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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

24.xi.10

ALARUMS IN THE EXTREME ORIENT

The last time I looked, that Far East – nothing like our own empty Far West – contained about three quarters of the world’s population. You would not be surprised, in what was Bombay and Peking or Colombo, in Jakarta, Hong Kong or Calcutta, to find yourself unable to move for the human press. In a restaurant I visited, the kitchen walls were hung with ducks drying; they served, they said, twenty thousand of them a day. Even given the sense of Japanese order, a square foot of pavement is honored if occupied; in Beizhing, if you took a car, eighty thousand bikes settled in front of you at every traffic light.

In those conditions, I take it that taking pot shots at a sparsely-populated island is good fun; it would relieve the tension. All the above places – everything East of Iran – have not had a moment of peace since at least a decade before their old colonial masters or their even more ancient imperial families, were removed from the scene. The wars fought in that vast territory have been among the most cruel mankind has ever endured, the longest-lasting and the most perilous to civilian populations. All of which I take to be consonant with extreme population pressures.

I don’t think, then, that it is insane, eccentric or racist, to point out that our tiny and rapidly- diminishing population of whites, is hardly likely to have any great influence on a part of the world that not only outnumbers us by a factor of about ten to one, but is also outgrowing us economically and entrepreneurially. For we are not talking here of a bunch of illiterate peasants; the populations of Asia are in fact part of our own DNA. Chess and mathematics are not ‘white’ inventions, though effective civil government and respect for the Law are. Nor so I believe that inventiveness is a ‘white’ trait. And it is becoming daily more evident that as entrepreneurs and capitalists, we are being outpaced by Asia.

So the idea that the Burmese government, the Sri Lankan, the North Korean, the Afghani and so on can and should accommodate themselves to that Johnny-come-lately ‘democracy’ strikes me as fatuous. We ourselves – in part due to our own large and miscegenated population – submit to constant weakening of the very stuff which once made us a proud nation. How can we expect to influence, shape or otherwise ‘interfere with governments which have vastly different problems from ours, whose populations (like those of the Indian sub-continent) required a bloody civil war and partition to come into independence? What experience do we have that could possibly be adapted to conditions in China or Afghanistan? These people do not even think as we do, much less act as we think they should. They neither can, nor should. The business of government is to keep any population in some sort of order, for anarchy is an even greater disaster than repression. This, Ireland, Greece and most of the European Union is beginning to understand. After all, soon enough, their demographics will soon rid them of those who dreamt up the Enlightenment.

Personally, I dread the Mass in any form. I suspect most governments and politicians do so too. But in Asia masses die, daily; and are replaced. Mao was a horror as vicious and corrupt as Hitler or Stalin, but the tasks faced by these governments today are not so very different from those that brought to power those totalitarianisms. Students riot in London and are not killed. That is good. If they riot in Asia they may well be killed, that is not good. I strongly believe in circumspection, and cultivate my own garden while I may.

Monday, November 22, 2010

A New Week

I am sure you will have been as delighted as I was to learn that la cuisine française, the French tradition of bang-up meals, convivial families around the table, the proper placing of cutlery and glass, has joined the Mediterranean diet and flamenco as a part of UNESCO’s ‘intangible world heritage’, the . . .er, less visible (say than the pyramids of Gaza or Stonehenge) part of what should be recognized as invaluable to our universal culture.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of meeting many of the distinguished gentlemen who work at UNESCO. In fact, you bump into them pretty much everywhere. It is, after all, a pretty cushy job, and there are several posts available for each and every country, however uncultivated or unscientific it may be. Our own rep is Mr. David T. Killion; Kazakhstan’s is the mayor of Altana. Mr. Killion’s qualifications reflect his passion for legislative drafting in Congress; of our Kazakh, rather less is known. The Venezualan rep is Ms. Jennifer Josefina Gi y Laya, who is also the Bolivarian Minister for the People’s Power for Education.

These are largely working pols, God bless them. It is down below that the plums are distributed: the translation, the conferences, the working groups, the sub-contracts and arcane sub-divisions. One such was the acronymic group (French member, the appropriately named Yannick Vin) that met recently in Nairobi to deliberate.

Most of UNESCO’s sites are, as well know, as dead as those celebrated in Ozymandias:

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
. . .boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


So, I fear, are these new, intangible ones. The last traditional French meal I ate (then with my French wife) was over a partage. The family property having been sold, what was left was to be redistributed, and argued over, at a crowded table. Such meals and such a cuisine are still to be found, but at a Parisian brasserie as lately as this summer, most diners watched the TV. How many French restaurants still have, by the Cashier, the boxes in which regular diners’ napkins were preserved from day to day?

