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 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.

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:

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)

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.

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.

I might demure on a couple of points though. He seems to tie the e-reader in with the financial strangulation of the writer. I think one of the points I was at least trying to make is that it’s the publishing industry that has done this, all on its ownsome. Tight margins and conservative booksellers with high rents made many publishers cagier. The long and the short of it is the writer was fucked anyway. I’ve generally understood you have to be incredibly lucky, skilled, in tune with the stars whether by accident or design, in tune with the public by accident or design, and a very very hard worker, possibly have some money in the background, to even have a hope of getting published by a hard-copy publisher. It doesn’t hurt to have contacts either. Certainly a tiny proportion of writers make money.

No, of course writers won’t make money. They don’t at the moment, apart from the  incredibly luck, skilled etc. What they will find is that they can have their words in a place where people might read them. Some people might even pay to read them. There will be lots of ‘more means worse’ people and to an extent that will be true. I’ve said what I think about that in my previous article though. More may also mean more interesting. And yes, issues about gatekeepers and quality and exposure all apply. Will there be readers for instance? I suspect that a mixture of blog communities, book clubs virtual and actual, recommendations on hubs, whether publisher backed or otherwise, purchases through these portals. If money finds a way into digital writing it’ll probably be through this sort of thing, oh, and the old subsidiary rights and tie-in stuff. True crime and sports-based writing will still have a massive market for instance.

As I said in the article,  at least what I hope was apparent, is that I think those who predict apocalypse are in fact still seeing things through the glass of the traditional publishing model. Yeah it’s fucked, don’t need an e-reader for that, son.

2.

I feel I need to redress the balance of yesterday’s piece, which seemed a bit gung-ho. I got rid of very nearly all of my books recently. Here’s what I wrote at the time about why and what I felt about it:

So, it’s come to this. I’ve got to get rid of a lot my books? For why? Well, a while ago I started having serious breathing difficulties – could only take incredibly shallow breaths, heart going like a jackhammer all night, no rest, no sleep etc, and it turns out that I’m allergic to dust or whatever it is in dust (mite poo I believe) that people get allergic to. This riles me considerably – I like dusty places, I prefer old buildings to new, a sagging sofa or armchair to a new, carpets to parquet. It also makes me feel like a veakly Wictorian child. Nevertheless, no use railing against an inescapable physical state.

I recently moved flat in the hope that a less dusty place will allow me to get back to sound in wind and limb, and for a while I did, until I moved my books in. I can’t really afford a large place, with the books in one of the wings or stable, so I live and sleep quite close to them. I dusted and vacuumed very carefully, but to no avail. Having been fine until I moved the books in, I now found myself, if not quite at square one, at least at the end of a considerable reverse.

It hardly needs saying that books contain an awful lot of dust.

The situation is not, I recognise, without a certain humour. I love books, they kill me. Love is the plan, the plan is death.

Why worry? Chuck ‘em, right? Of interest only to object fetishists and book bibbers. A material consequence of the implication behind the statement ‘Oh, I LOVE books!’ What, all of them? Even the ones by Clarkson? Anyway, they’ll all be on e-readers soon. Why worry?

Well, I like having them for one thing. I like clambering around the shelves, looking for stuff that occurs to me. Also I’ve got a terrible memory, so if I’m writing something, I’ll frequently have to go looking for the book, which is at the end of the mere thread of a thought my mind is tugging. It’s handy to have an ever-expanding library.

When I was growing up there were huge stacks of books at home. My dad was very much the self-educated man, didn’t go to university, but read a lot. Lot of left-wing history, lot of cricket books, lot of commuter thriller genre fiction, classics, out-of-the-way biographies, anything. Wandering around those shelves gave me a great inheritance. It’s not too much to say that it helped form my interior life – picking up the Myth of Sisyphus or Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, I didn’t know it, but I was picking up something that would shape my future thought, something I would still love 20 years later. Picking them up now contains a memory of when I first picked them up. If I’m lucky/stupid/foolish/careless/blessed enough to have children, then I’d want them to have something similar, not out of vanity, but for the hundreds of universes contained between covers, dissimilar, yet contained in one place and reflective in a diffuse and recondite way of a single personality. Even the serendipitous acquisition both adds to and becomes part of the acquirer. So yeah I do like books. Just not the ones by Clarkson.

