About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
31.12.14
Only the Beeb
Afternoon all,
Before you start on getting on with 2015, have a look back at our almanac of the best unexpected facts of 2014. 1. The Pentagon has a plan for combating a zombie apocalypse. Find out more 2. Seals like to have sex with penguins. Find out more 3. Hello Kitty is not a cat - she's a little girl. Find out more 4. It's quicker - by about three hours - to read the Hobbit than watch Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. Find out more 5. There have been lions in London since the 13th Century - arriving either in 1210 or 1235 - although they may have died out briefly under Henry VI in 1436. Find out more 6. Age renders you less certain as to whether a badger or a baboon would win in a fight. Find out more 7. Dreams get weirder as the night wears on. Find out more 8. Gladiators were mostly vegetarian. Find out more 9. The release of a track by Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson was delayed more than 30 years because Mercury objected to the presence of Bubbles the chimp at its recording. Find out more 10. It's possible to charge a Nokia Lumia 930 using 800 apples and potatoes connected with copper wire and nails. Find out more 11. Watching action films makes you eat more. Find out more 12. Sir John Gielgud wrote the script for a gay porn film. Find out more 13. It's against the law in England and Wales to swallow and regurgitate goldfish, even if they survive, but it may be legal to do the same with an octopus. Find out more 14. American teachers are allowed to whack children with a paddle (a wooden bat a little shorter and thinner than a cricket bat) in 19 states. Find out more 15. There is a "right" way to eat chocolate - you pop a piece in your mouth, let it melt between the tongue and the palate, and then breathe in through your mouth and out through your nose. Find out more 16. It's actually fairly easy to weigh an ant. Find out more 17. At least three Google employees have lived for months in their vehicles on the firm's California campus, eating in the staff cafeteria and showering in gyms. Find out more 18. The bass line of Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side cost £17. Find out more 19. Dollar squiggles on the pavement denote electric cables below. Find out more 20. The most effective office regime is to work for 52 consecutive minutes and then have a 17-minute break. Find out more 21. Ukraine's navy is equipped with combat sea lions. Find out more 22. A porcupine can fight off a pride of lions. Find out more 23. Two per cent of Anglican clergy are not sure whether God is "more than a human construct". Find out more 24. Los Angeles prison inmates have to pass a "gay-dar" test to stay in the safest wing. Find out more 25. Over 88% of individual winners at the Darwin Awards are men. Find out more 26. At the Starbucks outlet in the CIA's Langley headquarters, baristas aren't allowed to write customers' names on their cups. Find out more 27. When a person's age ends with a nine they are more likely to seek extramarital affairs, sign up for their first marathon, and run marathons faster than when they were slightly older or slightly younger. Find out more 28. Popping a criminal's phone in a microwave and closing the door (but not switching it on) stops said criminal wiping it remotely. Find out more 29. In China, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are known as Curly Fu and Peanut. Find out more 30. The most expensive pies of any English league football club are to be found at Brighton & Hove Albion - Rochdale's are the cheapest. Find out more 31. It is almost impossible to take a German-registered car into Japan. Find out more 32. Olive oil and baking powder are rubbed onto parts of the Sydney Opera House in order to maintain it. Find out more 33. Tall men get married earlier but short men stay married longer. Find out more 34. Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is the most expensive Major League Baseball ground in which to propose marriage. Find out more 35. There are more bicycles in Copenhagen than people. Find out more 36. Lawrence of Arabia was offered a job as a nightwatchman at the Bank of England. He turned it down. Find out more 37. The Indian record for staff absenteeism is thought to have been set by a biology teacher who did not turn up for work for 23 years. Find out more 38. Senior technology gurus at the White House don't have to tuck their shirts in. Find out more 39. Elephants can differentiate between men and women, and between different ethnicities, when they hear a voice. Find out more 40. There is a brown bear living at the Chernobyl site. Find out more 41. The average length of a Best Picture Academy Award-winning film is two hours and 20 minutes. Find out more 42. The best way to prevent your headphones from tangling in your bag is to join the ends together. Find out more 43. It is illegal to race rubber ducks in some US states. Find out more 44. A salmon cannon fires 40 fish a minute. Find out more 45. Simon Cowell has a saying for people editing shots of him on X Factor: Two words - happy and handsome. Find out more 46. When making a decision, former England and Derbyshire fast bowler Devon Malcolm asks himself: "What would Margaret Beckett do?" Find out more 47. Yorkshire and Humberside are as red-headed as Ireland. Find out more 48. There is a symphonic Finnish prog-rock concept album about Scrooge McDuck. Find out more 49. In Somalia, the word for president also means "big head". Find out more 50. When Richard III was killed he suffered at least 11 injuries, although some of them might have been inflicted after death. Find out more 51. According to OED, Cornish and Welsh have had less influence on the English language than Hawaiian, Swahili or Zulu. Find out more 52. The US National Security Agency used to have a Clown Club for staff members. Find out more 53. Kenny G's Going Home is used in public spaces in China to tell people to go home. Find