Let's head over to Bermondsey High Street KFC and see what Kirsty Wark has in store for us... if you've forgotten the rules, see last year.
Best New Author: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
This was a close one – the runner up was Milan Kundera for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I finally got around to reading in May. But Franzen gets the big prize this year for two reasons; firstly, he didn’t blow things with a banality fest like Kundera’s Immortality (more of that one below), and secondly, Kundera’s novels are a little too obviously narratives illustrating pop philosophical points, which for Alain de Botton readers makes them, like, the best thing ever, but only really very good to the rest of us. There’s philosophy in The Corrections, albeit jokes about literary theory, but not at the expense of the novel or the characters, who I still remember as people six months later (as opposed to say, ‘the guy who represents individualism’). And it’s also very funny, in the sense of being genuinely amusing and not just ‘darkly comic’ (is anybody else sick of that phrase?). The Lithuania plotline is the novel’s weak point (as a dozen Amazon readers have pointed out), and I found the opening chapter a little dismaying in its “I’m writing a literary novel, me,” tone, but get beyond that and it’s superb (or ‘generous,’ as nearly everyone says on the back cover. What do they even think that means?). He also does the sentient faeces plotline with more subtlety than South Park, too.
And the others? Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares was impressive in making it bearable to be in the company of an utterly repulsive character, but ultimately came across as not much more than The Singing Detective rewritten by Bret Easton Ellis; Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked was so-so but never really delivered the denouement it promised, and included popular fiction’s least involving car chase (and, if I was paying attention properly, something of a plot hole towards the end).
Best novel: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Well, if Jonno hasn’t scooped this one as well. I’ve already talked about it above, so let’s look at some of the runners up. Paul Auster came close with The Music of Chance (and, to a lesser extent, The Book of Illusions), making up for the abysmal Travels in the Scriptorium at the end of last year. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach was a good follow up to the excellent Saturday, although not quite the masterpiece everyone else thought it was. By contrast, Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog was nowhere near as bad as the reviewers would have you believe and was really quite funny in places (is this what happens in one’s thirties? Literary fiction starts to be actually funny? Will I now find Kingsley Amis as much a hoot as everyone else seems to?), which was also the case with Iain Sinclair's Landor's Tower. Christopher Priest’s The Glamour was very good, and much closer to The Prestige than the rather disappointing The Extremes and The Separation. However, I’m still hugely impressed by The Corrections, so there it is.
Best NeoVictorian novel: um, nothing.
Nope, I didn’t get around to reading any this year, not least because I was too busy reading the actual Victorian stuff. I may have to rethink this one as a category, partially because NeoVictorian novels are fashionable and I'm a curmudgeonly type who ditches things as soon as everyone else likes them (poker, for instance, which was so much fun until about five years ago).
Best Victorian novel: Wilkie Collins, The Two Destinies
This one is just going to get more and more obscure as the years go by, simply because rereads aren’t allowed (as I said last year, if they weren’t it’d just end up being Dickens, continually). I suppose it could have been George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, but if I’m going to have mesmerism and the like, then I’m going to have dancing cats as well.
Biggest Disappointment: Caroline Clive, Paul Ferroll
Again, lots of competition here. Milan Kundera followed up the superb The Unbearable Lightness of Being with Immortality, and in doing so made good on his thesis that convincing fictional characters are ultimately undesirable by putting on a spread of cardboard philosopuppets dancing around a set of unconvincing ‘insights’ – the only reason it didn’t win this one was because I didn’t finish it (see my comments on Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park last year). The same goes for Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, which I realize is some kind of heresy, but it simply didn’t give me enough reasons to continue beyond the first fifty pages (ironically, David Bowie’s The Buddha of Suburbia was very much in evidence on the ol’ MP3 throughout the year). Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin also falls into the disappointment category on the basis of the towering praise it’s received (one of the best novels of the twentieth century? No, it isn't). There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but I found it uninvolving and the supposed ‘twist’ a laughable get-out to cover the fact that all of Margaret Atwood’s characters sound just like Margaret Atwood. In similar vein, there’s nothing particularly bad about Angela Carter’s Wise Children, except when you’ve already read Nights at the Circus (I see that Wise Children is now an A-level text, continuing the tradition of picking something from a first rate contemporary author’s second string, cf. Ian McEwan, The Child in Time). But the prize this year goes to Caroline Clive for Paul Ferroll, one of those ‘forgotten’ Victorian novels which – can I say this? – was probably forgotten for a very good reason, i.e. it’s a mess. Apologists (and there are a few) argue that Clive’s style represents an interesting challenge to the conventions of high Victorian realist narrative and the limitations of popular genre, but I’m just reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer says there’s no moral, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. Morality was certainly a key factor in the novel’s reception - Victorian reviewers were mostly annoyed that Clive refused to condemn her central character for being a murderer – but this is a bunch of stuff and nothing more, one where potentially interesting plotlines emerge only to be dismissed a few pages later (the crazy arsonist butler and his unprompted confession, for instance, needed some development). But ultimately, I know that if I struggle through nineteenth century crime fiction (and I’ve read a bit of it), then there’s something wrong. Hell, I even like novels with dancing cats (see above).
Coming up…
As I write, 2009 has already got off to a good start with Paul Auster’s Mr Vertigo and Man in the Dark (wow, almost up to date); the latter shows a considerable improvement from the dreadful Travels in the Scriptorium (although the brief reference to that novel was not particularly welcome), but Auster is getting slightly too comfortable in his ‘man of letters in emotional crisis tells stories – one of which is tantalizingly incomplete - to ease his pain’ armchair. I’m not making any promises here, but I suspect this may be a year for Americans – in addition to Auster, I have my eye on Don Delillo, Marisha Pessl, and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (sitting on the waiting shelf since 2002). Come back in twelve months and see if I was right.
Thursday, 8 January 2009
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
Bringing down the House
At Television Centre, they've been waiting for the clocks to go back, so that as soon as British Summer Time has choked its last, they can slam a Victorian novel adaptation into the DVD player and punch 'play.' Bleak House was a hit three or so years ago, so how about... um... Little Dorrit?
