tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24133280058739529142024-03-13T06:45:51.888-07:00Paperback ThroneLaura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-80214969363629118002012-08-26T17:14:00.001-07:002012-08-26T17:14:17.492-07:00Recommends: The Birds<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pw8O4rnuYMo/UDq38C_vPvI/AAAAAAAAAOc/tAAkmoLSQjI/s1600/doodle%2Bparrot.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pw8O4rnuYMo/UDq38C_vPvI/AAAAAAAAAOc/tAAkmoLSQjI/s200/doodle%2Bparrot.jpg" width="140" /></a>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m9rmP2SoAZ4/UDq4AkWhQBI/AAAAAAAAAOo/VgIy9r7fIQk/s1600/salmon%2Bparakeet.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m9rmP2SoAZ4/UDq4AkWhQBI/AAAAAAAAAOo/VgIy9r7fIQk/s200/salmon%2Bparakeet.jpg" width="139" /></a> </div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nruWJNveVf4/UDq4JcXhA6I/AAAAAAAAAO0/N1ldRUzz9L8/s1600/twogreen.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nruWJNveVf4/UDq4JcXhA6I/AAAAAAAAAO0/N1ldRUzz9L8/s200/twogreen.jpg" width="125" /></a>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q6A0dbfIuIs/UDq4SJ-vRdI/AAAAAAAAAPA/u0q9U3Hm-cA/s1600/yellow%2Bbird%2Bdescending.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q6A0dbfIuIs/UDq4SJ-vRdI/AAAAAAAAAPA/u0q9U3Hm-cA/s200/yellow%2Bbird%2Bdescending.jpg" width="142" /></a> </div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QuD6WdKJZaA/UDq4XivlkVI/AAAAAAAAAPM/aKGNjPT2kv0/s1600/white%2Bcrested%2Bbird.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QuD6WdKJZaA/UDq4XivlkVI/AAAAAAAAAPM/aKGNjPT2kv0/s200/white%2Bcrested%2Bbird.jpg" width="128" /></a>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-e8RitOplw3k/UDq4cTCagqI/AAAAAAAAAPY/7kX69ZjoSpo/s1600/trio%2Bparakeets.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-e8RitOplw3k/UDq4cTCagqI/AAAAAAAAAPY/7kX69ZjoSpo/s200/trio%2Bparakeets.jpg" width="131" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/">Prospect</a> </i>(Issue 198) </span>
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<br />
<b>Happy Birthday Edward Lear: 200 Years Of Nature And Nonsense</b><br />
<i>The Ashmolean Museum, 20th September 2012 - 6th January 2013</i><br />
<br />
Literary conspiracy theorists set a lot of store by pedigree. Last year, Anonymous dusted off the claim that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Queen Victoria trumps Tennyson (a mere Lord) as the author of ‘In Memoriam.’ Edward Lear tried to quash rumours that it was really his patron the Earl of Derby who wrote his nonsense verse.<br />
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It must have been a tempting theory: Lear was known for most of his life as a serious landscape painter, who travelled through the Mediterranean, Egypt and India making sketches. The Ashmolean’s collection includes his oils of the plains of Lombardy, and a sweeping view of the pass of Thermopylae. As a young man, he published a book of watercolours of parrots, which garnered comparisons with Audubon, and had the distinction of being the first collection drawn entirely from nature rather than stuffed birds. <br />
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Yet seen alongside his illustrated poems, the idea that they aren’t by the same person seems nonsensical. Even if his “Old Man of Thermopylae / Who never did anything properly” has outlived the majestic scene he painted. <br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photos via <a href="http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hou02192">Harvard</a></span>
Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-3032046661707062542012-08-01T09:52:00.000-07:002012-08-01T09:52:12.726-07:00Recommends: Hardy fest<span style="font-size: xx-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/prospect-recommends-august-guston-hardy-troilus-cressida-simple-life/">Prospect</a> </i>(Issue 197) </span>
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<br />
<b>The 20th International Thomas Hardy Conference & Festival</b><br />
<i>Dorchester, 18th-26th August</i><br />
<br />
For at least the last decade of their marriage, Emma and Thomas Hardy had become so estranged that she had moved into the attic. Yet after her death in 1912, Hardy began an outpouring of desolate elegies, imagining himself haunted by her: “still she rides gaily / In his rapt thought / On the shagged and shaly / Atlantic spot…”<br />
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This is one strand of Hardy’s life and work picked out at the Thomas Hardy Festival, where the “Emma poems” (recently given new life in a slim volume selected by Claire Tomalin) will be read with piano accompaniment. Musical interpretations of Hardy abound, and there will be walking tours of the sites in his novels and performances of his work by poets Roger McGough and Daljit Nagra. Among the lectures given during the week, Professor Michael Irwin will speak on “The good little Thomas Hardy: a century of condescension.” No danger of that here.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-19237482991017313772012-07-06T10:12:00.000-07:002012-07-06T10:19:21.515-07:00Recommends: Prosthetic fantastic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e7xgTMKdaUY/T_cdqa7RMqI/AAAAAAAAAMA/qq73gk7S-Xo/s1600/prosthetic_nose.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e7xgTMKdaUY/T_cdqa7RMqI/AAAAAAAAAMA/qq73gk7S-Xo/s320/prosthetic_nose.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/prospect-recommends-july-titian-natalie-duncan-hitchcock-wellcome-superhuman-mark-haddon/">Prospect</a> </i>(Issue 196) </span>
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<b>Superhuman</b><br />
<i>Wellcome Collection, 19th July-26th October</i><i></i><br />
<br />
A photograph of Thomas Hicks, winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon,
propped up by two men as he stumbled towards the finish line is one of
sporting history’s oddest images of victory. Whereas a failed dope test
can now ruin a career, Hicks quite legitimately dosed up on strychnine
in brandy during the race to boost his endurance.<br />
<br />
The Wellcome Collection’s “Superhuman” exhibition shows the various
aids men and women have used to try to achieve things that had
previously seemed beyond human power. Often these are everyday
objects—the exhibition includes false teeth, tubes of lipstick and an
iPhone. More interesting are those paintings and photos which contain
the suggestion of an enhancement. For example, a pair of spectacles with
a silver nose attached to them present a mystery, until you read that
they were worn in the 19th century by a woman disfigured by syphilis.<br />
<br />
The show includes prototypes and portrayals of enhancements that have
never been realised, as well as those which have become
near-indispensable. Side by side, the failures make the successes seem
all the more fantastical.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-82361065434622626562012-06-06T09:36:00.000-07:002012-07-06T10:19:37.040-07:00Recommends: Poetry Parnassus<span style="font-size: xx-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/art-books/wittgenstein-gatz-prometheus-billy-bud/">Prospect</a> </i>(Issue 195) </span>
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<br />
<b>Poetry Parnassus</b><br />
<i>Southbank Centre, 26 June-1st July</i><br />
<br />
What is the difference between a poem and a song? In a spoof YouTube
video the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon wryly claimed to
detect an allusion to King Lear in the lyrics of Ke$ha’s hit song “TiK
ToK” (sample lyric “oh oh oh”). But he will reflect on the question
more seriously this year when he delivers the Poetry Society’s Annual
Lecture, “The Word on the Street—Parnassus and Tin Pan Alley.”
