About Adam
Email Address: DrACRoberts@aol.co.uk
Website: http://adamroberts.com
Posts by Adam
Monday, May 12, 2008
The War Between Wells and James
Over at Torque Control there’s a good account of, and interesting comment-thread discussion about, last Thursday’s day-symposium on ‘Science Fiction as a Literary Genre’ at Gresham College in London. I couldn’t make the actual day, which was a shame for me, as it sounds like it was a cracker. Luckily Niall Harrison gives good accounts of the papers presented by Neal Stephenson, John Clute, Dr Roger Luckhurst, Andy Sawyer, Dr Martin Willis and Professor Tim Connell. Some interesting points get aired in the comments, not least the divide between university-academic critics or science fiction and the gentlewo/men-amateur scholars, theorists and reviewers, with which the genre is particularly lavishly supplied. I’m particularly sorry I missed Roger Luckhurst’s paper, and not only because he’s a friend of mine and both a ferociously clever man and an excellent speaker; but because, indeed, it was on an especially interesting topic. Click the link and you’ll see: the relationship between SF and Literary Modernism. Niall summarises: ‘he talked about three different implications of modern: modernity, meaning a philosophically and scientifically enlightened society as we have had for the past few hundred years (in theory); modernisation, meaning the technological and ecological consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanisation; and Modernism, meaning the literary movement at the start of the twentieth century. Sf ... is a literature of modernity and modernisation but has an ambivalent relationship, at best, with Modernism.’ In the comments Nick Hubble stands up for Luckhurst’s thesis:
In defence of Luckhurst (whom I don’t know), it has to be said that his position is extremely radical for a specialist in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I should note at this point that this is also my field and so I had absolutely no problem following him because I’m familiar with the idiom and the general outlines of the positions ... What was especially striking was that he more-or-less said that sf was THE literature of modernity and concluded that what was modern about it was the absence of Modernism. People in the field of Modern and Contemporary Literature do not usually say this kind of thing (and that’s putting it mildly). So for me, that was EXCITING. I can see that others might be underwhelmed but that is because they don’t share the same underlying assumptions as people who work in Modern and Contemporary Literature. This was succinctly defined by Luckhurst as being that Henry James won the war with Wells and so came to dominate the modern definition of literary fiction. Of course, the reason others don’t share this assumption is because it is demonstrably false - only in the minds of academics and the literary elite did James win this war; the heirs of Wells, from Orwell onwards, inherited the real world and modernism burnt itself out by 1940. Therefore, what we were seeing in Luckhurst’s paper was the beginning of a sea change (well, it’s been coming some time) by which received academic opinion is transforming itself and recanting the last 100 years or so.
This is, as the thread notes, one of the core arguments of Luckhurts’s recent (and excellent) cultural history of SF, Science Fiction (Polity 2005). I reviewed this book when it came out, for an academic journal, and although I was very positive I also carped a little. Looking back the carping was ungracious: I complained that for a self-proclaimed cultural history of SF it was a shame Luckhurst didn’t include discussion of film and TV SF. But this was actually a reviewerish faux pas, criticising a book by somebody else because they didn’t choose to write it exactly as I would have done. You see it so happens that I also published a history of SF, in which one of my main arguments was that since the 1970s SF has, by and large, jumped media from written to visual forms--but of course it’s asinine to criticise Luckhurst for thinking for himself rather than sharing my peculiar views. The other of my main arguments is that SF begins in 1600. Luckhurst takes the much more orthodox view that SF begins in the latter half of the 19th-century, which is to say, at the same time (more or less) and determined by the same cultural logics (more or less) as Modernism. And as such his overall thesis was much more radical, and much more exciting, than I gave it credit for in my review. So, sorry about that: and you should buy Luckhurst’s book. It’s very good indeed. Better than mine, if I’m frank.
