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The Magic Fix: De Quincey’s portrait of the artist as addict

Thomas De Quincey produced two versions of his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He launched himself to fame with the first version, which appeared in two instalments in the London Magazine for September and October 1821, and which created such a sensation that the London’s editors issued it again the following year in book form. Thirty-five years later, as volume five of his own fourteen-volume selected edition of his writings, De Quincey published a second version, which was much longer than the original, and which contained his final reflections on more than half a century of drug use and abuse. De Quincey himself was an astute analyst of the central difference between the two texts. As he explained it in a letter to his youngest daughter Emily, the 1821 version was ‘an almost extempore effort, having the faults, the carelessness, possibly the graces, of a fugitive inspiration’, while the 1856 revision was ‘a studied and mature presentation of the same thoughts, facts, and feelings, but without the same benefit from extemporaneous excitement’.

Recently I sat down with John Cooper Clarke to discuss both versions of De Quincey’s book. Clarke – celebrated performance poet, former heroin addict, and long-time admirer of De Quincey – is the host of a new episode on the Confessions in the BBC4 series The Secret Life of Books. In two wide-ranging conversations, Clarke and I discussed the history of opium (derived from the same poppy plant as heroin), St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as De Quincey’s two key predecessors in the confessional mode, the depths of De Quincey’s involvement with the drug, and the many medical, ethical, and literary responses to the two versions. Filming took place in London, where De Quincey produced most of the 1821 text, and Edinburgh, where he wrote the 1856 revision. There was also a notable stopover in Grasmere. It is not Clarke’s favourite spot in England! But De Quincey lived there for many years in Dove Cottage, formerly the home of his literary idol William Wordsworth, and next door is the Jerwood Museum, where the Wordsworth Trust now houses the manuscript of the 1821 version of the Confessions. It was a remarkable experience following Clarke following De Quincey.

Of all the topics we discussed, perhaps the last was the most evocative. Many, many people have written about drugs since De Quincey published the first version of his Confessions nearly two centuries ago. Why do his accounts still stand pre-eminent, especially as so much has changed in our attitudes and policies, including the fact that in De Quincey’s day opiates were legal and widely available as analgesics and catholicons, whereas for us they are closely associated with criminality and restriction? To some extent, it is because De Quincey was the first to memorialize his experience in a compelling narrative that was consciously designed to engage a mass magazine audience. But it is also, and perhaps more centrally, because in the Confessions he put in place all three of the most formidable narratives of drug experience.

Robert Morrison and John Cooper Clarke, filming, The Secret Life of Books for BBC 4.

First, in ‘The Pleasures of Opium’ section, De Quincey describes the euphoria of consuming the drug occasionally and – as we would now say – recreationally as a way of intensifying his enjoyment of solitude, books, conversation, and music. His most obvious heirs in this line are The Merry Pranksters, whose drug-induced adventures are memorably described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Then, in ‘The Pains of Opium’, De Quincey reveals how, even as he luxuriated in the drug, it was tightening its hold upon him, until it inevitably pulled him down into addiction, where he endured intense psychic and somatic anguish, as well as lurid nightmares that reduced him to suicidal despondency. William S. Burrough is the most notorious twentieth-century practitioner in this tradition, as seen especially in Junkie (1953), with its nod to De Quincey in its telling subtitle, Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. Finally, in attempting to ‘kick the habit’, De Quincey reports on his many resolutions to abjure the drug, which soon brought on the fiercer agonies of withdrawal, which in turn sent him fleeing back to opium as the best means of obtaining relief. His intake levels shot upward. His life spiralled out of control once more. He re-committed himself to temperance, even abstinence. The grim cycle began again.

De Quincey won several individual battles with opium, but never the war. He published his revised Confessions just three years before his death in 1859, at which time he had been an opium addict for almost fifty years, albeit a remarkably high-functioning one. Clarke’s fascination with – and illumination of – both versions of the Confessions reveal their enormous impact on De Quincey’s age, as well as their burgeoning relevance in ours. Throughout The Secret Life of Books, he highlights a number of parallels between his opiated experiences and De Quincey’s, from their doctor-prescribed use of the drug when they were both children fighting illness, to their many adult promises to quit that started well only to end in relapse. But there is one crucial difference between the two addicts. As the insight, pathos, and humour of the programme fully demonstrate, Clarke did win the war.

The Secret Life of Books episode on Confessions of an English Opium Eater will be shown on Monday 2nd November on BBC 4 at 20:00.

Featured image: Poppy Pods by Barbara Moss CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Marketing Mozart

If you’re a parent, or soon to be one, you’ll know that the imminent arrival of a newborn generates above all else a mile-long shopping list. Up there with the organic cotton onesies, on many parents’ list is a CD entitled The Mozart Effect. The possibility that Mozart’s music could make our kids smarter is deliciously and yet simplistically tantalising, and a wealth of books, CDs, and resources are available for purchase promising just that. But what is the science – or lack thereof – behind it? Here is a five-step guide to the misconceptions, theories, and opportunistic marketing techniques that have made The Mozart Effect a phenomenon that continues to this day.