Little Dorrit? What next? Dombey and Son? Barnaby bejesus Rudge? Don't say it too loudly, but Little Dorrit divides opinions, like a big opinions knife. I have a peculiarly sentimental attachment to it, because very few people can say they met their wife through a novel (unless they're, say, psychotic and have misread the fact/fiction relationship dreadfully), and Little Dorrit was that novel. In summer 2005 I was invited over to the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz, a week long examination of a different Dickens novel each year, and that year it was - oh, you guessed. Anyway, I went over to talk about Victorian detective fiction; I came back with the kind of long distance relationship that made me feel I was in a Channel 4 lifestyle drama and meant that the next two years or so were largely spent in airports. I also met Miriam Margolyes out there, which just heightened the low key surrealism of the whole week, along with seeing people reading Terry Eagleton on the beach. But what was striking was the number of people at the conference/shebang who admitted that they didn't really like Little Dorrit that much. The plot is kinda murky, the imprisonment metaphors are laid on a bit much, Amy Dorrit is one of those heroines that a certain kind of reader finds utterly irritating (not me, but I know people who would readily send a spaceship crewed by Amy, Esther Summerson and Little Nell into the heart of the sun - it could be another Star Trek spin-off). As for me, Dorrit is admirable but not particularly lovable - it's more Dombey and Son than Bleak House. It may be significant that the characters I find the most compelling are Maggy, partially because of her self-reflexive love of narratives, but also for the way Hablot Browne has illustrated her, a round eyed stare that conveys her feeble mindedness (to use the Victorian phrase) but also provokes immediate sympathy; and Tattycoram, more of whom later. And is it really coincidence that Little Dorrit appears on our screens at the height of economic crisis? The Merdle financial fraud subplot seems to be the most compelling reason for adapting it, at least as far as the papers are concerned. I don't know how long it took to make, but surely someone in the drama department at the BBC knew more about the economic climate than most.
So, is it any good? My hopes were not rasied by the continuity announcer promising that "Dickens' work comes to life now on BBC1", as if literature were some corpse awaiting revivification from the golden hand of television. Saying that it's better than 97% of the rest of television doesn't really mean much any more, as the medium has become the new poetry - massive cultural potential, but virtually impossible to get right (and even House, the goggle box's best offering of recent times, has its weaknesses - the slightly repetitive plots and its obsession with the "Everybody Hurts" montage, whereby at the end we see everybody thinking about what happened here today). Much like the novel, the televisual Little Dorrit invites admiration but defuses involvement. Part of the problem is the familiarity with the BBC's 'prestige drama' format, and indeed the title sequence offers a bewildering range of famous names, all in the tiniest typeface ever used on television (it's called Victorian Drama and it's set in 0.0000000000000000000004 point) and highly derivative of the opening to Bleak House three years ago. Accordingly, most of the episode was spent identifying the faces rather than the characters. There's Bill Paterson and Janine Duvitski! Matthew MacFadyen's at the door! Sue Johnston and Alun Armstrong are downstairs! The guy from The Vicar of Dibley pops round, and the keys to the Marshalsea are held by that bloke who looks like Kenneth Connor, but it can't be Kenneth Connor because Kenneth Connor hasn't looked like that for years (primarily because of death), so it isn't Kenneth Connor, but you recognise him anyway. You know the one I mean - the one who looks like Kenneth Connor. The one thing more predictable than the stellar casting is the sop to up and coming talent in the lead -last time, Anna Maxwell Martin was probably best known for being Lyra in the National's His Dark Materials, before becoming face-changing space-dreaming Esther Summerson; this time, it's Amy who's been given to a relative unknown, Clare Foy, and consequently she seems to be more of an actual character than the rest of them.
To be fair, I'm being a little harsh. MacFadyen is shaping up well as Arthur, Tom Courtenay is showing everyone else how it's done, and Andy Serkis as Blandois shows great potential (I'm not sure how authentic that French accent is, but then again that suits the more performative side of Blandois' character, and anyway Serkis captures the magnetism of the man beautifully). My initial resistance to the appearance of Alun Armstrong again so soon after his turn as Bucket in Bleak House was overcome at the end of the episode, when I was reminded of Flintwich's doppleganger, so Bucket's regeneration (so to speak) seems appropriate. Maxine Peake (who, to her credit, I didn't recognise at first) is also an intriguing Miss Wade. Which leads us to the stunt casting - in 2005, we had Johnny Vegas as Krook, which kind of worked; this time, we have Freema Agyeman as Tattycoram, and it seems to be a train wreck from the off. I imagine the Dickens traditionalist mafia will be indignant that Tattycoram is now black, and there does seem to be an undertone here of poking the Daily Mailers, which is perfectly fine; the problem lies in the fact that making the character black brings up intriguing questions of the consequences for social interaction, which the script completely ignores. Although no reactionary, Dickens was not famed for his progressive racial politics, and the casting seems entirely at odds with the writing. It's fine to make Tattycoram black, but nobody else on screen seems to have noticed that she is. It doesn't help that the character has been terribly underwritten and that Agyeman is struggling to make the part work - the effects of psychological bullying just come across as stroppiness. Trailers for subsequent episodes suggest that the intimations of Miss Wade's lesbianism, subliminal in the original, are going to be accompanied by fireworks in the screen version and footage of trains going into tunnels... um... perhaps footage of a tunnel being built right in front of another tunnel? What is Sapphic visual shorthand nowadays, anyway?
Acting aside, the direction and set design is a little jarring. Victorian London looks less like Victorian London than Dickensworld (TM) - where the hell is everybody? Where's the visual onslaught of posters and bills? Where did all this space come from? For a story all about imprisonment, the actors are swimming in acres, and there isn't much of a sense of enclosure when it requires a panning shot for Arthur to get from one end of a room to the other. With the exception of a couple of shots of Amy, everyone appears in middle range, and the only hints at the theme of the novel are a few hackneyed shots through prison bars (Blandois in prison) or arches (Miss Wade and Tattycoram). I'm hoping the earlier episodes have set up this sense of space in order to break it down later on, but that may be too much to expect. Similarly, the direction often seems intent on making Andrew Davies' (oh, he adapted it, but you knew that already) script ridiculous, which occasionally it is; both are equally guilty in the scene where Mr. Meagles declares that they are imprisoned "in Marseilles, of all places!" and then cuts to a tricolore immediately afterwards - where do you think they are? (No, not Lyme Regis, which is what it looked like).
Ah, it's easier to pick holes in stuff. More fun, too. Ultimately, Little Dorrit is good, but not great, and I'm damning it with faint praise when I say that it's probably worth your time. It's not Bleak House, but then again, what is? Bleak House, obviously.
