Tuesday, April 26, 2005

The Honeysuckle and the Bee II



Is this a book for me?

Evergeen Books 1940 edition, pp 43-44


Depressed, and meditating once more on the imbecilities of our licensing system, I passed along the road, with a garage on my left, and a glimpse of lake through the old cottages and the new cinema site on my right. Once more I was astounded at my country, and at the brewers, and at the Tory Party. It was a Conservative Government which introduced a Licensing Act which arranged that "redundant" licenses should be abolished; that brewers (and why on earth should they own inns and tie them to their own brand of beer, good or bad, paint out the old signs and scrawl the names of their ales - one is called 'Shrimp' - across the old fronts?) should surrender an old license if they wanted a new one, and that benches of "Licensing Justices" (usually and deliberately packed by the most revolting type of whining, nonconformist teetotallers ever conceived of by the author of Hudibras) should have the power of deciding what should be shut, what should be open and when - people who regard a harmless village pub as rather worse than a brothel, and immesurably worse than a factory. "The people have the power of altering things," reply the blind worshippersof what is a nominally democratic system. "The people" is but a phrase; "the people" in France or Italy would make short shrift of anyone who attempted to take away their wine in return for giving them votes, i.e., the choice between one caucus nominee and another, each frightened of offending some small minority of cranks whose blinkered minds, on one issue alone, may swing an election one way or another, incidentally and in the mad manner of the Gaderene swine flinging the country into ruinous war, or disgraceful peace, or the loss of Empire or any other minor matter simply because they cannot bear the idea of not interfering with their neighbour's private habits. They have not dared to go to the lengths that they and their insane female accomplices went in America. Try England with Prohibition and it will go back to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson and Cobbett as it did in 1914 and during the General Strike, throwing off its back all the English-hating Welsh from Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell to Oliver Cromwell (nee Williams) and the rest. But take away from the ordinary Englishman only some of his liberties, remove his landmarks only in part,and, good-tempered and patient as he is, he will merely assemble where and when he is allowed to assemble, lament the passing of the "Old Ship" or the "Burlington" at Chiswick (which dated from Agincourst, was frequented by Thames ferrymen and had probably never seen a man drunk in our day), complain the new pubs are not what the old ones were, that they are more crowded, the managers from the north are not the same as the landlords from one's own locality, and that it is abominable to have to drink quickly at ten o'clock, but that "they're all the same - the ------- politicians " - and they stand it and console themselves with memories of horses and cricket, characters long dead and campaigns long over.



Hudibras - text (from exclassics.com)
Hudibras - To the reader (exclassics) : includes biography

Hogarth -
Plate IX ( Hudibras Catechized) of Twelve Large Illustrations for Samuel Butler's Hudibras




Sunday, April 24, 2005

The Honeysuckle and the Bee



One of the best books to come across is one you have had for many years, never read, discovering in an idle moment: in my case 4.30am just before dawn, lying awake trying not to think of White Bears, and failing.

By bedside light, I read 30 pages till dawn rose, chuckling and congratulating myself on the sheer pleasure of a chance find. Like the naughty person who flicks on or reads endings, I have a penchant for checking who authors are before finishing books. It ought to be possible not to do so: in several senses it spoils things by so doing. But by 5.30 I had logged on to discover facts about Sir John Squire {2} {3} which enhanced my enjoyment in reading him.

The Honeysuckle and the Bee
is the author walking from London to Devonshire, splicing into his narrative memories inspired by the places he past and people he met. It is very funny: a cornucopia of little gems. A thoroughly English book: by that I mean a Frenchman or a German could read it but he would enjoy it much less than a Englishman of a certain age: a man, probably not a woman, who might play the Flanders and Swann nostalgia-fest to lost railway stations, time and again, on occasion with with a moist eye or two.

John Collings Squire, (1884–1958), British poet (Solomon Eagle), one time editor of New statesman, poet, and author of On Destroying Books .









Friday, April 15, 2005

Plagiarism



Brains for sale: Hugh Levinson exposes the world of academic plagarism. BBC Radio 4 , Friday 15 April 2005.

