Will Buckingham's Blog, page 20

The Snorgh in the North

I’ve always loved the North East, and so I was particularly delighted to be invited by the wonderful Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books based up in Newcastle, to do an event along with my good friend Thomas Docherty to tie in with World Book Day. Seven Stories are building their World Book Day events and activities around The Snorgh and the Sailor and it’s a pleasure and an honour to be involved. If you want to find out more, you can go to Seven Stories, or else read the following article in the Northern Echo.

If you haven’t been to Seven Stories before, do pay it a visit. It’s well worth a visit to Newcastle. Having said that, Newcastle is also well worth a visit to Newcastle, so do give it a go.

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An Essay for Book Lovers and Bookish Lovers

I just stumbled again upon this wonderful essay by Anne Fadiman, which has been been posted on the Farrar, Straus and Giroux “Book Keeping” blog. The essay is in Fadiman’s lovely little book, Ex Libris, and FSG have reposted it on their blog in connection with — oh, I don’t know, with some festival or other that is coming up at the end of the week.

The essay is well worth a read. And once you have read it, you should go and buy the whole book. Marrying Libraries by Anne Fadiman.

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How Satisfied Are You With This Poll?

One evening last week, the phone rang. At the other end was a polite man who said he worked for Ipsos MORI, the market research company. He asked me if I would mind answering a few questions. Having nothing else to do, I agreed. Besides, I always wondered who this mysterious ‘British public’ was that ended up being polled; and realising that on this occasion I was one of them made me think I might as well make use of the opportunity.

The polite man on the end of the phone started asking all kinds of questions about my view of the political landscape in the UK. I answered the questions as diligently and truthfully as I could.

Then I came to the biggest question of all, Question 10. Question 10 went like this: “Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the way the government is dealing with immigration and asylum?” I had to say whether I was very dissatisfied, fairly dissatisfied, fairly satisfied and so on.

Faced with Question 10, I could only answer that I was very dissatisfied. Why? Well, because of several things. Because of the deliberate political elision between questions of immigration in general and questions of asylum. Because of the outsourcing of housing for asylum seekers to odious and incompetent private companies like G4S and Serco (see the article here) who skim off money for their shareholders whilst failing in their duty of care. Because of the brutality of an asylum system that allegedly awards immigration officials with holidays and shopping vouchers for winning tribunals.

For all these reasons, and a hundred more, I told polite man on the phone that I was very dissatisfied. I then waited for Question 11, which would allow me to contextualise this answer. But the interview moved on, and there was no chance to provide any context. By the time I got off the phone, I felt uneasy. I felt as if in answering this question transparently, my voice was being added to a pool of data that would suggest an entirely opposite view. I thought of the sketch from Yes Prime Minister about political polling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJX...

That evening, I wrote on Facebook and said that “I came out of the interview with the horrible suspicion that my discontent will enter some mass of statistics that will be used to argue for some kind of insular, bigoted, small-minded, Faragism.” A friend suggested I get in touch with Ipsos MORI, so I sent them a tweet (because that’s what you do these days…) to say that I was concerned about the poll. To their credit, Ipsos MORI responded very swiftly to say that they were always concerned about transparency and balance, and to ask what I thought was wrong with the poll. I had a friendly exchange of emails with the Chief Exec, who conceded that there was an issue here. The issue is this: that one could be as far right as it is possible to go and think the policy too weak, or as far left as it is possible to go and think the policy too strong, and either way this would be lumped in as dissatisfaction. I replied to thank him for his response, and to say that I mainly worried about how this data was to be used politically. It is not that I think the poll is deliberately misleading; only that it has not taken account of the context in which it is set, and it has inherited a number of assumptions from that broader context that make it somewhat questionable.

So I was not entirely surprised when last night I saw in the Evening Standard a big picture of Nigel Farage, and beneath him a headline reading, “Six in 10 unhappy with Government on immigration, exclusive poll reveals” (I’m not sure why the Evening Standard need to use the adjective “exclusive”, but that’s beside the point). Despite the big mugshot of Farage, the article — by Joe Murphy, the Standard‘s political editor — was careful not to say directly what the nature of this dissatisfaction was. The editorial in the same paper was less careful, however, reading:

Some six out of 10 people are unhappy with the Government’s handling of the issue, including more than half of young people. Plainly the Government has failed to meet the Prime Minister’s commitment to reduce net immigration levels to the “tens of thousands” rather than the hundreds of thousands; the most recent net migration figure was 182,000.