(1)   The term ‘Mozart Effect’ was first coined in 1991 by the French researcher Dr Alfred Tomatis, in his book, Pourquoi Mozart? Dr Tomatis – who was anecdotally banned for life from the French Medical Council in 1977 – used Mozart’s music as a potential cure for a variety of disorders, and as a means to retrain the ear. But while Dr Tomatis may have first employed the term, his method, which used Mozart’s music along with Gregorian chant and recordings of the voices of his patients’ mothers, should not be confused with what we now know of as the Mozart Effect. Aptly named the ‘Tomatis Method,’ his alternative medicine theories of hearing and listening make no reference at all to music as a means of increasing general intelligence.

(2)   It was a 1993 paper by Rauscher and colleagues that initially gave the effect its claim to fame. After listening to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata, the adult participants in the study exhibited enhanced mean spatial IQ scores. But their better spatial-temporal performances did not extend beyond 15 minutes after the completion of the experiment. Surprisingly, not only did the study not involve children, but the article that started it all never claimed that listening to Mozart could improve general intelligence.

(3)   A follow-up experiment in 1998 was actually undertaken on rats. During this experiment different groups of rats were exposed in utero and after birth to various sound sources, including, of course, Mozart. The speed with which the rats successfully navigated mazes was then recorded. After three days of avid maze running, team Mozart was declared the winner. Inspired by these findings, the governor of the state of Georgia in the United States gave a free Mozart CD to all parents of newborn children.

(4)   Questions began to arise as to why Mozart’s music in particular seemed to be getting all the attention. Was it in any way special? This was answered in a 2010 meta-analysis of studies undertaken on this question, and while short-lived positive results were found, it was also demonstrated that other types of music, and indeed other activities, could also generate the same effects. The ‘Mozart Effect’ was subsequently criticised for having little to do with the fact that it was Mozart’s music that had been used in the original experiment, or even that it was classical music at all. Indeed, any positive findings were put down to being caused by what was termed “enjoyment arousal,” where the important factor was not so much the temporal quality of the music, but the level of appreciation, engagement, and enjoyment of the task being undertaken.

(5)   The big winner from a marketing perspective is without doubt Don Campbell, who trademarked a set of commercial recordings and related material he billed as not only increasing intelligence and mental development, but also enhancing “deep rest and rejuvenation” and “creativity and imagination.” His products and the method he promulgates are claimed to enable everything from a reduction in stress, anxiety, and depression, to an alleviation of the symptoms of dyslexia and autism. Campbell’s trademarked products may be contentious to say the least, but have sold well over two million copies, and continue to be snapped up by well-meaning and unsuspecting consumers worldwide. While there is no conclusive evidence that The Mozart Effect® can increase intelligence or mental development, it is clear that it has had a considerable effect on the size of certain wallets.

So what should new parents do? It’s undeniable that there is no need to go out and buy every child-friendly Mozart CD on the market. But there is also no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. While it may not make them smarter or more able to navigate the mazes of life any faster, exposing young children to music they enjoy will hopefully foster in them a life-long relationship with music.

Featured image: dora dora 2. Photo by Philippe Put. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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A Very Short (and spooky) Introduction to Halloween

It’s that time of year when pumpkin sales go soaring, horror specials sell out at the cinema, and everyone is seemingly dressed up as a vampire or a zombie. To mark the spookiest time of year, we are sharing some Very Short Introductions to a few of our favourite Halloween themes with free chapters from VSI Online.

Reinventing witches

“In the summer of 1935, a team of German researchers began to scour the nation’s archives, hunting for early modern witches. Overseeing the project was Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, to whom witches were either persecuted religionists of the Germanic race or magical warriors fighting demons – a ‘black order’ like the SS itself. Himmler hoped that the Hexensonderkommando would find millions of witches, but by the time work ceased in 1943, just 33,846 cases had been recorded. And what they revealed was that the witch’s greatest enemies had been not clerical inquisitors but ordinary Germans.

The research, though flawed, has been useful to modern scholars. Himmler succeeded in bringing witches back to life, but because they were not what he expected their propaganda value was nil. The fact that our ancestors surprise us in this way is our fault not theirs. Many people claim to be haunted by the past, even that they see ghosts. But the dead don’t bother us: we bother them – endlessly. Certain trades specialize in this: necromancers, sorcerers, Spiritualist mediums, and historians. Why? Because there is power in what precedes us; the dead are useful for understanding who we are in time.”

— Read the rest of this extract from Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction by Malcolm Gaskill

Alien invasions

“In the decades following the Second World War, the crude monsters of the pulps became transformed into a whole range of creatures whose actions were presented as invasive and threatening. Alien invasion narratives tend to raise one stark issue: conquer or be conquered. But their subtleties often lay in the strategies used to delay their revelation of the aliens, for they have to be seen and identified before they can be resisted. In evoking such diverse threats to humans, these narratives overlap constantly with the Gothic.

Among British examples, the television series The Quatermass Experiment (1955) dramatized contact with aliens as an infection. A rocket crashes on Wimbledon Common bearing a sole astronaut who is carrying an absorptive virus. Carroon, the astronaut, is traumatized and has great difficulty remembering what happened, which remains a mystery. A sequence of images begins with ‘some sort of jelly’ found in the rocket, through a grey inhuman hand as Carroon begins to mutate, culminating in a whole creature which materializes in Westminster Abbey, where it is finally destroyed. The second Quatermass series and the film Quatermass 2 (1957) describe more of an invasion than the first. Mysterious objects are picked up on radar falling to Earth. When some of the objects are examined, they prove to be hollow vessels, presumably carriers of some sort. Investigating the area where they fell, Quatermass, the central scientist, comes across a mysterious industrial plant, apparently built by the government and barred to visitors as top secret. As author Nigel Kneale later recalled, he was playing here to fears in the mid-1950s of official bureaucracy and secret installations. As in the first series, suspense is built up by reports of a strange illness affecting people living near the plant, whose guards are called ‘zombies’ by the locals because of their masked, insect-like appearance. It is finally revealed that the plant is manufacturing synthetic food for the organisms that have dropped from the sky. Quatermass pursues them back to their home asteroid and destroys them. The US title for the film, significantly, was Enemy from Space.”