Muldoon’s poetry, laced with obscure words and far-flung puns, has
earned him the nickname the “Puck of Princeton” (where he teaches) and
he is just as bracing as a lecturer.<br />
<br />
His address will be a highlight of the Poetry Parnassus, a six-day
festival of poetry at the South Bank Centre, presided over by Simon
Armitage. Planned to coincide with the Olympics, poets from all 204
countries represented in the games will gather for a marathon of
readings, essays and workshops. Fittingly, there will be a tribute to
Ted Hughes, who championed foreign writers as co-founder of the journal
Modern Poetry in Translation. “The amazing boom of translation,” Hughes
told The Paris Review in 1995, had had the greatest effect on poets
after the war, including his wife Sylvia Plath: “And she never heard
the Beatles.”Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-75536473863794519652012-05-15T11:49:00.001-07:002012-05-15T11:50:36.883-07:00Review: The Language Wars by Henry Hitchings<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mNuqO0-HmGU/T7KlBco5QvI/AAAAAAAAAL0/5LT9hVoehZc/s1600/languageofwars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mNuqO0-HmGU/T7KlBco5QvI/AAAAAAAAAL0/5LT9hVoehZc/s200/languageofwars.jpg" width="125" /></a></div>
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<br />
WHAT IS THE good of books on “proper English?” If you felt self-conscious about the way you spoke in the late nineteenth century, you might throw yourself on the mercy of Oliver Bell Bunce’s guide, from 1883, to good English. Its title, Don’t, is menacingly negative, but at least it promises some definitive rules. “Don’t say lady when you mean wife,” Bunce counsels. “Don’t fail to exercise tact”; “Don’t speak ungrammatically.” The last two examples are curiously roundabout and non-specific, but Henry Hitchings finds them “pernicious.” Writing like Bunce’s, he says, reinforces the unhelpful belief that “the avoidance of mistakes is more important than the achievement of excellence.”<br />
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Yet Hitchings’s new book points out all of the ideological pitfalls of debating language use, and he takes pains to avoid falling into them himself. Where Bunce’s aspirational Victorian readers wanted to learn to speak “proper English,” Hitchings’s presumably want to know what their attitude to “proper English” should be. On the first page, Hitchings half apologizes for putting the word “proper” in inverted commas: “I might have deployed them in several other places, save for the suspicion that you would have found them irritating.” This bit of courtesy is tongue-in-cheek, but it is followed by a straight-faced justification: “notions such as ‘proper,’ ‘true meaning’ and ‘regional’ are all contentious.”<br />
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Hitchings’s point is not a trivial one. But too often this cautiousness saps the sense of fun suggested by claims such as the following: the history of language disputes, he writes, is “the history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance.” Hitchings admits that he is part of this “mad confederacy,” a racket of writers who thrive on attacking other people’s illogical usage. He winces when he hears someone say “between you and I” instead of “between you and me.” Where Bunce would yell “don’t!” (he wrote under the playful pseudonym “Censor”), Hitchings denies himself an emotional response to the words. “Even as I wince, my inner linguist recognizes that the response is aesthetic and is one which I have been conditioned to express.”<br />
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The inner linguist is bound by a descriptivist’s code of honor: instead of instructing people how they should use English, he should simply describe how they tend to use it without making value judgements. This may be more noble than his aesthetic response—which could be to wince, but which could equally be delighted laughter, or sympathy—but it is only the aesthetic response that can persuade someone to change the way he uses language, for better or worse. To use an example that Hitchings quotes, Benedick is wrong-footed by Beatrice’s inventive way of speaking in Much Ado About Nothing. He concedes, “Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so forcible is thy wit.” It is no coincidence that it takes an effort of seduction to bring about a change in the meaning of a word as well as a change of heart in a sparring partner.<br />
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...<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Read more at <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/language-wars-history-proper-english-henry-hitchings">The New Republic</a> </span>Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-1562624786494919712012-04-25T20:20:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:55:27.796-07:00Feature: Modern Magic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vKxcSBODpK4/T5i7fPCKVzI/AAAAAAAAALc/H-HXeXcq0tk/s1600/houdini.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vKxcSBODpK4/T5i7fPCKVzI/AAAAAAAAALc/H-HXeXcq0tk/s320/houdini.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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I wrote this feature ("<a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/04/for-my-next-trick/">For my next trick</a>") about stage magic and scepticism for <i>Prospect</i> magazine. Two of the most interesting magicians I spoke to were <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Jermay">Luke Jermay</a>, who read my mind alarmingly specifically in Finsbury Park's Costa Coffee, and "scholarly magician" <a href="http://www.todd-landman.com/">Todd Landman</a> (of Essex University's political science faculty by day). They follow in a long tradition of magicians, stretching back to Houdini, who make no claim to supernatural gifts. Yet audiences impressed by the shows' artistry find themselves caught between a desire to believe and the will to doubt.<br />
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Here's an excerpt:<br />
<br />
In his “scholarly magic” shows, Todd Landman uses tricks to make people reconsider the way they think. He says that, for a recent trick he performed at a party, he stopped a woman’s watch. She said, “‘That’s fantastic, you stopped the second hand for five ticks.’ But others were staring at me with their arms crossed over their chests, and said: ‘You didn’t stop her watch; you suspended our belief in time for five seconds.’ So I ask: which is more plausible? I love that grasping for explanation.”<br />
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It is nothing new for illusionists to deconstruct and debunk magic that pretends to be supernatural. Landman follows in the footsteps of James Randi, a Canadian-born conjurer and escape artist, who has been the magic world’s arch-debunker since 1972, when he claimed that self-declared psychic Uri Geller’s spoon-bending could be achieved by sleight. In 1996, Randi established a $1m prize for proof of the paranormal. It has yet to be awarded.<br />
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Derren Brown makes no psychic claims for his shows. He too is sceptical of the supernatural, and is a vocal supporter of the new atheism that has become a prominent pillar of rationalist thought in recent years. Brown draws parallels between religious or superstitious beliefs and the belief an audience experiences when they are taken in by one of his tricks. Encouraging sceptical thought is something of a personal cause for Brown, who was an evangelical Christian in his teens and twenties. In 2008, he appeared on biologist Richard Dawkins’s Enemies of Reason TV series, telling him: “I wanted to be able to defend my non-belief as strongly as I should have been able to defend [my religion] as a believer.” [...]<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Read more at <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/04/for-my-next-trick/">www.prospect-magazine.co.uk </a></span>Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-71088285974581295122012-03-21T19:39:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:47:45.512-07:00Recommends: Detective Weekend<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/03/prospect-recommends-april/">Prospect</a> </i>(Issue 193) </span>
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<br />
<b>Sleuths! The English Riviera Festival of Crime and Thriller Writing</b><br />
<i>Various venues in Torbay, 18th-21st April, Tel: 01803 665 800</i><br />
<br />
Although most fictional detectives are eccentric loners, crime fans
are an ever-expanding mass. Witness the cult following of Danish TV
thriller <i>The Killing</i> or the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s <i>Millennium</i>
trilogy, which has spawned a film franchise and inspired a clothing
line by H&M. But the Queen of Crime is still Agatha Christie, whose
books have been translated into over 100 languages (a world record) and
whose play <i>The Mousetrap</i> is the longest running (from 1952 to the present) in the West End.<br />
<br />
The fourth annual Sleuths! crime-writing festival takes place over a
long weekend in Christie’s hometown, Torbay. On the Sunday her grandson
Mathew Prichard will present a talk about the letters she wrote while
on a round-the-world trip in 1922.<br />
<br />
This year’s headline act, however, is Colin Dexter, who created one
of the best-known sleuths of his generation: Inspector Morse. Having
killed off Morse in 2000, Dexter recently revisited the inspector’s
youth in the prequel <i>Endeavour</i>, and he will talk about the
crime-ridden Oxford of his books at the festival. Alongside the talks,
there will be writing workshops, a mystery trail and a psychological
thriller play performed by the Bijou Theatre Company.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-44289913465249764622012-03-10T19:24:00.000-08:002012-04-25T20:52:05.753-07:00Review: Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in the <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article870035.ece"><i>Times Literary Supplement </i></a></span><br />
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Dingy flats and rented rooms are Leontia Flynn's territory in Profit and Loss. Anyone who has spent the first decades of their adult life (Flynn points out: "these days we're classed as youth / till 44") in academe or poorly paid work will recognize the succession of neglected digs she describes with a comic sense of bravery. Several of the poems in the first third of the book use the same opening gambit: "I once lived in a house ...". The effect is sometimes curious ("I once lived in a house with rusted locks"), sometimes macabre ("I once lived in the house of an infamous death"), and, cumulatively, deadpan. There is a trace of the stand-up comedian's patter in the movement of Flynn's best verse. Her most surprising opening lines are understated, with a faintly amused delivery, and she is not averse to a bawdy punchline in poems whose titles, at least, give some warning: "The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail" and "The Vibrator". The ease with which she moves between registers is most impressive in the book's centrepiece, "Letter to Friends", a long conversational poem modelled on Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron". Her manner is airy, though rarely arch like Byron's or Auden's in his "Letter" - she has a knack for working clever rhymes into the ode stanza without sounding self-satisfied, often invoking brand names in pairs such as "artefacts" / "Filofax" and "Apple" / "grapple".<br />
