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liked it
| If you want a basic guide to the state of scientific research into the alleged nature of autism twenty years ago (and an insight into the attitudes of If you want a basic guide to the state of scientific research into the alleged nature of autism twenty years ago (and an insight into the attitudes of somewhat cold and clinical positivists) then this may be the book for you but I found it mildly creepy and even sinister at times. What were the problems that I had with it? Partly it was a matter of the arrogance of tone towards those who had a view of autism closer to that of the much later book by Devon Price ('Unmasking Autism') which tried to claim autism as yet another 'identity' in a society already reeking of them. There was an odd point (like an upsurge of atavistic feminism) where the author seemed to be playing with the idea of men being autistic simply by being men. She moves swiftly on but it gives us a clue to an attitude that sees 'normality' as 'normative' along lines that are peculiar to her own world. In my earlier review, I criticised Price for going too far in accepting the language of victimhood and identity politics but Frith takes us to the other end of the spectrum in what appears to be an alliance of interest between a profession seeking research grants and worried middle class mummies. Cultural alliances fascinate me because of their distorting effects within liberal democracies and the fact that they emerge without a central point of control. They are certainly not conspiracies but emerge naturally, like that between Greens and business, to distort reality. Autism has certainly 'exploded' in terms of 'diagnosis' (always a reason to be suspicious in the world of clinical psychology) and in cultural awareness. It has become a blank sheet on to which fears, interests and ambitions may get projected with social and political consequences. Now, do not get me wrong here. I do accept that autism in its extreme forms can and will be dysfunctional and that, if truly dysfunctional, it requires sensitive intervention to help individuals become functional - but this begs the question of what we may mean by functional. Frith is undoubtedly expert in analysing, understanding and developing solutions to truly dysfunctional autistic behaviour. The quarrel here is not with her expertise (which is substantial and demonstrable) but its extension from the particular to the general. I noted in an earlier review the insights of Richard Bentall in 'Madness Explained' where he suggested that professional diagnostics may have got out of hand so that (he speaks of classical insanity) we fail to see that much behaviour classed as 'mad' is, in fact, on an extensive spectrum. There is no reason to consider all 'abnormal'behaviours as dysfunctional. Neuro-diversity is often not a problem at all. People have, in fact, often become dysfunctional because of social demands and expectations. 'Sufferers' could often get on adequately with reassurance and a different society. We should not have to sit there, whoever we are, and accept society when it clashes with our essential given nature or our existentialist ambitions so long as we offer no threat to others. Normalising us can be one of the nastiest forms of human oppression because it is so insidious. We willoften see a power struggle between an individual who is who they are and a society who demands that they be something else. The obvious example in history were the demands made on LGBTQ+ people. Dysfunctionality in any situation requires careful analysis in this context. Normality is a conceptual trap because what is normal shifts and changes according to culture. It would be normal to hate Jews in Nazi Germany, to believe in the virtues of the proletariat in the Soviet Union and to believe in a Christian commitment to marriage and corporation in 1950s America. From this perspective, Price, although he/she goes far too far, is correct that many autists (like many people who hear voices) can and should kick back against attempts to diminish and control them, force them back into normality as once we tried to force gay people into binary sexual situations. I must admit to something here. Everyone around me seems convinced that I am 'on the spectrum' when it comes to autism although it is fairly mild in my case. I am very high functioning. When it comes to matters of 'madness', I am possibly even hyperrational to my own distress. This makes me believe that it is normality that is often dysfunctional. When it comes to human survival, it is normal to accept being conscripted for absurd wars and to deny your own desires sexually to maintain a historically-generated Judaeo-Christian mythic culture. But that is how it is. Interest in Autism in certainly relatively recent - it possibly has not yet reached its half century of serious professional engagement. In this, it is unlike 'madness' which has troubled humanity in some form since the days of shamanism. A fully balanced approach seems yet to be developed. So, neither Price nor Frith's books are entirely helpful because both tell only half the story. Both are polemical and rather rigid. Neither is prepared to critique the special interests and social conditions that define functionality (Frith) or the post-modern ideology that denies social reality (Price). Just as I advised the Price-ians to persist in dropping their masks on their terms but without wasting time on constructing a group identity, so I would advise the Frith-ians to step back and define dysfunctionality with more care and to consider social dysfunctionality as of equal concern. In the ideal situation, in dealing with the 'mad' and the 'autistic', individuals would be left to self-develop as much as possible with as much reasonable non-invasive support as possible. Those who collapsed into true dysfunctionality should receive the bulk of what resources there are. It is the idea that autism is necessarily a disorder that most concerns me. To be fair, Frith does point out the aspects of autism that might be regarded as positive but her language of disorder always privileges some reified order to which it is necessary to adapt. Order is not the human condition. The book retains throughout a certain implicit arrogance about the extent of neuro-diversity as disorder. The normal brain is treated as a biological and essentialist absolute, abandoning all awareness of the adaptiveness and resilience of the mind (and so of the underlying brain). Perhaps 'normies' need to be taught more not to fear or to panic (especially middle class mums) and to loosen up a little. Nevertheless, boundaries need to be agreed where it becomes clear that the safety of the individual and of society might require someone to step in. There is another consideration against enforced normality of any kind where there is no significant suffering or harm to the wider world or to the individual themselves. This is that (as we seem to forget) we are evolved animals and not machines or gods. We are a species with massive variation. Neuro-diversity is not an aberration from some Platonic form of the brain, pickled in aspic for eternity (this is pre-Darwinian thinking) but variation. Neuro-diversity may be truly dysfunctional we have accepted, but it may also be massively creative as we see in Elon Musk. OK, some people may consider Musk dangerous and abnormal (we have reviewed his biography at length elsewhere) but that is frankly a political decision or one based on classic 'ressentiment'. Whatever one thinks of him, he has made exceptional advances in business and engineering. Variation is vital to the survival of a species. It may be become very important as our species, which has a weird aspect in being part-hive (a socialised unthinking culture) and part consciously individualist (the creative yeast in society), adapts to new technological conditions. The bits of humanity that seem dysfunctional to 'normies' may contain the genetic seeds to future survival. Attempts to treat moderate autism or 'madness' as a 'disorder' and to seek to cure it may gain grants for ambitious academics but it may also lead us in a very dark direction. This dark side would be genetic intervention to normalise our species within a narrow band. This would be a conservative attempt to preserve an existing order that may be doomed to fail. It is implicit in liberal panic at the fact that people keep coming up with the wrong political answers. To identify serious dysfunctional abnormality in the brain is one thing (action to deal with this is beneficial) but contemporary professional liberal capitalist society is constantly engaged in mission creep - whether as NATO or human resources managers or clinical psychology. This mission creep is the unthinking 'hive' at work. It is the sort of thinking by 'normal people' that tends to lead to problems like risking nuclear war, debt crises or the rise of populism in reaction to 'norms' imposed without true consent from above. The point is that all attempts of authoritarian science to control humanity generally end in disaster for the professional classes and society in general (Adam Curtis' 'Pandora's Box' documentary series is good on this). Humanity is always best guided rather than forced. The 'hive' must be challenged. Now, let us be clear, Frith is not (at least overtly) directing us to the dark side at all but the positivist attitudes and essentialism implicit in her account make things just that bit easier for those who might. For facts, this a good book. For ideological sophistication, go elsewhere. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political change in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Some contemporaries were irritated by this interest in the times as much as the life but not this reader. The book is nearly 680 pages long. Perhaps the more casual reader might have liked some cuts to make it more manageable but the length is justified by the authors interweaving of three closely related stories - that of a personality, that of a scientist and thinker and that of his times. The personality is fascinating in its own right but what comes across as equally interesting is the subversion of his own class - that of the well-heeled but capable gentleman naturalist - by his alliance with the new men of professional science, self made and seeking 'jobs' in institutions. This is where personality ties in with wider social change. What drove this rather timorous man with a life time of seriously unpleasant psychosomatic illnesses to defy convention at some social risk and, quite late in the day, allow the publication of his radical thoughts on evolution and natural selection? Although Desmond and Moore do not quite answer this question directly, a personality that could do nothing but investigate and think on what it investigated - a classical case of scientific curiosity as core to personality - eventually had to break ranks to express its 'truth'. His biography (excepting a rather unprepossessing country gent early life and the last days of being lionised and loving every minute of it) can be roughly broken down into three phases - the days on 'The Beagle', those living his theory discreetly in the country and those once his theory was in play. The first phase is of a very young man with a considerable capacity for hard work who built up sufficient reputation from his specimen collecting to become accepted as part of a family of naturalists and scientists exploring the difficult terrain between nature and revealed religion. The second phase has him highly respected within a respectable world but finding that his 'thinking' was taking existing evolutionary thought and extending it into something that could and would 'in the wrong hands' completely undermine the very social order on which he and his family depended. We have to remember that Darwin was never in want of funds. He was connected to both the Darwin and Wedgewood dynasties and the valuation of his estate at £250,000 (roughly £23m in today's money) at the end of his life did not arise from his writings or scientific work. This was a man from a comfortable Whig family. It may have been in class opposition to aristocratic Tory squires and parsons but it was, like Labour and Tory today, essentially part of a struggle in which both sides competed for advantage within a system they both maintained as 'sound'. During this second phase (as the book makes clear) Darwin's 'thinking' led him into troubled waters because its logic was that of a challenge to the very ideological fundamentals that held the mob at bay in the years following the Chartist threat to property. Working and middle class radicals were very interested in evolution for ideological reasons although they preferred the ideas of Lamarck, a preference of the Left that was to prove highly problematic in the Soviet Union under Stalin. To undermine the ideology of God's grace creating a perfectly structured and benign nature (as proposed by the Anglican Paley) with the 'truth' of an evolutionary natural order with God (if present at all) very distant could imply that radical solutions to social problems were potentially correct. The secret to Darwin's triumph lies not in him being 'right' (which he mostly was) but in what he proposed arriving at just the right time to buttress rising social forces that endorsed a new imperial order that, in turn, buttressed the order of property more effectively than religion. The trigger of course was that Darwin could see that his ideas were in danger of being trumped with the less experimental or consistent thought of others, notably by the younger socialist (in a confused sort of way) Alfred Russell Wallace. He had to publish or lose his edge. It should be made clear here though that Darwin and Wallace were not competing as scientific equals and that Darwin had earned the right to leadership in the field. Darwin never treated Wallace badly and Wallace never regarded Darwin as having done so. Darwin is a complex character. The biography restores emotion to the Victorians but, for all the usual faults that lie in the character of the time (his imperialism, his casual racism, his patronising attitudes to the working class), he was by mid-Victorian lights ethical and broadly compassionate. So, Darwin has to publish to be the one who gets credit for a truth that is brutal in its vision of nature as a war of all against all in the battle of survival and of the survival of those who are fittest. These then, it seems, go on to drive species, racial and all other forms of 'progress'. We can see straight away how useful this was to the rising middle class professionals in the scientific community but also to a new imperial society being born out of the expansion of trade and industrialisation. It 'explained' hegemony. It 'countered' socially radical alternatives. 'Property' (all things being equal) might have been happy to continue with the old Tory paternalist ideology of a settled and benign Nature and of traditionalist values that placed everyone in their assigned role and relied on squires to protect the poor and parsons to comfort them. Science was always going to unsettle this view because science is what it is - the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, Nature is actually mindlessly brutal with God increasingly (if he even exists) pushed further back by reality into being little more than the designer of general laws. The initial challenge had come from two equally opposed sources. We have mentioned the radical challenge which became a socialist one in due course. This emphasised the possibility of social improvement on Lamarckian lines but the more important challenge at this point was the Whig one. Whig intellectuals took up Malthus which led, after the 1832 Reform Act, to the cruelest triumph of Liberal Progressivism - the Poor Laws. Prior to Darwin's publications over a quarter of a century later, 'existential struggle' was already being brutally imposed on the working classes. It is part of the centre-left myth of its own trajectory that Victorian Liberalism was a good thing and the Tories were a bad thing but nothing is so simple. For totally different reasons, yet both thinking in compassionate terms, Tories and radicals challenged the Malthusian ideology of this new elite. Victorian Liberalism was intent on a form of managed revolution in the interests of its own class alliances - wealthy industrialists and dissenters, evangelical Christians, Malthusians, the new professional class, self-made men, the first propertied feminists. This was a culture of trade and empire and of assumptions of worth epitomised by the Self-Help doctrine of Samuel Smiles. The way to handle too many working people was to force them to export themselves to colonies where the imperial authorities subjugated inferior peoples to fit them in. In a weak form, these are attitudes about cultural superiority, social control, ideological conformity and the handling of the working class that are still embedded in American progressives and what was once called 'New Labour'. It is the ideological original sin of the Anglosphere Centre-Left. Darwin straddled this main ideological divide. He was of free-thinking stock where the money had been made in industrial enterprise. He was 'liberal' in the best sense in his dealings with people but, on the other hand, he was also a village country squire and responsible for a parish and good order. The third phase in his life and in the book is what happens when he deals with his internal conflicts and publishes 'The Origin of Species' (1859) and later 'The Descent of Man' (1871) (as well as very many other works) dropping a lighted match into the oil dump of elite ideological tensions. Darwin's work becomes the weaponry to be used by a self-consciously engaged network of 'professional' (or aspirantly professional) elite scientists actively seeking to overturn the old order and transform the existing 'gentlemanly' institutions of the scientific community. Darwin's technique is interesting. He knows what he is doing and he wants to promote the scientific revolution but he also wants to retain his aura of respectability. He does this by standing back and providing the guns and bullets for his shock troops but avoiding the front line himself. His health shifts from being the psychosomatic result of intense stress at the potential revolution that he might create to its being the excuse for not engaging in revolutionary acts by attending events and for not commenting on the ideological, social or political ramifications of his theories. He sits like a spider at the centre of an ideological web as Huxley in particular (but not only Huxley) takes on those who refuse to abandon religion as the core of Victorian ideology (men such as Bishop Wilberforce and the Duke of Argyll) and builds up a shock troop