Category: culture

Hay Book Festival 2024: day two – libraries, a little levity and big reads

A second day at the Hay Book Festival. Hazel and I walk around the town, have a coffee, browse (and buy!) second-hand books, she contemplates buying a very ancient-looking and very heavy stone trough for her garden. Impossible to carry.

To be more serious. There was a short item last night from the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in Russia on a still surviving George Orwell library. They have now been told to find new premises. Free speech and free thinking are dangerous. Ideas are dangerous. Compare Hay. It has no newspaper sponsorship, no political connections. If it’s left of centre, then maybe that’s just because it’s where freethinking takes us.

From the town it’s a ten-minute walk to the festival, just time for lunch, good Indian fare, on paper plates, then our first session, Hazel and I together, Ken Follett and Kate Mosse, two amazing historical novelists, talking. How do they start? He maps out an outline, she launches in, having gone through a total immersion in the period. Her characters speak to her.

We’re in a safe zone, as I am at 2.30, listening to Katherine Rundell being interviewed with her adult (Faber) and children’s (Bloomsbury) editors.  Her book, Super-Infinite, on John Donne, is marvellous, but she is also a hugely popular children’s author, her last being the much-acclaimed Incredible Creatures. She is super-bright and self-assured. She enjoys roof-climbing and tight-rope walking and turns cartwheels before breakfast.

But we lose something of that self-assurance and sure-footedness at 4pm. The subjects are, or should be, challenging. Hazel is off to hear Caitlin Moran talking about men, and feeling sorry for boys who don’t quite know their role any more as women rise higher. My session is a panel taking about ‘The Limits of Comedy’. ‘Play the room’ was the main message from comedy writer Joel Morris. And don’t pitch too low, that is, don’t play too safe. You can only find the limits by playing to them.

The problem – comedy goes viral, it slips out to where it was not intended to go, and offence is caused. For Morris (I’m quoting from an article on the Chortle website, marking the publication of his new book, Be Funny or Die) that is in the very nature of things. ‘Comedy is meant to divide us, and delight us, to appeal to niche audiences … It’s meant to gather us in small tribes under the flag of whatever joke we, and only we, like best.’

5.30 Hazel listens to Channel 4’s international editor, the brilliant Lindsay Hilsum and two other very fine women journalists talking about the Gaza war. I should have been there.

I’ve chosen, as with comedy, something that’s important, but less in the limelight. Sadly, my session, Beyond Conflict: The Role of Libraries, with Elif Shafak and Priscilla Morris, and vice-patron of Book Aid International, Paul Boateng, in the chair, never quite takes off.  Priscilla Morris reads a passage from her novel, Black Butterflies, about the destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo. Ukraine and especially Gaza have seen libraries destroyed. Book Aid is doing a valiant job in Africa. Back home we have school libraries (and in the USA school librarians) threatened. Questions widen the debate but there’s too little on the action we might take. How can we extend the successful focus on literacy (and numeracy) in our schools to a love of reading and literature? And, indeed, history and music? 

History is my subject. If we forget, or learn our history through a distorting lens, we will indeed be condemned to relive it. Hay is part of a long and until recently ever-extending tradition of investigation and understanding and tolerance. The last fifteen years or so have, despite Obama, taken us in another direction. The message must be – yes, we still can.

Taking sides

I quoted from a song called The Partisan is my last post. It has a history as I’ve discovered that long precedes Leonard Cohen. It was written, as ‘La Complainte du partisan’, by two members of the French Resistance, in 1943. It was widely popular. It expressed for me the emotion of the moment, as of a week ago, but it is a song about resistance to an occupier, and freedom from that occupier is clear-cut. And the current conflict around Gaza is anything but.

Far too little is written in the English and American media about the dispossession of the inhabitants of Palestine, of many many centuries standing, by the Jewish immigrants who created the state of modern Israel. (The plan of course had been that Jew and Palestinian should live together in harmony, communities side by side.)

But that wrong cannot be put right by the destruction of a country, modern Israel, which has been heroic in many ways, and which I’ve long supported.

I, like so many others, am conflicted.

While l support Israel in its determination to remove Hamas forever from Gaza, I also support Palestinians seeking to create a country of their own, with boundaries which allow the old areas of settlement, in and around Gaza, and Nablus and Ramallah and Bethlehem, and beyond, to flourish.

The Partisan is a song Palestinians might take up. For Israel, it would be a different song, though ‘song’ for Israelis facing what seems like an existential challenge is totally inappropriate.

Whatever our politicians say, the only answer has to lie in the UK, US and Europe identifying as much with the Palestinian cause as they do with the Israeli. And that means all of us, people and governments. Only if we do so will we ever find a solution.  A solution which both sides, those of Christian heritage, and those of Muslim heritage, can readily accept.

Amid all the terrible carnage, and the apparent intractability of the conflict, and the way in which all the world takes sides, and we polarise all the more, we have to keep that in in view.