Of course, Londoners also appreciate that migrants contribute enormously to the economy, especially the service economy and the health service, but many people are concerned about the impact of large numbers of arrivals on the provision of public services and housing. Any audit of the costs and benefits of migration must take both into account.

In other words, the implication is being made very strongly that the dissatisfaction with the government’s stance on immigration is that it is not hard-line enough, and that there are not enough controls upon immigration. This implication is itself not surprising. Given the current political (and media) climate, this was always going to be the assumption that this is what the data meant, which is why the question was leading question. And yet, strictly speaking, this conclusion is not warranted by the data at all. It might be that most people are dissatisfied because they perceive immigration levels as being too high. That would not be surprising. But ”might“ is not good enough. In terms of Question 10, we cannot reach any clear conclusion about the reasons for dissatisfaction with the government’s stance on immigration. In other words, if it is a question that a) tells us nothing concrete, and b) is liable to be over-interpreted to fit political agendas, it is a question better unasked; or else it is a question that, if asked, should be asked alongside further questions to provide more context.

This small insight into the way that political facts are conjured up out of over-interpreted data, and then used to feed into wider agendas, is something that is both instructive and dispiriting. Even if Ipsos MORI are careful not to over-interpret their data themselves, the construction of the poll is troubling because questions about satisfaction and dissatisfaction about such politically charged issues — without being contextualised by questions about in what way and why — can lead to poor understandings, poor reasoning, poor judgements, and ultimately poor political and ethical decisions.

So how satisfied was I with this poll, where one is very satisfied, two is satisfied, three is neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, four is dissatisfied and five is very dissatisfied? I would have to say five.

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Seven Stories Event

February looks like it is turning into a busy month; and I’m very pleased to be heading up to Seven Stories in Newcastle (my favourite UK city, by the way…) for a Snorgh event to tie in with World Book Day. This year’s World Book Day (the actual date of WBD is Thursday 6th March) at Seven Stories is all about Snorghs, sailors and adventures. So Tom Docherty and I are heading up north to do a warm-up event on Sunday 23rd February. Here’s the link to Seven Stories to find out more.

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Mini Book Tour In Bulgaria

Right. I’m dusting off my Teach Yourself Bulgarian book, ready for a trip back to Bulgaria for the first time in seven years, to tie in with the launch of the Bulgarian translation of my novel, The Descent of the Lyre. I’m hugely looking forward to the trip, and am delighted to be doing some events at the Lecti Centre in Varna between the 9th and the 13th of April. Have a look at the link here.

There will be more Bulgarian events forthcoming, so I’ll post to this blog when they are fixed up.

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The Bulgarians and Me: a New Year’s Tale of Disappointment

Well, what a disappointing day the first of January 2014 was. After spending all December reading the tabloid press (and the Telegraph as well), I’d whipped myself up into a state of some excitable frenzy at the thought of 50,000 Bulgarians trooping past my door from the first of January. So in the spirit of Anglo-Bulgarian friendship, back in December I ordered in five thousand copies of my Bulgaria-based novel, The Descent of the Lyre. What a sales opportunity, I thought: fifty thousand homesick Bulgarians filing past my door, finding their feet in a new country. They would see my book, feel a pang of nostalgia, and snap up a copy.

So on New Year’s Day, I set up a table outside my house, with Bulgarian and British flags flapping in the January breeze. I made a sign in English (and Bulgarian too — thanks to Google translate, as I’ve sadly forgotten most of the Bulgarian I once knew) reading “Welcome, fellow citizens of the EU!”, followed by a brief outline of the book, and a special celebratory price in UK pounds and Bulgarian levs. Then I stacked up my five thousand books, ready to make some sales, made myself a big plate of shopska salata to chew on as I waited, poured myself a glass of good rakiya, and sat down to wait.