of like-minded scientists. This is why the book is so valuable. It not only gives us an insight into Victorian elite society at a key point in its history between the troubles of the 1840s and the High Imperialism of the 1880s but it helps to explain why change happened and suggests how change might happen today or tomorrow. By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, the 'revolution' is completed. The thesis of Tory Anglicanism and the antithesis of Liberalism are synthesised into the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Darwin's interment in Westminster Abbey (fixed by Huxley and the gang). As Desmond and Moore indicate, Darwin had become a secular saint but his interment in the Abbey as provider of a neat indirect justification of British imperial superiority ('survival of the fittest') was a symbolic negation of the alternative of his interment in a family vault as local patriarch. In essence Gladstonian Imperial Liberalism 'won' and old-style Tory Paternalism lost but the Anglican Church was vouchsafed a place in maintaining social order and the Lamarckian socialists were 'dished' by the weight of evidence that Darwin had provided. Alongside the British story there is, of course, the story of 'Darwinism' (the -ism helps indicate the ideological aspect of this new way of seeing the world) as both Social Darwinism (a more overt ideological system with no serious evidential base) and as its reception overseas. Darwin cannot entirely be absolved of responsibility for Social Darwinism although he did not actively promote it or anything like it. It emerged as, if you like, its own 'bourgeois necessity'. However, he shared the baseline thinking - the struggle for existence with winners and losers in life's race. What becomes interesting is the rapid German intellectual adoption of Darwinism with an enthusiasm and excitability that sometimes comes across as at the edge of comical if we were not reminded of some of the eventual darker consequences of its adoption in the next century. The authors are only interested in how the Germans related to Darwin personally but we can see the lineaments of an interpretation that is similar to that we have seen in relation to the British Empire - an idea, strengthened by its apparent truth, met a newly necessary ideological need. This is the Germany of Bismarck. The defeat of 'effete' France by Prussia saw most of the British elite preferring modernising Germany to France with its perceived tin pot Napoleon III. Germany looked dynamic, the fittest, both to itself in potential and to the wider world. With Haeckel playing the role of Huxley, Darwinism appealed because it weakened the role of the churches in restricting the authority of the State and it suggested ideas of natural selection that were not uninfluential on philosophers like Nietzsche. As my mentor at university, the late Norman Stone, pointed out to me, national socialism was the consequence of a lot of young people being taught half-baked ideological theories by half-educated schoolmasters in small towns. Darwinismus would have been part of their tool kit. One day the path by which two decent men's ideas (those of Darwin and Marx who only interacted briefly in writing once) becomes socially transmuted away from their actual intentions into mass murder and genocide will be traced with more insight than we have seen to date. From this perspective, Desmond (who was an historian of evolution prior to the 'Origin of Species') and Moore (whose previous work was on the controversies in Victorian London triggered by Darwin's work) provide important material on the ideologisation of 'truth' and the role of intellectuals. We should add here that the authors concentrate as much if not more on the man as on his ideas and environment. This makes the book, based on deep research into available letters and papers, extremely readable as a human life that unfolds over more than seventy years. There are two critical death scenes (of Darwin's daughter Annie and of Darwin himself) that should move anyone - in both cases the available evidence gives us scenes of horror that few biographies tend to provide. It is important to understand what death entailed for Victorians. Similarly the account of the Voyage of the Beagle is a deft summary of Darwin's own writings that allows us to picture a young sea sick man prepared to put up with a great deal of hardship and risk to find out how the world might work and do his job of collecting specimens for home. For all the social and ideological aspects and consequences of the case, Darwin comes across as a basically decent human being who loved his family and especially his long-suffering wife Emma, was loyal and supportive to his friends and worked immensely hard because that is who he was. His 'genius' was not based on one just idea or the books for which most people remember him but on a major body of research work involving demanding and committed experimentation and the ability to worry at a problem and follow the logic of his experimental discoveries. How his material was used was not really his fault because he was only telling the truth as he saw it. His truth almost entirely (with the odd speculation overtaken by history) stands up as exceptional science that just happened to be very convenient to powerful people who then weaponised it. Fortunately we have long since moved past the ideological accretions. Scientists eventually returned to the science and built on it. One hopes that, at some stage, the same can be done with those aspects of the work of Marx that still hold 'truths' that it has now become all too convenient to deny. ...more |
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liked it
| This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a governm This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a government department. As a basic primer, it might be useful to someone entirely new to the subject but it cannot be said to be 'inspiring'. One insight (although dealt with rather tentatively by the authors) is that our perceptions have been over-defined by, first, American reactions to the very specific experience of Italian-American organised crime and by, second, the emergent special interests of 'law enforcement'. A sub-text of the final chapter is a frustration that law enforcement's propensity to secrecy makes it difficult for academics to get access to the data that they think they require in order to understand what is going on 'out there'. A suspicion is that law enforcement's political narrative may be flimsy. Although the book is largely descriptive with little or minimal opinion, the final chapter more than hints at an uncomfortable truth - that organised crime is really not that organised except insofar as the market is organised ... it is just another aspect of human aspiration. This leads us to some uncomfortable thoughts because, in the end, criminality is not defined in terms of moral good and evil so much as what the law dictates. Any assumption that the law is the same as justice or morality is as dodgy as the equation made between education and intelligence. In general, there is some consonance of terms. Most people most of the time can reasonably prefer the order of the lawful State over the disorder of a market without restraints especially when the human condition creates desire for things that are harmful to it. The discomfort comes from a number of factors - one is that criminal behaviour can be a reasonable response to aspiration in any system where aspiration for things (including security) is unavailable to some people but normal for others (within the system that law protects). We might add here that the desire for 'bad' things - like addictive drugs or tobacco - may be driven by legitimate anxieties and pressures that the system as a whole will not deal with. Even human and sexual trafficking may be far more a negotiation with crime by the vulnerable than we might think. Protection (revisited later as extortion) may be the least worse outcome where law enforcement itself has failed to provide it. Loan sharking would not need to exist outside a world of low wages and vulnerable small businesses. Criminals mostly exploit the already weak or exploited. The authors flip things on their head a little further by pointing out that many criminals simply want things and do a cost-benefit analysis on the various non-legal means of ceasing to be weak or exploited themselves. They are, in short, just business people working in a parallel system. Another factor is that we should be in no doubt that order (in the form of States) originated in what we would call crime if extortion is a crime. Most of our state structures are derived from older forms where tribute was exacted for 'protection' and eventually became 'taxation'. In other words (and we do not have to be an anarchist to accept this), exactly who benefits from the State structures dependent on taxation and how and what they define as criminal is highly relevant to any attempt to match any concept of good and evil to the law. Finally, in the struggle between order and criminality, order is not averse to extreme and cruel measures sanctified as law if and when it can get away with it. One matter not covered very much in the book is organised political crime or 'resistance' but this really needs considering. If the State under pressure can start banging people up for a Facebook post and turning them into 'criminals', frustrated and excessively exploited or marginalised communities can turn to criminality to finance resistance or create their own authority. The response of the prevailing global neo-liberal community has been to try to force the abandonment of any notion of resistance or national liberation but retain the political dimension by creating a super-criminal category of 'terrorism'. The category may have back-fired as the complexity of Hamas' or Hezbollah's resistance has been understood better under what amounts to a state terrorist operation against their communities by Israel but it has also enabled States to impose extreme measures on their own populations. The abstract problem here is that, whereas lawful states can define criminality by fiat, there is no universally valid international legal structure that has not ultimately been a measure of the American interest (now under severe pressure). The 'rogue state' category has been invented to deal with this. Globalisation, which may prove to have been order's fundamental strategic error in maintaining itself viably, has intensified the ability of aspirational actors to work the global market system and driven 'order' to go trans-national and build a sledgehammer bureaucratism under US influence. Similarly, the New World Order's attempt to define itself as a global police force seems to be in ruins as 'rogue states' and 'terrorists' have proven resilient with increasing sympathies for their predicament from significant domestic minorities who are otherwise law-abiding. This presents a fascinating crisis of definitions where the temptation of the system is to start criminalising aspects of political dissent at home. This threatens to worsen the situation as elements amongst those targeted may start to see unlawfulness as a reasonable response to unjust legality. On balance, one should very much be part of the faction of humanity that seeks order over market chaos but if that order fails to deliver what people aspire to, is inept at controlling the market in general and becomes tyrannous in defence of order, then we have mounting problems. In practice, we should not be romantic about criminals. Sometimes they deliver 'goods' that really should never have been under state sanction. The case study of alcohol during prohibition is probably one of humanity's greatest examples of unintended consequences on these lines. Far more often, they supply 'bads' - addictive drugs, faulty counterfeit products, low priced tobacco, unnecessary protection (extortion), financial redistribution from the most vulnerable in society to themselves, exploitative labour, access to non-consensual sex and so forth. Getting the balance right between meeting the aspirations of all humanity equally, dealing with the trade in oppressive and dangerous 'bads' and maintaining a 'good' (that is, smoothly functioning) market system is not easy. A certain balance was seriously broken with imperial neo-liberalism. It would have been good if the authors had been bolder in addressing this tension which is essentially political but, as a basic overview, even if unsatisfactory in places, this will serve most newcomers to the subject well enough. ...more |
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really liked it
| Darryl Jones gives us one of the neatest and most informative accounts of what counts as horror in his introductory chapter although the rest of the b Darryl Jones gives us one of the neatest and most informative accounts of what counts as horror in his introductory chapter although the rest of the book, despite many insights, will not contain many surprises or fresh thinking for any but those with no previous knowledge of the genre. As an 'introduction' (which is what it is supposed to be) it is solid and to be recommended but it is not without minor flaws and absences. Nevertheless, it has the virtue of clarity. Someone new to the field will get sufficient information to suggest a useful private reading or watch list. Not everything can be covered in 'a very short introduction' but the over-emphasis on literary fiction and film with only a passing mention of British television not merely misses out horror in gaming but horror in eighteenth century poetry and some important writers. If mention of Caitlin Kiernan, Robin Ramsey or Adam Nevill might be forgivable for reasons of space, it seems perverse not to mention Thomas Ligotti or Dan Simmons or refer to a wider range of popular literary parallels to some of the films he mentions. He is overly dismissive of Lovecraft, picking out his racism with the same core ignorance of those who disrespect Heidegger for his Nazi experiment without looking at the man as a whole. It might be a slog but he really should read S T Joshi's 'I am Providence' before making jejune judgements. There is also a fair degree of over-thinking at key points with the academic mind coming into play, sometimes missing the commercial and popular point with an over-emphasis on politics and a certain Adorno-derived 'snobbisme' about popular taste and desires. There is a point where the general reader can almost predict (I am sure that an advanced AI could do this) the ideological formulations that will get trotted out whenever an academic is asked to introduce his subject to the great unwashed. Some of the political commentary is justified to be sure and it is not, to be fair, overly obtrusive in most of the book but, when it appears, it can be over-egged and makes one realise just how ideologically conformist the academy has become over the last half century. There is not much more to say. The final chapter on contemporary horror is the least useful as so often happens but the introduction is very good and (if you are a newcomer to the field) the bulk of the book is going to be very helpful as an initial guide so I can recommend it on those grounds. ...more |
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it was ok
| It is very rare for me to abandon a book. I generally follow my Gran's rule which is 'if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all'. If I dump It is very rare for me to abandon a book. I generally follow my Gran's rule which is 'if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all'. If I dump a book before a third of the way through I tend to remain silent but if I have invested roughly five hours to reach two thirds I comment. Exactly why I dumped it at that stage and not earlier (and merely skimmed the rest to see if I was likely to miss anything) will come a little later but, for the moment, let us try and see what this book was supposed to offer us. It struck me as the work of an intense man with ideas drawn from a form of 'ressentiment' at minds that operated in ways that normatively he could not approve of. This was work that seemed to be seeking proof for some form of prejudice about the 'other'. The irony of its moralism when the bulk of the book seemed to be a condemnation of the moralising of Blake's 'Urizen' (Your-Reason) struck me as showing a lack of self awareness and even of analysis. Anti-moralism became transformed into a form of neo-moralism that dared not speak its name. The style is repetitive as if trying to hammer home points to readers who perhaps he felt may not be listening intently enough. He is preaching, not teaching, three themes that are not reliably connected and which need teasing out for their different levels of value and meaning to the reader. One theme is the claim that William Blake's poetry provides us with insight into how the human mind works confirmed by contemporary neuroscience. I am no scholar of Blake and Tweedy is a literary scholar who specialised in the romantics so some benefit of the doubt has to be given him here. The leap from a reading of Blake (which I have no reason to believe is not well based on a close reading of his life and poetry) to neuroscience is suspect but those interested in the peculiar mind of this poetic genius may still get some significant profit from the book. The second theme are the claims about the left and right hemisphere of the brain that seem more dubious and are part of a sometimes self-serving literature of hemispheric difference in a cultural war of personality. It is a psychological cult begun in good faith by Julian Jaynes many years ago. Do not misunderstand me. The evidence of different functional roles related to our two brain hemispheres is reasonably demonstrated. The construction of our consciousness genetically, historically and experientially in light of this is well worth open-minded study. My quarrel is only with the temptation of cultural figures both to extrapolate what we know into what they want to be true and to use their extrapolations in order to make sweeping, usually normative, statements about the human condition. Great leaps are taken from brain science to cultural criticism. The third theme is that of Tweedy's own great leap into huge assumptions (Jaynes attempted the same) about the origins of human consciousness and its current nature and so to value judgements about good and evil that are mere opinion but accord with the demands of his first theme (Blake). None of this would have stopped me finishing the book despite the flaws in thinking, repetitions and passionate intensity (which rarely appeals to me on matters of great moment). What stopped me in my tracks were his comments on 'psychopathy' and 'autism'. Suddenly, the oddity emerged of someone