Ian McEwan is patronisingly ill-read (and maybe should watch a film or two?)

Ian McEwan has written a new novel - Machines Like Me - that looks at the ethics around artificial intelligence. I haven't read the book and it might be utterly brilliant. What can't be left festering there, however, is McEwan dismissing 200 years of science fiction writing in one sentence:

McEwan has an abiding faith that novels are the best place to examine such ethical dilemmas, though he has little time for conventional science fiction. “There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.”

Seriously? What on earth does McEwan think Frankenstein - the seminal science fiction novel - is about if it isn't about "being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you"? This is the problem with literary novelists who discover SF and then pretend that nobody ever in the whole history of literature has ever considered those issues the oh-so-fucking-smartass-literary novelist wants to explore.

The contempt in McEwans' dismissal - "not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots" - shows a pathetic ignorance of science fiction. McEwan doesn't even seem to have got around to watching blockbuster SF movies - if he had, he'd have noticed that the whole premise of 'Bladerunner' was that it's hard to tell the difference between humans and humanity's machines. You'd have thought that, maybe - just maybe, McEwan might have run into the writing of Iain Banks at some point in his reading. Especially when he was planning to explore the ethics around artificial intelligence - something that's right bang in the middle of Banks' 'The Culture' series of novels.

I could go on, talk about Olof Stapledon, Brian Aldiss, John Brunner and new wave science fiction. Maybe mention the cyberpunk movement or cite Paolo Bacigalupi's 'Windup Girl'. But it is a fruitless task because I know that, at some point in the next year or so, some grand literary novelist will turn his or her hand to spec fiction and, in doing so, claim that what they're doing is finding some sort of new direction for novel writing rather than joining hundreds of other great writers who chose to create SF - not "conventional" SF (although some space opera is great) but thoughtful, intelligent examinations of the dilemmas given to humanity by the growth of technology and the pushed boundaries of science.

And the saddest thing is that, rather than acting to break down the chasm between SF and literary fiction, the work of a grandee like McEwan will be feted while commenters chitter around him agreeing - because they've never read any and SF is just Star Trek and Star Wars - that its good that real writers are looking at the ethics of AI.

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Philip Pullman wants to make more money - at book buyers expense

Writing books is a competitive business. There are uncountable aspiring novelists scribbling away at their masterwork while scraping a living in some dead end job (or so it seems). Even people who have completed a book and got the precious thing published soon find out that, after the initial buzz of giving your mum a copy, the reality of book sales is that most books...er...don't sell:

I went through the BookScan numbers for every fiction book listed on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014. I used 2014 instead of 2015 to make sure each book had at least 12 months of sales. No list is perfect, but the NYT list includes story collections and small press books alongside the big name literary authors and award contenders. 2014’s list includes names like Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, Marlon James, and David Mitchell as well as small press debuts by Nell Zink and Eimear McBride. It’s a good sampling of the “books that people are talking about” in the literary world.

The BookScan sales of those books literally ranged from 1,000 to 1.5 million, with an average (mean) of just over 75,000 copies sold per book. That 75k number is pretty skewed by the existence of Anthony Doerr’s runaway literary hit, All the Light We Cannot See, which sold over 1.5 millions of copies. (The next highest book was about 270,000.) If we remove the best and worst selling books on the list, we get a mean of 46,550 copies and a median of 25,000 copies.

These are the big books, the ones raved over by critics, featured in brainy magazine 'what you should read this summer' lists and chewed over on late night TV shows. So what does all this mean? You've guessed it - authors can't earn a living:

According to a survey of almost 2,500 working writers – the first comprehensive study of author earnings in the UK since 2005 – the median income of the professional author in 2013 was just £11,000, a drop of 29% since 2005 when the figure was £12,330 (£15,450 if adjusted for inflation), and well below the £16,850 figure the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says is needed to achieve a minimum standard of living. The typical median income of all writers was even less: £4,000 in 2013, compared to £5,012 in real terms in 2005, and £8,810 in 2000.

The result is that even those acclaimed, much-feted writers we see talked about in The Guardian and TLS have to have some other form of income. Here's Neal Stephenson (who does make a living from writing) on the issue:

I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

Now Stephenson was using this anecdote to explore the different way in which genre writers like him are treated compared to writers of literary fiction but it's a useful reminder that, without patronage, literature struggles. And for most writers - the ones like the writer Stephenson talked to - their income from writing is nice but not central to survival. Earning £11,000 is very nice bunce when you've £45,000 of tenured academic earnings.

