Thou speakest bollocks

The title of this post comes from Withnail & I’s deleted Scene 60, in which there’s a swordfight (no, really). It’s one of many marvels to be found in the screenplay, which also includes some notes about the real bloke that Withnail’s based on.

“[Viv’s] nicknames were ‘the spine’ and ‘crime’. I don’t know where the first came from, but the latter predicated on his ability to spend all day in the pub, and always with discretion navigate his turn to buy a drink. ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’ But none of us cared because his company was worth the price. Viv was into literature, Keats and Beaudelaire, and turned me on to both these great poets. Plus the funniest book I’ve ever read, the great A Rebours, is one of the two novels Marwood shoves into his suitcase at the end of the film.”

Bruce Robinson, Introduction to Withnail and I – the screenplay, p. viii.

A Rebours (or, “Against Nature” as it’s published in English) is a hugely self-indulgent French decadent novel first published in 1884. It influenced the fin de siecle of Oscar Wilde, and is referred to in A Picture of Dorian Gray as “the strangest book he had ever read”. It remained something of a cult hit ever after, and was especially cool in the 1960s. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition cites Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography where she’d ask her dates if they’d read A Rebours.

“And if he said yes you’d fuck.”

Marianne Faithfull, Faithfull, p.100, cited in ‘Introduction’ by Patrick McGuinness, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against nature (a rebours), p. xv.

After a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll that eats up too much of his inheritance, the aristocratic Des Esseintes retires to a small house and solitary life of thought and indulgence. We glimpse his put-upon servants, cabbie and doctor, and there are fleeting accounts of his exes and parents, but mostly it’s Des Esseintes’s views on life, subject by subject.

A chapter will list, for example, his heroes and villains of prose, while another might address poetry, the classics, music, perfume, painting, religion… The general opinion is that anything other people like is rubbish. His former favourites can be ruined just by their becoming popular.

I knew a bloke once who railed against the sheep at university who all had the same Oasis album on their shelves, next to their identical Tarantino posters. But there’s a balance to be struck between a sneery snobbishness against anything just because it’s popular and a desire to find new stuff, new perspectives, which challenge the conventional.

Des Esseintes’s wants to flout fashion and taste, and spends his time being willfully difficult. McGuinness points out that a more literal English translation of the title is “stubbornly against the tide” – in exactly the way that King Canute wasn’t.

Des Esseintes is not a character you’d want to emulate – weedy, sickly, cynical and silly – though that’s exactly what Withnail is doing. That said, the book’s often very funny. The absurd jewel-encrusting of a turtle, or an excitable trip out of town that doesn’t quite work out, are both reminiscent of the dour tomfoolery of the film.

It’s a bitter attack on the plebeian hideousness of life. It’s wild, free-wheeling, rude and very strange. Funny, yes, but funny peculiar.

Off to see my auntie now, in a quiet backwater of France (though – hooray for the Internet! - there’s a detailed site about the river valley in question). Back Wednesday.

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Impliedly and hoverports

Are two words I learnt yesterday. Something at work was said to be “impliedly defined” and I hazarded that this might be bollocks. Word certainly didn’t like the term, and scribbled under the first bit in angry red zigzag.

Google threw back “about 986,000” finds for it (in an impressive 0.17 seconds), but a cursory glance suggests these are mostly people wanting to know if this bastard is really a word?

Yes, reply those shackled to the right of legalese to obfuscate (or, those who think it’s okay for lawyers to make things complicated). For example:

“I have a great deal of sympathy with the hon. Lady's comments on seemingly cumbersome words such as “impliedly''. However, lawyers tell me that, over the years, those words acquire a meaning that all lawyers understand in the context of Acts of Parliament and Bills before Parliament. Although she is worried about the cumbersome and alienating nature of the prose, “impliedly'' achieves something in the text. If we did not keep it, we would have to list every possible purpose in the agreements reached with other countries, which would almost certainly result in their being revisited often. Fraud, international or otherwise, evolves and changes over time. As one loophole closes, others may open and other ways of defrauding the system are created. The language we use in our Acts of Parliament seeks to put a stop to such practices and to keep up with that evolution.”

Angela Eagle on the Social Security Fraud Bill [Lords], Official ReportCommons Standing Committee A, 9/4/01.