condemning the gross authoritarianism of religion and science (on both of which I agreed with him, albeit not quite for the same reasons) becoming singularly authoritarian in favour of what was starting to look like right hemisphere extremism. Being live and let live by nature, I do not have a problem with the 'hello trees, hello flowers' type of mind or the peculiarities of those who are 'spiritual' or seek to be without 'ego' but I reasonably expect to be allowed to live and let live in return and not be damned to hell for the way I might think. Not that I think in pure right or left hemispheric ways - indeed, observation suggests that most people most of the time are on a huge spectrum of balances between extremes. The healthy mind is any that, on either side of the game, can communicate with the other side on respectful terms. Two thirds of the way through we get two sets of authoritarian statement that I found very worrying. The first was the unjustified deep association of very dominant left hemispheric thinking with psychopathy. The second was the severely negative attack on the autistic (neuro-diverse) mind. For me, this was getting close to personality fascism on two grounds. The first is that the fashionable labeling of certain personalities and achievers as psychopathic is little more than 'ressentiment' in spades of people who have as much a role in the construction of humanity as they do. This is a trope of the most conservative element in our society - the frustrated, angry and anxious progressive liberal-left (I cannot say if Tweedy belongs to this community or not). All our problems are believed to derive from some 'psychopathic other' (military, banker, corporate, political). It is the error of thinking that a total system like late liberal capitalism is a conspiracy of some kind rather than something that has evolved organically to represent the current relationship between technology and the human condition. These alleged psychopaths are just part of us. If you really want to change things, you do not attempt the fantasy (as the Soviets did) of changing humanity but instead concentrate on creating different social and political forms to improve the relationship of humanity to technology and resource availability. You may still get serial killers on occasions and there will still be people who talk to the trees and spout poetry but what Tweedy seems to think is psychopathy will simply be the same types of mind doing better things because that is how things are set up. There is nothing more dangerous in our current times than the emergent war between personality types which is the almost inevitable concomitant of a war of cultures under a total networked society without national and other fire breaks. And this is what this book seems to represent. The very extreme right hemisphere without any ethical base and without impulse control is a threat no doubt and it might be nice if more people considered the consequences of their actions in their social roles but the first are aberrant and the second are normal because that is how evolution works. As for the neuro-diverse and autistic, their demonisation (by strong implication in this case) is a moral wrong, as much as demonising someone for the genetic colour of their skin, physical disability or gender. There is no call for it. I have no time for those who do it. I would like to have read on but I was already bored. At this point, I realised that the socio-cultural and political conclusions being drawn from what might have been a scholarly review of Blake's thought were heading into personal fantasy based on slender reasoning. This a shame because I suspect the comprehension of William Blake's way of thinking was insightful and did not need the attempt to draw it into a quasi-religious critique of contemporary humanity. It would have been better to have let us draw our own conclusions about another way of human being. ...more |
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| May 14, 1998
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it was amazing
| Gosh, where to start? This late eighteenth century (1796) shocker by Matthew Lewis is still surprisingly readable. It rattles along at quite a pace de Gosh, where to start? This late eighteenth century (1796) shocker by Matthew Lewis is still surprisingly readable. It rattles along at quite a pace despite the occasional weird meandering to insert a horror or new angle. Altogether not bad for a bored nineteen year old acting as a diplomatic intern. Given that William Beckford's 'Vathek' (1782), another lush horror though orientalist in tone, was begun by a rich youngster at 22 and that Mary Shelley knocked out 'Frankenstein' (1818) before she was 21, we have a phenomenon here of youthful imagination exorcising its anxieties in gothick mode. As Beckford used the world of the Arabian Nights so Lewis goes into the collective imagination of the English in order to express strangeness and horror - the alien Spain of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition which held the same fearful fascination as the red peril of communism would do later. Beckford is writing well over a century after the panic over the Popish Plot and two centuries after the Armada but Spanish Catholicism, its 'superstition' and its alleged totalitarian cruelties could still send a shiver down the spines of any Englishman. There but for the grace of God and all that. Underlying the text is an Anglo-Saxon empiricist's sense of superiority over a culture that believes in saints' relics and uses incense which he then subverts by using it to play on the equally superstitious sensibilities of his readers with tales of ghosts and examples of sorcery. An amazing sequence (written for a cinema that could not exist) has a religious procession cascading into mayhem, an assault on a convent, the tearing to shreds of an errant prioress and the burning of nuns guilty and innocent alike. On this atavistic framework, Lewis builds a story of aristocratic honour and love, of the sin of pride and the roots of hypocrisy, of cruel superstition and of dark magic in which a rather Catholic conception of the Devil and Hell plays its role to deliver a true horror novel. Subversion lies in using a ready-made atmosphere of cultural fear to introduce more basic fears - of the mob, of the hypocrisy of evil (the other minds problem), premature burial, seduction in a shame culture, ghosts, loss of sexual control, rape, entrapment in a totalitarian institution and more. But what struck this reader was not so much how Lewis took the Gothick to new levels of extremity for the time (and introduced fairly transgressive sexual themes) but how mature his reading of human psychology was beneath the formal literary narrative expectations we might have. At one point we get a detailed account of a woman waking in a sepulchre amongst suppurating corpses and at another a carefully drawn account of how a naive woman might be captured by a seducer and how the women around her work to protect her. We get an interpolated ghost story after a conventional tale of banditti in the German forest but within this again we see an almost filmic interplay of our hero Lorenzo and the attempt of the bandit leader's wife to warn him of the plot to murder him. There is a lot of this interplay between a melodramatic story line and acute understanding (remarkable given the age of the author) of human psychology. By the end of the book I came to feel that it had been underrated and deserved much more attention. The book is certainly not classically proportioned. The tormented super villain of the story (also treated with sophistication in regard to his complex inner life) disappears for a huge chunk of the book after his introduction in order to permit more sensation. However, somehow it all hangs together. Its sheer momentum gives us a series of succeeding climaxes of increasing horror. Its reception was to be much like that of the video nasties of the early 1980s. Quite a bit of self censorship was necessary for later editions especially as Lewis was to become an MP (in the age of rotten boroughs) not too long after. He, like Beckford, was from a slave-owning family whose wealth came from sugar. He died in 1818 of yellow fever returning from Jamaica. Nevertheless, the book was immensely popular on publication. It set the tone (if later muted) for the rise of the Gothick as horror rather than terror. It might perhaps even be seen as an inventor of the 'jump scare' that is now a cliche in cinema. It is the subject matter that sustains the horror. The Gothick tropes are intensified beyond the clanking chain, sins of the past, dungeons and moonlight (with owls hooting) into rape, incest, carefully described murder, starvation, sex (surprisingly explicit), corpses and demonology. With many characters excellently drawn and feeling very real despite the fantastic framework, Lewis' adolescent sensibility seems itself to be expressed in the passions of the characters. He seems to be imagining himself into extreme situations in a most remarkable way. The character of Ambrosio, the monk of the title, is of course central and critical. At one level conventional (his fall comes from the sin of pride from which all else springs), this perpetrator of evil is far from one dimensional. He has a rich internal life if a self-deluding one. His pride makes him lack self awareness. He slides from dark act to dark act with the unleashing of his 'shadow', passions that he ultimately cannot control while periodically recognising his predicament. And yet he is also manipulated - victim almost as much as perpetrator. The cause of his doom lies in Rosario/Matilda who seems not to be a demon (but who may be) but more a sorcerer in the dark arts with a prodigious and manipulative libido whose transgressive sexuality has a certain libertarian integrity to it. She personifies absolute moral rebellion. As to the other characters (Don Lorenzo, his sister Agnes (imprisoned in a sepulchre with her dead child) and lover of Lorenzo's friend Don Raymond, Lorenzo's love Antonia (raped and murdered) and her family network), these are interweaved artfully. You care about their condition. Yes, the boys can appear exceptionally dim and self-absorbed at the expense of the girls (always the victims, our scream queens) but this is a group of young adults - the eighteenth century version of the world of the High School. Antonia has been criticised as just too perfect but she is only 15. Of course, Ambrosio gets his comeuppance in ways that might genuinely have frightened its audience far more than the more visceral body horror but the book's conclusion is pragmatically cynical just we might expect in the period of Choderlos de Laclos and the Barber of Seville. Let us not do any more detailed spoiler here. Let us just say that Lorenzo does rather well for himself, possibly better than if Ambrosio had never existed, and leave it like that. The young aristocrats (barring one who lost her honour and had to be dealt with accordingly by Lewis) survive and prosper. ...more |
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it was amazing
| If you want an intelligent and informed short overview of British cinema, you would be hard pressed to find anything better than Barr's book. It is no If you want an intelligent and informed short overview of British cinema, you would be hard pressed to find anything better than Barr's book. It is not about 'films' as such but about a broader cultural phenomenon covering not just production but distribution and the role of film in British society. To tell the story of British cinema over a century or more and be complete is impossible in one of OUP's 'very short introduction' series but Barr does surprisingly well by cherry-picking key films, events and dates to produce a rounded and yet personal picture of the field. It cannot be definitive but what we get is a coherent story that, until we reach the more ideologically contested twenty first century, is plauaible and even revisionist. He is certainly determined to recover film as 'teamwork' against the extremes of 'auteur' theory. He frequently shows how relationships between figures on the creative and production side of cinema created generations of film maker who were partly at the right place and at the right time but mostly co-creators, collaborators, in making films happen that related perfectly to their environment. As to the history, although a pioneer of film technique, a declining empire had not the will, culture or capitalist structures necessary to build a viable creative industry to match that of Hollywood. Indeed, in the 1930s, Hollywood was actually defining British imperial culture from overseas. The high point of British cinema is undoubtedly the 1940s. Barr is excellent at demonstrating that what we had was largely an English cinema, with the 'Northern' (set in the North of England and occasionally in Scotland) playing the outsider role of the 'Western' in American cinema. We see a cinema built on waves of creative team work sponsored by Government or foreign money interspersed with dead periods when Government support declined and foreign capital walked away. There are national capitalists involved, of course, but they are generally secondary to 'progress'. At times, British cinema is truly dreadful. At times, it reaches considerable artistic heights. Some auteurs definitely do emerge albeit with teams around them. For much of its history, there is a dialectic with Hollywood - the latter draining talent but also arriving with funds for major projects. There is a call and response here without any deliberate guiding hand. The market is at work. Talent emerges out of a creative advanced culture, moves to Hollywood, Hollywood accumulates capital that helps talent to flourish and then drains it again as its collective mind wanders on to new projects. Barr's broader cinematic approach linking audience, capital and production gives us three ages. The first is the 'repertory' age when mass audiences visited specific locations for transitory experiences that existed only in the memory after a few weeks. It ended with television's emergence. Cinema as an art form depended on the emergence of even more specific locations and libraries that catered to the few ('cineastes' and professionals) who could revisit material that the public had no access to until television revived classics or lengthened the time a film might be seen with 'repeats'. This moves to an 'armchair' age with television and then various technologies enabling film to be seen at home, albeit at fixed times which might have to be planned. The dialectic between state-sponsored television (BBC and later Channel 4) and cinema would eventually enable new production. We are now in an age of remarkable choice - a streaming age. There is almost no historical film that you cannot find somewhere, often for free on the internet, and, if not entirely free, on low cost streaming services or the continuation of 'armchair' DVD technologies. From a transitory medium creating memories of national events collectively experienced in dark rooms (and often creating false memories at that), cinema has shifted to personal experiences of imagery that may come from anywhere in the world and where the choices are repeatable. The relationship between this 'cinema' and the nation is interesting. This is where Barr is at his best, teasing out that relationship in terms of the creation of national mythologies and political change. He is almost (unlike most academics today but see below) non-ideological in his analytical review. We are now getting a better idea of the 1920s not quite being the fallow period that we think it was but it was not a remarkable one compared to what was happening in the US and Germany. Hitchcock was a bright spark yet he owed something to his junior assistant role watching Murnau on set. Where things get interesting is how a decaying and exhausted empire, never larger and never more vulnerable, found itself being defined in the 1930s by Hollywood's sympathetic portrayals of British imperialism, literature and history. They may have been travesties but they were very well made ones. It is no surprise that British talent would migrate westwards with Britons playing a major role alongside German Jews in the construction of the cultural language of America's Golden Age. We have only to think of James Whale's re-thinking of the story of Frankenstein at Universal. Hitchcock's move to Hollywood was a coda. His genius must be recognised despite Barr's attempts to downplay his 'auteur' status. But things were changing and the challenge of war created a dynamic relationship between cinema and propaganda that produced an era of genius specific to the country. The impression we get is that from the great wartime movies, with Powell & Pressburger at the top of the creative tree, through to the Ealing comedies of the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a genuine relationship between film and the 'matter of Britain'. Churchill's interest in film is important here but also his refusal to behave like Stalin and kill off what he did not like. Although the British war film eventually declined into 1950s posturing, again with Hollywood myth-making added, British film in the war and after was genuine high art for the people. It sloughed off imperial myth-making and spoke of the nation, often critically although always within a particular soft establishment structure, liberal and open-minded, although very English at core. It is part of a reality that the British remain to this day dominated by southern English culture. Barr is happy to be part of the revisionist movement that has included 'The Wicked Lady' and Gainsborough in this flourishing as a contribution to a national myth that rejuvenated the country only to become sclerotic later as the country further declined. If there are violent culture clashes today, it is in part because this body of work in the 1940s still defines the psyches of many Britons who are older and those of even younger traditionalists but it is a lost world. The history of cinema helps indicate how lost we as a 'nation' were to become over time. The dearth of interesting material in the 1950s (bearing in mind that the 'quota quickie' era lasted from 1927 to 1960 based on counterproductive protectionist legislation) was partly a reflection of a loss of any national will to use cinema as Churchill and Stalin (and Hitler) had done. There is another surge of creativity in the 1960s alongside 'swinging London' with an orientation towards 'realism' and working class culture as well as social critique. Barr does not need to mention that London was also becoming a way station between European and US cinema (Polanski, Antonioni). American money was again attracted into London during this period until problems with recession and