Also a lot of the stuff I’d be getting rid of – genre stuff – would be my dad’s and it has some sentimental value, even if the literary value is sometimes dubious. (Adam Hall is absurd).

Still, he wouldn’t want me suffering ill-health as a consequence of a sentimental attachment, and now I must get rid of as many of them as I can bear. A bar to this in the past has been an inability to discriminate. No, I definitely need this James Hadley Chase thriller. Yes, I need two copies of Tennyson’s poems – this one has a nice soft cover and fits easily in the pocket, this one has the sturdy hard boards and wide leading. That sort of thing. It meant that I think in the past years I’ve only got rid of a completely redundant book on double-entry bookkeeping (no idea) and something on ‘50s forensics (and I was rather reluctant about that – what about the ‘50s detective procedural I can now envisage myself writing as I get rid of this?)

So now I’m being indiscriminate. Anything I absolutely can’t bear to be without will stay, everything else, I’m going to get rid of. Down the charity shop. There’s nothing special there – obv I’m keeping the first edition of Wyndham Lewis’ Paleface that was once owned by Bruce Montgomery.

Why not put them in storage? Well, I can’t be arsed basically. I see no point in the nearish future when I’m going to be living somewhere where they’ll be able to go, without a similar situation, and moving them around is too much hassle.

There are questions about what I should keep and what I should definitely throw, the answers to which might not be immediately apparent (what about reference books? aggregated essays? things read and liked but unlikely to be read again? what does the internet replace? do I need that two-volume concise OED?).

It’s probably a good thing. It doesn’t feel like it – but I guess shriving oneself from one’s acquisitions rarely does. Acquisition is only important to those who feel an inner lack, right?

3.

And now for a message:

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

It’s a recent enough habit. They were the last big change in publishing format. Around properly since 1935 in this country, 1939 in the States. A lot of fears and arguments similar to the ones doing the rounds with regards to e-readers at the moment did the rounds back then. Only I’m never quite sure what arguments are doing what in the media. There’s never any shortage of straw men, and never any shortage of writers wanting to jump into straw men suits. I wish people would shut the fuck up about straw men anyway – they can go the way of scarecrows as far as I’m concerned:

Nobody’s banging on about the death of them?

The reason this sentence caught my eye was because I’d just been reading an essay on the rise of the paperback in American publishing. (20th Century Publishing and the Rise of the Paperback – James LW West III yessir)

The origins of the modern paperback book lay in piracy. In 1840s America price-cutters took advantage of the lack of international copyright agreement to issue soft-cover versions of classic British writers. Then and in the 1880s when a second wave of soft-cover piracy erupted, competitive price-cutting and overproduction meant the industry disintegrated. In 1891 an international copyright statute was introduced, which restricted the practice.

It seems likely that, as with music, the problem of how to prevent free pirated downloads will be electronic publishing’s biggest challenge, and one that it is unlikely to be able to thwart through various means of protection. Pirated reproduction is of course free and easy. There is no chance of pirates destroying each other through over-competition. Pricing is clearly important but no matter how cheap you make something it can’t, all things being equal, compete with FREE.

Piracy, however, was not the reason the paperback caught on. America’s version of the net book agreement collapsed 104 years before its breakdown in the UK, but for pretty much the same reasons. Macy’s department store challenged it in 1890 on the basis of collusion and restriction of fair trade and won.

In the States it caused a change in business model, which ultimately resulted in the format change:

US firms now saw that the British model of book-publishing would not work for them. They would have to do business in a fashion better suited to the laws and demographics of their own country.

Fortunately for these publishing houses, new and more populous areas for sales were opening up, printing technology was improving, and literacy levels were rising. A new business model was very much possible,. American publishers therefore developed a more competitive, frontlist-orientated style of publishing, with emphasis on sales, advertising, and promotion … The backlist (which, under the old business model, had generated a steady flow of operation capital) now became less important. Emphasis was placed instead on subsidiary rights and on tie-ins with other forms of public entertainment – especially the stage and moving picture business.

Hello JK Rowling.

As with Macy’s, pressure from the big book chains like Waterstones and Dillons, as well as supermarkets, brought about the end of the Net Book Agreement in Britain over 100 years later. In the UK, its collapse has come at the same time as the digital revolution, complicating the business models of bookshops and publishers. They thought they’d be the beneficiaries of price-cutting but they got screwed by a seller with better distribution and pricing, Amazon. The e-version is an extension of this trend.

