Next stop
On the train to Stafford yesterday, the announcement for each stop went:
“We will shortly be arriving at Stoke. Stoke is the next stopping station on this service today”
How is this better than “The next stop is Stoke”?
The Pennine Host
On the train to York yesterday, I was startled by an announcement: “The Pennine Host will shortly be passing through the train.” I had a vision of some grizzled warriors dressed in sheepskins, rampaging through the ranks of commuters prior to a spot of ritual boat (or train) burning. Turns out it was a bloke wheeling a tea trolley.
My Motorway Reading
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..and no, I don’t mean I tool along with War and Peace propped open on the dashboard. What strikes me as I make my journey to work, largely on motorways these days, is how vans and trucks have become mobile advertising hoardings, with a sprinkling of mission statement thrown in.
Years ago, if you were in the business of moving stuff from one place to another, you would call yourself a haulier, and your lorry would say something like “Thos. Jenkins, Hauliers, Derby”. There would be a phone number, and, if you were at the cutting edge of technology, a fax. (By the way, what is the point of putting phone numbers on the side of trucks? Do people say, as they speed past, “Oh look darling, there’s an Eddie Stobart – just scribble down the phone number, will you?”) Now, however, the vehicle has to make a statement. So, forget being a haulier- you are in distribution, or, better, logistics. You don’t want anything as obvious as your own name as the identifier of your company. You need to have a name that is preferably meaningless, and you need to combine it with a statement about what you do. So now, you may go on the road as something like “Interlock Logistics – delivering quality to the nation”. Recently, of course, no activity has been considered worthy unless it contains the “solutions” tag. So, as we have seen, supermarkets now sell “meal solutions” instead of meals, hardware stores sell “DIY solutions” instead of tools, and one insurance company I noted wanted to sell me “risk solutions”. It’s all documented fortnightly in Private Eye, though not in the online version, I notice. This raises the stakes, of course, as haulage now has to become “logistics solutions”, and the mission statement becomes ever more complex as companies struggle to present themselves as distinctive. Thus, a firm that might have got by with “Perkins: Refrigerated Distribution” a few years ago now has to have “Ice-spire: Delivering Coldchain Logistics Solutions to the Frozen Food Industry Community” or some such abomination.
There are some compensations to this thin reading diet on the road, though. I forgave one catering company its incorrect use of the apostrophe in “Caterer’s” for its notice on the back of the van “No cakes are left in the van overnight”. My favourite, though, is the firm of electricians I often spot on the way to work. Their logo is unmistakeable – a silhouette of a head with an aquiline nose, with a deerstalker and pipe. The name of the company? “Mr Ohms”.
Muriel Spark, The Finishing School
This novel was sent to me by Penguin, so that I could add a review to their Blog a Holiday Read site, where, apparently, it will appear sometime. You, discerning reader, can read about it now though.
Many things are coming to an end at the faux-bohemian College Sunrise: not just the education of a motley bunch of multi-national teenagers, but also the marriage of the proprietors, Rowland and Nina, and Rowland’s grip on sanity. It also marks another ending too: Muriel Spark, at the age of 87, published this novel in 2004. It was her last work. It is a testament to her vitality that the novel is as witty, sly and mordantly funny as the books for which she is most famous, Memento Mori, and, of course, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
The major conflict in the novel is between Rowland, whose youthful success as a playwright he cannot now replicate, and Chris, precocious and faintly sinister red-haired prodigy, whose half-written novel about Mary, Queen of Scots triggers a bout of uncontrollable jealousy in the older man.
All this detail and much more is deftly delineated in the opening pages of this slight but immensely enjoyable novel. Spark’s reputation for a kind of elegant nastiness, most obviously on show in novels such as The Abbess of Crewe and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, is certainly sustained here. The lives of the characters are sharply observed, with the telling detail often being used to skewer the pretensions of her cast of minor European royals, county-set girls, ambitious youths and phlegmatic locals. The running joke throughout is that Rowland, consumed utterly by his jealousy of Chris, has writer’s block, but is obliged to teach creative writing.
Those reviews that claim this is a satire on the publishing industry seem wide of the mark to me. True, a couple of publishers are exposed as shallow and grasping, but then, no-one emerges as wholly pleasant, as Spark anatomises the rivalries, ambitions and narcissism of her entirely believable characters.
This novel is not great literature, yet it is compelling, a genuine page-turner that can be read in a day with comfort. What keeps you turning the pages is the sheer pleasure of discovering what the next development will be in this fascinating tale of obsession and jealousy.
A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi
This is not the sort of book I would usually read, but since I was going to be in Tuscany for seven days, I thought it seemed an appropriate travelling companion. Evidently, it’s a sequel to her A Thousand Days in Venice, and there are other volumes on Umbria and Sicily- so you can see a pattern, no? In the Venice volume, this American-Italian gourmet journalist of a certain age meets, falls in love with, and marries Fernando, a Venetian banker. The sequel chronicles their new life in a Tuscan village. It’s a romanticised version of Tuscany, to be sure, and the heavy emphasis on the food of the region contributes to the production of a bucolic utopia only occasionally darkened by the intrusions of modern life.