local responses to television forced it back home again in the early 1970s. Franchises like Hammer and the Carry On films and their copies maintained some presence for cinemas. Creatively, Hollywood was also learning in the 1970s how to create the B-Movie Blockbusters that relied entirely on domestic film school talent. This had a lively commercial sense and an understanding of a highly exportable American popular culture. There is thus another dead period before another surge of British one-off blockbusters and talent in the 1980s although my own view is that 'Chariots of Fire', 'Ghandhi' and so forth may have sold well at the time but will be hard put to last into this century as 'great works'. A classically British national popular cinema was largely dead by then although British talent and production was far from being so. Quite the contrary, British actors and creative talent play a disproportionate role in American-led international cinema today. Similarly, at the 'art level', Britain has produced a large number of excellent Directors producing distinctive work in a sustained way and managing to cobble together sufficient funding to keep going from a syndicated approach that can be called private/public partnership - pure Blairismo! But most of what is produced is globally financed for global markets and has caught a diversity bug that effectively makes London the mirror of the world rather than of the nation. Cosmopolitanism is essential both commercially and ideologically - and the two modes are manipulated into one. Part of this arises from the role of state-backed television which has a symbiotic relationship with film. The BBC and Channel 4 have become the prime vectors for lower budget but still very well produced material that is only briefly shown in cinemas and then becomes part of streaming. Both BBC and Channel 4 lost interest in the nation as we saw in the hysterical reaction to Brexit. Indeed, even Barr, generally reliably detached, suddenly goes a bit potty with a rather peculiar 'Brexit' analysis of the Ealing comedies as if he needed to let off steam. We will pass over this in silence. What they became interested in was diversity, cosmopolitanism, liberal values and so on and so forth - certainly required up to an important point. Giving space to female and ethnic talent was good. Unfortunately it became indulgent. It failed to link these talents to the national question or questions. Instead of looking outwards in order to present a proportionate view inclusive of new voices but geared to national realities, the new voices were allowed to spin off into projects that affirmed their own identities within a universalist liberal ideology that spoke to increasingly few people. For the last three decades, funds have poured into somewhat manipulative projects designed to 'project' ideology outwards from a relatively small urban coterie of technically highly proficient people, extremely competitive for resources, but looking outwards to Europe or New York. Part of this was political not in the sense of ideology but as part of the drive to make British creative industries world important. This was a major Blairite mission. It has, to a large extent, succeeded. The export services drive triumphed over any interest in national cohesion. Barr does not critique any of this because it is clear that he belongs sympathetically to the world of an ideology which now needs some radical correction in age of populism, riots, liberal and identity narcissism and national infrastructural collapse but it is hard to know how this can now be done. Certainly we seem to have the wrong government to take this in hand - a liberal-left Government with the allegiance of only one third of voters (one quarter of all possible voters) seems to be precisely the wrong sort to take on anxious Southern liberal intellectuals in defence of the nation. As Barr points out, film is only part of 'cinema'. We now have a 'cinema' that is a self-reinforcing and rather narcissistic industry imposing ideology on a nation rather than either reflecting it or reflecting on it. It wants to change minds and not conditions. No wonder there is incoherent push-back. The link between cinema and riots may seem tenuous but the link between the films of the 1940s and the war effort and building the welfare state and the link between the films of the 1960s (notably Ken Loach) and social reform were far from tenuous. It is not reasonable to deny a link with society today. Cinema is powerful because, while it does not dictate culture, it gives power advantage to one part of culture over another - against appeasement or against conservatism in the past. It is closely linked to political decisions affecting culture and to capitalism with all attendant internal contradictions. Contemporary British cinema 'reflects' the ideology of educated urban middle class 'bien-pensants', cherry-picking feminist or ethnic talent to taste and providing them with the necessary resources to buy their way into the market through tax-payer subsidy. That bit is a racket. Barr is perhaps surprisingly blind to the link between cinema and society in the twenty-first century given his acute understanding of it in the last century. I can only believe it is because it would be inconvenient to question a world which he has placed himself on the side of his angels. Certainly, I would argue that the positive commitment to diversity of Jeremy Isaacs and other has deteriorated as absurdly as the genuinely moving war cinema of the 1940s had degenerated into the schlock stiff upper lip falsification of war by the late 1950s. Having noted this, the book is excellent and much recommended. It is not all there is to say on the subject. Barr is open in admitting this but the reader will get something more than a list of films to watch. He or she will get an insight into what it is to be British and even why Britain is troubled today. For Britain has lived a number of lies noble and ignoble through cinema - an imported cod-imperialism in the 1930s, the noble lies of community and heroism in the 1940s, the lie of actually mattering as a nation and now the lie that pushing diversity is solving issues of national cohesion. Perhaps understanding this history will, at best, encourage a cinema that challenges its status as an advanced form of lying (if we are Platonic in analysis) or, at worst and more likely, create a lie that actually works in reflecting the national society in which it embedded. If not, we are stuffed. ...more |
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| May 01, 2018
| May 01, 2018
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really liked it
| The British Library has long since turned entrepreneurial with extensive and relatively cheap collections of classic British crime novels and collecti The British Library has long since turned entrepreneurial with extensive and relatively cheap collections of classic British crime novels and collections of weird tales. Its science fiction efforts have not paid off so well, possibly because the genre ages far too fast for the general reader. The cosy mystery set in a nostalgic English past and the frisson of the weird and the occult still appeal, as we know from re-runs of tales of Hercule Poirot and the fashion for folk horror, but the dystopianism and clunky technologies of British golden age science fiction much less so. If the Science Fiction Classics series seems to have died a death (I am glad now that I snapped up three of them), the experiment left behind Luckhurst's literary history of the genre (2017) which is very much above the average for this sort of general guide. Eight relatively short yet full and well written essays take us chronologically from the precursors of the genre through to the current century in an orderly way that is surprisingly seamless albeit with somewhat eclectic further reading suggestions. The first half of the story through to the American-dominated Golden Age is well known although there are insights that make the tale fresh. It is the second half that adds most value - the curious dialectic between 'conservative' and 'new wave' forms of science fiction and its unfolding. Luckhurst's own contribution on the late Victorian and Edwardian era manages to introduce H. Rider Haggard without patronising him which is a rare pleasure nowadays. He succinctly contextualises H. G. Wells and explains why he is important. Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck also gives us a solid presentation of utopianism and dystopianism in the first half of the twentieth century including pre-Soviet and Soviet Russian attempts to imagine the future under communist ideological conditions. The following chapter on pulp science fiction, mostly in the US, by Mark Bould is precisely how such history should be done, dealing with issues of war, politics, race, feminism and the market on terms that respect the world of the work rather than imposing anything on that world from today. If there is a fault to the book it is that editorial direction enabled the subsequent story of ideological wars within post war science fiction to be told well but failed to stop those wars infecting some of the contributions, especially towards the end. Some contributors edged into implied polemic. Given that the worst offenders are American-based contributors (two of them female academics) then, as a British reader, I came away a little depressed at the insistent over-egging of diversity and the obvious preference for progressive examples of science fiction at the expense of its complexity. Ideology could be seen triumphing over objectivity. Of course, the final contribution must have the completely unnecessary to us (but necessary to our anxious and troubled university elite) reference to Brexit and 2016 as well as the usual over-excitable references to climate change. We just have to live with this now, much as older wise heads once had to live with the hegemony of the nonsense of Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century and a pig-headed Marxism in the middle of the last century. But it does become tiresome after a while. Nevertheless, if Luckhurst is a little lazy in not weeding out these inherent prejudices, and the propensity of one contributor just to list diversity-friendly story lines, he still manages to produce an excellent guide which teaches a lot even while we grit our teeth in places. Where the book scores is in linking the genre to modes of production - turn of the century periodicals, the fan magazines of the post-war period, the rise of the book and then the blockbuster - as well as to events outside the often closed world of the creators. Gerry Canavan, who comes under my general definition of 'cause of gritted teeth', nevertheless makes an excellent point in his opening to his contribution that little predicted by science fiction ever actually happened as proposed. Perhaps he should have taken this on board in the rest of his essay. Science fiction, heavily anglophone in its historical orientation despite attempts to globalise or 'indigenise' it by the diversity crowd, cannot be divorced from its environment. It does not dictate to society but reflects its rebellions, fears and anxieties (liberal) or aspirations (right wing or socialist). It is also dynamic. Even if it rarely tells us what the world is actually like or going to be like, its attempt to do so can make people behave as if they may have the power to reshape the world on its lines. The cash-fuelled fantasies of Elon Musk can be linked directly to his reading of Heinlein. Science fiction is thus very important culturally even if it quickly becomes redundant having left behind only a few canonical examples. It is not the truth of the matter but its noble lies and fantasy are culture-shaping. Hence the concern to capture it for any currently prevailing ideology. The struggles (well explained in this book) between the American version of the 'New Wave' (culturally progressive) and the determined traditionalism of the American Right, economically libertarian and yet militaristic and progressive in a very different sense, are indicative of this. The British 'New Wave' was more introvert and literary and much less interested in politics but, proportionately, unable to build a large mass base. Here was a common situation where a short period of intense innovation influenced much of what followed but could not sustain itself for long. At a certain point, we have a synthesis. The passions subside but the struggle meant that, instead of science fiction reflecting a social consensus of reader requirements, it became a matter of self-conscious 'auteurs' and then of attempts to impose an implicit world view that spoke to anxieties. This has always been a part of science fiction - although Wells became duller the more he became didactic - but the threat of nuclear war and the experience of the individual (which writers tend to accentuate as type) in an age of conformity created the seeds of dissent that became sixties rebellion. As the decades have rolled on, the politics of identity, especially feminism, and fear of what is now called techno-feudalism and the machines (leading to the hysteria around the coming 'singularity') have driven tales of science fantasy. Eco-fears have now added to the mix. Cyberpunk remains an excellent case study of a writer with little practical knowledge of what he was writing about (William Gibson) using a fertile imagination to extrapolate reality into a science fantasy that came to define what many people would think was reality or a coming reality. Still (although you might not know it from this book), not everything is about ideology and anxiety. There are still solid old-fashioned space operas out there as well as thrillers with a strong science fiction coating (Michael Crichton is not mentioned which is odd and yet in character with the book). We must not make the mistake (as some contributors in this book seem to do) of thinking what science fiction should be and then reading back its story in order to make it what we think it ought to have been. A literary history is useful but science fiction is sociology as much as literature. Nevertheless this is a worthy and useful addition to the mounting numbers of popular academic books on the genre since Amis and Alldiss had attempted to create the first definitions and canons. There are discoveries and ideas in here. The book is also an easy and relaxed read. ...more |
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it was ok
| 'Haunted Tunbridge Wells' is very much a book for the gullible although, to be fair, even Neil Arnold baulks at some of the nonsense he is re-telling 'Haunted Tunbridge Wells' is very much a book for the gullible although, to be fair, even Neil Arnold baulks at some of the nonsense he is re-telling and it is largely a re-telling from a very few sources. What more is to be said? The preponderance of hotels and pubs suggests to me that ghosts are largely marketing gimmicks to get local media coverage and attract tourists and drinkers. Poorly remembered local histories of smugglers and villains do much of the rest. We see the usual over-egging of the standard phenomena - things seen out of the corner of an eye, temperature changes, creaks on the stair - mashed up with folk horror tales of murder, suicide and neglect. There is not one tale here that persuades that ghosts may exist. ...more |
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| Dec 05, 2023
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it was amazing
| The title of Professor Grafton's book on early modern magical thinking and practice is a little misleading. Faustus is mentioned at the beginning of t The title of Professor Grafton's book on early modern magical thinking and practice is a little misleading. Faustus is mentioned at the beginning of the book only briefly. Although it ends with Agrippa who is dealt with at length, the author reaches back to Roger Bacon to tell his story. The core thesis may be nothing new - that magical thought was not as irrational as later observers had assumed and was at the cutting edge of the Renaissance and of its concern with technology and understanding a reality that had to take account of both classical philosophy and faith. The book is scholarly and quite dense to start with. It is centred on roughly the mid-fifteenth through to the mid-sixteenth centuries with two chapters (of five) devoted to the contrasting figures of Trithemius and that great synthesiser of magical thought, Agrippa. The story is complex and detailed (with excellent illustrations of key texts). It would be impossible to summarise the full argument of this excellent work in a relatively short Goodreads review. Each chapter is like a mini-monograph, the whole strung together to make the larger argument. Grafton begins by exploring the dynamic tension between Catholic Christianity and magical thought. This led to great pains being taken to divide 'bad' magic (essentially folk magic and magic undertaken for corrupt advantage) from 'good' magic which was a precursor to the natural sciences. We see here a late medieval and early modern discovery of what Arthur C. Clarke would later claim - that magic was just undiscovered science. In a world that accepted miracles from faith, magic was interested in wonder based on reason in that context. The links between good magic as Christian, explanatory of the world, as a potential mastery of the world (very much like twentieth century visions of technology in science fiction) and actual technological innovation are well demonstrated in the book. There is another trend that is explored: the discovery of neo-Platonic philosophy which, of course, had to be squared with Christianity. This created the conditions, in the differing thought worlds of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, for a Renaissance form of magic. We can add to this the discovery of the Jewish Cabala, partially Christianised as Kabbalah, which was seen as an insight into the mind of God through techniques based on the magical use of language and numbers (gematria). Magic could also call down demons (thus 'bad' magic or at least magic where good magicians must know what they are doing before attempting anything) or angels. This latter reached its latest form in that Enochian exploration of John Dee in the second half of the sixteenth century. The relevance of Faustus is only that this figure became the model for the misuse of magic and example for those who would condemn charlatanism, manipulation, fraud and association with demons - as also exemplified in literature much later in Christopher Marlowe's 'Faustus'. However, it is the link to technology or at least to a technological mind set that is most interesting. Grafton recovers astrology as a reasonable 'science' in the context of the time doing no more perhaps than