Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 37
April 18, 2013
You didn't have to be there
It isn't so much the political side of this article by Zoe Williams that interests me (though it's actually quite a balanced argument, acknowledging the usefulness of "checking one's privilege" every so often, but warning against being rendered completely mute by it). But what drew me was this paragraph, because of its relevance to fiction/poetry and people's reactions to same:
I'm not entirely sure if this is specifically an argument of the right. But it does strike me as quite similar to the kind of criticism of fiction, and especially of poetry, which focuses on "did it really happen?" and seems to think (a) that the factual truth of the words employed is more important than the skill displayed in the use of them and (b) that writers who have not been there, done that, have no locus to write about experiences they have not actually been through -or, as Williams might put it, dismissing imagination, empathy, research and verbal skill and attempting to replace them with the power of personal testimony. There is sometimes a political dimension to this, in that writing about characters from a different culture or even, sometimes, gender, can be dismissed as "appropriation". This worries me in itself, because, though such writing demands proper research and sensitivity, if it isn't allowed at all, I don't see how fiction can ever be universal rather than somewhat boringly compartmentalised: is not part of the point of writing to be able to step outside oneself and into others? But it isn't purely political; it's also commercial in that readers seem to want to think the writer at least could have been there, done that. Thus male Mills & Boon writers use female pseudonyms, while women writing m/m erotica use male ones, and both happen more often than the innocent reader might think.
The specific problem for poets seems to be the I voice allied to the lyric form. Nobody reading a novel in the I voice assumes that the narrator is the writer; alarming numbers of readers assume when reading a poem that not only is the narrator the writer, but also a totally reliable narrator who never embroiders experience. Quite recently, a poet I know via social media had to correct online information about herself which stated confidently that she had conceived her child via IVF. She'd done no such thing and never even had IVF, but she'd written a poem about it, so naturally they assumed It Must All Be True! Or, possibly, that it should be, for I've heard people maintain that though novelists are allowed to make things up, lyric poets should "write from the heart". I've mentioned before that when someone at a reading assumes it's All True and you say "no, actually I made it up", there is sometimes a look of disappointment. Someone once speculated, about a book of elegies for a poet's wife, whether people's reactions to it would be altered if they found out it wasn't true, that the lady was alive and well (she wasn't; the critic was just being interestingly hypothetical). But I was mildly horrified by the number of readers who said it would ruin the book for them - hang on, the words would be exactly the same? But it would be insincere, says a lady who presumably doesn't feel incapable of being moved by emotions expressed in a novel merely on the ground that the person expressing them never existed?
Personally I never assume that the I in a poem is (a) the writer or (b) telling the truth (it isn't the case in my work, so why should anyone else's be different?). In fact of course it sometimes is; there are poets whose I voice is sometimes, often or even perhaps always them, and who write so much from their own experience that you might mistake the result for autobiography. But they aren't the most memorable poets, not unless they manage along the way to transcend the experience, to universalise the personal and go beyond facts to a deeper "truth" that comes from imagination, perception and the transforming power of language.
What makes me doubt this idea is its striking similarity to a technique of the right, the hyper-individualisation of every argument. Unless you are penniless right now, this second, you can't complain about inequality. Even more exclusively, unless you were born poor you can't take the side of the poor. I dislike the argument because it's anti-intellectual, dismissing reason and systems – all the tools of discursive progress – and attempting to replace them with the power of personal testimony.
I'm not entirely sure if this is specifically an argument of the right. But it does strike me as quite similar to the kind of criticism of fiction, and especially of poetry, which focuses on "did it really happen?" and seems to think (a) that the factual truth of the words employed is more important than the skill displayed in the use of them and (b) that writers who have not been there, done that, have no locus to write about experiences they have not actually been through -or, as Williams might put it, dismissing imagination, empathy, research and verbal skill and attempting to replace them with the power of personal testimony. There is sometimes a political dimension to this, in that writing about characters from a different culture or even, sometimes, gender, can be dismissed as "appropriation". This worries me in itself, because, though such writing demands proper research and sensitivity, if it isn't allowed at all, I don't see how fiction can ever be universal rather than somewhat boringly compartmentalised: is not part of the point of writing to be able to step outside oneself and into others? But it isn't purely political; it's also commercial in that readers seem to want to think the writer at least could have been there, done that. Thus male Mills & Boon writers use female pseudonyms, while women writing m/m erotica use male ones, and both happen more often than the innocent reader might think.