— Read the rest of this extract from Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction by David Seed

Zombies

A true zombie has to be completely indistinguishable from a normal person on the outside. “Zombie” by kpgolfpro. Public domain via Pixabay.

“Imagine someone who looks exactly like you, acts like you, thinks like you, and speaks like you, but who is not conscious at all. This other you has no private, conscious experiences; all its actions are carried out without the light of awareness. This unconscious creature – not some half-dead Haitian corpse – is what philosophers mean by a zombie.

Zombies are certainly easy to imagine, but could they really exist? This apparently simple question leads to a whole world of philosophical difficulties.

On the ‘yes’ side are those who believe that it really is possible to have two functionally equivalent systems, one of which is conscious while the other is unconscious. Chalmers is on the ‘yes’ side. He claims that zombies are not only imaginable but possible – in some other world if not in this one. He imagines his zombie twin who behaves exactly like the real Chalmers but has no conscious experiences, no inner world, and no qualia. All is dark inside the mind of zombie-Dave. Other philosophers have dreamed up thought experiments involving a zombie earth populated by zombie people, or speculated that some real live philosophers might actually be zombies pretending to be conscious.

On the ‘no’ side are those who believe the whole idea of zombies is absurd, including both Churchland and American philosopher Daniel Dennett. The idea is ridiculous, they claim, because any system that could walk, talk, think, play games, choose what to wear, enjoy a good dinner, and do all the other things that we do, would necessarily have to be conscious. The trouble is, they complain, that when people imagine a zombie they cheat: they do not take the definition seriously enough. So if you don’t want to cheat, remember that the zombie has to be completely indistinguishable from a normal person on the outside. That is, it is no good asking the zombie questions about its experiences or testing its philosophy, for by definition it must behave just as a conscious person would. If you really follow the rules, the critics say, the idea disappears into nonsense.”

— Read the rest of this extract from Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction by Susan Blackmore

Ghosts

“Tragedy is full of them. In the first surviving complete tragedy that has come down to us, Aeschylus’ Persians (472 bc), the ghost of the dead King Darius rises from his tomb. He pronounces judgement on his overweening son, Xerxes, who has squandered the wealth of the mightiest empire the world has ever known. King, father, god (for he has been deified in the underworld), Darius speaks from beyond the grave with an authority we rarely find in subsequent tragedies. Even the immortal gods whose authority is beyond question are often hard to understand, speaking as they do through oracles and prophets and seers, like Cassandra and Teiresias.

In the central play of the Oresteian trilogy, Agamemnon’s son and daughter converge on his tomb, along with the chorus, to lament his passing and seek inspiration for the justice his spirit demands. But Agamemnon does not rise from the underworld – unlike some other murdered kings and fathers. The ghost of Hamlet’s father does walk abroad, but where does he come from? The purgatory that good Protestants are no longer supposed to believe in? Does he bring ‘airs from heaven or blasts from hell’ (I. iv. 22)? Why does his son feel ‘Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell’ (II. ii. 586, emphasis added)? We may note that the roots of our English word ‘ghost’ seem linked, in the dark, backward abysm of time, with fury and anger.”

— Read the rest of this extract from Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction by Adrian Poole

Featured image credit: Zombie, by kpgolf pro. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Ukraine’s two years of living dangerously

Last year in 2014, Ukraine made its way into our Place of the Year shortlist, garnering 19.86% of votes. Though Scotland beat out Ukraine for the top spot, it by no means undermines everything this Eastern European country has gone through. Serhy Yekelchyk, author of The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know, reflects on how Ukraine has transformed in recent years.

Although the last two years have brought unprecedented international media attention to Ukraine, most Ukrainians would be happy to trade this newfound spotlight for a return to peace and normalcy. As the country approaches the second anniversary of the Euromaidan Revolution, its citizens look back at a growing list of unfulfilled promises and squandered opportunities that the new government has accumulated. As of the fall of 2015, Ukraine is burdened with challenges even more formidable than the ones that caused the revolution in the first place.

The Euromaidan Revolution was a spontaneous popular uprising against the corrupt and manipulative regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. His last-moment cancellation of the Association Agreement with the European Union (EU), under Russian pressure, served as the proverbial last straw for Ukrainians who found the domestic situation intolerable. Few protesters had a clear idea of what the EU was like or what exactly the agreement promised. For them, “Europe” was a metaphor for democracy, the rule of law, and economic opportunity—all the things that were so sorely lacking in Yanukovych’s Ukraine, as well as in Putin’s Russia next door.

The spontaneity of the revolt caught even the opposition parties off guard. It began innocuously, with a Facebook post by a popular opposition journalist, a Ukrainian of Afghani descent, Mustafa Nayem. In November 2013 he invited friends for an evening “stroll” on Kyiv’s Independence Square (or Maidan in Ukrainian), and the crowds quickly swelled from a thousand on the first night to over a million a week later. The rest is history: the plaza’s peaceful occupation over the cold winter, the riot police’s use of firearms in February, an open rebellion in much of western and central Ukraine, and the president’s ultimate flight to Russia.