Asimov's Hari Seldon claimed to do with The Foundation. Some might make similar claims in advance of the 'magical' qualities of quantum AI. If everything is connected (a view held by many today), then those connections should be 'scientifically knowable' (and this would include the connections to Heaven and Hell and so to angels and demons). Roger Bacon's alleged autonomous talking head, cryptography, engineering, theatre engines, herbal medicine and war machines could be seen as 'scientific' in being functionally effective but also mysterious as to some of the precise mechanisms that allowed them to work. A lodestone could be both natural (an observable fact in the known world) and implicitly magical insofar as its uncanny properties could not be explained. Of course, engines of war or for courtly masques could be explained but the engineer might not wish to do so and so appear a 'magician'. When technology worked but with no knowledge of the laws of physics or the findings of modern science then an early modern intellectual might reasonably say that something magical was going on without in any way implying the woo-woo of today. The 'artist' enchanted society. Magicians and technologists were thus often conceptually interchangeable. The best example in the book of this is Trithemius' cryptographical work. This was simultaneously magical and scientific. It clearly disturbed contemporaries because of its 'secret' or occult implications. However, it was also technology since encrypting messages within the extensive diplomatic networks of dynastic Europe required secrecy. Many codes could be easily broken once a specialist got hold of the correspondence. Science, technology and magic were all interconnected. Magic was thus a rational response to what could be known at that time and was in fact 'progressive', creating testable explanatory models or paradigms that were ready-made for alternative explanation with new evidence or the eventual unwinding of medieval Christian faith assumptions. The fluidity and uncertainty of all this meant that there was no fixed system, no rigid ideology, of magic until Agrippa's great work of synthesis. Even he, despite his huge commitment to his 'Occult Philosophy', seemed to retain a healthy doubt about aspects of what he was drawing attention to. Both Trithemius and Agrippa, when looked at in the round, evidenced much more rationality and scepticism than we might expect. It is as if intellectuals were determined to understand the world whilst privately knowing that not all magical explanations were sufficient. We should also remember that intellectuals have to eat. Demonstrating magical capacity (especially astrological prediction) was a fee-earner. The temptation to delude oneself about results or be a charlatan for profit might have been considerable. Faustus was just more obvious at the latter. On the other hand, the risks in performing 'bad' magic could be considerable. There was a block on any scepticism about God's ordering of the world, necessary for scientific developmen. It was more than discouraged. It was taboo. Thinkers were thus partially trapped into magic by faith. Any sign of atheism could lead to dire consequences as Giordano Bruno found. He was burnt at the stake even though nearly everyone else who slipped over the approved social and clerical line could generally draw back quickly with a carefully worded retraction We suspect, on the basis of what we read in the book about Trithemius and our own awareness of the Socinian movement, that thoughts that might have been interpreted as cynicism or scepticism about the received Word were far more general and took place far earlier than we might expect. Once some people started to think as an intellectual class across borders, the power of faith was ultimately doomed but a long transitional period had a lot of very intelligent people working very hard to square divinity with observation and technological creation. There is not much in the book about 'bad' magic except in terms of exhortations about charlatanism and that is probably because not a lot of demonic magic was actually going. If it was it was simplistic incantation and talismanic magic and what was mostly happening was deliberate fraud. One insight though is how the debate, from the point of view of those determined to justify 'good' magic, about what was 'bad' magic helped to institute the fear and anxiety that led to the atrocious wave of witch trials that disfigured Europe and North America in the subsequent century. If magic becomes established as undiscovered science and is taken seriously then intent (as with atomic power or genetic engineering or AI) becomes a subject of concern and debate. If all is connected, those who would summon demons from hell become as real as those summoning angels. This excellent book adds a great deal of meat to the bones of our understanding that magic (whatever happened to it later) was part of the process of discovering reason in the world and so a step towards our modern conception of science. It is a highly recommended book with, incidentally, very interesting material on the curious dynamic betweem Judaism and Christianity. The occult tale here is of the emergence of an early attempt, using many new sources, at scientific and philosophical investigation of reality in an age of faith. Magic was thus a sound working model in this context even if it would be overtaken as an intellectually acceptable form of knowledge a hundred years after the high point of Agrippa's 'Occult Philosophy'. Today it seems to be just an adjunct to traditionalism and a form of psychotherapy. ...more |
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really liked it
| 'Damnable Tales is a worthy effort at a folk horror anthology. If it falls down, it is not in its intention but on the fact that historic literary fol 'Damnable Tales is a worthy effort at a folk horror anthology. If it falls down, it is not in its intention but on the fact that historic literary folk horror (as opposed to its later television and cinematic versions) is not, in fact, very inspiring and rarely truly horrific. Richard Wells has delivered, in broadly chronological sequence, 23 tales that might be regarded as within the genre but, while some are important in framing it, they are often rather disappointing in purely literary terms. It might have been better to refer to Folk Unease. Yes, we have Machen's 'The Shining Pyramid' and M. R. James' 'The Ash Tree' but these are already much anthologised and, I argue below, may be outside authentic folk horror though rural witchery might reasonably be included in the genre. Many of the remainder are rather weak potboilers by famous writers (Stevenson, Hardy) or stories that helped create the genre but are otherwise not remarkable. Others are more interested in the idea of Pan and the old gods or in historical survivals and ghosts. This is mostly literary source material and so useful in defining the style (so worth having in the library) but it also reminds us that folk horror was a relatively minor part of English literature, a variant of the modernised folk tale, the ghost story and the fascination with Pan and rural mystery. What does make a difference are Wells' illustrations. These are done in a rough woodcut style, one for each story. These help tell us that the book was a labour of love which is confirmed by the over 12 pages of small print 'supporters' who helped make the book happen. The stories range from 1872 to 1964. The vast majority were written for periodicals which helps us to understand their often ephemeral nature and the tendency to entertain more than to explore what they are addressing in depth. There is nothing bad in here, just fairly ordinary and unsurprising. Having said that, as in all anthologies, there are some works that stretch beyond being interesting just because they shape a now-established genre or as literary expansions of folk tales into horror. Of the latter, 'The Sin Eater' (1895) and 'The Black Reaper' (1899) may be the best. Of the later works, Margery Lawrence's 'How Pan Came to Ingleton' (1926) has a charm to it that has nothing of the horrible, Walters De La Mare's 'All Hallows' (1926) exudes menace and Rolt's 'Cwm Garon' (1948) captures a common intuition that some landscapes can be evil by their very nature. The problem here is that all three represent tales that drift away from folk horror. Lawrence's is not horror, De La Mare's is more about evil or the cosmic and is Gothick in tone and Rolt's, though it does have a legitimate folk element, concentrates on a landscape. The last probably counts. Two of the three last works are superior. Shirley Jackson's 'The Summer People'(1950), an American addition, offers us the essence of folk horror which is the educated urban middle class out of place in the country. The horror is the insidious truth that summer visitors do not matter to locals. Finally the inconclusive 'Bind Your Hair' (1964) by Robert Aikman is possibly the most interesting because of its realism in depicting its characters (too many protagonists in these stories are cardboard cut-out sterotypes). It leaves us with a sense of unease yet not quite knowing why we are uneasy. Rolt and Aikman, Scott's 'Randall's Round' (1929) and the grim 'The First Sheaf' (1940) by Wakefield certainly pass muster. Others too perhaps but I should explain why I am reluctant to allow folk horror to be defined too broadly and be too inclusive. As a compendium of themes to be plundered in popular culture by a full-blown genre as it stands today,'Damnable Tales' is useful but there is not a lot of true horror here. The folk aspect constantly feels like urban literary types inventing memes for their own type of person who reads periodicals. If much of this does not persuade as horror and only a few works as 'unease', it does not persuade as authentically related to folk either. If the concern is to show the unease of the urban middle class, then some of the work does that but very few cut to the chase of an essential cultural clash. To make folk horror work it either has to be set well within the 'other' (the rural world) and be horrible (like Nevill's 'The Reddening') or the incomer needs to show some emotional engagement with being at the margin of the 'other' that creates unease if not outright horror. Telling a story about rum doings by peasants might be included as folk horror but not re-telling their own stories in literary ways. We also need to be clear that unease or horror at nature or 'rurality' (as Pan) is not the same as unease or horror at rum doings. 'The First Sheaf' is grim because the urban type is confronted not with nature but another type of person's relationship to nature. This is also the case with the unease in the Aickman story. Nature is a source of horror only indirectly as belief system. The nature of the 'folk' is what should interest us. Folk horror should be anthropological horror first and existential or cosmic horror second. If it is historical horror, the folk must be like us and embedded in the knowable past but not Neanderthals or degenerate cave dwellers under the moors. Even Adam Nevill in 'The Reddening' makes sure his story is centred on the realism of a corrupt folk on the surface of things that taps into something dark rather than having the primary focus being on something dark that erupts from below that is not human (though his ambiguities here are clever). Unease or horror at some prehistoric atavistic and supernatural force (like the fairies) is thus a different kettle of fish from unease and horror at nature or the 'volk'. 'Ballinghurst Barrow' (1892) and 'The Shining Pyramid' (1895) fall into this category. So, folk horror (in this anthology) seems to confuse three different 'others' under the same label- our past selves (which was very much a late Victorian post-Darwinian concern), nature as 'being' (Pan) and others who live a very different life closer to nature and often interpreting it through ritual. Yes, these can be interconnected - the 'folk' seem to have a different relationship to 'nature' than us and this relationship may seem atavistic (again, Nevill's 'The Reddening' brilliantly merges these three conceptions) - but if they are not melded folk horror should just be about the 'folk' in its relations. The cinematic and television variants of the genre tend to get this more right because things have moved on from the era of literary concerns with Pan and Darwinism. Atavism is now a matter for science fiction and the relationship with nature has become eco-horror (Vandermeer). The atavistic branch of horror dragged on into the work of Nigel Kneale and Dr Who. Given 'Quatermass and the Pit' and 'Quatermass IV', Kneal was in the world of science fiction and not that of anthro-horror. A true folk horror film like 'The Wicker Man' is still about a (albeit fake) 'folk' cult. Even 'The Children of the Stones' is set more in a science fiction environment though it scrapes in as folk horror because of the village atmosphere. We have to go to 'Blood on Satan's claw' or even 'Witchfinder General' to find again this concern with the horror that arises from the 'folk' out there. Those stories that have an urban middle class type entering into the nearby unknown or which describe the behaviours of the unknowns in their own country must be regarded as authentic. Ghost stories, literary folk tales, 'Pan tales' or tales of degenerated or atavistic primitives need not apply. ...more |
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liked it
| Mark Fisher's fairly slim 2016 exploration of the weird and eerie (as two separate if related concepts in culture) reads as a series of very long blog Mark Fisher's fairly slim 2016 exploration of the weird and eerie (as two separate if related concepts in culture) reads as a series of very long blog articles on representative figures rather than a sustained argument but, at that level, it contains insights and is a relaxed read. The problem is that he could probably have defined both his terms in a single article or perhaps pamphlet so the explorations become like a lot of cherries on a rather basic cake. There is also some Lacanian theory added on as unnecessary cream. Nevertheless, I would not discourage anyone from reading it. It may introduce the reader (especially the young reader) to new sources and films or books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Fisher's judgements are generally sensible and informative and he clearly cared about his subjects. As to the core definitions, he gets these about right without actually needing the examples. The weird involves the irruption into this world of something from outside. The eerie is when there is something where there should be nothing or nothing where there should be something. Taken as set of interlinked essays that create a mood or understanding of a psychological reality that culture represents, something to be read alongside Burke's 'Philosophical Enquiry' of 1757 on the Sublime and Beautiful, the book has merit as a footnote to aesthetics. Tragically Fisher, who suffered severe depression, killed himself just after publication and it is hard not to read a diffident slightly melancholy perspective into the book. There is a constant skirting of theory as if already he was giving up on it and going through the motions. There is a desultory anti-capitalism and an unfashionable engagement with Freud (albeit via Lacan) but the book reads as if the concrete, the work, is what is to be investigated as a facet of something of which the weird and eerie are just symptoms. He writes of the 'death drive' in touching terms. Perhaps there is a danger of reading too much into this book in this sad context. It is certainly not an emotional work but rather a quite clinical exploration of authors and auteurs that perhaps he had hoped might have offered some salvation through 'art'. This leads one to the thought that perhaps we have here an intellectual who was going through the same crisis about aesthetics, the salvatory role of the artist, as Nietzsche had done but whose own disposition did not enable him to overcome or explore his situation in the same way. The critique of capitalism for which he had been best known is present but only barely. His artists are now observing a 'reality' (it would seem) that may no longer be challengable except negatively through an escape into an unreality that perhaps casts light on that reality. This is all speculation, of course. The book is cool more than it is melancholy, the very lack of emotion in itself disturbing in the light of his irrevocable decision. And an opportunity was lost perhaps to take the plunge and look more existentially at the weird and eerie. If the weird and eerie are just artistic responses to the existential question of why there is something rather than nothing through either 'irruption' of something or something or nothing being present when things should be otherwise, then this is certainly worth exploring. The book describes the symptoms of the disease of imagining a fantastic reality through the artists the author admires and who perhaps gave him solace and meaning or perhaps adventure and distraction as they do many of us. Why many of us need them is not explored however. The underlying situation that gives rise to the weird and eerie also seems to be skirted whereas a Burke or a Nietzsche at either ends of the philosophical spectrum might have dug deeper whether analytically or to pass through a dark night of the soul into something new. As a result the book is a stepping stone that is full of interesting data towards solving a problem rather than a resolution of a problem. The weird and eerie are 'professionally' defined but what all this means is rather skimmed over even if we see the lineaments of where an argument may go. Knowing what happened yet with my prejudice never to see a man and his work as identical - as much in the case of rogues like 'Gary Glitter' as in apparent intellectual saints - it is still impossible not to mourn this man who one feels might have overcome his situation with more help. ...more |
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liked it