Now, positing Modernism in terms of ‘a war between Wells and James’ is, clearly, a slightly polemical way of putting it; and asserting either the victory of James, or dedicating oneself to a Maquis-style battle on Wells’s behalf, lacks a certain nuance. It’s a shorthand, not an all-encompassing critical description. Keen says ‘I’m not denying the influence of James—I suppose I am trying to reflect the bifurcated culture: James only won in realm of elitist literary culture and the academic modernist industry (he didn’t win in the wider world).’ He goes on ‘admittedly, those spheres are very influential and have cast a distorting material effect over the wider culture’. I wonder whether he’s right to assert that ‘current Modernist studies are showing signs of this position [i.e. the victory of James] breaking down; but as is so often the case, the immediate result of this will be a massive retrenchment with hordes of top scholars declaring contemporary literature to have gone wrong and demanding a return to James (this is starting to happen).’ Coincidentally I have recently been rereading James and my reaction has been a sort of ingenuous surprise at how good he is. That looks rather stupid written down there like that, but its been my reaction, prompted in part by a long period (going back to my undergraduate experience) of not especially liking James. I’ll say more about that in a day or two. But for now I’ll close with this: in my history I cover the period of Modernism in two chapters, one for ‘high’ cultural Modernism and one for Pulps like E E Doc Smith, although my main thesis is (given the, I argue, deeper roots of the genre) they’re basically the same thing. By this I mean that both popular sf and High Modernist art are responding in similar ways to a similar cultural logic: that, in a nutshell, High Modernism is sf. Proust’s Recherche, say, whatever critics have said about it, is actually a time-travel story deeply indebted to Wells’s Time Machine. Similar cases can be made for Kafka, Marinetti, Eliot etc. Enough! Or too much.
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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Authentic Frontier Gibberish
[Title ref: not that you need it]. The frontier in this case is the 1960s, which was a motherfucker of a decade that knew where it was at. Or so I hear. Continuing the haphazard process of transferring my numerous CDs to jpg format so as to bung them on my MP3 player, I unearthed Vintage: the Very Best of Moby Grape, which I hadn’t listened to for ages. Now it goes without saying that Moby Grape were excellent. They were simply excellent. But one of the nice things about the Vintage best-of is the way it includes not just variants and demos and things, but snippets of in-studio conversation. For example, here is producer David Rubinson speaking to drummer Don Stevenson by way of asking him to have another go at ‘Fall on You’ (from the band’s superb 1967 debut album);
Don would you do me one favour, just for me? Play that rhythm that you play in the bridge all the way through the tune. Dum tackum, coomcoom tackum, coomcoom tack--Just try that. Right? You know what I mean? Try driving from the top to the bottom man. Just make the cuts. Alright? Because it lifts right off the ground in the bridge, man, and there’s a reason for it. You get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at ... Alright! From the top! Ba-pa-ba-pa-ba-pa that’s where it’s at!
I suppose it’s the sense that we’ve eavesdropping on actual unguarded 1960s-chatter that makes me like this so much. They really spoke like that. If I wrote a character from the 60s who said something like ‘you get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at’ I’d be ridiculed. Yet it turns out that that truly was where their groove was at. Vintage indeed.
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Thursday, April 24, 2008
How Best to Describe Keith Richards’s Face?
A nice piece in today’s TLS by Alan Jenkins about the Stones, ostensibly a review of the new Scorcese concert film Shine a Light, but actually an opportunity to ponder not just the persistence of the group (‘What’s in it for Jagger?’ Jenkins wonders: ‘a man who qualified a few years ago for his free bus pass, who could almost certainly buy the Beacon Theater and get change from a week’s wages, but who keeps whirling and strutting and leaping, pointing and shouting and pouting through a whole longish set without once looking as if he’d rather put his feet up with a DVD and a glass of Pomerol?’) but their continuing hold on the popular imagination. Why are we all still so fascinated by this superannuated collective? Richards, in Jenkins’s words, only ‘approximates’ playing the ‘chugging Chuck Berry riffs that helped make the Stones rich and famous forty years ago’ (approximation is ‘all he seems prepared to do now’). More, the band ‘haven’t produced a body of great or even memorable songs since the burst of inspiration that gave the world Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street in quick succession from 1969 to 1972.’ Jenkins makes an exception for the ‘odd one-off such as “Start Me Up”’, which may be being too dismissive. (The first Stones album I bought was Tattoo You, and, listening to it a few weeks ago, I was struck by what a fine album it still is). But this is not to quarrel with his key point, which seems to me unarguable: it’s been many decades since the Stones released a markworthy album.