out more 54. Czech deer still avoid the Iron Curtain. Find out more 55. Sir Bradley Wiggins is a fan of the Archers. Find out more 56. The largest hunting dinosaur probably ate whole sharks. Find out more 57. In Oklahoma, the average marijuana joint costs the same as 2.41 bottles of Bud Light. Find out more 58. Group jogging is a crime in Burundi. Find out more 59. It would cost £12.6 billion to issue every man, woman and child in the UK with an owl (and £69.3 billion if each was to get its own aviary). Find out more 60. Some nurses in the UK wear fat suits as part of their training for dealing with morbidly obese patients. Find out more 61. People are more likely to catch yawns from people of their own ethnicity. Find out more 62. Putting broken pottery in plant pots doesn't aid drainage. Find out more 63. When given a date far in the future, William Hague can tell you off the top of his head which day of the week it will be. Find out more 64. Detainees at Guantanamo are allowed to watch the World Cup but don't see it live - it is made available a day later to ensure nothing subversive can be conveyed. Find out more 65. Guinness in 1982 came close to re-launching the brand as an English beer brewed in west London. Find out more 66. Prince is very good at ping pong. Find out more 67. When crows drop stones into water to make food more accessible, they display the reasoning skills of children aged 5-7. Find out more 68. People called Eleanor are disproportionately likely to get into Oxford University. Find out more 69. Hillary Clinton hasn't driven a car since 1996. Find out more 70. Man-eating sharks are nine times more likely to kill men than women. Find out more 71. Cate Blanchett and her husband share an email account. Find out more 72. Men whose dating profile pictures are taken outdoors on a sunny day with trees in the background are most popular. Find out more 73. Main characters are more likely to die in children's cartoons than in films for adults. Find out more 74. The authorities in Oregon, USA, are very, very particular about getting urine in their reservoirs. Find out more 75. It's possible for a bat in the UK to fly across the sea to continental Europe. Find out more 76. Richard Nixon was interested in the mating habits of pandas. Find out more 77. The code A113 is implanted in every Pixar movie. Find out more 78. The coat of a dead dog called London Jack, whose stuffed remains were used to collect charity donations at railway stations, changed colour twice. Find out more 79. French trains are fatter than 50 years ago. Find out more 80. In primates there is a correlation between female infidelity and males having large testicles. Find out more 81. The last British Prime Minister to regularly wear a wedding ring in public was Lady Thatcher. Find out more 82. Kladdkaka, a flat gooey chocolate cake, is the most googled food in Sweden. Find out more 83. The faces of the fastest riders in the Tour de France are 25% more attractive to women than the slowest 10% of riders, although women on the pill had a reduced preference for quicker riders. Find out more 84. Early risers are more unethical at night and night owls more immoral in the morning. Find out more 85. St Mary's Church is the most ambiguous term on Wikipedia. Find out more 86. Researchers at Michigan Technical University have been looking for the existence of time travellers on the internet. Find out more 87. The sound of a ticking clock can make women keener to have babies younger. Find out more 88. Dead passengers on British Airways flights used to be given sunglasses, a vodka and tonic and a copy of the Daily Mail to disguise them from other passengers. Find out more 89. The Black Death improved public health in subsequent centuries, although no-one knows the exact reason. Find out more 90. There are at least three different approved ways of saying Hyundai, depending on whether you're in South Korea, the UK or US. Find out more 91. England manager Roy Hodgson and player Leighton Baines share a passion for the novelist Haruki Murakami. Find out more 92. The Star Wars character Han Solo was partly based on Francis Ford Coppola. Find out more 93. The first bar code on a commercial product was on a packet of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Find out more 94. Pennsylvania is the most linguistically rich US state - it has five dialects, compared with the typical two or three. Find out more 95. There is a once-a-year a bus service from Salisbury Plain to Imber. Find out more 96. Comedian Les Dawson wrote a secret romantic thriller under the nom de plume Maria Brett-Cooper. Find out more 97. Congo-Brazzaville has a peat bog the size of England. Find out more 98. Snakes squeeze tree trunks far harder than necessary. Find out more 99. The pope believes that animals go to heaven. Find out more 100. The dark side of the Moon is actually turquoise. Find out more |
There will always be
Lord Kitchener's appeal for recruits pasted on a letterbox (Keystone/Getty)
From ‘The Great Improvisation’, The Spectator, 2 January 1915:
Though we fully recognize that praise is dangerous, we must at Christmastide indulge ourselves with a little praise of the British people, or rather of the British Army, for that part of the British nation which really deserves praise is in the Army. Once again, what we are doing, and doing exceedingly well, though in a sense it is a disgrace for any nation to have to do it, either well or ill, is improvisation. We are improvising an Army in a way that probably no other nation in the world, except the American, which, after all, is only the other side of the same medal, could accomplish. We are proving that, though we are bad organizers, we have an extraordinary gift for rapidly making something out of nothing, and converting chaos into order. The way in which the regiments, battalions, batteries, and other units of the New Army and of the Territorials have been developing into efficient military units during the past four months can only be described as amazing.