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Despite the collection's grim settings and even grimmer context - "a scary month for news" from the banking crisis to "the Church of Rome, / its awful crimes" - Flynn often strikes an optimistic note, and that note rings true in some of her more inventive conceits. Flynn's line in "The Girl Upstairs" celebrates the fact that "the rising wind / rumbles the bins and makes the drinkers shout" and neatly absolves the loud culprits, even as she tells us she is the girl crying in the poem. Meanwhile her description of a "mid-price, brick mid-terrace" in "The Dream House" would be flatly sarcastic if its "loving grubby marks" were not transformed by her vision of "some mythic beast in a distant land" beginning its "trek towards their life".Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-70856436961936566202012-01-09T19:36:00.000-08:002012-04-25T20:52:24.718-07:00Recommends: The Walking Artist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DCjdpPD7FVw/T5di-3DGNVI/AAAAAAAAALU/JkXG4H7cUjY/s1600/walk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DCjdpPD7FVw/T5di-3DGNVI/AAAAAAAAALU/JkXG4H7cUjY/s320/walk.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/prospect-recommends-january/"><i>Prospect</i></a> (Issue 190) </span><br />
<br />
<b>Hamish Fulton: Walk</b><br />
<i>Turner Contemporary, Margate, 17th January-7th May</i><br />
<br />
For Wordsworth, Dickens and Dr Johnson, walking was an essential
part of creative life. But Hamish Fulton is not just an artist who
walks: he describes himself as a “walking artist.” In 1973, he covered
the 1,022 miles from Duncansby Head on the coast of Scotland to Land’s
End on foot in 47 days. By the end of the trip he had decided he would
“only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks.”<br />
<br />
In the last 40 years, Fulton has climbed Everest, retraced Sitting
Bull’s footsteps at Little Big Horn and walked 106 miles without sleep
on Kent country roads. The walks, he says, shift “where the mind’s
located,” like a form of meditation. <span id="more-103956"></span>His
shows are typically minimalist: vast gallery spaces house photos from
his journeys, alongside sketches and spare, haiku-like descriptions.<br />
<br />
“Walk,” Fulton’s first solo show in nearly a decade, brings out the
political dimension of his work, the Romantic idealist. In 2009,
Fulton, who usually walks alone, began to choreograph walks in which
hundreds of people took part—walking single file, a metre’s distance
from one another, in silence. His slowed-down group walk in support of
Ai Weiwei this year was collective action as art; its geometry
is worth seeing this winter in Margate.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-23732646791893041952011-12-23T19:27:00.000-08:002012-04-25T21:20:52.280-07:00Review: Sidereal by Rachel Boast<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in the <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article846809.ece"><i>Times Literary Supplement</i></a></span><br />
<br />
The poems in Sidereal are full of people who cannot sleep. The opening lines of “Pinnacles” are characteristic of the exhausted wakefulness of Rachel Boast’s speakers: “And as there is no chance of sleep / you’ll spend the hours considering all the sounds / rain could be against the fabric of the tent ...”. Boast rearranges impressions and images like someone on the brink of sleep, merging Confucius, Canaletto and fencing terminology in another poem, but the effect is not dreamlike. She builds up “precision”, “skill” and “accurate intent” in the poem’s slender two-line stanzas until “you are ... / foregrounded in broad awareness”.<br />
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The attraction of night-time for Boast is, above all, the cosmos, and the parts of it which are not visible in sunlight. The epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes the keynote: “unmeaning they / As moonlight on the dial of the day”. It is fitting then that her collection takes its title from the sidereal day, which is based on the Earth’s relation to the stars rather than the Sun. She has a light touch with the technical language of astronomy, which she balances with conversational circumlocutions and anchors with plain, subtle rhymes. In “The Hum”, a poem about the process of writing, the effect is intimate:<br />
<br />
Then in that way you have<br />
When you persist, like a siderostat,<br />
In fixing me in your view<br />
What I’ve kept hidden becomes visible to you<br />
<br />
A drawback of Boast’s sharp-witted, poised verse, however, is that she is too easily “habituated to the Vast”. The phrase, set in italics, is borrowed (again from Coleridge), and the feeling comes at several removes. Boast is most comfortable describing unwieldy emotions in the second person, as though addressing herself calmly. It is, perhaps, too easy to conclude “Agrarian Song”, a poem which captures the spirit of a warlike “god of the soil”, with a glance at the heavens: “Plant in me / the effort of your dark songs. / Constellate them”. But when the crotchety note of the long-term insomniac surfaces in her poems, Boast is more mischievous, even bracingly rude. She says “good riddance to the English apology” in the placidly titled “Peace and Plenty”: just what is needed to disrupt the solar system.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-92207970717277829392011-12-06T19:30:00.000-08:002012-04-25T20:53:15.769-07:00Recommends: Rabindranath Tagore<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p4itZfqfEqY/T5dhmH956II/AAAAAAAAALM/TNeCB3DG8R8/s1600/tagore.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p4itZfqfEqY/T5dhmH956II/AAAAAAAAALM/TNeCB3DG8R8/s320/tagore.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">First published in <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/11/prospect-recommends-december/"><i>Prospect</i></a> (Issue 189) </span></span></b><br />
<br />
<b>Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Painter</b><br />
<i>Victoria & Albert Museum, 11th December-4th March, Tel: 020 7942 2000</i><br />
<i> </i><i> </i><br />
The 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth this year has
seen a resurgence of interest in his work. Yet two of his most
prominent champions, Amartya Sen and Amit Chaudhuri, have complained
that his poems—written in Bengali and difficult to translate—are
under-read in the west.<br />
<br />
Unlike his poetry, Tagore’s paintings do not suffer from the
language barrier; he even declined to give them titles. An exhibition
opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December offers another
approach to this extraordinary figure, who had already won the Nobel
prize for literature when he took up painting in his sixties.<br />
<br />
Tagore’s early sketches—doodles he drew around the crossed-out words
and revisions on his manuscripts—are some of his most immediate works.
They show fantastical creatures, which he would later describe in a
typically poetic fashion: “a bird that can only soar in dreams” or “a
probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence.”<br />
<br />
On loan from Visva-Bharati University, many of the paintings on show
have never been displayed outside India, where Tagore’s work has been a
major influence on artists such as Jamini Roy and Eleena Banik. This
exhibition, one of only a handful in Britain since the 1930s, is a rare
chance to appreciate Tagore first-hand.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-47099297203462854722011-11-18T19:22:00.000-08:002012-04-25T20:53:38.554-07:00Recommends: The Genius of Illumination<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/10/prospect-recommends-november/">Prospect</a> </i>(Issue 188) </span><br />
<br />
<b>Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination</b><br />
<i>British Library, 11th November-13th March 2012, Tel: 01937 546546</i><br />
<br />
The illustrations in Henry VIII’s personal copy of the Psalms are as revealing as the annotations he made in its margins. On display at the British Library from November, the drawings show a stout, doublet-clad figure—indistinguishable from the Tudor king—doing battle with Goliath and posing as King David. Jean Mallard, the artist and scribe, clearly knew how to flatter.<br />
<br />
The library’s first major exhibition of illuminated royal manuscripts—beautifully decorated, handwritten volumes collected by the kings and queens of England—gives a fascinating insight into their owners’ lives. Ranging from the 9th to the 16th centuries, the exhibition includes a parchment roll nearly five metres long, tracing the genealogy of the royal family back through William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Saxon kings. One of the most intriguing manuscripts is a 13th-century bestiary describing real and imaginary creatures, accompanied by moral lessons. A lion’s skull, excavated from the Tower of London’s moat, is displayed alongside it as a reminder that the king of the beasts had his place at court, among the exotic animals of the royal menagerie.<br />
<br />
The manuscripts on show are remarkably well preserved, having remained hidden from view in private collections for centuries. This vibrant exhibition offers a chance to appreciate the beauty of the handmade book, but also to see some of the best surviving examples of medieval and Renaissance decorative art as art in its own right.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-72683983331968635142011-10-15T18:21:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:53:59.898-07:00The Salt Book of Younger PoetsFive of my poems are printed in the anthology. Four new ones: "The Winter Empress," "Mistakes in Closed Captioning," "Relics" and "The Wife’s Lament." "Apollo’s Hyacinths" first appeared in <a href="http://pomegranate.me.uk/submission/read/apollos-hyacinths"><i>Pomegranate</i></a>.<br />
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<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Salt-Book-Younger-Poets-Anthologies/dp/190777310X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335316920&sr=8-1"><i>The Salt Book of Younger Poets</i></a> showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.<br />
<br />
