Literature

I watched Peter Ackroyd’s BBC programme on the “Romantic poets”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/ yesterday and was rather taken with the account of John Clare. So I was googling around trying to find out more and, via the “Wikipedia entry”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare , happened upon the extraordinary fact that much of Clare’s work is subject to a copyright dispute. Since Clare died in 1864 I wondered how this could be so. There’s a page of links on the whole dispute at the “John Clare page”, but the in-a-nutshell version is in “a Guardian article by John Goodridge”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4042964,00.html :

bq. Under the 1842 Copyright Act which was in force at Clare’s death, in the case of published works copyright endured for 42 years after publication or seven years after the author’s death, whichever was later. Thus three of Clare’s published volumes came out of copyright in 1871, and the fourth in 1877. For unpublished works, however, copyright was a very different matter. Under common law, an author, or after his death his personal representative, retained perpetual control over his work as long as it remained unpublished. This is particularly important in Clare’s case, since his four published volumes contained only about 10% of his total output – some 300 poems out of more than 3,000 he wrote in his lifetime. This common law “perpetual” loophole for unpublished material was written into the Copyright Acts of 1911 and 1956, and finally replaced in the 1988 Act with a finite, 50-year term of protection (made potentially extendable by a further 25 years in a 1996 Act). In Clare’s case, this could extend the copyright claim well into the middle of this century ….

There’s more, including the tenuous chain by which the copyright was passed on and the more recent purchase of the rights for £1 by a US academic.

CT readers who aren’t already following the Moretti discussion on the Valve, should head over to read Cosma Shalizi’s “essay”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/graphs_trees_materialism_fishing/ on Moretti’s approach to the analysis of literature. It’s one of the best pieces of scholar blogging that I’ve ever seen, if it’s not in fact _the_ best such piece.

We’re staging a book event at the Valve. The book is Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, subtitled “abstract models for literary history”. That means: quantitative history, geography and evolutionary theory. It was originally available on the web as articles in the NLR, but no longer. But we’ve got free PDF’s of the chapters temporarily available. At the very least, I think you owe it to yourself to look at the neat graphs plotting the rise of the novel in Britain, Japan, Spain, Italy and Nigeria. (Those would be in “Graphs”.)

I went to see a production of Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”:http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/classes/coreclasses/hss2/library/man_for_all_seasons.html in Bath last night. Martin Shaw was marvellous as More. I was surprised that I already knew much of the dialogue (certainly from “the Fred Zinnemann film”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0060665/ ). And there are many great moments such as the confrontation between More and Roper in Act 1 concerning the conflict between conscience, God’s law and the laws of England. I wondered, watching the play, whether anything had been mucked about with to make the performance more “topical”, and I was sure it must have been when the “Common Man” declaimed at the start of Act 2:

bq. Only an unhappy few were found to set themselves against the current of their times, and in so doing to court disaster. For we are dealing with an age less fastidious than our own. Imprisonment without trial, and even examination under torture, were common practice.

But no. Those lines are there in Bolt’s original.

Here are, more or less, two thoughts on Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

§1 The Magic Christians
The setting is England at the turn of the 19th Century. Once upon a time, there was real magic – no more. Hence such comedy as the York Society Of Magicians:

They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic – nor ever done any one the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble on a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one’s head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.

John Segundus appears, who "wished to know, he said, why modern magicians were unable to work the magic they wrote about. In short, he wished to know why there was no more magic done in England." The society is discomfited.

The President of the York society (whose name was Dr. Foxcastle) turned to John Segundus and explained that the question was a wrong one. "It presupposes that magicians have some sort of duty to do magic – which is clearly nonsense. You would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the task of botanists to devise more flowers? Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars? Magicians, Mr. Segundus, study magic which was done long ago. Why should anyone expect more?"

Magic is socially disagreeable, "the bosom companion of unshaven faces, gypsies, house-breakers ; the frequenter of dingy rooms with dirty yellow curtains. A gentleman might study the history of magic (nothing could be nobler) but he could not do any." A debate breaks out. A few members are roused from historicist slumbers to Secundus’ defense. One such – Honeyfoot – soons explains to Segundus about the Learned Society of Magicians of Manchester, a failed clutch of magical positivist hedge wizards.