Yet, the war and the occupation that followed are still very much part of Ukraine’s difficult present. Yanukovych was not an usurper; he was elected legitimately in 2010 with strong support in the country’s eastern and southern regions. Formerly the electoral bailiwick of the Communist party in the 1990s, these depressed industrial regions had shifted their political allegiance to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions by the early 2000s. The latter dropped the communist rhetoric, but retained and reinforced the notion of Russian speakers as an endangered group in the Ukrainian southeast. This position helped mobilize Yanukovych’s political base, yet it also opened the door for interference from Ukraine’s former imperial master, Russia.

The Russian-speakers in the southeast were a legacy of the Soviet past. Ethnic Ukrainians constituted a majority in all of the provinces in the region, except for the Crimea, but creeping assimilation in the postwar Soviet Union left many of them identifying with Russian culture. In a curious way, their Soviet nostalgia morphed into allegiance to Putin’s Russia, a country that Lenin would have seen as the worst example of state capitalism. When Russophone activists in the southeast resisted the removal of Lenin statues in early 2014, they interpreted them not as communist symbols, but as emblems of the imperial identity the Soviet Union had left behind—one based on Russian culture and Cold-War rhetoric.

This separate regional identity, no matter how different it was from the ideals of the Euromaidan, in itself did not produce what some Western media have mistakenly called a civil war. It took Russia’s direct and indirect military involvement for the conflict to start. The Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the Russian military’s role in it, first vehemently denied but later acknowledged by President Putin, did not result at first in a military conflict with Ukraine’s new authorities. Soon, however, pro-Russian militants, many of them bona fide Russian citizens, trekked from the Crimea up north to the industrial region of the Donbas. Their leader, a retired Russian intelligence officer named Igor Girkin (nom-de-guerre: Strelkov), at first complained that the locals were not prepared to take up arms against the Ukrainian government. By the summer 2014, however, a war was raging in the Donbas, with more “volunteers” arriving across the Russian border. They were provided with tanks, mobile artillery systems, and surface-to-air missiles. The Ukrainian air force was grounded after the separatists shot down several military planes. In July 2014, a sophisticated high-altitude Buk missile fired from separatist-controlled territory destroyed a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board.

Emasculated by decades of corruption, the Ukrainian army did not fare well against the professional mercenaries recruited from active-duty and reserve Russian military personnel. France and Germany initiated international mediation, but the peace process was slow to begin as each side in turn sought to exploit momentary strategic advantages. The first armistice concluded in Minsk, Belarus, in September 2014, did not hold. Only the second Minsk agreement in February 2015 led to a noticeable de-escalation in fighting, both because the war had reached an impasse and because the Russian financial system was crumbling under the impact of falling oil prices and international sanctions.

Low-intensity warfare continued along the contact line for months, ending suddenly the moment that Russia got involved in Syria in late September 2015. For all the talk in the Russian state-controlled media about the Ukrainian “civil war,” it is telling that fighting there stopped the moment the war’s chief sponsor switched its attention elsewhere. This spectacular reversal confirmed the much-ignored global dimension of the Ukrainian conflict. For Putin’s increasingly assertive Russia, the conflict represented just another front in its global stand-off with the West.

None of this was good news for Ukrainian citizens, both supporters and opponents of the Euromaidan Revolution. The economic situation deteriorated greatly during the war and the government did not attempt much-needed structural reforms. Uber-rich oligarchs have retained their grip on the country’s political life and continue to wage war against each other through rival media empires. President Petro Poroshenko is himself a billionaire who failed to distance himself from his business interests in the way a democratic politician would have after being elected. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk managed to win the last elections with a platform based on nationalist rhetoric, but saw his approval ratings collapse to single digits by the fall of 2015. As ordinary citizens struggle to make ends meet, the extreme nationalist right—the favorite bogeyman of the Russian media, but in reality a marginal force in Ukrainian politics—try to exploit violence as a political tool.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the new Ukrainian authorities have only a small window of opportunity to start building that new “European” Ukraine that they have been talking about—one that will be attractive for its own citizens, as well as for those who remain in the occupied Donbas and the Crimea. Soon it will be too late. The nationwide local and municipal elections on 25 October 2015 only confirmed this impression. The low turnout demonstrated popular disillusionment with the new authorities, while the elections in several cities of mayors associated with the previous regime confirmed the old regional elites’ unbroken hold on power. There will be little to celebrate on the revolution’s second anniversary on 21 November 2015.

Headline image: Photo by tandalov.com. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Place of the Year 2015 longlist

Make sure to cast your vote by 31 October and remember to keep checking back on the OUPblog, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr for regular updates and content on our Place of the Year 2015 contenders.

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Gérard Depardieu, an unlikely poster boy for French ambitions

There is no one more acutely aware of the damage done to his reputation in recent years than Gérard Depardieu himself. “When I travel the world”, he admitted to Léa Salamé in a recent interview for France Inter radio, “what people remember above all else is that I pissed in a plane, I’m Russian, and that I wrote a letter calling out the Prime Minister.” This of course is simply the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the star’s notoriety. His weight problems, his alcohol consumption, his tax exile status, and his predilection for dodgy business and political associates (Rafika Khalifa, Sepp Blatter, Ramzan Kadyrov to name but a few) have long been the subject of attack and cruel satire in the French and international media.

