The Intellectual and the Dog

One of he many great things about reading Empson is the regularity with which his intellectual wit produces the most remarkable imaginative conceits and insights. No matter how silly they may occasionally seem, there is always the strong sense of intellectual rigour, so that I disagree only cautiously and often as not find myself a few sentences later revisiting the point to examine further. It happens page upon page.

Of Voltaire calling Dr Johnson a superstitious dog:

The stress, of course, is on superstitious; with the stress on dog it would have seemed as rude then as it does now. Dog is unstressed because the phrase assumes everyone is some kind of dog, so that that is not the distinctive feature of Johnson. It is the pastoral idea, that there is a complete copy of the human world among dogs, as among swains or clowns.

The Structure of Complex Words by William Empson, from The English Dog chapter

The effect is to show how far the robust intellect need not fear either nonsense as obtuse argument or “nonsense!” as an accusation.

A Student’s Guide to the Prose of China Mieville

If you’re going to read China Mielville’s newish novel Embassytown you might want a few tips to help you through it. I’ll choose one paragraph at random and then go through how to negotiate it.

A complex, many-chambered place the angles of which astonished me. Everyone who had ever talked about my poise would have laughed to see me literally stagger backwards in that room. Walls and ceilings moved with a ratcheting machine life like the offspring of chains and crabs. A kind staff member steered Scile and me. Our party walked without Ariekne chaperone. I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart. I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them. More than I’d ever seen.

Ok forget the fact that the first sentence isn’t a sentence. Well, don’t exactly forget it, because it’s indicative of Mieville’s notebook style, just try to ignore it a bit maybe. I’m not exactly sure whether it’s a go at a ‘modern’ prose style, denuded of bourgeois fripperies of phrasing – it’s minimalism! – or whether such telegraphese is expressive of thoughts coming directly from the mind of the narrator, without any intermediary articulation. Up close and personal in an alien mind. Choose one, move on. You can say ‘hazy stab at a bit of both’ if you want.

Because there’s no description we just have to say ASTONISHED AT ANGLES and nod. After all, gothic ribbed vaulting is pretty impressive. That has angles.

There’s an odd subset of people/alien things you’re asked to imagine now. Here goes. Ready? “Everyone who had ever talked about my poise would have laughed”. Why are we being asked to imagine them? Not sure really. Wait, the narrator is female. Is this weird ‘teen girl’ style meant to be shorthand for ‘female’? Maybe gloss over this bit.

btw why is poise italicised? Hmm. Maybe it’s the equivalent of a recent French loan word in their alien tongue. I will say it PWAHZ.

I can’t quite do “to see me literally stagger backwards in that room”. I mean I know ‘literally’ is always easy pickings, but what’s it doing there? I think it’s quietly suggesting that “to see me stagger backwards” might be ambiguous, potentially metaphorical. Also somehow it manages to imply ever so slightly that it’s “backwards” that is open to ambiguity and that without “literally”, “stagger backwards” might be potentially be misunderstood as “stagger forwards”. Just silently take it out. It’ll be ok. Maybe it’ll be taken out for the paperback. Plain sailing now.

Or at least it would were it not for… well, never mind Embassytown, we’ve just hit PREPOSITION CITY. So the narrator and her group are walking into the room. Staggers back. Only preposition that really makes sense here is “out”. Well it doesn’t really make sense, but that’s the motion. But no, she staggers backwards in. No wait she staggers backwards “in that room” (which one? oh, that one). OMG THE ANGLEZ.

Ok! Description time! Welcome relief! “Walls and ceilings moved with a ratcheting mechanical life”. Shit! Sounds pretty cool! I wonder what that’s like! “like the offspring of chains and crabs”. Oh. Like that. Sounds painful. Cool man, cool. Chains and crabs, mechanical and organic, not sure whether this is metaphor or not but whatevs – got it.

“A kind Staff member steered Scile and me.” lol where. are they a golf buggy.

“I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart.” I could feel my bum.

“I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them.” Suddenly the author couldn’t be arsed. (Reminds me of the time I tried cycling home after a lock-in and plenty of whisky and ‘suddenly’ a parked car came out of nowhere).

“More than I’d ever seen.” Notice the way he balances the paragraph with non sentences at either end, lending formal symmetry to the whole.

The cumulative effect the short sentences have of building up the excitement and tension is well worth studying:

“I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart. I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them. More than I’d ever seen. Phone dentists. Do laundry. Bills.”

OK, I didn’t choose the paragraph at random.

And I do feel bad. Mieville does stuff I feel I should be interested in – genre experimentation and constructing places that are attempts to reach outside realist description, building stuff out of a non-rectilinear imaginative Lego. But unfortunately it’s shit.