The specific problem for poets seems to be the I voice allied to the lyric form. Nobody reading a novel in the I voice assumes that the narrator is the writer; alarming numbers of readers assume when reading a poem that not only is the narrator the writer, but also a totally reliable narrator who never embroiders experience. Quite recently, a poet I know via social media had to correct online information about herself which stated confidently that she had conceived her child via IVF. She'd done no such thing and never even had IVF, but she'd written a poem about it, so naturally they assumed It Must All Be True! Or, possibly, that it should be, for I've heard people maintain that though novelists are allowed to make things up, lyric poets should "write from the heart". I've mentioned before that when someone at a reading assumes it's All True and you say "no, actually I made it up", there is sometimes a look of disappointment. Someone once speculated, about a book of elegies for a poet's wife, whether people's reactions to it would be altered if they found out it wasn't true, that the lady was alive and well (she wasn't; the critic was just being interestingly hypothetical). But I was mildly horrified by the number of readers who said it would ruin the book for them - hang on, the words would be exactly the same? But it would be insincere, says a lady who presumably doesn't feel incapable of being moved by emotions expressed in a novel merely on the ground that the person expressing them never existed?
Personally I never assume that the I in a poem is (a) the writer or (b) telling the truth (it isn't the case in my work, so why should anyone else's be different?). In fact of course it sometimes is; there are poets whose I voice is sometimes, often or even perhaps always them, and who write so much from their own experience that you might mistake the result for autobiography. But they aren't the most memorable poets, not unless they manage along the way to transcend the experience, to universalise the personal and go beyond facts to a deeper "truth" that comes from imagination, perception and the transforming power of language.
April 16, 2013
Slight change of nationality
I'm now officially a Scottish poet. I thought it might take longer (I've only been living full-time in Shetland since 2009), but a poem of mine has made it into the online anthology Best Scottish Poems 2012. Quite chuffed about this. If Jack Charlton were still around, I'd have a go for the Irish football team on the strength of my Irish granny. Here's the poem:
You can read the whole anthology (20 poems) here.
The Eye
Across the bay, they’re building a house
with a glass wall, panes all the way up
into the gable, windows that wrap
around corners for a view as wide
as sea and sky, to take in Sumburgh Head,
Auriga, every passing vessel
and pod of orca, storm-force gales,
anvil clouds, the cliffs of Levenwick,
the waxing moon lighting a track
clear to Fair Isle. This huge eye,
lidless, unfillable, as hungry
for every last object it can rest on
as if it were mortal, knowing how soon
light goes by; how little time it has.
You can read the whole anthology (20 poems) here.
March 8, 2013
Making it different
Bartleby Snopes' list of things that generally turn them off would be more use to writers if it weren't such a hodgepodge. It contains things that should always, not generally, turn an editor off, like poor writing, poor editing, undeveloped characters and punch endings, but also another set of current writing tics - second person, third person present tense - that are tiresomely prevalent but can work if well done and some overworked themes and settings - marriage, writers, bars - that can also work if well done.
I've judged story comps and know what they mean, though I'd put it positively rather than negatively: I would try not to sigh at the 15th story in the present tense, but one in past tense would probably have a head start (which it'd soon lose if badly written). But it's certainly true that there are not only overworked themes but overworked stylistic tics, and that's true for poems too, though they are often different. The last poetry competition I judged, I swear there were half a dozen poems about bees, God knows why, but obviously after the first couple, the rest had a hill to climb. (And please, don't bother to write the one about telling the bees someone's died, it must have been done scores of times.)
Another ubiquitous theme that, unusually, is common to stories too these days is caring for someone with Alzheimers. There's no point in suggesting people avoid this theme; it's clearly a major concern of today or it wouldn't be ubiquitous. But if you want an editor or judge to recall yours, rather than the other two dozen, you need an individual angle. Humour is a good bet, especially since in itself this theme is bound to depress the reader.
Poetry has its fashionable technical tics too - like ending on an "as if" clause, or what I think of as the Billy Collins ending, where a "but" in the last few lines sends the poem off on a whole different tack. It can work well, too, it just gets wearisome after the first ten or so. Similarly with the Simon Armitage What If Poem, where we start in reality but suddenly go off, like Corporal Jones, into the realms of fantasy.
