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Thursday 30 April 2009

Simple words...

My friend the poet and publisher Micheal Schmidt once told me that he liked poetry that was made up of simple words. "Sex, love, food... the vital things are simple words," he said to me (or something like that). I took his point, and certainly agree that it isn't obscure vocabulary that makes e.g. the late Beckett such a vital (and challenging) read. But should we always eschew the arcane? And is it arcane to write "arcane" when I could have written "difficult"? Wrong to have written "eschew" when I could have said "avoid"? It surely isn't always sesquipedelian ostentation to use the multisyllabic when the monosyllabic would have fitted almost as well - is it? (Surely only a sesquipedelian ever invokes the term sesquipedelian.) Isn't the abstruse sometimes the more accurate? The recondite might not be as recognisable, but it might be the more rigorous; simple might simplify to the point of becoming wrong, complex might be confounding but absolutely correct (now, is "absolutely correct" a pleonasm? Oh, bother!) Isn't the move from "fitted almost as well" to "fitted exactly" the move from a basic to more a complex vocabulary? Well, not always, for sure...

Beckett's Proust was written in 1931, when he was 25 years old, and exhibits the sort of language use one might expect from a precociously gifted academic rather than a poet. The poetry of the later work, when Beckett showed us impotence, futility, loss, has shorn its lexicon of flash, academic jargon: Worstward Ho is far, far from simple, but its difficulty doesn't arise from tricky terminology. His prose, now, is exactly as Michael would like it: simple words directing us towards vital things (and non-things, of course: to the unsayable). Still, between the baby-language of the modern media and the blistering, elementary severity and clarity of Beckett, there does lie a place where being wordy is surely just about ok. I'd guess that even Michael would want me to know the difference between disinterested and uninterested, whilst expecting me to be neither with regard to sex, love, food... and poetry.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, poetry, samuel beckett

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Tuesday 28 April 2009

On Human Smoke again

In Max Dunbar's response to Stephen Mitchelmore's critique of Max's review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke (yes, the internet is an echo-chamber!), Max quotes Steve's summing-up of some of the parallels between World War Two and the Iraq war. The parallels are important -- and it is especially important to draw attention to them to someone who suppported the slaughter in Iraq, as Max did.

Max quips that "it may stun Mitchelmore to know that the facts around Western support for Saddam, and the true motives behind the 2003 invasion, are available outside the Medialens chatboards." Well, indeed. But there is an interesting slippage when Max continually suggests that, with regard to that invasion, and to WW2, "it’s outcomes, not motives" that matter. This is, of course, a very convenient way to forget -- to ignore the history of -- how and why wars occur, how we got into Iraq, how the invasion was sold to us, and how those who bought the lies that created the conditions that allowed for invasion further communicated those lies to their own constituencies. This is very similar to WW2. The myth, so often told that very many people do believe it, is that the Allies were White Knights who came to the defence of the Jews. Are we to forget that that is a lie because "it’s outcomes, not motives" that matter? Because saving the Jews became the post-facto justification for the Allies war to prevent German imperial ambitions, are we to forget the anti-semitic nature of much Anglo-American domestic discourse in the 20s and 30s (and beyond)? Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the outcome of the Anglo-American adventure in Iraq has been chaos and death on a huge scale. If "it’s outcomes, not motives" that matter then the outcome here has been catastrophic for ordinary Iraqis.

Mitchelmore, we are told, "upbraids" Max:

... for using the term 'lazy moral equivalence': which is no surprise, as it's a technique he's fond of using. Thus: 'The recent invasions by US and UK forces are direct equivalents of the Nazi assaults on Poland and Russia'.

But as Steve makes very, very clear in his example (which Max does not quote in full): "The recent invasions by US and UK forces are direct equivalents of the Nazi assaults on Poland and Russia in that they violate the sixth Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention." A factual equivalency then, not a moral one.

Max jokes that those who supported the slaughter in Iraq don't bear any responsibility for what has happened there ("I suppose that's for the tribunal to decide when we are all shipped off to the Hague"). Well, sadly, those who clamour for war from the safety of their front rooms don't have to take responsibility for their words, but they should be reminded that they help create the conditions that make war acceptable and that they thus bear some of the responsibilty for the death and destruction that war brings. It might be a laughing matter for Max, but I reserve the right not only to find it far from funny, but to find such a political position morally reprehensible.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics

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Monday 27 April 2009

On our "very, very clever" bankers

On Radio 4's Start the Week this morning, one of Andrew Marr's guests was the Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, author of Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. Tett, Marr told us, has been credited with being one of the first journalists to have spotted the then oncoming credit crunch.

Tett explained that "if finance is made out to be very complicated, only a small number of people understand how it works, and so the people who have that knowledge are in a very strong position." Later in the interview Marr gushed about those same bankers -- bankers who were called Masters of the Universe by their friends in the media -- that "we have to remember, these are very, very clever people." Tett, almost by reflex, affirmed this characterisation, and then moved on to explain a little more about the macho, hothouse atmosphere of the City. But it was earlier, when she said that "if finance is made out to be very complicated" that she had it down.

