Cheering

At the outset, I realise, I should apologise to anyone I have misled - possibly disappointingly, this is not an essay about the activity of cheering, as in shouting in support of a person or cause or to express  pleasure at a sporting team's success or a remarkable performance by a musician.

I am very sorry if that is what you were expecting & I assure you, if you are really keen, that I will at some point in the future have a bash at the subject, if that would cheer you up at all?

Speaking of which - cheering up, that is, (the actual subject of this blog post), - I just have been, by a very minor incident that took place a few minutes ago in the cafe in Canterbury where I am sitting.

The exact spot in the cafe that I have chosen for myself is on the ground floor, near the door, which gives me the opportunity to see all the people who come in & out & hear bits of their conversations. My idea of bliss, Lord knows why, (oh, all right, because I am irredeemably nosey, I admit it).

Anyway as I sat sipping coffee & idly sticky beaking, a small girl came in with her mother. The two of them paused & looked around as they entered, & then the little girl looked up at her mother, an expression of excitement on her face:

"Because we haven't got a bike today, can we go upstairs?" she asked.

 "Yes", said her mother, & the child's face lit up with pleasure. She executed a very small dance of infant joy.

The little girl appeared to be as pleased as I used to feel when we were allowed to go upstairs on the bus & got either that wonderful seat that used to be tucked in at the back near the staircase on the old Routemasters or one of the seats right at the front, under the windows.

I didn't know children could still be content with small pleasures. Perhaps there is still some hope for the world.

No Dyssing

Someone I heard on the radio yesterday claimed he was chastised by a tutor at university for using the word "dystopia". The tutor insisted that the word did not exist,  (even though it is an entry in the OED).

I like the tutor's attitude. His real point was that the correct word in the context of the man's essay was "utopia". The word "utopia" contains within it the inevitable promise of failure; no attempt at building a utopia has ever been successful to date, and therefore there is no need for a separate term to describe the failure that is inherent within the concept.

On the other hand no one has yet tried Auden's utopian plan

Virtuous Circles

I am not entirely sure whether I've got this right but I'm assuming the phrase "virtuous circle" is an attempt to articulate the phenomenon in which someone goes so far in one direction that they end up meeting themselves coming the other way.

I encountered a perfect example of this while listening to a podcast of the Arts & Ideas programme, broadcast on Radio 3 on 21st April. In it Philip Dodd, (who is really such an astonishingly irritating broadcaster that I usually avoid him), interviews someone who makes the following observations about the recent flow of would-be migrants to Europe:

"What these people - let's call them "radical refugees" - demand is something very precise. They say, 

'I can choose the country I want; I can go there & that state is obliged to take care of me, to provide education & so on & so on, all of that'. 

This, I claim, is sheer madness. And it's avoiding the problem. We have to solve the problems there. Is the solution that all the poor people from the Middle East & then from Africa come to Europe? Then what?

And what about the extremely rich Muslim Arab countries just south of the war zone (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Emirates, to name them)? They're taking practically none of the refugees."

These comments sound to me like the kinds of remarks that extreme rightwingers might be expected to make, provided they are prepared for howls of outrage in reply. In polite liberal society they are as acceptable as telling a Brussels bureaucrat you actually think the Brexit camp have a few good points.

The comments were in fact made by the self-described Marxist Slavoj Zizek.

If you can put up with the bleated interpolations of Dodd, the full argument Zizek makes is an interesting listen, (not that he ever gets a chance to fully articulate it, thanks to Dodd's incessant interrupting). You can find it on the BBC Radio 3 Arts & Ideas website. 

Battered Penguins - V by Thomas Pynchon

I know quite a lot of people who have read V, but I have not met one who professes to understand it. While Pynchon has a very readable style and the book swings along with gusto and confidence, it never really goes anywhere very much. 

Actually, I should rephrase that slightly - the book in fact goes to lots of places: Malta, Florence, Africa, New York, to name but a few. What it never does is arrive anywhere. Instead, it adopts the approach later taken - with somewhat less verve and energy - by Italo Calvino in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and Robert Bolano in 2666 .  In those novels, and in V, one narrative gets underway and is then replaced by another and then another, over and over again.

The result is quite vexing, if you are the reader.

But is it a novelistic duty to be comprehensible and not to annoy your reader? And is it possible that Pynchon is doing something deliberate with his interruptions and general lack of coherence? Is this jumbled approach emblematic of the random absurdity of life?

Who knows. Possibly the broken narrative is a deliberate attempt to invoke the mystery of existence - or possibly it is just a sign that the author couldn't think of any good endings.

Mind you, the concluding passage of V does have a poetic beauty - and it seems to hint at the ephemeral, meaningless quality of life. But it also doesn't have much to do with anything that has gone before, (admittedly, it involves sea and water, of which we do see quite a lot as the novel progresses, but the character who appears in the finale is one we have only recently been introduced to).

Does incoherence matter, if it is (moderately) entertaining? Should we sit back and enjoy the sheer variety on offer in the book, without worrying about whether it all makes sense? Pynchon is certainly inventively generous. He conjures up a sojourn in the New York sewers, (including crocodiles), several rollicking naval passages, a recurrent fascination with the world created by Baedeker guides, a sidetrack into the world of Parisian ballet and another, even more vivid, into a nightmarish period in the history of an unnamed African country. Presented with such a feast, I feel a bit ungrateful to have to admit that, rather than revelling in Pynchon's invention, I found myself increasingly appalled.