So, er, international fraud would get away with new tricks if a law said “definition is implied” or that something “implies definition”?

The “lawyers tell me” suggests the hon. Angela Eagle doesn’t agree herself, and its being a word “that all lawyers understand” just means it’s jargon. A colleague unkindly suggests that it is in lawyer’s interests to make things unwieldy for the layperson. I have every respect for the nuance of meaning, and it’s on the basis I question the term. It’s longer, it’s more complicated, and really quite bright people don’t know what it means.

Not being a lawyer (or that bright) I’d still hazard it’s bollocks. And googling also turned up the equally silly “implicative”.

Meanwhile, a “hoverport” is a port for a hovercraft, rather than a port that hovers. Bit disappointed about that one.

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Mod cons

“Many different styles can be characterised as Modernist, but they shared certain underlying principles: a rejection of history and applied ornament; a preference for abstraction; and a belief that design and technology could transform society.”

Information board at the V&A's Modernism exhibition, June 2006.

The huge exhibition (until 23 July) makes clear that Modernism emerged as a rejection of terrible things past, advocating a new, post-world-war order. Much of it derives from friendly, leftie ideas about social equality: better housing for the poor, workplaces that ease the burden on the worker. But there’s a great difference between equality and the sort of uniformity these grand designs impose.

Some things are great fun – I liked the kooky teapots and saucers – and the foldaway furniture makes the most of confined accommodation. But the great blocks of housing in concrete and glass are just ugly and oppressive, fitting people into neatly wrought boxes.

Despite the elegant socialite in the foreground of JJP Oud’s “Municpal Housing” (1931-2), it reminded me of Victorian models of the panoptic prison system – where individual identity is subsumed by the institution.

There’s also little softness or comfort in the models. With my lower back beginning to protest at all the time spent hunched at computers, I didn’t think the various takes on chair looked that supportive.

Having lived in a concrete block, I know how impractical an austere little living chamber is to keep warm and damp-free, and how quickly the weather and vegetation can make the crisp lines and bright facades look old and dour and forsaken.

Actually, the insistence on abstract lines and blocks rather than the “natural” (for all there’s a section on Modernism’s observation of the natural world) could suggest a rejection of the squidgy, mucky sort of existence we actually live.

It’s a world of firmness and phallic projection into space, which I can see might be liberating after decimation by world war and flu. Though not denying the genuine social ills the Modernists tried to put right, there’s something disturbing about artists and engineers organising people’s lives on such a scale.

The Dr made the point (after a few beers) that you could show the same Modernist-built housing estates now as their builders did the Victorian slums, and make the same points about deprivation and despair. The buildings are not solutions to the problem: the communities in question are still places money is not directed.

There was something a bit sinister about the projected health and dynamism of this new generation of people. A fun bit of film about nudey ladies doing exercise swiftly moved on to mass-participation stretches and Triumph of the Will.

The totalitarian edge to Modernism is its rejection of the past: the arrogance of defining the bright future, once and for all.

Those laughing, nudey girls are part of a rejection of the “wrong kinds of body” – which led to the singling out of “corrupting” racial, political and sexual elements. The dehumanising power of abstraction made the 20th century’s mass killing machine all the easier.

Though this may just be our being wise after the event, Modernism is sinister because we know where the ideology led. It’s an interesting, comprehensive display and analysis of a major social and political movement. Intellectually vibrant, ambitious and bold, but really not very comforting.

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Happy-slapping hoodies with ASBOs and ringtones

Have proofed "Incongruous details", which will now be published in July. Also looked over something else related, but you'll have to wait and see.

Have talked before about the importance of details, especially in this freelancing lark. On Monday, learned colleagues were wondering why ASBOs are always "slapped" on offending chavs, and which red-eyed, red-topped newspaper had first called it that.

"It's slapped because it's a knee-jerk reaction," said one colleague. But I don't think you can slap with your knees.

Details are important in stories, and my late grandfather once suggested a very clever thing which I then wangled into an essay. He was asking about my filthy love of sci-fi, a millieu he'd never got.

("Most of it seems pretty appalling rubbish," he said. Which is pretty much my view, too.)

He did admit, however, to a filthy love of a good detective story - and recommended me Dashiell Hammett, for which I shall always be grateful. And he knew that some people just don't get detective stuff.

