This again

Really that is enough enough about Twitter now. Something that is not an original idea (and which I have moaned about before) has become a vitally important piece of news content.

They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature.

Oh sweet mother of fuck, protect us from these charlatans and bullshitters. If this is a cynical cash-in then fair play to them, I just don't see why it warrants free advertising. If it is in anyway serious then things are worse that I feared. To repeat myself, this is not an original idea, it is a fun parlour game that should not be repackaged and foisted upon the gullible nor used to appeal to the worst qualities of the verbally incontinent, the vapid and the self-obsessed.

One thing that worries is the fashionable delusion in all sorts of media circles that words, language and literature must now be reduced to mere "content" – a thing that has no intrinsic merit in itself, but which can be packaged, marketed and judged on its ad-generating powers. In other words, a triumph of the bullshitters which will seriously degrade culture, literature and thought.

------

Add journalism to that list too. There are some people who give every impression that the most important thing about the Iranian revolution is that it's on Twitter. Well no it isn't actually, though it's one faddish way of getting some people's voices heard; after all, there are multiple ways in which the net has allowed information to leak out - Facebook and Fark (of all things) have got in on the act, so too YouTube.

The trouble with the tweets from Tehran is that the stew of rumour and misinformation can obscure as much as it can enlighten. (As illustrated here - note too the claim that Moldova's authorities used Twitter to sew confusion and misinformation among the protesters there). Oh and the fact that the death of the People's Pederast has overwhelmed Twitter (sorry Iranians, you're already last week's news). There is no substitute for having proper journalists, who know the territory and the people, on the ground trying to sift through the mass of claim and counter-claim and give an accurate reflection of what is really going on. (An impossible task, of course, but one can make a decent stab at it).

I wonder if this confusion between the means and ends doesn't date back to the Reformation and the role of the printing presses in spreading Protestant ideas. Without denying the importance of technology in spreading ideas, I don't think the existence of the printing press itself explains why the Lutherans succeeded where the Hussites or the Lollards (for example) failed.

In revolutions the means in which the message has been spread was never as important as the message itself. In other words, a printing press is no substitute for having a Luther, a Milton or a Jefferson to hand; or a Lenin for that matter. If the Iranian revolution doesn't have a clearer message that a random sequence of 140-character comments, I very much fear it will not succeed.

PS: The following rather illustrates the point.

British homewares retailer Habitat apologized on Wednesday after ads for the store appeared on Twitter tagged with words linked to the Iranian election crisis.

Some Twitter users became angry after the upmarket store's messages turned up in searches for topics such as "Iran" and "Mousavi," the name of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Events, hijacked by bullshit merchants online.

Trollied Tuesday on the telly

Spectacular drunkenness, like all vocations, requires a certain artistry. One could say the same about broadcasting, I suppose. In any case, broadcasting while blootered is one of those things that, when done properly, enters the realm of the sublime.

The Guardian's Organ Grinder has a run-down with some fine anecdotes and footage (the audio of Lt Cmdr Thomas Woodroofe's glorious "the fleet's lit up" broadcast is well worth a listen if you haven't heard it before.)

Here's a personal favourite that was missed from the Organ Grinder list: Serge Gainsbourg meeting the young Whitney Houston on French television. ("Sometimes ee's a beet drunk you know.") It has everything you could want from the human drama: comedy, farce, passion, romance and the tragedy of his eventual rejection.

You see, for the public drunkard going on telly while trollied is the ultimate performance; one that subverts the established order of things reveals profound truths about the artist and life itself. As the following vignette about Brendan Behan following one especially paralytic appearance demonstrates:

Meanwhile the writer was congratulated on the street for his performance long after the event. "Good on yer, you was properly pissed on TV last night," opined one literary buff, while another claimed he had understood every mumble Behan had made, but "hadn't a clue what that bugger Muggeridge was on about".

Sackville Street regained

Tomorrow is Bloomsday in which scores of silly sods descend on Dublin dressed in Edwardian costume to reenact various scenes from Ulysses. To make the sorry business worse they don't even do the thing whole-heartedly: a proper reconstruction would see them jerking themselves off on the beach while leering at a sexually precocious young floozy, getting into a fight in a pub with a GAA fan about anti-Semtism and finishing the whole thing off in a brothel somewhere in the northside of Dublin.

Admittedly there might be logisitical problems with some of these (the days in which Monto was Europe's largest red-light district are long gone) and the gardaí might try and spoil the fun; but I reckon they are not insurmountable. And surely if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing properly.

For one thing it might help rescue Joyce's novel from the poseurs and academics. Becuse no amount of fannying about in Edwardian dress in modern-day Dublin will get you to the heart of the place Joyce was trying to recreate. A new book by Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, surely has a right idea; to offer us a guide to a half-familiar place the better to uncover its hidden byways and mysteries. Kiberd himself notes the supreme irony that:

The book has become a notoriously incomprehensible bore, almost wholly the property of academic Joyceans, and is seldom if ever read by anyone not forced to the task. (Surely an exaggeration?) As he sums up: “A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.”