In the world of cinema his talent and professional judgement have increasingly been called into question, with the fortunes of two recent high profile projects exemplifying an apparently unstoppable career decline. Both Welcome to New York, in which he incarnated a fictionalised version of disgraced politician Dominique Strauss Kahn, and United Passions where he played the role of World Cup supremo Jules Rimet, failed to gain theatrical release in France, and went straight to video on demand. The timing of the release of the latter, which did not manage to cover even one percent of its production costs, could not have been worse as it was released in the USA a mere four days after Blatter was forced to resign the FIFA presidency amid corruption allegations. The film also has the dubious honour of grossing an American opening weekend all-time low of $607. The bulk of Welcome to New York’s attention took the form of appalled shock at the out-of-shape star’s nude body, and the film has recently been described as Abel Ferrara’s ‘embarrassingly amateurish career nadir’ by critic Adrian Martin in Sight & Sound. The film is a flawed but important one that has much to say about corruption, power and hypocrisy in French politics. But somehow, all the critics wanted to talk about was Depardieu’s aberrant physicality, and how pathetic the once great actor had become.

 Depardieu can go as far away as he likes, but he is not yet ready to be painted out of the picture of French life.

What seems to be particularly galling to French cultural commentators, however, is Depardieu’s refusal to play the game and shuffle off quietly into retirement and exile. He clearly has an inestimable capacity to weather the barrage of criticism about his decisions, body, and behaviour, and to reject the narratives of shame and humiliation the media seek to impose on him. Rather than keep his head down and hope for the storm to pass, Depardieu continues to work in France, give selective media interviews, and make public appearances. For example, when the organisers of the Nice Carnival announced the theme for 2014 would be a celebration of French gastronomy, Depardieu gamely participated in the opening ceremony, and cheerfully applauded the float depicting him as a greedy Russian princeling, sat on a Kremlin-style throne surrounded by folkloric ‘little people’ feeding him local delicacies. Entitled ‘Gargantua’s New Home’, the float featured a giant bulbous-nosed effigy of the actor, with a wineglass in one hand and a miniature Vladimir Putin serving him caviar from a silver spoon in the other. The star enjoyed the creation so much he autographed its arm, and spent the night drinking and spraying silly string onto his fellow revellers.

But as the sustained media coverage reveals, when a man of the stature and celebrity of Depardieu rejects his citizenship, and openly criticises the institutions and elite figures of French life, people have a tendency to pay attention whether they agree with his motivations or not. There has been a lot of soul searching on the back of Depardieu’s decision to take up Russian citizenship (granted by Vladimir Putin in January 2013). While many have rejoiced with a hearty ‘good riddance’, glad to see the back of a particularly loud, unpredictable, and over-privileged fool, many others see the loss of such a towering figure as symptomatic of France’s struggle with a loss of historic grandeur. In a country whose beleaguered president self-identifies as ‘Monsieur Normal’, and where the Culture Minister admits she has never read the French Nobel Prize winning author Patrick Modiano, where do the French look for reassurance, inspiration and leadership? Where does today’s public look for the ‘distinction’ – as Depardieu called it in a recent interview for Le Figaro – of politicians like de Gaulle, Mitterrand, or even Danton, famously incarnated by Depardieu in Wajda’s eponymous 1983 film.

For others, the loss of Depardieu to the French cinema industry seems to point to the end of a golden era of French talent and creativity, the great years of Gabin, Carmet, Noiret, Deneuve and their specific brand of distinction, now superseded by a host of identikit reality TV stars and coarse comedians. Depardieu’s presence and outspokenness testify, I would suggest, to a confidence, and an ambition absent from many areas of French life. His defiance sits comfortably in French traditions of contestation, while his ability to disrupt, to provoke and to galvanise (many below the line commentators express ‘go Gégé’/’voice of the people’ statements of support), reveal him as a curious barometer of current French thinking about Frenchness. Depardieu can go as far away as he likes, but he is not yet ready to be painted out of the picture of French life. For now at least, he is as deeply political a figure as any elected to public office in France.

Featured image credit: ‘Gérard Depardieu’ by Siebbi. CC-BY-3.0 via ipernity.

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Dickens’ fascination with London [map]

At the height of his career – during the time he was writing Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend – Dickens wrote a series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The Uncommercial Traveller. The persona of the ‘Uncommercial’ allowed Dickens to unify his series of occasional articles by linking them through a shared narrator. Travelling the streets of London he describes and comments upon the city, its inhabitants, commerce and entertainment. Scenes of poverty and social injustice are interwoven with childhood experiences and adult memories. In the interactive map below, you can explore the areas of London visited by Dickens throughout his travels.