I said it was odd that a) science-fiction and detective stories both began around the same time (some people even argue they were invented by the same odd bloke), and b) that if you don't get into them at about the age of 11, then you never really do.

"Hmm," my grandfather said, or words to that effect. "Perhaps that's because they're both about spotting details in the stories to build up a picture of the world. In a detective story, you're looking for clues about who committed the crime and how. In science fiction, clues tell you how the world itself works. If you never learnt to decode these kinds of story, you'll always be locked out."

Which I think is very true. In sci-fi, the laying down of clues is called world-building. Some writers like to spell it all out, so Orwell's 1984 (yes, of course it's sci-fi) has a whole great chapter on exactly how his dystopia came about and on the etymology of Newspeak. It's a not very subtle infodump - though its political acumen lifts it above the usual sci-fi bollocks where someone explains how "My culture is unlike yours, Earthman. We believe in Honour, and do not use contractions."

The subtler stuff is more tricky to pull off. A classic example (I think it's cited in Bob Shaw's book on writing sci-fi) is a fleeting reference to the doors of a house "dialescing" rather than just opening. That doors open in a strange, sci-fi way tells us we're on a strange, sci-fi world where we shouldn't trust any of the normal, everyday things we take for granted. It doesn't need to be a plot point, it's just part of the furniture.

My favourite for this kind of thing is Cold Comfort Farm.

Put your teeth back in; yes, it's sci-fi. It's written in the 1930s and set in the 50s, after some horrific world war. The well-to-do fly bi-planes everywhere as they might do their motorcars, and public telephone boxes are fitted with TV screens. The number of people I've pointed this out to... Even those who've read the thing several times, and never once noticed the details.

(Why it's sci-fi - what its sf-ness achieves - is one for another post, and I should probably reread the thing anyway.)

I laughed at the Doctor knowing in School Reunion all about happy-slapping hoodies. In a couple of years when the terms have all dated, the line will mean something slightly different. The Doctor's not up with ver kids, he just knows his history.

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Late-developing and fairies

"At age fourteen, by a process of osmosis, of dirty jokes, whispered secrets and filthy ballads, Tristan learned of sex. When he was fifteen he hurt his arm falling from the apple tree outside Mr Thomas Forester's house: more specifically from the apple tree outside Miss Victoria Forester's bedroom window. To Tristan's regret, he had caught no more than a pink and tantalising glimpse of Victoria, who was his sister's age and, without any doubt, the most beautiful girl for a hundred miles around."

Neil Gaiman, Stardust, p. 29.

Knocked through this very quickly and pleasurably, patting myself on the back for noting various references to what Grimm fairy-tales I've read (the Dr got both books for Christmas). Gaiman's got the feel, the strangeness and the Freudian undertones (glimpses of vivid sex and brutality) spot on, though his morality is more fathomable and consistent.

It's also much more plotty, and longer as one sustained story than the Grimm stuff. It could have been far longer in fact, but Gaiman glosses over digressionary adventures in a sentence, teasing us with details from his fairy-tale world without having to get all indulgently epic about it.

Tristan wants to impress Victoria, and to get rid of him she says she'll do anything if he'll fetch her the star they've just watched falling. Tristan sets off, but the star fell on the far side of the Wall that keeps out the lands of Faerie. He's not the only one who wants the fallen star. And she's not best pleased either.

Tristan's a bit late in discovering girls at 14, isn't he? Though I guess they didn't have James Bond films in the 1830s. And in the prologue for (the never written) "Wall", there's a girl who comes on for the first time at 13. Which - and I admit not to being an authority on the subject - seems a bit late. Perhaps both characters hold onto their innocence later than most because of their connection to Faerie.

The fairy world is a real and fascinating place, which also reminded me of Little, Big and Strange and Norrell, and bits of CS Lewis. The ending made me think of Arwen from Lord of the Rings. And I'm aware that all of these are helping themselves from older mythologies which I should really get round to reading one day.

As with Clarke's book, it's set in the 19th century and mixes the period costume we know with fanciful fairy-tale world - grounding the made-up with familiar history. Since we feel we know something of the parochial life of Victorian small towns, it makes everything more credible and real.