Great efforts are made in Italy (and far fewer in places of catastrophic eating like Greece) to preserve the varieties of the Mediterranean diet, the ingredients simple and good. But it does require effort: to find or produce.

As for flamenco, the less said the better. The authentic stuff probably died at about the same time Garcia Lorca, an aficionado, was killed. Oh, there are still Sevillian ladies about to twirls their skirts and clack their castanets. But like most of my life, such expressions of culture as part of daily life are long gone and UNESCO cannot but despair.

Perhaps it should take up causes that can be salvaged? Paper bags in markets, books that don’t fall apart on reading, ocean liners, railways that go everywhere, marriage itself, thrift, respect?

Friday, November 19, 2010

Thoughts of the day

I note with pleasure that Mr. Tsiolkas’ ( 'much-acclaimed’ seems to be the epithet of choice) novel, The Slap! has been nominated for one of the Bad Sex awards. He should certainly be awarded the prize, for the sex in the book is what debases what is otherwise a fair-to-good anatomy of Australian society. The plot is simple, its working-out consistently interesting: man at party slaps an obnoxious child, eight characters react differently to the ‘outrage’. Unfortunately, to find out their attitudes towards the incident, the hippy, the pc, the perp, etc., you have to wade through pages of tediously detailed sex amongst them.

From my limited experience, though I do have a number of friends in Australia, I do not believe this to be a national trait; I suspect it may be generational or, worse yet, personal to Mr. Tsiolkas, in which case he’s got a problem.

My view is that all explicit sex in fiction is boring in the extreme. It has been eschewed by every major writer since literature began. Anna Karenina did not exude, drip, sigh, exclaim, sweat, smell or otherwise pass on the intimate details of her unhappy affair.

I have always liked that article of the French Code which addresses the atteinte à la pudeur of minors: literally, an assault on their (supposedly) inherent modesty. We also badly need a prize for Immodesty: Lady Gaga, James Ellroy & Co.. For what we call today ‘celebrity’.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Commonplace Books

There is much to cull from reading. Writers often kept Commonplace Books ,in which they recorded what they found striking or needing further explanation. There are a multitude of such things in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia. He obviously notes everything down, as I have for years. He picks up on Jorge Luis Borges defending himself from accusations of kow-towing to the military regime’s by saying, No leo los diarios! I don’t read the papers! He recalls Cocteau with this cautionary tale: ‘There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.’

You can pick this stuff up anywhere.

The departing British Prime Minister is reported to have said, ‘I don’t regard any sex as pleasant.’ But then Isaac Babel claimed that he had made love to the ‘understandably unbalanced wife of Yezhov [the Nasty who headed the old Soviet Secret Police] and almost everyone who slept with either of the Yezhovs was shot in early 1940.’

I think there is a lesson in those two statements, but I don’t know what it is. For those of you who wonder, there is the Lewis Carroll defense. Children some to those who know ‘the simple art of giving them their whole attention.’ That one happens to be true, and all too few do.

I close with a wonder from the excellent Juan Ribeyro: ‘a new President has been elected. He doesn’t smoke, drink, gamble or womanize.’ This is worrying: ‘It would terrify me to be governed by a man who was won a prize for virtue.’

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Some Thoughts on the Day

I had occasion today to correspond with a former student – he must now be thirty-something – who wished to go on to an MFA. Would I recommend him? I’ve done that for literally hundreds of students, who are a faithful bunch and after all have their way to make. But in this case, I growled, Writers Workshops and MFA problems are a plague and a pestilence. It is thanks to them that an excrescence like the New York’s Forty (or was is twenty) Young writers got cobbled together. They take up literary space, these people do; they chat, they tweet, they Face and above all they log-roll.

So I vented to the young man. I said that when I wound up in one, in Iowa, sixty years ago, it was because they laid on some money for me, which I lacked. I met a lifelong friend, Paul Engle was a generous prairie-fed maecenas, Robert Lowell shambled through poetry, the most talented boy in the program, Bob Shelley, killed himself, and Dylan Thomas blew through town, drunk, to get his teeth fixed. I was a lousy writer at 21 and Iowa didn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, at the time. It offered fellowship at a time when literature was taken seriously.

