The child is father to the man… how far can we take this idea?

A child from the moment he gives a name to item, human or otherwise, gives it an identity, is bringing in associations, emotional and physical, which determine how he will view that item for the rest of his life.  Whatever happens in all the years that follow the associations from childhood will be the deepest-rooted and hardest to break.

So far, nothing new.  We know how critical the early years are. And yet, in our own adult lives, we pay little attention to how are our views and opinions were formed. They help us identify ourselves, with a point of view, or family, or a wider group, be it a gang or a political party. Once that identification is established we don’t challenge it. We’re a Daily Telegraph or we’re a Guardian reader. We accept their prejudices as our own, even subtly (or not so subtly) adjust ours as they adjust theirs. What’s more, we associate opinion with attitude and emotion. We’re a naturally angry (not suffering fools) person, or we’re naturally proud (pompous) or assertive (aggressive). 

Phone-ins and live audiences, and shock-jock programmes, feed on this behaviour. It makes for good radio, or good TV. At the same time it demonstrates how little we have by way of self-awareness. How sure we are, how sure the other person is, how much we love or we hate, we follow or we oppose.  We’re in a world of opposites, and we’re not comfortable without them.

An awareness of who we really are, and how we came to be the people we think we are, or with the views we hold, is almost impossible in this world of ours. There’s much talk of mindfulness these days but we’re talking here of mindfulness not just of now but of how we came to be where we are now.

We don’t necessarily have to change the views we hold. But we do need to know where they’ve come from before we put them out into the world, and seek to lay them down for others.

Of course you may enjoy all the adrenalin, the confrontation and the anger, and even the hatred. In which case, stay as you are, ill-informed and angry to the last. For you, a path that makes you more humble, less assertive, less emotional, more compassionate and just a wee bit happier won’t be the right one.

I’ve bought myself a Kindle and forked out a pittance (felt wrong paying so little) for the Howard Jacobson Booker Prize winner. But I can’t bring myself to sit down and read it. I want a book, the sense of a whole book, not a pageless Kindle-screed, in my hand.

35% of US sales in the first week of Jonathan Frantzen’s new novel were e-book, we’re told. How many have read it yet, as opposed to being attracted by its cheapness? Has anyone done the research to find out how they experienced it – how they read it, what they got out of it, how the book and e-book experiences compare? 

E-books of course aren’t so bad. Paper and digital can co-exist at this level. It’s when e-books get enhanced, and the whole book reading experience gets merged with the wider online cheap-knowledge experience that we have to start getting seriously worried.

* 

A few quotes and thoughts from Tom Chatfield’s article in the current (November) Prospect highlight the issues further:

We hear first from a few old-school voices. For Lionel Shriver carefully-crafted novels may be hard to find ‘in a sea of undifferentiated voices’. She’s also ‘concerned that the ‘kind of fruitful professional life as she knows it might be consigned to the past’.  Blake Morrison: ‘Will the craving for interactivity drive books to extinction.’  Philip Pullman: ‘I strongly resent the time it takes.’

Books in digital form, on screen, are suddenly part of a stream of media, so the danger is they’ll lose their identity. So Chatfield argues, and yet it seems he isn’t too concerned, there’s almost an inevitability about where we’re headed.

Apple, Google and Amazon will know what we’re reading, and all those authors who blog and tweet know all about their audiences too. They can write what their audiences want. Don DeLillo: ‘Novels will become user-generated.’ The new digital authors get out there and woo readers, and ensure their output generates mass discussion and consumption. We’re hearing more and more about telling stories, less about novels. Thrillers – ‘the only real genre’ (Lee Child). The novel as potential film script, novelist Julian Gough re-categorising himself as storyteller.

‘In whole fields of research, from politics to academia, the very notion of a book as a static, authored discreet hunk of prose – is starting to seem quaint.’ (Chatfield)

Time pressure: ‘Outside the elemental appeal of stories, many books are ill-equipped to fight their corners.’ The world is becoming increasingly customised, altered to individual specifications.  People will only click to read a novel that fits their own tastes and moods.  ‘This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people, speak, write and read.’

DeLillo again: ‘Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page?

 *

Digital it seems will change the way we read, and that means the way we think. Will we really be left with an undifferentiated world of pseudo-knowledge, with story uppermost and subtlety, critique and analysis sidelined? Chatfield’s analysis is over-egged, he’s bought into digital, doesn’t recognise that there’s a point beyond which digital may yet not go. It may run up against its own natural limitations. Our concern has to be that if and (as we must hope) when it does there is still a book industry – publishers, distributors, bookshops – to support it. And indeed authors worthy of the name.

The idea of story, even thrillers, taking over the earth is pretty horrifying. So too this lazy notion that we will even more than now only buy what matches our tastes and moods. There’s a trap here and the likes of Chatfield are walking right into it, because they rather love the buzz, and want to see what happens. Those of us who love books enough, and the serious business of reading that goes with them, need to start fighting back, and not lying back and let ourselves be steam-rollered.