Commas
'Literally,' Emojis, and Other Trends That Aren't Destroying English
Experimental psychologist Steven Pinker talks about a few cherished grammar rules he'd prefer to see forgotten—and replies to critics of his book The Sense of Style.
Rebecca Goldstein/Wikimedia
In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, the author and Harvard professor mines both the science of cognitive psychology—how the brain processes language, how we associate words with meanings, etc.—and the art of language to re-engineer the writing guide.
I spoke with Pinker about his new book, his grammar feud with The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller, why the misuse of “literally” doesn’t literally orfiguratively drive him crazy, and how italics—as used in the first paragraph of this interview—may be the writing tool you’re not using enough.
Scott Porch: Do people write the way they talk?
Steven Pinker: Not really. Clearly, there’s overlap and some people write in a more conversational style than others, but it is striking how a transcript of a talk given extemporaneously does not read well on the printed page. I first noticed this when I was a teenager and read the Watergate transcripts—the conversations among Nixon and advisors like Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Mitchell. A number of people at the time who had never seen conversations transcribed were astonished at how difficult they were to interpret.
Porch: What do you think about the flagrant misuse of the word “literally”? Does it literally make your head explode?
Pinker: [Laughs.] It’s understandable why people do it. We are always in search of superlatives, of ways of impressing upon our hearer that something that happened is noteworthy or even extraordinary. And the words we use to signal that eventually lose their meaning.
Porch: Like “awesome.”
Pinker: “Awesome” is a recent example. In the UK, “brilliant” is used for the most banal observations. Before that, words like “terrific,” meaning inspiring terror, “wonderful,” inspiring wonder, “fabulous,” worthy of fable. We see the fossils of dead superlatives that our ancestors overused the way we overuse “awesome.” “Literally” is a victim of a similar type of inflation. The figurative use doesn’t mean the language is deteriorating. Hyperbole has probably been around as long as language has been around.
Porch: I don’t think it’s hyperbole. I think people don’t know what “literally” means.
Pinker: I think people know what it means but can’t resist the temptation to overuse it. When I give a talk and point out that someone doesn’t “literally” explode, everyone in the audience laughs. I think they get it.
Porch: Does the comma go inside the closed quotation mark or outside?
Pinker: If I ruled the world, it would go outside.
Porch: That’s terrible. It looks terrible!
Pinker: Our British cousins don’t find it that ugly.
Porch: It looks untidy. It looks like a bedroom with clothes all over the floor.
Pinker: Your aesthetics may have been shaped by a lifetime of seeing it in the American pattern, but this would be a case in which any aesthetic reaction should be trumped by logic. Messing up the order of delimiters in a way that doesn’t reflect the logical nesting of their content is just an affront to an orderly mind.
Porch: Should it be “the news media is” or “the news media are”?
Pinker: I tend not to be a pedant about Latin plurals. I like “the media are,” but I’m in a fussy minority here.
Porch: What about “data”?
Pinker: I prefer data as a plural of datum—so I refer to one datum, many data— but the linguist in me recognizes that it is quite common for Latin plurals to become English singulars, such as “agenda.” Originally it was agendum “is” and agenda “are.” Likewise, candelabra is now singular, and it used to be be the plural of candelabrum.
Porch: Are you an Oxford comma guy?
Pinker: [Laughs.] I put my vote with the Oxford comma.
Porch: I like the Oxford comma. It keeps things clear.
Pinker: I do, too, though I think Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would disagree with us!
Porch: Nathan Heller dinged you in The New Yorker for having what he considered a loose approach to usage rules on things like “who” vs. “whom.”