All of which is prelude to the point of this post. Journalists and commentators who write on the Stones are locked in an unofficial competition to come up with the best new way of describing Keith Richards’s extraordinary face. Q magazine recently called it ‘heroically wrinkled like a tortoise’s testicle.’ Here is Jenkins’s go:
“Keef” himself, smoking continuously and looking more and more like the love-child of W. H. Auden and Freddy Krueger, has been so close to vanishing into rock legend so often that no one could begrudge him back-from-the-dead act, his rogueish vamping and leering.
Nice, that. The Auden ref smuggles in our sneaky admiration for Richards qua poet (more than one commentator has called him ‘Byronic’), where the Krueger allusion registers the way his face has increasingly assumed an alarming, poured- and striated-latex mask-like quality. It is not so much lined as ridged, like the roof of a dog’s mouth. It is monstrous, in a fascinating way. I suppose its appeal inheres in a more thoroughgoing form of the same impulse that moved Pete Townshend to smash up expensive guitars on stage—the decades-long smashing up of a beautiful face in the service of the same aim: an offering to the presiding Rock and Roll deities of destruction and nihilism. There’s something splendid about its decay.
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Thursday, April 17, 2008
‘Over London, By Rail’ (1872)
My lovely home-town, as beautiful today as it has ever been:
This famous image is by Gustave Doré, of course; one of his many illustrations for Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage (1872).
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
And what? And what? of the House-man?
Not this House-man
This Housman.
Although actually there’s a certain resemblance there, I think.
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Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Worst Titles of Henry James
James? Fine writer. His titles? Classics, all: Portrait of a Lady. What Maisie Knew. The Princess Casamassamissima. Models of the titler’s art, every last one.
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Friday, March 14, 2008
Phil Dick Again, or Picturing Palmer Eldritch
This is a pendant to Bill’s post on Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and especially to the excellent comment-thread discussion it provoked. The Library of America published a Dick-compendium last year, ‘four novels of the 1960s’ chosen and edited by Jonathan Lethem: The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) and Ubik (1969). My review of this volume has just been posted at Strange Horizons; indeed, knowing that the review was in the magazine’s pipeline, together with my phobia of sounding like a stuck record, explains why I didn’t weigh into the discussion on Bill’s post last week. Don’t want to end up making the same points over and over. As it happens, that portion of my review dealing with High Castle isn’t so hot on the novel; too smoothly done, I argue, for the uniquely PKD tang:
The Man in the High Castle occupies an unusual place in the PKD oeuvre because it was the only one of his novels to win a major award in his lifetime (it won the Hugo for Best Novel in 1963); or to be more precise, it occupies an unusual place because of what that fact says about the book. It says it’s a book liable to find approbation from regular SF fans. It says it works cannily through an ingenious premise, that it’s well-written; tightly plotted, that it construes engaging characters via good and eloquent detail from a properly built-world. Which is a long-way-round of saying that it is uncharacteristic Dick, and rereading it in this new edition (rereading it, I think, for the fourth time) I found that its very polish, its various evidences of craft, alienated me somewhat from the book. Of the four novels collected here it seems to me the least Dickesque, and so the least worthwhile.
The main angle of the review parallels one of Rich P.’s characteristically insightful observations. He mentions a vision, or halluincation, Dick himself experienced (‘of a masked creature in the sky, or something, that reached down with a metal claw to grab him’) and discusses the ways it worked its way into his fiction:
The imagery from this episode apparently was the source for a good deal of Palmer Eldritch … What strikes me about the episode, for instance, is clumsiness. The metal face is unable to show emotion, the metal claw not able to grip as well as a real hand. In Palmer Eldritch, the artificial eye, jaw, and hand infect everyone; it’s a great metaphor for various things, including the nature of a society based around consumption. But it’s also authorial. The face in the sky is the author / the demiurge, and his clumsiness can’t help but be the clumsiness of everyone he creates.