The Plain Speaker

Drifted into the library late, with only a couple of hours left before it closed, too late to start on anything serious, or engage with any of those long-term projects that never get done. Needed something to read for two and a bit hours, on a slightly dull-witted, rainy afternoon. Sometimes I scratch around in these situations, plucking various titles from various shelves, and flicking through them in a desultory and unrewarding fashion before giving it all up as a bad job and skulking off to the pub. Today, however, I knew exactly which shelf to go to.

I took down The Plain Speaker, because I hadn’t delved into it before. I’m not going to go on about how he’s one of the best prose writers in English, and how his voice of compassion and reason – in that order – is as clear and honest as a church bell heard in the silence of a summer’s morning.

And although I found reading him today continually remarkable, as I always do, I just wanted to pick out two quotes where the pitch of my interest changed its note to one of sublime intensity, such as is more normally encountered when reading a poem that is revealing its greatness to you for the first time.

The first is from his essay On Dreams:

It should appear that I have never been in love, for the same reason. I never dream of the face of any one I am particularly attached to. I have thought almost to agony of the same person for years, nearly without ceasing, so as to have her face always before me, and to be haunted by a perpetual consciousness of disappointed passion, and yet I never in all that time dreamt of this person more than once or twice, and then not vividly. I conceive, therefore, that this perseverance of the imagination in a fruitless track must have been owing to mortified pride, to an intense desire and hope of good in the abstract, more than to love, which I consider as an individual and involuntary passion, and which therefore, when it is strong, must predominate over the fancy in sleep. I think myself into love, and dream myself out of it.

The second isn’t Hazlitt at all, but is a quotation from the memoirs of slavery abolitionist Granville Sharp, contained in Hazlitt’s remarkable anti-utilitarian essay Of Reason and the Imagination:

There was an example of eloquent moral reasoning connected with this subject, given in the work just referred to, which was not the less solid and profound, because it was produced by a burst of strong personal and momentary feeling. It is what follows:— “The name of a person having been mentioned in the presence of Naimbanna (a young African chieftain), who was understood by him to have publicly asserted something very degrading to the general character of Africans, he broke out into violent and vindictive language. He was immediately reminded of the Christian duty of forgiving his enemies; upon which he answered nearly in the following words:—’If a man should rob me of my money, I can forgive him; if a man should shoot at me, or try to stab me, I can forgive him; if a man should sell me and all my family to a slave-ship, so that we should pass all the rest of our days in slavery in the West Indies, I can forgive him; but’ (added he, rising from his seat with much emotion) ‘if a man takes away the character of the people of my country, I never can forgive him.’ Being asked why he would not extend his forgiveness to those who took away the character of the people of his country, he answered: ‘If a man should try to kill me, or should sell me and my family for slaves, he would do an injury to as many as he might kill or sell; but if any one takes away the character of Black people, that man injures Black people all over the world; and when he has once taken away their character, there is nothing which he may not do to Black people ever after. That man, for instance, will beat Black men, and say, Oh, it is only a Black man, why should not I beat him? That man will make slaves of Black people; for, when he has taken away their character, he will say, Oh, they are only Black people, why should not I make them slaves? That man will take away all the people of Africa if he can catch them; and if you ask him, But why do you take away all these people? he will say, Oh! they are only Black people—they are not like White people—why should I not take them? That is the reason why I cannot forgive the man who takes away the character of the people of my country.’”—Memoirs Of Granville Sharp, p. 369.

But the entire essay is filled with things as stirring, such as when Hazlitt calls fools those who believe ‘their own shallow dogmas settle all questions best without any farther appeal’. Or when he says:

So with respect to the atrocities committed in the Slave-Trade, it could not be set up as a doubtful plea in their favour, that the actual and intolerable sufferings inflicted on the individuals were compensated by certain advantages in a commercial and political point of view—in a moral sense they cannot be compensated. They hurt the public mind: they harden and sear the natural feelings. The evil is monstrous and palpable; the pretended good is remote and contingent.

And although our current government does not directly sanction anything as grotesquely revolting as the African slave trade, Hazlitt’s description of the brutalisation of the public mind when it is asked to accept suffering for commercial or political advantage felt, as I read, like a barb aimed directly at the heart of Britain today.

A Rosicrucian Ramble

There sometimes seems to be a kerfuffle about ‘real’ identities on the internet. Google seem keen on it. You can always find an article or two suggesting that people would be better behaved if they used their irl identities, whatever they may be. But reading today about Rosicrucian & anti-Rosicrucian pamphleteering in the early 17th century reminded me afresh how much publishing of any sort has always been enmeshed with the shadow world of non or pseudo identities.