| Not strictly a book of the best horror comics but probably of the best that an expert such as Normanton can offer that does not belong to the usual su Not strictly a book of the best horror comics but probably of the best that an expert such as Normanton can offer that does not belong to the usual suspects like Marvel and DC or which would allow him the copyright. Still, it is a useful run-through (over 50 examples) of the genre. The book is chronological (by decades) which gives a good understanding of changing tastes. Frankly the material from the 1940s and early 1950s about which so many fans are 'nostalgic' is offensive - not as horror but in terms of insulting the intelligence and the canons of aesthetics. If the moralists may have done us an unintended favour in this regard by taking this material off the news stand, the revival of the genre from the early 1960s and most material presented (over 50 examples from 1944 to 2005) in the last century is a different kettle of ghouls. The graphic work improves to the point of grim and gruseome high artistry in some cases and the stories reach an extremely transgressive level in others. The work then tends to fall off in this century, sometimes into graphic incoherence, and often into the obvious and uninteresting. When so many stories are presented like this, it becomes hard to keep track enough to mark out what is good or bad. The product was always ephemeral and the attempt to 'preserve' it as more than it was a somewhat nerdish pursuit. It might be best to let the product flow over you, occasionally disgust you and move on, adding it to the stock of popular cultural images and ideas that inhabit your mind but not taking it too seriously. What may be more interesting is the way these stories can (rarely) become filmic storyboards. Given the later success of 'The Walking Dead' and 'Thirty Days and Thirty Nights' in the cinema, one suspects that some comic artists were often tempted to do just that, trying to trigger a budget in the post-Carpenter/Craven/Romero age when the money was in cinema and not in fringe comics. One also sees here a 'tradition' where the story tellers in particular are aware of their predecessors and will even (as in the 'The Monster of Dread End' which appears in 1962 and 2004 in different forms) redraft earlier tales in a more contemporary form. Gothic and horror literature obviously also inspires - the book opens with a 1944 version of Poe's 'The Black Cat'. However, apart from some later derivations from Lovecraft, the literary origins tend to be at the dodgier end of 'Weird Tales' than in any classical or canon work. The form seems centred on the crude shocker or twist much like the suspense tales that Roald Dahl and Alfred Hitchcock might promote. The horror lies, especially in the early work, in the sheer nastiness of whatever twist is being offered. Although the early work in the decade 1944-1954 is rather formulaic, the revival material is generally much more varied and so harder to categorise. The tale with a twist still dominates the 1960s but by the mid-1970s we are getting more subtle narratives. 'The Weirdest Character I Have ever Known' (1974) expands on the dark humour (which always helped to alleviate any real horror) in the genre with a tale in which a horror writer's characters come to life and can be destroyed when the manuscript is burned but it too ends with a 'twist' . Perhaps the introduction of cosmic horror (see 'The Glass Darkly' of 1975) helps the genre get out of this trap of having to surprise and instead demonstrate some deeper darkness though even this story has to have a dramatic conclusion requiring the end of the universe. Hints of a stronger potential for narrative are found in the small town paranoia of 'Ghouls Walk Among Us' (1973) and 'The Tradition of the Wolf' (1975) but by the 1980s fewer but better material is being published albeit to small audiences. The psychological horror of 'Over His Head' (1983) still has a twist but it is told within a far more satisfying tale of male longing at the bottom of society. 'A Christmas Carol' (1984) introduces sheer nastiness of irredeemable evil without the implicit moralising of 'twist' stories. 'Home Ties' (1985) is a ghost story, again of male longing (perhaps horror permits this in a coded way more than other genres) where the twist is only the logical culmination of what went before and less important than the emotion implicit in the story. There is a long extract of consummate brutality from the zombie series 'Deadworld' (1987). It shows the cinematic aspect of some 1980s horror comics. This is the story board of a film that would be hard to make even today because of its remorseless cruelty worthy of Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'. Equally transgressional is the 1999 version of 'The Dunwich Horror' which opens with an evisceration that could never have appeared in this form in the 1940s or early 1950s. The graphic work of John Coulthart is here masterful as it is everywhere else. I should also mention 'Dream Snake' of 1999 for its concentration on horrific narrative and mystery rather than shock and the flawed but interesting demonic serial killer shocker 'Purgation' (1996) from Chuck Regan which is also partly cinematic in conception. I won't continue into this century because the general trend is not to develop the genre in the direction it had been heading in the last decade of the last century but to return rather (on the evidence here) to the short shocker and even the wry dark humour of the 'tradition'. Beyond nasty is Socar Myles' vicious take on a nursery rhyme ('There was an Old Woman' (2003) while a take on the fairy tale ('Luna's Story Little Red Riding Hood') is long and, frankly, graphically incoherent to the extent that I puzzled at its inclusion. So what is the conclusion of all this? In general, while Normanton has done his job well, the genre turns out (with exceptions) to be far less interesting than it could be. Very little of the work rises above the nasty suspenseful twist or shock. Perhaps graphic representation of horror denudes it of its power except in a few cases. Perhaps it requires the visual imagination to come from within rather than out. Even when it is more sophisticated, the genre often becomes 'intellectually' satisfying rather than truly disturbing. When the genre is disturbing, it usually means that all it has done is reduce the story to some kind of gross out. Again there are exceptions. A few story tellers do manage to disturb but the genre oscillates between neutering fear through dark humour to showing us obscenities rather than truths. Is this down to commercial and fan expectations? The market is small for this sort of thing. The purchasers want either to be startled or comforted (or both) from within their tradition. It is not a genre that in general wants anyone to face existential reality which is where the real horror lies. It is also interesting that some of the best work is so cinematic (notably 'Deadworld) and so carefully story boarded. Here you feel you are engaged in an imaginative enterprise because although everything is laid out, it flows without breaks as if it was real. Cinema can be horrific despite being visual because you can lose yourself in the narrative and this is what 'storyboard' horror does. Otherwise the tale tends to get told in jumps between crafted but separate images and often more words than you may need. You can admire Coulthart's art yet not be truly emotionaly horrified in the way that you might actually be disturbed by the flow of 'Deadworld' or even 'Home Ties' or 'Over His Head' where the author is tapping into something existential much as slasher movies did for young women. Perhaps the awful pregnancy in 'A Christmas Carol' is what gives that story its punch alongside its brutal lesson on the costs of compassion if you get it wrong in offering it. There is an existential fear there of the other in the street and of the price you might pay for a mistake in judgement. ...more |
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liked it
| Max Decharne has produced an encyclopedic account of something he evidently cares about - the rockabilly music genre that emerged out of country, blue Max Decharne has produced an encyclopedic account of something he evidently cares about - the rockabilly music genre that emerged out of country, blues, western swing and, above all, boogie-woogie in its heartlands of Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia and in Texas-Oklahoma. Decharne is quite precise in explaining the roots of what Elvis Presley triggered. It was initially the rebellious music of the young in the South before it got cleaned up and 'nationalised' only to fall before first the saccharine sweetness of teen idols and then the British invasion. The bulk of the book is a somewhat dense but still a possibly definitive account of a surprisingly short period of time - roughly 1954 to 1959 with a long dedicated tail in which England (to some extent Japan and the rest of the world) played a major role in reviving the genre and sustaining it until today. He usefully explores the sources of 'rockabilly'. This term covers something more precise in style and origins than rock'n'roll and, though a kissing cousin and with much cross-over, different from the more dominant country musical tradition of the American South. Those origins ensure that its rebelliousness included a lack of interest in racial division since both white and black music shared in its creation. Its rawness and rebelliousness would later allow some cultural cross-over in the UK between rockabilly and punk fans. As a record of a cultural moment with an extensive bibliography, Decharne is to be congratulated even if the book sometimes reads like one giant Wikipedia article. There are times when his enthusiasm perhaps over-eggs his pudding. It could also have done with an index. Certainly the importance of Elvis Presley in popular music is not up for debate even if the King is as much known now for soppy ballads as erotic gyrations. In fact, Elvis is more typical than we might think given the number of working musicians who switched from rock to country. Decharne might try to argue for his favoured form but it seems that a lot of the 'greats' were more interested in a musical career in general than in a specifically rockabilly one. Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash,Wanda Jackson and many others moved easily between genres when necessary. Where Decharne is very good is in describing the market in which rockabilly emerged - initially in county fairs and rough joints, thence to small enterprising record labels and on to big ticket national entertainment platforms and finally to the small-scale but global touring circuit. He covers not only how it came to be and what it was but how it manifested itself in TV performances and in film. He uses his own experience to describe its unfolding as a later British phenomenon that revived the genre back in its homeland - a reverse late invasion to that of 60s Britpop. Decharne exhaustively lays out how independent small-time entrepreneurs released material from the 1970s that had not been released in its heyday and arranged for original artists to cross over to the UK and tour. An honest assessment is that rockerbilly (which can be raw and very enjoyable), like punk, is best seen as a moment in history that expressed a particular need for sensation arising out of disparate sources and needs. After that, it becomes nostalgia for those who were not there. This is often the way with cultural innovation. It is not there but the seeds are. The seeds germinate into something creative and exciting. Small and then big capital takes it up and exhausts it. What remains develops a nostalgic cult following that gives it a brief new lease of life. It is studied. Today, we have a fuller record of the era and the music (not all of it as good as perhaps Decharne would like it to be) and easy availability via Spotify of the bulk of it. Collectors can collect. Fans can still connect. This book acts as an excellent guide in that context. ...more |
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really liked it
| Shilo Brooks has undertaken an exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of the four 'Untimely Meditations' that Nietzsche produced between 1873 and 1876 ( Shilo Brooks has undertaken an exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of the four 'Untimely Meditations' that Nietzsche produced between 1873 and 1876 (Ages 29-32) with one clear mission - to demonstrate that they are not to be treated separately but are part of the same philosophical project. In this endeavour Brooks is plausible and broadly successful but he also provides the insights that allows us to see the four essays as (by their termination) an ending and a beginning. Nietzsche expresses a romantic idealism only to prepare the ground for its eventual subversion. All Nietzsche's often absurd and certainly egoistic genius is to be found in these essays as he moves from his excessive debt to the Hellenic heritage of his education through a coruscating critique of contemporary German philistinism and on to the hero-worship of the monumental artist. As always with Nietzsche, the essays are filled with irony and philosophical exclamation points as he thinks his thoughts in public, half in love with the potential for his world-historical fame and half insulting those who would give him that meaning he craves. His reasoning has its logic even if the logic will eventually subvert the very argument he wants to make here. He is already doubting the hero-artist thesis even as he writes his last essay on Wagner. The conclusion may be daft but it does follow on from his reasoning. Thinking in public here does not mean thinking to persuade through sophistic appeals to what his audience wants to hear (mere 'rhetoric') but persuading his audience to think as Nietzsche thinks and Nietzsche cannot help but keep thinking to the point of the eventual subversion of his own thought. Much of 'Untimely Meditations' will seem irelevant to us now. Brooks is able to position what Nietzsche wrote as quite specific to the 'kulturkampf' that Bismark triggered after his victory in the Franco-Prussian War. He positions the essays as a cultural assault in their own right. What we have here is an insurgent cultural bandit attacking the apparent victors of Sedan but refusing to act for the older Catholic tradition that those victors were trying to put in its place. Nietzsche offers something entirely new - a 'forwards to a new past' that unravels conventional ideas of Truth. Is Nietzsche a radical or a conservative in these essays? This is not easy to say . His attack is radical on 'civilised philistinism' but the appeal is to grand post-truth monumental history (a rewriting of the past) and the example of 'great men' whose existence is no longer what they were in reality. The future is one based on new recreations of the past that need have no identity with the actual past but which provide unifying limitations on society. The future belongs to the young who can invent their own future out of the acquisition of the qualities of exemplars and so create new great men. The 'great man' thesis, of course, is of its time. Carlyle had driven that idea in England. Napoleon had existed as exemplar and (temporary) conqueror of Europe only six decades before, roughly where we sit in relation to John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Despite this romanticism, these essays become a way station of great value to understanding the Nietzsche whose tougher critiques of conventional thought would appear later. He will jettison the grand theorising around Schopenhauer and Wagner in order to create a new Nietzschean universal. On the way, he ruthlessly eviscerates the grand old man of complacent German bourgeois Hegelianism, David Strauss, to the point of cruelty and continues the destruction with a post-truth critique of history as the framework of culture. Having destroyed, he tries to rebuild with Schopenhauer and Wagner as exemplars of the great minds that will revive German culture although neither of these figures are to be taken as particularly 'real' - as Brooks argues, they are simply cover for Nietzsche himself as 'great man'. The egoism and narcissism of Nietzsche is here fully present to the point where one hates oneself for accepting that this man is both perhaps a little unhinged even at this early stage in his career and a true philosopher whose analyses (though not his prescriptions) are generally spot on. His critique of the civilised philistine hits home not only in the Germany of the 1870s but in the West of the twenty first century. There is also much meat in his critique both of the academic and professional world that stands today and of history as narrative that shapes culture for good or ill. The shadow of the Greeks lies heavy over early Nietzsche. His attitude to Hellenism is deeply romantic even if he uses it not to mimic the past but only to seek a methodology that will create new mythologies for a German and European future. He contests Plato and the latter's negativity towards the arts in order to engage in a reversal in which life exists within Plato's cave as illusion and not in the reality outside the cave. He wants Art somehow to create an (admittedly contingent) social order that has no room for philistinism. Much of this, of course, is romantic nonsense expressed with a certain desperation as this young man tries to will into being meanings that are not there. His negative experience of the actuality of Bayreuth after the last essay was published was the last nail in that particular coffin. However, what Nietzsche writes here cannot be easily dismissed. The way that he reaches absurd and contingent conclusions is far from absurd or contingent. He is beginning to give insights to the psychology of meaning and what it is to be human that will unfold in the next set of works. The 'Untimely Meditations' may be solely read for purely antiquarian reasons as an insight into Nietzsche's more mature thought but this would be a mistake. His process of thought (if one is patient) unlocks a much more profound critique of how we think under modernity. We are looking at a psychological and phenomenological approach to philosophy in which we construct truth out of reality against the truth constructed for us within reality. Destruction is sought to construct what will have to be destroyed again in order to construct something new once more. The essays come together as a description of the necessity for struggle, action and invented truth as processes required to enhance the life instinct against the flaccidity and deathliness of convention and the chatter of a culture which Nietzsche implicity criticises as 'capitalist' but from the 'Right'. The problem with most readers of Nietzsche is that they jump to the near-hysterical quasi-religious late works and neglect the process that led to their creation. The late works become triggers for just another form of civilised philistinism. What matters is what Nietzsche does when he 'thinks'. The 'Untimely Meditations' are rightly to be seen as coherent (even if the last is 'cringeworthy' in Brooks' words) and as providing a romantic idealist and sometimes absurd base-line for later thinking. Many of the themes that are worth noting and understanding later are first developed here. We can be unmoved (rightly in my view) by the more contingent aspects of the four essays and find the romantic idealism surrounding Schopenhauer and Wagner meaningless and even hysterical (in both the comic and neurotic senses) but the underpinnings of Nietzsche's analysis are deadly serious. A virtue of this book is that it exposes the bones of Nietzsche's thought processes and how they are consistently linked to one other regardless of the ostensible purposes of the essays. 'Untimely Meditations' is recovered as important for uncovering what makes Nietzsche great and dangerous. ...more |