I remain agnostic, or at most fellow-travellerish, about Rich’s demiurgic aesthetic philosophy more broadly, but he’s surely right about the importance of clumsiness to Dick’s art. Indeed, I wonder why there hasn’t been more aesthetic philosophy on the subject of clumsiness itself: apart from that one corner of the artistic world that prizes poise and polish above all things and can only see clumsiness as an unalloyed fault, most art parleys clumsiness into its mix, and rightly so since clumsiness is so central a portion of the lives we live.
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Saturday, March 08, 2008
John Keats on Pregnant Women who Devour Toes
My friend and colleague Roy Booth, over at his blog Early Modern Whale (highly recommended, incidentally) delves a little into a curious Keatsian story of toe-eating from a letter to James Rice from December 1819:
My dear Rice,
As I want the coat on my back mended, I would be obliged if you will send me the one Brown left at your house, by the Bearer … If you do not see me soon it will be from the humour of writing, which I have had for three days, continuing. I must say to the Muses what the maid says to the Man---"take me while the fit is on me.”
Would you like a true Story[?] There was a Man and his Wife who being to go a long journey on foot, in the course of their travels came to a River which rolled knee deep over the pebbles---In these cases the Man generally pulls off his Back. This Man did so; and his Wife being pregnant and troubled, as in such cases is very common, with strange longings, took the strangest that ever was heard of. Seeing her Husband’s foot, a handsome one enough, look very clean and tempting in the clear water, on their arrival at the other bank she earnestly demanded a bit of it; he being an affectionate fellow and fearing for the comeliness of his child gave her a bit which he cut off with his Clasp Knife---Not satisfied she asked another morsel---supposing there might be twins he gave her a slice more. Not yet contented she craved another Piece. “You Wretch cries the Man, would you wish me to kill myself? take that!” Upon which he stabb’d her with the knife, cut her open and found three Children in her Belly two of them very comfortable with their mouth’s shut, the third with its eyes and mouth stark staring open. “Who would have thought it” cried the Widower, and pursued his journey …
Ever yours sincerely John Keats—
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Sunday, March 02, 2008
Hail, Zerbin!
[The story so far. The beautiful princess Angelica has been captured by pirates from ‘Ebuda’—which is to say, the Hebrides—where she is to be sacrificed to a hideous sea monster by the natives in order to appease the sea god Proteus. That’s her, above, according to Gustave Doré [note: originally I posted Doré’s Andromeda by mistake; but that image above is definitely from Doré’s illustrations to Ariosto. Dig that hippogriff! Indeed, if you’ve a moment, check out a whole splendid series of Doréan Ariosto on Wikimedia Commons]. Meanwhile her paramour, the brave Sir Orlando, Charlemagne’s greatest knight, searches Europe for her in vain. In other news, Sir Ruggiero, who has battled monsters and enchantresses on Alcina’s isle, finally escapes on the back on the flying hippogriff. Now read on.]
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Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The Barking Sealion
I’ve been reading MacNeice’s sprawly, centripetal but often arresting and compelling verse-diary Autumn Journal (written Autumn 1938; published 1939) and am very favourable struck by the mood of the piece. It’s extremely evocative: the failures in Spain, the palpable imminence of war with Germany, the textures of quotidian 1930s English life. In particular I was struck by one detail early on. Section V of this 24-part poem opens in a London brooding on the knowledge that Hitler is knocking on the metaphorical door:
To-day was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliant
...Blue for the first time for weeks and weeks
But posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered
...World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks
And we cannot take it in and we cannot go to our daily
...Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’[.]