I would not make lists, because rules are made for breaking. Tell someone that four adjectives in a line is seldom a good plan and they'll quote you "Sweet day: so cool, so calm, so bright" - and quite right too; as long as there are George Herberts about, there is nothing that cannot be successfully done in poetry. And there are limits to how far you can change either your style or your themes (which generally choose you). But if you want a judge or an editor to recall you out of a pile, it's probably as well to be thinking, not just "does it work" but "does it work better, or differently, than the next five s/he'll read in that vein".
I've judged story comps and know what they mean, though I'd put it positively rather than negatively: I would try not to sigh at the 15th story in the present tense, but one in past tense would probably have a head start (which it'd soon lose if badly written). But it's certainly true that there are not only overworked themes but overworked stylistic tics, and that's true for poems too, though they are often different. The last poetry competition I judged, I swear there were half a dozen poems about bees, God knows why, but obviously after the first couple, the rest had a hill to climb. (And please, don't bother to write the one about telling the bees someone's died, it must have been done scores of times.)
Another ubiquitous theme that, unusually, is common to stories too these days is caring for someone with Alzheimers. There's no point in suggesting people avoid this theme; it's clearly a major concern of today or it wouldn't be ubiquitous. But if you want an editor or judge to recall yours, rather than the other two dozen, you need an individual angle. Humour is a good bet, especially since in itself this theme is bound to depress the reader.
Poetry has its fashionable technical tics too - like ending on an "as if" clause, or what I think of as the Billy Collins ending, where a "but" in the last few lines sends the poem off on a whole different tack. It can work well, too, it just gets wearisome after the first ten or so. Similarly with the Simon Armitage What If Poem, where we start in reality but suddenly go off, like Corporal Jones, into the realms of fantasy.
I would not make lists, because rules are made for breaking. Tell someone that four adjectives in a line is seldom a good plan and they'll quote you "Sweet day: so cool, so calm, so bright" - and quite right too; as long as there are George Herberts about, there is nothing that cannot be successfully done in poetry. And there are limits to how far you can change either your style or your themes (which generally choose you). But if you want a judge or an editor to recall you out of a pile, it's probably as well to be thinking, not just "does it work" but "does it work better, or differently, than the next five s/he'll read in that vein".
February 6, 2013
There must be some....
A friend of mine who teaches at uni is looking for teaching material in the shape of "good erotica with characters with disabilities (and I mean characters, not stereotypes or cardboard cut-outs there to boost the able-bodied character's sense of breaking taboos)." My first thought was "no idea"; my second "bet there's some in fanfic". Any suggestions?
February 4, 2013
Making up stories
Poets on Facebook, who can hardly help being aware of an ongoing plagiarism scandal, will guess why I should currently be occupied with folk who are not quite as they seem. But in fact I've been fascinated for years by people who reinvent themselves, who discard their past, their country, their culture, their name, and become someone else.
Some, of course, are just frauds, like "Robert Maxwell", born Ján Hoch, and I've always wondered if changing one's name does in fact release one to some extent from conscience and shame – not having a family name to dishonour, as it were. And some are opportunists: whenever there's a disaster, like a tsunami, you can bet some persons presumed dead in it will in fact simply have jettisoned their old identity, and a life which wasn't proving satisfactory, and wandered off in search of a new one.
But the ones who interest me most are rather more positive and proactive about it; they have an image of themselves which isn't quite what nature dealt them, so they set out to rectify the error. There are two in particular whose reinvention was almost total, and whom I find endlessly fascinating.
The first, Jan Janszoon, may actually have started off as an opportunist; he was born in Haarlem, Holland, in the 17th century and was captain of a privateer which was captured by Barbary corsairs. The fact that he then "turned Turk", as the saying was, and became a corsair (and a Muslim) himself, may well initially have been pure self-preservation. But having started on a new course, he surely went the whole hog. Murat Reis, as he now called himself, was one of the most famous, and successful, people-traffickers there ever was, kidnapping Europeans on a grand scale to sell in the Tunis and Algiers slave-markets. He stole a villageful of 108 people from Baltimore in Ireland, he abducted 15 from Grindavik in Iceland; he even used Lundy Island as a base for a while. And he had more than one chance to go home to his Dutch wife and family, had he wanted, but he chose not to leave his new family and home, a castle by the shore of Salé.