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it was amazing
| One of the problems in studying philosophy historically is that philosophers are taken as an 'event' rather than as a 'process'. A master work is chos One of the problems in studying philosophy historically is that philosophers are taken as an 'event' rather than as a 'process'. A master work is chosen as exemplar or the writer of a book tries to set down the philosophy of a thinker as if it was a thing out of time or out of cultural place. This forgets that philosophers are thinking in time and over a life-cycle of their own from birth (as incipient personality) to culmination in death and that philosophers are not only responding to the past but to the shifting politics and social and cultural changes of their own era. Safranski's 'Nietzsche' is very much the story of a process of thought, a 'philosophical biography', that lodges Nietzsche's thinking within a life (less so within a culture) and tracks how his thinking changed over decades until madness overtook him. Seen in this way, his thought unfolds in three broad phases that match the way a man thinks as he grows and matures. How Nietzsche took something in his core personality and expanded it into something that changed our whole culture is the story of this book. I write 'in his core personality' because, from a very early age, Nietzsche is thinking 'differently' and showing a driven quality to pursue thought to its limits. His life is 'thinking to its limits' in ways that were literally 'unthinkable' to his contemporaries and to the vast majority of our species even today. The first phase of his thought is that largely of his twenties until his final breach with Wagner (1876, Age 32). Influenced by Schopenhauer, his early philosophy might be seen as interesting more in its potential rather than the actual. It is a philosophy of over-enthusiastic late romantic aesthetics. A man of high intelligence drawn into academicism, he rebels because his thought processes see how dessicated was the world that he had joined professionally. Art (not art but Art) as a total Dionysian experience appeared to be a way out as he developed a theory of culture. 'The Birth of Tragedy' provides a grounding for his later thought, situated between his own reaction to Greek thought and what will become an emergent psychology - the bicameral tension between Dionysiac excess and Apollonian order. The disillusion with Wagner (when he sees Bayreuth as just another example of what we might call 'show business') permits the second phase of his thinking which, in my view, is the most important of all - from 1876 until his transcendent peak experience in August 1881. This relatively brief period in his mid-thirties allows him to escape German Idealism entirely and think, without restraint, about the relationship between himself and the world and so, more generally, about what it is to be human in relation to existence. This is a period of both personal misery and sometimes ecstatic insight. He is making profound contributions to epistemology but also to psychology in ways that not merely anticipate Freud but, frankly, are vastly superior to the thinking of the later founder of the psychoanalytic wrong turn. Above all, Nietzsche is a phenomenologist, observing with care how his own mind works in relation to the world and drawing general conclusions about the human condition. From there, he draws, less reliably, further conclusions about culture and society. It is at this point that we might have hoped he would retain his full sanity and come to terms with the 'world-shattering' vision he was developing. But the link to personal misery, much of it expressed psychosomatically, and manic depression meant that things were not going to end well. Given the culture into which he was born and his undoubtedly unstable personality, the idea that he could have somehow transformed himself into Heidegger 'avant la lettre' and explored his thinking about our relation to Being with dogged academic determination is absurd. Nietzsche simply did not have the all the mental tools to sit back and observe his own thought in the way that he seemed to demand as necessary. He 'lived' his thought. His body 'lived' his thought. And he never found a way of conquering the psychological conflicts that his thought created. One of the most interesting aspects of that thought is the transfer of his initially academic Dionysian-Apollonian analysis of culture and the human condition to psychology. Bicamerality is today seen as neuroscientifically real as our minds try to cope with balancing two hemispheres in the brain. Nietzsche's intuitions about bicameral conflict, extended beyond the individual to society and culture as a whole, now look remarkably astute. Attempts to reconcile the impulses in one part of our brain with the cognitive apparatus of the other raise fundamental questions about perceived reality. Our relationship to Being is complicated by physical responses to the fact of our being in Being (questions for Heidegger to deal with although he lost this bicameral psychological assessment in doing so). Nietzsche's real physical reaction to the process of thinking is part of the thought. At the Surej boulder in 1881 (age 37), Nietzsche goes on a very different path. We might consider that the final phase before his collapse into madness in 1889 (Age 45) is one extended mid-life crisis in which he attempts to resolve his contradictions through assertion. What we see is a drive towards self-expression as the 'will to power' amidst a new mythology of the 'eternal recurrence' and the promotion of his poetic character of Zarathustra. It is fertile stuff culturally but often hard to pin down as reliable 'philosophy'. This final phase (if we discount the subsequent decade of insanity) is nevertheless of immense cultural importance although (I would argue) more philosophically barren. Sometimes it seems like a constant scream of egoistic 'look at me', increasingly monomaniac as time passes. This is not to say that these powerful final works are not important but only that the thinking, which is often contradictory and extreme, sometimes has the feel of a tormented man letting rip on the psychologist's couch. Yet it is these works that mostly define what Nietzsche is to the public. The power of these late works (which Safranski significantly spends relatively little time analysing) lies in the effect that their no-holds-barred narcissism has on Europeans looking for an excuse for high emotional expression in a repressive culture. Humans always need excuses. A final chapter on the way Nietzsche's work came to be employed after his death is invaluable in this context especially because of its German focus, indicating how his thoughts came to be used before Heidegger, Adorno/Horkheimer and Foucault employed them as seeds for their own thought. Can Nietzsche be 'blamed' for national socialism? Only a fool would not see that Nietzsche's late thought leads inexorably to its use as a tormented brutalism that follows logically from his refusal to compromise on his vision of the human condition. But 'blame' is absurd. Indeed, it is hard to fault Nietzsche's logic (such as it is). Or, in some respects, even Hitler's and that of the national socialist philosophers like Bauemler, a rival to Rosenberg, who Safranski recognises as sophisticated. Nietzsche's brutal logic can imply national socialism without much difficulty. Yes, his sister and brother-in-law twisted his legacy to serve German nationalism and, no, Nietzsche was anti-anti-semitic and highly critical of nationalism but special pleading cannot hide the continuity between the philosophy of existence and anti-Christian Nazi Darwinian struggle. It is at this deeper (the scientific, in its time) level of existential skirting of nihilism with an invented commitment to will that we see the affinity between Nietzsche and National Socialism and not at the secondary level of antisemitism, militarism, nationalism and imperialism. This is the problem with Nietzsche. The more you read his brute analysis of the human condition (the thinking of Truth including the non-Truth of Truth), the more plausible it becomes although there is no doubt that his struggle was always against the consequent logic arising from this of nihilism. To avoid the nihilistic interpretation of reality, Nietzsche required a will to something, a human engagement in Life and this engagement in Life married to the darkness of Being resulted in a cruel and vicious view of life that failed to live up to the fanatic expectations for Life itself. That this Truth troubled Nietzsche despite his attempt to think things through according to the facts of the matter becomes clear in snatches and it strikes me as no accident that he finally goes mad in response to the beating of a horse which could stand for inner revolt against his own philosophy. It is as if he thought himself into a corner from which there was no escape but insanity and at times, being an honest man intellectually, he could see the way of the meek as a form of will to power whose conquest of the brute might perhaps be part of the Truth too. Whenever he comes close to systematising his thought, his intellectual honesty (which is undoubted) would periodically break through in force to ask an awkward question of himself that might unravel the psychological scaffolding that held him together. If we accept that Nietzsche describes our condition accurately once God is recognised to be dead (God stands for all past solutions to the human condition invented to avoid the Truth), then we are left with decisions about what to invent in its place. Making the invention consonant with science as it was understood in the 1870s and 1880s in Europe means over-accepting science in the construction of the Overman (Ubermensch) and allowing Darwinism to become over-privileged in defining the human condition. In other words, a correct assessment of our relation to the world as material existence (a different issue than the relation to Being as Heidegger would attempt to understand the problem) can get bogged down in inadequate assumptions about our scientific understanding of that world. Nietzschean thought is literally 'beyond good and evil' because it can end up anywhere. Much of non-analytical philosophy since Nietzsche has, therefore, been spent trying to analyse the world in ways that restore some sort of value or re-jigs Truth to be more palatable (that is, not-Truth). Each attempt to do so must be of its time and place much as Nietzsche's own solutions, which were less 'truthful' than the Truth, were bound by its (or rather his) conditions of existence. At this level, all philosophy is personal and about knowing where to sever derivative truths from the Truth itself. In Nietzsche's case (Safranski is very informative on this), our philosopher was embedding his truth in the fact of science (the Appollonian/left hemisphere) in tension with the Dionysiac and so scientific materialism (not the Marxist version) became central to his will to power. This is where Truth becomes problematic for our species - the innocent Darwin set off a chain of events that led to Auschwitz and Nietzsche was no more responsible for that than Darwin was. In both cases, ideas that were true became tools and weapons in the struggle for human meaning. So, Nietzsche sits as a child of mid-century Germany trying to cope with personal turmoil, the death of God (which Heidegger found equally problematic), the rise of science, cultural philistinism, the chatter of the blind and the conventional and he came to certain conclusions. For example, his analysis of Christianity in 'On The Genealogy of Morals' was only too accurate although his assesssment of socialism remained that of a spoiled bourgeois brat. What we do with his analyses is what counts and that includes fundamental criticism of the limitations of his thought. Where Nietzsche 'went wrong' is only in failing to continue to think along the lines he was thinking in his second phase - phenomenologically, psychologically, epistemologically as well as existentially - and jumping into the cultural fray with a form of 'revelation' that over-privileged the Dionysiac. This seems to be core to Nietzsche and to Nietzscheans - the centrality of the rational Apollonian in their assessment of reality but under conditions where they desperately yearn for the Dionysiac, the animal spirits of music, poetry and religion and try to force an older animal brain into action. At a certain point, like an 'old man in a hurry' as if he knew time was limited, Nietzsche wanted to make a mark on the world, to be 'important, the centre of attention, a prophet, perhaps (through Zarathustra) a founder of new world religion or at least national culture. In fact, Nietzsche was not inherently Dionysiac. He wanted it desperately. He thought himself into this state out of this desperation and perhaps it helped tip him over the edge into insanity. Certainly, the psychosomatic aspects of the second phase merge into near-monomania in the third. He never stopped writing important things in that third phase but we, the reader, find ourselves shifting from the thought as a whole to abstracting the thoughts we find useful from a huge corpus of ranting and aphoristic position-taking which is exhausting and time-consuming to say the least. Nietzsche must be counted a true genius if an unstable one but one around which we should be careful to retain our critical faculties. Safranski has thus done us a great service by showing his thought as a process within a particular context underpinned by a very definite personality. What exactly we do with Nietzsche is down to our particular contexts and our particular personalities but one thing is clear. If we are at all serious about thinking, we have to start, in effect, from the Truth of our situation in relation to the world that this genius exposed to us. His thought is only the beginning of our own thought and is not for the faint-hearted. It was always potentially very dangerous to individual and society alike. The continuing denial of its truth may indicate just how deluded about our condition we necessarily have to be in order to be human. ...more |
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really liked it
| Mary Hollingsworth has delivered an 'insider' account of the Papal Conclave of 1559 through the eyes of the aristocratic Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, lea Mary Hollingsworth has delivered an 'insider' account of the Papal Conclave of 1559 through the eyes of the aristocratic Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, leader of the French faction that contested for the prize of appointing the next Pope with both the pro-Spaniards and the Italians linked to Paul IV. The late Paul IV was unpopular and had run a repressive and vicious administration so Romans were waiting for something better. The fact that it took so long (nearly four months) to 'cut a deal' is one of the things that makes this Conclave so interesting. Her sources are d'Este's papers, above all his account books (over 200) and letters (over 2,000). We have a blow by blow account of the micro-politics of the Papacy where two thirds of the vote of well over 50 Cardinals would decide the tone and fate of Catholic Christianity as well as of Northern Italy. And what a rum lot these cardinals are, nearly all about as spiritual as a conclave of gangsters in interwar Chicago - competitive, manipulative, ostentatious, greedy and often deeply unpleasant, with one of their number in the job as a teenage jobsworth yet it kept elite wheels turning. There is also the phenomenon of the cardinal-nephew for us to cope with. Each Pope would make new cardinals out of his relatives (this was accepted as due to the 'family') and these would make a 'dead weight' mini-faction in the Conclave. The practice was only ended finally in the 1690s. We see the lack of dignity and squalor of the election as it unfolded beneath Michelangelo's Last Judgement and the other great works in the Apostolic Palace. We also see the frustration of the Papal Master of Ceremonies [Firmano] as his instructions were ignored and chaos ensued. This is Namier-type history with personal interests triumphing over anything much greater. The overwhelming impression here is of Firmano trying to herd cats as the cardinals and their hangers-on behaved like naughty fourth formers in a boarding school straight out of St. Trinians. Sometimes the complex negotiations in the election can be hard to follow. The author also rather likes the minutiae of clerical expenditures. Hollingsworth has introduced an odd 'tic' by which almost exactly the same balance of factions is repeated at the head of her account of key days. But these are small complaints to set against the readability of the story and the clarity she provides about political life at the beating heart of a still fundamentally medieval Catholicism, Renaissance culture notwithstanding. There was a lot at stake here because, once appointed, the Pope was an absolute autocrat with his hands on a great deal of patronage for the major noble families of Italy and huge influence over the tone and direction of continental foreign policy in age of great power rivalry. There is an equally important ideological sub-text insofar as Protestantism had arisen as a threat over the previous forty years or so. Cardinals would have different responses to the challenge - reformist-accommodating, hard-line or simply uninterested and pragmatic. Who became Pope therefore mattered at multiple levels - in relation to accommodation with princely Protestantism or not, in advantage for Spain or France in Italy, for Church reform and credibility, for noble houses in Italy, for the peace of mind of the Romans themselves and for their quality of life. The two Great Powers attempting to influence the election were the superpower of Habsburg Spain and its weakening rival Valois France with the three main factions in the Conclave attempting every possible dirty trick to protect their interests. As a result, you have quite a story. Although not in the top ten longest conclaves in Papal history, it was, at well over three and a half months, the longest in the sixteenth century because of the sheer difficulty of getting the two thirds majority amidst the gross interference of the outside powers and desperate greed of some families In the end a Medici was elected as Pius IV. He was not a bad choice as a reasonably sensible and moderate candidate who helped clean up some of the corruption and who resumed the slow-burning reforming Council of Trent which had initiated the Counter-Reformation. Ippolito d'Este, clearly highly regarded and influential, risked his own wealth to get through a Conclave where one speculated to accumulate, hoping that the right choice would deliver greater benefits and so recovery of funds. This was simple entrepreneurialism. Others gambled and lost with the downright evil Neapolitan Carafa family suffering most. 1561 saw the execution of the Cardinal (a cruel and licentious gay bandit and murderer) and his brother (wife murderer and gangster) in 1561. These Cardinals are mostly an unprepossessing lot. Some were honest. Most were not stupid. A very few were what we might understand as moral in the sense that the Church teaches morality. The rest were mostly opportunistic equivalents of our billionaires or aristocratic thugs, sometimes both. Still, as the mafia say, that was then and this is now. The Conclave was a hinge point after which the Church begins the slow process of reform - simony was not outlawed until the 1690s - if only because of a growing understanding that Protestantism arose because of its own Italianate excesses. There is a coda to the main story as d'Este (who had inherited the Archbishopric of Milan at the age of 10) becomes Cardinal-Protector of France just as that country stumbles its way into the first of its eight wars of religion. There are some interesting perspectives here. He died in 1572. D'Este, an undoubtedly highly intelligent statesman and diplomat, was not untypical of his time - an aristocrat destined for the Church from a very early age and seeing preferment as a means to wealth and the protection of the family interest and its alliances. Despite the complexity of the negotiations, the book is highly readable. The author is good at revealing character - especially important in dealing with the somewhat inept and pushy Spanish Ambassador Francisco de Vargas and the increasingly desperate Cardinal Carlo Carafa. The double-dealing is sometimes quite fun to observe. The reputation of sixteenth century Italy is done no favours. We have ground for judging its church nobility as just a classy form of sustained criminality. Still, the seeds of something better were sown in 1559. ...more |