The only solution is to read the damn thing: just because it requires a bit of effort doesn't mean it won't be enjoyable. Admittedly as an experimental novel, some parts of the experiment are more successful than others; but I would endorse Kiberd's approach. It's explained more fully in a piece in The Times here.

It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people. The more snobbish modernists resorted to difficult techniques in order to protect their ideas against appropriation by the newly literate masses; but Joyce foresaw that the real need would be to defend his book and those masses against the newly illiterate specialists and technocratic elites.

If you haven't visited the Dublin of 1904 before, give it a chance. Best of all, like Joyce himself, there is no need to be physically present in the modern Irish capital.

Could everyone shut about Twitter now please?

A few weeks ago I remember saying (this was in real life, there's no mention of it on the blog) that it was only a matter of time before some cretin tried to rewrite Ulysses via Twitter (possibly as life on Bloomsday). Sure enough:

"Maybe we are only just beginning to appreciate the potential of Twitter as an art form," he said.

[Tim] Collins, whose The Little Book of Twitter is published this week, said it was ironic that the novel he had most trouble shortening was Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, which is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that has much in common with many Twitter updates.

Some examples:

Ulysses

jamesjoyce: Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.

How stunningly banal. In a way, though, it's quite an achievement to miss the point of both Twitter and literature. Of the two I far prefer the latter - obviously - whereas the former seems to have passed its high watermark. Not that I object to the idea of laconic literary summaries - some of you may remember my six-word game. The point is that it's a fun parlour game that tells about the reader and how they perceive a book. And to try and condense everything into an ultra-laconic form, all the damned time, rapidly becomes intolerable.

In the case of Twitter: it's a great example of how just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should. The compulsion to reduce everything, to simplify and to always be instantaneous is going too far. Those who wish to reduce everything to series of tweets are either reducing their own capacity for profound thought, or were incapable of it in the first place.

There has to mental space for longueurs; for slow, considered thought, silence and reflection. You may regard my intermittent silences on this blog as a service in that regard. (You may also regard it as bone idleness, of course, but I like to demonstrate how idleness can be a virtue).

More generally I am coming round to the view that a lot of the contemporary technological fads have passed their high watermark. Far too much stuff out there: far too little worth bothering with. Most of its free, of course, but that's pretty much what its worth. (I include supposedly commercial operations in this; self too of course).

When critics disagree, the blogger is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All blogging is quite useless.

Measuring out life in coffee spoons

Can Gordon Brown's stint at Number 10 be explained entirely through the medium of the poetry of TS Eliot? The Macavity jibe has long been a popular way of describing his habit of vanishing from view when there's rough work to be done and, of course, for many hacks the poems about cats are about the extent of their knowledge of Eliot's work.

But Andrew Grice in the Indie today makes a manful extent at extending this modernist approach to political commentary with a piece on the theme of April as Brown's cruellest month; albeit he - or his editors - resist the obvious and crass course of directly comparing the economy with the waste land itself. Still, it is something of the nature of that poem and its endlessly allusive nature which ensures there is no shortage of passages one could apply to the present day. However, since Eliot's source material itself is so rich, rather than re-echoing Dante, Baudelaire or Petronius, say, I should prefer to quote them directly.

I confess that nothing in the first two strike me as immediately apposite (except perhaps the section in Purgatorio where failed rulers are sent to do penance); but the epigram taken from the Satyricon has some resonance. In political terms Brown is the withered, shrivelled Sybil suspended in a bottle longing for death.

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.

But as for Brown and his diminishing band of "loyal" followers (caveat: I would not be surprised were Ed Balls to deliver the final blow to his old mentor - "et tu fatty?"), there is a much more obvious choice of poem: The Hollow Men.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
...
                                
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Bonus random and entirely irrelevant fact: as part of his final exams at Oxford WH Auden was asked to write about one contemporary poet. He chose TS Eliot. Unfortunately for Auden none of the dons were familiar with Eliot's work; and when one of them spotted that his name was an anagram of "toilets" they concluded it was some undergraduate prank. Auden received a third.

Worse than a crime, a mistake

There is one thing to be said for smear tactics, spin and the other political black arts: they can be extremely effective. What Derek Draper and Damian McBride were plotting was straight out of the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove play book. (Especially the stuff about Frances Osborne's mental health and the suggestion that the Cameron family would be targeted).

The downside is, of course, that people will hate you for using these tactics. And they only work if you're smart enough not to get caught. As it is: I refer you to my comments about there being nothing worse than looking sleazy and ridiculous. I was not quite right: looking malevolently vile and simultaneously displaying the astuteness of Frs Ted and Dougal takes quite a lot of beating.