It’s interesting to look at the British model referred to in the passage above:

The key issues were distribution and price maintenance: British book publishers could market their books through an established network of bookshops and send them virtually anywhere in Great Britain through an efficient railway system … British book publishers depended on the home island for most of their sales and got rid of slow-selling titles and remaindered stock in the colonial trade.

‘Virtually anywhere’. With a tweak of sense, it could be an e-book motto. The internet provides similar advantages of distribution, which is as much a matter of time as it is space, as the Victorian railway. The variation between 3g/wifi models is the modern version of being on mainline or being on a branch line.

That exotic element, the colonial market, is interesting in and of itself, I think, not clearly relevant outside of Victorian Britain, other than prompting thoughts about what will happen to backlists. Unlike print versions, backlists would be cheap to maintain, perhaps, if cheaply enough sold, providing a steady low-level source of income for publishers, with front-line gambles earning the most.

In the States various marketing methods appeared to sell books in a financially competitive industry. The Book Club appeared, with monthly catalogues and massive sales tapping a ‘hidden market’. Paperbacks appeared in 1939 and the Second World War saw free literature sent out to American armed forces in the form of the paperback. The GI Bill of Rights meant returning soldiers could study at the Government’s expense. Literacy was never higher, reading was never more popular. Paperbacks were the perfect marketing tool:

The great insight for publishers was that paperbacks would be distributed through the same outlets as popular magazines. Paperbacks could be sold from revolving wire racks in tobacco shops, newsstands, pharmacies, and grocery stores. The storeowners did not choose the titles; that work was done on a weekly basis by the distributors, who removed slow-selling stock for pulping and replaced it with recent strong sellers. The covers of these early paperbacks often featured lurid artwork and sexually suggestive blurbs.

Author profits were lower. They had to be, with cheap products the margins were lower and relied on greater quantities to make money – published paperback writers got 4% up to 150,000 copies sold, 6% thereafter. It’ll be interesting to see what level digital versions settle at, and what authors get. To my mind, frontlist digital titles seem very expensive, when you consider the lack of physical product. Physical books are a dreadful burden financially – they have to be sent out, returned, destroyed, printed, printed again, they take up precious shelf space in warehouses and shops that could be filled by something more popular, they even degrade easily. Without any of these problems the main costs would be administrative, editorial and paying the writer.

I picked two titles that popped into my head: One Day by Adam Nicholls, which I’ve seen everyone reading it seems, is cheaper to buy on Amazon as a paperback than as a Kindle edition. The hardcover of David Millar’s cycling autobiography Racing Through the Dark is cheaper than its Kindle counterpart. E-readers are currently competing with bookshops rather than books.

This has to change and the biggest obstacle to it will be, I suspect, moribund publishing industry business models.

What about the writing? The key word in that section on the marketing of the paperback quoted above is of course ‘pulp’. To make money out of quantity, as paperback publishers with their lower margins had to do, you have to be absolutely certain of popularity. Of course, the cost of failure is less, but equally, failure will not be persisted with. They’re removing your stock from the shop window if it’s all still there a week after it was put there.

The effect that populism had on writing is well known. Writers wrote badly. Whereas before the garish cover had been slapped on Faulkner and Fitzgerald in order to sell (not Willa Cather though, who refused to have her novels published in paperback for this reason), now writers lived down the garish cover, filling their cheap novels with sex and murder. This at least was the reaction of literary gatekeepers. Here’s Edmund Wilson, who I think is a frequently very acute critic, and also the platonic ideal of literary gatekeeping, on detective fiction:

I have recently been sampling the various types of popular merchandise, I have decided that I ought to take a look at some specimens of this kind of fiction, which has grown so tremendously popular and which is now being produced on such a scale that the book departments of magazines have had to employ special editors to cope with it.

He does not like what he finds, finding the imagination in them ‘meagre’, and compares Hammett to ‘those newspaper picture-strips’.

He got so many complaints in response to his first article he decided to write a second:

The specimens I tried I found disappointing, and I made some rather derogatory remarks in connection with my impressions of the genre in general.

And a third:

The furious reaction of these readers confirms me in my conclusion that detective stories are actually a habit-forming drug for which its addicts will fight like tigers.