And yet... it is never clear how much of his old personality remained intact; how much he could not leave behind. In old age, he had a visit from the grown daughter he'd left in Haarlem; they seem to have got on well. He flew the Barbary flag, except when attacking the ships of Holland's old enemy Spain; then he flew Dutch colours. And once he buttonholed an English diplomat in the street and sounded out the possibility of changing his nationality yet again, assuring the man "I was ever a Christian at heart" (unlikely, but with our Jan you can never tell).
I think Jan Janszoon became Murat Reis, and found his new persona suited him better. He didn't so much reject his old self, as find it incompatible with the new. But my other fancy in this line was even more radical, and his motives were purely those of a writer; he altered his back-story, and much else, to fit the character he wanted to be.
Tristan Jones was an adventurer, a talented writer and an extremely skilled and daring sailor. There were circumstances in his back-story that didn't, to his mind, fit this undoubted truth, so he rewrote them. His surname really was Jones, but to his given name of Arthur he preferred the sadder and more equivocal Arthurian hero Tristan. In his mythology, he was the son of the captain of a tramp steamer, which might even have been true, since he was born in Liverpool, but he had no way of knowing, having been born to an unmarried girl and brought up in orphanages. The place of birth was Walton Hospital, but he decided the man he was in the process of creating should have been born at sea (in a storm), so he made it so. Some adjustment was also needed to his date of birth, because 1929, the real date, would not have allowed him to serve in World War 2 as a boy seaman, so it became 1924. And this was only the start…
I admit to a huge degree of indulgence for Jones; I can't think of him without smiling. But it would, I think, be pedantic to class these as lies. In his mind, the mind above all of a novelist and storyteller, these were things that should have been true, and would have been, had not inconvenient reality got in the way. He may have claimed achievements he didn't actually accomplish; he never claimed one that he didn't have the talent to have accomplished, had circumstances been right. If he'd been five years older, or the war had obligingly happened five years later, he would have been a boy seaman; there's nothing more certain.
And this of course is the big difference between him and the would-be poet who has lately been in the news for passing off others' work, very lightly altered, as his own. I think it's possible that a serial plagiarist sees things in the same light as Jones did; he reads a poem he likes and thinks "I could have written that"; by and by he thinks he should have, and makes it so. But to judge by the minor alterations this person makes, inevitably for the worse, I see no evidence that these are poems he could have thought of all by himself, if only someone else hadn't got there first. Not, of course, that this would make it all right to go stealing the achievements of others (another thing Jones didn't do). Jones embroidered his own story; he never would have wanted to appropriate anyone else's, still less speak in their voice; it was his own that fascinated him, and that he wanted to perfect.
But then, Jones was a writer.
Some, of course, are just frauds, like "Robert Maxwell", born Ján Hoch, and I've always wondered if changing one's name does in fact release one to some extent from conscience and shame – not having a family name to dishonour, as it were. And some are opportunists: whenever there's a disaster, like a tsunami, you can bet some persons presumed dead in it will in fact simply have jettisoned their old identity, and a life which wasn't proving satisfactory, and wandered off in search of a new one.
But the ones who interest me most are rather more positive and proactive about it; they have an image of themselves which isn't quite what nature dealt them, so they set out to rectify the error. There are two in particular whose reinvention was almost total, and whom I find endlessly fascinating.
The first, Jan Janszoon, may actually have started off as an opportunist; he was born in Haarlem, Holland, in the 17th century and was captain of a privateer which was captured by Barbary corsairs. The fact that he then "turned Turk", as the saying was, and became a corsair (and a Muslim) himself, may well initially have been pure self-preservation. But having started on a new course, he surely went the whole hog. Murat Reis, as he now called himself, was one of the most famous, and successful, people-traffickers there ever was, kidnapping Europeans on a grand scale to sell in the Tunis and Algiers slave-markets. He stole a villageful of 108 people from Baltimore in Ireland, he abducted 15 from Grindavik in Iceland; he even used Lundy Island as a base for a while. And he had more than one chance to go home to his Dutch wife and family, had he wanted, but he chose not to leave his new family and home, a castle by the shore of Salé.