Pinker: Nathan Heller’s an ignoramus. He really does not know what he’s talking about. He said that in the sentence “It is I” that “I” is the subject of the sentence, which is just a howler. Sentences don’t have two subjects. He is doing exactly what I said one should not do, which is to confuse meaning, case, and grammatical relations, which is what he does in that preposterous claim. If you were to say, “I think we should break up, but it’s not you; it’s I,” you’d sound like a pompous jackass.
Porch: He’s making an argument, though, that language needs committed rules to give writers a baseline, which is different than a writer knowing the rules and taking license with them.
Pinker: He’s wrong. That’s absolutely not what I say. As you and I have noted in this very conversation, I have motivated guidelines as to how one should or shouldn’t write. It’s not that good writers have chosen to flout a rule; it’s that the rule is not a rule in the first place. What Heller and many writers before him have never asked is: What makes a rule a rule? Who decides? Where does it come from? They write as if there’s some tribunal or rules committee who makes the rules of English, which there isn’t, or that it’s a matter of logic or objective reality, which it isn’t.
Porch: In the book, you cite a flyer that had some accidental language about an event featuring “sex with four professors.” Can you talk a bit about that?
Pinker: [Laughs.] It was about “a panel on sex with four professors,” which sounds racier than it was. We tend to connect material to the immediately preceding words as opposed to words even earlier in the sentence. The intended reading was that “with four professors” modified “panel,” but we associate it with the immediately preceding word “sex.”
But that does not work when it is a “a panel of four professors on drugs.” We store the patterns of usage when we learn phrases like “on drugs” and “sex with.” That overrides the expectations we have that sentences are right-branching.
Pinker: No, I’m a big fan of italics. I think your intuition is correct that it eases a reader’s task of parsing and interpreting a sentence in the way that a writer intended. It’s particularly useful in emphasizing contrast, which echoes what we do in conversation. There’s a strain of Jewish humor that hinges on which word is stressed in speech, which corresponds to which word is in italics in writing.
I remember a joke from my childhood that Stalin had read a letter from Trotsky that said, “You were right, and I was wrong. You are the true heir of Lenin, and I should apologize.” And a man ran up and said, “No, you forget that Trotsky was Jewish. The proper reading is: You were right, and I was wrong? You are the true heir of Lenin, and I should apologize?”
Porch: When you recognize that a phrase is like Faulkner or like Hemingway, is there something about the syntax and style of those writers that a linguist can actually describe?
Pinker: That is largely unexplored territory at the intersection of linguistics and literary studies that I would love to see filled. There are computer algorithms that look at statistics of word choice and transition probabilities—how often you use one word after another—that can distinguish writerly styles. It has been used, for example, to figure out which passages of The Federalist Papers were written by Madison or Hamilton or Jay and to determine whether Shakespeare had a co-author on some of his plays.
Porch: And plagiarism is being discovered that way.
Pinker: Indeed, it is. Even though those statistical techniques can ascertain authorship, they don’t provide much insight as to what makes a style a style. I think a literary scholar with training in linguistics, or vice versa, could comment insightfully on what makes Faulkner Faulkner.
Porch: Eric Hayot’s new style guide for academic writing says graduate programs don’t put enough priority on writing instruction and that the things you have to write as a graduate student aren’t especially conducive to the things you would write as an academic. Do you agree with that?
Pinker: He’s absolutely right. The amount of writing instruction in a typical graduate program is zero, which is definitely too little. I find it interesting that the writing of graduate students is often worse than that of undergraduate students.
Porch: Hayot thinks that may be because students in masters and Ph.D. programs tested out of a lot of high school and undergraduate classes where they would have learned how to write well.
Pinker: That’s not mutually exclusive from my observation, which is that when you enter graduate school you enter into a tiny clique, a sub-sub-sub-set of your discipline. Your estimate of the breadth of the knowledge of the people you are writing for gets radically miscalibrated. Highly idiosyncratic ideas are discussed if they are common knowledge, and you lose the sense of how tiny a club you have joined. And you’re in terror of being judged naive and unprepared, and so you signal in your writing that you’re a member of this esoteric club.
Porch: And the professor you’re defending your dissertation to may not be a very good writer either.
Pinker: The professor may not be a good writer, and he’s exactly the person who knows all the idiosyncratic jargon and who talks about “stimulation used in a habituation paradigm” and may even have coined that jargon.
Porch: Is there anyone you would point to who is writing about language and usage today along the lines of what William Safire wrote for years in his “On Language” column in New York Times Magazine?