Don’t get him on to Lovecraft.

A fear of popular forms in their entirety is usually misguided. Certainly the uncomprehending contempt of Wilson is for a critic nagl. It’s likely that if you get a lot of writers writing in a single vein that a lot of it will be bad. Equally, good writers will also get drawn to popular writing. Many examples of popular fiction of the period whether horror, science-fiction, horror or westerns, as well as the films they inspired and were derived from, have come to seem freshly written. They stand outside literary traditions, or participate in them only weakly, and are perhaps from the perspective of those traditions ‘bad’, but they can also be vigorous, unfettered by thoughts of intellectual and moral propriety – they feel part of the age we live in, and not standing above it. This makes them appealing. They are also frequently entertaining, even when very bad. The reason the fear is misguided is you can’t win against popular forms: It’s why you’re wrong, Bunny, even when you’re right.

What does this have to do with e-readers? I don’t think many critics would now say that writing is will become worse the more people read. In the articles that I’ve read something weirder is suggested. It’s where Leith ends up: we’ll read differently because of the medium. To my mind this is the thin end of people who talk about the brain rewiring into a marshmallow because computers mean we’re no longer able to sustain concentration. It’s complete hokum and people should be ashamed of believing such balls, if indeed anyone does, even the people writing about it.

No we all know the immediate accessibility of a lot of more or less emotionally contentless

but quick-thrill material can

draw our attention away

from things that require more concentration.

(Although if you don’t concentrate Monster Dash can really fuck you over as I found playing it while trying to watch Farewell, My Lovely this afternoon. Relevant quote: “I always thought private detectives were omniscient. Or is that only in rental fiction?” <—-another marketing tool).

But writing and other arts that require sustained concentration have always relied upon people shutting out distractions. My impression is that human beings are both bad and good at this. Bad – it doesn’t take much to distract us. Good – we can do it when we want.

Put it this way, I don’t think writing is going to change because people are easily distracted. Nor will it change because writers will change their style and cenception to fit the new format.

Everything that I’ve described so far about paperbacks should suggest that what is most likely to change how writers write is marketing. What techniques publishers come up with to sell their e-product. That may well end-up resulting in Tetris Kafka (you slide the chapters around with your finger on the screen) or RPG Dostoevsky (HP: 1, Stamina: 1, Def: 0, Special Powers: Self-Degradation and Buffoonery) but it won’t be because only epilepsy-inducing levels of twickering lights will be the only thing that can engage our vapid minds.

So I do kind of wonder whether when this argument is presented, even in fairly neutral tones, as in Leith’s piece, whether it’s because of a fear of populism in some form. No one dare say it explicitly – we don’t live in that sort of age, at least not in refained literary circles – but it’s kind of implicit in this ‘we don’t trust people to their own minds’ sort of tone.

The rise of popular modes hasn’t meant a decline in an appetite for serious, literary fiction or classics either. The rise of the paperback in the States was driven by pirating classics and later by producing cheap classics for the armed forces. Penguin Classics, with their crypto cloth-bound æsthetic of sobriety have proved enormously popular. What does seem to have happened is that publishers seem less willing to take risks on more difficult or experimental material. It might be hoped that a reduction in overheads will enable more risks to be taken, although I am sceptical.

At the moment e-version marketing is still based round the book. E-reader editions aren’t visually striking, and the front cover is still the visual pull in places like Amazon.

In the sentences following his comment about liking paperbacks, Leith says -

Much of my professional life is spent reviewing, and I like to scribble on my books and bend the pages back. Plus I can’t be arsed figuring out how to get publishers to send e-versions.

The scribbling and bending pages back were themselves seen as deplorable and congenital weaknesses with the original paperback. They would make writing less serious (hints of the distraction argument). More important with regard to publishing is the second point:

1) As a reviewer and critic, Leith might be expected to perhaps make a bit more of an effort to request formats that people are increasingly reading.

2) When publishers want to push e-versions, Leith will notice he’ll find he won’t have to be arsed figuring out how to get them.