N.B.: The <i>Independent</i> recommended that you <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-10-best-valentines-gifts-6611977.html?action=gallery&ino=6">buy a copy for your Valentine</a>.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-86000477926990277532011-08-17T19:49:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:54:15.607-07:00Review: Sandgrain and Hourglass by Penelope Shuttle<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in the <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/"><i>Times Literary Supplement</i></a></span><br />
<br />
Penelope Shuttle invokes Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour” in her title, Sandgrain and Hourglass. These poems of loss and mourning, following from Redgrove’s Wife, pay tribute to her late husband Peter Redgrove’s love of “the microcosmic – / sandgrains, water droplets / chips of granite . . . ” and range across continents, from Penzance to Baghdad, by way of meditations on “Distance” and “Telling the Time”. With a glancing comparison to Rembrandt, “the Master of the Small Landscape”, Shuttle also ushers in allusive worlds of painting, literature, hagiography and folklore, into which her grief expands. In “Gifts”, she offers to take the sufferings of the famously unfortunate upon herself, but at the same time enters into a competition, as though challenging them: “Take my breasts / St Agatha / Take my tongue Philomela”. <br />
<br />
Anne Boleyn, John Milton and Hannibal Lecter – Shuttle’s pantheon includes those who inflict pain as well as those who suffer – are rivals too and therefore they provide her with a yardstick of sorrows. But grief proves the mother of invention in this collection, as Shuttle dreams up more devices for quantifying memories and auditing the past. <br />
<a name='more'></a>“Machine” describes a gadget for “grading kisses / on an approximate scale of 1–20”, while “In Your Sleep” takes stock of words “harvested . . . from the quiet of night”, when her husband was talking in his sleep. Shuttle does not discount these nocturnal “riches saved for a rainy day”, but she takes little comfort in them. Even the sandgrain, with its promise of cosmic insight, is reduced to part of a measuring instrument in the title poem: a particle marking the tiniest interval of time. Shuttle’s bleakest poems work through repetition and often resist any consoling resolution. Most frequently repeated is an increasingly lonely “I” at the start of a line. Lines and stanzas of unpredictable lengths spiral out from this “I” as Shuttle tries to redefine it, making her more whimsical poems read uncomfortably. <br />
<br />
The closeness of Shuttle’s “you” softens this sense of a world shrinking without the beloved in it any longer. His memory can be restored, even multiplied through a lyrical mirroring: “You have your sandgrain / and your sorrow. / I have my hourglass / and my grief”. The world she rebuilds for herself can contain laughter at its own shortcomings, with its “Royal Society for the Promotion of Loneliness” and box of tissues in every room, but also the “wren song” of modest happiness, the self-sufficient pleasures of the singer “who keeps his shop in his throat”.<br />
<br />Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-42142992230498410092011-08-17T19:43:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:54:50.162-07:00Review: Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in the <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/"><i>Times Literary Supplement</i></a></span><br />
<br />
The manufacturers of Dragon speech recognition software should be flattered by the title poem of Fleur Adcock’s most recent collection. “Dragon Talk” ought to describe an elderly matriarch’s sharp tongue, as Adcock later hints in a picture of her granddaughter and baby “just off to a lecture on Beowulf”. Instead, the discovery of this resource, which frees writing from fine motor skills, sparks a love affair with the program’s “phantasms” as well as its hardware: “Your microphone, kissing my lips, / inhaled my words”. <br />
<br />
Adcock’s spirited appreciation of this new technology is in keeping with her lifelong habit of curiosity, which enlivens this largely autobiographical collection. Its longest section, “My First Twenty Years”, approximates a child’s outlook, with often hesitant descriptions of immediate circumstances. Adcock’s line of vision typically meanders through apparently straightforward, unrhymed lines, recalling inventions and fads with a mixture of clarity and awe. Meanwhile, she raises one eyebrow at the enduring innovations of her time: “case solved – I think” is her verdict on the post-1945 success of the Biro. The appended misgiving may have something to do with the fate of the less popular “Glitterwax”, which she calls “the apotheosis of modelling clay”. It is difficult to sing the praises of modern technology unreservedly, if tastes can be so unpredictable that “the world has decided to live without it”, this “plasticine of the gods.”<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The challenge of Dragon Talk is, then, to adapt, just as Adcock adapts in her “First Twenty Years” to a world at war, leaving her home in New Zealand and moving from house to house in England, as she and her family are repeatedly bombed out. There is an unphased quality to Adcock’s verse, which is conversational and direct, while moving at an unhurried pace throughout. Adcock embraces technical glitches, both for their colour (her computer types “rain or ring” for “wren”) and their comic turns (it spells “doom to romance / by writing ‘flotation’ for ‘flirtation’”), though the limits of her vision perhaps approach in “A Petition”; her prayer to see beauty in Leylandii and loft extensions verges on sarcasm as she asks, “Make me a devotee of Health and Safety”.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-68177644469385738422011-08-17T19:37:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:51:53.765-07:00Review: The Gift of Boats by Jane Routh<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in the <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/"><i>Times Literary Supplement </i></a></span><br />
<br />
An incomplete and often unreliable photographic record is the starting point for many of Jane Routh’s reflections in The Gift of Boats. Sometimes old snapshots are misleading. If the poet remembers “the exact shade of pink” her bike was painted, why is she “smiling and proud” next to a black Raleigh in “Memory’s Bicycles”? But when a picture could recover the lost “faces for names” in Routh’s notebooks, she finds “memory’s camera not even unpacked for ordinary days”. Getting the shot means being prepared at any moment and that is not likely, Routh suggests, in middle age, “when memory’s seen it before / and isn’t laying much down”. In these poems, taking a photograph is an event in itself, which alters its subject, except for the rare master “so light on his feet / as not to disturb even the air”.<br />
<br />
While a poem on the page does not disturb the air, Routh’s poems ask to be read aloud, making much of plosive and onomatopoeic disturbances. Many begin with a jolt (“Better scuttled”, “World comes knocking”) and gather momentum through the modulations of alliterative lines (the “re-caulked and commodious hull”). With a broken photometer in her pocket, Routh embraces photgraphy’s imperfections and its blind spots. The darkroom replace associations “of endings, of night, of fear” with “the dark of beginnings / an orderly dark you know / your way round in” in “A Day’s Work”. Routh sees the risk in bringing something out of the dark or up from the depths. A boat would be better off “scuttled” than filled in with concrete and turned into a gaudy garden ornament amid a “square lobelia sea”, she insists in the opening poem.<br />
<a name='more'></a>She voices similar anxieties in “A Lewis Chess Piece, Her Grievance”. A queen piece, unearthed from the Hebridean seabed and now on display in a museum, recalls the deep blue of her underwater home in the spare language of someone who is already “begin[ning] to forget” the details. The poem has a mathematical elegance; Routh even mimics a chess move over the line break when she tells “how light castles / underwater”. Routh’s poems play their own tricks with snapshots, glowing with all the contradictions of a “cloudybright” photometer reading.<br />
<br />Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-28340899585845371842011-08-17T19:32:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:51:20.150-07:00Review: The Ache of Appetite by Rachel Hadas<span style="font-size: x-small;"> First published in the <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/"><i>Times Literary Supplement</i></a></span><br />
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The Ache of Appetite is firmly rooted in the everyday, as the opening “Home Remedy” suggests: “if life’s a loaf, a poem is a slice”. Yet Rachel Hadas hesitates to make sharp divisions in her real or imagined experiences: <br />
<br />
A poem need not be a diary <br />
entry or letter, dream report, or shred<br />
of the observations of the day,<br />
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.<br />
<br />
The poems that follow work through many of these forms, as Hadas recounts a dream about her doctor, meditates on a set of coasters and weighs Keats against Kafka while giving blood, all with journal-keeping closeness. The sense of an event, meanwhile, is staved off in the more self-conscious poems, with abstract titles such as “Attention”, “The Flow” and “Event Horizon”.<br />
<br />
Hadas’s preferred mode is the list, running details together without explaining their relations to one another, and often doubting their reality. Starting with “A sneeze; a gull; an argument”, detail accumulates in “Event Horizon” until the eye is lost in “Remorseless foreground, / no one thing more real than any other”.<br />
<br />
Slicing life’s loaf is not just problematic but also painful in the second half of the collection, as Hadas comes to terms with her husband’s early-onset dementia. After the “dream logic” of a chance meeting with his doctor at a railway station, Hadas is recalled “to a maimed mind / Back to a lopped life”. Writing a poem is a way of reclaiming excised experience, though falsifying memory is among its risks and it is, the short “Mnemonic” warns, all too easy to “Abstract the daily / quota; spread out; re- / distribute into parcels of energy”. Hadas is, instead, at her best when dispensing the “strong medicine” of wry humour—contemplating the loss of her husband and parents she jokes, “I’m nothing / if not an equal opportunity misser” — making light of the new language of illness and officialese that has “infiltrated” her “glossary”.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-58863164899517906572011-08-09T18:06:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:50:42.098-07:00Review: A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published at <i><a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/michael-holroyd-book-secrets">The New Republic</a></i></span><br />