Having made a leap into the dark by deciding to forge a new life in Tuscany, the couple immediately become the gastronomic heart and soul of the village, a fixture at the Bar Centrale, and enthusiastic preservers and revivers of old Tuscan customs. Their main ally in this project is a kind of village elder called Barlazzo whose knowledge is apparently infinite- he becomes their guide.
It’s an entertaining journey, following the rustic rituals of the calendar, interspersed with recipes that, to this vegetarian seem somewhat long on preparation and short on consumption. My favourite was a leg of pork marinaded in three bottles of wine and cooked over seven days in a specially built outdoor oven. Life’s too short.
The author, clearly a somewhat head-in-clouds romantic, veers off from her account of the ways of the Tuscan peasant occasionally to indulge in the kind of soul searching often to be found in those “follow your dream” life coaching manuals beloved of Americans. These passages are rather cloying, but they are compensated for by the pervasive presence of Barlazzo, for me the hero of this book. It is his dark secret that provides a teasing thread through the narrative.
Barlazzo’s status as the village chieftain (de Blasi calls him ‘the duke’) is undisputed, and he is at the heart of every culinary activity. He also provides the historical and cultural context in not entirely credible style when, for no apparent reason, he decides to recount the history of Tuscany in guide book fashion. These sections are clunky, and although the context is useful, I don’t see why de Blasi couldn’t have told us in her own voice.
The book is published here by Virago, once fiercely feminist but now just another imprint of the giant Hachette empire. The text is, as is the way of things these days, resolutely American, so the usual linguistic differences occur- rigor, clamor, practicing, fall and so on. Less acceptable, it seems to me, is the use of ‘sharecroppers’ for the Tuscan tenant farmers, and ‘unphased’ for ‘unfazed’. 
It’s an enjoyable read, especially if, like I did, you read it whilst gazing out over a beautiful Tuscan valley as pictured above. It’s educational too, as even herbivores are provided with some useful recipes. And now I can pronounce ‘bruschetta’ correctly.
Gruaniad in shock horror
The Guardian has a feature where readers say how wonderful the paper is. It’s usually either someone who has read the paper man and boy for fifty years, or some youngster who says how he picked up a copy in an idle moment, and abandoned the Daily Telegraph, or the Neasden Gazette, or whatever, on the spot. It’s not particularly edifying, and a bit pointless, since, because it’s printed in the Guardian, it’s unlikely to convince non-readers to switch. The second group is presumably the demographic that the Guardian is trying to attract with its Saturday Guide, in which events are listed, and associated articles are printed. One section is on Clubs, and I don’t mean the Athenaeum or Whites- I mean ones where rare groove trance grunge garage house- or whatever it is – is played. Given the average Guardian reader is distinctly middle-aged, I wonder who they think reads these pages. I do use the listings bits, but this week my attention was drawn to the opening page, which attempts to dissect a current TV commercial.This week’s was about an advert for Northampton University, but also contains a gratuitous attack on my place of work, Edge Hill University.
It’s the worst kind of lazy journalism. The author, one James Donaghy, has decided, on no evidence at all, that Edge Hill’s degrees are worthless, and that anyone who goes there is an idiot. I think he’s trying to be funny, but it’s hard to say, so puerile is his prose. A sample: “Too thick to get into a real uni? Come to Edge Hill University where we will ruin your life with a meaningless qualification, rubbish social scene and low quality sex and drugs”. (But see update at the end of this post) Now, I suppose one could say, well, this guy is obviously a complete tosser so why bother even acknowledging him? If he’d published this in some grotty little internet forum, I would- but he’s published it in the paper I read every day, a serious national newspaper, whose readers will include many potential Edge Hill students and their parents. It’s easy enough to refute his pathetic drivel- any serious examination of the progress at Edge Hill over recent years will confirm this- we were shortlisted for the Times Higher’s University of the Year award last year, and there’s endless material available to show that we have an excellent reputation in our field. But Donaghy isn’t interested in facts. And that’s really my point. Famously, CP Scott, the guiding light of the Guardian, said that “comment is free” as the Guardian blog pages confirm on a daily basis- but the second part of his statement was “…but facts are sacred” . Donaghy’s vile little piece sets out consciously to ignore the facts, in the name of humour- but I’m afraid it fails there, because it just isn’t funny.
Donaghy appears to be a freelance, who runs a website. It’s not an edifying read. Those of a nervous disposition should look away now as I give you a sample of his marvellous wit:
Imagine it. It is December 2001. You are Spencer McCallum, Keeley Hawes’s newly acquired husband. You couldn’t be happier….Update: in the original post, I quoted a lot more of this, but I think it’s sullied my blog enough now. Go to the website for the full experience, but take a shower afterwards.