It's a little predictable, and sometimes the revelations are a bit too spelt out. We don't need Victoria, for example, to explain how there's two Monday's this week. And though it's simply told, wryly funny and charming, it's also odd and spooky and really not one for children.

Not that they wouldn't enjoy it, I just think they'd miss what it's really about. It's not about a childish world of make believe, but that we (ourselves as adults and as modern society) have left that childish world behind.

Related stuff, if you're bovvered:

• On Anansi Boys
• On Gaiman in London, November 2005
• Interview with Dave McKean

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Hoons

This crime-fighting story amused me.

It's kind enough to explain what "daggy" means, but not "hoons". I
assume it's short for hooligans. And it's my new favourite word.

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Bare naked ladies

Went to the exhibition of Michelangelo’s sketches at the British Museum (until 25 June) which was really rather busy. In between getting shoved and stepped on by the myriad other punters, saw some really fascinating stuff.

Even the most dashed-off outline shows a world of technical skill. The bloke was just 21 when he carved the Pieta I’d been so impressed with in Rome. Git.

Interesting to see different constructions and arrangements for familiar pieces. The sketches are useful because they give an insight into technique – and there’s a pretty fab computer wossname showing how the sketches make up the Sistine Ceiling.

His work is based on very close observation of models, though he’s happy to take liberties for artistic effect. The exhibition points out that Adam in the Sistine Ceiling (and the South Bank Show title sequence) couldn’t really lounge like that without breaking his pelvis. And the iconic David’s hands are too big.

I think it was my A-level art teacher who said this was ‘cos Mike was showing off he could do hands. Some chums who can’t catch say it could mean something else.

The Dr and her chums got giggly about the apple-like lumps that did not look like real boobies. This was not an artist taken to scrutinising nude ladies – a sharp contrast from the feminine curves in the Picasso Museum just over a week ago. No, the women look like men with bits stuck onto them. (But see also my expert analysis of the contemporary Tintoretto).

The implicit sexuality is referred to in the exhibition, but I felt they’d played down the salacious detail so as not to damage the master’s reputation. There’s a short notice which effectively says, “It wasn’t really gayness. It was sort of expected at the time to shaft young boys.”

Across the entrance hall, the Warren Cup offers an insight into “Sex and society in Ancient Greece and Rome”, and the Dr was busy taking notes. I know exhibitions are meant to be neutral, dispassionate and objective, but I felt something was lost in this abstraction. The exhibits are cold and long-dead, though they’re insights into people’s busy, passionate and mucky lives.

(Note the picture of the cup on the website is tastefully positioned so you can’t see any boys shagging.)

Went to a rather good party on Saturday night and was sat at the front for Dr Who. Bloody hell, that was a bit exciting. Other’s have already spoken of the Firefly influence (which even the Dr spotted, bless her), and my first question to those in the know was, “Go on then, is it Sutekh?”

They told me, God damn them. But you’ll have to wait and see. 

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Playground economics

I am formulating a theory that the economy works a bit like kids in the schoolyard.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the kids compare notes on what presents they're expecting, and to start off these predictions are pretty reasonable. A remote control K9, maybe. A book of short trips. The obligatory satsuma.

The predictions are based on tangible evidence - what they got last year, how much their parents are likely to spend, what they've actually asked for.

Slowly, though, the competition grows. A new Playstation wossname, or a bike, or something else a bit more costly. The kid who starts it merely wants to claim, "My parents really love me" - it's less about greed as about confidence.

But that makes everyone else feel a bit rubbish, so they're saying that they'll be getting something similar. An X-box or a go-kart... It's important at school that you don't lose face.

No one wants to go too far too quickly for fear of being caught bullshitting. But the bluff continues with its own inertia; real, achievable gains slowly warping into dreams. Anyone a bit flash, a bit bolshy, is likely to increase everyone's stakes.

But it can't go on forever. If no one says "Balls!" at any point, if they don't escape the cycle, then it's all brought crashing down anyway by the reality of Christmas Day. Targets are only partially met. They might not even have got all of their original, paltry wants.

And who is to blame for this calamitous shortfall? The kids comparing notes that first day back at school know exactly where the error lies.

Their parents simply failed to deliver. If only they could sack them.

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Blair, the party and reasons for going to war

“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.”

