above to show a myriad of reflections on its surfaces. A pink staircase made of see-through cloth hinted at the real thing. 

As a group that normally discusses books, we were inevitably attracted to arguments about the role of texts as interpreters of art, whether as simple wall-plaques or as book-length discourses. There was some cynicism about the roles of art criticism and commentary in demanding deference to the work.

Was it possible to draw out the message from some of the artefacts without a textual introduction? In the case of the two houses colliding, for example, it seemed that its cultural meaning might not have come through without a textual guide, even if the extremity of the clash was obvious to the eyes.

On the other hand, how far did the texts matter, if we were prepared to be open to the experience of viewing the works in their actual, challenging state? Did not their materiality and sensuality make us view familiar things in a new light? Was it always necessary to reference the known, or could art not produce new experiences, like imaginative fiction? Was traditional art any less bound up with ideas, as distinct from simple representation?

Our discussion showed clearly, if we hadn’t known it already, that the knowledge and expectations we bring to a work are crucial in determining our responses, although these can be reinterpreted in discussion. The exhibition worked, in that it brought us individual pleasure in one way or another. But it seems that art education – in the sense of explication and clarification – needs more work, if we are to approach exhibitions like this with confidence.” 

Being a patient

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on August 29, 2008
in Arts and culture and Health and medicine
. 7 Comments

This is the second in a series related to my cancer treatment. The aim is to talk about the personal experience of illness in a broadly analytical way. The first posting looked at blood, and how its condition affects our mental state.

This time I am focusing on patienthood. When you have a serious illness, being a patient is a major occupation, and not just because of the time taken up by medical matters – although, god knows your diary commitments, all of them once Very Important, go through a rapid reclassification after diagnosis. Patienthood also involves, potentially, a change in one’s entire take on life.

One reason is that you receive massive exposure to the way doctors think, and they think in a very particular way. This is partly because of their training and specialist knowledge, but it is also simply because medicine is what they do for a living.

The things that make doctors happy are not always the things that the patient thinks of. When I was first diagnosed, doctors were happy that my tumour tested strongly for hormone receptors, because that meant they could throw an extra treatment at it. I was not happy, because I had a freaking tumour.

Doctors think in general categories rather than individual narratives. Naturally they wish the patient well, but other things are driving them. They want a good outcome – as measured against others in their field – so that their own reputation, and that of their hospital, is enhanced. They value skill and craftsmanship. I do not begrudge this. When the ultrasound specialist first spotted my tumour, after another hospital had missed it entirely, a flash of professional pride passed across her face. At one level, she was pleased. And why wouldn’t she be?

It is not just doctors who think a certain way, but medical establishments in general. When you become a patient, you submit to the system with both your mind and body. There has to be a system, of course, or nothing would get done, but when the system is deficient you end up being there for their benefit, rather than the other way around. It is a fine judgment to make, when to submit and when to challenge the system.

The everyday meaning of patient is ‘a person receiving medical treatment’ but as one person commented in a previous posting, its roots are in the Latin pati, to suffer.  A patient is therefore also defined as someone who ’suffers and endures the actions of others’. If you are a patient patient, you do it without complaint. 

The suffering results not just from surgery and medication, but from all kinds of smaller, regular invasions. My own bugbear is the canula: a piece of plumbing inserted into the vein which provides a port into the body’s interior. The insertion is painful and if the first attempt does not succeed, results in multiple bruises. It has an effect on the mind as well as body: the canula harpoons the patient’s private space and signals clearly to the world that one is enduring the actions of others.

There is a lot of information that medical people don’t think to volunteer, and if you don’t ask the right question, you may not get the answer. But you need information to know what questions to ask. So you become informed, using terms unimagined a short time ago. You start to make the same distinctions and comparisons as specialists.

The main change in outlook as a patient is the attitude to risk. I will look at this in the next posting of the series. Meanwhile, feedback is very welcome.

Why blood cells count

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on August 15, 2008
in Arts and culture and Health and medicine
. 9 Comments

This is the first in a series of postings related to my cancer treatment. The aim is to talk about the personal experience of illness in a broadly analytical way.

I am starting with blood: what it is made of, and how that affects our very being.