But while Draper and McBride receive a richly deserved ordeal by media I don't think it changes much. It does reinforce the impression that Brown and his acolytes are not best suited to lead the country, but I think most people had come to that conclusion already, including the smarter and more principled elements of the Labour party. (For the avoidance of doubt I would include Blair and co in the 'more principled' list; you can decide for yourself how well that reflects on Brown).

However, there is one aspect to this story that has caught my eye. Damian McBride is only 34.

What? He looks about 50, like the sleaziest, clapped out, most corrupt, thuggish and self-important, third-rate west coast of Scotland Labour councillor. A cardiac in need of arrest.

How to do you get to look so seedy, dissipated and unhealthy in such a space of time? God knows, I'm a similar age and I've tried but clearly I have led a life of comparative virtue and clean-living. (I now feel much better about myself for seeing his bloated, bloodshot mug across the papers).

For lovers of literature it has always been fun to imagine how the picture of Dorian Gray would have looked. I think I have an idea now.

Ineluctable modality of lying

Some kind of survey: most people lie about reading books they haven't read.

Why?

To impress people.

No, why?

Is there any evidence this approach has worked? Are there women out there who dream of being wooed by someone who has read Ulysses? Are there men who could never love someone who has not read 1984? Has anyone ever decided that someone was, in fact, less than the total tosser they appeared to be because they had read the Bible cover to cover?

Lying about things you have read, but do not want to admit to having done so, that I could understand. Readers with impressive memories might recall that there are those who would take against a Flashman fan. More generally, being over-read may make one appear a dweeb; the sort who would bang on about modernist classics or lengthy Russian potboilers. A friend of mine was once approached by a bar maid in a pub in Dagenham while he was flicking through a book - Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes. (NB: it was mine. I was in the gents at the time). "What's that you're reading?" she asked him. "A cultural history of Russia," he replied. "What's wrong with you?" she asked. "Why can't you read things that normal people read, like Martina Coles?" He could not answer.

Don't forget the fun of celebrating the gaps in one's own knowledge.

And did those sweet

Since it's Valentine's Day (oh, I only just noticed) here is the best poem ever about love. I wouldn't stick it on a card, mind.

The Clod and the Pebble.
William Blake

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

NB: one small and relatively unimportant point, but it interests me – interesting capitalisation.

Severe Burns unit

Poor old Robert Burns. It's bad enough that in his lifetime that "heaven taught ploughman" was patronised and sentimentalised in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh – the kind of treatment that dulled his creative edge. It is, however, a particular misfortune that he's suffered from a similar fate in death too.

Much of his legacy - in the Anglophone world at least - has always been locked in the prison of kitsch nationalism, bound with tartan fetters and caged with bars of shortbread. This year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, has caused an especially severe outbreak since this anniversary forms the centrepiece of the Homecoming -

Homecoming Scotland 2009 is an events programme celebrating Scotland's great contributions to the world. In 2009 join us to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth, Scottish contributions to golf & whisky, plus our great minds and innovations and rich culture and heritage. [all bits in bold sic]

Just give me the whisky and let me blot out the rest of it please. It's a sorry fate for any poet to become the focal point of some type of vainglorious national branding effort. Burns suppers, which should be reaching their apogee tonight, are fair enough if you like that sort of thing (I can't really criticise anything that's mainly an excuse to knock back the single malts, though if people are foolish enough to eat haggis just because Burns wrote a poem about it then that's their look out); but it can all so easily become overly sentimentalised.

It's not that Burns is Scotland's only, or even its pre-eminent poet. (After all, one could make a decent case for Byron, born just three decades later, as being a type of Scotsman. Certainly he was the superior writer, though no one really holds Bryon suppers in which people drink wine from monks' skulls and fornicate wildly, do they? Nor for that matter does anyone think to commemorate Burns's peers like Blake or Coleridge by sitting naked in the garden seeing visions of angels or lounging around in an opium-induced paralysis of existential despair). As for other unquestionably Scottish poets, the anonymous balladeers who wrote the likes of The Daemon Lover, Sir Patrick Spens and the Twa Corbies are, to my mind, the country's greatest.

But that's hardly the point. Of course there is an overt patriotism to some of Burns's poems, although it's pretty anachronistic to use an 18th century writer as a vehicle for modern-day nationalism. It's little wonder that for some the temptation to sneer becomes overwhelming: whether it be Simon Heffer's cartoonish Jock-bashing (although all credit to him for spotting the merits of Dunbar and Henrysoun) or Michael Fry's recent complaint that Burns was a drunken, racist philanderer and is no role model for the Scots. Fry's mistake, confusing the worth of man with that of his art, is a common enough one but it's no less annoying for that. Worse, it is akin to the pernicious idea that Burns's contemporaries held that his humble origins gave his lyrics a sort of authenticity or realness that gave them an especial merit.