All of which brings me to the Society of Authors - chaired by Philip Pullman (another successful genre writer) - and their complaining about discounting and bulk deals:

“I don’t like it when I see my books sold cheaply,” Pullman said. “But I’d like to think I’m speaking on behalf of all authors who are caught in this trap. It’s easy to think that readers gain a great deal by being able to buy books cheaply. But if a price is unrealistically cheap, it can damage the author’s reputation (or brand, as we say now), and lead to the impression that books are a cheap commodity and reading is an experience that’s not worth very much.”

This seems to me like a pretty crass argument designed entirely to protect the earnings of successful authors (and as an side effect the profits of publishers) rather than anything that will expand the market for literature. It essentially looks like people like Pullman - and Chocolat author, Joanne Harris (also quoted in the article) - are sticking two fingers up at book buyers in the interests of them making bigger royalties from their assured sales.

Going back to Neal Stephenson, we are reminded that it will still be patronage (in so far as a tenured academic position in creative writing or a writer in residence position can be called patronage) that drives literary fiction rather than gross sales. Cheaper books mean more people buy books, more people read books and the social value of literature is enhanced.

There's a sort of arrogance to Pullman's argument that something only has value if it is more expensive - for someone railing against 'market fundamentalism' it is doubly ridiculous as that 'price of everything, value of nothing' approach is usually directed at market fundamentalists! In the end the Society of Authors just want to fix the market for their members to make more money. And if books are more expensive we'll buy fewer of them - we'll buy Pullman's and Harris's latest but probably not the work of some new author we've not heard of.

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The Booker Prize isn't as important as a lot of folk think

Tim Worstall reports on a lefty professor's comments about the Booker Prize:

The Booker now has a stranglehold on how people think of, read, and value books in Britain. It has no serious critics. Those who berate its decisions about individual awardees (James Kelman’s prize back in 1994 prompted one judge to say it was “frankly, crap”) ritually add to its allure.

Thing is that, if we look at book sales in the UK, the Booker Prize is marginal at best. I remember reading a tale from SF writer Neal Stephenson where he talked about being at a literary event with a well-regarded writer of literary fiction. From memory it went something like this:

Writer: "So what do you do for a living?"

Stephenson: "I write"

It continued in the vein because the writer (a tenured professor at a good university) couldn't get to grips with the fact that Stephenson earned a very good living writing science fiction - indeed the Baroque Trilogy is one of the very best ever science fiction trilogies. All the writers this person knew had another job, most usually in or associated with a place of learning.

We need to remember that over half of book sales are children's books and non-fiction while 60% or more of adult fition sales are genre (crime, romance, fantast, science fiction, historical).

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What do you mean fairies aren't real, Professor Dawkins?

Fairy Sculptures, Cottingley

Richard Dawkins, High Priest of the New Atheists, has (or perhaps hasn't) been having a go a fairy tales:

Fairy tales are harmful to children because they “inculcate a view of the world which includes supernaturalism”, according to Professor Richard Dawkins.

Now part of me collapses in laughter at this statement since it is essentially the same as the desire by some over-enthusiastic Christians to ban Harry Potter because it has witches and bad stuff like that in the book. Or - and I wrote about this a bit ago - the campaign in the USA to ban Dungeons & Dragons. In the latter case, just as with Dawkins and his mates, with lurid tales of how D&D corrupted young people.

Now I'm sure that Dawkins didn't quite mean what he was saying (although this is very sloppy from a scientific literalist) - I'm sure he's not suggesting that Hans Christian Anderson's stories are torn from the shelves and burned or that age warnings should be attached to The Hobbit or to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But what this does reveal is that some people - Dawkins being one - seem incapable of understanding a different sort of reality. For them, the only reality in the reality of St Thomas - proved by thrusting the atheist arm elbow deep into the spear wound.

A while ago I was talking with my son (who as far as I know is an atheist) about the latest fantasy series he was reading and one passing comment was along the lines of: "it has an interesting magic system". As ever with alternative realities in fiction (which is all fairy tales are really), we are able to suspend disbelief so as to explore what that alternative reality might mean were it, so to speak, real. However, one of the consistent themes in such tales - whether a twelve volume fantasy blockbuster or one of those Grimm stories - is that magic and the use of magic has consequences (oddly enough this isn't the case with Harry Potter where magic seems mostly effortless and free of downside).

