What Do You Think of This?

Following the almost complete alteration of meaning of ‘disinterested’, (it now means ‘uninterested’ almost universally), I have noticed that ‘definately’ is becoming almost interchangeable with ‘definitely’.

There is a strong argument that English is successful precisely because it is flexible. There is also historical evidence that demonstrates spelling has only recently been standardised. However, some might say ‘definately’ is the thin end of the wedge.

For me, the spelling of a word isn’t that much of a worry, provided it is still understandable. But the loss of nuance that has occurred with the repurposing of the earlier ‘disinterested’ makes me sad.

What Do You Think of This?

I was surprised to see a clip on the BBC news the other evening purporting to show Iranian armed men hunting for an American serviceman whose plane had apparently been shot down in their country. I found it unsettling that the BBC chose to air this footage. I wondered if they would have done the same if the technology in World War Two had allowed them to get hold of some footage of Wehrmacht or SS officers setting out to hunt down Allied airmen shot down in enemy territory.

In Children of Men, PD James points out that “you don't need to manipulate unwelcome news; just don't show it.” Most evenings, the BBC follows this advice very closely. Huge events it doesn’t care for are ignored or get the briefest of coverage, while tabloid nonsense pads out the half hour. To me that makes the decsion to show viewers footage that I suspect comes direct from the Iranian regime’s propaganda machine particularly mystifying.

What do others think?

Recent Reading - A Misalliance by Anita Brookner

A Misalliance tells the story of Blanche Vernon, a well-off London woman who is getting used to being on her own, following her husband Bertie's decision, taken a year ago when the book starts, after twenty years of marriage, to leave her for a younger woman. Bertie sounds amusingly inadequate as a respository of devotion:

"disappointingly vague about colours and tastes...[When asked what he'd had for lunch] he would appear to search painfully in the recesses of his memory. 'Meat', he would say finally. Or, 'Some sort of fish.'"

However, Blanche had believed "marriage [was] a form of higher education, the kind that other women gained at universities". With the loss of her marriage, she is left not only alone but unqualified. Consequently, as Brookner explains when introducing her:

"Blanche Vernon occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay."

To this end, Blanche drinks quite a lot of white wine in the evenings and spends a great part of her days at London's National Gallery, where: 

"she did not expect art to console her - (why should it? It may be that there is no consolation) - but, like most people, she did expect it to take her out of herself, and was constantly surprised when it returned her to herself without comment". 

When not at the gallery, Blanche volunteers in a hospital cafe.

It is at the hospital, after contemplating Bacchus and Ariadne at the gallery, that Blanche meets Sally who "had the smile of a true pagan" and her small step-daughter, who has been brought to be treated for her sudden refusal to speak. Blanche forms an unlikely alliance with the duo - or rather she attaches herself to them 

The book's central theme seems to be that there are two kinds of people. On the one hand are the pagans like Sally Beamish and Bertie's new woman, Mousie, characterised as an "emotional thug". This group are amoral and grab what they want and live in the moment and entirely for their animal selves. On the other hand, there are those like Blanche, who don't, (which doesn't necessarily make them terribly nice: "Blanche was not a foolish woman, although she eagerly contemplated foolishness in others.")

Anita Brookner's writing is full of precision and observation - dotted with occasional sly wit. However, while reading, there were moments when the sensation of being trapped by an extremely intelligent, very intense obsessive produced a kind of claustrophobic panic in me.

Which is unfair as the book is exquisitely written and emotionally perceptive - and regularly quietly funny. Additionally, as a document of social history, A Misalliance is fascinating. Almost no one lives like the women in this book any more - Blanche has little or no concern about money and leads an orderly autonomous life, untouched by any pressure to earn a living or make a career. At the time Brookner was writing I am sure such a person was typical of the English urban upper middle classes. Indeed, my childhood was crowded with such people, including my mother and her friends - and even cousins little older than me expected such an existence. Now the areas of London that Blanche and her like once took for granted as the ones they could live in are unaffordable for anyone but the recently created breed known as the super-rich. Also, leaving aside where such people might be able to afford to live, these days the Blanches of this world can rarely manage financially at all without working - nor would they necessarily be allowed to feel comfortable about having no career - a decision to "stay at home" has begun to need justification. 

The book ends enigmatically. As Blanche has already speculated "it may be that there is no consolation".

But there is always, thank heavens, reading. And Anita Brookner is, whatever the mild irritations of her manner, worth a read.