Blood and its qualities have long served as powerful metaphors for the human condition. And people spend a lot of time putting things into the bloodstream to alter their mental state. In the case of medical treatments, the alterations are less voluntary.

In the case of chemotherapy, you are also taking something away from the blood’s basic composition, rather than adding to it. Chemo works by killing off cells that divide and grow rapidly. This targets cancer but also catches other, more useful, cells like hair and the bone marrow, which produces red and white blood cells. So the patient feels worse during the long treatment, not better.

What is it like to receive a dose of chemo? It is like being in a pool, and someone throws you a boulder. The boulder drags you down into the water, until you shake free and float back up to the surface. In the body, the chemicals feel heavy, like an unmoved meal. They are heavy – body weight goes up by several kilos immediately after a dose, before coming down again a day or two later. 

Medicine worries a good deal about the effect of chemo on the body; specifically about the blood cell count, because a deficiency in red cells causes anaemia, and in white cells leaves you vulnerable to infection. Medicine doesn’t worry so much about the effect on the mind. (The mind, that is, as a complex process of thought and feeling, rather than a disembodied, Cartesian object.) But even when there is no physical emergency, the lack of white cells has an impact. Without those cells, you literally have no ‘fight’; no defence against a threat to existence. And this state exists at the level of feelings, not just as a physical fact.

At the lowest point in the chemo dose’s three-week cycle, it feels humanly hard to go on living. Not because you are depressed, but because you lack the basic bodily ingredients, which we otherwise take for granted, that make living possible. And in a long course of treatment this happens not just once but over and over again, leading to an accumulated feeling of precariousness. It is this specific effect, I believe, that makes chemotherapy the dreadful experience that everyone acknowledges it to be.

Future postings will look at the business of being a ‘patient’; attitudes to risk and mortality; and the impact of serious illness on our relations with others.

Any feedback on these themes, or any others that you think I should consider, is very welcome.

Reports from the cell face

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on July 20, 2008
in Arts and culture and Health and medicine
. 3 Comments

Back in April, I posted something here about the unexpected depilatory effects of chemotherapy, and asked readers if they thought there was a place for the personal in the Prospect blog. More generally, I asked, what makes writing about illness interesting to others?

The response was encouraging, both on the comments board and in private messages. To sum up, people appreciate having a clear description of things that don’t usually get noticed – sheer reporting from the cell face – and a level of analysis that can connect the particular to the general.

I started scoping out some themes right away for a series of postings, but got distracted by treatment and other major life difficulties. Now I am back. The aim is to find a language to talk about the body that is neither personal nor impersonal. It’s about a particular experience, but not “my story” in narrative. That old literary form, the personal essay, delivered by blog.

The first in the series will focus on blood: how the composition of what is flowing through our veins can affect the mind, and our existence generally.

Others will look at being a “patient”; the way one learns to assess risk and mortality; and the impact of serious illness on our relations with other people.

Any feedback on these themes, or indeed others that you think I should consider, is very welcome.

 

What we are depilating: Part 2

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on April 16, 2008
in Arts and culture and Science and technology
. 7 Comments

Last time I posted on this subject, back in November 2007, it was to mourn the loss of the local beauty salon, after a takeover by a cosmetic surgery firm. Where, I asked, was I going to have my legs waxed now?

The problem is solved, for the time being. I am being treated for breast cancer, so I have no hair to remove – on my legs, or anywhere else.

Everyone knows that you lose your hair from chemotherapy – it features in a thousand television dramas. What they don’t tell you is that it hurts. Losing it, that is. First the scalp itches, dementedly. Then, when you put your hand up to push a lock of hair, each strand rocks back and forth in its follicle, like a tree trunk being levered out of the ground. Finally, after a couple of weeks, someone shouts “Timber!” and the hair falls out in clumps. Even with the warning, the final falling away is swift and shocking.

The other surprise is that head hair is not the only kind that counts. The absence of eyelashes has been a much bigger shock. Who knew? I now feel very exposed to the world, and the world is very exposed to me. When I cry, my tears splatter and leak in all directions, without hindrance.