Clearly the industry in its entirety isn’t really quite sure about what to do with its new product just yet. I’m think looking at what’s happened to music in recent years in the hope of seeing a template for literature, is misguided other than in terms so general they’re pointless. One area where a comparison is sensible is that the traditional books industry is fucked if it tries to hold on to old business models by attempting to prevent change. E-versions are still a new enough phenomenon for a good deal of uncertainty to surround them, but all the signs are that they are going to be tremendously popular. Like the creation of paperbacks and book clubs, there is the potential for a ‘hidden public’ who don’t live near or don’t go in the dwindling number of bookshops or libraries, but who have numerous electronic devices.

Leith concludes the paragraph by saying

I’ve no hostility to digital. I’ve spent a good deal of time with the Kindle, and it does the trick.

Like a stock cube, or a bodged bit of DIY, ‘it does the trick’. Ok, but not desirable. This tone of reluctance seems to pervade much of the media debate. It’s understandable. I’ve been surrounded by books from a young age, and the associations they have are powerful. But they are clearly replaceable and the probability seems to me that he Kindle and other e-readers will end up doing more than the trick. They seem to have been embraced quickly and easily by a wide range of people (if my office is anything to go by). I suspect a future e-version of Sam Leith will be saying ‘I’m still in the habit of e-readers, I like the electronic bookmarking and marginal note-taking facilities’

The success of the American publishing houses based at least partly on paperback publishing led to a series of conglomeration buy-outs in the ’60s:

The entry of conglomerates into publishing caused much unease among literary people – writers, critics, editors, and the publishers themselves – about whether the quality of American literature might be negatively affected. Would experimental fiction still have a place in the offerings of major houses? What would happen to midlist authors, whose novels and other writings generated only modest returns? Would book publishing be transformed into a headlong pursuit of lucre by corporate business types with no literary taste? Would publishers still function as intellectual gatekeepers and cultural arbiters?

The conclusion in the essay is that the essentially conservative and inefficient nature of the publishing industry meant that not an awful lot changed. Plus, publishing was in a good state. Increase in capital from popular sales and conglomeration funded all manner of literature which wasn’t aimed at making immediate profit. The publishing industry at the moment is not in a good state. Conservatism, and preserving the ever-reducing status quo is not an option.

New models and publishing enterprises are springing up all the time, including self-publishing, with a few heavily-advertised success stories, and ascertaining the readership for a book before it’s written. There will be all sorts of unintended consequences, with different winners and losers – what will happen to publishing on demand for instance? (Fucked I hope). But I think we can be more or less certain that people will still want to read and others will still want to write, some will do it well, some will do it badly, by some lights, most will be poorly paid. Publishing, in other words.

So I wrote that brief post expressing some minor irritations with the academic style generally and Alexandra Walshingham’s The Reformation of the Landscape specifically, although it’s a book I have every confidence will be thoroughly excellent.

Along with a hugely enjoyable link from Stevie T, themidnightbell commented

humanities academic idiom fascinating me more and more. How did this style evolve? A lot of it seems to be hedging, or retaliation-in-first, maybe a product of crowded fields.

The dead metaphors that drift through academic prose are part of the problem – umbilical cord feeding in to something rooted, kind of a creepy image.

Hedging sounds right. It’s what it feels like. Fear.

In order to analyse this we must first establish by what means…

Toe in the water.

I wonder whether it’s also to do with the proliferation of words like ‘resonate’ and ‘underline’, ie ‘not actually linked by evidence or close argument’. Need to overdescribe how you’re thinking to compensate for a lack of rigour in your argument elsewhere.

Anyway, this book’s driving me crazy. There’s a chapter Loca Sacra, which describes and analyses the way the pagan landscape became a Christian landscape. A large part of this chapter is spent in toponymy: analysing place names with supposedly saintly or Christian etymologies. Walsham admits this is a notoriously difficult area, but pleads the general lack of evidence from the period (warning: not actually dark). Fair enough I guess, this is all a prelude to the actual subject of the book – how the landscape was affected by the Reformation. Deferral! Sorry, background.

So there’s a harmless enough review of the usual charming folklore about holy wells, saintly oaks, the Devil’s footprints, virgins decapitated by lusty bishops whose hair becomes entwined in a tree etc.

A reasonable amount of actual argument is entwined, like the maiden of Halifax’s hair in the yew, within this section though. There’s a good deal of ground laying. Of the hagiographical attachment of saints to pagan religious sites, Walsham says

It is a mistake to read them as instances of superstitious recidivism – as barely disguised survivals from an earlier period rendered legitimate by a thin layer of Scripture and by their assimilation with approved templates of personal sanctity.