It was a society of quite recent foundation … and its members were clergymen of the poorer sort, respectable ex-tradesmen, apothecaries, lawyers, retired mill owners who had got up a little Latin and so forth, such people as might be termed half-gentlemen. I believe Dr. Foxcastle was glad when they disbanded – he does not think that people of that sort have any business becoming magicians. And yet, you know, there were several clever men among them. They began, as you did, with the aim of bringing back practical magic to the world. They were practical men and wished to aply the principles of reason and science to magic as they had done to the manufacturing arts. They called it ‘Rational Thaumaturgy’. when it did not work they became discouraged. Well, they cannot be blamed for that. But they let their disillusionment lead them into all sorts of difficulties. They began to think that there was not now nor ever had been magic in the world. They said that the Aureate magicians were all deceivers or were themselves deceived. And that the Raven King was an invention of the northern English to keep themselves from the tyranny of the South (being north-country men themselves they had some sympathy with that.) Oh, their arguments were very ingenious – I forget how they explained fairies.

If only Max Weber had written "Magic as Vocation" [Zauber als Beruf], on the process through which the activity of enchantment has gradually become disenchanted. [click to continue…]

David Kopel “has a post”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_11_20-2005_11_26.shtml#1132694542 about the origins of the Thanksgiving hymn “We Gather Together”:http://www.centrofriend.it/thanksgiving/we_gather_together.htm. (Originally Dutch: a “Nederlandtsch Gedenckclanck,” which is a phrase I could say all day.) It put me in mind of the stuff I learned when growing up in Ireland. Much of it was pretty thin gruel, like the execrable “Christ be beside me”:http://www.know-britain.com/hymns/christ_be_beside_me.html. But there were a few standouts — mostly leftovers from the pre-Vactican II fire-and-brimstone era. Chief among these was “God of Mercy and Compassion”:http://romaaeterna.web.infoseek.co.jp/romanhmn/rh216.html. Nothing like hearing a bunch of eight-year-olds cheerily singing lyrics like “See our saviour bleeding, dying / On the cross of Calvary / To that cross my sins have nailed him / Yet he bleeds and dies for me.” Clonk! Clonk! Clonk! Do you hear those nails going in? Do you?

To offset this, though, when I was in fifth class our teacher, Mr Buckley, read us Frank O’Connor’s small masterpiece, “First Confession,” which put a more humane face on the whole thing. My view of religion was never quite the same afterward.

Then, to crown my misfortunes, I had to make my first confession and communion. It was an old woman called Ryan who prepared us for these. She was about the one age with Gran; she was well-to-do, lived in a big house on Montenotte, wore a black cloak and bonnet, and came every day to school at three o’clock when we should have been going home, and talked to us of hell. She may have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for hell had the first place in her heart.

She lit a candle, took out a new half-crown, and offered it to the first boy who would hold one finger — only one finger! — in the flame for five minutes by the school clock. Being always very ambitious I was tempted to volunteer, but I thought it might look greedy. Then she asked were we afraid of holding one finger — only one finger! — in a little candle flame for five minutes and not afraid of burning all over in roasting hot furnaces for all eternity. “All eternity! Just think of that! A whole lifetime goes by and it’s nothing, not even a drop in the ocean of your sufferings.” The woman was really interesting about hell, but my attention was all fixed on the half-crown. At the end of the lesson she put it back in her purse. It was a great disappointment; a religious woman like that, you wouldn’t think she’d bother about a thing like a half-crown.

You can “read the whole thing”:http://hrsbstaff.ednet.ns.ca/brownle/first_confession_by_frank_o.htm in the space of a few minutes. Vintage publish “a good edition”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394710487/kieranhealysw-20/ of O’Connor’s short stories.

From a “FT”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c06badc2-566d-11da-b98c-00000e25118c.html review of recent books on the criticism of photography.

bq. The argument relies mostly on Dyer’s uncanny powers of description and sometimes merciless wit. At the end of a section on photographic representations of the blind – in particular blind beggars and musicians in the work of Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Evans and Winogrand – he considers a photograph by Richard Avedon of the venerable critic Harold Bloom, who happens to have his eyes closed. “The impression is of a man,” writes Dyer, “so swaddled in self-regard that he can read books – and possibly even write about them as well – with his eyes shut.”

Der Spiegel has “an interview with Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,380858,00.html — currently facing criminal charges for having publicly discussed the mass murder of Armenians during the First World War — which touches on his career as novelist, the political evolution of Turkey, the possibility of Turkish accession to the EU, among other matters.

MEG: Have you got your paper?

PETEY: Yes thanks.

MEG: That’s nice? Anything interesting?

PETEY: Not really.

MEG: That’s nice.

PETEY: “Someone won a prize”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4338082.stm .

MEG: That’s nice. Who?

PETEY: I don’t think you’d know him.

MEG: What’s his name?

PETEY: Harold.

MEG: I don’t know him.