Little Dorrit? What next? Dombey and Son? Barnaby bejesus Rudge? Don't say it too loudly, but Little Dorrit divides opinions, like a big opinions knife. I have a peculiarly sentimental attachment to it, because very few people can say they met their wife through a novel (unless they're, say, psychotic and have misread the fact/fiction relationship dreadfully), and Little Dorrit was that novel. In summer 2005 I was invited over to the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz, a week long examination of a different Dickens novel each year, and that year it was - oh, you guessed. Anyway, I went over to talk about Victorian detective fiction; I came back with the kind of long distance relationship that made me feel I was in a Channel 4 lifestyle drama and meant that the next two years or so were largely spent in airports. I also met Miriam Margolyes out there, which just heightened the low key surrealism of the whole week, along with seeing people reading Terry Eagleton on the beach. But what was striking was the number of people at the conference/shebang who admitted that they didn't really like Little Dorrit that much. The plot is kinda murky, the imprisonment metaphors are laid on a bit much, Amy Dorrit is one of those heroines that a certain kind of reader finds utterly irritating (not me, but I know people who would readily send a spaceship crewed by Amy, Esther Summerson and Little Nell into the heart of the sun - it could be another Star Trek spin-off). As for me, Dorrit is admirable but not particularly lovable - it's more Dombey and Son than Bleak House. It may be significant that the characters I find the most compelling are Maggy, partially because of her self-reflexive love of narratives, but also for the way Hablot Browne has illustrated her, a round eyed stare that conveys her feeble mindedness (to use the Victorian phrase) but also provokes immediate sympathy; and Tattycoram, more of whom later. And is it really coincidence that Little Dorrit appears on our screens at the height of economic crisis? The Merdle financial fraud subplot seems to be the most compelling reason for adapting it, at least as far as the papers are concerned. I don't know how long it took to make, but surely someone in the drama department at the BBC knew more about the economic climate than most.
So, is it any good? My hopes were not rasied by the continuity announcer promising that "Dickens' work comes to life now on BBC1", as if literature were some corpse awaiting revivification from the golden hand of television. Saying that it's better than 97% of the rest of television doesn't really mean much any more, as the medium has become the new poetry - massive cultural potential, but virtually impossible to get right (and even House, the goggle box's best offering of recent times, has its weaknesses - the slightly repetitive plots and its obsession with the "Everybody Hurts" montage, whereby at the end we see everybody thinking about what happened here today). Much like the novel, the televisual Little Dorrit invites admiration but defuses involvement. Part of the problem is the familiarity with the BBC's 'prestige drama' format, and indeed the title sequence offers a bewildering range of famous names, all in the tiniest typeface ever used on television (it's called Victorian Drama and it's set in 0.0000000000000000000004 point) and highly derivative of the opening to Bleak House three years ago. Accordingly, most of the episode was spent identifying the faces rather than the characters. There's Bill Paterson and Janine Duvitski! Matthew MacFadyen's at the door! Sue Johnston and Alun Armstrong are downstairs! The guy from The Vicar of Dibley pops round, and the keys to the Marshalsea are held by that bloke who looks like Kenneth Connor, but it can't be Kenneth Connor because Kenneth Connor hasn't looked like that for years (primarily because of death), so it isn't Kenneth Connor, but you recognise him anyway. You know the one I mean - the one who looks like Kenneth Connor. The one thing more predictable than the stellar casting is the sop to up and coming talent in the lead -last time, Anna Maxwell Martin was probably best known for being Lyra in the National's His Dark Materials, before becoming face-changing space-dreaming Esther Summerson; this time, it's Amy who's been given to a relative unknown, Clare Foy, and consequently she seems to be more of an actual character than the rest of them.
To be fair, I'm being a little harsh. MacFadyen is shaping up well as Arthur, Tom Courtenay is showing everyone else how it's done, and Andy Serkis as Blandois shows great potential (I'm not sure how authentic that French accent is, but then again that suits the more performative side of Blandois' character, and anyway Serkis captures the magnetism of the man beautifully). My initial resistance to the appearance of Alun Armstrong again so soon after his turn as Bucket in Bleak House was overcome at the end of the episode, when I was reminded of Flintwich's doppleganger, so Bucket's regeneration (so to speak) seems appropriate. Maxine Peake (who, to her credit, I didn't recognise at first) is also an intriguing Miss Wade. Which leads us to the stunt casting - in 2005, we had Johnny Vegas as Krook, which kind of worked; this time, we have Freema Agyeman as Tattycoram, and it seems to be a train wreck from the off. I imagine the Dickens traditionalist mafia will be indignant that Tattycoram is now black, and there does seem to be an undertone here of poking the Daily Mailers, which is perfectly fine; the problem lies in the fact that making the character black brings up intriguing questions of the consequences for social interaction, which the script completely ignores. Although no reactionary, Dickens was not famed for his progressive racial politics, and the casting seems entirely at odds with the writing. It's fine to make Tattycoram black, but nobody else on screen seems to have noticed that she is. It doesn't help that the character has been terribly underwritten and that Agyeman is struggling to make the part work - the effects of psychological bullying just come across as stroppiness. Trailers for subsequent episodes suggest that the intimations of Miss Wade's lesbianism, subliminal in the original, are going to be accompanied by fireworks in the screen version and footage of trains going into tunnels... um... perhaps footage of a tunnel being built right in front of another tunnel? What is Sapphic visual shorthand nowadays, anyway?
Acting aside, the direction and set design is a little jarring. Victorian London looks less like Victorian London than Dickensworld (TM) - where the hell is everybody? Where's the visual onslaught of posters and bills? Where did all this space come from? For a story all about imprisonment, the actors are swimming in acres, and there isn't much of a sense of enclosure when it requires a panning shot for Arthur to get from one end of a room to the other. With the exception of a couple of shots of Amy, everyone appears in middle range, and the only hints at the theme of the novel are a few hackneyed shots through prison bars (Blandois in prison) or arches (Miss Wade and Tattycoram). I'm hoping the earlier episodes have set up this sense of space in order to break it down later on, but that may be too much to expect. Similarly, the direction often seems intent on making Andrew Davies' (oh, he adapted it, but you knew that already) script ridiculous, which occasionally it is; both are equally guilty in the scene where Mr. Meagles declares that they are imprisoned "in Marseilles, of all places!" and then cuts to a tricolore immediately afterwards - where do you think they are? (No, not Lyme Regis, which is what it looked like).
Ah, it's easier to pick holes in stuff. More fun, too. Ultimately, Little Dorrit is good, but not great, and I'm damning it with faint praise when I say that it's probably worth your time. It's not Bleak House, but then again, what is? Bleak House, obviously.