Oh, I don’t know, that sounds rather convincing to me. Too convincing I suspect, even for Walsham… I want to call her Alexandra, can I call her Alexandra?

No? Ok. Anyway, there’s a bit of bluster about what follows:

Perhaps some were contaminated by older assumptions that lingered on subconsciously in contemporary minds, but others must be recognized as wholly Christian artefacts. Many date from the later Middle Ages, when paganism as a living faith had arguably long since evaporated. St Thomas Becket (d.1170), for instance, was the patron of no fewer than than twelve wells in the vicinity of Canterbury, and a path in Wiltshire that was visible in a field…

Well, I needn’t carry on. There’s something about this passage that causes your nose to twitch. It’s probably the ‘arguably’ and ‘perhaps’, followed by the red herring of St Thomas Becket, with that surely unnecessary death date for a bit of factual heft. Following your twitching nose you realise that it’s a spurious argument. There’s no reason why later examples of sanctified places within a predominantly Christian world means that earlier examples weren’t substantially pagan. It’s quite possible that early Christian encounters with pagan immanence influenced later Christian tradition. I don’t know. More importantly, I suspect Prof. Walsham doesn’t know either. So it’s a spurious argument, and Prof W knows it’s a spurious argument. You can tell from the style. I’ll come on to why I think she’s done this a bit later. (<—academic style)

First though, so you go through all this section about place names, and the exact nature of the Christianisation of the landscape etc. Then we get this paragraph at the end:

While most of these tales of etymological derivation are probably later fabrications, they too underline the extent to which Christianity succeeded in colonising both the rural and urban landscape.

Now, I agree there aren’t many situations where a need to distinguish between early toponymy and later toponymical interpretation or folklore is important: mostly they’re just nice stories, we don’t believe them anyway. But if there’s one area where it’s vital, it’s establishing the process by which the landscape became Christianised. She’s even made the point herself, with regard to Thomas Becket (d. 1170). It matters whether the interpretations come imposed retrospectively by already Christianised world, or whether they were formed with the Christianisation of society.

Am I boring you? I don’t give a fuck. I need to get this off my chest.

There’s more. The next paragraph says:

The Church also stamped its authority on the physical world in the guise of splendid churches and minsters, monasteries and convents. The wealth and power of bishops and religious orders was visibly enshrined in the substantial complexes of buildings that came to occupy prime locations across the British Isles.

Wtf. ‘Oh yeah, they also built some churches n shit, whatevs.’

Now, I don’t think she’s being disingenuous, not really, with the way she’s gone about matters. Well, I do a bit, and she should certainly realise. I think she doesn’t realise because she’s deceived herself to a degree. Alexandra Walshingham is, according to Keith Thomas’s review of the book in the LRB, the first woman to hold the Cambridge chair of modern history and one of the youngest fellows of the British Academy. She’s been researching and writing about this subject and these periods all her life. She knows her shit. So I’m inclined to think she’s probably right, whatever she says about her specialist subject – she’s right. I think her hunches, even when the evidence is weak or non-existent, are almost certainly correct. I’m happy to take it all on trust. But the way she goes about it both in structure and style, perpetually undermines that trust, has me constantly calling bullshit. And I think the reason is the one themidnightbell suggested – that of an overcrowded area. The need for an argument.

I know, because Keith Thomas in the LRB told me so, that Alexandra Walsham is arguing against ‘a master narrative’ of the secularisation of the landscape and the disenchantment of the physical world, with a correspondent Protestant internalisation of spirituality.

Walsham is saying it’s more complicated than that. This makes me want to like her book. It’s always more complicated than that, whatever it is, so I trust people who say so, about whatever it is, especially because they usually have interesting nuggety details that are all about the contemporary picture and less about the narrative. I flicked ahead, there are some good pictures, so I know this is going to be the case here.

What I suspect has happened is that Walsham is trying to undermine the master narrative very early on, but the evidence isn’t really there either way. Like the adverbial style it looks like she’s trying to convince you of things by the back door.

The question is why she felt she needed to defer the actual subject of the book at all. I think she’s engaged in typology. Showing that a process similar to the one she’s going to describe happened earlier. The process is that she’s got a theory and projected them back onto a period where the evidence is too scant to support it. Happens to us all. Like when children make some shit up to prove something they know is true. It must be. I saw it. No, you didn’t. Did too, it’s there.