Student plagiarism made me think the website was the perfect place for passing others' ideas off as your own - for example, a weblog might not contain your own ideas at all. In the main, because linking is available, citation is done quite assiduously: non - professional thinkers adopt the protocols of the academic paper, in this sense. The weblog, being hypertextual, is geared up to citation - if you link to it you've cited it! The original source may be more than one link away.

Levinson discusses a technique used by modern students called patch writing. This is writing an essay or doing course-work by:

1. cutting and pasting a series of paragraphs from a variety of sources
2. linking the paragraphs using your own words: as few as possible presumably.

It is said to be common: understandable now most essays are written on computer, and there is greater access to source material via the internet. But surely it happened in the days of manual transcription, too? I can remember, in extremis, copying out chunks from reference books or research papers, later to be reprimanded for my efforts being 'too dependent on source material'! You eventually grasp how to grasp the essentials and express your understanding concisely.

I used these to get up to speed on the latest definitions and ideas:

Avoiding plagiarism from Virtual Writing Center

Guidance on the avoidance of plagiarism Keele University
Designed for the undergraduate, this would also be usful for the A level (high school) student. it gives a concrete example which is fool proof.

Plagiarism is not cheating The Joint Information Systems Committee

Why we shouldn't concentrate on cheating

Plagiarism.org software to fight plagiarism

creativitypool.com forum on academic paper databases

The great tradition of the precise, one of the vital educational and life skills, has resulted in the general insistence in writing everything 'in your own words'. And we all do so because the core tasks in becoming educated are marshalling, concision and clarity. Attribution accepted, there must be an argument for freely using other people's words in bulk if you think what is being said is being said as well as can be.






Monday, April 11, 2005

What is an intellectual?



When I was in sixth form, I asked a hapless geographer holding fort for an English teacher: 'What is an intellectual?' Me: stupid for not to having looked it up in the dictionary. He: flummoxed, saying nothing, walking briskly away to the Master's Common Room, amongst the scrum of noisy, scuttling students. He had been to the South Pole, was a member of the Royal Geographical Society. Obviously - I later saw, though at the time it seemed a slight not to give an answer - this was not within his knowledge or remit. He did not have an answer. He had probably never asked himself the question.

The point? I was an 18 year old science student attending what was called General Studies. The only formal, non-science intellectual activity I had formally engaged in was research for an essay on Orwell for the recently formed Literary Society. My efforts were abysmal: I read out a compilation of directly transcribed source material, with hardly a word of my own! What opinions could I have? I had only read - aged 15 - the essay on shooting elephants! My fellow student were dumbfounded, indifferent or bored, and the headmaster, the chairman, probably thought me an utter dolt: I was immediately able to recognise I was one, in this regard, even though no one had the decency to tell me there and then. Why had no one asked me : Is this what you think? The anser would have been : I have to rely on what others think, I'm afraid.

...

Erich Heller: The Disinherited Mind, Pelican edition.

Rilke and Nietzche p. 110

...the first commandment of all enlightened education: to form his own opinions.

...

The oft quoted quote from Alexander Solzhyitsyn turned up in a letter by A P Drury of Stourbridge, England to The Observer, 25 August 1985 to satisfy my much earlier question:

May I offer Neal Ascherson (Column, 11 August) an alternative definition of an 'intellectual'? It comes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In The Gulag Archipelago he says:
An intellectual is a person whose interests in and preoccupations with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant.
Maybe this would stem the 'retreat from kindness and tolerance' which Mr. Ascherson laments.


How I would love to know - remember - what Ascherson wrote in the first place.

Never mind. It is enough to talk about insistence and persistence for those of reasonable intelligence to get the message: it is not cleverness but profundity. But how are they to judge which is which? Though many are brilliant, having learnt their lessons well, and are able to weave webs using them, interminably, in unending permutations, the result is not necessarily understanding or wisdom. The tragedy: education has almostly certainly foxed them into thinking cleverness amounts to understanding. Time and experience will,should, untwine the two.