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
Xeroxy Music
There I am in Blackwell's, looking around to see if the reading list for my module has magically transformed itself into a stack of actual books for actual students to come in and actually buy (answer: I don't think so, although I did see a pile of Bleak Houses; although every Blackwell's at every university is obliged to stock a pile of Bleak Houses. Or Bleaks House, I don't know), when I caught sight of the retooled Oxford Classics, and in particular their new Middlemarch. That looks familiar, I thought, for reasons I won't insult your intelligence by only hinting at right now, if only because this website's limited options for displaying pictures have given the game away from the start (i.e. the Russell T Davies effect). Yes, the same slightly plain, grey garbed, "I'm a governess and no mistake" woman was on the cover of the very same copy of Jane Eyre that I was already carrying (it's Daniel Macnee's "Lady in Grey," in case you wondered). What does this mean - that Dorothea Brooke was Jane Eyre all along? Was Sherlock Holmes really Casaubon? Did Lydgate turn into Rambo? You never saw them in the same room together.
Ah, books and their covers. Despite the turn towards a more cultural materialist perspective in criticism, the relationship hasn't really received a great deal of academic attention, probably because everybody knows that apparently you can't judge the former by the latter. Although in some cases, you can; the worst novel I've ever read also had the worst cover, best described as the personnel of a pub covers band (possibly called Xeroxy Music) badly photoshopped around a solar eclipse (which was at least partially relevant to the plot). I'm naming no names here, but it's the only novel I know of to be set at my old institution, the University of Exeter; the honour isn't so much a poisoned chalice as a McDonalds coffee spat into by Richard Littlejohn. In any case, book covers are far more interesting and culturally interesting than cliche would have you believe. When I'm in the US, a normally bland bibliopolis such as Borders becomes fascinating, because of the (often baffling) difference in cover art for the same novel on either side of the Atlantic. Paul Auster, for instance, gets treated much better over there by Penguin, as opposed to Faber's gloomy and grainy intimations of Americana for the UK market (and there's a better typeface in the US, too). The design for Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is also much better stateside: a largely blank silver cover with the barest hint of reflection, looking directly at it and seeing the word GOD superimposed on your fuzzy mug somehow suggests Dawkins' argument more acutely than the UK version of a red explosion vaguely reminiscent of a nu-prog album. Sometimes, the differences are more subtle; the cover of Ian McEwan's Saturday in the US is really just a close-up of the back of the British cover, no doubt because many American readers won't be familiar with the British Telecom tower (the UK cover for Saturday is curious anyway, being a rather literal staging of the first chapter and therefore a bit like a Pan's People dance number). In other cases, the British versions are better; buy Haruki Murakami in the US and you're entering a whole world of crazy kitsch, rather than the more studied minimalism here, while crime fiction in America still tends to favour design that's unthreateningly populist, as opposed to the rather more cryptic Colin Dexter covers that have been around here since the mid nineties. And talking of crime fiction, I'm still hugely fond of the original Faber cover for P. D. James' Devices and Desires as a strangely haunting image, although I can't remember that much about the actual novel.
Back to the nineteenth century - there are definite trends to be considered. Buy Thomas Hardy in Penguin Classics in the nineties (where most of mine date from), and you'd almost certainly get a medium-to-long shot of landscape. Nowadays, it's medium-to-close images of a single person. Does this mean the way we read Hardy has changed, from a recognition of the importance of place to his work in character study? Dickens seems to have gone the other way - from one or two people on the covers a few years ago, to today's extremes - either moody empty spaces (Bleak House, Great Expectations) or crowded scenes from the original text (David Copperfield, Little Dorrit). As for George Eliot, designers seem to go back and forth as to whether it's the social setting or the individual character who really carries the reader's attention. Middlemarch is a place - Middlemarch is a state of mind...
Friday, 22 August 2008
The Rumble in the Lambeth Palace
Iain Sinclair once said (actually, he said it right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GZw4Ym5U28) that television simply isn't suited any more to the documentary format. There's simply not enough space for the material that needs to be included in any in-depth discussion. Before I get irate e-mails about my use of spatial metaphors to discuss television ("SIR - Is it not the case that television is a temporal phenomenon..."), consider the fact that an hour's documentary really boils down to a script of about sixty pages, double spaced, and which includes all kinds of visual and effect cues scattered among the actual intellectual content. How much can you actually cram into an hour's documentary, once you've dealt with all the slow-mo, speeded up footage of people walking across a bridge on the Thames, and zeitgeisty blasts of Coldplay?
(A brief pseudo-digression (pseudo because I haven't really got to the main subject of this week's doughnut, although you've probably already guessed that it's the final episode of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin): in the clip mentioned above, Sinclair mentions how a documentary on J. G. Ballard failed to engage with the man's work in any depth, and reduced the contributions of those such as Sinclair to snippets barely totalling a fistful of minutes. And yet... Ballard's reputation has always baffled me, especially the regard in which he's held by far better writers, such as Will Self and Sinclair himself. I can see how his earlier work might have shaped the development of science fiction, but his most recent novels have been banal doodles around the themes of modern society and violence, the kind of thing Chuck Palahnuik did with Fight Club, although Palahnuik clearly didn't feel the need to keep writing the same novel. If you're a J. G. Ballard and having trouble writing your next novel, why not try this one? Make your protagonist a white professional male, who leads a relatively dull life until some kind of explosion/terrorist attack/murder/general outburst of violence at a local industrial estate/airport/shopping centre involves him/his wife/partner/ex-partner. During the investigation into the mayhem, your protagonist gets deeper into a cabal of middle class types whose lives have become so affluently boring that they only feel alive through acts of violence. End with moral ambivalence aplenty, the hero almost seduced by this argument, ooh, perhaps the spectre of violence lurks within us all and our Starbucks lattes. Das End.
There. I've said it.)