Thus, what we get from fairy tales is a lesson about the use of power. Whether the debate is about the use of wishes or the application of power in pursuit of vanity, the tales have a moral depth that, perhaps, Dawkins is missing in framing his criticism.  Indeed Dawkins cannot get beyond his conception of 'supernatural' in discussing the role of magic in stories - perhaps he should remember the words of hard SF writer, Arthur C. Clarke: 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Once we have crossed the bridge, in the manner of Piers Anthony, from Mundania to Xanth (and children are much better as crossing from real to fantasy and back) then we can explore the world of magic safely. The idea that this exploration is without critical thinking is again to misunderstand - the same questions, fears, challenges and moral dilemmas exist in the land of faerie as do in our dull old world. It's just that the system of magic - whatever form it might take - allows for a different response.

To take a stark example of how this works. In David Brin's 'The Practice Effect' he creates a world where things improve with use - so to make a spade you make something that looks vaguely like a spade and start using it to dig. The more you dig the better it gets as a tool. After many years use it becomes the spade tool-lovers would die to own. But beware, if you neglect its use it will deteriorate eventually returning to the original vaguely spade-like thing.

So, while Brin constructs a story round this concept (where the hero is a physicist), he also explores how society would be different if this 'practice effect' applied. On one level it's a good bit of (slightly sciencey) fantasy but it also asks how environment shapes moral behaviour or forms society - Brin has peasants parading around in fine clothes because they're made to do so by aristocrats who want to stop their wardrobes going off.

In the apparent world of Dawkins, children who immerse themselves in these fantastic worlds are being harmed. The nature of the harm in question isn't specified - Dawkins, one presumes, is concerned that by reading stories about fairies, dragons or sorcerers, the child will be tempted by the atheist's demon - a thing called god. But Dawkins does this without any evidence of harm - he simply believes that because fairy tales have the "supernatural" in them they are harming the child. For a man so wedded to critical thinking and the skeptical scriptures, it seems odd that he should make such presumptive and unevidenced accusations about fairy tales.

And, as people in Cottingley know, fairies - or at least photographs of fairies - are definitely real!

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Martians, ignorance and rudeness: on reading the Spectator's 'Books and Arts" section...

I read the Spectator every week. In the old-fashioned way by sitting or lying holding the words printed on paper and reading them. None of this fancy la-di-dah modern technology malarkey - a little moment when part of the mind thinks Ogden Nash was right about progress:

Progress might have been alright once but it has gone on too long

Really though I read the front part of the magazine - the politics bit - and then arrive at the page labelled: "Books and Art". At this point I enter a bewildering world filling with things I know nothing about and that, even after reading the words of clever Spectator contributors, I remain completely confused by.

A masterpiece of this confusing genre is a piece written by Philip Hensher that begins:

It’s important not to be too immediately dismissive of poor Craig Raine. Book reviewers and editors like him, who invent rigid literary principles and then dismiss anything that fails to embody them, have been on the decline since the 1970s. It’s true that one would probably sooner go for guidance to a generous reader who tries to discover what an interesting book is seeking to do, and how it achieves it. But the principle-wielder is an endangered species, and however ill-founded the principles themselves may be, as readers we might welcome the existence of one or two.

I am, my friends, immediately at a disadvantage since, until this moment, I had never heard of Craig Raine (although I have heard of Craig Davies). What I gleaned from this paragraph is that Philip Hensher doesn't like Craig Raine very much. In the spirit of adventure and discovery I venture further into the article - this is a full two page hatchet job with a cartoony picture (presumably of Craig Raine) and find out that the target of Philip Hensher's wrath is, or was, a poet:

Raine has carried on publishing poetry since his heyday in the late 1970s, when he founded a minor fad called ‘Martian’ poetry. 

'Martian' poetry tickled my mind a little so I looked some up - here's a chunk from one called "A Martian sends a postcard home". I leave you to judge:

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

I think the poem's OK but it was, Philip Hensher says, "a minor fad" so what do I know.