One reason for this is that as I grow older my tolerance for depictions of male sexual violence toward women is diminishing day by day, particularly when they are presented - as they are in V - as a kind of entertainment, or certainly without any apparent reference to the female perspective. The whole African section of the novel is vile in this regard. It also does not allow a black point of view even for a fraction of an instant to penetrate the text. I hope I'm not becoming absurdly precious and too heavily influenced by the whole "safe space", "trigger warning" movement, but the description of female impalement seemed to be undertaken with a disturbing relish that did not appeal to me. On the other hand, perhaps if you accept from the beginning that the novel is told from an entirely, utterly male viewpoint, a viewpoint that sees women as variations on a template supplied by Jayne Mansfield, (whose impending marriage is bemoaned by one character), you may get on better with the book than I did.

Pynchon does pepper the text with aphorisms, some of which don't stand much consideration, while others may resonate a little. Here are some examples; the second two are better than the first, in my view, but I don't spend much time in bars so it's hard to judge, (the fourth is problematic, I think, and the final one I can't judge at all, or even fully understand):

"... people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look."

"...we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in."

"People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rat house of history's rags and straw."

"Surely, if war has any nobility it is in the rebuilding not the destruction."

"Perhaps British colonialism has produced a new sort of being, a dual man, aimed two ways at once: towards peace and simplicity on the one hand, towards an exhausted intellectual searching on the other."

Pynchon also lards the text with ditties he has made up, and I'm afraid I found them tiresome. Mind yoy, I found the consistently wacky and, presumably, allusive names of his characters even more tiresome. Here are some examples:  Profane; Mafia; Stencil; Howie Surd; Veronica Manganese; Pappy Hod; Fergus Mixolydian; "Roony" Winsome, (who appears in an apartment decorated in what Pynchon describes as "Early Homosexual"); Benny Sfacim; and Dudley Eigenvalue,

Some surprising things that are mentioned in a book written as far back as 1963, include "Gitmo", "jihad" and "Chilean Riesling". Even more surprisingly, the book includes this passage about the Koran:

"The Lord's Angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord's Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice. If the Koran was nothing, then Islam was nothing. Then Allah was a story, and his Paradise wishful thinking."

Impossible to prove, but I doubt that would be included in the text if the novel were published for the first time today. Joking about the Koran is not much of a laughing matter any more.

In conclusion, I found the book extremely original and intriguing but not entirely satisfying. Whether for good or bad, I also suspect it was a trailblazer - would David Foster Wallace have produced Infiinite Jest without Pynchon's puzzling precedent? It seems to me there is a line that leads from one to the other.

Possibly the novel is an attempt to portray through fiction the vision of life articulated in the diary of a character called Fausto:

"There is, we are taught, a communion of saints in heaven. So perhaps on earth, also in this Purgatory, a communion: not of gods or heroes, merely men expiating sins they are unaware of, caught somehow all at once within the reaches of a sea uncrossable and guarded by instruments of death."

Possibly; possibly not. While I admire Pynchon's persistence and confidence, I think that a novel cannot be described as entirely successful if, at the end of very nearly five hundred pages, the reader is still asking themselves, "What exactly is this thing all about?"

Unfair

I have to go to England next week and so I booked a Eurotunnel trip last night. Trudging, metaphorically, through the dreary stages of the booking process - car number plate; caravan or no caravan; "API"; et cetera - I noticed for the first time this:

What about budgies, I thought, what about anacondas (even though I don't actually know what exactly an anaconda is)? Why just dogs, cats and ferrets? Why can't I take my tadpoles, if I want to?

Or can I? Is the discrimination the other way round? Is it that you can take any pet without paying the outrageous extra cost of 25 Euros, but dogs, cats and ferrets, for mysterious reasons, incur that extra charge?

Why charge for animals anyway? So far as I can tell, you can shove thousands of people into your car and pay no extra, but one miserable ferret and you're up for 25 euros. Where's the logic?

Anyway, I'm collecting together a menagerie for next week's trip, and they'll all be on the back seat - just to test the system. There won't be a dog or a cat or a ferret among them - so I'm assuming they'll all be free of charge.

A cockatoo, I thought I'd take, plus a frog and a goldfish - and maybe a walrus. An angora goat, for something fluffy, a sloth or two, (I've always been fond of them), an orang utan, (one of the ones I adopted at Christmas), a goldfinch, (ideally the one from the Mauritshuis, provided I have time between now and then to whip down to The Hague) and maybe a butterfly. That should do it. Any other suggestions gratefully taken onboard (onboard geddit?)

Please Beleaf Me

Although it is still quite cold, the trees in the park behind our house are getting dressed up for summer. Which should bring to mind the Philip Larkin poem with the line about the trees coming into bud, "like something almost being said"

Instead, all I can think of is that Lydia Davis micro-story called Spring Spleen. It goes like this:

"I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly.

Soon they will hide the neighbor and her screaming child."

(For more Lydia Davis, search out the book that Spring Spleen comes from: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0-241-96913-7)

Mud Larks

No sooner had I scoffed at beaches made of mud than I was forced to reconsider the errors of my ways. This was done via the medium of film, more particularly the film called A Bigger Splash, which we went to see yesterday and very much enjoyed.

Anyway, having never encountered the concept of a mud beach, I was now confronted with one in full "glorious" technicolor. More particularly, I was confronted with the sight of Tilda Swinton and the new(ish) Belgian film star called Matthias Schoenaerts lying on such a beach and fondly smearing mud over each other.

I have to say I'm still not enthusiastic. It was, quite frankly, an unappetising sight.

But the film is excellent - and the image of a mud covered Swinton sitting bolt upright on her mudflat (sorry, beach) and peering up through muddied eyes at the heavens, wondering what she had done to deserve the blow fate has just dealt her is one of the more comic things in a film that, while essentially serious, is also at times very, very funny indeed.