It was probably his misfortune to coincide with the first flowerings of the Romantic movement; it was an era when works like the Lyrical Ballads attempted to simulate the type of earthy, natural qualities that were seen as being innate to Burns. It was nonsense, of course, the effect and not the origin is the important thing.

The same applies, especially so, to Burns. That his poems are the work of a humble Scots ploughman writing in a form dialect are incidental to his true worth as a poet. It is the power and directness of his lyrics, an artform that requires simplicity and directness, that make his poems live in the imagination of the reader. That it was what won the hearts of his early readers, it is why his poems are still worth bothering with today.

Oh wert thou in the cauld blast,
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee;
Or did misfortune's bitter storms
Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,
Thy bield should be my bosom,
To share it a', to share it a'.

Or were I in the wildest waste,
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,
The desart were a paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there.
Or were I monarch o' the globe,
Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign,
The brightest jewel in my crown
Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.

In that spirit, if people wish to dress all this up with the tartanry, the sentimentality and petty nationalism then fair enough, even if the man o' independent mind looks and laughs at a' that. However, I think we can all agree that the bright idea someone had 100 years ago – of holding a teetotal Burns supper – is the worst of all possible worlds.

All morality is quite useless

An addendum to the previous. There is one especially corrosive and long-established form of idiocy: the desire to impose one's moral views on everyone. Lamentably it has always been popular. Of course, the people who do this sort of thing usually fail to distinguish between morals and ethics, and they are usually wrong about whatever it is that they wish to moralise about, but these are mere details beside the fact that such sanctimoniousness is unutterably annoying.

Take, if you like, this week's news that some people in Worthing are seeking to remove a plaque commemorating Oscar Wilde.

Chris Hare... points out that Wilde, a homosexual man married with children, had a documented taste for seducing teenage boys. At least one of his victims, a 14-year-old newspaper delivery boy named Alphonso, had to flee Worthing when the scandal of his relationship with Wilde became public knowledge. "This role model, a man preying on teenage boys with little or no education - I don't think that would be regarded as heroic today."

This is the perfect type of a perfect preposterousness. It is exquisite and leaves one wanting more. And, of course, it encapsulates the trouble with moralisers in one anecdote. One would not regard that sort of thing as heroic today, of course, but Wilde lived in a different age when sexual mores were rather different to our own. The age of consent for girls was 13, there was no age of consent at all for homosexual sex and lesbianism was not illegal because, the story goes, Queen Victoria refused to believe such a thing existed.

Besides: Wilde is not honoured for being a fat old queen. Sex with teenagers was not what bothered the Victorians at all: it was the homosexuality. That no one would really expect to be taken seriously if, today, they objected to honouring Wilde on the grounds he was posing as a somdomite highlights the folly of trying to impose contemporary moral values on the past. Were Hare's argument to be taken to its extreme, we should revile Plato and a host of other Greeks for their advocacy of pederasty. (Admittedly there has been the odd prep school classics teacher who has taken Grecian mores rather too much to heart, but that hardly detracts from the main point).

News of Wilde's sexual inclinations

came as a great shock to the Victorians

More lamentably, the inability to distinguish between the artistic work and the person who produced it shows a woefully distorted set of perspectives. It is wrong-headed, it is philistine and shows an inability to distinguish the valuable from mere dross. One could see this, to an extent, in some of the responses to Harold Pinter's death. It is not that people criticised his political views (which were admittedly asinine) nor that they were a factor in considering the man as a whole. For that matter there was nothing wrong with criticising those political views immediately after his death: it's the inability to judge his plays as plays that disturbs.

Admittedly, Pinter's is a fairly trivial example. But the attitude is, I think, a dangerous one too. The fact that Wilde's work was ignored for decades because of the desire to allow moral considerations to trump everything else should cause the modern day moralists to pause before we head down the path of ignoring work by people of whom we do not approve. Totalitarians, both political and religious, have always been rather keen on this after all, and taste and decency are but staging posts along the road of silence, censorship and suppression.

Let's let Oscar sum up:

I never came across in anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.

PS: Is this effort by a contemporary pederast so terribly wrong because of the values espoused, or is it the fact that such a terrible-looking old roué singing a bloody awful song presents such an unpleasant spectacle? I shall have to listen to some music by that vile anti-Semite Wagner to recover.

Trollied Tuesday: Ice in the heart

Here's that rarest of things, an article in the Telegraph I whole-heartedly commend. It's Christopher Howse on the joys of cold, properly cold weather. Here's just a sample:

But a walk in the winter woods is more than health therapy or a chance to stock up on firewood. At best it is an opportunity to discover that sharp, stark weather is not bad weather. It is the way things are, and should be made the best of. That is what the Book of Common Prayer implies by its biblical canticle of comic praise: "O ye Frost and Cold, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever."