The Great Leap Forward (well, mostly upward actually)

Thank you to the New York Times for informing me that The Jump Book exists. A book of photographs of the most unlikely people jumping. Rather great. Take a look. The Duke of Windsor or Richard Nixon - which is the most surprising?

Recent Reading - March of the Long Shadows by Norman Lewis

Moderately entertaining, well-written, faintly surreal novel set in post-war Sicily. Certain characters seemed to have appeared direct from a Wes Anderson movie, but since the book predates Wes Anderson, perhaps he has read it and drawn inspiration from it - or possibly he could make a movie based on it. 

Lewis has a strong sense of the absurd and there are a lot of laughs in this novel, if you like fairly dark humour. Examples chosen at random:

a) one character announcing "To really enjoy a war...you have to be as far from the action as possible and of course on the winning side. Given those two essentials the experience is incomparable"

b) this description: "Marinella, a small manic seaside town of a kind only to be found in Sicily, with a wild mixture of crenellations, Moorish arches, stained glass, crazy pavement and broken statuary. People went there to fornicate surreptitiously in the vicinity of a ruined temple of Venus, to gape at an angel's footprint in the rock, to cuddle the polished shaft of a prehistoric phallus and sometimes to commit suicide by sliding down an increasingly steep grassy slope which finally precipitated them into a deep sea saturated with the benign magic of coral."

c) a character described thus: "He was a tactless man who had ruined his career by criticising people it would have been safer to leave alone, including Mussolini for seducing every woman who ever came to see him, Marshall Badoglio for losing battles and the Pope for his alleged possession of a gold telephone. As a result, having once been a consultant in urinology [stet], he now presided over a unique collection of fossilized toads and several cases of pickled exhibits demonstrating the growth of the foetus in the horse."

The book, via this passage, also led me to finally understand why I could never live among high mountains:

"I had been offered a remarkable house on a cliff's edge near Ragusa. 'Buy it', the locals said, 'It's going for nothing.' I took a friend along to ask his advice. The view everyone raved about was of a rock pinnacle known as U Vicchione (the Old Man) rising a thousand feet sheer from the sea. I handed my friend a pair of 12-power binoculars at the precise moment when one of Europe's last sea eagles perched on its summit drew the wedge of its tail-feathers tight and unfolded its enormous wings, about to take off. He passed the glasses back and shook his head. 'Overpowering', he said, 'it is far too beautiful.' 'Is that possible?' 'You want to settle permanently in a place like this?' 'That was my intention.' 'After three months this view would overpower you. You'd sit with your back to it, and then you'd move into a room facing the other direction. To live in a house you don't need eagles. You need swallows under the eaves. Forget about it. This isn't for you. What's wrong with a moment of calm in one's life?'

I also liked this description of the sensation of knowing you are soon to leave a place in which you have been living - and to which you will probably never return:

"I was attacked by a feeling of impending loss. It was describable as a kind of anxiety to fill in every minute of what was left of time in Palma [the town where the novel is set], to imprint its scenes on the mind, to gather up as a matter of urgency the last of the Sicilian experiences and sensations that would soon be beyond reach. 'When the tree is gone', says their proverb, with its memory of Arabian sands, 'we appreciate its shade.' This was a preposterous island, but enslaving as well, and I had developed an addiction to its hard flavours, its theatricalities and its restlessness. Everything had to be salvaged, nothing squandered of these last hours. Running a bath I listened to the throaty outpourings of water brought from some ancient conduit, feeling its coolness flood into every corner of the room, and sniffing its odours of ferns and earth. I pushed open the window and a blade of sunlight sliced through into the room's twilight. The pigeons were clapping their wings in the courtyard, and a girl on a rooftop sang an African song ..."

What Do We Think of This? (a New Series)

To my astonishment, this orange contraption appeared in a quiet street in Bristol the other day.

What I think about it:

Not very long ago (possibly during COVID lockdowns?) I wasn’t overjoyed when masses of under-paid men* began hurtling about the streets and pavements of European cities on bikes and scooters, carrying soft cube-shaped* boxes on their backs - but this new wheeled object is not an improvement. At least there was human interchange with the cube-people - and you could give the poor fellows a decent tip when they turned up at your door.

This machine, which presumably seeks to replace them, must have used up masses of energy in its construction (in China, I’m guessing, therefore possibly its construction was carried out by Uighur slaves). It probably also caused masses of soil and water pollution while being made - and almost certainly continues to burn up fuel of some kind in its operation as well (a lot of energy is needed for a machine to be able to think well enough to go where it’s sent, without a human to drive it). And I bet it is not free of rare earths, with all that they entail (child labour springs to mind, plus the scarcity their name implies).