I wouldn’t want to give up the anonymous work of 1623 entitled Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones, in the name of bogus ‘authority’.

And frankly, excerpts like the following from Frances Yates’ The Rosicrucian Enlightenment get me really hot:

Theophilus Schweighardt published in 1618, with no name of place of publication or printer, a work with the following title: Speculum sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum, Das ist: Weilauffige Entdeckung des Collegii und axiomatum von sondern erleuchten Fraternitet Christi-Rosen Creutz. This is a typical example of a Rosicrucian title, with its mixture of Latin and German. In this work Theophilus Schweighardt, who may be one Daniel Mögling, or may be the same as ‘Florentinus de Valentia’, who may be Andreae himself, is enthusiastic about the ‘Pansophia’ of the Brotherhood and their threefold activities, which he classifies as (1) divinely magical (2) physical or ‘chymical’, and (3) ‘Tertriune’ or religious and Catholic.

While I’m on Rosicrucians – the combination of them being required to heal the sick for free, and their red cross symbol made me wonder if this was where the Red Cross got its symbol from. Their webpage assures me that it’s an inversion of the Swiss flag, thus referencing their neutrality and the Geneva convention but I think I prefer my theory.

Despite its tendentiousness and the occasional whiff of the hobby horse there’s all sorts of good stuff in Yates’ book – Descartes showing himself to his friends in Paris to assure them he was not one of the invisible Rosicrucians (although his travels and indeed life are weirdly cognate with the trail of that phantom organisation – in fact I started dozing off and hazily imagined him on a mystical search across Europe for the secret of Thomas Hariot’s algebra…)

Then there’s this dizzying sentence:

The ‘Rosicrucian furore’ which arose in response to the stirring announcements of the manifestos soon became inextricably confused through the large numbers who tried to join in without inside knowledge of what it was all about, being merely attracted by the exciting possibility of getting in touch with mysterious personages possessing superior knowledge or powers, or angered and alarmed by the imagined spread of dangerous magicians or agitators.

A non-existent organisation, a ludic dream-fantasy of the Reformation, a ghostly reflection of Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuit shock troops, present only in publishing history, exists in its most concrete form in people who knew nothing about ‘what it was all about’? Those closest to the centre, the Paracelsist physicians Robert Fludd (from Bearstead, Kent – go Bearstead!) and Michael Maier regularly sending out pleas for this organisation to reveal itself, the ‘inside knowledge’ to which they were privy an allegorical structure of alchemical and mathematical mystical symbols? Madness, I tell you, madness:

The Invisible College of the Rose Cross Fraternity (from the Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum)

Sssssh

I had never seen this before (courtesy Samuel Beckett’s Only Cinematic Project: A Silent Film from 1965 | Brain Pickings and Ready, Steady, Book):

Buster Keaton in Samuel Beckett’s 1965 Film. It’s wonderful.

Good things:

An old Buster Keaton is still, through a combination of his hat and locomotion, still recognisably Buster Keaton, but with strong elements of decay and therefore tragedy about his floppy athleticism.

The way that light, and lines of sight become the physical objects negotiated by physical comedy and slapstick. Very like Molloy. What was once the obstacle course of a rail handcar or construction site with its pulleys and planks is translated into an invisible and abstract environment.

The atmosphere of terror, with numerous perhaps rather surprising baroque, or Victorian ghost story elements: the grotesque head-carving on the chair, the stalking camera, the briefly-seen back of Keaton hurrying up the stairs.

The more minimalist elements of same, the terror constructed out of observation, death and identity. I’m sure there are all sorts of film and camera theorists who can elucidate this endlessly, but on a simple level – camera as self, camera as death. The deadly reflection that this engenders.

[edit:] I should have said here, I think, ‘The combination of baroque or literary stimuluses to fear with the elements that make up existential fear”. I think this is what gives the film a good deal of its character and force.

The elements characteristic of his novels – the choreography of the main character, very like Murphy, or Watt. The rocking chair, such a central object in Murphy: the only thing that gets faster and faster and then stops, if I remember the book correctly.

The classic silent film comedy of the cat and dog. The dog!

The way the minimal structure and expression allows all sorts of clear, unobstructed symbols to be present without being cluttered; to take one: the death of the vicar/priest figure compared to the destruction of the Egyptian idol.

The broken landscape.

What a Sunday morning treat.

I’d've let him go first if only I’d known

After all it’s easier to respond than to put forth.

1.