Featured image credit: Leadenhall Street in the City of London. Engraving by J Hopkins after a drawing by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Monthly etymology gleanings for October 2015

Some Idioms

I keep receiving comments and questions about idioms. One of our correspondents enjoys the phrase drunk as Cooter Brown. This is a well-known simile, current mostly or exclusively in the American south. I can add nothing to the poor stock of legends connected with Mr. Brown. Those who claim that they know where such characters came from should be treated with healthy distrust. Cooter Brown may well have been a habitual drunk at the time of the Civil War. But compare the idioms to be all Coopers ducks with one “to be all over with one,” all in a heap like Brown’s cows, you got what Patty shot at (that is, nothing; personal communication from Minnesota—all the other sayings are British), as drunk as Davy’s sow, as busy as Throp’s wife, as wise as Waltam’s wife, as contrairy as Wood’s (or Lewis’s) dog, as proud as old Cole’s dog, as lazy as Lawrence’s dog, as fess (i.e. eager; ill-tempered, etc.) as Cox’s pig, as hot as Mary Palmer, as slow as old Jon Walker’s chimes, and dozens of others centered on proper names. A search for those people seldom brings convincing results, though a certain Mr. Waltam might have had a wife of more than average sagacity, while Mr. Brown might have lost all his cows in an accident. Even such seemingly transparent idioms as grin like a Cheshire cat are usually of unknown origin despite the fact that some have been the object of serious research.

Almost equally opaque is the expression hell for leather (the question about it came from another correspondent). To ride hell for leather means “to ride at full speed.” It is surprising how little books have to say about the origin of this idiom and how voluble the Internet is, especially because people love discussing the difference between hell for leather and hell bent for leather (hellbent is often spelled as one word). The first secure citation of the phrase goes back to 1889 (Kipling). The OED online adds a putative 1851 example from Wiltshire, but the word there is hellfalleero, and no one knows what to do with it. I am aware of two German etymologies of the phrase, namely Heil für Läufer, supposedly medieval and meaning “save the runner,” and Hülfe für Leder “help for leather.” I have no idea how those etymologies occurred to their authors, but both strike me as absolutely fanciful.

Those youths are indeed hell bent for leather.

A more realistic explanation was offered in Notes and Queries in 1927 (vol. 153, p. 231). Its author wrote: “I believe the phrase originated among the gunners, and means exactly what it says, i. e., the fullest strain put on all harness by the dashing forward of the guns at the utmost pace of the horse-teams.” All the other suggestions known to me refer to riding a horse. Charles F. Funk (Curious Word Origins, Sayings & Expressions, 1993) goes so far as to suggest that Kipling coined the phrase, “though he may have been actually quoting army speech.” (I don’t know why Funk added actually here; for decades I have been fighting my students’ use of this word in sentences like “the First World War actually began in 1914,” though I concur with this statement and most others reinforced by superfluous adverbs.) Funk “actually” continues: “Though the term must originally have referred to the terrific beating inflicted upon leather saddles by heavy troopers at full speed, even by Kipling’s time it had acquired a figurative sense indicating great speed, on foot, by vehicle, or by horse.” He does not say how he knows what the original sense of the phrase must have been. The editors of Brewer’s Dictionary of Fact and Fable offer no explanation.

Devizen and Devizses

In connection with the post on the word Devisen, Mr. Gavin Wraith pointed out that there is a town called Devizes in Wiltshire. He also quoted part of the relevant entry in Eilert Ekwall’s The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Place-Names, Fourth Edition, 1966, a fully reliable source. I’ll expand the quotation but will leave the abbreviated references to the sources undeciphered: “Divisas 1139 Ordericus, 1142 BM, Divise 1139 HHunt, (de) Divisis 1162 PJ. Fr devises, Lat divisæ ‘boundary’. An important boundary must once have run past Devizes.” (One can see that Wiltshire is featured prominently in the present post.)

Wiltshire, England, and the castle in Devizes
The various hypostases of bodkin

Ms. Sara Thomas wonders whether Scottish Gaelic bod, “coyly defined” in one of the dictionaries as “membrum virile,” can be related to bodkin. Charles Mackay, who excelled in Irish Gaelic and in early Modern English, made a fatal mistake; he decided that he was able to look at an English word and stare out its Celtic etymology. The result was a dictionary that covered him with disgrace. But he wrote several other books, also touched by Celtomania but more useful. In A Glossary of Obscure Words and Phrases in the Writings of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries… (1887), at bodkin, he said, among other things:

S. P. Botkin, 1832-1884, a famous Russian clinician

“On this radical word, that exists in many Asiatic as well as European languages, might be founded an instructive examination into the occult and deeply comprehensible meaning of the root words of all languages, starting from the fact that bad signifies not only a point that pricks, but the divinely ordered instrument of human propagation, which none but physicians speak of without rendering themselves liable to the imputation of indecency and impropriety. It may here be noted that the English bawdy, obscene, is of the same Keltic origin, from bòd, the virile member, and badaire, a fornicator.”

One hundred and fifty years later we no longer blush when we mention “the divinely ordered virile member” in print or in mixed company. As regards the origin of bawdy, Mackay was certainly wrong. The etymology of bod is less clear. The word is old (in Old Irish it also meant “tail”—a common merger of senses), and its original form was bot, which complicates matters. The attempt to connect bod with Latin futuo “copulate” (a verb unrelated to the English F-word!) should be abandoned not only for phonetic reasons but because the name of the penis is hardly ever akin to the verb of copulation. The other etymology traces bot and the Slavic word for “nail” (Russian gvozd’, etc.) to the same Indo-European root. This is an impeccable reconstruction if bot indeed reaches all the way into Indo-European antiquity, but if it turned up as medieval slang, its history was different. The question remains open.