The suggestion painted along the box’s metal side is that we should “just eat” and the plan is to remove obstacles to doing that. In an age of over-eating, is this not unwise? Even if it isn’t, is the pleasure of eating food delivered in plastic boxes really greater than the pleasure of food made at home, having exercised the uniquely human ability to plan and prepare a meal, (not to mention the business of shopping for the ingredients, with all the small experiences you have along the way - think Vonnegut’s post office outing).

This glorified wheelie-bin cuts out one more person-to-person interaction in daily life. Its introduction is fuelled by greed - not just the greed for food, but the greed for profit that is also behind the drive to get rid of people on tills in supermarkets, enlisting customers to do that work themselves, and the removal of staff to take your money at boomgates on European motorways, which relies on the computerised system working smoothly (you should see the chaos when it doesn’t) and the disappearance of bank branches where you can talk to a human being - and so on and so on.

People somewhere far away, whose names we may never know and whose faces will almost certainly never be revealed to us, are dedicating their energies to devising ways to make more and more money by depriving others of work and the chance to feel worthwhile and part of a community. I hate it.

What do you think?

*interestingly, there does seem to be a females-need-not-apply element to this new, (potentially fleeting) field of employment

*if we can say ‘tubular’, why can we not say ‘cubular’?

Literary Meals: Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart

 

Admittedly this 25p bargain might at first glance be taken for a Mills & Boon offering. However, when I saw it I remembered that my mother and her friends used to love Mary Stewart and, whatever their other faults, they weren't happy to read trash. So I bought the book, despite its lurid cover, curious to find out what it was that they had enjoyed about the author. I am so glad I did.

Madam Will You Talk? is set in an English person's dream of France, where it is extremely easy to find inexpensive, quiet and comfortable hotels, where Provencal towns are not choked with coaches full of tourists and where the kinds of restaurants Elizabeth David seemed to find waiting round every bend are indeed waiting round every bend. I had begun to think lately that David had been romanticising France in much of her writing, but Stewart describes the same world as David vividly and convincingly. By the end of the novel, my faith was restored and I believed once again that for a decade or two after the war that lovely French world did indeed exist. 

The book is a thriller but a highly literate one. In one conversation, characters casually swap lines from Macbeth; in their milieu, it seems, such things are part of the average person's normal store of knowledge. Additionally, at the start of each chapter the reader finds a quotation:  Stewart chooses to recruit for this purpose Chaucer, Spenser, Browning, Coleridge, Marvell, Blake, Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare, among others. I suspect that fragments from such authors rarely grace the pages of contemporary "chick lit". 

When I finished the book, I looked up Mary Stewart, to find out more about her. She was a vicar's daughter who seems to have been a brilliant English literature student, which explains the quotations. The poor woman had an ectopic pregnancy, which led to infertility. Whether that alone led to the writing of many novels, I don't know.

Anyway, Madam, Will You Talk?, despite a slightly unconvincing plot twist you can sense coming almost from the first page, is charming and enjoyable. It also has a scene with an hors d'oeuvre trolley in it. I have never forgotten the hors d'oeuvre trolley in a station hotel in Scotland my father took us to one evening while we waited for a train to travel further north. It was as delightful as Stewart's and, like the setting of her book, it belonged to what was very shortly to become a lost world:

"Presently at my elbow I heard the chink of silver, and opened my eyes to see the big glittering trolley of hors d'oeuvre, with its hovering attendant...The man served me from the tray. I remember still those exquisite fluted silver dishes, each with its load of dainty colours...there were anchovies and tiny gleaming silver fish in red sauce, and savoury butter in curled strips of fresh lettuce, there were caviare and tomato and olives green and black, and small golden-pink mushrooms and cresses and beans. The waiter heaped my plate and filed another glass with white wine. I drank half a glassful without a word, and began to eat...The waiters hovered beside us, the courses came, delicious and appetising, and the empty plates vanished as if by magic. I remember red mullet, done somehow with lemons, and a succulent golden-brown fowl bursting with truffles and flanked by tiny peas, then a froth of ice and whipped cream dashed with kirsch, and the fine smooth caress of the wine through it all. Then, finally, apricots and big black grapes, and coffee...and...liqueur brandy...swimming in its own fragrance in the enormous iridescent glasses. For a moment I watched it idly, enjoying its rich smooth gleam."

Madam, Will You Talk?, which was Mary Stewart's first novel was published just after the end of rationing in Britain, which, given the long time between manuscript completion and publication, makes me wonder whether Stewart wrote it hungrily, in the midst of Britain's austere rules.