I am not one of those people who lap up illness stories. Unless you are going through it yourself, it is not all that useful, and you don’t want to know. The narrative clichés – courage, black humour or gritty realism – are hard to fight. And my own reality, which includes personal problems beyond the illness, has been a bit too gritty. So I hesitated.

But in the end, I am interested to hear what ‘Prospect’ readers think. Is there a place for the personal in this blog, or should it remain “issues” orientated? Or a mix of the two? What makes writing about illness interesting to others?

If you want issues, I can come up with a few. My cancer was missed by the local hospital (Whittington) and was only caught later on a national screening programme. As ‘The Observer’ reported recently, missed diagnoses still result in unnecessarily harsh treatments and extra deaths.

One reason it was missed first time was because the ultrasound view was blocked by a cyst. I had asked radiology to drain the cyst but they refused – too much time and bother. I have since learned that in the US, they routinely draw the fluid from cysts of any size and redo the scan, because they know the risk of having an impeded view.

A gap in UK attitudes worth exploring? Do let me know if you have any interesting stories or information on this point.

Creative capital

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on November 25, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books and Economics
. 0 Comments

The market now laps onto so many shores that it can be odd to remember the horror provoked by the first wave of Reaganomics. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, published for the first time in 1983, was one of many efforts of that time that looked for non-market alternatives. The book became a word-of-mouth success, and was finally published in the UK this year in paperback. This made it eligible for the Prospect Reading Group’s November meeting.

Hyde, a professor of creative writing in the US, argues that in western society the balance between the gift and market economies has become too skewed in one direction. He does this by hopping from an anthropological theory of gift-giving to a detailed exegesis of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound as examples of giftedness, with a look at the Protestant reformation along the way.

There is a charm in the eccentric path of the argument, and one understands the book’s appeal as a robust declaration of the right of things to be pursued for their own sake rather than for some ulterior purpose. One of the most depressing elements of modern life is the feeling that there is now no escape from a narrowly managerial view, in which everything is instrumental and nothing counts unless it can be measured.

The book has its disappointments, however. The parts do not work together as a whole, and it becomes obvious that Hyde is not going out of his comfort zone, sticking only to the literary arts and even then, only to examples that match his transcendent ideal. Hyde has a very particular Romantic view of creativity: for him, the artist is an untutored and inarticulate genius, and emotions are separated from critical thought by a very high wall. One can make room for creativity without relying on this old trope.

At least one of his case studies may not have stood the test of time. We’ve learned a lot more since about Walt Whitman who – far from being the unworldly poet – was a busy newspaper editor and entrepreneur who wrote favourable reviews of his own work under a pseudonym.

The most fascinating passages, to me, end up being about usury in the Middle Ages, and an afterword about the impact of the end of the Cold War on government support for the arts. The alternatives that Hyde proposes for support to creative work are original, and should be explored more widely.

What we are depilating

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on November 12, 2007
in Arts and culture and Economics
. 1 Comment

First Drafts has a category called ‘What we are reading’. This posting probably comes under the rubric ‘what we are depilating’.

For the last 25 years, I have gone to the same beauty salon on the Holloway Road for leg waxes. Established by a beautician who wanted to work for herself, the Holloway branch was the first in what became a very successful London chain. The staff were competent, the prices reasonable, and appointments easy to arrange. It was also one of the few places left in this country that still offered the hot wax, not warm.

I know: you’re thinking, what’s all this frivolity in the weighty world of Prospect? On the contrary, the tale is an example of my extreme seriousness. Waxing, especially the hot variety, is more effective than other forms of depilation and lasts much longer – in my case necessitating only five visits a year. It allows me to devote less time and money to my appearance, and more on the important things in life, such as writing personal essays for this blog.

Anyway, the original salon owner decided to retire. She sold her chain to Renew Medica, an example of the new breed. Cheap and effective is out. Expensive treatments that sound medical are in. Treatments include dermal fillers, teeth whitening, micro pigmentation (ie semi-permanent makeup), hyperhidrosis control (for sweating) and sclerotherapy (for spider veins).

One can hardly blame the company for cashing in on a social trend: a greater emphasis on physical perfection, acceptance of cosmetic surgery and large audiences for television programmes such as ‘Ten Years Younger’. Distancing itself from the old-fashioned local beauty salon on its website, Renew Medica offers instead ‘medical aesthetics’ – a cheaper version of Harley Street.