Ukraine, Russia – and the world

Do I head to Northern Ireland with this post, or to Ukraine, or to India, or stay back home…? Northern Ireland, and that absurd boast from Rishi Sunak that Northern Ireland now has the best of both worlds. It can trade with open borders with the rest of the UK, and with Europe. Just as we all could do before June 2016. We will leave it there.

Ukraine: the issue our government should be focusing on. Instead we have and will have more of that ruinous Brexit aftermath.

It was my privilege with many of my fellow villagers to attend a Ukraine evening at the Ukrainian Social Club in Gloucester, which dates back to immediately after the Second World War. One highpoint was the dinner, with local dishes, beginning with borsht and ending with a layered coffee cake. Next came an auction, with a highlight being a very fine birch-wood clock, retrieved I believe from a bombed-out factory. It will in the near future have pride of place on the wall of our village hall. And, finally, a concert: solo violin, accordion, a Cossack dancer of extraordinary style and agility, and singing – adults and children – and Oksana in a long white dress and silver boots leading us, it seemed incongruously, but maybe not so, in the chorus of Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

They were fundraising, we have to remind ourselves, for a war. Even Switzerland has to re-think its historic neutrality, though it’s not there yet. But more than that, we had a sense of a country, a culture and a language, and a thriving democracy (corruption issues notwithstanding). The contrast with their eastern borderlands, and with events in Donbass, is so extreme. And yet, Russia is the land of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Dostoevsky and Chekhov, of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam.

(Thinking of Donbass … Shakhtar Donetsk are one of Europe’s leading football teams, but they no longer play in Donetsk. In 2014 they moved to Lviv and now are playing matches in Kyiv.)

And they love their Shakespeare in Russia. I thought of Shostakovich’s curiously-named opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The story is very different from Shakespeare but we have Lady Macbeth (she is planning a murder) as a universal trope or archetype. But I’m assuming any hint of the subversion of an existing order would be too much in Putin’s Russia, as it was in Stalin’s.

We went to Stratford for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest last Thursday. Prospero and Ariel are played by women, and quite brilliantly and convincingly so. There was a very special and personal link between them. Could we imagine a woman playing Prospero in a Russia where gender roles are increasingly narrowed down to the old male and female and ‘there-shall-be-no-other’ split?

We are curtailing our imaginations, we are losing creativity. Erdogan imprisons any journalist with a creative and thereby critical take on the country’s fortunes. He’s an example to Narendra Modi, responding to a recent highly critical BBC documentary with a police raid on BBC offices in India, on the grounds of tax irregularities. A charge of corruption is the reason for the arrest of one of the leaders of a rising opposition force in India, the Aam Aadmi party.

Istanbul’s mayor, a leader of the main Turkish opposition party, has been sentenced to over two years in prison for ‘calling members of Turkey’s supreme election council “fools” in a press release three years ago’. There’s a crucial election coming up.

Rupert Murdoch admits that his TV channels in the USA went along with the Trump lie about a stolen election. They are polishing their hate figures in the USA, polishing their anger. There’s a very relevant comment in an article by William Davies in the current London Review of Books. He highlights Donald Trump’s ‘affective state of seemingly constantly being on the verge of losing his temper’, adding ‘a sense of danger and excitement to his political career’. ‘Boris Johnson, by contrast, always appears to be on the verge of bursting out laughing’. Both approaches win converts, as we’ve seen only too well.

We have to be watchful on all sides and everywhere. Republicans in Congress are challenging the levels of expenditure on the Ukraine war. Maybe they aren’t as foolish and sinister as Trump in his cosying to Putin, but they haven’t fully bought into the reality that this is where democracy, as we understand it, stands or falls.

The reality is that democracy is for many, on the right primarily but also on the left (think Lopez Obrador, known as ‘AMLO’, in Mexico), seen as the way to power, and once they have that power they are keen to pull up the democratic drawbridge after them.

Bring on the Ukrainians: they are focusing our minds. We can see where our complacency might lead.

To London, and back (to normal)

The wild garlic is about to flower, acres of it, covering woodland slopes. The first cowslips are opening, the skylarks are ascending, the long tailed tit echoes itself. But yesterday it was London and the long lines of destination-driven travellers always keeping left in corridors below Paddington station. Occasional mask wearers on the underground, otherwise near normal. Normal would be delays and hold-ups, but now we flow smoothly.

My destination – meeting an old friend at the Royal Academy to view an exhibition of the paintings of the Japanese artist, Kawanabe Kyosai. His was a time (he was active c1850 to his death in 1889) of extraordinary change, the overthrow of the Shogunate, and the Meiji Restoration. There’s a saké-influenced crazy irreverence about Kyosai, his emblematic black crow in stark contrast with armies of frogs battling with bullrushes. I learnt about shogakai, parties where professional painters and calligraphers ‘produced spontaneous creations’. They were not known for ‘their seriousness or sobriety’.