Pinker: The foremost would be Language Log, which has contributions from about a dozen linguists. The two main contributors are Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, and they are both astonishingly brilliant and both are superb writers. Pullum is one of my favorite essayists in any genre. John McWhorter is extremely good. Ben Zimmer, who wrote the “On Language” column at one point, is also fabulous. Another is Jan Freeman, who has a blog called Throw Grammar from the Train.
Porch: There was a big think piece on emoji recently in New York magazine. Are you pro- or anti-emoji?
Pinker: I don’t think it means the death of language. One of the interesting discoveries I came across reading earlier style manuals was a manual written by F.L. Lucas in the 1950s. He said the English language really could use a new punctuation mark that indicated that the foregoing sentence was used ironically or in jest. He basically called for the smiley face 35 years before it came to email.
Porch: Can we talk about the hair, or is that off limits?
Pinker: [Laughs.] So what’s the deal with the hair?
Porch: There’s an illustration of you on your website with huge hair that looks like a caricature from the New York Review of Books.
Pinker: That is absolutely from the New York Review of Books by longtime artist David Levine. I bought the original a number of years ago and have it hanging in my study. A fair number of people approach me and say, “Are youSimon Rattle?” [Rattle is the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and has lots of curly hair.] If I ever meet Simon Rattle, I’ll ask him if people ever confuse him with Steven Pinker and be prepared for the answer, “Who?”
31 December
Today is New Year's Eve, a day to take stock of the old year and make changes for a new year.
People across the world tonight will be linking arms at the stroke of midnightand singing "we'll take a cup o' kindness yet, for auld lang syne," from the Scottish folk song popularized by Robert Burns (books by this author). In Scotland, New Year's Eve marks the first day of Hogmanay, a name derived from an Old French word for a gift given at the New Year. There's a tradition at Hogmanay known as "first-footing": If the first person to cross your threshold after midnight is a dark-haired man, you will have good luck in the coming year. Other customs vary by region within Scotland, but most involve singing and whiskey.
English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (books by this author) wrote: "Ring out the old, ring in the new / Ring, happy bells, across the snow / The year is going, let him go / Ring out the false, ring in the true."
Here in the United States, the custom of raising and dropping a giant ball arose out of the time when signals were given to ships at harbor. Starting in 1859, a large ball was dropped at noon every day so sailors could check their ship chronometers.
The Times Square celebration dates back to 1904, when The New York Timesopened its headquarters on Longacre Square. The newspaper convinced the city to rename the area "Times Square," and they hosted a big party, complete with fireworks, on New Year's Eve. Some 200,000 people attended, but the paper's owner, Adolph Ochs, wanted the next celebration to be even splashier. In 1907, the paper's head electrician constructed a giant lighted ball that was lowered from the building's flagpole. The first Times Square Ball was made of wood and iron, weighed 700 pounds, and was lit by a hundred 25-watt bulbs. Now, it's made of Waterford crystal, weighs almost six tons, and is lit by more than 32,000 LED lights. The party in Times Square is attended by up to a million people every year.
Other cities have developed their own ball-dropping traditions. Atlanta, Georgia, drops a giant peach. Eastport, Maine, drops a sardine. Ocean City, Maryland, drops a beach ball, and Mobile, Alabama, drops a 600-pound electric Moon Pie. In Tempe, Arizona, a giant tortilla chip descends into a massive bowl of salsa. Brasstown, North Carolina, drops a Plexiglas pyramid containing a live possum; and Key West, Florida, drops an enormous ruby slipper with a drag queen inside it.
A Little Toast
The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo. An early Happy New Year to all of our Delanceyplace.com readers. In honor of our favorite New Year's Eve beverage, an excerpt on Dom Pérignon and the invention of champagne.
"Dom Pérignon was justly famous for his superb skills as a blender -- but his legendary wines did not have bubbles. This is one of the great ironies -- we might even say great deceptions of wine history, for conventional wisdom tells us that Dom Pérignon was the delighted inventor of champagne. He is supposed to have quipped to one of his sandal-shod brothers, 'Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!' Yet it only made sense that Dom Pérignon wanted to rid champagne of its bubbles. There was no market for sparkling wines yet. In France, nobody wanted them. So, over the course of the next decade, Dom Pérignon dedicated himself to experimenting with ways to stop the development of bubbles.
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| Dom Pérignon |
"In fact, the idea that Dom Pérignon invented champagne was always just imaginative marketing. It was a brilliant but misleading sales pitch. The popular legend has its origins in a late-nineteenth-century advertising campaign, started at a time when sparkling wine was already big business. In her book When Champagne Became French, scholar Kolleen Guy shows how it wasn't until the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris that the region's champagne producers saw the marketing potential and started printing brochures about Dom Pérignon. From that point on, the role of the celebrated monk became a truism.