I don’t really begrudge the new enterprise… except that it has ended up leaving me with less choice, not more. The leg waxing is being phased out, and I am not in the least interested in the other treatments it has to offer. Although press releases accompanying the buy-out gushed about benefiting from the old beauty salon’s ‘highest calibre professionals’, many of the old staff have now left. It looks like the new company is dismissing its customers as well.

Measuring the world

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on October 22, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books and History
. 1 Comment

The Prospect Reading Group met this month to discuss Measuring the World, by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. I wasn’t able to attend the meeting due to illness but a report was compiled by group member Caroline Ballinger, including observations from those present and a few of my own.

Measuring the World is an imagined account of the lives of two German scientific giants of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, structured around a (real? potential?) meeting between the two men later in life. The book was a literary sensation in Germany itself, and had good reviews in the UK, including in this magazine. The book was chosen following a discussion by the reading group about whether there were novels coming out of Europe as ambitious as some noteworthy examples from the US, in asking the big questions and linking the private and public spheres.

Our reading group had an interesting but rather unenthusiastic discussion about the book: interesting because of the subject matter, but unenthusiastic because of doubts about the work as a piece of writing. The most important complaint was that Kehlmann fails to make the science come alive, so that it is difficult for non-scientists to grasp the significance of the breakthroughs made by these two men. There were also questions as to whether the narrative structure – in which alternating chapters follow the careers of each man – was entirely successful, and a sense that the Humboldt sections worked better than those on Gauss.

What holds it together is the author’s ironic humour and the vivid descriptions of Humboldt’s travels to South America, which had a ‘Heart of Darkness’ feeling at times. There is also an interest in the emotional detachment of the main characters, who take to extremes the championing of the scientific and rational over the emotional, and Humboldt’s obsessive attempts to impose order on a chaotic world. There is ambivalence here: Gauss’s son Eugen loves poetry, but is also susceptible to political romanticism which can lead to extremism. Kehlmann shows sly self-awareness when he has Gauss muttering darkly about the modern fancy for fictional stories about real people.

A darker side of Prussian emotional repression emerges in a scene towards the end of the book in which the leader of the Gymnastics movement, an early expression of militant German nationalism, delivers a rant on the nation’s humiliations. One imagines that for German readers, Kehlmann’s book offers a subtle, witty examination of what it is to be German. But he also offers a view on the vagaries of power from a wider slant. In the period in which the novel is set, the United States is a newly independent nation looking with concern at the antics of powerful Spain to its south. Thomas Jefferson queries Humboldt about Spanish rule: “If one had a great power for a neighbour, one could never have enough information.”

Bloom – and Plato – still provoke

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on September 28, 2007
in Academia, Books, Philosophy and What we're reading
. 14 Comments

Back in July, on its 10th birthday, I introduced the Prospect Reading Group to this blog, and wondered out loud why reading groups were treated with such suspicion.

I promised to share our future discussions, but as things would have it, the last meeting on August 30 was a real set-to, and I’ve only had time now to pull together a report. Anything I write will inevitably reflect my own views, but hopefully members of the group – and of course anyone else – will add their comments.

The discussion focused on a nonfiction/fiction pair: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, and Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow, which reportedly used Bloom as inspiration for the main character. In the scrum over Bloom, Bellow’s novel ended up receiving a good deal less attention.

Bloom is now dead but his arguments, first published in book form in 1987, are still part of a continuing debate. Even in our relatively homogenous reading group (professional, well-educated and international) there were strong and differing responses. Many members found his book pleasantly challenging: especially the last third, about the deficiencies of modern university life. But the unfamiliarity of the material to most members of the group could be seen as proof of his main argument, that people in the west lack knowledge of their own culture’s intellectual traditions.

Bloom’s answer is to insist that all university students be acquainted with Plato, and the broad narrative of Western philosophical thought, if the best of its values are to survive. Here, our group may have offered proof for another Bloom argument, that people are not only unfamiliar with the heritage, but also unsympathetic to it: some group members joined wider critics in finding him guilty of elitism, irrelevance or neo-conservatism.