Another letter came from one of the bearers of the last name Bodkin. Despite the common derivation of Bodkin from Bawdekyn, from Baldwyn, a Norman name well-established in Ireland, this etymology runs into serious phonetic difficulties. Equally disputable is the derivation of Bodkin from bodkin and explaining it as an occupational name, like Smith or Cooper. In Russia, three famous Botkins made their name universally known there. Unfortunately, Boris Unbegaun’s excellent dictionary of Russian family names does not feature Botkin, and I could not find out from where the first Botkins came to Russia. In the English-speaking world, Botkin seems to be a variant of Bodkin.

Image credits: (1) Dirt flying action photography of a horse making a fast turn. (c) customphotographydesigns via iStock. (2) Fighting on a bridge by Arnold Böcklin. Public domain via WikiArt. (3) England Police – Wiltshire. Image by Nilfanion, Mirrorme22. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (4) Entrance, Devizes Castle 19th century. Photo by Mike Faherty (2008) from the Geograph project collection. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (5) Sergey Botkin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The legal profession [infographic]

The legal profession has endured many changes, particularly in the last ten years. As the price of education continues to increase, competition becomes stiffer and jobs are harder to come by. Law schools are producing more and more graduates, and while big law firms continue to dissolve, more students turn to jobs in business. We’ve gathered information about this constantly evolving field from The Trouble with Lawyers and Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession for the following infographic on what you need to know about the major trends and challenges for this profession.

Authors Deborah L. Rhode and Benjamin H. Barton also discuss the evolution of the legal profession in an interview with OUP.

Download the infographic in PDF or JPEG.

Featured image credit: Photo by succo. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay. 

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Roman author, Greek genre: Martial’s use of Epigrams

This editor introduction to the epigram genre is taken from the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Martials’ Epigrams, which is the focus of our new season of #OWCReads. You can follow along, and join in the conversation by following us on Twitter and Facebook, and by using the #OWCreads hashtag. 

An epigram is a short poem, most often of two or four lines. Its typical metre is the elegiac couplet, which is also the metre of Roman love poetry (elegy) and the hallmark of Ovid. In antiquity it was a distinctively Greek literary form: Roman writers were never comfortable in it as they were in other imported genres, such as epic and elegy. When they dabbled in epigram they often used Greek to do so. Martial’s decision to write books of Latin epigrams, and nothing else, is thus a very significant departure.

The Death of Alexander, in 323 BC. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Epigram had emerged as a literary force to be reckoned with in the Hellenistic age, in the centuries after the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC). Its roots were inscriptional – ever since the archaic period, epitaphs and such had occasionally been composed in verse – but it took a library-based culture of scholarship to collate these older texts and turn them into models for literary imitation. Epigram quickly found a home in the Greek symposium, the traditional after-dinner drinking party at which guests (‘symposiasts’) were expected to contribute a party turn to the evening’s entertainment. It soon diversified: poetic epitaphs and praises of athletes (imitating the inscriptions found on the bases of statues of victors at games such as the Olympics) were joined by love-poems, descriptions of works of art (‘ekphrases’), mock dedications, and poems about the symposium itself. Epigram bred epigram: from the beginning the genre encouraged proliferation, with ‘families’ of poems ringing the changes on favourite themes. This is a feature that carries through into epigram as practised by Martial: the reader will see that there are certain topics he keeps coming back to, each time with a slightly different spin.

Symposium scene in ancient Greek pottery. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

When Rome subsumed the Hellenistic kingdoms into its growing empire, the literary culture that it encountered – and that so astounded and intimidated it – was one in which epigram was just hitting its peak. Philodemus of Gadara (first century BC), the Epicurean friend of Piso whose literary criticism inspired Horace’s Art of Poetry, was a witty poet of love epigrams, many of which survive. Around the same time, Philodemus’ fellow Gadarene Meleager was composing his own love-poems to boys and girls and assembling the ancient world’s first significant anthology of verse: the Garland. This inaugurated a tradition that was to culminate in the Anthologia Palatina, the Byzantine-era ‘Greek Anthology’ that is our main source of ancient literary epigram.

Even before Meleager, Romans had begun paying attention to Hellenistic epigram and making home-grown versions. The early epicist Ennius (239-169 BC) is known to have composed several, and the late second and early first centuries saw a noted trio of epigrammatists: Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, and Lutatius Catalus (with one ‘L’). They composed in elegiac couplets, the traditional Greek metre for epigram, and adapted Hellenistic models. Several of their poems have come down to us, the major source being Auluus Gellius’ collection of supposed after-dinner conversations, Attic Nights (19.9.10).

The most important Latin epigrammatist before Martial, though, is Catallus (with two ‘L’s). Martial refers back to his major model and as a justification for his choices – for instance, the use of strong language, pre-emptively excused in the preface to Book I: ‘. . . but that’s how Catallus writes, and Marsus, and Pedo, and Gaetulicus, and everyone who gets read all the way through’.

Martial mentions one or other of the Augustan poets M. Domitius Marsus and Albinovanus Pedo a dozen times in his oeuvre (e.g.2.77); they are pretexts rather than influences for his own style of epigram. The more frequently cited of the pair, Marsus, composed his epigrams in Greek, as did the slightly later Gaetulicus (adduced only here by Martial but known through the Greek anthology). Catullus though, is a much more lively presence in Martial. For modern readers of the classics he is one of Ancient Rome’s most important poets, second perhaps only to Virgil; he was probably read less widely in the first century AD than he is today (he had died nearly a hundred years before Martial was born), but his name still had power, and Martial wields it in almost every book:

 

If ever I read out a few of my own couplets, you immediately recite some Marsus or Catullus. (2.71)

Just so, perhaps, did tender Catullus dare send his Sparrow to great Maro. (4.14)

Please find room for my little books on whatever shelf Pedo, Marsus, and Catullus share. (5.5)

 

The names of the poet and his notorious mistress, Lesbia, appear often in Martial, although they cannot always point to that Catullus and that Lesbia, or not straightforwardly (see pp. xiii-xiv on the Lesbia cycle).