People gossip not about the cricket, but about ’Hodza, Henlein, Hitler,/the Maginot Line’; and everything is overshadowed by the prospect of invasion.
What will happen next. What will happen
...We ask and waste the question on the air;
Nelson is stone and Johnnie Walker moves his
...Legs like a cretin over Trafalgar Square.
And in the Corner House the carpet-sweepers
...Advance between the tables after crumbs
Inexorable, like a tank battalion
...In answer to the drums.
In Tottenham Court Road the tarts and negroes.
...Loiter beneath the lights
And the breeze gets colder as on so many other
...September nights.
A smell of French bread in Charlotte Street, a rustle
...Of leaves in Regent’s Park
And suddenly from the Zoo I hear a sea-lion
...Confidently bark. [p.15]
The unprepearedness of 1938 Britain—the naval hero Nelson gorgonised and static, with only a facile advertising icon to replace him—of the land laid out like a carpet to be swept up by advancing tanks—is nicely rendered. But what’s extraordinary about this is that final bark from the Zoo, given that these lines were written in 1938. Nobody in England knew that Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain (wafted over from France like the smell of the bread), a plan literally to roll tanks across Trafalgar Square, was going to be called Operation Sea-Lion. (According to Wikipedia, Großadmiral Erich Raeder didn’t even start drawing up the plans for Sealion until November 1939). It’s bizarrely prescient of MacNeice to include his confident and rather threatening barking sea-lion in a poem written over a year earlier.
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Saturday, February 16, 2008
Cloverfield
There’s a moment, early in the film, before the characters realise what it is that’s causing the distant explosions, roarings and thumpings, and as they all rush upstairs to have a look from the roof of their building, when somebody says, ‘is it terrorists?’ I went into the cinema primed enough by reviews and the like to think ‘it’s clearly, on one level, going to be a 9-11 metaphor, New York ravaged by the monstrous Other’, so this stuck out as a minor, ‘aha! that’s knowing‘ moment. But by the film’s end I was struck by an absence: nobody in this movie, on the news footage, or personally encountering this huge ocean-born monster rampaging through the streets of Manhattan, smashing Brooklyn Bridge with its tail, ripping the head off the Statue of Liberty Except For Muslims, nobody at any point says ‘wow, this is just like Godzilla!’ Wouldn’t they, though? (There’s a stilted little half-conversation at one point about Superman, as if to say ‘look these kids aren’t entirely innocent of popular culture’; but that, to me, only made the absence more noticeable). Given that the film is an explicit Godzillan midrash (J J Abrams on the genesis of the project: “We saw all these Godzilla toys, and I thought, we need our own American monster") I suppose the makers thought too obvious a metareference would be, in some sense, distracting: we’re to believe, just as the population of Ambridge don’t listen to The Archers, that none of these wealthy young Americans have seen a Japanese monster film (Or, hey: this is science fiction; maybe the film takes place in an alternate timeline precisely identical to ours except that the Godzilla films were never made). Perhaps this is the Last Action Hero lesson, a contemporary Hollywood mantra: a text referring to itself leads instantly to postmodern shortcircuit and a stench of burning that stops us caring about the characters. Of course, there are other reasons to stop caring about characters: smugness, improbably ubiquitous good looks, too much money, general idiocy and so on. I felt the tug of identity more with the monster himself, in part because he’s got a big baby-like face (well, OK, obviously big; but really quite babylike too), and in part because he’s got these ungainly, sticky-out elbows. I’ve got quite sticky out elbows myself. They make life difficult on the Tube, say.
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Saturday, February 09, 2008
Hamlet, Revenge!