PETEY: No.

There’s an interesting piece, "Molecular Self-Loathing", in the Oct 1-7 issue of The Economist. On a personal note, the degree of self-loathing programmed into my molecules is, apparently, this: I turn first to Lexington, notice there’s a cartoon of an aging hippie hitchhiking, thumb out; a car with a USA license-plate is passing him by. I read the whole thing. (To save yourself that trouble, do the following: say "He didn’t think that was so groovy", in a Monty Burns voice. Favorite line: "For their part, the Republicans have been trying to get beyond Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy.’")

[click to continue…]

Today sees “yet”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4312110.stm “another”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16825259%255E2703,00.html “round”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/unmasked-the-real-shakespeare/2005/10/05/1128191785837.html of stories about a claim to have discovered the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Today’s candidate is Sir Henry Neville. A book claiming he is the author is about to be released by Brenda James and William Rubinstein.

[click to continue…]

The NYT Magazine has a “long story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11BELIEVERS.html?ex=1284091200&en=e1fba3185dd284cf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss on “The Believer”:http://www.believermag.com/ and “n+1”:http://www.nplusonemag.com magazine as apostles of the new seriousness in literary culture.

bq. In the end, this may be the common ground n+1 and The Believer occupy: a demand for seriousness that cuts against ingrained generational habits of flippancy and prankishness. Their differences are differences of emphasis and style – and the failings that each may find in the other (or that even a sympathetic reader may find in both) come from their deep investments in voice, stance and attitude rather than in a particular set of ideas or positions. For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them – “to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.” And this can lead, at times, to the credulous, seemingly disingenuous naïveté that Greif finds infantile. For n+1, the index of seriousness is thought for its own sake, which can sanction an especially highhanded form of intellectual arrogance. But, of course, this distinction, between a party of ardor and a party of rigor, is itself too schematic, since The Believer, at its best, is nothing if not thoughtful, and n+1 frequently wears its passions on its sleeve.

It’s an interesting article, which has a lot to say about the role of the little magazine in American culture. Still, its underlying argument misses the mark in its attempt to bundle two dissimilar publications into the same category. There’s a very big difference between sincerity, which is what The Believer is looking for, and the kind of seriousness that _n+1_ advocates. The one is more or less entirely apolitical, and (in my personal opinion) quite annoying – its underlying claim is that we should abandon our critical faculties and only speak when we have something nice to say. The other is a claim that both literature and politics _matter_ and should be subjected to harsh and ferocious criticism where they go wrong. Randall Jarrell, moved to sarcasm at an editor’s wrath on behalf of an aggrieved reviewee, wrote:

bq. I had thought a good motto for critics might be what the Persians taught their children: _to shoot the bow and speak the truth_; but perhaps a better one would be Cordelia’s _love and be silent_.

As best as I can tell, _n+1_ is of the Persians’ party, and _The Believer_ of Cordelia’s. Not the same thing at all.

(Full disclosure: a piece of mine will probably be published on N+1‘s website in the next month or two).

Update: “John Holbo”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_functioning_little_magazines reacts to the same article on the _Valve_.

Listening to “Bob Harris Country”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/playlist.shtml last Thursday, I was really captivated by “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com/ talking about Charles Bukowski. I didn’t know anything about Bukowski, except having a vague idea that he might be something to do with the beat poets. Anyway, I was intruiged enough to go out and buy “Post Office”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876850867/junius-20 , Bukowski’s grittily written account of working for the US post office as a relief postman and then as a clerk whilst being almost permanently drunk, gambling and womanizing.

bq. It began as a mistake.

A great opening line to hook you in, reminiscent of Hammett or Chandler, except this isn’t a crime story. Brilliant muscular writing about snagging with petty authority figures, trudging around delivering letters to lunatics in the pouring rain, mean and manipulative men and women, making money at the track, routine, boredom, cheating the system.

One of the best things I’ve read in a while, I don’t mind saying. Completely non-boring. I’ve now gone out and bought “Ham on Rye”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876855575/junius-20 , which I’m really looking forward to, as well as a book of poems: “You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876856830/junius-20 . Comments to further remedy my Bukowski-related ignorance (or my Tom Russell-related ignorance for that matter) would be most welcome.

Michael Dirda has a very good “review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090101761.html of Paul Park’s _A Princess of Roumania_ in the Washington Post today (warning: some spoilers); for my earlier review of Park’s novel, see “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/21/a-princess-of-roumania/. It’s really a lovely book – highly recommended. (Powells link here; Amazon (deprecated) here; all commission earnings go to charity).