And yet... it is never clear how much of his old personality remained intact; how much he could not leave behind. In old age, he had a visit from the grown daughter he'd left in Haarlem; they seem to have got on well. He flew the Barbary flag, except when attacking the ships of Holland's old enemy Spain; then he flew Dutch colours. And once he buttonholed an English diplomat in the street and sounded out the possibility of changing his nationality yet again, assuring the man "I was ever a Christian at heart" (unlikely, but with our Jan you can never tell).
I think Jan Janszoon became Murat Reis, and found his new persona suited him better. He didn't so much reject his old self, as find it incompatible with the new. But my other fancy in this line was even more radical, and his motives were purely those of a writer; he altered his back-story, and much else, to fit the character he wanted to be.
Tristan Jones was an adventurer, a talented writer and an extremely skilled and daring sailor. There were circumstances in his back-story that didn't, to his mind, fit this undoubted truth, so he rewrote them. His surname really was Jones, but to his given name of Arthur he preferred the sadder and more equivocal Arthurian hero Tristan. In his mythology, he was the son of the captain of a tramp steamer, which might even have been true, since he was born in Liverpool, but he had no way of knowing, having been born to an unmarried girl and brought up in orphanages. The place of birth was Walton Hospital, but he decided the man he was in the process of creating should have been born at sea (in a storm), so he made it so. Some adjustment was also needed to his date of birth, because 1929, the real date, would not have allowed him to serve in World War 2 as a boy seaman, so it became 1924. And this was only the start…
I admit to a huge degree of indulgence for Jones; I can't think of him without smiling. But it would, I think, be pedantic to class these as lies. In his mind, the mind above all of a novelist and storyteller, these were things that should have been true, and would have been, had not inconvenient reality got in the way. He may have claimed achievements he didn't actually accomplish; he never claimed one that he didn't have the talent to have accomplished, had circumstances been right. If he'd been five years older, or the war had obligingly happened five years later, he would have been a boy seaman; there's nothing more certain.
And this of course is the big difference between him and the would-be poet who has lately been in the news for passing off others' work, very lightly altered, as his own. I think it's possible that a serial plagiarist sees things in the same light as Jones did; he reads a poem he likes and thinks "I could have written that"; by and by he thinks he should have, and makes it so. But to judge by the minor alterations this person makes, inevitably for the worse, I see no evidence that these are poems he could have thought of all by himself, if only someone else hadn't got there first. Not, of course, that this would make it all right to go stealing the achievements of others (another thing Jones didn't do). Jones embroidered his own story; he never would have wanted to appropriate anyone else's, still less speak in their voice; it was his own that fascinated him, and that he wanted to perfect.
But then, Jones was a writer.
December 28, 2012
Steam coming out of ears....
.. because I've just come across a review of an anthology launch that refers to "surprisingly imaginative poems from old ladies". (Yes, it is by a man). Am now mentally listing Old Ladies I Have Known And/Or Read, such as U A Fanthorpe, Rosie Bailey, Louise Glück, Ruth Bidgood, Elma Mitchell, any one of whom had enough imagination in her little finger to surprise, nay astonish, certain pipsqueaks. Grr.
December 24, 2012
Review of Alif the Unseen by G Willow Wilson, pub. Corvus Books
I think this might be the first novel to take a computer geek for a hero and make a real success of it. The problem has been that sitting in front of a screen typing has never, hitherto, had much dramatic or narrative potential. But if you set your scene in the months leading up to the Arab Spring, in an unidentified, heavily censored society where using the internet is a way of evading and thwarting the state security system, and if you further exploit the parallels between the virtual, the fictional and the magical worlds, things can quickly become far more interesting.
Alif (his screen handle; he chooses not to use his real name) spends his young life online helping others avoid state censorship; doesn't matter what of, or what state, though he does have to devote a lot of resources to outwitting the security forces of the one he lives in. Disappointed in love, he devises a program designed to make himself invisible online to his ex. But it does far more than he ever intended and he finds himself on the run from the state's own leading computer expert. In the process he discovers that the online world is not the only one where people can be unknown and unseen by others, where nobody goes by their right name and the barriers between the real and the fictional are permeable to say the least.