Remember Philip Pullman’s comment about the time it all takes. Good writing takes time, slack writing doesn’t. Pullman has worldwide following, much of it online. But let them follow. Authors need to lead a different way.

Publishers are doing their best, but they’re covering themselves, trying to point both ways. We need the ‘lay readers’, ordinary people of the book, not publishers, to start fighting back. And we need to do it now. Lose bookshops and it will be much harder.

Let’s not get too alarmist – but there is a death of culture argument here.

Palin, Voldemort 2012

Joy almost unconfined when I read then news this morning. Hope at last! Big rally in Washington held by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert – the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. For once a halt to all those endless reports about mad hatters at tea parties, with Sarah Palin as a malevolent Alice, and Fox TV talking up the ‘patriots’, giving their events and issues attention they’d never normally have achieved. Maybe it’s not accidental that it’s been hard to pick up on sane America in the UK because we have to put up with the Murdoch Times, Murdoch Sunday Times, Murdoch Sun…with other natural tea party supporters in the Mail and Telegraph.

This suddenly is the America we remember from the Obama campaign and inauguration, that doesn’t get reported – and been there all the time. They’re disappointed, yes , that more hasn’t happened, critical of banks, health reforms (too much or too little), Afghan policy and much more, but aware that the American way shouldn’t involve all that confrontation and nastiness, opposition to any compromise or middle ground, the hatred of opponents… The Tea Party is a legit movement, but it’s got out of control.

‘Palin, Voldemort 2012’ was the slogan of the rally. A few more (courtesy of the BBC):

I’m a little annoyed but I’ll get over it

Somewhat irritated about extreme outrage

I’m pretty content actually

We have nothing to fear but fear itself and spiders

A few more:

Hyperbole is the antichrist

Obama – re-open NY subway toilets now

One nation under Aqua Buddha

Fox keeps fear alive. (Shades of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and all those chickens.)

Aqua Buddha…. being interested in Buddhism I thought I’d check this out. Tea Party senate candidate Rand Paul, son of Ron, apparently ‘kidnapped’ a girl back in his college days and took her off to be inducted into the Aqua Buddha sect…all very unChristian, and Paul has had a lot of flak for it. Now we all want to know more about Aqua Buddha.

Stewart at the end of the rally:

We live in hard times not end times….. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing…. We hear every damned day about how fragile our community is – on the brink of catastrophe. We work together to get things done every damn day.

The last comment prompted the loudest cheer of the day, reports the Beeb.  And it is the best. The simplest of messages but with all the screaming going on around you the easiest to forget. They scream, you scream, we all scream. Ted Kennedy and John Macain had a better way when in the Senate of not long ago they worked together if the occasion demanded.

Obama is not up for re-election next week, but he might as well be as the crazy US electoral system could well impose a Republican Congress upon him, or at least a Republican House of Representatives. All we read is about the disillusioned masses, Tea Parties, Main Street rebelling against Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street. (Who would be a road these days?) It’s crazy to blame Obama for the crash and the housing crisis, but it goes deeper – it’s seen as battle for America’s soul, and Fox TV and others have tried to ensure that race and parentage cast Obama outside the pale of true Americans. It’s all been pretty vicious stuff, and I’m not certain I’d enjoy being out on Main Street listening to all the anger and vituperation.

The sad thing is – Obama is still Obama. The guy who wrote Audacity of Hope, who bared his soul in Dreams From My Father, hasn’t changed. His ability to do what he wants has been terribly constrained by the crisis, and a social liberal is not going to endear himself to the Sarah Palin right, and, well, the heathcare bill was always going to be massively divisive.

Out on the left of the Democrats we have people who wanted more, and blame Obama for that. By holding back their support they will get less instead. Strange how people’s political psyches work. 

On the right, if we had only an inkling before of what the backwoods were capable if we know better now. I can relate to the small town, the backwoods mentality. I want the state off my back. Give me a stretch of the backwoods and maybe a view out over the canopy, and a log cabin, comfy bed(!) and log fire I’d be happy, for a while at least. But there’s a real global world out there, and unless we get on board in both political and economic terms we’ve had it.  It’s the old argument: if you’re on board you can change things. (Likewise over here with Europe.) . If you’re not, they pass you by, and you’re left waving for the train to stop, and if you’re  lucky they’ll pull you up on to the last coach…

So get out all you Democrats, all you undecideds, students, anyone who looks beyond the small-town palisade – and VOTE.

Wish I could, but I guess I’m quite happy being English.  Less stressful ….