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WHEN IT COMES to reading other people’s diaries, biographers claim a sort of diplomatic immunity. In what he calls his final book, Michael Holroyd gleans salacious details from the life of Ernest Beckett, a womanising English nobleman (he inherited the title Lord Grimthorpe—a name Evelyn Waugh might have struggled to coin) and minor politician. “Ernest’s diary made it clear that an innkeeper’s beautiful daughter in Naples had fallen in love with him,” Holroyd writes half-admiringly. Yet the boundary between his world and Ernest’s is blurred when he discusses the diaries with Catherine Till, who believes that she may be the late lord’s illegitimate daughter. “I thought he was insufferably pleased with himself,” she tells Holroyd. “The diary was full of trite generalisations such as ‘Fringes and flirtations go together.’”<br />
<br />
Personal links are in fact what drew Holroyd to Ernest’s story. Holroyd had already been entranced by Rodin’s bust of Eve Fairfax, Ernest’s abandoned fiancée, when he saw it in the early 1970s. Then he finds himself visiting the Villa Cimbrone, the palazzo in southern Italy where Ernest sought refuge from a disappointing career and financial embarrassment. He and Till search the house for clues to her paternity and drop in on Gore Vidal nearby. Holroyd returns seven years later at the invitation of Tiziana Masucci, who is organising a literary festival there. She is consumed by a passion for another of Ernest’s unacknowledged daughters, the novelist Violet Trefusis. “I don’t belong to them,” she says of her friends in Rome: “Violet is me!” Turning her “hypnotic gaze” on Holroyd, she convinces him of the novels’ importance.<br />
<br />
This complicated, nebulous family promises more than a colorful cast of personalities. The family invites Holroyd to become one of the characters in its story, blending biography and autobiography. It is an irresistible invitation, as he has remembered that his first subject, the writer Hugh Kingsmill, “required of the biographer some account of his or her own life as a passport for travelling into the lives of others.” This spells the end of his diplomatic immunity, but the extended Grimthorpe family leads the way here too. Through their thinly disguised autobiographies and revisionist memoirs, they provide Holroyd with models of defensive secret-telling and keeping.<br />
<br />
His book is named in honor of the enormous leather-bound volume that Eve Fairfax compiled over fifty years as a perennial country house guest. After her broken engagement, she drifted away from her family and lived on friends’ hospitality, “calculating exactly how long she could stay before her hosts became too irritated.” Each visit swelled her collection of autographs and wistful poetical tributes. Edith Sitwell’s ‘To Eve’ strikes the keynote: “I seek lost suns within your eyes;/ And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.” Hilaire Belloc, John Betjeman, and Somerset Maugham all left their mark on her book, as well as archbishops, generals and foreign royalty. Most intriguing perhaps is the signature of Mordaunt Milner—might he be Eve’s lost son, John Francis Mordaunt? Above all, Holroyd suggests, “this is a book of secrets.”<br />
<br />
The potential for scandal in Eve’s book is contained by a web of tacit agreements and antagonisms, all of them relished by Holroyd. He is an expert reader of its “great empty spaces, its undergrowth of clichés.” This is partly because the biographer in him sympathizes with the book’s contributors. They were faced with the task of saying something insightful and original about Eve, but not so original as to be presumptuous, or so insightful as to be cruel.<br />
<a name='more'></a>“Opinion differed as to whether it was better to fall back on quotation or attempt something personal,” Holroyd explains. For his part, he does both. He proposes that Vita Sackville-West’s description of Eve’s ancestral home “would have pleased [her] more than other people’s poetry.” But he also pays a personal tribute by casting his memoir in the image of Eve’s “eclectic anthology.” Like Eve, he collects people, and attempts to tell the story of his life through them. <br />
<br />
This would have seemed a quaint project to Violet Trefusis, Holroyd’s subject in the second half of A Book of Secrets. She included a veiled portrait of Eve in her novel Pirates at Play, describing her as “one of those popular elderly girls who happiness was purely vicarious … It had taken her the best part of ten years to realise that popularity could become a substitute for love.” With his oblique anecdotes about Salman Rushdie, and a footnoted reference to one of his wife Margaret Drabble’s novels, Holroyd, too, sometimes gives us his literary-social milieu instead of real emotional involvement.<br />
<br />
Violet is the perfect antidote to the biographer’s reserve. She was intensely absorbed in the social rituals of the European aristocracy, and prided herself on being the daughter of King Edward VII’s mistress. In her private life, she took her mother’s “almost obscene discretion” to new heights. Although she had no interest in men, she “amused herself madly at the expense of others.” She courted Osbert Sitwell and Gerard Wellesley to the point of engagement, before luring Denys Trefusis into a mariage blanc. All the while, she poured out her true feelings in letters to Vita Sackville-West: “If there ever were two truly primitive people, they are surely us … My days are consumed by this impotent longing for you, and my nights riddled by insufferable dreams.”<br />
<br />
Violet and Vita eloped together several times, but Vita was always drawn back to her husband, Harold Nicolson, not to mention her other lovers. Instead, she offered Violet a fantasia of “primitive” passion in her novel Challenge, based around their sexual alter egos Julian and Eve. “This book is yours my witch,” reads the dedication. “Read it and you will find your tormented soul, changed and free.” Violet, who collaborated on parts of the novel, also believed in the transformative power of the roman à clef. She vies with Virginia Woolf for both Vita’s affections and for literary achievement in her Broderie Anglaise, a parody of Orlando with herself, Vita, and Virginia Woolf recast as Anne, Lord Shorne, and Alexa.<br />
<br />
Much of Holroyd’s writing about these three women inevitably spills over into literary criticism. As champions of Violet’s novels, he and Tiziana Masucci recognise that the three writers must be read differently:<br />
<br />
…whereas Virginia was a writer, tied to no specific time, whose novels might exist for all time, Vita belonged (even in her own time) to the past, and Violet was a European writer who represented her own time.<br />
<br />
Biographically then, the richest pickings are to be found in Vita’s novels, which translate to her own past without the complications typical of great art. For Holroyd, Challenge is of interest primarily as a fictional extension of Vita’s relationships and a glimpse of her outlook.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile Violet’s French novel Sortie de Secours, or Emergency Exit, frames a problem that Holroyd, with his passport into others’ lives, must dread: “In every person there is a self-interest which in its various forms allows one to escape … The disadvantage is that one cannot always come back.” Masucci herself is an example of one who has chosen not to come back, but to advance her love affair with Violet through endless research, writing and relic-hunting. Only through their discussions of Violet’s work can Holroyd become “vicariously intimate” with Masucci.<br />
<br />
Holroyd, on the other hand, extends this extraordinary sympathy to all of his subjects. The culmination of his book is an act of imagination, in which he brings them together at the Villa Cimbrone: “finally they will all meet one another … and learn with much amazement and shaking of heads what they never knew before.” His earlier reservation (“if I were a novelist”) about rearranging their lives no longer applies. In a sense, he has already provided the medium for reconciliation between these characters, having pieced their stories together in his Book of Secrets. Although Holroyd’s own character remains its greatest secret, he does not disappear into the Grimthorpes’ faded world. By enlisting them in his memoir, he brings them back into his, trusting that everything “will at last be transmuted into the comedy of life.”Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-53776488133532287322011-05-11T17:49:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:50:22.836-07:00Review: Maggot by Paul Muldoon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published at <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/maggot-paul-muldoon"><i>The New Republic</i></a></span><br />
<br />
IN ONE OF Aesop’s fables, an overambitious frog tries to puff himself up to the size of an ox, and explodes. Paul Muldoon mocked this type of moralizing animal tale in his poem “The Frog,” in 1983. Attempts to find a “moral for our times” in the frog’s story are naïve, and threaten to turn sour, as Muldoon suggests:<br />
<br />
What if I put him to my head<br />
and squeezed it out of him,<br />
like the juice of freshly squeezed limes…<br />
<br />
The animals in Muldoon’s poems do not tell us how we should act, but they do allow us to “glimpse the possibility of what we might become.” This is how Muldoon puts it in his introduction to The Faber Book of Beasts. Writing about animals, he insists, comes with its own responsibility, the moral obligation to help people live their lives. “Nowhere is that responsibility thrown into sharper relief than in our accounts of the parallel lives of ‘our little kinsmen.’” In “Horses” (1998), for instance, Muldoon put this into practice, brooding on the parallel life of Chuang Tzu, who famously wondered whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or vice versa.<br />
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Muldoon’s new collection might be considered another “book of beasts,” an experimental bestiary. Almost all of the poems here are in some sense animal poems. Some of them—“Geese,” “A Porcupine,” “A Hare at Aldergrove”—announce as much. In others, such as “The Adoration of the Magi,” the approach is subtler. “A plume / of ox breath” and the braying of a child suggest the ox and the ass of the nativity scene. Throughout the collection, Muldoon tries to reimagine the natural world, the “sym- / biotic relationship” between man and beast, and the beastly side of man. The few poems concerned solely with people show them acting ruthlessly and evasively, as they “abbreviate / [their] most promising rlshps.”<br />