Anyway, the shortcomings of television as a documentary medium had a big parade this week, with the third instalment of Richard Dawkins' series The Genius of Charles Darwin. I criticised the last episodes for a lack of historical context, which at least wasn't as much of a problem this week, since Dawkins decided he was going to ditch the content (except for a brief interlude on Darwin's own religious crises) and go after religious types instead. As such, there wasn't a great deal to complain about, since it's always fun to see the man tussling with 'science' teachers who honestly believe the Earth is about six thousand years old, or creationists who keep repeating that all they want to do is 'open up the debate,' as if the will to argument were on a par with actual evidence or theoretical credibility (how far, I wonder, would I get if I wanted to 'open up the debate' that Shrewsbury is a myth perpetrated by Margaret Thatcher, who lives in my foot?). But, fun as it is to goad people who believe that the eye is perfect while peering through lenses an inch thick, it didn't deserve nearly an entire episode of a series purporting to be about Darwin himself. The fact that such goading went on for far too long was clear from the editing of the discussion with three school teachers about the responsibilities of teaching science and challenging religion; while Dawkins went on about kicking religion in the 'nads, the teachers began exchanging slightly worried glances of the kind they might bandy about if confronted by a drunk at a bus station, with the result that he began to lose a bit of ground with the viewers. The programme nearly lost it altogether when Dawkins faced the camera and declared resoundingly that "If you're a relativist, you're a massive dickhead" (well, not quite like that, but almost). What, any kind of relativism? Dawkins certainly has a good case to make, but not when he ditches nuance in favour of grandstanding, and there was too much of that over the course of three episodes apparently about Darwin.
Similarly, the effort to cover so many angles (that is, to fit in a smattering of nutbars as well; covering the angels, perhaps) meant that the curse of the television documentary struck again, inasmuch as everybody got two minutes. That's OK when you're talking to a man who believes god is better than scientists at explaining the origin of the universe because scientists weren't there (and, worse still, wears a 'hilarious' t-shirt proving god's existence through equations denoting science) because more than two minutes and you'd be pummelling the screen in outrage, but what is the point of driving all the way to visit Daniel Dennett for a brief conversation which really only retreads Darwin's "There is grandeur in this view of life?" (which Dawkins quoted in the first episode anyway)? And who else thought that the meeting with Rowan Williams was poorly served by being condensed into a couple of minutes betwixt adverts for hair conditioner? This surely deserved its own programme (if only because they'd managed to book Williams in the first place), ideally on Christmas Day in an attempt to liven up Channel 4's otherwise leaden anti-yule scheduling. Instead, we got Dawkins being annoyed by a metaphor, further conversation on which would have been fascinating, if we hadn't been obliged to leap into the car and drive to Dan's house afterwards.
Ultimately, then, The Genius of Charles Darwin was a disappointment, primarily because Dawkins couldn't keep his mind on Darwin and kept wandering off to poke at religious types. Of course, the critique of religion is right there in evolution, but Dawkins seems content to live up to his reputation as megaatheist (somehow I think hyphenating that term would dilute it). Ironically, in doing so he's rapidly leaving behind his work in science, by getting fixated on telling us what isn't there, instead of what is and thus letting the absences speak for themselves. As speech theorist ("say what you see") Roy Walker once said, it's good but it's not right.
(A brief pseudo-digression (pseudo because I haven't really got to the main subject of this week's doughnut, although you've probably already guessed that it's the final episode of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin): in the clip mentioned above, Sinclair mentions how a documentary on J. G. Ballard failed to engage with the man's work in any depth, and reduced the contributions of those such as Sinclair to snippets barely totalling a fistful of minutes. And yet... Ballard's reputation has always baffled me, especially the regard in which he's held by far better writers, such as Will Self and Sinclair himself. I can see how his earlier work might have shaped the development of science fiction, but his most recent novels have been banal doodles around the themes of modern society and violence, the kind of thing Chuck Palahnuik did with Fight Club, although Palahnuik clearly didn't feel the need to keep writing the same novel. If you're a J. G. Ballard and having trouble writing your next novel, why not try this one? Make your protagonist a white professional male, who leads a relatively dull life until some kind of explosion/terrorist attack/murder/general outburst of violence at a local industrial estate/airport/shopping centre involves him/his wife/partner/ex-partner. During the investigation into the mayhem, your protagonist gets deeper into a cabal of middle class types whose lives have become so affluently boring that they only feel alive through acts of violence. End with moral ambivalence aplenty, the hero almost seduced by this argument, ooh, perhaps the spectre of violence lurks within us all and our Starbucks lattes. Das End.
There. I've said it.)
Anyway, the shortcomings of television as a documentary medium had a big parade this week, with the third instalment of Richard Dawkins' series The Genius of Charles Darwin. I criticised the last episodes for a lack of historical context, which at least wasn't as much of a problem this week, since Dawkins decided he was going to ditch the content (except for a brief interlude on Darwin's own religious crises) and go after religious types instead. As such, there wasn't a great deal to complain about, since it's always fun to see the man tussling with 'science' teachers who honestly believe the Earth is about six thousand years old, or creationists who keep repeating that all they want to do is 'open up the debate,' as if the will to argument were on a par with actual evidence or theoretical credibility (how far, I wonder, would I get if I wanted to 'open up the debate' that Shrewsbury is a myth perpetrated by Margaret Thatcher, who lives in my foot?). But, fun as it is to goad people who believe that the eye is perfect while peering through lenses an inch thick, it didn't deserve nearly an entire episode of a series purporting to be about Darwin himself. The fact that such goading went on for far too long was clear from the editing of the discussion with three school teachers about the responsibilities of teaching science and challenging religion; while Dawkins went on about kicking religion in the 'nads, the teachers began exchanging slightly worried glances of the kind they might bandy about if confronted by a drunk at a bus station, with the result that he began to lose a bit of ground with the viewers. The programme nearly lost it altogether when Dawkins faced the camera and declared resoundingly that "If you're a relativist, you're a massive dickhead" (well, not quite like that, but almost). What, any kind of relativism? Dawkins certainly has a good case to make, but not when he ditches nuance in favour of grandstanding, and there was too much of that over the course of three episodes apparently about Darwin.
Similarly, the effort to cover so many angles (that is, to fit in a smattering of nutbars as well; covering the angels, perhaps) meant that the curse of the television documentary struck again, inasmuch as everybody got two minutes. That's OK when you're talking to a man who believes god is better than scientists at explaining the origin of the universe because scientists weren't there (and, worse still, wears a 'hilarious' t-shirt proving god's existence through equations denoting science) because more than two minutes and you'd be pummelling the screen in outrage, but what is the point of driving all the way to visit Daniel Dennett for a brief conversation which really only retreads Darwin's "There is grandeur in this view of life?" (which Dawkins quoted in the first episode anyway)? And who else thought that the meeting with Rowan Williams was poorly served by being condensed into a couple of minutes betwixt adverts for hair conditioner? This surely deserved its own programme (if only because they'd managed to book Williams in the first place), ideally on Christmas Day in an attempt to liven up Channel 4's otherwise leaden anti-yule scheduling. Instead, we got Dawkins being annoyed by a metaphor, further conversation on which would have been fascinating, if we hadn't been obliged to leap into the car and drive to Dan's house afterwards.