Further into the article - after the bleeding corpses of Raine's novels are left twitching in the dust of this arena, we get to read about the actual book being reviewed. But first we meander down the side alley of Raine's magazine - Areté. Nope, I'd not heard of it either. Philip Hensher doesn't like it:

...I picked up a recent issue to find an essay by Raine attacking Penelope Fitzgerald. He found her similies, as well,  lacking — being not extravagant enough (Raine’s poetry was praised back in the 1970s for its extravagant way with simile). 

I am drowning in my ignorance now as - not only had I not heard of Philip Hensher or Craig Raine but I've not heard of Penelope Fitzgerald either. Although having checked, I should since she's one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945" according to The Times (in some list designed to depress folk like me who won't have read much by anyone on that list).

The article continues - and my ignorance extends - as Philip Hensher actually comments on the book he's reviewing:

Don Paterson is done over; Raymond Carver is ingeniously declared to be a less brilliant writer than his editor, Gordon Lish; the wonderful Derek Walcott is savaged. These are all quite entertaining essays— though twice as long as they need be — and are fine examples of what Oxford used to specialise in: the perverse case, vigorously made.

A glimmer of hope here - I'd vaguely heard of Derek Walcott (although if asked "who is Derek Walcott", I would probably have answered that he's a West Indian cricketer) but otherwise more of someone I don't know of writing about another person I have never heard of writing about some other people I've never read. I must admit to feeling no loss at this lack of knowledge if it is to create such gushing unpleasantness as Philip Hensher's article.

I have learnt from this read that I am ignorant, Philip Hensher is rude (but not ignorant) and Craig Raine wrote some OK poems about - well not really about, as such - Martians.

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Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/o/ogden_nash.html#SYYFoJrqXGsVSoYX.99

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/o/ogden_nash.html#SYYFoJrqXGsVSoYX.99

Frankenstein, science fiction and missing the point - commenting on Mary Hoyland at The Spectator

Every now and then magazines that write most often about that tedious world of literary fiction stray into writing about science fiction. And they usually display either or both of complete ignorance and highfalutin' disdain. So seeing a reference to Frankenstein in the Spectator's blogs filled by with expectation - with the certainty that we'd see a load of nonsense. And I was right:

The story is well known. One wet summer by the shores of Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley — 18 years old, living out of wedlock with the poet Shelley — had a horrifying dream, one that she would later write as the novel Frankenstein. What is less well known is that another of the key pillars of modern horror fiction — the vampire myth — was born during that same extraordinary holiday.

Less well known? Not to either fans of Ken Russell or us science fiction readers - more to the point Shelley's book wasn't the consequence of a dream (such a literary fiction contrivance) but of a specific decision to fuse, in story form, scientific ideas and fantastic speculation. Frankenstein became one of the archetypes of science fiction - debating issues we'd see again in Olof Stapledon's 'Sirius', in Asimov's 'I, Robot', in Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and, in many other stories and series.

Yet Kate Hoyland - who's clearly not familiar with horror films let alone with fantasy literature - can only refer to one source:

Mary’s morality tale has also appeared in frequent guises, some obvious, and some less so: think of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, in which androids, indistinguishable from their human counterparts, agonise over the nature of their existence.

Oddly enough the androids in Blade Runner - drawn from (like so much of recent science fiction film) the writings of Philip K. Dick, in this case 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' - are more certain of their place in the scheme of things. It is human fear and uncertainty (we might see it as a metaphor of racial prejudice given when the book was written) that Dick explores rather than android angst.

"If I test out android," Phil Resch prattled, "you'll undergo renewed faith in the human race. But since it's not going to work out that way, I suggest you begin framing an ideology which will account for-"

 

The presence of androids is frightening for humans yet Dick's androids are quite self-assured. 

It is a shame that writers such as Kate Hoyland persist in their misreading of science fiction - assuming, one guesses, that they have read some of it. Frankenstein is a seminal book in the genre, for sure questions about the morality of science are there within it, but the essence is the wonder of man's ability to create -  mixed with a worry about that creation.

Which is why Brian Aldiss released Frankenstein giving him spirit and independence - celebrating rather than cursing science. It is why Iain Banks made computers citizens.

And it is why, when the Spectator writes about science fiction, it should employ some writers who've actually read some of that fiction rather than watched one film.