Me, I'm a sucker for any book that offers djinns, afreets, ancient books of cryptic fairytales, solid walls that reveal hidden entrances to alleys that exist in another dimension, and cats that aren't quite what they seem. But even if you aren't usually a devotee of novels with a fantasy element, this one might be the exception, because it is also sharply modern and political. Most of all, it is about how little any of us know about the richness of each other's inner worlds, as Alif finds when his friend Dina, who has worn the veil since girlhood, throws it over his head to shelter him:
The author is an American living in Cairo, who has previously written journalism for opposition papers and blogs, and graphic novels. If this is what happens when a history graduate specialising in Arabic literature meets new media, I'm all for it. When two worlds collide, whether east and west or ancient and modern, something new and interesting is always liable to happen on the faultline.
Alif (his screen handle; he chooses not to use his real name) spends his young life online helping others avoid state censorship; doesn't matter what of, or what state, though he does have to devote a lot of resources to outwitting the security forces of the one he lives in. Disappointed in love, he devises a program designed to make himself invisible online to his ex. But it does far more than he ever intended and he finds himself on the run from the state's own leading computer expert. In the process he discovers that the online world is not the only one where people can be unknown and unseen by others, where nobody goes by their right name and the barriers between the real and the fictional are permeable to say the least.
Me, I'm a sucker for any book that offers djinns, afreets, ancient books of cryptic fairytales, solid walls that reveal hidden entrances to alleys that exist in another dimension, and cats that aren't quite what they seem. But even if you aren't usually a devotee of novels with a fantasy element, this one might be the exception, because it is also sharply modern and political. Most of all, it is about how little any of us know about the richness of each other's inner worlds, as Alif finds when his friend Dina, who has worn the veil since girlhood, throws it over his head to shelter him:
He could not have guessed the world she had created for herself. Sewn into the underside of her long outer cloak were patches of bright silk, patterned, beaded, spangled with points of light
The author is an American living in Cairo, who has previously written journalism for opposition papers and blogs, and graphic novels. If this is what happens when a history graduate specialising in Arabic literature meets new media, I'm all for it. When two worlds collide, whether east and west or ancient and modern, something new and interesting is always liable to happen on the faultline.
December 4, 2012
Someone Is Wrong On The Internet But It Isn't My Problem
Here's an early New Year resolution which I think is going to make my life far more relaxing.
I love the internet, I really do. But even I would admit it has its drawbacks, and one of them is that it does lead to people getting far more irritated with each other than they would otherwise. This is not, however, entirely the internet's fault.
I think the point is that people are mostly getting irritated with people they would never have come across, much less got to know in any way, in real life. Most of us move, for the most part, in groups of like-minded people. We may have spats with our relatives, friends and workmates, but they basically have quite a lot in common with us and our way of thinking – or if they don't, and get on our nerves, we avoid them.
Online, although we also have our groups of friends and colleagues in social spaces and on mailing lists and forums, the room we are in is exponentially bigger and we overhear snatches of other conversations that in real life would pass us by. This can be a blessing and an education, or it can be an eye-opener in quite the wrong way. People on our friends-lists have friends of their own, who may not be our type of person at all, and we can't help seeing their wrong-headed, ill-informed comments. The same applies, in spades, to online forums, where we come across the most peculiar individuals, the worst of whom would not, frankly, be within our orbit in real life unless we did some kind of social or medical work. But even the relatively well-adjusted ones may be from the other end of the political spectrum, or have views on race, sexuality and science which we hardly suspected were still extant - I came across an Amazon reviewer who had failed to finish a book by David Attenborough because he "never mentioned God and talked about evolution like it was a fact" (these people's notion of grammar also tends to be irritating).
In real life, if we met these people at all, we would soon glance at our watches and say "Gosh, is that the time? Must dash…". And that, I've concluded, is what we need to learn to do online. It is too easy, when we read a plainly ignorant or hateful comment online, to reply, to get into the kind of argument which some eastern sage rightly characterised as useless, on the ground that the mind of a bigot is like unto the pupil of an eye: the more light you shed on it, the more it contracts. I am as prone as anyone to the mindset satirised in that brilliant cartoon; "no, I can't come to bed; someone on the internet is wrong". But I think I'm about to stop doing that, and make my life far more relaxed and enjoyable at a stroke, by asking myself some simple questions.