Ultimately, then, The Genius of Charles Darwin was a disappointment, primarily because Dawkins couldn't keep his mind on Darwin and kept wandering off to poke at religious types. Of course, the critique of religion is right there in evolution, but Dawkins seems content to live up to his reputation as megaatheist (somehow I think hyphenating that term would dilute it). Ironically, in doing so he's rapidly leaving behind his work in science, by getting fixated on telling us what isn't there, instead of what is and thus letting the absences speak for themselves. As speech theorist ("say what you see") Roy Walker once said, it's good but it's not right.
Thursday, 14 August 2008
Dawkins' Doughnuts
So, part two of The Genius of Charles Darwin. Last week I bemoaned the lack of historical depth to Richard Dawkins' account of evolutionary theory. Did things get better this week? Well... not really.
Let's focus on the good parts, for the moment, because there were many. The Dawk is at his best when explaining concepts, not trying to contextualise them, and so there was a nice part on why applying Darwinian principles to business is simply stretching a metaphor too far. It's clear, too, that Dawkins feels uneasy that The Selfish Gene is often associated ideologically and historically with Thatcherism (much of the programme was Dawkins saying "honestly, I'm a liberal"), and the case he made for the fallacy of the comparison was a good one. Some interesting material on the Darwinian uses of altruism, although the section in which he confronted another researcher who had criticised his work as promoting veneer theory (i.e., that morality is really just the misleading icing on a cake of survival-driven viciousness) was a bit disappointing; encouraged by the fact that Dawkins had let a voice of informed dissent onto the stage, it really turned into Dawkins saying "But of course, he's wrong." As for other voices of dissent; this week's hilarious scene was the interview with the Kenyan priest, who after Dawkins had patiently explained the theory of evolution (including the crucial nugget that humans didn't pass through a stage of being apes, they simply have a common evolutionary ancestor), replied with "So what's evolution's aim? Will we all have, like, really big heads?" You can take the teleology out of the priest, but you... actually, no you can't.
And so to the not so good; that is, Rick's grasp of scientific history. I threatened to kick my television to death if Francis Galton didn't crop up in a discussion of eugenics, and although admittedly I spent a minute in the kitchen during this part, I didn't hear Galton mentioned once (I haven't, however, destroyed the television. I'm saving that for the next time some pop 'historian' lets "And the Victorians, yeah, they like totally covered up table legs 'cos they looked well rude" drop out of his or her mouth). This seems a little too much like intellectual dishonesty to me, not least because Dawkins was keen to point out that eugenics is not Darwinism, yet it's the figure of Galton who muddies the waters on this point. Firstly, because Galton - who actually coined the term eugenics - was thinking about these kind of things throughout the 1860s and 1870s in articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865) in Macmillan's Magazine, and books such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), which pretty much does for Dawkins' implications that these were twentieth century ideas (and therefore nothing to do with the uberVictorian Darwin). Secondly, and closer to home, it's rather disingenuous to say that eguenics had nothing to do with Darwin whatsoever, when the very term was invented by his cousin. Yes, you heard it here four hundred and twelfth.
There was also another moment of "Did he actually say that?" (although I suppose Galton was "Did he actually not say that?") towards the end, when musing on humanity's capacity for altruism. Dawkins wondered how we could explain such behaviour as charity, kindness, the establishment of asylums for the mentally ill, the Poor Law... Um - go back a bit. It's well known that Dawkins despises Foucault (mainly, it seems, for proposing ideas that can't be conclusively verified, and often doing so in a stylistically challenging manner. Or perhaps for being bald and French, who knows?), but you don't have to have read Discipline and Punish or The Birth of the Clinic to understand that asylums were less instances of human kindness and more instruments of social control and normativity. Similarly, the Poor Law as monument to empathy? Has he read Oliver Twist, or any of Dickens' (arguably the key empathetic figure of the nineteenth century) critiques of the system? Perhaps Dawkins thought the Poor Law sounded nice, but then that doesn't explain why council tax isn't called the Super Fun Paradise Ticket. Ah well.
Next week - finally, Dawkins gets round to religious resistance to Darwinism. Why hasn't he looked at this before?
Let's focus on the good parts, for the moment, because there were many. The Dawk is at his best when explaining concepts, not trying to contextualise them, and so there was a nice part on why applying Darwinian principles to business is simply stretching a metaphor too far. It's clear, too, that Dawkins feels uneasy that The Selfish Gene is often associated ideologically and historically with Thatcherism (much of the programme was Dawkins saying "honestly, I'm a liberal"), and the case he made for the fallacy of the comparison was a good one. Some interesting material on the Darwinian uses of altruism, although the section in which he confronted another researcher who had criticised his work as promoting veneer theory (i.e., that morality is really just the misleading icing on a cake of survival-driven viciousness) was a bit disappointing; encouraged by the fact that Dawkins had let a voice of informed dissent onto the stage, it really turned into Dawkins saying "But of course, he's wrong." As for other voices of dissent; this week's hilarious scene was the interview with the Kenyan priest, who after Dawkins had patiently explained the theory of evolution (including the crucial nugget that humans didn't pass through a stage of being apes, they simply have a common evolutionary ancestor), replied with "So what's evolution's aim? Will we all have, like, really big heads?" You can take the teleology out of the priest, but you... actually, no you can't.
And so to the not so good; that is, Rick's grasp of scientific history. I threatened to kick my television to death if Francis Galton didn't crop up in a discussion of eugenics, and although admittedly I spent a minute in the kitchen during this part, I didn't hear Galton mentioned once (I haven't, however, destroyed the television. I'm saving that for the next time some pop 'historian' lets "And the Victorians, yeah, they like totally covered up table legs 'cos they looked well rude" drop out of his or her mouth). This seems a little too much like intellectual dishonesty to me, not least because Dawkins was keen to point out that eugenics is not Darwinism, yet it's the figure of Galton who muddies the waters on this point. Firstly, because Galton - who actually coined the term eugenics - was thinking about these kind of things throughout the 1860s and 1870s in articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865) in Macmillan's Magazine, and books such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), which pretty much does for Dawkins' implications that these were twentieth century ideas (and therefore nothing to do with the uberVictorian Darwin). Secondly, and closer to home, it's rather disingenuous to say that eguenics had nothing to do with Darwin whatsoever, when the very term was invented by his cousin. Yes, you heard it here four hundred and twelfth.