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Sorry, Dame Stella, but you're wrong about children reading - and about social media

Dame Stella Rimmington, former head girl and ex-spy is chairing the judging panel for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I suspect that part of the job description for this chairing role is to say something controversial about literature or reading or the general state of the world through the eyes of bookish folk. And Dame Stella has obliged with a gentle rant about twitter:

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Now I don’t wish to be too critical of such an eminent lady but she’s talking nonsense:

In the UK, the value of publishers’ sales of children’s books actually increased in 2010 by 2%, to £242m. The report shows that the value of publishers’ UK sales has been increasing year on year over the last three years, from £236m in 2008.

And this represents some 60 million books sold which makes for five books on average for each of the UK’s roughly 12 million children. OK, the kids aren’t devouring hundreds of books in the manner that Dame Stella doubtless did as a girl but they are definitely reading.

More importantly however social media – all that twittering, emailing and texting – means that children are doing something we never did (and which I suspect Dame Stella’s contemporaries didn’t do either). Children are writing to eachother. OK, they’re writing in a language that only just approximates to English and is replete with acronyms, shortened words and peculiar codes but it is written communication.

If – twenty years ago - we’d have said that the most common form of communication between young people would be written communication, the experts would have looked at us, shaken their heads and called for the men in white coats. Yet that is the reality – we have replaced the verbal communication, whether directly or via the telephone, that was the dominant feature of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s with a mish-mash of written forms.

It seems to me that, regardless of the oddity of language involved, the growth of social media forms – facebook, twitter and so forth – makes a positive contribution to the literacy levels of young people. After all you can't play in the sandpit of social media if you can’t read or write can you!

Dame Stella’s comments reveal yet again the extent to which the literary elite are out of touch – not just with the facts about books and literacy but with what interests and excites young people about reading and writing. Yet again much chatter will be expended on the Man Booker Prize – chatter that will sail completely by the majority of folk. Why?

Because the literature involved presents an impenetrable arrogance that covers up the deeper truth – it is indulgent literary fiction that is dying out not reading. And this is because the books promoted by the literary elite are not what most people want to read. If the Man Booker Prize is to mean more it has to break out from the narrow genre into which is has crawled – it has to embrace popular fiction and recognise that just because a book doesn’t use three words that aren’t in the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the first page and has fun things like spies or wizards or vampires in it, that doesn’t make it a bad book.

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Post-digimodernism and the Art of Blogging

There are moments of epiphany or are they lightning strikes on the road to Damascus – my grasp of religious metaphor’s a tad limited. But there are moments when you encounter the incomprehensible and wonder why it’s there:

Well, what about digimodernism, one might ask? This is akin to some of the pairings in Ihab Hassan's famous list of binaries where the qualities of modernism were placed over against the characteristics of postmodernism. If within a thematic there are logically only two possibilities, and modernism is clearly over, and postmodernism clearly followed it, does this mean that the more recent moment will be with us forever, there being no other options?

I would reply that digimodernism does not choose to focus on either time or space in this manner, but that it combines and enmeshes two relatively new definitions of both. "Real time" and "cyberspace" are the twin axes of digimodernism. The digimodern appears at the intersection of the two. It's not so much a matter of choosing one term or the other, but first redefining then superimposing them.

One might ask, might one? About digimodernism? Somehow I think this unlikely but let’s explore a little further clutching our trusty Concise Oxford for the trickier words:

Since its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the impetus of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm. It owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship.

So it seems that this ‘digimodernism’ is something to do with the textual analysis of all the crap that we write on the web – a sort of Jacques Derrida meets the blog. That plus the bizarreness of reality TV, mockumentary and the ubiquity of computer gaming. In essence our ‘digimodernist’ already exists except he, she or it remains blissfully unaware that such an exalted status has been thrust upon them!

I wrote a few crown-sourced (well twitter-sourced really) blog posts – the best of which is:

Beards, cats and clever octopusses - thoughts on the World Cup Finals 

This post wasn’t a conscious digimodernist experiment – more of a giggle really. But it approaches this idea of:

In its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development.

While part of me loves this stuff – especially the arrogance of saying you wish to appeal to the ‘general reader’ and then exclaiming:

These in turn become the hallmarks of a group of texts in new and established modes which also manifest the digimodernist traits of infantilism, earnestness, endlessness and apparent reality.

The rest of me just want to take the piss – but no-one did that better than Paul Jennings!