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It is unnerving that Muldoon places the maggot, a creature that feeds on the corpses of other animals, at the center of his vision. Yet he sees the process of decomposition as a source of vitality in these poems: death and decay unite all forms of life, as organic matter is eventually recycled. In reasoning this way, Muldoon himself recycles Hamlet's observation: “we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.” Of course, this view makes no special claims for human life and says nothing of respect for the dead. For Muldoon, a body “beleaguered by pupae” does not bear thinking about in itself. Instead it prompts the breezy reflection: “Who knew that humus might lie beneath ‘humane’?” There is a maggot-like etymology here, as Muldoon makes connections between words, as well as creatures, by breaking them down into their smallest parts.<br />
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The wordplay in Maggot is rarely incidental. Many of the poems seem to take their lead from word associations and figures of speech: in “Plan B,” a “KGB garotte” makes Muldoon think of a Scythian torc bracelet, which reminds him of copper wire, and then of Thomas Edison, an elephant named Topsy and Edward VII. Likewise, in “Balls” he wonders whether a culture of litigious break-ups has anything to do with the shared Latin root of testify and testes. Muldoon attaches significance to these similarities, constructing Freud’s “‘verbal bridges’ … leading to the unconscious.” By associating freely, he tries to edit himself out of the cycle of poetic composition and decomposition:<br />
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All I had to go on was the pouring of sulfur<br />
over a clog print in snow, which seemed to highlight<br />
that the poem began to self-digest<br />
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The poems offer readings of themselves, foregrounding possible connotations and coincidences. They also digest parts of the other poems in the collection. The first line of “Maggot,” for instance, picks up the last line of the preceding poem, while “Loss of Separation” recycles the refrain used in “Maggot.” The effect is that one poem seems to evolve from another, as though independent of the author.<br />
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Muldoon’s conception of the poet is undoubtedly influenced by competing theories of evolution. In this, he draws on the work of Redmond O’Hanlon, a literary critic who found traces of Darwinism in Conrad’s novels, and who makes an appearance in “Quail.” Peter Kropotkin’s theory of “mutual aid” (referenced later in the collection) has perhaps an even greater impact on Muldoon’s thinking. A trio of mutual aid poems describe the cooperation of dolphins and fishermen; a dolphin who guided ships through the treacherous Cook Strait; and the myth of Arion riding to safety on a dolphin’s back.<br />
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For Muldoon, an all-encompassing, indifferent evolutionary process seems to offer “the continual extinction of personality” that T. S. Eliot famously called for in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Muldoon has expanded on Eliot’s phrase: “This is the selflessness we find in nature, whereby individual ‘selves’ in the ‘colony of our being’ so readily accept anonymity.” It is a revealing interpretation, especially as Muldoon goes on to read “colony” in “the zoological sense … as ‘an aggregate of individual animals or plants, forming a physiologically connected structure.’” Among his efforts to reconcile his own individual talent with colony-like tradition is “Capriccio in E Minor for Blowfly and Strings,” addressed to the “homegrown surrealist” John Ashbery. Although the title promises a virtuoso performance, the poem is an ode to the unassuming maggot, who, “content to be in a crowd scene,” does not always “want a speaking part / like an animal ‘of largest size.’”<br />
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There are important emotions, however, which cannot be conveyed in a crowd scene. When an “assembly of hares” takes a decision, it is only “as if they’d had a collective change of heart.” Muldoon chooses the cliché—the mass-market phrase “change of heart”—precisely because it is heartless. But we rarely see a contrast to this heartlessness: his mention of a friend suffering from cancer later in the poem does not convince us of “her pain rising above the collective pain.” Elsewhere, Muldoon even seems to delight in a sense of detachment. In “A Hummingbird,” he indulges the absurdly frivolous small talk at a party, rhyming “fidget,” “digit’s,” “midgets” and “widget.” The social group operates mechanically:<br />
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Like an engine rolling on after a crash,<br />
long after whatever it was made a splash.<br />
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This is a criticism not just of the partygoers, but also of the lyrical momentum of the poem. Muldoon’s song does not pour forth sweetly from the “ruby-throated hummingbird,” as we might expect from the title. The poem actually takes its name from the Humming Bird, a train that ran on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad from the 1940s until its cancellation in the late 1960s. Once we are in on this joke, the poem “remakes / itself,” as it “rolls on” like its mechanical namesake.<br />
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Esoteric pranks are, increasingly, the fuel for Muldoon’s poems. He recasts Greek myth in “Arion on the Dolphin,” replacing the heroic dolphin with a ship named USS Dauphin. And the Medusa mentioned in the final canto? She once served in the fleet of the U.S. Navy too. “There’s a lot of clowning in these poems,” Muldoon explained in an interview, “A lot of acting the maggot, as we describe acting the buffoon.” If the animals in Maggot can remake themselves as engines and battleships, Muldoon suggests that we “remake ourselves as Frog Boy and Human Chimera,” the hybrid circus acts in “The Side Project.” To embrace the animal side of our nature is, apparently, to abandon the responsibilities of everyday life, and indulge in the “rank and file” tomfoolery of the big top. Imagining himself as a “satin-lined grizzly” in another poem, Muldoon wrestles with the notion that “we are slaves of duty,” which is—just about—for the best if it restrains “that selfsame man-eater.”<br />
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Muldoon’s method, then, is not all sleight of hand. And even a trick can tell us something about “what we might become.” The best moments in the collection bear out his claim that “it’s not an out-and-out hoax / when the Bearded Lady enters the blade box / to be sawn in half.” Yet Muldoon rarely gives us more than a hint of real consequences, of the limits of the illusion. Without these, even the most interesting subjects are little more than performing animals. This is what Yeats warned of in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:<br />
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Winter and summer till old age began<br />
My circus animals were all on show,<br />
...<br />
Players and painted stage took all my love,<br />
And not those things that they were emblems of.<br />
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Muldoon’s own circus animals are not likely to desert him, as he finds more and more ingenious ways to set his stage. Their performances still have the power to captivate; but only as performances, not as the complex “parallel lives” that cast a light on human nature.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-13525938995729992212011-02-15T18:01:00.000-08:002012-04-25T20:50:03.930-07:00Review: The English Opium Eater by Robert Morrison<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published at <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/english-opium-eater-dequincey-robert-morrison"><i>The New Republic </i></a></span><br />
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In a gesture of admiration, Charles Baudelaire devoted half of his Artificial Paradises to a translation of Thomas De Quincey’s memoirs. “The work on opium has been written,” he explained, “and in a manner so dazzling, medical and poetic all at once, that I would not dare add anything to it.” Would-be biographers have perhaps shared these reservations: of all the Romantics, De Quincey has received the least attention from the “life-writing” industry. He wrote so voluminously of his own experience, of the traumas of his past as well as the “shadowy world” of his opium dreams, that there is little room to speculate on his inner life. The biographer is largely consigned to rehashing De Quincey’s version of events in a saner, scientific manner, or to parodying him.<br />
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Robert Morrison’s biography somewhat daringly, then, takes its title from De Quincey’s most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. While he draws on De Quincey’s reminiscences and self-analysis, Morrison also shows what De Quincey’s life looked like from the outside. In an opening vignette, we meet not the introspective sybarite of the Confessions but a down-at-heel, elderly magazine writer, who has walked eight miles to hand in his copy. Indeed, De Quincey’s tendency to bring hardship upon himself (and others) permeates the rest of the book. Born in 1785 into a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions (hence the ‘De’), he ran away from Manchester Grammar School at 16, choosing to live alone and penniless in London. He began to dissipate his inheritance long before he was legally entitled to it by living determinedly beyond his means. He was, for most of his life, pursued by creditors, whom he eluded with gusto, although he was imprisoned for debt once and publicly humiliated on several occasions. His long-suffering daughter Florence described leaving the debtors’ sanctuary where they spent seven years as “one of the most lively foretastes of Paradise I have had in my life.”<br />
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By tracing De Quincey’s public persona as “The Opium Eater” through to old age, Morrison avoids reducing his subject to The Man Who Wrote The Confessions. Soon after he was identified as the author of the hugely successful (and originally anonymous) memoir, which was one of his first published works, he was able to trade on “the magic prefix ‘by the Opium Eater.’” It was the name under which he published his Gothic novel Klosterheim: or the Masque, the signature on many of his London Magazine articles, and the name used against him in gossip columns. <br />