Just so, there is something invigorating, life-affirming about feeling the smart of an icy blast on one's skin, to starting the blood with a walk through the snow. In similar fashion, when it gets very cold I start to yearn for extremely cold drinks.

It might be an ice cold lager - German for preference; a good dry white; maybe even, now that Christmas and New Year are safely past, a fizz. Best of all though is to copy the Russians. Now they do now how to drink in cold weather (if one ignores the whole getting so paralytically drunk that you fall down in the snow and freeze to death thing). I always like to keep a bottle of vodka in the freezer, now is the time to remove it.

A quite shot of the stuff neat will chill and then thrill. When drunk in the outdoors its effect is enhanced, by embracing the cold (internalising one might say were it not a little too literal) you'll come alive in a vivid, bright winter's day.


Really, the closer to freezing the drink the better (Absolut Zero, if you like). Ideally you should clutch in a gloved hand a glass made of ice from which to down a shot or two of pepper vodka (NB it also goes well in bloody mary). No better combination of ice and fire exists. It is an element combination worthy of the frost-bound sensuality of Keats's The Eve of St Agnes.

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,	235
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex’d she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress’d
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
Blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain;	240
Clasp’d like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

NB: St Agnes Eve is Jan 20. I have no doubt that, in a couple of weeks, if I were to go breaking into girls' bedrooms bedrooms to watch them as they sleep, the police will readily appreciate the aesthetic intention behind my actions.

EDW: John Milton

Coming slightly late to the great man's 400th birthday party, but there has been a superfluity of comment on his works – with commentators across the board, from Theo Hobson and Terry Eagleton in the Guardian, through Boyd Tonkin in the Independent to AN Wilson (since disembowelled) and Simon Heffer (sounding a little surprisingly sympathetic towards what Marxists used to call the English Revolution) in the Telegraph – all eager to claim the man for their own worldview.

I don't wish to add to this babel. Not least because if you don't appreciate his importance, I doubt I'll be the one to change your minds, and if you do then there's no point in boring you with it. Besides, the best line about him remains Blake's observation that he was of the Devil's party, but did not know it.

Satan is key to it all, of course, the defiance of the perpetual tyrannies of existence, the unfulfilled and unfulfillable aspirations (the perpetual fate of revolutionaries that; Milton was no great lover of the Cromwellian oppression that replaced the Stuart one), are all there – along with the Charles I-like over-inflation of one's own importance and powers, the unreasonable self-righteousness. It's the human condition captured in the supposed arch-enemy of man.

If a shower of contemporary hacks can reflect these contradictions, then so can some of the great poets who followed Milton: without Milton I doubt we should have Byron's Vision of Judgment or Baudelaire's Litanies de Satan. No Blake either, of course. Even if one dismisses the preposterous notion that Milton was better than Shakespeare, this range of influence does support the case for regarding Paradise Lost as the true English national epic (then again, why do the English need one?).

Although I most often use the term puritan as one of abuse, Milton represents another, better side to that complex skein of non-conformist thought – independent-minded, inquiring, free-thinking, unbending and unwilling to put conscience to one side. In other words, a libertarian if not a libertine. Besides that, one cannot wholly dislike a man who spent several years travelling, studying at university and a further six doing little except reading books in preparation for his career as a poet. That's the sort of work ethic I admire.

As for the poetry itself: he might go on a little for modern tastes (that's what you get copying Roman epics rather than the Greek lyricists and epigrammists) but there's a grandeur matched with a sinuous subtlety in those mighty lines.

Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering: but of this be sure--
To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which ofttimes may succeed so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destined aim.
But see! the angry Victor hath recalled
His ministers of vengeance and pursuit
Back to the gates of Heaven: the sulphurous hail,
Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid
The fiery surge that from the precipice
Of Heaven received us falling; and the thunder,
Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep.
Let us not slip th' occasion, whether scorn
Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe.
Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
The seat of desolation, void of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend
From off the tossing of these fiery waves;
There rest, if any rest can harbour there;
And, re-assembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair.

Just don't, for goodness sake, bother with Samson Agonistes.

Lyrical Ballads

A most amusing media catfight between Lily Allen and Marina Hyde has developed, in which the Guardian hack takes issue with a press release that rather incautiously refers to the singer as "the Wordsworth of the MySpace generation".

The two of them get stuck in in the comments, with Allen taking the spat to defcon two status by bringing up the Piers Morgan thing (scroll down here to find it). Defcon one would be… let's say it would certainly deleted by the Guardian's moderators.

Interestingly, the two also swap their views on Wordsworth: Lily likes Westminster Bridge, but Marina recommends the Prelude. Now never mind her alleged dealings with Piers Morgan: liking that particular bit of poetic frottage is a serious lapse of taste that diminishes someone's standing in my eyes. The Prelude is bloody awful: solipsistic, self-important and dull, dull, dull. Poetry has become ever more inward-looking, self-referential and utterly irrelevant ever since the publication of that wretched work; Wordsworth's true literary legacy.