"The truth is that no one in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century associated Dom Pérignon with the discovery of sparkling wine. His friend Dom François, writing the biography of the famous monk, never mentions bubbles, and even the abbey's lawyers in the nineteenth century -- looking for things to claim rights to -- didn't think they could convince anyone that Dom Pérignon had anything to do with making wine sparkle. As the lawyers knew, the monks at Hautvillers didn't even start bottling their wines until the 1750s.
"The truth is that no one in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century associated Dom Pérignon with the discovery of sparkling wine. His friend Dom François, writing the biography of the famous monk, never mentions bubbles, and even the abbey's lawyers in the nineteenth century -- looking for things to claim rights to -- didn't think they could convince anyone that Dom Pérignon had anything to do with making wine sparkle. As the lawyers knew, the monks at Hautvillers didn't even start bottling their wines until the 1750s.
"For those who enjoy the romance of the Dom Pérignon legend, there is even worse news. Wine historians now claim that champagne did not even originate in France. Champagne was first 'invented' in Great Britain, where there was already a small commercial market for sparkling champagne by the 1660s ...
"Monks like Dom Pérignon knew that local wines could sparkle, even if they considered it a nuisance. And scientific and historical records show that the climatic changes of the little ice age -- those decades of unusually cold weather that stalled the fermentation process in the winter and allowed for the natural and unwelcome springtime emergence of bubbles -- had been disrupting agriculture in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century. ...
"Even if Dom Pérignon and his predecessors did not discover champagne, by the end of the seventeenth century the royal court at the Palace of Versailles certainly had. King Louis XIV of France now wanted nothing more than bubbles in his wine. Suddenly winemakers on both sides of the English Channel were scrambling to find ways to make champagne sparkle, and in order to support his taste for bubbly, the king gave the city of Reims an exclusive license to sell their wines in bottles. It was the beginning of a regional monopoly that would survive, in one form or another, for centuries. ...
"Even if Dom Pérignon and his predecessors did not discover champagne, by the end of the seventeenth century the royal court at the Palace of Versailles certainly had. King Louis XIV of France now wanted nothing more than bubbles in his wine. Suddenly winemakers on both sides of the English Channel were scrambling to find ways to make champagne sparkle, and in order to support his taste for bubbly, the king gave the city of Reims an exclusive license to sell their wines in bottles. It was the beginning of a regional monopoly that would survive, in one form or another, for centuries. ...
The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It
Author: Tilar J. Mazzeo
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
30.12.14
The Future
Two peculiar counter-intuitive facts about the digital world this year. First, sales of computer tablets have been on the slide. Second, even less predictably, sales of ebooks – at least in the summer – were down by a quarter on two years before, while sales of print books have been rising.
I know, it’s the big trends that are important, but it is strange nonetheless that digital technology is not sweeping all before it. Real books were certainly supposed to have been consigned to the secondhand shop – Ikea was even said to have redesigned its children’s bookcase in the light of the decline in books.
The French historian Jean Gimpel predicted something along these lines just before he died in 1996. In fact he went further, hailing the glorious return of many of those technologies we regard as somehow more “real” and which were supposed to have been driven out. And he was right: trams, cycling, brick and timber-framed houses, cotton and natural fibres have all been creeping back, just as he said. To which you might add other defunct technologies that refuse to lie down and die, like vinyl records, where sales are at an 18-year high.
If you take a longer view, the phenomenon is even stranger. During the Apollo moon missions in the late 1960s, the meals the astronauts ate – beef stew in a plastic bag where you add water, high-potency breakfast pills – were popularly supposed to be the future of food. Kitchens were supposed to disappear, with meals delivered to our doors in neat vacuum packs. But they had reckoned without Nigella, and – far from disappearing – our kitchens, with their shiny pots hanging unused above the stove, are now the biggest rooms in the house.
In two cases, the old technology has almost driven out the new. And bizarrely so, given the time it takes to queue in coffee shops while the machine endlessly hisses and gargles for each customer. Instant coffee still exists, but it isn’t entirely polite. Nor is instant mashed potato. Those Smash robots, which used to fall about laughing at potato peelers, must be rusting with chagrin.
So what is going on? Well, I think two things. The first is that we cling to the real world ever more tightly as the virtual world presses its claims, a phenomenon predicted by theAmerican philosopher Robert Nozick. A growing minority of us may not shun tablets or ebooks (I write them, for goodness sake). We might even drink instant coffee sometimes. But we are determined that the unspun, unmanipulated and unmarketed shall not perish from this Earth. Even if we have to wait in line for a hissing coffee machine.