There was also another moment of "Did he actually say that?" (although I suppose Galton was "Did he actually not say that?") towards the end, when musing on humanity's capacity for altruism. Dawkins wondered how we could explain such behaviour as charity, kindness, the establishment of asylums for the mentally ill, the Poor Law... Um - go back a bit. It's well known that Dawkins despises Foucault (mainly, it seems, for proposing ideas that can't be conclusively verified, and often doing so in a stylistically challenging manner. Or perhaps for being bald and French, who knows?), but you don't have to have read Discipline and Punish or The Birth of the Clinic to understand that asylums were less instances of human kindness and more instruments of social control and normativity. Similarly, the Poor Law as monument to empathy? Has he read Oliver Twist, or any of Dickens' (arguably the key empathetic figure of the nineteenth century) critiques of the system? Perhaps Dawkins thought the Poor Law sounded nice, but then that doesn't explain why council tax isn't called the Super Fun Paradise Ticket. Ah well.
Next week - finally, Dawkins gets round to religious resistance to Darwinism. Why hasn't he looked at this before?
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Finally, some Darwin; or, What Would Terry Eagleton Do?
Hello all. Apologies for the two-month hiatus, but these last two months have been somewhat busy. Off to the US for much of June, various conference dates (as keen readers will already know) in July, and now a relocation. Yes, as of 8th August, the Doughnuts are moving from the terrorist's medium sized city of choice, Exeter, and up to Newcastle. In the meantime, however, I'm sad to report a muffin retraction. You'll remember a few months ago how I congratulated the Continental Airlines ground staff at Gatwick for their service in getting me good seats, with the cry of 'muffins all round'? Unfortunately, Continental's response on my return to the UK at the end of June was to act with such incompetence across two continents (starting with ineptitude and hungoverness at Oklahoma City, going on with massive inconvenience at Houston, and ending with startling rudeness at Gatwick) that I doubt there will ever be muffins for Continental again.
Right, to business. Finally, some Darwin, as on Monday I caught the first part of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin on Channel 4. I sometimes wonder what Dawkins' RAE contribution must actually be, because for the last few years he seems to be spending increasing amounts of time wandering away from science and into lacklustre cultural analysis and godawful episodes of Doctor Who (of the series finale, I'll say this - it was mostly fun to watch but utterly embarrassing to think about). This has been characterised by his shift from evolutionary biologist to professional atheist, from The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, from being implicitly questioning to explicitly blunt. As an atheist myself (primary school RE was always on the back foot after the six year old me couldn't quite reconcile prayers to a loving god with the footage from Ethiopa; secondary school RE and I didn't get on when I kept taking what might best be called the Gregory House approach) there were parts of The God Delusion I liked; as a cultural historian, there were parts I found incredibly weak. The problem is that for Dawkins, evolution immediately refutes any religious narrative, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But for many people, they aren't. Are these people just plain wrong? Or are there more complex cultural and social reasons for this seeming contradiction and the persistence of religion? I'm guessing the latter, and this is where Dawkins falls down, as he simply doesn't have the philosophical background to deal with such questions. For instance, his treatment of Anselm's ontological argument in The God Delusion is astonishingly intemperate; dismissing it as a playground exchange as swiftly as he does leaves no room for the consideration that, although it seems silly now, it obviously had great rhetorical power for a different historical culture. That said, I'm more tempted to side with Dawkins than with Terry Eagleton, whose review of Delusion in the London Review of Books began with some good points before sliding into a diatribe that said more about his own sentimental attachment to Catholicism than anything else (God is not a man on a cloud, but rather a precondition for existence? Huh?).
Similarly, there are of course plenty of people for whom evolution and religion cannot co-exist and who reside on the frankly mental side of the coin. Three examples from my personal experience should suffice. Firstly, a friend of mine once showed me a leaflet from his local church on how to be a good Christian. There was a ten point plan for spreading the word, the final point of which was (and seriously, I'm not making this up) "If somebody wants to talk about the existence of dinosaurs or evolution, change the topic of conversation." Honestly. Secondly, an encounter with a man on the street who started talking about the wonder of the world and how there must be a intelligent designer. I let him speak for a bit before explaining why there wasn't an intelligent designer. He said that, actually, in like, later life, Darwin said his theory, was, like, totally wrong? I told him I lectured in Victorian culture at the local university; he told me that I should probably move on and let him have a crack at someone else. The final example, and the one in which I was completely unable to keep a straight face, was when I met another evangelical on the street, who started a lecture on how amazing the human eye was. How could so perfect an organic tool have come about with design? It was just too good to be true. The fact that she delivered this earnest speech wearing glasses about two inches thick somewhat undermined her claims to the divine perfection of eyes. God moves in mysterious ways, mostly around Specsavers.
I've drifted from the point slightly. The Genius of Charles Darwin is a perfectly fine programme, but it's let down somewhat by Dawkins' own limitations as a cultural historian. The way Dawkins tells it, evolution was an insight that seemingly came out of nowhere but the mind of an intellectual superhero. Although attractive, such a narrative largely ignores the many other cultural influences around the appearance of the theory, in favour of a Romanticist notion of the lone genius turning the world upside down (ah, should have read the title). Alfred Russell Wallace, who was coming to the same conclusions at much the same time, is mentioned briefly but grudgingly; Herbert Spencer, who really coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' hasn't appeared at all yet, which is bemusing because at points Dawkins seems to drift into a more progressive Spencerian model of evolution than the more chance fuelled Darwinian mode. Admittedly, this is a three part series, so there's still time for more of this (next week, on eugenics, had better mention Francis Galton, otherwise I'm kicking my television to death), but I can't help but feel that it would benefit from more historical precision and fewer scenes of kids looking for fossils. Or perhaps more lines like "Hello, I'm Richard... so how long have you been a sex worker?"