(There are spoilers in this post). Mysterylist summarises this, the second Inspector Appleby yarn [I add some extra exegesis in square brackets]:
Excellent murder story, of the Lord Chancellor no less, set in a huge Blenheim-Palace-like country house [Scamnum Court] during a grand [amateur] production of Hamlet in the great hall. [Lord Auldern, the Lord Chancellor, is playing Polonius; he is shot dead Act III scene 4, just as he is speaking the lines ‘help, help, ho!’ as per Shakespeare’s playtext. Since he is carrying a vital secret diplomatic document about his person, there’s a deal of Establishment anxiety about spies, assassination and so on. John Appleby comes down from London to solve the crime]. Giles Gott [Oxford Don, crime writer, Appleby’s pal] appears, as director of the play, and the cast has many upper-upper-crust characters. A spy element, but basically a good mystery. The Hamlet stuff is very good, as is Lady Elizabeth’s [the daughter of the house, romantically linked with Gott although in a fairly desultory way] method of hiding from the killer. The killer is also a fascinating study, and the misdirection by the author that also contains the solution. Gott, of course, comes up with a logically ingenious explanation that turns out to be completely wrong.
Years since I’d read a Michael Innes mystery, and I enjoyed reading this one, although it places various obstacles in the reader’s way ... I don’t mean ‘obstacles to solving the mystery’, because obviously that’s a mystery-writer’s job: but obstacles to the reader actually turning the next page and carrying on reading. It’s often prolix, and is fatally prone to stretched digressions. It is, moreover, a book that trades frequently on a ponderous university-academic English Literature wit and leaden levity that I, as a university academic in an English Literature department, found only intermittently entertaining, and which will presumably be as dull to non-specialist crime readers as jokes about academic molecular physics would be to those who don’t work in university departments of molecular physics. In other words, a fairly high proportion of the text is a kind of novelistic adipose tissue, in which one occasionally comes across chunks of gristle in the form of antiquated cultural attitudes to gender, class and race--the latter especially jarring, actually: a mixture of condescension, orientalism and plain ugly racism in respect of the Indian character Mr Bose (’the black man’ the characters call him, when they’re not calling him ‘the nigger’). The country house setting, the artificially isolated and thought-experimental nature of the crime, the cast of witty, charming and eccentric aristocratics, some with attendant old family retainers who speak wholly in caricature vernacular: it is all so overdone that it almost achieves a weird postmodern escape velocity to soar into the ether of revolutionary counter-text. ‘Are you a Jacobin, John?’ a character asks Appleby at one point, who replies: ‘I’m probably violently reactionary’ [139]. Isn’t that probably a nice touch?
Certainly Appleby gives Innes the opportunity to vent a variety of crusty-to-Blimpish, sentiments. For example: on the subject of the sightseers who assemble on the edge of the estate at Scamnum Court to rubberneck the scene of a sensational murder of a member of the aristocracy and Lord Chancellor to boot, Appleby is scathing:
It was quite a crowd now: idlers in the neighbouring towns, reading the stimulating news in their morning paper, had hurried to get out the car and motor over to see what they could. And soon there would be similar arrivals from London; people ‘running down for the day’. And portents these, thought Appleby, of a society running down in another sense: clogged by its own mass-production of individuals who, let loose from a day’s or a lifetime’s specialized routine, will neither think, nor read, nor practise any craft, but only gape. [201]
Of course we might prefer to describe these folk not as portents, but just people indulging a natural human curiosity. The opinion that ‘society [is] running down [because] clogged by its own mass-production of individuals’ reads, in a novel published in 1937, as rather more disturbing than Innes perhaps intended; for hindsight reveals how easily violent reactionaries, or for that matter violent revolutionaries, could enact as solution to this very problem the remedy exterminate a good percentage of the brutes. The treatment of murder as an elaborate game, and (indeed) dramatic performance, feeds into this too; as perhaps it inevitably will in a work of this genre. Innes occasionally, though, strikes a curiously modern note:
Gott hesitated, as if seeking some brief expression of what was in his mind. ‘All over the world today are we not facing a rising tide of ideological intolerance, and are not violence and terrorism more and more in men’s thoughts?’ [249]
Well, quite. Other moments, on the other hand, have aged less well (’"What magnificent Dorothy Perkins!” said Mrs Terborg’, 229).