I'm not sure why, but it has become something of a commonplace that, amidst the ruins of the global financial crisis, one thing that journalists seemingly have to do -- perhaps embarrassed that, unlike Tett, they didn't see this thing coming -- is affirm the complexity of the financial markets and, simultaneously, the matchless intelligence of bankers and traders. This is a very curious and incredibly tendentious way of reading the banking collapse. Strangely, too, this constant affirmation of bankers' braininess runs alongside a conflicting narrative: that the slicing and dicing of debt got so complicated that the "very, very clever" bankers no longer understood their -- our -- level of financial risk. So, they were "very, very clever", but they (or their clients) didn't understand the tools they were using or what they were doing with them? If a gaffer gave one of his carpenters a saw and told him to hold it by the serated edge you wouldn't think that either the gaffer or the carpenter was much of a brainbox; quite rightly, you'd think both were idiots. Understanding what credit default swaps or collateralized debt obligations are doesn't make you "very, very clever" -- it just makes you expert of a very limited vocabulary. It is most akin to being a teenage boy. Our children can talk in acronyms, abbreviations and neologisms about stuff that we don't really have too much of a clue about, but it doesn't tend to make us think that they are geniuses. They aren't. And neither, Andrew Marr take note, are any of those stupid bankers.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, politics

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Thursday 23 April 2009

Charity auction at The Book Depository

Over at The Book Depository, we are having a charity auction with all the proceeds going to Downsed International ("Down Syndrome Education International works around the world to improve education for young people with Down syndrome"):

To celebrate our new website launch we asked our favourite authors and illustrators to design an exclusive bookmark to be sent out to our customers to thank you for your support, whilst raising money for a worthwhile cause.

We were absolutely thrilled with the results, with fantastic bookmarks from people as diverse as cartoonist Matt from The Daily Telegraph to Noel and Dave from the Mighty Boosh - take a look for yourself, you can see the full list of bookmarks at the bottom of this page.

From the 18th April we will be enclosing one of these exclusive, limited edition, Book Depository bookmarks with all orders from the site (whilst stocks last of course). There are 18 bookmarks to collect. If you have a favourite, or indeed want to collect all 18, you will need to get your orders in quick, as they are in limited supply.

And what's more, you also have the chance to own the original artwork! Starting on Thursday 23rd April we will be auctioning off the signed originals on eBay, with all the monies raised being donated to Downsed International. (More.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, the book depository

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Tuesday 07 April 2009

Marina Hyde's Celebrity

My mini-review of Marina Hyde's Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy over on The Book Depository:

It is hardly original suggesting that celebrity -- and our obsession with it -- is absurd, but Marina Hyde's excellent book also fully debunks the idea that it is harmless. Hanging our collective hopes on the do-gooding activities of entertainers is not only childish and ridiculous it is, Hyde argues, dangerous.

For sure, celebrity-worship has been around for a long time, but in our media-saturated age the easiest copy to write and publish normally involves Someone Famous doing Something (anything!). Look at any tabloid "news"paper -- news is now simply what A. N. Actor has recently got up to, however dull or tawdry. Tragically, what now passes for more substantive copy is when Someone Famous does Something for Charity. But obscenely overpaid mannequins lecturing us to cough-up our hard-earned on their personal hobby-horse is no way to solve the world's problems.

Is there anything more senseless then Sharon Stone attending the World Economic Forum or Jude Law lecturing us about the Taliban? Hyde doesn't think so. Ginger Spice may well be a goodwill ambassador, but all that shows is that even the UN has bought into our collective inanity and fawning in the face of fame.

So, what is the solution? Hyde doesn't really offer one, but the first step might be simply to laugh at the pomposity of the performing monkeys we've insanely begun to worship. Hyde's book is as good a place as any to start our much-needed celebrity detox!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, the book depository

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Thursday 02 April 2009

More from Mitchelmore on TKO

Now that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is all but decided (see details about the shortlist here) I'm feeling the need to opinionate so, next week, I'll try to pick up the blogging baton again (not least because I want to write about the IFFP09 shortlist)...

In the meantime, Mr Mitchelmore is in superb form opinionating once again about Littell's The Kindly Ones:

The Kindly Ones is perhaps the first novel I have read and felt the need to write about before any hype kicked in. Had it been another, quieter publication, such as Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee or Thomas Glavinic's Night Work, then the review itself would have been enough. All three novels, however different and however removed from the vicious modernist circle familiar to this blog, prompted long attention because they opened a space making narrative possible, even necessary. Or, to put it another way, the space became palpable only through writing like this. Each review was an attempt to make this space clear and thereby to ease future readers into a different kind of reading than that practised elsewhere (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, IFFP09, personal

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