A couple of neighbours passed walking their dogs. They asked me what I was up to. I told them I was waiting for the Bulgarians. One of my neighbours shrugged and said, fatalistically, “We all are, mate! We all are!” The other neighbour just looked confused. A little later, some kids came past on skateboards. “What are you doing?” they asked. “I’m waiting for the Bulgarians. I’m going to sell them some books.” “Are they your books?” they asked. “Yes,” I said. “Are you famous?” one of them said. “Of course he’s not fucking famous,” another one said. “He’s sitting outside a house in Leicester trying to sell books. He’s not famous, he’s desperate.” The kids went on their way.

By noon, no Bulgarians had appeared. I decided to plug in my laptop speakers and blast out Valya Balkanska’s famous tune, Izlel e delyo haydutin, the one that Carl Sagan liked so much that he put it on a golden record on the Voyager 2 space probe, so that aliens could listen to it as well. I wept a little to hear Valya’s voice: it is a very sad tune. Then, as I sat there sobbing into my shopska salata, my next-door neighbours came out and told me to turn down the music, because it was new year’s day and they were hungover. I wiped dry my eyes and turned off the music.

By three thirty in the afternoon, the rain started. By three forty-five, the books were getting wet. By four o’clock, it was already dark. I finished off the rakiya (had I drunk the whole bottle? How easily it slips down!). I saluted the British and Bulgarian flags and carefully furled them up. I folded up the table. And I took the boxes of books inside.

All that effort and not a single sale, I thought. How dare they!

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In the Moominhouse

Just a quick post this, to round off the year. I’m busy at the moment trying to get a book chapter finished by the first of January. It is about Moomins, flat ontology, Levinas, and other important matters of the day; and if it is taking longer than I had hoped, it is partly because I’m finding some rich philosophical seams to mine. Anyway, the deadline is looming, and it would be good not to start 2014 with a missed deadline, so at the moment I’m holed up with the cat and a pot of coffee,  ploughing through Totality and Infinity, Moominland Midwinter and other great philosophical classics. 

But the thing I wanted to write about on this blog was something different: the question of co-operation in the academic world. Recently I’ve been putting the finishing touches to another book, and have dropped a few lines to fellow academics and scholars asking for help on this and that — references, hard-to-source images to use in the book, that kind of thing — and I have been struck again and again by the way that, despite all the rhetoric of competition and so forth, the world of scholarship is one that is often marked by generosity, mutual assistance, and overwhelming friendliness.

There are those who dream of universities running like slick machines, or like businesses (because we all know that businesses are the ideal model for virtually any institution whatsoever). But my preferred utopian image of academia would be as a kind of global Moominhouse in which various oddballs and eccentrics — some antisocial, some downright weird, some personable, but all of them managing to get on more or less well — have the space to pursue their interests, for their own benefit and for the benefit of others — even if they are threatened by the passing comets of government policy, the midsummer floods of rampant managerialism and so on. Now I come to think of it, I’m sure I’ve spotted a few hemulens wandering the corridors of my university, not to mention the occasional flustered fillyjonk and a couple of muskrat philosophers…

Anyway, I must get back to finishing the chapter. Have a very happy end of 2013, and here’s to 2014.

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A Note on Bread and Books

Over the last few days, I’ve been up to my ears in edits of my I Ching book project, this curious novel-of-sorts that has been preoccupying me for seven or eight years now. I’m hoping to get the final manuscript sent off by Christmas, so the next few days will be busy. In between long stints editing, I’ve also been baking bread. I’m not sure at the moment how the fiction is going, but the bread (sourdough with poppy seeds) seems to be doing well. Here’s what I found when I came downstairs this morning…

White Sourdough with Poppy Seeds

The bread was a bit more vigorous than I had expected it to be. It is lucky that I didn’t get up any later, as I think it might have taken over the entire kitchen. Anyway, I managed to wrestle the thing into submission, fashion it into loaves and rolls to prove, and then to stick it in the oven. Then I went back to the writing whilst it did its thing and the smell of baking spread through the house. An hour or so later, the bread was done, and I’m pleased to say that it was excellent.