That is no longer the case. The joints proliferate the way literary festivals do, What can an MFA program offer but replicas of what the failed writers who staff them (or the occasional ‘name’) think is good writing? True writers know the art is unteachable. What a still-young writer needs is to write, to put stuff out, to get rejected; to read a lot; to learn what it is to tell a story that someone else will want to read; to know a lot, languages (plural) especially, so that his diet is not just stuff spawned from MFA programs; to see the real world and forget his own little special self.

Still, I will write his letter: the way he wrote his reply suggested he may know that already.



The University of Maryland and one other stateside institution, back a kind of ‘medical’ program offered by something called the Ibero-Americal University with its seat in Costa Rica. In this country where there is no real education or culture, such ‘universities’ spring up like hollyhocks. This is now quite common. Our universities are now just marketers, and the underdeveloped countries are the ‘huddled masses’ of the day: ripe for academic exploitation.

-----------------------------------------------

My London bookseller, John Sandoe, is usually very good to me. I patronize them because they have taste, because all writers should support independent booksellers, because they deserve our custom (at full price). I buy most of my books in England because I like well-produced books as objects, too, and America now binds in plastic, uses heavy paper, and is otherwise unattractive.

When I go into Sandoe’s, I let each of its staff pick a book I might like. They have batted at about .800, which is pretty high. Until this last time, when they passed off on me two novels that were complete disgraces. Both of them, of course, bore the usual accolades, Thomas Leverett’s The Exchange-Rate between Love and Money (which the Guardian found ‘dazzling) was simply unreadable. On the first page I was offered Frito, who’d ‘heard about this amazing thing love, had been trying to score for some years – He’d painted a target on every girl he met and shot himself out of a cannon at them, but none ever withstood the impact.’ Anyone who thinks that has anything to do with love is simply a smart-aleck. I did twenty pages of that one and then fled.

The second, Simon Mawrer’s The Glass Room (‘a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry’) had an unbearably turgid story line – a Jugendstil house – to which, as in those epitomies of history published by earnest divines in the nineteenth century, a set of ‘characters’ were marched through. There were Nazis and Jews and artists and women who smoked cigarettes in elongated holders, venal servants and nasty little communist bureaucrats. None with any life whatever.

That one I read all the way through. The author was so goddam earnest I would have felt it lacking in charity not to wave goodbye to him at the end.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Blog is up again

Apologies to my readers. It was not a good summer and I was ill and uncommunicative.

Also it seemed the Blog needed re-thinking.

It is now more a journal of what goes through my mind that I think might be of interest to others.

IRELAND & THE TROUBLES

I re-read as I read, a lot. Last week five novels by William Trevor, who is by a long shot the best living writer in English. Fools of Fortune which alas I will finish today, made me reflect the Great War, the Spanish Civil War in the mid-‘Thirties, and the more recent dismemberment of Yugoslavia are cut of the same cloth. They can’t be extirpated from Irish, Spanish or Serb memories; injustices, follies, were committed during these events and there will forever be family connections to those acts and crimes. They will all have lost something valuable.

The big totalitarianisms of the past century, in contrast, were vast, impenetrable and anonymous. It was talk one heard, or other peoples’ memories. The fouler for that, but not so personal.

OF BURMA

My memory was jogged by hearing of the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. An old friends from my Sunday Times days, Mihir Bose, had made me read a little twentieth century Burmese history, in which his father – mysteriously killed in a plane flying to Japan – played a part. If I remember rightly, this fetching lady’s father was the head of Burma’s communist party, which thought it better to collaborate with the Japanese invader than submit to British rule.

The lady cannot, then, be said to spring full-blown from. Jove’s brow. There, too, there is a family history.

It is curious that in moments of euphoria, democracy and whatnot, all sense of history is lost. Does anyone remember anything?

FROM SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS

Now there is to be a Library (or something) Prize for homosexual literature for the young. Will it be literature, which is just that, with no adjective preceding it?

WHY FOOLS RUSH AND THE SMART WAVER

It took some time to get the actual words our President used in the press conference after the recent election. Here is the gist of what interested me:


“There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

“When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. Those letters that I read every night, some of them just break my heart. But nobody is filming me reading those letters. And so it’s hard, I think, for people to get a sense of, well, how is he taking in all this information?”

A President who can both think and feel can’t be all bad. I’ve known presidents and nabobs and big shots, and there’s a part of most people that wants power. But ultimately my observation is in accord with Lord Acton’s. Exercising power over others will kill you. You live by it, you die by it. It is the biggest bubble there is: when no one’s left who dares say, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Power deletes thought in those around you.

I thought it was a pretty remarkable thing to say to the nation.