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To some extent, the persona took on a life of its own, adding to the myths around the man, even when he was doing nothing at all. De Quincey never defended himself against accusations, for example, that the “stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense” in his Confessions had caused an increase in opium-related deaths, but such was his notoriety that he did appear in fictionalized form in a sketch in Blackwood’s Magazine, which broached the subject. Questioned on the “fifty unintentional suicides,” the caricature responds cagily: “I have read of six only, and they rested on no solid foundation.” Meanwhile, his celebrity as a profligate and a sage was laughable to the literary Lake District circle. Noting his indulgence in drugged solitude, Mary Wordsworth jibed, “The Seer continues in close retirement”. <br />
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If De Quincey scarcely reflected on the tribulations of his everyday life in print, it is because he believed that his opium-induced visions revealed deeper truths. The faculty for dreaming, he proposed, was impaired by a “too intense life of the social instincts.” But when properly nurtured “the dreaming organ … throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of that mysterious camera obscura—the sleeping mind.” However he tried to dodge charges of mysticism, he found symbols everywhere: the industrial city of Liverpool represented a world aloof from suffering; Coleridge was a risen phoenix condemned to feed on carrion; the unfinished stairs in Piranesi’s Dreams, which De Quincey had never actually seen, suggested the “power of endless growth and self-reproduction.” <br />
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This “purely aerial” world, he acknowledged, had always had a stronger hold on him than the “real world of flesh and blood.” Very little would be known about the shape of De Quincey’s worldly existence if we had to rely solely on his own records. He was typically “flustered at the thought” of filling out his household’s 1851 census forms. At a loss for what to write under “Occupation,” he settled for “writer to the magazines,” which the enumerator doubted, amending it to “annuitant.” His description of the endless work done by his daughters was merely fanciful: “These are like the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin.” De Quincey is the rare case of an eccentric subject who demands a conventional biography. The headings “life at college, marriage, career” that Virginia Woolf thought “very arbitrary and artificial distinctions” offer, in this instance, much-needed reference points for his phantasmagorical autobiography. <br />
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De Quincey understood as well as anyone the literary devotee’s desire to know the man behind the work. Long before he appointed himself Pope of the “true church on the subject of opium,” he made a cult of Wordsworth and Coleridge. “The bowers of Paradise,” he told Wordsworth, on being invited to his house, “could hold out no such allurement.” While he plucked up the courage to visit, he gleaned as much as he could from mutual friends, whom he invariably considered “traitors” to the great men, when they did not prove as fanatical as he was. Their lives gradually became intertwined, to De Quincey’s initial delight. He edited Wordsworth’s pamphlet The Convention of Cintra, became tutor to his son and paid Coleridge’s debts out of his own pocket. Best of all, he took out a six-year lease on Dove Cottage, whose rooms had been “hallowed” by Wordsworth, the previous tenant. <br />
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The adage “never meet your heroes” accounts for the subsequent cooling of relations between them. Or as De Quincey put it stiffly: “Men of extraordinary genius and force of mind are far better as objects of admiration than as daily companions.” Sometimes he was only mildly disappointed. He had hoped, for instance, that ten-year-old Hartley Coleridge would be able to repeat some of Wordsworth’s table talk after their trip through Uxbridge. Yet the best the child could produce was Wordsworth’s gripe that, instead of buttered toast, he had been served “dry toast dipped in hot water.” In later life, when he began to write short biographies of his friends, De Quincey made extravagant criticisms: “never describe Wordsworth as equal in pride to Lucifer; no, but if you have occasion to write a life of Lucifer, set down that … he might be some type of Wordsworth.” <br />
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Morrison’s biography contains plenty of anecdotes of the buttered toast variety. The Opium Eater loses some of his carefully cultivated air of mystery in the encounters compiled here; those who met him often saw through his self-deceptions, only to be left wondering whether the old man was not in on the joke. Hill Burton’s description of De Quincey, then in his 60s, wearing a boy’s duffle coat, and nothing else but “inner linen garments dyed with black ink” to pass for trousers—so that he seemed fully dressed at a glance—would not be out of place in a Dickens novel. Even when faced with extreme poverty, he emerges as a comic figure whose imagination allowed him to brazen out various indignities.<br />
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Dickens himself counted De Quincey’s works among his “especial favourites,” but the feeling was not mutual. The suggestion that De Quincey saw something of himself in Dickens’s darker comic characters—like the irresponsible Romantic Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, who was based on his contemporary and fellow magazine grandee Leigh Hunt—is a tempting one. There is a child-like, excessive side of De Quincey that Morrison captures in descriptions of his less glamorous habits. Compulsive book-buying, for example, forced De Quincey and his family to leave the hallowed Dove Cottage, which was now overflowing with books, and rent a second property nearby in the winter of 1820. Although he could not really afford it, he reasoned blithely that “there is such a thing as buying a thing and yet not paying for it.” According to Morrison, this was no one-off: when the books began to pile up in the numerous apartments he rented away from home, De Quincey “often simply locked the door and turned elsewhere.”<br />
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The English Opium Eater does not aspire to be a “dazzling” or “poetic” rival to De Quincey’s memoirs. Nor could it be confused with a “work on opium,” as Baudelaire called the Confessions. Baudelaire’s inevitable rewriting of the work as a treatise on intoxicants—he did dare to add to it, despite his protestations—submits to De Quincey’s own claim that “the opium is the true hero of the tale.” Robert Morrison’s biography describes, instead, the exhausting productivity of a now under-read writer, and fleshes out his less than heroic life. His impressive account shows, above all, that the world from which a writer seeks to escape can be as absorbing as the one he creates for himself.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-5913209499030014052010-11-17T17:41:00.000-08:002012-04-25T20:49:30.618-07:00Review: The Last Lingua Franca by Nicholas Ostler<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published at <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/tongues-twisted"><i>The New Republic</i></a></span><br />
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While English is the most widely-spoken lingua franca in history, so-called common or working languages can be much less pervasive. Elamite, for example, was the submerged administrative language of the Persian Empire in the sixth century B.C.E. All official documents were written down in Elamite, but they were both composed and read out in Persian, the language of the illiterate ruling class. Then there is Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhism. No longer used in everyday conversation, Pali is written in different scripts in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Burma, and sounds different when read aloud by Thai and Burmese speakers. The identity of the language is almost obscured by its profusion of forms.<br />
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Pali is a tantalizing case for Nicholas Ostler, because it suggests to him the possibility of a “virtual” language. A “virtual language” would not be read or spoken itself. It would allow the user to understand what is being written or said without learning the original language—in much the same way that “virtual reality” allows the user to have an experience of something without actually doing it. Pali is not “one language” in the concrete sense that it has one set of words, but those who know any of its forms can access exactly the same information. Yet on closer inspection this is not because it is a “virtual language.” It is because the differences between its forms are largely superficial. However the words are pronounced or written down, they mean the same thing. It is one language after all.<br />
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Despite this setback, Ostler has faith in a virtual system, which he claims will revolutionize global communications, and make foreign language learning a thing of the past. The traditional culture of Theravada Buddhism may not be the most receptive context for such radical change, but the internet serves as a low-cost, low-risk testing ground for new translation technologies. Google Translate, Babel Fish, and Microsoft’s Bing Translator all offer instant, automatic translation across a range of languages, and are constantly expanding their services. The results are often riddled with mistakes, sometimes amusingly. But Ostler believes that improvements in the technology will eventually “remove the requirement for a human intermediary to interpret or translate.” Printed texts and recorded speeches will be accessible to anyone with the right software as “virtual media.”<br />
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It is a bold vision of the future, and a particularly attractive one to Ostler, who is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. A technological revolution could save declining tongues from extinction. Those who now neglect their traditional regional language in favor of English would no longer need a lingua franca to access the same commercial and cultural opportunities. For Ostler, this is not just a desirable outcome. It also affirms “the social order created by mother tongues, where each community has its own language, as if by nature.” He does not admit the irony that this natural order could only be enforced by digital means, but the belief in its enduring integrity is perhaps enough. Such beliefs, he argues, can be a powerful force for change: “The survival of a lingua franca is always a matter of confidence and ideology as much as reasoned calculation.”<br />