Anyway, Marina Hyde's poor poetic judgment has also played her false with regard to her original sneer. The lyrics she chose to mock:

Now I lie here in the wet patch in the middle of the bed,
I'm feeling pretty damn hard done by, I've spent ages giving head

are actually Wordsworthian, in their own way. Not so much the subject matter admittedly (it's Byronic, sort of, but without the wit and subtlety). The rhymes, however, are all too worthy of Wordsworth's output (if not Southey's). Compare it with these gems for instance.

And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry,
I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide. (The Thorn)

Or His master's dead – and no one now
Dwells in the halls of Ivor
Men, dogs and horses all are gone
He is the sole survivor. (Simon Lee).

Where is the Coleridge of the MySpace generation?

Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen…
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.

EDW: Oswald von Wolkenstein

Let's revisit Theo Hobson's ravings for a moment. In bemoaning the coarseness, violence and immorality of the James Bond series he complains that Bond debases the traditions of chivalry:

In reality chivalry is simply incompatible with sexual hedonism. The heroic knight of medieval epic is a warning against sexual adventurism: his conquests are not of women but of various temptations. Chivalry is a tradition that encourages us to admire the sublimation of male desire rather than its indulgence.

Ah the good old middle ages: a time of brotherly love, virtue, easy living and tolerance. No matter that the chivalric literature of the day was as much escapism as the Bond stuff: in the 20th/21st century people like to dream of transcending the constraints and moral codes of an ordered society and acting pretty much as they please; in the middle ages courtly literature allowed the aristocracy a constraints from a harsg, cruel life defined by service to one's lord. The Knights Errant of literary tradition, you see, can go off on a whim for whatever cause they please rather than being bound by their feudal obligations and women are transformed from being either peasant girls to be ravished or units of property to mysterious, pure damsels.

At least the latter is how, I assume Hobson sees women in medieval literature. Its all bollocks, of course, there are quite a few "favours" granted to the knights in courtly literature. But it's easiest to grasp how much of a fantasy chivalry is by looking at the lives of some of the real life poet knights. The obvious English example is Thomas Malory: who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, so tradition has it, while in prison for burglary, banditry and rape.

We don't know Malory's life story for sure, though, so let's go for an Austrian instead. The rather forbidding looking gent up top is Oswald von Wolkestein. He was something of a freebooter, travelling to the Holy Land, across southern Europe and Scandanavia. ("Gen Preussen, Littwan, Tartarei, Türkei, über mer, /gen Lampart, Frankreich, Ispanien mit zwaien küngesher /traib mich die minn auff meines aigen geldes wer.") You'll note he only has one eye, he lost that whilst having fun at a carnival, and spent much of his life feuding with his neighbours. He was also an accomplished poet, the last of the Minnesingers indeed, and an innovative composer.

Sadly I can't find any English translations of his poems, and I don't have one to hand, but his works give you a good flavour of the chivalric lifestyle. Ain guet geporen edelman, for instance, is a long litany of complaint about all the people who'd done him wrong, the misfortunes he'd suffered and includes the classic line "And then I got married just to make things worse." There are also love poems, of course, but many of the women encountered in his ballads are given the James Bond treatment; desires indulged rather than sublimated. In reality one suspects that he didn't indulge his desires as much as he would have liked to (does any man?) and so had to use his imagination instead.

Still, quite a fellow - and has a certain sense of style too (nice ermine that). I doubt Theo Hobson would have approved of him had they met.

Post Script: It's sometimes argued that the Age of Chivalry ended with Agincourt. Last week a group of eccentric Frenchmen tried to get the results retrospectively amended by charging the English with war crimes. Doubtless they would have been by modern standards, but that's the middle ages for you. The long tradition of holding up that era's mass slaughters as moral exemplars is far more pernicious than enjoying the adventures of a louche, fictional spy or a few legendary knights.

Trollied Tuesday: carpe diem vs financial tedium

Given the current financial turmoil, many of you may be tempted to turn to drink. As an investment, I mean. I was going to invest in cardboard boxes, braziers and real estate near railway bridges and trash heaps, but apparently booze can give you a much better return than the stock market or property. Or maybe not.

My view on wine as an investment is: well, if you're asking me for investment advice you deserve all you get. But the mindset of someone who would pay thousands for the finest wines known to humanity, solely with the intention of selling them on at a profit without ever tasting them is something I do feel able to comment on.

As anyone with even the most basic grasp of economics (that'd be me now) could tell you: the value you derive from a fine wine is not to be solely measure in terms of its future resale value – the pleasure you would derive from drinking it in suitable company must be factored in to the cost when you buy it. The fact that large chunks of the financial world are, apparently, given over to people who are, apparently, only able to see wine as another way of adding to a wealth they will never truly be able to enjoy is a perfect representation of the sort of sterile, self-defeating greed that has gotten us into this fine mess.