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What do we mean by 'good'?

***

I have spent a moderately pleasurable day updating music, cataloguing CDs and generally playing at being a librarian. I even wore the uniform!

While doing this the matter of standards and art arose. In reality it sprung from an on-line interchange with Dave Briggs in response to a blog post I wrote about books. The interchange related to genre fiction and whether the constraints of the form limit the capacity for greatness. Thus it is less likely for a list of greats to include writing from a given genre.

To explore this, I felt it would be interesting to consider music - an area where the same snobberies and prejudices sit but where I am more comfortable with what might be termed "elite" music. However, reviewing my collection of music reveals a bewildering variety - everything from unashamed pop-rock from Bread, through more highbrow prog rock stuff (Caravan anyone?), reggae and ska, folk music - including the incomparable Incredible String Band, jazz and plenty of that elite music.

If I were forced to choose what I consider the very best - and I expect not to be so forced - it would be a tricky toss up between Bach and Led Zeppelin. Yet, in the comparison with the literary world, Led Zeppelin is 'genre' music constrained by the limitations of the rock form whereas Bach's world is limitless. But this ain't so - any more than is the case with literature.

We create categories of art, literature, music and so forth merely for our convenience - genre works like brand in this respect by providing a shortcut to decision-making. I like science fiction so that's where I head. However, such categories do not separate good from bad, the elite from hoi polloi.

Orchestral music ranges from pretty shallow and derivative work (I fear much of Vaughan-Williams falls into this definition) to the immense, shuddering majesty of Mahler or Beethoven. But where does 'good' stop and something else begin? At what point does opera become operetta and hence musical theatre? We could argue till domesday about these subtle distinctions - about whether dystopic fiction such as '1984' or 'Brave New World' is science fiction, as to how we define Neal Stephenson's magnificent 'Baroque Cycle' - is it magical realism, or historical fiction or (as Stephenson chooses) science fiction.

All of which just leaves me still more confused - I do know what I consider good which I guess is what matters! Even when others choose to think otherwise - for sure it ain't not being a genre that makes for good or bad!
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Why I hate English Literature!

Its funny isn’t it, those things which we get chippy about! And the sheer hypocrisy of such chippiness. However, this blogpost is about my shoulder-based chip and why it is important.

My chip is with English literature. Not the books themselves – although if I’m honest, I have tried and failed to read those books beloved of English teachers. I’ve set out to read a Jane Austen novel or two, I’ve struggled through a few chapters of assorted Brontë sisters writing and I’ve banged my head against D H Lawrence. All without success – I can find no joy or pleasure from such reading.

Nor do I find more recent writings any better – I waded my way through ‘Midnight’s Children’ although to this day I’m not entirely sure why I ploughed on through the indulgent, impenetrable prose as it gave me no satisfaction. And I could go on – every now and again one sets oneself to read one of these books so praised by the cognoscenti. And the result is inevitable disappointment.

So this is my chip. The intelligent press and media whenever it speaks of literature, speaks of these books. And I feel the weight of arrogant, smug, superiority from these literati – the clear impression that they are so much cleverer, so vastly more impressive since they can speak the language of “English Literature”!

So when I write words like this I mean them:

They don’t want to bury themselves in what some smug literary critic (in this case from the Guardian) calls “thought-provoking books” because, to put it pretty bluntly, most of the literary novels that clutter up the prize shortlists are really dull. A little bit of me smiles with pleasure at the fact that Katie Price (or rather whoever wrote the book with her name on) outsells the entire Booker shortlist!

This isn’t inverted snobbery – I don’t think that the potboilers churned out under Ms Price’s name are great books. But equally, I do not believe that a great book is defined by a narrow, self-referencing audience such as that which decides upon the Booker Prize shortlist and, ultimately, that prize’s winner. Such writing shoves aside – and the cognoscenti dismiss – whole areas of writing as mere ‘genre fiction’. No science fiction or fantasy book has ever graced the Booker shortlist for the simple reason that those who decide on that list believe no good writing exists within that genre (and more to the point wouldn’t be caught admitting to reading any of it).

I recall an especially snide article on science fiction in The Spectator. What struck me wasn’t that the author was snide – he’s entitled be so – but that it was abundantly clear that he hadn’t read a single SF novel and was basing his dismissal of the genre entirely on having watched a few mainstream science fiction TV shows and films.