I am not in that camp, and I don’t remember finding the book hard to read (another charge) although I see that I left unmarked the entire first section, where he vents ‘grumpy old man’ prejudices about modern life. But despite its faults I find it prescient: why else do we seem to have so little to say now in defence of western values, except that we are ‘free’ to wear skimpy clothing? (I know, I know, there’s more to it than that, but I am making a point).

I would add that the main reason why Bloom is associated with the right is that, at the time he wrote the book, the left had vacated the space where ‘values’ and western intellectual heritage could be reinterpreted in a positive light. In fact, since then, it has arguably re-entered that space, but that is the topic of another blog, or article, or book.

The Prospect Reading Group is 10

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on July 23, 2007
in Academia, Arts and culture, Books and British politics
. 7 Comments

What is it about reading groups? Never done anything to hurt anyone, but still a regular target for insult. Columnists sneer at an imagined coffee klatsch of middle-aged women, while authors veer between gratitude and suspicion. Earlier this year, Zadie Smith described the reading group as the enemy of the individual reader, a delivery mechanism for a conformist culture of ‘system reading’.

Contrary evidence doesn’t seem to dent the prejudice. A study by Jenny Hartley showed that reading groups vary enormously in make-up, reading habits and method. In a recent article updating her findings, she reported that nearly half of all groups in the UK are now mixed, not women-only, and their choices are highly unpredictable – some three-quarters of all books chosen by groups in her survey were read by only one group.

On the plus side, fans cite reading groups as proof of a flourishing literary culture, like the festivals name-checked by Gordon Brown. But they might also be a sign of failure: a cultish effort to seek out small numbers of like-minded people, in an otherwise uninterested environment. It is certainly a sign of fragmentation: with so many different titles out there, how else can one find a group of people who have all read the same thing?

Of course I am biased. I started a reading group 10 years ago, before they became fashionable. The group, drawn from readers of Prospect, is still going strong. Why did I start it? Because I read a lot, and enjoy discussing what I am reading with other people. The views of others bring fresh insights, and the effort of communicating makes me distill my own thinking. Why has it continued? Because other people feel the same way. Why do I bother to counter these attacks? Because the activity they are describing is unrecognisable.

In a reading group, we remain individual readers. We read on our own, and bring our thoughts to the discussion. It seems odd to assume that discussion equals conformity. There is some collectivity, which is not the same thing: we have certainly developed a collective memory, saved for posterity in monthly email reports. I hope eventually to put all 10 years of our reports in the public domain, to see if others find them interesting. An outside observer may even be able to find an implicit ‘system’ in our response, though I would say our group has resisted any totalising theories.

If there is anything that unifies our response, it is not critical theory but a form of poetics. Our group includes several writers and editors who are interested in how literature is made, from the maker’s point of view. One suspects that a more general audience is interested in this too, hence the success of commentaries like John Mullan’s Guardian book club series. But this only works when the audience is taken seriously. John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel, for example, makes a cynical (mis)calculation that it can get away with sheer waffle, because it is not for a ‘professional’ audience. Zadie Smith herself, who is including her essays on writing in a forthcoming collection, will find an enthusiastic market among reading group members – or may do so, if she can cut out the insults.

What does ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ mean in this context? As a professional wordsmith I believe there is a distinction, but also notice an interesting trend. In the Web 2.0 world of user-generated content, the task of selecting and evaluating content simply moves downwards, from supposedly elitist gatekeepers to the ordinary punter. In response, the ordinary punter has started to train for the task, and become a little more professional. Hence the interest in university writing courses and degrees in vocational media subjects. Hence also the move in our reading group from vague talk of what people ‘like’ (or not), to more disciplined discussions about the choices writers make. In other words, we are looking ‘at’ the work, not just ‘through’ it, as Richard Lanham puts it in The Attention Economy.

Prospect has not yet made too much of its ‘offline community’ of readers: this blog is a start. From the end of August, I shall be posting regular notes about our discussions. At the next meeting, we will be looking at Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, reportedly based on Bloom. I hope to see you here again.

• Read about the Bloom discussion here

• Read the October discussion here, on Measuring the World

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