If you find yourself in possession of a good wine which is now ready to drink, the only sane advice is to enjoy it.

"How sweet is mortal Sovranty!"--think some:
Others--"How blest the Paradise to come!"
Ah, take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest;
Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the dawn of Nothing--Oh, make haste!

 How long, how long, in infinite Pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute?
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

As for the economy now, I shouldn't worry too much - the whole thing will probably end with us drinking the finest clarets and champagnes. Admittedly we'll be drinking them while standing around a brazier, having looted the bottles from the mansion of the last banker who has just been strangled with the entrails of the last trader. Still, I'll see you there.

Trollied Tuesday: In Search of One's Inner Flashman

Claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

You may well be familiar with Dr Johnson's quip already – it's certainly sound advice when it comes to sorting out the young fellows. However, you'll note his careful choice of words there: brandy may be a noble drink, imbued with heroic sentiments; it won't make you a hero, no matter how you aspire to it, though. Tempting as it is to speculate that drink could imbue you with particular qualities – heroism from brandy, boyishness from claret, manliness from port; we must accept that this is not so, and take a stiff drink to recover from the bitter knowledge that we cannot wash away our flaws so.

A good fictional example of this phenomenon is Sir Harry Flashman VC– arch bounder, bully and brandy swiller but, as he freely admits, an abject coward. Still, he is in his own way a great advertisement for the benefits of brandy. Less so is a real life example: Kim Jong-Il. The Dear Leader is a particular devotee of Hennessy (yes, I know I have elided the precise Cognac/brandy distinction; this is not a blog for drink-sodden train-spotters, I'm afraid.)

According to one recent estimate he gets through $650,000-worth of the stuff each year (then again, it's also been suggested recently that he's dead. I'd say check the drinks bill. If Hennessy is still shifting vast quantities of the stuff to Pyongyang, he's still alive. [Or there's a claque syphoning it off, I suppose]). Note this, though, that although Kim is a lover of the good things in life (fond of cinema, private railway travel, and has his own "Pleasure Brigade" of young women to attend to him – JFK would have been just the man to deal with him, wouldn't he?) he is a decidedly unheroic figure. Managing to be an utterly preposterous little man and, simultaneously, the pinnacle of the most monstrous and - potentially - dangerous tyranny on earth is not a good combination, nor much of an advertisement for the Hennessy brand.

And yet, it's possible that selecting the correct drinks will bring out the right elements in your character. Try being witty, subtle and profound while clutching a can of White Lightning if you doubt this. (You want Special Brew for that - says that puerile little corner of my mind that is possibly attributable to the claret I am drinking).

A deeper appreciation of brandy's profundity and sublime power may allow one to understand and develop the heroic elements of one's character, after all; as a moral education rather than a simple case of in vino veritas. Churchill was another funny little man with a privileged background and a taste for brandy, after all, yet he turned out rather better than Kim. It might be that he had an innate heroism, resolution, eloquence and foresight, which the correct dose of the correct brandy brought out; whereas Kim had an innate cowardice and degeneracy (don't we all?) which an injudicious and flashy consumption of expensive brandy drew out of him.

Alternatively, it may just be that one should avoid Hennessy and stick to other brands (or, if you wish to be literal-minded, shun the DPRK's mixture of mysticism and Stalinism and stick to liberal democracy).

The full relationship between drink and one's nature is a question for the philosophers ultimately. Do we all have it in us to be another Churchill, another Kim or even a real-life Flashman - or is it the brandy that makes us so? It's one that the likes of Socrates, Plato, Kant, Marx and Hume – all of whom were found of the dialectic method of arguing the toss over several drinks – would have been well-qualified to discuss.

Since they're all dead, however, we can outdo them in this at least. What drink would you choose to bring out a hitherto unexplored aspect of your nature?

Trollied Tuesday: an August Bank Holiday lark

Philip Larkin had it right, you know. How can you eulogise a lost idyll without reference to the the public house? A world of

dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist; and the pubs
Wide open all day. (MCMXIV)

Oh for such an age again, the reader is invited to think. It's worth noting that the restrictive licensing laws in England and Wales were introduced during the Great War as a ghastly expedient to stop munitions workers getting drunk (it could have been worse, I suppose; absinthe was made illegal in France after the troops at the front line over-indulged in the stuff). While life for most people may have improved immeasurably in the latter part of the 20th century, the retention of the licensing laws did not aid this process. (Tony Blair, incidentally, is to be commended for attempting to restore some measure of this ancient liberty).

Of course it lacks the pathos of the 'thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer' , but there is still something pre-lapsarian of the old world, an other Eden if you like, of freedom to drink as and when one pleases.

One man's freedom fighter is another's memoirist

Britain's 'youngest terrorist' jailed.

Not really, though.