Brilliant, eh? There’s loads more like this. Why let this man loose in the pages of the Guardian? Well, presumably because the Graun wants to attract the kind of readers who like this sort of thing – the same reason they are increasingly covering the vacuous lives of alleged celebs, and dumbing down all over the place. And to do this, they are employing people such as Donaghy. Well, I’m afraid the schoolboy pottymouth “humour” has made me consider whether I need to part with my cash every day for this stuff- and since I can get the diminishing amount of readable material on the net anyway, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. So if the Guardian want a column on why a former reader has stopped reading, I’ll be happy to provide it. This stuff is not big, not clever, and not funny. The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust. They have betrayed the principles of that great editor, and lost me as a reader.
Update: the reference to Edge Hill has now been removed…
Bog people, Rosencrantz and a fake grave
To Aarhus for the 9th international ESSE conference.’Er indoors accompanied me to this lovely city in Denmark, and we had a great time, both academically and socially. Aarhus has a very pleasant feel to it, and we certainly intend to be back in the future. You can get a flavour of what we saw from the flickr stream on the right.
Highlights included Den Gamle By, or the Old Town, where you can wander about the 17th century buildings; the buzz of the cafes and bars on Aboulevarden; and the Museum at Moesgård where the Grauballe Man is exhibited. This was a really impressive place, and the story of Grauballe Man, and other peat bog sacifices is told very clearly. The exhibit is displayed brilliantly, and I was reminded of how disappointed I was with Manchester Museum’s recent Lindow Man exhibition, which focuses, for reasons that escape me, on the lives and times of the people who found it in the sixties. Seamus Heaney’s poem about Grauballe Man conveys some of the impact of the sight of this man, apparently sacrificed to the gods of the bog two thousand years ago.
We also went on an organised trip to Rosenholm, castle residence of the Rosencrantz family. There’s no real Hamlet conection, though the guide told us that a member of the family and his friend Guildenstern were reportedly in London in the 1590s. The family was very aristocratic, and that’s reflected in the grandeur of the castle. It was occupied by the family until relatively recently, and is now run by a trust. As part of the trip we were taken to an unremarkable mound where a stone with a poem about Hamlet is located. It’s not Hamlet’s grave, but is roughly where it might have been, according to the 1930s councillors who wanted to drum up a little tourist custom.
Did I learn any Danish? No- everybody, but everybody, speaks excellent English. I did note the connection between the By (pronounced Bu) of Den Gamle By and the Orkney word Bu, meaning place of dwelling. On the academic front, there was much of interest, but I’ll save that for another post.
Penelope Fitzgerald
Good news that Penelope Fitzgerald now has a permanent space on the web, and a little shameful that the originators are American- why couldn’t we manage it in Britain? Well, I suppose the web knows no boundaries, and it is an excellent site- congratulations to those who put it together. It’s curious, as Dovegreyreader says, how PF has never had the kind of reputation that her work deserves. I hope this will be the start of an upswing in her fortunes. It would help if the US press would review her letters!
Powers of 10
This film was made by the Eameses thirty-one years ago. I thought they made chairs…
Fascinating, and remarkable to think that it’s three decades since it was made. Not sure about the cheesy organ though, even if it is by Elmer Bernstein.
Little Monsters
I suppose the way I encountered Charles Lambert’s excellent debut novel Little Monsters is emblematic of how the interweb works these days. I hadn’t read a review, despite my voracious appetite for the book pages of the proper papers, but came across Charles’s engaging blog, which in turn led to some correspondence. The upshot is, I have had the privilege of reading a brilliant novel, and now Charles has very kindly agreed to a kind of long distance Q and A session, which I will be including in the new e-journal I am co-editing at Edge Hill. As we speak, Charles is eating pork pies in Wolverhampton, apparently, but when he returns to his lovely home in Italy, I hope to do the email interview. With luck, that will be available in September via Edge Hill’s web site.
The novel is a study of damaged people, but also touches on the possibilities of human renewal in the face of what used to be called man’s inhumanity to man. The opening sentence has already lodged itself in my consciousness as one of the most startling and arresting I’ve read: “When I was thirteen my father killed my mother.” I still think Burgess’s opening line in Earthly Powers is my favourite, but this is now a high new entry on the chart.
The central character and narrator, Carol, deals with the traumatic events of her childhood, and her exile to the loveless home of her aunt, by reinventing herself. The narrative switches from the memories of an adolescence growing up in the pub owned by her aunt and her Polish refugee husband in the sixties, to the contemporary setting of the camp for asylum seekers in Italy where the present day Carol works. Lambert’s prose is delicate and nuanced, and one of the delights of the novel is seeing how each narrative strand informs the other, through the repetition and variation of images and references. I was particularly struck by the use of what pompous academics would call tropes of flight, used by the author to link the strands and the characters. It is a beautifully realised novel, and one which manages to deal with very big issues on a human scale. I loved it.
Charles writes about it here, and there are reviews by John Self here and Scott Pack here. Oh, and now I know what Pokemon means, so it’s educational too…