Walking in the October sunlight, in Richmond Park, the colours hardly changing, still the banks of green woodland as backdrop to sparkling water. A time of peace, which I then seek to analyse. It’s as if I am asking myself – what are the component parts of this peace? There is harmony of colour and form, but whence comes our appreciation of such harmony? At such times we feel good toward others, good without any prior motivation, so whence comes this altruism?  It was as if I must understand what I saw and heard before me, before I could appreciate it fully, and as I did I emptied out not all but some of the beauty. 

I then concluded I was over-analysing. Did Wordsworth do this in the Lake District two centuries ago, or Bach fifty and more years before that, or Yeats in all the turmoil of the Troubles?  No, they knew where they stood in relation to their world, they avoided self-consciousness,  and found a higher form of expression not least because they didn’t analyse.

Best on such autumn days just to enjoy the knowledge beyond words. The words will come in their own time. 

** 

The greatest art comes when societies are shaking off bonds and discovering their identities, Bach born thirty years after the Thirty Years War, Wordsworth reacting intensely against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and Yeats embodying that remarkable self-discovery that marked the Ireland of a hundred years ago. What have we in our own times? Less than 50% of Americans now believe in the American dream, we have a sense of a broken not a big society in our own land, we find identity in football not in any sense of our own creativity. So it’s not surprising that our art is valueless, and mimics the absence of identity and substance it finds around it. Arguably, in that sense it’s successful, but is success which merely confirms the disjunction we see all around us really worthy of the name?

And yet, taking this same fractured society, if we were only to view it, ourselves, and others, in a different way, see what binds rather than destroys, we might find we were living in a golden age.

Thinking books, and the future of books, a subject as reader and publisher that’s dear to my heart. Something we should all be thinking about. How will we read in future – smartphone, iPad or similar, PC, or even an old-fashioned book?

There’s a big, big debate going on out there, and new platforms and approaches emerging all the time. A snippet from that debate…

Bestselling (so I’m told) author Sean Godin has decided to dispense with his publisher, Penguin in the USA, and go direct to his readers, because he  believes he has through his blog (readership in the several  hundreds of thousands he tells us) identified his readership.  He writes: It’s been years since I woke up in the morning saying, “I need to write a book, I wonder what it should be about.” Instead, my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it’s not a traditionally published book.

Do I want an author out there figuring where I want to go and having him or her take me there? What a crazy, insulting notion.

I want an author to write because he has a great idea, has something to say, believes in something. I’ll follow him there if I want to, become a fan if I want to.

We’re in a world which claims to be the new democracy, where we all can have a say, and in many cases that happens, and it’s quite a breakthrough. But it’s also a world which crowds our every reading and watching and listening moment, where CCTV watches us, credit agencies check us, direct marketers profile us, and now authors suss us out and write what we want to read.

Seth Godin’s approach is better suited to running a grocery shop than writing books.

Just what has Charles Saatchi given to the nation? A unwanted present of highly ephemeral art, art which at best belongs to the moment and at worst has no place in time or art. Art which once it’s achieved the shock it was aiming for has no other value, and yet, it’s now ours, glorified as the Museum of Contemporary Art, London, God help us,  in the hope that we will be condemned to remember it.

Financially it has huge value, but for how long? How long before it all crumbles? Duchamp didn’t want his art to survive but we’ve made certain it did. In our time Hurst and Emin may want their output to survive, but I’m sure future generations, museums notwithstanding, will make certain it doesn’t.

Only art which goes beyond political and cultural boundaries, and defines in some way what it means to be human, can survive.  Art that shocks is hardly art, and only curiosity will keep it alive.

Saatchi’s pseudo-museum can only have value if it endlessly chucks out the old and replenishes with the new. But it’s all tied to the values Saatchi represents and the monetary value he put on each item, so he won’t want to see them replaced, and thereby devalued. If ever a museum was tied to money, this is it, if ever in time a museum was destined to fail it is this.

If I’m wrong… well. I can’t be wrong. If I’m wrong, it will be a measure of our times, and how we’ve sold out to the ephemeral, and put anything of lasting value well behind us. That may indeed be the world to which were headed, a world of soundbites and snippits, easily accessed, easy to move on from, ever-changing, and ultimately worthless.

How we hold on to values in our modern world is a major concern. Saatchi may yet triumph. Inception as a new movie is all about inhabiting minds. Maybe our minds are already inhabited…

One final thought. Does the nation exist as a disembodied entity to which items can be given? I think not, and thank God for that. The nation as the state? ‘No charges,’ we are told, ‘will fall to the state.’ Which is just as well.

We’ve been worried about Michael Gove. In a government of pragmatists (in most of the senior positions) he stands out as a zealot. We thought though that he’d be reined in. It looks as if we were wrong. Quoting him from last Monday (5th July):

’The Building Schools for the Future scheme has been responsible for about one third of all this department’s capital spending. But throughout its life it has been characterised by massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy …. dysfunctional.’