But the reason that I mention any of this is that I recently stumbled across a nice little link between these two activities of bread-making and fiction by way of etymology. Because — strange as it may seem — both come from the same Proto-Indo-European root, *dheigh, which means “to form”, “to shape” or “to knead”. I’m not sure what lessons to draw from this, if any; but I like the idea of shaping works of fiction the way that you make loaves — combining the right ingredients, kneading well, then waiting patiently during the successive risings… and it occurs to me now that this I Ching book I’ve been working on is not unlike the monster I found in the kitchen this morning: unable to stay put in its bowl, multiplying outrageously, becoming huge and strange and unmanageable. I can only hope that, once it has passed through the hot ovens of the publishing world, the book tastes as good as the bread did…

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Images from the British Library

This morning Twitter is all a-twitter with news that the excellent people at the British Library have released a million images over on Flickr under nicely non-restrictive licences so that they can be re-used, re-mixed and re-purposed. This is exactly the kind of thing that an organisation such as the British Library should be doing, and so it is a cause for celebration. After a quick search through some of the images, I thought I’d share this one, which is one of my favourites, from Mrs. Archibald Little’s 1899 book, Intimate China: the Chinese as I Have Seen Them (what do you mean, you haven’t heard of it…? Best head over to the internet archive and download the whole book!)

Anyway, the image caption says “Sacred Tiger”, although I can’t help thinking that this might be a typo, and that it should say, “Scared Tiger”, or perhaps “Anxious Tiger”.

[image error] Sacred Tiger, from “Intimate China. The Chinese as I have seen them” 1899

 

You can find the rest of the photo-stream by following the link HERE.

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Postmodernism? What postmodernism?

Don’t you just hate those Postmodernist writers? You know the ones… the ones who can’t just get on with telling a story. The ones who pop up all the time and say, “Hey, folks, look — this is a story!” The ones who just can’t do anything straightforwardly. The ones who like mucking around. The ones who are too clever by half…

I’m busy at the moment putting the finishing touches to my long-term project, A Book of Changes, a strange kind of novel-of-sorts based on the I Ching. And now I’m getting to the end of it, I’m realising that the book will, when it is eventually published, almost certainly annoy readers who have a distaste for this so-called “cleverness”. It fools around with mixing fiction and non-fiction, it comments on the stories that are unfolding as they unfold, it addresses the reader directly. It occasionally stops mid-story to say, “Oh, look at this…”, before moving on again. If John Gardner is right that the job of the reader is to create a continuous dream — as he says in his book, The Art of Fiction — then all of this tomfoolery is entirely reprehensible. Here’s what Gardner says:

 

Fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind.  We may observe, first, that if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must probably be vivid and continuous–vivid because if we are not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.

 

If you assume that this is the base-line against which all fiction should be judged, then it can seem as if anything that breaks the readers’ continuous dreaming is an aberration. Sometimes the diagnosis for this disease is that the writer has simply indulged in a diet of far too many self-referential literary theorists. But if I had to trace the sources of this enthusiasm of mine for stories that show their working (as my maths teachers used to say), it would trace it not to literary theorists drunk on Derrida, but instead to… well, to The Beano. Have a look at this page (which comes from 1984).

 

The Three Bears – the Beano Annual, 1984

 

I loved this kind of thing when I was growing up. I loved the sly interjections as if from the point of view of the artist, editor, characters or even the reader. I loved the playing with point of view, and I loved the sheer fun of it. Growing up on publications such as The Beano and The Dandy, I have always seen stories as things that are made; and it has always seemed to me that part of the fun of telling stories is playing with this fact.

None of this is about clever Postmodern theory. Instead, it is about fun. It is about the way that storytellers down the ages have told stories — interjecting, making jokes, talking about the storytelling as the story unfolds. It is about poking holes in the continuous dreaming of the reader, because through these holes you can smuggle all kinds of things: jokes, anecdotes, puzzles, conundrums, nuggets of information. And in doing this, readers can find themselves to be not just readers, but also accomplices, allies, or co-conspirators.

Of course, I’m not averse to a spot of Postmodernist theorising myself; but in the final analysis, it is not to the temple of Literary Theory that I must return to make offerings to the spirit of my ancestors, but instead to the altar of The Beano…

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