Contrast the major Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery, where I headed later in the day. Everything is measured and controlled, carefully worked through in drawings, and the effects precisely and wondrously calculated. Raphael’s workshop was legendary in its time and I can’t imagine alcohol featured. I’m assuming Kyosai sold his work on the open market. Raphael in contrast would be working within the constraints of patronage, not least the church in the form of Popes Julius II and Leo X.  Contrast the endless virgins in different poses with a naked child, studies in affection and reverence, with Kyosai’s long scroll which features a much-more-than-lifesize profile of the Buddha’s face with on its upper lip a tiny Zen Buddhist monk working his way up, an extended parasol in his right hand. ‘Today, once more, saké after saké,’ he captions a painting of a ‘shojo’, a mythical red-haired saké-loving creature out of Japanese folklore.

Later in the day I’m standing in front of an almost full-scale reproduction of Raphael’s extraordinary School of Athens, identifying Euclid and Pythagoras, and joining Plato and Aristotle’s discourse on the nature of reality…

Was Kyosai, in truth, no more than an illustrator? Ephemeral, a commentator in the style of Rowlandson or Gillray? A man of the people. Great art on the other hand belongs in cathedrals, churches, great houses…

Museums and galleries have opened Raphael’s world to ordinary folk, and he’s become part of our wider cultural heritage. Kyosai belongs to his time, his imagination is in your face, he’s a crazy acquaintance, not, maybe, a companion for the long term. If Raphael is for quiet and private contemplation, Kyosai is for sharing – ‘hey, look at this, check it out!’ Not that Kyosai is all comedy, all parody. There’s a sinuous grace to ‘Egret over Lotus Pond in the Rain’. But a minute or two later you’re looking at ‘Fart Battle’, which is just that.

The day ends with coffee in the café in the crypt in St Martin in the Fields. No-one pitching you out 5.30 or 6. Graves beneath your feet, brick-vaulted ceiling above. Then the tube and Paddington. Back to open spaces, commons and hidden valleys, where I can run or walk without seeing a soul.

Only the rumble of a distant train, heading to … London.

Museums – first steps toward censorship

A quick note this sunny bank holiday morning. Get the serious stuff off my mind before enjoying the day.

My last blog took in Empire and trade and how we handle our colonial legacy. I mentioned that Oxford’s Oriel College had decided not to ‘begin the process of removing’ the statue of Cecil Rhodes. Instead they’ve outlined a series of initiatives which will take the controversy as a starting point – a strategic plan for improving equality, diversity and inclusion, a tutor to cover the same, scholarships, an annual lecture, student prize…

This has to be the right way forward. The focus on context. By understanding context the college and by extension the university and indeed anyone who will listen can move forward.

The following report from the Independent has a very different story. It speaks for itself:

A trustee who backed the ‘decolonising’ of the curriculum has been purged from the board of a prestigious museum group, triggering the resignation of its chair in protest. The refusal to reappoint Aminul Hoque – a leading Bangladeshi-British academic – at the Royal Museums Greenwich is being seen as the latest example of the government’s ‘culture war’.

Likewise this item from the Museums Journal, highlighting a letter sent to national museums by Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden which stated that ‘publicly-funded bodies should align with the government’s stance on contested heritage’.

‘The government did not “support the removal of statues or other similar objects” and told recipients (of a letter sent to national museums) that he “would expect arm’s lengths bodies’ approach to issues of contested heritage to be consistent with the government’s position”’.

This is simply sinister. The issue here is not the removal or otherwise of statues. It is the wider agenda implied. It represents an attempt to influence research into and the presentation of our cultural heritage which is simply unprecedented. That heritage, the impact of colonisation on the world, is what it is. And it needs to be centre-stage if we’re to understand the world we live in, and change it for the better.

Dowden insists that museums ‘continue to act impartially’ and by so doing interferes in an unprecedented and highly partial and dangerous way.

It is consistent with attempts to stir up a wider opposition to the BBC as a licence-funded operation, using its news coverage, which is to an impartial observer (check out opinions from other country’s on this!) remarkably impartial in an ever-more divided world, as an excuse for turning it into just another subscription channel, and thereby losing its identity as a national channel – leaving British TV open to market forces, which has of course been Rupert Murdoch’s aim all along.

The Diana/Martin Bashir story is almost twenty-five years old but is being treated as if it’s current news. By the Daily Mail and the Murdoch press. Murdoch is of course about to launch Times Radio to compete with BBC Radio.

We live in dangerous times, with the Americanisation of our media, and the serious consequences that could result, a real possibility. The tabloids and Telegraph and Times won’t help us. Their owners ensure their readers are unaware of the hard realities. Journalists and writers to get published need to toe the line. The BBC likewise must toe the line: it cannot make a case for itself. Social media is a deeply divided and contentious space.

Those of us who can must make our case as best we can. The wider public, most certainly in the case of the BBC, is on our side. Open minds and impartiality have become part of our DNA. We must not give them up lightly.