Hammaad Munshi, the 18-year-old in question was 16 when he was arrested. He might be the youngest person convicted under the Terrorism Act, as the BBC claims, but to call him Britain's youngest terrorist (sorry 'youngest terrorist') is pushing it a bit.

Brendan Behan was also 16 when he was arrested, and convicted, of trying to blow up British war ships in Liverpool on an IRA mission. He even wrote an entertaining and heavily fictionalised memoir about his experience: Borstal Boy. His is an example these young jihadis would do well to follow.

Six-word classics

Further to the six-word short story challenge, and in particular Dominic's precis of Crime and Punishment in the comments, here's the follow-through: six-word summaries of the literary classics.

These are my first efforts, I daresay more will occur to me over time and – I hope – to you too. Consider this an open challenge – in the comments or your own blogs – to outdo me.

The Odyssey

Sorry I'm late. I got lost.

Hamlet

I should be King, shouldn't I?

Pride and Prejudice

'I won't. 'He's rich'. 'I will.'

The Brothers Karamazov

Guilt? Leave all that to God.

War and Peace

Napoleon invaded. But life goes on.

The Great Gatsby

I love her. Let's all party.

James Joyce and PG Wodehouse are proving especially tricky to do in this format. More to follow, no doubt.

Trollied Tuesday: Dylan and Caitlin Thomas

The pissed-up writers seam is always a reliable one to mine for something like Trollied Tuesday. When the writer in question's other half was someone he met in the pub (the Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia, in fact) it seems a bonus.

Apparently there is also some sort of film coming out about this pair, a fact that had pretty much passed me by until I came across this highly entertaining piece in the Mail (no, really) written by Caitlin's great-nephew. So with that in mind, let's have this pair of bohemian boozers this week.

I hope, but do not expect, that the film will include incidents such as the one with Caitlin knocking her hostess to the ground in an attempt to break into the drinks cabinet which had been specifically locked to stop her getting at the booze (this seems an appropriate response to such pointedly inhospitable behaviour, if you ask me). However, what's striking is that depsite such fine anecdotes, and this gem:

Caitlin herself was remarkably free of such bourgeois restraints. After all, when Caitlin and Nicolette's father walked out on the family, they were taken in by the notoriously promiscuous artist Augustus John. He became the children's unofficial stepfather - the other 'flamboyant father' in my grandmother's memoir - and had an affair with Caitlin when she was just 15.

From then on, Caitlin rarely seemed to pass up any sexual opportunity. Apparently she once had sex with 12 Irish labourers, one after the other, in the back room of a pub.

On hearing the news, one sanguine relative remarked: 'At least it wasn't 12 Welshmen.'

the two of them generally seem to have been a pain in the arse. It's true of most so-called 'hell-raisers', really, isn't it?; the fact that the hell they raise will be one of infinite boredom and egotism (more Huis Clos than Paradise Lost, in fact). The other problem with boorish and obnoxious behaviour from literary drunks is that it in all but a tiny handful of cases the drunken part inhibits or overshadows the writing part.

In the case of Dylan Thomas, this is partly his own fault. He was rather prone to self-aggrandising claims about his drinking. There is the legend that his last words, following an evening in the White Horse in Manhattan, were "I've just had 18 straight whiskys. It think that must be the record."

Lightweight.

Oh and the story isn't true – certainly they weren't his last words – and it's quite possible he had drunk less than the amount he claimed on the night in question. However the fact that so many people know it shows te dangerous of Thomas's brand of braggardly myth-making. In truth, Thomas probably wasn't really cut out for being a top-class drunk.* It's pretty obvious from looking at the photo that Caitlin could hold her drink far better than Dylan could – a fact which might explain many of their problems.

Anyway, far be it for me to pass judgment on someone who likes to pass the time in boozers in the company of drunken Irish girls with the morals of alley cats, but he might have been better off putting his genius into his art rather than his life.

For Dylan Thomas might make a list of great literary drunks, but he never quite developed his youthful promise as a poet to make it on the list of the 20th century's greatest poets.

Not quite, but it would be a shame to allow the boozing yarns to overshadow his writing entirely. There's definitely something there. Try reciting one his poems next time you are being ejected from a boozer. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night would be perhaps too obvious. Try something like this, rich with the cadances of the chapel, instead:

And death shall have no dominion
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone
They shall have stars at elbow and foot
Though they go mad they shall be sane
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not
And death shall have no dominion.

After the first drink there is no other.

* Another literary lush, Anthony Burgess, used to claim that the Welsh weren't really into drink – far preferring sex as their vice of choice – whereas with the Irish it was the other way round. This Hiberno-Welsh couple pretty much reverse the stereotype, however. Perhaps that what was what caused all the trouble. In truth, though, whatever validity there is in this stereotype – and there is some – it is generally applicable only to the men. (Burgess should have known that: his first wife was Welsh and drank herself to death).