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Before Ostler’s own ideology—entailing a fanciful technological determinism—takes hold of his argument, The Last Lingua Franca is wide-ranging and insightful. He is on firm ground when he uses historical examples to question the future of English as a global language. He shows repeatedly how governments abolish even well-established lingua francas “at the stroke of a pen” for ideological reasons. An especially neat case is the relegation of Persian both in India under British rule and in Central Asia after the Russian Revolution. For the British, this was as simple as changing the language of the courts, on the principle that “justice should be comprehensible to those being judged” and not just to the Persian-speaking elite. In the new Soviet republics of Central Asia, the lingua franca was edged out on the grounds of ethno-linguistic self-determination. The revolutionary government drew up the borders of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan according to the language spoken in each region, and raised literacy in these from less than 10 percent under Tsarist rule to almost 100 percent by 1959, at the expense of Persian.<br />
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Given how easily a language can be dethroned, Ostler does not share the optimism of David Crystal, David Graddol, or Robert McCrum, in thinking that, in one form or another, English will “find itself in the service of the world community for ever.” Historically considered, English has little chance of outlasting the economic and military dominance of Anglophone powers around the world. Emerging powers will remain loyal to their mother tongues and will be unlikely to “indulge the nostalgia of their Western suppliants by speaking to them in English,” as Ostler puts it, contemplating with special glee the decline of the language in which he is writing.<br />
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Yet one could be forgiven for entertaining the thought that massive media saturation—in radio, television, movies, pop music, and above all the internet—has brought English to a point of no return. Of course, this way of thinking has its own technological fallacy: it implies that English has achieved the linguistic apotheosis denied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, or Persian, by virtue of faster electronic communications. The major insight of Ostler’s book is that technological innovations can have unexpected consequences. In the last ten years, the fastest growing languages online were Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and French, in that order. “The main story of growth in the Internet,” he reminds us, “is of linguistic diversity, not concentration.” And there is a startling parallel with Latin and the print revolution. At first, it looked as though printing would ensure Latin’s pre-eminence, making standardised textbooks widely available. In practice, the new technology mostly benefited the vernaculars, feeding a demand for novels and pamphlets among the expanding middle-classes.<br />
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These are convincing arguments, but they lead no further than a grim prognosis for English. Ostler’s grand theory that English will be the last lingua franca stands and falls with his vision of “virtual media.” One problem with such a vision is that there is no evidence that the technology on which it relies will ever be perfected. There is a lot more at stake in translation than the bare words of the text. To reach human standards, an automated translator would need to understand subtexts, cultural resonances, idioms, jokes, and puns, and find a way of conveying these to an audience. Since Ostler includes recorded speeches in his vision, it would also need to handle intonation and timing.<br />
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Most puzzling is that Ostler recognizes the intricacies of translation, and the problems that can arise from even the most minor differences in interpretation. He recounts the memorable misunderstanding among delegates of the European Union in 1990 when presented with a report on the success of a long-running initiative. Those who read the report in the original French had thought it generally supportive of the committee’s work, while those who read the English translation believed the project had mostly been a failure. The divergence in attitudes stemmed from the word insuffisant, which was rendered as “inadequate” in the English translation, rather than the more literal, and forgiving, “insufficient.” Ostler’s analysis of the words’ differing connotations is one of the most engaging passages in his book; his account of lingua francas is more immediate when the people who use them have a decisive part to play. “Human reason, and even more human rhetoric, is inclined to be inscrutable,” he writes, conceding that this “sets some limits on the value of machines as all-purpose interpreters.”<br />
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Instead of probing these limits—which would surely give Ostler’s vision greater definition—he routinely effaces them. Up to this point, the book’s appeal lies in the remarkable nature of its case studies, which are discussed with scientific disinterest. While not woven together by any strong authorial voice, each chapter is split into sections, which sometimes read like units in a textbook. It is especially surprising, then, when Ostler begins to make defensive, even personal protests to the reader. He admits that the future he envisages “may seem a hopelessly utopian dream,” but he makes no attempt to rationalize such doubts. Elsewhere he resorts to sheer bravado, insisting that “the future is easy to predict, and not really debatable.” The book’s triumphal final sentence strikes a fatuous and false note: “Thereafter everyone will speak and write in whatever language they choose, and the world will understand.”<br />
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There are limits to what Ostler calls “the world’s new linguistic order,” and even a bludgeoning prose style cannot disguise them. “Virtual media,” like the notion of Pali as a “virtual language,” is not all that it seems. Although he argues as if high-quality instant translation will enable a linguistic revolution, Ostler’s vision is really founded on something more closely resembling the deeply flawed technology that already exists. The often unreliable, awkward translations currently produced by machines would be used as a basis to “access and penetrate texts”—the word ‘understand’ is wholly resisted—which would otherwise be “totally closed books.” Ostler defends this “partial understanding” against anyone who might want or need to understand the text in a more nuanced way. They are rather oddly accused of “naïveté on the human side,” as though the machines had their own perfectly reasonable opinions on the niceties of semantic theory.<br />
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This last point is only an authorial flight of fancy, a utopian over-indulgence. But there is a chance that machine translation will come to be used in the manner that Ostler describes, and he appears unconcerned by the huge cultural losses that such a development would bring. Quite the opposite: he claims that casual users are already taking advantage of the new technology, and that “the actual future that awaits it… is not an inglorious one.” Even if this is true, the needs of casual online users may be more or less satisfied by a technology that could make costly mistakes in business or diplomacy. Such technology would be of little use in face-to-face meetings, which count for a lot in both of these fields, and would be still less useful for informal, personal conversations.<br />
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Ostler touches on the role of foreign language teaching only briefly in the last section of the book. He is interested in the work of the British Council, the Alliance Française, and more recently China’s Confucius Institutes in spreading their national languages across the world. He does not mention that their Danish, Swedish, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, and Catalan equivalents could not possibly have been established with the same goal. It is worth learning these languages as a way of engaging with their speakers, as well as their literature and culture. Ostler quotes twice from Fitzgerald’s famous translations of Omar Khayyám, without mentioning that these translations were the product of the serious study of Persian literature. He does not say whether the poetry of Wordsworth and Kipling, which he quotes in his epigraphs, could be translated by machines. If machine translation put an end to foreign language learning, would there be anyone left with the skills to attempt a translation of them?<br />
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The Last Lingua Franca is subtitled English Until the Return of Babel. This is intended, no doubt, to summon the image of a tower being rebuilt, as a monument to human ingenuity and technological achievement. The ideal of effortless communication is understandable, but it is mythical. In reality, it means irritating misunderstandings, an impoverished cultural exchange, and technological dependency. This situation evokes the Babel story too, the disastrous confusion of a world in which there is no shared language. Such confusion should be avoided, even if the current dominance of one language seems overwhelming or unfair. The most interesting and responsible question now is what kind of lingua franca, or more likely lingua francas, will replace it.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-47824007072687462822010-06-10T20:39:00.000-07:002012-04-25T20:48:24.368-07:00YM: Histories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6EpxOgJYeXM/T5jDJncPOjI/AAAAAAAAALo/8AlKeyVFgnY/s1600/ymhistories.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6EpxOgJYeXM/T5jDJncPOjI/AAAAAAAAALo/8AlKeyVFgnY/s320/ymhistories.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I was guest editor of the <a href="http://www.ympoetry.org/?cat=13">second issue</a> of the Poetry Society's newly-relaunched online youth magazine. We published the best poems by the society's under-18s on the theme of "histories", plus essays by Ben Wilkinson and Daniel Hitchens, with a workshop set by Jack Underwood. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/38428543@N08/">Charlotte Goldney</a> shot the cover.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2413328005873952914.post-6737854377678156682009-01-17T18:32:00.000-08:002012-04-25T20:48:03.478-07:00PoetCastingI recorded two of my poems for the PoetCasting website (www.poetcasting.co.uk), as part of Pomegranate's <a href="http://www.pomegranate.me.uk/editions/edition-six-noise">"Noise" issue</a>. Here's a link to the <a href="http://www.poetcasting.co.uk/?p=122">recordings</a>.Laura Marshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09486518303401953652noreply@blogger.com