So yes, one of my favourite TV moments will always be the expression of utter disappointment on Clive Anderson’s face when he had to announce that “The Lord Of The Rings” was the greatest English novel (or so the public had voted). And I smile serenely at some of the frothing antagonism (and allegations that the books vote was somehow fixed by hordes of “well-organised” Tolkien fans) that followed. Like from some writer I’d never heard of called O’Hagan:

O'Hagan, who was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize with his novel Our Fathers, expressed anger that the show is based upon public opinion.

"Somebody said that The Big Read was not just un-literary but anti-literary and I think that's right," he said. "It is based on the assumption that the opinion of the public is always beyond reproach."

O'Hagan added that he "hated the opinion of the population".

"Their choice in books is bound to be emetic, and so it has proved to be."

You do see why we hate the literary establishment now don’t you?

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Fantasy politics - a world without the Party

I have been reading one of those substantial, detailed fantasy epics. You know the sort – sweeping vistas, warring kingdoms, dark lords and magic everywhere. This one – Wolfblade – is slightly unusual in that it’s written by a woman, which seems not to change the nature of the narrative style or the complicated array of lords, barons and knights so typical of the genre.

However, the description of politics in a fantasy world got me to thinking about how a polity without political parties founded in ideology might look. And how the politics might play out in such a place. Even – and I’ve restrained my fantastical urges here – where there are no mages, sorcerers or wizards.

We have got used to a land where political parties are the entire – or almost the entire – basis for political competition. Even down to the level of little town councils in small market towns, we find elections contested between the parties of left and right, liberal and conservative, authoritarian and free. The presentation of politics by the media, the analysis by academics and even the cynical public bar conversation – all these are formed round the assumption that politics needs the political party.

But let’s fantasise for a moment. Let’s consider a world without political parties. Where everyone is “independent”, where there are no whips, no ‘lines to follow’, no tribal politics. Rest assured my friends, I’m not getting like that dreadful fraud, John Lennon, and imagining some nonsensical utopia – indeed the world without political parties may be dystopian rather than utopian!

Which takes us back to Wolfblade and the world of fantasy. The book details a politics founded on competition between Warlords moderated by the need to retain national unity against the possible – even probable – external threat. The contest is driven by two factors – self-interest and strategic difference. And we should note that these factors are not separate but weave together in determining the factions, interests and politics of the realm. This is the world without political parties – at least as we know them. Different factions – parties if you must – exist but their contest is not ideological but practical, strategic – even tactical.

In the world without political parties, we focus more strongly on leadership, on character and – trumping all this – on our own self-interest. Our support – whether it be votes in an election or troops in a battle - is governed not by ideology or the political tribe but by which person best represents our interests. It becomes a true politics, one determined by consideration rather than habit and where we choose as out representative one who represents our interest not that of some distant party headquarters.

Or at least that might be so. But just as likely is the triumph of the courtier – the man whose sole purpose is to secure power. For sure, these men – and women – abound in our politics already. For every honest politician – for each Philip Davies or John McDonnell – there’s a dozen or more interested mostly in preferment and in power. In a world without parties – in my fantasy – we might find ourselves in a darker world of corruption, power-broking and destructive government.

And this is the theme of so much fantasy literature – the contest between a fearful, corrupt world under some dark lord and a brighter, chivalrous world under some shining king or queen. But what we should remember – and Tolkien knew this – is that even the best can be corrupted by power:

In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!

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A little more on Whimsy....

I am – as my more avid and assiduous readers will know – something of a fan of whimsy. If we’re allowed to use such a base word as ‘fan’ to describe the fine work of great writers? I’m never quire sure where to find the finest whimsy – the Americans have always had a knack for it. From way back writers like Mark Twain, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote whimsically – capturing that slightly laid back, wide-open-space feeling of Middle America. And this thread runs right through American writing and film – Stephen King’s short stories, Capra’s films and even more recently delights such as “Big Fish” all capture that spirit of wonder.

But it’s not just the Yanks – the “Little World of Don Camillo” is a wonder of whimsy created by an Italian, Giovanni Guareschi and there is little to top the joyous whimsy of Idries Shah’s delightful Sufi tales. Nor should we discount the English writers of whimsy – Paul Jennings with “Resistentialism” and "Ub" or Peter Simple’s collection of characters, some satirical, some just providing a great, happy smile. It is all magical, delightful – you can’t read Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust” or “American Gods” without the sorcery of whimsy sparkling through you.