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p. 137.

No, this is E. Blair, not T. Had read this while doing my A-levels and took it to Spain to reread. How’s that for diligent?

It’s a vivid, action-packed adventure yarn, as Orwell joins up with the POUM to fight the fascists. The language is straight-forward and simple (not stupid).

Julian Symons makes the point in his introduction that the kind of warfare Orwell describes had changed little since World War One. It’s a sharply observed and detailed account – from memory too, as his notes had been continually nicked or burnt. It’s concise, action-packed and male.

He’s casually brusque about the hardships and I’m not sure whether that’s English reserve or an inability to deal with the emotional. His 1984 is similarly grubby and brutal, and just as sparse on love.

“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.”

Ibid., p. 51.

We only rarely get any hint of how the events affect Orwell himself (or his wife – I’d be fascinated to know what she thought about it all). He’s a bit surly and he could do with more cigarettes, that’s about it.

The factions involved in the Spanish civil war are notoriously complicated, and Orwell keeps the topic for an appendix chapter he says we needn’t even read. I tried to, got about midway and realised I’d not retained any of it. You really just need know that there were all sorts of different anti-fascist groups all getting at one another, a bit like in Life of Brian.

It’s odd to read all this and Orwell’s 1937 predictions about what would happen next when we know about the world war to come. You keep wanting to shout, “Look out behind you!”

It’s interesting to hear of the Russians “sabotaging” the communist revolution in Spain so as not to bother their new-forged diplomatic and trade links with other European counties. And the European neighbours are also keen not to intervene for fear of antagonising Hitler.

Not included, though referred to in the introduction, is Orwell’s 1942 essay looking back on the war. Nor is there anything to let us know what happened to all the people mentioned. Peter Davison (no, not that one) provides a note on the text which mentions how Jorge Kopp might have introduced the second edition. We’d last heard of Kopp languishing in a Spanish jail while the Orwells fled the country – and all the indications are that he won’t be seen again.

Symons’s introduction suggests how near / far Orwell was in his predictions. He also refers to both Raymond Carr and Hugh Thomas sniping at Orwell’s partisan views, though he (Symons) says that neither give specifics on where they think he’s wrong. I’d have liked some kind of afterword to tie all that stuff up.

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Confused feelings created by relative's sudden and unexpected beauty

“When Helen saw a movie in which the happy ending was that the super-intelligent working-class girl received the letter telling her she’d been accepted for the swanky academy, she always wondered whether that really was a happy ending. The likely outcome of the girl getting her education would be that in the future even if she loved her parents dearly she wouldn’t be able to stop herself being bored and petulant with them and though she struggled against it she wouldn’t be able to resist finding her home town tedious, tiny and peculiar.”

Alexei Sayle, The Weeping Women Hotel, pp. 147-8.

Finished this while on the plane out to Malaga, and as those who replied to my thoughts on Sayle’s Overtaken advised, it’s really rather special.

A strange and vivid opening chapter in the first person sees a battered, shell-shocked woman escaping something terrible. We then backtrack to follow the story of fat, ugly Harriet as she tries to change her life while her pretty, mean sister Helen finds her own unravelling. Right up until the end, we’re not sure which sister it is who’s headed for the opening chapter.

It’s funny and sharp and moving throughout, with brilliant observations and turns of phrase. Sayle throws in so many details and oddments that though the final section is him merely knocking down the pins he’s already set up, you still can’t guess which way things will turn.

He’s savage about Martin Amis’s dancing, and what Neo from the Matrix must be like as a neighbour. There’s a nice line on psychiatrists all being screwy themselves, but not sectioning each other out of professional courtesy. I kept interrupting the Dr’s own much more pious reading to point out particularly choice bits.

We care about Harriet in a way I didn’t feel for Overtaken’s Kelvin. As a result it’s a much more absorbing and satisfying novel. Am sitting on my hands to not spoil it any further. But look you, read the bloody thing.

In other news: the Dr came to a momentous decision yesterday which I’ll speak more of in about a month. I’ve spent the day busy editing things which are yet to be announced, and reintroducing myself to the gym.

Read something I wrote about The Great Escape, and this deluded fellow thinks I’m a hero for services rendered half a lifetime ago. And not, as it happens, by me.

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