Would I ever read a Daily Vile article in print? No, because it isn't my sort of rag and I know it will annoy me. So why follow a link to one that someone's posted, just because it's a click away?
Would I bother getting into a real-life debate with someone who says "evolution and creationism are both just theories so you can't say one is better than the other"? No, because that level of ignorance and stupidity in a conversational partner gets tedious within seconds. So why waste time trying to enlighten them as to the meaning of "theory" in an online forum?
Would I haunt a café where racists and misogynists hung out, listening to their conversation with steam coming out of my ears? No, nor would those of my friends who nevertheless can't seem to stop wandering over to blogs like Guido Fawkes and letting the comments below the line upset them (even I'm immune from that one).
Now I can see the counter-argument, that it is good to be aware of different world-views in the way the internet makes possible. But being aware of is not quite the same as putting oneself constantly in the way of. In real life, we are (if perhaps more dimly than we should be) aware that there are such people as racists, misogynists and general ignoramuses in the world, but if our own tastes don't lie that way, we end up avoiding their company, because life is too short to waste in constant indignation.
If we want to avoid being permanently stressed out by the bits of humanity that strike us as stupid and wicked, I think we have to learn to be as discriminating in cyberspace as we are in real life. We don't have to go anywhere, just because it's only a click away. We don't have to talk to people, just because they are in the same virtual room. And if someone is wrong on the internet, we can, actually, just shrug our shoulders, leave him in his ignorance and go to bed.
I love the internet, I really do. But even I would admit it has its drawbacks, and one of them is that it does lead to people getting far more irritated with each other than they would otherwise. This is not, however, entirely the internet's fault.
I think the point is that people are mostly getting irritated with people they would never have come across, much less got to know in any way, in real life. Most of us move, for the most part, in groups of like-minded people. We may have spats with our relatives, friends and workmates, but they basically have quite a lot in common with us and our way of thinking – or if they don't, and get on our nerves, we avoid them.
Online, although we also have our groups of friends and colleagues in social spaces and on mailing lists and forums, the room we are in is exponentially bigger and we overhear snatches of other conversations that in real life would pass us by. This can be a blessing and an education, or it can be an eye-opener in quite the wrong way. People on our friends-lists have friends of their own, who may not be our type of person at all, and we can't help seeing their wrong-headed, ill-informed comments. The same applies, in spades, to online forums, where we come across the most peculiar individuals, the worst of whom would not, frankly, be within our orbit in real life unless we did some kind of social or medical work. But even the relatively well-adjusted ones may be from the other end of the political spectrum, or have views on race, sexuality and science which we hardly suspected were still extant - I came across an Amazon reviewer who had failed to finish a book by David Attenborough because he "never mentioned God and talked about evolution like it was a fact" (these people's notion of grammar also tends to be irritating).
In real life, if we met these people at all, we would soon glance at our watches and say "Gosh, is that the time? Must dash…". And that, I've concluded, is what we need to learn to do online. It is too easy, when we read a plainly ignorant or hateful comment online, to reply, to get into the kind of argument which some eastern sage rightly characterised as useless, on the ground that the mind of a bigot is like unto the pupil of an eye: the more light you shed on it, the more it contracts. I am as prone as anyone to the mindset satirised in that brilliant cartoon; "no, I can't come to bed; someone on the internet is wrong". But I think I'm about to stop doing that, and make my life far more relaxed and enjoyable at a stroke, by asking myself some simple questions.
Would I ever read a Daily Vile article in print? No, because it isn't my sort of rag and I know it will annoy me. So why follow a link to one that someone's posted, just because it's a click away?
Would I bother getting into a real-life debate with someone who says "evolution and creationism are both just theories so you can't say one is better than the other"? No, because that level of ignorance and stupidity in a conversational partner gets tedious within seconds. So why waste time trying to enlighten them as to the meaning of "theory" in an online forum?
Would I haunt a café where racists and misogynists hung out, listening to their conversation with steam coming out of my ears? No, nor would those of my friends who nevertheless can't seem to stop wandering over to blogs like Guido Fawkes and letting the comments below the line upset them (even I'm immune from that one).