For me it all started with Thurber. With the man who described his writing like this:

“The writing is, I think, different. In his prose pieces he appears always to have started from the beginning and to have reached the end by way of the middle. It is impossible to read any of the stories from the last line to the first without experiencing a definite sensation of going backwards. This seems to prove that the stories were written and did not, like the drawings, just suddenly materialize.”

Thurber wrote biography (or at least what he claimed was biography), stories – you’ll know one or two of them such as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” more likely from film versions – and an array of short pieces such as the wonderful ‘Fables for Our Time”. There are occasional moments of laugh out loud but mostly the stories relax you, make you want to sit back, take a sip of whisky, a drag of good cigar and just smile that big smile.

And Thurber – like so many of these writers – was modest about his talents seeming ever grateful that the world hadn’t yet rumbled him. I suspect there might be an element of self-description in the ‘moral’ to “The Owl who was God”:

“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time”

On whimsy....

Whimsy:
1. An odd or fanciful idea; a whim.
2. A quaint or fanciful quality

This piece started with me exploring the meaning of whimsy and how it might be important. It has become something of a statement of policy for The View from Cullingworth. So let’s get that out of the way before we discuss whimsy…

I can’t categorise all the blogs there are or ever will be but looking at what I’ve blogged on The View from Cullingworth it seems to me that:

The world doesn’t need another shouty political blog – for those who share much of my crossness there are blogs that do the anger so much better than me like Constantly Furious, there are blogs so much ruder than I would ever dare such as dear old Obnoxio, and there are cynical & worldly-wise blogs so much better written than I can manage such as Al Jahom’s Final Word.

There’s plenty of good, solid commentary out there – my ramblings add very little to the contributions from Iain Dale, Charlotte Gore and Hopi Sen. Or for that matter from hundreds of other interesting bloggers with “something to say”

And I don’t do gossip – much though I love to read the political gossip mongers; Tory Bear, Parlez_me_nTory and the daddy of them all Guido Fawkes, I lack the necessary chutzpah to do such tale-telling

This leaves very little space for a political blogger so I have decided to focus on whimsy – those odd, fanciful ideas that never get mentioned because…well, because they’re just too strange! I’ve written in praise of idiots, have questioned the rule of experts and would like to discuss sortition, citizen juries and models for participatory democracy. I love the idea of the little man kicking against the system and succeeding against all the odds.

The conceit we see in my favourite film, "It’s a Wonderful Life", where the achievements of one man in one place ripple – like something from chaos theory – through the world and touch many more than that man thinks. That is whimsy – glorious whimsy. And staying with films, the idea in "Field of Dreams" that we should 'build it and they will come' – the triumph of the better mousetrap and a hymn to passion. That is whimsy – personal, private and dreamlike

Don’t we all love too the sweet other worlds of literature – whether Shakespeare’s “Midsummer’s Night Dream”, Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust” or John Crowley’s incomparable “Little Big”. These are not mere dreams – lifeless inconsequential things – but places of meaning where the stories tell of private victory and loss, of how our personal mores affect the entire world not just those we can see and above all that good will win over evil in the end - but not necessarily in the way we think. That is whimsy – dreamlike, almost insubstantial yet full of meaning.

I shall borrow the words of the greatest writer of political whimsy, Giovanni Guareschi – creator of Don Camillo:

“…I want you to understand that, in the Little World between the river and the mountains, many things can happen that cannot happen anywhere else. Here, the deep, eternal breathing of the river freshens the air, for both the living and the dead, and even the dogs have souls. If you keep this in mind, you will easily come to know the village priest, Don Camillo, and his adversary, Peppone, the Communist Mayor. You will no be surprised that Christ watches the goings-on from a big cross in the village church and not infrequently talks, and that one man beats the other over the head, but fairly – that is, without hatred – and that in the end the two enemies agree about essentials.”

I will never reach GG’s genius but if a whimsical approach can bring a smile and maybe cast a little light on our puffed up, pigeon-like political debate that would be good. And if I fail in that mission it will have been done without recourse to malice, spite or the projection of aggressive anger.