It’s bad enough to cancel, but the language has all the hallmarks of Tory right-wing true believers, a partisan bunch with their own agenda and few supporters among teachers.

Gove is overlooking how much people have been engaged with this process, and how it gave schools an opportunity to escape from decaying buildings into decent learning environments. They are now told in effect that it was a worthless process, was misconceived and didn’t deliver. It was as everyone knows seriously flawed: too much money focused on too few schools (rebuilding all schools by 2023 was always a pipedream), too ambitious for each chosen school, too time-consuming, bureaucratic, always overspending and likely to continue to do so.

But it was a programme. And now there’s none.

It needed to be re-thought, reconfigured so the benefits were spread more widely and in the current climate slowed down, but not abandoned. It’s one thing to reduce spending, another to take out spending altogether, to take out hope, and you don’t take out hope where children are concerned.

My hunch is that Gove’s actions are terminal to his hopes are transforming the school system on a wider scale. Who will countenance money spent on gimmicky new schools when existing schools are denied any funding for new build, and forced to exist in structures crumbling around them for at least another ten years?

By actions and language Gove has foolishly engendered so much hostility that the educational world, already inclined not to take him seriously, though fearful of where his ideas might go, will now be very disinclined to pick up on any initiatives where they’ve not already bought into the ideas.

He’s made life very difficult for the Lib Dems as coalition partners, and for his PM too. Cameron has been clever in avoiding some of the hostility he might have expected, taking care not to go out on a limb. By giving Gove his head he’s done himself damage. He needs a radical in the cabinet to keep his right-wing happy, but put simply he’s cut his education minister too much slack and he’ll regret it.

Language and attitude do Gove no credit. We don’t like his language and even fewer of us will want his policies now.

I look around my study and wish I had more space for all the variegated spines and odd sizes, all the colour and fun of a well-organised book collection. Space is one problem, the other is the internet. Without the internet, I’d have been more ruthless, spent more time in moving out some of the older books, the memories, the must-read-sometimes, and made certain I had in here the essential reference, all those reliable vade mecums which you know will give you the hard information – on a politician or poet, an idea, a simple fact – that these days you can get online.

What you gain with the internet is serendipity, there’s always something to surprise you, or make you think differently. What you lose is a sense of order, as you build a library as an extension of your ideas and interests, pieces in a jigsaw mirroring the jigsaw in your mind. Not one that’s ever remotely completed, sometimes hardly started, but there is a sense of order and indeed development there and for just that reason what you think or write makes better sense.

Ah, but the internet is free, you say. My rejoinder: you’ve a choice between what I could call bright happy chaos, that doesn’t cost you a sou, and something of more substance, with your library the mirror of your mind, your study the fulcrum. Make the internet your mirror and you may briefly be happy, but you’re lost.

The Sublime in Art (Tate Britain from May 2010): an exhibition that takes us beyond ‘art is what I like’ to asking why it is we like it. Like it or not, we’re into aesthetics. 

Discussions of the Sublime in art usually start with Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (punchy title), and the Tate in this case does just that. 

Turner’s storms and shipwrecks and de Loutherberg’s avalanches, Francis Danby’s biblical flood, Joseph Ward’s Gordale Scar and John Martin’s Last Judgement, they all take us to the edge – to a dramatic point where (in imagination) we fear for our very existence. The walls of Gordale Scar are unnaturally, threateningly high. The imploding earth at the Day of Reckoning is terminal. Awe also belongs to the Sublime, and Martin’s plains of heaven take the breath away. 

But the exhibition loses its way a little. 

John Collier’s North-West Passage focuses on Hudson adrift in his boat, Richard Dadd’s Return From Egypt pushes the boundaries of sanity (his own), Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix celebrate love in very different ways. Any connection with the Sublime is tenuous.  All are mid-19^th century or later, and we’re stretching definitions and timeframes here.

We’re closer with William Blake’s Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils. (Some title.) Hogarth has Satan and Death confronting each other, separated only by Sin. Two paintings bringing the Bible and Paradise Lost frighteningly to life. But even here there’s not the identification with experience that the Sublime needs really to make an impact. Blake and Hogarth’s are descriptive paintings, whereas we can imagine ourselves caught up in Danby’s flood or de Loutherberg’s avalanche. 

What about Orpen’s desolate World War I landscape, Zonnebeke. Sublime? 

Arguably it would have been better to have stayed closer to 18^th century definitions, when Beauty, with its focus on form, the Sublime and the Picturesque came to define aesthetic sensibility. We’d have then had a real contribution to an understanding of the Sublime in art, rather than a catch-all from the Tate’s collection. Even if we define it as Romantic art, the net is still cast too wide.

I loved the paintings and the juxtapositions ask important questions. But as an exhibition on the Sublime as a movement, a period, a sensibility – well, to me it doesn’t quite work.