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really liked it
| 'Medieval Bodies' is a cultural history for the general reader. You should not expect anything more deep or less anecdotal than you get. Nevertheless 'Medieval Bodies' is a cultural history for the general reader. You should not expect anything more deep or less anecdotal than you get. Nevertheless as a run-through of examples of how the medieval mind worked and the body acted, the book is informative, useful and entertaining. Hartnell (under the Wellcome Collection imprint) uses the parts of the human body from the head to the feet to provide a flow of mini-essays on whatever aspect of medieval culture comes to mind at each stage. From this perspective, it can be seen as a loose small-scale encyclopedia on a whole variety of subjects from attitudes to nudity, burial customs and the heart in courtly love through to blood miracles and bleeding icons, surgical instruments and the medieval attitude to farting. Where it scores is not only in its up to date scholarship but in its superb and copious illustrations and its inclusion of Islamic and to a lesser extent Judaic medieval ideas and images. The publishers have made a real effort to have each relevant illustration match its text. A model of its kind in this respect. There are, of course, many things that will be new to the average reader in the book although probably not its general picture of the medieval mind with its faith-based world view. What is striking as one reads it is just how much of that world survives today. We see a medieval population no different in fundamentals from us but with a different ideological structure that had its logic and use-value in its time and which would only be changed with the arrival of scientific method and empirical investigation of claims about the world. Materially our world is very different but a surprisingly large number of people today still believe things believed in then. Such ideas as the heart as expression of certain emotions have a 'stickiness' that provides strong continuity with that long multicultural age of approximately 1,000 years. There is too much detail in the book to review and share here but one insight should noted - that we seem to have lost the bulk of a complex language of hand signals and possibly of touch of which there remains only traces in Catholic signing and (I would add) Italian expression. The medieval world is both different in its priorities from ours and the same in its essential humanity. 'Medieval Bodies' adds value as a non-academic popular gateway to that world, clearly written and with something of interest on almost very page. ...more |
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liked it
| 'The Unexplained File: Cult and Occult' arrived at an interesting period (the early 1980s) in the cultural exploration of 'occult matters', immediatel 'The Unexplained File: Cult and Occult' arrived at an interesting period (the early 1980s) in the cultural exploration of 'occult matters', immediately after the explosion of interest in the 1960s and 1970s but before the very different culture of paranoia that emerged in the wake of the X-Files. This collection of articles from the Orbis part work (1980-1983), edited by historian of the occult Francis King, shows its partial derivation from the slightly more serious 'Man, Myth and Magic' (1970) series produced by BPC. It is an interesting mix of the utterly credulous and the intelligently sceptical. In the early 1980s, a lot of early paranormal scientific investigation (now reasonably dismissed as pseudoscience) could in good faith be taken far more seriously than it can be today. We have here a rather good summation of Aleister Crowley (King infamously upset the nerdish O.T.O in 1973 with his revelation of its rituals) sitting alongside a rather breathless credulous appreciation of the hoaxes undoubtedly perpetrated in the name of Le Comte de Saint Germain and Fulcanelli. An excellent and fair account of the tragic Salem witch trials (as far as 1985 might settle the matter) can be found with accounts of the Nazi occult which tell us more about the world created by Sefton Delmer than they do about the national socialist political experiment. In short, the book is a snapshot of a point of time before the cross-checking allowed by the internet when many people were caught between the desire that there should be an occult condition of the world and access to the popular education that would qualify that belief. In fact, King remains intelligent. He allows a door to open on what it might mean to recognise occult phenomena that has not been shut today. His excessively trusting attitude to divination techniques (notably astrology and gematria) does not require babies to be thrown out with the bath water. He is balanced in his way, presenting material that is mostly survival from the pre-scientific age which appeals to something in our anxious human psychology. The credulity also does not extend to the claims of Gerald Gardner while there are other insights that are well worth noting. Where does that leave us? The book remains in the library with all its many flaws because of its snapshot value. This was what a commercial publishing company could get away with in 1980 in another world from ours. A bit like retaining Dennis Wheatley in the library. Despite its occasional insights and sound judgments, the bulk of the book may tell no lies but equally it tells few truths but it does open a door on a whole range of dubious occultisms as well as on ways of thinking that are not only persistent but have developed further since it was published. Both Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley have created working religions (Wicca and Thelema) which are now perfectly respectable and who is to say that the major religions we are supposed to reverence more than these did not have equally questionable origins. Similarly the human experience of the occult (regardless of any actual existence it may have) has to be explained. Anthropology, psychology, science and philosophy have still not cracked it. Something is going on here between the human mind and material reality. Far from embedding ourselves in scientific materialism of any sort, we are faced with new irrationalities (panpsychism springs to mind). The speculations around AI and its possibly emergent consciousness clearly trouble many people and suggest new mania to come. Quantum physics and cosmology keep throwing up ever more interesting challenges. The human mind seems more rather than less complex (vide the placebo and nocebo effects and mass hysteria in politics) forty years on. There is undoubtedly a human driving need to believe in something on the one hand (not an affliction this reviewer has ever suffered from) meeting up with phenomena that really are very difficult to explain (I have experienced a few myself) on the other. This intersection of human need and of the 'unexplained' results in strange fruit indeed. Much of it can be shown to be nonsense and charlatan behaviour as well as outright delusion but there are still the glitches in the matrix to explain. Simply shutting off one's mind to them is not 'truth'. Ideally one would abandon the impulse to believe and learn to be more coldly clinical about the 'unexplained', allowing for what we do not know to be as real as what we think we know. But we are human. Most humans need to fill in the gaps in knowing with imaginings ... and thus this book. ...more |
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it was ok
| Published immediately before the Millennium by the New Age publishing house Element Books, any book that puts a quotation by Adolf Hitler right next t Published immediately before the Millennium by the New Age publishing house Element Books, any book that puts a quotation by Adolf Hitler right next to one by Jesus Christ in order to send a negative message about Messiah ideology ought to have something going for it. Unfortunately what starts out as an interesting critique of all forms of organised religion that are based on charismatic leadership eventually degenerates into a sales pitch for New Age alternatives in general and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh aka Osho in particular. The initial argument is not, in fact, a bad one. The book is even a useful compendium of selective quotations designed to prove his point but Hogue's mildly gonzo style of writing does not inspire confidence in his objectivity. Any sign of this being more than a polemic disappears by the end. There is an interesting question to be answered here and it is not one answered by an appeal to the right side of the brain - why is it that our species has to find unusual individuals as exemplars in order to build institutional systems that rely on visions of end times and apocalypse? What I would like to have seen is not an angry excoriation of such phenomena but rather an analysis that deploys historical and textual research, anthropology and sociology, neuroscience and psychology in order to help explain the repeated absurdity that is messianic religion. It would, of course, be a sub-set of a wider analysis of the apparent human need for religion and 'spirituality' with the question at hand being why so many religious leaders seem to repeat each other in adopting a negativity and pessimism about the future and making promises they cannot keep. From there we have to ask why so many people end up believing in often lurid apocalyptic nonsense cast in the most obscure and metaphorical terms. Hogue may identify the problem here only to fall into a new trap drawn from his interest in the Eastern religions. Instead of the present becoming worse and worse and ending up in terror and horror until the Messiah returns to save us all, the new gurus offered a general awfulness of the present which can only be resolved magically by a change of consciousness instigated by the gurus themselves. These two types of response to reality may look like opposites but are just variations on a theme of absurd human belief, merely a civil war within a world of minds yearning for their right hemispheres to become a true representation of reality instead of a limbic residue. We live in an age where, at the margin, expectations of the 12th Imam, Eretz Israel and the Rapture are all playing a walk-on role in the tragedy currently unfolding in the Middle East yet all the major Western religions and others contain apocalyptic and expectant seeds. But are the cultic Eastern modes much better when naive and lost individuals lose themselves in following canny gurus whose promise is that, if only they follow them, they will lose their Egos, become 'themselves' and change reality itself? Oh, give us a break! What seems to be going on is that great tranches of humanity have never been able to deal with the brute facts of having an evolved self-consciousness that is faced with both the inevitability of death and the reality of social and cultural impotence for the bulk of us for the bulk of our time. The Eastern religions tend to solve this by coming to terms with both problems by withdrawing from reality yet accepting it when it cannot be avoided while the Western religions seem to emphasise inventing new and magical realities that can create the illusion of potency and even immortality. There is much to say on this but not here. Suffice it to say I was not sorry to have read the book but it is on its way to the charity shop. It could have been so much better if it had been more disciplined in its analysis of the messiah complex (leadership and submission) at the heart of the human condition. Perhaps we are left with humanity as still no better than baboons with their petty hierarchies and urges to dominate and submit to which evolution has added an existential fear of the future and of the chaos of a world we do not understand. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 26, 2024
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| 3.42
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liked it
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Sep 27, 2024
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| 4.50
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it was amazing
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Sep 08, 2024
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| 3.52
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liked it
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Aug 24, 2024
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| 3.98
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really liked it
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not set
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Aug 17, 2024
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| 3.93
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it was ok
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Aug 17, 2024
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| 3.84
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it was amazing
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Aug 09, 2024
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| 3.69
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it was amazing
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not set
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Aug 07, 2024
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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not set
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Jul 30, 2024
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| 2.83
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it was ok
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not set
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Jul 23, 2024
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| 3.50
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it was amazing
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not set
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Jul 15, 2024
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| 3.89
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really liked it
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not set
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Jun 28, 2024
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| 4.03
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liked it
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not set
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Jun 26, 2024
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| 3.65
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liked it
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not set
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Jun 25, 2024
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| 4.04
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liked it
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Jun 24, 2024
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| 4.50
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really liked it
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not set
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Mar 31, 2024
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| 4.11
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it was amazing
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not set
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Mar 28, 2024
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| 3.96
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really liked it
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not set
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Mar 20, 2024
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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not set
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Mar 16, 2024
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| 3.33
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liked it
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Mar 09, 2024
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| 3.61
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it was ok
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not set
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Feb 26, 2024
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