The novel manages some attractively ingenious reveals, mind you; and the prosiness throughout works, intentionally or not, as a sort of defamiliarisation technique that lifts the book into a strange, mannered, rather striking realm of its own. ‘Scamnun’ is a good shammy name for the country house, too; and the Hamlet-scamming-playlet is neatly worked in.
The final solution lacks the necessary rubber-band snap-back of the best puzzle-crime writing, though. A moment’s thought reveals all sorts of problems with it. So: the murderer shot Auldearn from close range as the old man stood behind the stage. Now, our killer could have shot him from the anonymity of various backstage drapes and curtains; but chose not to do this, instead stepping up to shoot him at close range ... even though in doing so they revealed themselves to the beady eye of the prompter. The detective uncovers the reason for this aberrant behaviour: the shooter in question must be a woman, because a man would have shot Auldearn from a safe distance, but a woman can only hit a target from close range. (Our survey says: do what?) Exposing herself to the victim with a gun in her hand, and (we assume) a murderous glint in her eye, causes the victim to call out ‘help, help’ just as scripted in Shakespeare’s play; but how could she be sure he wouldn’t shout out ‘Madame Merkalova! Why are you pointing that pistol at me?’ The prompter--the aforementioned and saintly Mr Bose--witnesses the crime, but instead of telling the police he evades questioning and hurries back to his room to write a letter to his father in India asking him what the proper course of action should be. (He is himself murdered before he can post this letter). That’s a pretty crazy response; and, more to the point, it’s not something Merkalova could possibly have anticipated. Finally we discover that Merkalova and her accomplice, the actor Clay (the play’s lead) came to the amateur theatricals on the offchance that the Lord Chancellor would be carrying some or other vital secret state document about his person which they could murder him to steal. A pretty far-off offchance you might think; but when they discover that Auldearn had indeed arrived with just such a document they rapidly concoct the whole elaborate ‘let’s kill him during the play, then record a spoken version of the secret document onto the experimental recording equipment brought along by the American academic we probably didn’t even realise would be present at the performance, replace the document, and then spirit away the wax cylinder’ plot. Credulity, she is strained. Credulity, she is broken. Woe!
PS: Mysterylist says: “Lady Elizabeth’s method of hiding from the killer is very good.” And the method is? Well, at novel’s-end, Clay is chasing her across the grounds of Scamnum through a dark night intermittently illuminated by moonlight. In a dark interlude young Elizabeth is able to strip nude and clamber up to stand motionless on an empty plinth. The moon comes out again, and the killer, glancing about furiously, doesn’t notice her. Innes just about pulls this off; although I can’t be the only reader to have read this and thought to myself, ahem ... pubic hair?
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Saturday, February 02, 2008
Hegel Hates The Stars
Sounds like a track by Air. But it’s nothing but the bald truth:
Altogether, Hegel’s conversation was always a kind of monologue, sighed forth by fits and starts in a toneless voice. The baroqueness of his expressions often startled me, and I remember many of them. On beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the bessed. But the master grumbled to himself: “The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.” [Heinrich Heine, Confessions (1854)]
I have no idea why Hegel hated the stars. Unless it’s an oblique dig at what Kant saw above and therefore within him. Hum! Hum! indeed.
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Sunday, January 27, 2008
Cat Head Hamlet
Well, contumely and silence, in equal measure, have been visited upon my free-associating yesterday about the possible authorship of the ur-Hamlet. So disregard that post, and instead follow this link to a version of Hamlet performed by felinocephalic actors. Much better.
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Saturday, January 26, 2008
Who wrote the Ur-Hamlet?
Our survey says: Thomas Kyd.
The Ur-Hamlet is a play called, er, Hamlet, that was being performed in the 1580s and 1590s. We know it existed, because contemporaries made reference to it in prose works and the like, although no copy of the play has survived. The play we do have, called Hamlet, written by one William Shakespeare, was probably written 1601, and certainly not before 1600; but it is certain that Shakespeare knew, and seems likely that he utilised (adapted, stole from) the earlier play. Some people think that Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet too; but most scholars agree he almost certainly didn’t.
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