Only – Cambridge Chair of Modern History… one of  youngest fellows of British Academy, and all that.

And the problem is, every other page throws something up that makes you wince.

Medieval people also regarded the material world as a matrix of points of access to the divine

No, they didn’t. I’m not one of the youngest etcs and I know that. This isn’t Neuromancer. You’re calling it a matrix. Why? Not sure. Fashionable? Maybe. Keanu Reeves. Medieval kung-fu.

Sacralized by virtue of the ‘holy radioactivity’ that emanated from the fragments of the bodies of the martyrs and saints or by secondary relics of their activity and presence, such sites stimulated a tradition of ritual journeying that was a defining feature of contemporary religious experience.

No, no. It’s not what you think. I quite like that holy radioactivity, and anyway it turns out it’s an actual quote, not something she’s just invented. Although she doesn’t say it’s an actual quote until the end of the sentence so you do spend some time wondering when she dropped the acid. No, it’s the first bit. It’s really confusing. The phrase ‘by virtue of’ is simply conversational filler. So yes, you can say ‘he came first by virtue of the fact he trained hardest’ but you probably could also say ‘he came first by virtue of the fact he cheated’. It’s nothing. It’s dead, deader than dead, invisible. But here it comes terrifyingly alive. ‘What the heck is “Sacralized by virtue”?’ I wondered. ‘Is it the opposite of “sodomised by presumption”?’

(5:40; save it for later, it’s ten minutes long)

Then you get to that ‘of’ and you realise it’s ‘by virtue of’, then you go back to the beginning of the sentence, then, because the effect is so strong, you find yourself proclaiming again, ‘wtf is sacralized by virtue!’.  Sodomized by presumption. Play. 10 minutes long. Pause. Rewind. Repeat. Pause. Play. You’ll have wasted an hour or so on this one sentence before you know it.

Anyway, all of this section is about pilgrimages, which amongst other constructions, is called ‘the external expression of an inner quest for transcendental meaning, a kind of ‘extroverted mysticism’. ‘Fostered what anthropologists have labelled ‘communitas”, um, ‘convenient excuse for frivolity’, ‘religious tourism’. Ok, I’m cool with all that stuff, esp the ‘holy radioactivity’. Oh wait, she’s got a final suggestion.

Perhaps above all, however, pilgrimage to hallowed sites in the landscape embodied a deep yearning for divine intercession and miraculous healing.

People went on pilgrimages to go to holy places to get better cos they were sick. She’s done that churches thing again. Slipped it in as if it’s a subsidiary point. ‘Perhaps above all’ indeed. Once again, the bits in and around the matter of the argument have undermined it.

I’m not asking for a minimalism denuded of all description. In many respects I want something more conversational. More easily aware of its deficiencies and less academically neurotic about showing them.

There’s some good stuff of course. There’s the sixth century Gildas commenting on Britain:

I shall not enumerate the devilish monstrosities of my land, numerous almost as those that plagued Egypt, some of which we can see today, stark as ever, inside or outside deserted city walls: outlines still ugly, faces still grim. I shall not name the mountains and hills and rivers, once so pernicious, now useful for human needs, on which, in those days, a blind people heaped divine honours.

And hard not to raise a knowing eyebrow at this:

Aldhelm, about of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherborne (639-709), can be found commenting on how houses of prayer and residences for students now occupied the locations where the pagan had once worshipped the snake and the stage, ‘with coarse stupidity in profane shrines’.

All I’m saying is that if this was a made-up book of made-up stuff, I’d have thrown it aside long ago.

Oh, yeah, in the acknowledgments, she mentions among many others, ‘the reader of the press’ before going on to say,

Although I have not embraced all of the latter’s recommendations, I hope it will be apparent that I have profited from reflecting on them in preparing the final version.

That’s hubris. Publishers’ readers know their shit. I don’t feel so bad about writing nearly 2,000 words on this tiny matter now.

I hope she doesn’t come and bust my balls. She looks, idk, coolly sardonic. She could sacralize my virtue any day. Maybe I could firmly embrace her before she got in a withering put-down.

Good job this is just a corner of the internet where I write shit rather than a blog people read or anything.

Probably shouldn’t have linked to that photo though.

“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.

“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.”