The failure of education to make this difference clear is tantamount to a crime against humanity: the waste of thousands of hours - the precious lives - of well-versed young people, digging with freshly acquired academic tools into the fertile soil of what it is to be human, to little purpose or avail. They will almost certainly dig in the wrong places to begin with: they have not thought things through themselves.

Some are born, education or not, with an intellectual streak. It would be wise to seek them out: where to look is not always obvious.






Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Deja fu {deja lu II}



The idea had been to write a short essay on: can you tell a man from his books? It soon became permutations of sub-questions, such as separating possession from reading, which led to a stodgy outline.

The plan is to leave the "references" where they are but to work up the ideas in stages, adding in the links from Deja lu as and when. None of this is going to be original: it has all been done before a thousand times, but I want to run through it myself, adding as many links as possible. What seemed wrong was to expect to be able to do it in one go, from a basic outline: why not in comfortable stages? We have the technology.

Here, all I plan to say is I came across a hardcopy of the May 2003 The Atlantic Monthly, Hitler's Forgotten Library, while doing yet another severe cul of newspaper cuttings: a sort out. I don't want to become like that interesting guy in the TV progamme about New York, on BBC a week ago. The authorities had to come into his apartment to throw away his papers and magazines because they were, they considered, a fire risk. The tristesse comes in imagining someone coming into your own place, after you are dead, and throwing it all away anyway. Why not do it yourself, so that what is left is a representative sample of who you are. It might give someone who had a feeling to do so, an easier way to figure who you were. This means, at my stage in life, getting rid of many books that I have till now clung on to like this man clung to his papers and mags. In the process of boiling eveything down, you are asking yourself the old questions : What really matters to me?; What really matters?.

See it? He was asked whether the floor-to-ceiling collection was a family thing. No. The answer was, rather, in the simple statement: {paraphrased} "You don't know when you might want to read something." He didn't strike me as being mentally ill. Gentle, reserved, lucid. The lady in charge of the disposal job, clearly chosen for her sympathetic way with hoarders, did not condemn him for his eccentric behaviour. She seemed quite interested in this particular type of human behaviour. I've been reading about the history of reading and writing! Imagine hoarders when all they had were little clay tablets. Was Moses a hoarder? Did he get the Commandments muddled up? Did he misplace the one's he really wanted?

A short-story or short film worked up in my mind as I watched the programme. I felt perfectly in tune with the old fella. I knew exactly how his mind worked, and saw that the removal men just didn't get it: they probably read a little, but were people who didn't values words highly, or see their significance in the way that he did. They could see he had an overwhelming need but not exactly what it was: to be able to suddenly say: "I need an article on this subject I have started thinking about" and find something, somewhere, just right, to help him. I wonder if he ever wrote anything? I would really like to know who he is, if he's still alive.

Even people who an afford to buy many books to form personal libraries keep some cuttings and magazines. This man formed a library solely of newspapers and magazines, probably because he couldn't afford to do it any other way.






Mitchelmore on Banville on Houellebecq



Where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise: or some variation. Banville's long essay seemed to be the way out for the person who reads more about books than books themselves. Then Steve weighs in with a further critique.

This reminds me: never, never, ever, under any circumstances except pain of death, use "I critiqued it", or, "It was critiqued by....". Please, I beg, plead, implore you. It is an uglyism of monumental proportions and completely unnecessary. Though I have never seen this erstwhile young man {I don't know is he?} using this vile American usage, he somehow brought it to mind with his critique of Banville: such is the mystery of the cerebral cortex.

Steve, like me, has not read Houellebecq, but writes well on him. I guess we all have to read one Houellebecq, but which? The answer is there in Banville/Mitchelmore.





Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Michael Harrington 1928 - 1989



A crumpled Pelican paper back full of off-cut strips of light blue, top quality 'Conqueror' paper. Each strip with a person, place, thing, concept, or a short quote; and always a page number: all written in soft pencil. Anyone walking in here would know the books I concentrated on by the number of bookmarks in each one. The problem - or not - for me is the paper tufts draws attention back to these few books. Michael Harrington's Accidental Century is a book that gets dipped into more frequently because the bookmarks stand out like road signs!