This has been dismissed as a middle-class fad, but most of us seem to be demanding more personality from politicians, more moral coherence from corporations. Authenticity is basically classless, even if it manifests itself in different ways for different people.
The other trend is more controversial. It is that, despite what we are told, technological change is actually slowing down. I’ve been travelling on Boeing 747s and driving Minis my entire life (I’m 56). And although the technology inside them is very different, just compare that with a century ago – with the extraordinary development over the same 56-year period of cars, aeroplanes, submarines, telephones and all the rest.
If I was born in 1858, would I still be struggling along in my wagon at New Year 1915? These days, we live at the same addresses as we did a century ago. Travelling in London, at least, we take the same bus routes, use the same stations.
The notion that technological change is accelerating is based on dubious factoids about the idea that mobile phone penetration into the American market was faster than it was for radio. In reality, the reverse is the case.
The future is already here, wrote William Gibson; it’s just unevenly spread. The truth is that it’s more complicated than that. The future is not what it was, and it’s often remarkably like the past.
Poetry
Seamus Heaney in 1996
The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his audience. Counterintuitively, we like the imposition of imposture. We connive at deceit, at replication, for the release of neurotransmitters, the flood of endorphins — the brandies of the brain. I once heard Peter Ustinov on a chat show replicate the sound of an electric bell being pressed. Pleasure on a different, even more vertiginous level. The audience was convulsed.
Unless a poet can produce this ungainsayable instant delight in the reader, this drench of dopamine, the poetry is automatically of the second order. (We expect less of our novelists, though great prose writers, such as Joyce or Dickens or Kipling, can also do it at will: Major Bagstock has a ‘complexion like a Stilton cheese, and… eyes like a prawn’s’; Mrs Podsnap has ‘nostrils like a rocking-horse’; Kipling gives us ‘the sticky pull of… slow-rending oilskin’; Joyce has the iron rim of a wheel ‘harshing’ against the kerbstone.) Effortlessly, Seamus Heaney gives us ‘The song of the tubular steel gate in the dark/As he pulls it to.’ As Bloom says in Ulysses, ‘Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.’ Sllt is the noise made by a paper-slitting machine.
Heaney’s genius is an amalgam of moral complexity and the simple make-over of reality to his readers. He can describe things. He can describe things in a phrase, spray them with fixative — if not Ustinov’s ringing of a bell, then the sound a football makes when kicked — ‘it thumped/but it sang too,/a kind of dry, ringing/foreclosure of sound.’ Remember?
These lines are not included in New Selected Poems 1988–2013, but ‘A rowan like a lipsticked girl’ is, with its ready pleasure, its obvious likeness, like one of those Picasso miracles of simplification made from a few fluent lines. Description, if it is to be successful, can’t be a wordy wrangle, arguing for its accuracy and sounding increasingly desperate. It should be as swift as turning over a card — an ace. Poets have to avoid an infinity of shuffling, cutting, shuffling and dealing. This ability is fundamental. In the words of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Porro unum est necessarium: ‘but one thing is needful.’ Not the only necessary gift, of course — an ear, a feel for syllables and rhythm, for verbal music, are further requirements — but without it, poetry is likely to be an endless marathon of ambiguity, a joyless game of patience for adepts. The Cambridge School of Poetry, in fact, turning its back on pleasure, snubbing the audience, withholding the endorphins, proffering perpetual difficulty, disparaging ‘descriptive decadence’.
The pleasures of the flesh aren’t always sensual. They can be pleasurable because they are accurate and irrefutable. This is Heaney helping his father to the bathroom in the last week of his life: ‘my right arm/Taking the webby weight of his underarm.’ And this is the young, yearning, lovesick Heaney mesmerised by an older woman: ‘I could see the vaccination mark/stretched on your upper arm.’ Heaney’s rapt astonishment is transferred to a slow goods train ‘full of big-eyed cattle’.
Ted Hughes thought of poetry as a less literal way of capturing the animals that fascinated him as a boy. Heaney records things as they come, democratically, unaware of hierarchy: the bevel left in his hair by a policeman’s hat; ‘Yippee-i-ay,/Sang “The Riders of the Range”’; ‘Slim Whitman’s wavering tenor amplified/Above sparking dodgems’. In ‘Seeing Things’, there is ‘a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied’ when people stepped into it; in ‘Weighing In’, a weighbridge ‘well-adjusted, freshly greased’ on which ‘everything trembled, flowed with give and take’. Both bang on target, like Heaney’s target: ‘the bullet’s song/So effortlessly at my fingertip,/The target’s single shocking little jerk.’ Heaney can even manage a central-heating boiler: ‘Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life/Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse/Of a sawn-down tree…’ Captured and captivating. Somehow, you can’t imagine Matthew Arnold admitting this disreputable fact into ‘Dover Beach’.