Now I can see the counter-argument, that it is good to be aware of different world-views in the way the internet makes possible. But being aware of is not quite the same as putting oneself constantly in the way of. In real life, we are (if perhaps more dimly than we should be) aware that there are such people as racists, misogynists and general ignoramuses in the world, but if our own tastes don't lie that way, we end up avoiding their company, because life is too short to waste in constant indignation.
If we want to avoid being permanently stressed out by the bits of humanity that strike us as stupid and wicked, I think we have to learn to be as discriminating in cyberspace as we are in real life. We don't have to go anywhere, just because it's only a click away. We don't have to talk to people, just because they are in the same virtual room. And if someone is wrong on the internet, we can, actually, just shrug our shoulders, leave him in his ignorance and go to bed.
November 24, 2012
Review of "Shakespeare's Restless World" by Neil MacGregor, (Allen Lane, BBC Radio, British Museum)
This book is both the most information, and the most fun, I have had all year. I missed the BBC radio series on which it was based, so it was all new to me. Basically, it takes 20 objects that were current in Shakespeare's time and place, from a fork dropped in the theatre, through plague proclamations, Henry V's armour and a model ship, to the hapless designs for a union flag commissioned by King James, and uses these objects to illuminate the plays. All the way through, I was muttering "why did I never think of that before?" Reading or seeing the plays in isolation from their context, one can easily forget that, for instance, Shakespeare was 16 when Francis Drake circumnavigated the world and that this had caused a shift in the way people saw their world comparable to what happened when we saw the first pictures of earth from space. It had also generated a fashion for maps and globes that makes the name of his most famous theatre seem a lot more topical and relevant than we might have thought.
The book is full of fascinating and useful information (eg the price of admission to the theatre, one penny, which was the same as the price of admission to see Henry V's armour in Westminster Abbey). And the fact that theatre performances and afternoon church services both began at 2pm, which explains a lot of church hostility to the theatre. It is also, having been co-produced by BBC Radio and the British Museum as well as the publisher, Allen Lane, full of fascinating and beautifully produced illustrations of the objects in question. Strangely enough, I didn't find the human eye in a reliquary anywhere near as moving as Henry's battered, shabby shield or the fancy fork engraved with its careless owner's initials, A.N.
Paradoxically, the firmness with which the book locates Shakespeare in his own time and place merely emphasises his universal, timeless relevance, with which the last chapter is rather movingly concerned. This book is beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated (the 20 objects are only the start of it) but above all, the text is intelligent, thoughtful and penetrating, giving a genuinely novel and informative angle on the plays. Let's never forget that it came about as a result of a radio series by one of the very few broadcasters that would have undertaken such a project. The BBC is as much of a cultural asset to our time as Shakespeare was to his; we'd surely miss this kind of enterprise if we didn't have Auntie.
The book is full of fascinating and useful information (eg the price of admission to the theatre, one penny, which was the same as the price of admission to see Henry V's armour in Westminster Abbey). And the fact that theatre performances and afternoon church services both began at 2pm, which explains a lot of church hostility to the theatre. It is also, having been co-produced by BBC Radio and the British Museum as well as the publisher, Allen Lane, full of fascinating and beautifully produced illustrations of the objects in question. Strangely enough, I didn't find the human eye in a reliquary anywhere near as moving as Henry's battered, shabby shield or the fancy fork engraved with its careless owner's initials, A.N.
Paradoxically, the firmness with which the book locates Shakespeare in his own time and place merely emphasises his universal, timeless relevance, with which the last chapter is rather movingly concerned. This book is beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated (the 20 objects are only the start of it) but above all, the text is intelligent, thoughtful and penetrating, giving a genuinely novel and informative angle on the plays. Let's never forget that it came about as a result of a radio series by one of the very few broadcasters that would have undertaken such a project. The BBC is as much of a cultural asset to our time as Shakespeare was to his; we'd surely miss this kind of enterprise if we didn't have Auntie.
November 19, 2012
Thought on a poem
Had fun recently writing a short article for the Poets Reading Poets series on the excellent Writers' Hub website. It's always more entertaining reading and writing about other people's work than getting on with your own. I wrote about a poem by Paul Henry, called "College Library" which has always been a favourite of mine, powerful, nostalgic and enigmatic like so many of his. The article's here.