It was not so much his arguments, though I still go along with many - treat it as a historical document if nothing else - but the way he drew me, by quite detailed exegesis, to a variety of works that I might not have gone straight to. Now, many years later, having read quite a few of the books he mentions, checking some of these favourite passages - for example on Mann - is a stimulus to re-read the books themselves, or perhaps try others not read.

I have no detailed idea why - except from the previous suggestion of a writing exercise involving the biography of a famous writer {first or third person}, while trying not to crib directly from the character of Adrian Leverkuhn - but now there is a strong desire to start Dr. Faustus again after 30 years, with a strong determination to finish it for the first time.

Doctor Faustus is a book I couldn't get into in the big reading phase in my late 20s. Now I can see it's going to be important for me both as a novel, per se, and in helping me develop writing skills. Though one can never be sure of anything in this life, it feels as if there might be a straight run on several others of Mann too, since they are there on the shelves: patient, pleading, yellowing, crumbling.

The blurb for The Accidental Century {written in 1966} says:

One clear theme underlies all the bewildering changes in western society this century - the technological revolution. Out tools are now transforming our way of life; yet in this man-made age we have no real control over their use.

In this controversial book the author of The Other America argues that this 'accidental revolution' has undermined traditional ideologies and systems of belief. With the growth of the monopoly corporation, free competition has destroyed itself; and the socialist ideal has been corrupted by compromise with the welfare state. The contempory crisis, in which neither religion nor humanism can command widespread faith, is implicit in the works of such writers as Mann, Orwell, Malreaux, Sartre, and Camus. Now, Michael Harrington argues, the prospect of a cybernated and automated future presents us with a stark choice: either build a new democratic and socialist world by controlling our rampant technology; or to suffer an avoidable fate - the tyranny of the machine.


The last chapter, 9, titled A Hope: here he lays out his final analysis. It would not be a crime for someone trying to work out if it was worth reading, cover to cover, to run quickly through this, first. You will be drawn to the index, with its surfit of references to literary authors, which draws you into great chunks of the book. Before you know it your want to go back to the beginning to run through this what might seem rather old-fashioned business of decadence and see if it fits your world.

It is a good book for a science student wanting a guide wider reading. You will be able to overcome accusations of sciolism with this book! Trust me: they'll never know.

It occured to me while looking through a few modern OS maps to find a mountain mention on a post card that just arrived, a book such as The Accidental Century is like one of those 1950s maps which lie unloved in secondhand bookshops, stuffed into a large carboard box. I buy them, knowing they will not serve me as well as the modern equivalents. But there is a pleasure to be had running over the old roads - the topographical contours will be the same - in order to be taken back in one's mind to the time when there were of use.


Refs.

Michael harrington :
a bibliography from MBEAW.
A resources page for MBEAW, under title voices of reason, covers quite a lot of writers.

Down the bottom of this Jesse Jackson Jnr. site {not links} is a set of front pages of all Harrington's books {presumably U.S. editions}.


Conversation with an Atheist -- Michael Harrington on Religion and Socialism

All that is solid melts into the air, The Experience of Modernity, By Marshall Berman

Only small mention of Harrington: serependipitous find, but interesting read about another book.

Why should I grieve now? A Zen story {chapter 3} : mentions the words 'the accidental century". No Harrington, but obviously referring to the book. Need a zen quote? Check out the Irishman 'joke'.





Saturday, April 02, 2005

Deja lu



Refs. for something in preparation:


Hitler's forgotten Library: The Man, his Books, and his Search for God


Secrets of Hitler's forgotten library

Scotman commentary


Don't let the Nazis occupy your mind

original source : Sunday Times (London) December 15, 2002, Sunday

What a swell party it was. . . for him

Scots Historian Niall Ferguson reviews autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth century Life by Eric Hobsbawm

The Age of the Essay
Writing, Briefly

by Paul Graham








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