I wrote a long, rambling post about e-readers, and how their effect won’t be to do with bullshit psychology but marketing, that like most of what I write irritated me the next day by seeming dishonest; the act of putting things into words somehow sundering the connection between what I feel and what is said. That’s writing for you, I guess, or at least not particularly good writing. I went to bed late and was knackered for work today for that shit! Not only that, but the next day I see an article, an entire speech no less, that goes into the marketing etc of writing in the future far better and in more detail.

Well.

e-readers are literally KILLING books

This article by Sam Leith on e-readers and the book seems reasonable. It seems reasonable because that’s its tone – practical engagement rather than fanatical frothing of one extreme or another. I’m not actually sure it is particularly reasonable really, but in order to say why, I want to look at one sentence that particularly caught my eye:

Personally, I’m still in the habit of paperbacks.

Leave it, Tom, she’s not worth it.

This is a really long, really boring post. That isn’t some kind of aporia, intended to seduce you into marvelling at the polished excellence of what follows. It’s just really long. There is a song about halfway through though.

Argued where? Linked how? Extended when? Why won’t you ANSWER these questions?

“It will be argued here that there are merits in considering the Reformation not merely as a movement that extended forwards into the late Reformation not merely as a movement that extended forwards into the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also as one umbilically linked with impulses rooted in the preceding period.”

The Reformation of the Landscape – Alexandra Walsham

I’m looking forward to reading this book, but this sort of academic writing makes me scream. I think some of he stuff that annoys me – the This Study Will stuff for instance – probably has good motivations to do with setting out your stall clearly. It doesn’t feel a particularly natural way to do it though and makes me cringe away from the page.

The adverbial stuff feels more pernicious though, trying to sneak in assumptions behind the verbs doing the logical work of the argument. At the very least they feel redundant. (A model is “firmly embraced” in the previous paragraph. A theoretical model that is, not a clothes one).

Not particularly pernicious tautologies like ‘extended forwards into the late 17th and 18th Centuries’ do something to undermine your trust in the writer, or at least create an unwelcome noise and a feeling that you are listening to the inherited cadences of academia rather than fresh thought. That may well not be true, and the substance of this particular book looks very interesting, but mental alertness is needed in order not to be lulled by the tones of its institutionalised writing styles.

On the Trail of Robinson

It is in the nature of shadowy and apparently peripheral figures to appear when you aren’t expecting them and in contexts where your guard is down. I read the narrative of the man Robinson some time ago, and had squirreled it away into one of those mental places that are inaccessible on request, but open up suddenly with the right key. So despite a post-work lassitude, I sat bolt upright when I came across the following passage in the narrative of a sensational and apparently impossible murder in Paris in 1948. It is difficult to be certain of course, but the facts – place and date etc – seem right. But it’s the descriptions of the character that finally convince me although other readers will be more sceptical, a trait the man thrives on of course. I have edited the several pages down to that which I consider pertinent:

“I still think you had better read this,” insisted De Lautrec, and slapped the paper down on the counter.

Bencolin bent over a remarkable first-page splash.

OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT SOLVES

THE MYSTERY OF THE VILLA MARBRE!

THE BRILLIANT EXPOSITION OF

AUGUSTE DUPIN!

MM. THE POLICE, TAKE NOTICE!

L’Intelligence here has the honour to present the first despatch, from the actual scene of the ferocious crime at the Villa Marbre, written by our famous correspondant M. Auguste Dupin. The name of ‘Auguste Dupoin’, as all Paris knows, conceals the identity of a celebrated criminologist -

“His name is Robinson,” said Bencolin out of the side of his mouth, “although he is French. He is actually a briefless lawyer who hangs about the courts. The devil of it is that the fellow who is as shallow as a spectacle lens, takes a jump at the truth and is often right. He really did put Durrand on the track about that strangler in the Bois de Vincennes. Also, for sheer persistence in bothering the police, I know of no-body who can match him.

…

“We don’t give a curse what he reflects,” snapped Bencolin. “But the housewives like this philosophising and the men feel that it ought to be even if it isn’t. How did he get his facts?”

…

I need not trouble to report in detail the facts as I found them; these facts the reader will have studied in other journals. But my conclusions? That is another matter! For fully an hour, I confess that I was completely baffled –

“Modest sort of chap, isn’t he?” observed Curtis.

– and then suddenly, I saw! I saw what was, mathematically speaking, the only possible solution, I had got hold of the right end of my judgment…

“Dupin, however misguided, is a stimulating fellow…”

Bencolin did not seem pleased. He rapped his knuckles on the counter; he picked up the paper and flung it down again.

“Yes, he uses his head, confound him! But I should hate to think I was indebted for ideas to that – that petit morceau. Jean-Baptiste Robinson. Basically he is wrong; he must be wrong. But there are times, I imagine, when he almost burns his fingers on the truth.”