Poetry is exclusive, naturally self-culling, fastidious, over-fastidious. One of Heaney’s ‘Settings’ in Seeing Things begins with Yeats’s lofty remark that ‘To those who see spirits, human skin/For a long time afterwards appears most coarse.’ Heaney then describes a bus with one other passenger — a boy bound for Vietnam: ‘He could have been one of the newly dead come back,/ Unsurprisable but still disappointed,/Having to bear his farmboy self again,/His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.’ A drab but powerful pathos. The wordplay here — on ‘otherworldly’ meaning innocent, naïve and also from the spirit world — is as swift, as economical, as telling as the shaving cuts and their outrun risk of bathos.
The Spirit Level (1996) followed on the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1994 and many of its poems welcome peace — if obliquely and a little warily. For example, ‘Damson’ is a benign version of the Red Hand of Ulster: in the legend, a shipboard king cuts off his hand and throws it ahead of a rival claimant about to reach land before him. In Heaney’s poem, the bricklayer is ‘not like him — /Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board.’ A version of swords into ploughshares.
But in ‘Mycenae Lookout’, a poem in five parts, Heaney writes of the return of Agamemnon from Troy — to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, for complicated reasons. Clytemnestra is revenging her daughter Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon has sacrificed to procure favourable winds for the Greek fleet. He is called ‘King Kill-/the-Child-/and-Take-//What-Comes’ — in the chopped-up section of triplets about Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam, who is brought back in triumph as a captive.
Cassandra will die too. She is a key figure — prophetic and terribly damaged, less a Trojan princess than a comfort woman. ‘She looked/camp-fucked//and simple.’ The language is unsparing. When she prophesies, the ugliest emotions are stirred in the hearers: they want ‘to do it to her//there and then./Little rent/cunt of their guilt.’ The whole, brilliant, flinty, unforgiving, unforgetting sequence looks at the peace after the Greek victory at Troy. The bystanders still hate the Trojan princess and want to rape her. They already have. Clytemnestra’s main motive for doing away with her husband isn’t simply righteous vengeance. It is sexual. Thunder is caused by the gods making out noisily. When Agamemnon’s troops first disembark at Troy with war cries, they are compared to ‘the agony of Clytemnestra’s love-shout’ as she reaches her orgasm. Agony! There is a zeugma here that equates violence and sex, as if both were immovably rooted in us.
As perhaps they are. ‘Small crowds of people watching as a man/Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran/Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down’ (my italics).
The key figure of the Lookout cannot exculpate himself either. He knows he should have told Agamemnon about the sexual shenanigans during his absence, but somehow he didn’t: ‘all smiles/to Aegisthus every morning,/much favoured and self-loathing.’ He knows he is a trimmer. He has to accept his guilt: ‘But when the hills broke into flame [the beacons announcing victory in Troy]/and the queen wailed on and came,/it was the king I sold.’ I think Heaney includes himself — the poet as watchman — in the statement, ‘I moved beyond bad faith’.
When I was Heaney’s editor at Faber, I would sometimes phone him at home. Because of the political pressures on him —‘when, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write/Something for us?’ — his voice was always subdued at first before he knew who was calling. I once said as much. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘erecting screens around the voice.’ The Greek story here is another screen, but you can see through it to all the silt of bitterness, the resentments, the complications, that come with experience of the Troubles. Heaney isn’t one of the ‘mouth athletes’ with their trite certainties, one of Kundera’s ‘moral exhibitionists’:
Mouth athletes,
Quoting the oracle and quoting dates,
Petitioning, accusing, taking votes.
Hear the disdain here for the righteous, the politically certain, the morally overbearing. It is no accident that when Heaney first began to write, he signed himself Incertus. It expresses an existential truth about his moral configuration, his helpless, deliberate and conscious commitment to awkward complication.
There are wonderful poems in these two carefully representative volumes. Nothing Heaney wrote was without some touch. But a single Selected Poemsof 250 pages, half their combined length, could be a sustained astonishment — just as the unsurpassed North (1975) remains Heaney’s one consistent, continuous miracle.
'New Selected Poems: 1966–1987', £16.99 and 'New Selected Poems:
1988–2013', £16.99 are available from the Spectator Bookshop. Tel: 08430 600033
1988–2013', £16.99 are available from the Spectator Bookshop. Tel: 08430 600033
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