Image Credit: Antiquity, Creative Commons Licence via Pixabay. 

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Food and agriculture: shifting landscapes for policy

Where does our food come from? A popular slogan tells us that our food comes from farms: “If you ate today, thank a farmer.” Supermarkets cater to the same idea, labelling every bag of produce with the name of an individual farm. Food marketers, farm lobbies, agriculture ministries, and politicians from rural districts all perpetuate the notion that our food comes from family farms, invariably portrayed as sunny smallholdings on verdant hillsides.

But the reality is that modern food is no longer a product of small farms, and hardly even a product of the agriculture sector. Changes in global food systems have created an ever-widening divergence between what is produced on farms and what consumers purchase, at least in rich countries. In modern economies, food is primarily a product of the manufacturing sector and the service sector, rather than of farms and agriculture. When we sit down to eat, we should not only be thanking farmers; we should also be recognizing the people who never get mud on their boots: chemists and clerks, truckers and traders, baristas and bakers. These office, factory, and shop workers arguably contribute as significantly to our food supply as farmers themselves.

The economic facts are striking. Of a consumer dollar spent on food in the United States, less than 20 cents goes to farmers. Food processing and food service are both larger sectors in terms of value than agriculture. US labor force statistics show that as many people work in food and beverage manufacturing as on farms. Employment in restaurants and food services is far higher still. (Similar figures hold for the United Kingdom and most other OECD countries.)

The dwindling role of farms in the food system stems from massive shifts in consumption, production, and trade. With respect to consumption, a key driver has been the growing demand for convenience. This reflects underlying shifts in the value of time, especially women’s time, as there are far more women in the workplace today than there were when food was mainly a product of small farms. With this rise in the value of time, demand has increased for prepared and processed foods that reduce or minimize the effort required around mealtimes (as documented recently in this Food Policy paper). This has shifted much food consumption out of the home:  Figure 1 depicts a striking trend for the US; within the next ten years, about half of consumer food expenditure will go towards food consumed outside the home.

Figure 1. Used with permission.

When we sit down to eat, we should not only be thanking farmers; we should also be recognizing the people who never get mud on their boots: chemists and clerks, truckers and traders, baristas and bakers.

On the production side too, major shifts have taken place in the structure of farms and in the location of production and processing. Most farms remain small, even in rich countries, and the largest farms tend to be family-owned and family-managed. But large farms increasingly dominate production. A recent study from the USDA’s Economic Research Service found that more than half of US crop agriculture in 2007 took place on farms with over 1,100 acres of cropland. Animal agriculture has also consolidated rapidly; by 2007, half of American dairy cows were kept in herds of 570 cows or more, compared to a comparable figure of 80 cows in 1987.

Large farms are massively capital-intensive. On the largest US crop farms, an acre of wheat, maize, or soya requires less than three hours of labour per year. By one estimate, the value of land, equipment, and structures required for a medium-sized grain farm in the midwestern US might approach $8 million.

Today’s large commercial farms are miles removed from the mixed crop and livestock establishments of yesteryear. The farms of storybooks have not disappeared; but they have lost market share to large and ultra-specialized producers.

Figure 2 by UN Comtrade database. Used with permission.

Farm production is still to some degree tied to geography and climate. But processing has become global. Since processing can take place anywhere capital and technology are available, it has become mobile. Food trade has shifted away from bulk commodities towards processed and semi-processed foods (Figure 2). Food value chains frequently now involve multiple countries, with processing carried out in places that are neither the sources of the raw commodities, nor the ultimate destinations of consumption.

For instance, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes that “today, up to 90 percent of seafood consumed in the United States is imported…. A significant portion of this imported seafood is caught by American fishermen, exported overseas for processing, and then reimported to the United States.” As reported in another USDA study, the US exports whole fish to China and imports fish filets; fresh-caught shrimp are similarly exported to countries in Asia from which shelled and deveined shrimp are then re-imported. Similar examples can be found in fruit processing. As consumption shifts steadily towards manufactured foods, the logic of manufacturing value chains applies, and processing will move ever farther from the farm.

But globalized and commodified food chains raise major regulatory issues. Who monitors these globalized food chains? Does the food industry require different regulation than, say, the shoe industry? Does it require different institutional arrangements than those that were constructed to manage an early 20th century model in which farmers sell more or less directly to nearby consumers?

How should food system governance take place today? At present, producers and retailers in rich countries engage in substantial self-regulation, driven by legal liability concerns and reputational risks. In some cases, this leads large industrial producers to advocate for government regulations so stringent that they effectively proscribe artisanal production. But this is not an adequate solution. When self-regulation breaks down (as with the UK horse meat scandal of 2013), consumers are quick to call for reform and regulators enact patchwork measures. But arguably more fundamental changes are needed, beginning with a forward-looking assessment of how the food industry is evolving. The starting point must be a recognition that food no longer comes from farms – and that governing the food system requires a broader understanding of how food is produced in the 21st century.

Featured image credit: Veranotrigo by Soil-Science.info. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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