Right, to business. Finally, some Darwin, as on Monday I caught the first part of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin on Channel 4. I sometimes wonder what Dawkins' RAE contribution must actually be, because for the last few years he seems to be spending increasing amounts of time wandering away from science and into lacklustre cultural analysis and godawful episodes of Doctor Who (of the series finale, I'll say this - it was mostly fun to watch but utterly embarrassing to think about). This has been characterised by his shift from evolutionary biologist to professional atheist, from The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, from being implicitly questioning to explicitly blunt. As an atheist myself (primary school RE was always on the back foot after the six year old me couldn't quite reconcile prayers to a loving god with the footage from Ethiopa; secondary school RE and I didn't get on when I kept taking what might best be called the Gregory House approach) there were parts of The God Delusion I liked; as a cultural historian, there were parts I found incredibly weak. The problem is that for Dawkins, evolution immediately refutes any religious narrative, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But for many people, they aren't. Are these people just plain wrong? Or are there more complex cultural and social reasons for this seeming contradiction and the persistence of religion? I'm guessing the latter, and this is where Dawkins falls down, as he simply doesn't have the philosophical background to deal with such questions. For instance, his treatment of Anselm's ontological argument in The God Delusion is astonishingly intemperate; dismissing it as a playground exchange as swiftly as he does leaves no room for the consideration that, although it seems silly now, it obviously had great rhetorical power for a different historical culture. That said, I'm more tempted to side with Dawkins than with Terry Eagleton, whose review of Delusion in the London Review of Books began with some good points before sliding into a diatribe that said more about his own sentimental attachment to Catholicism than anything else (God is not a man on a cloud, but rather a precondition for existence? Huh?).
Similarly, there are of course plenty of people for whom evolution and religion cannot co-exist and who reside on the frankly mental side of the coin. Three examples from my personal experience should suffice. Firstly, a friend of mine once showed me a leaflet from his local church on how to be a good Christian. There was a ten point plan for spreading the word, the final point of which was (and seriously, I'm not making this up) "If somebody wants to talk about the existence of dinosaurs or evolution, change the topic of conversation." Honestly. Secondly, an encounter with a man on the street who started talking about the wonder of the world and how there must be a intelligent designer. I let him speak for a bit before explaining why there wasn't an intelligent designer. He said that, actually, in like, later life, Darwin said his theory, was, like, totally wrong? I told him I lectured in Victorian culture at the local university; he told me that I should probably move on and let him have a crack at someone else. The final example, and the one in which I was completely unable to keep a straight face, was when I met another evangelical on the street, who started a lecture on how amazing the human eye was. How could so perfect an organic tool have come about with design? It was just too good to be true. The fact that she delivered this earnest speech wearing glasses about two inches thick somewhat undermined her claims to the divine perfection of eyes. God moves in mysterious ways, mostly around Specsavers.
I've drifted from the point slightly. The Genius of Charles Darwin is a perfectly fine programme, but it's let down somewhat by Dawkins' own limitations as a cultural historian. The way Dawkins tells it, evolution was an insight that seemingly came out of nowhere but the mind of an intellectual superhero. Although attractive, such a narrative largely ignores the many other cultural influences around the appearance of the theory, in favour of a Romanticist notion of the lone genius turning the world upside down (ah, should have read the title). Alfred Russell Wallace, who was coming to the same conclusions at much the same time, is mentioned briefly but grudgingly; Herbert Spencer, who really coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' hasn't appeared at all yet, which is bemusing because at points Dawkins seems to drift into a more progressive Spencerian model of evolution than the more chance fuelled Darwinian mode. Admittedly, this is a three part series, so there's still time for more of this (next week, on eugenics, had better mention Francis Galton, otherwise I'm kicking my television to death), but I can't help but feel that it would benefit from more historical precision and fewer scenes of kids looking for fossils. Or perhaps more lines like "Hello, I'm Richard... so how long have you been a sex worker?"
Saturday, 31 May 2008
Tour dates 2008
Something of a makeover this week, doughnutfans; since the day after I adorned the top of this e-journal with my strange double-exposure photo of scenes of Exeter (c. 2001) the city was caught up in the war on terr'r (to use George's pronunciation), I thought something more immediately Victorian might be appropriate, not least because the Victorian content suggested by the title hasn't been much in evidence so far this year. More to come in the forthcoming months, honest. I really can't wait to get hold of a scanner and share with you the late Victorian/Edwardian delights of The Doings of Vigorous Daunt, Millionaire, a kind of prototypic James Bond who first appeared in the Harmsworth Magazine at the turn of the century. The illustrations are great, marauding tigers and revolvers all over the place. In the meantime, you'll have to make do with Sidney Paget's image of John Watson from Conan Doyle's "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" in volume two of The Strand Magazine, 1891. Those of you wanting more gloss on this image should see what I said about it in Victorian Periodicals Review, 40.1 (2007). Ah, the distinctive aroma of self-promotion. While I'm about it, anyone in the academic business who wants to say hello (and to moan about the lack of Victorian stuff so far this year) can do so at any of the three forthcoming conferences I'll be speaking at in the next few months.
Firstly, there's Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film at the University of Portsmouth, 14-16 July 2008, where I'll be presenting on urban myth and Edwardian crime fiction, in particular Marie Belloc-Lowndes' novel The Lodger. Although we tend to associate urban legends with twentieth century popular culture (and in particular fifties Americana onwards, I would guess), there's a persuasive case that such stories were all over nineteenth century popular culture, and certainly by the time Belloc Lowndes took a hearsay story about Jack the Ripper and turned it into fiction in 1912. It's probably a little on the late side, but you can book your front row seats here.
Secondly, and in the same week, a rare hometown gig; Artistry and Industry: Representations of Creative Labour in Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Exeter, 18-20 July 2008. This one is a development of the research area I unveiled at Birkbeck back in October, magic and conjuring in Victorian fiction. Like that paper, there'll be some Dickens in there, but this one is more generally about Victorian conjuring's internal struggle with its aesthetic status (is it an art? 'Yes,' says David Devant and other successful fin de siecle magicians; 'um maybe' says the public; 'Hell no' say the arbiters of high culture, but they obviously say it more politely). Expect side discussions of spiritualism and perhaps a bonus bad Derren Brown impersonation.
Thirdly, and finally for now, off to Leicester for Victorian Bodies: Touch, Bodies, and Emotions, 1-3 September 2008. Although last on the list at present, this one is part of my primary research project, being a cultural history of London Underground (those of you who have been paying attention to a psychotic degree will remember I mentioned this about fifteen months ago). Here, I'll be looking at how the establishment of the Underground in the 1860s gave popular culture a new space for fear, unease, and general terror, in particular in John Oxenham's 1897 crime serial A Mystery of the Underground, a story apparently so terrifying that readers refused to travel by underground. Or so Peter Haining argues, although I'm finding actual evidence for this rather scant (itself an interesting point; why are we so keen to accept narratives of terror about the underground?). Tour T-shirts to follow, featuring rockin' John Watson; yours for thirty pounds each.
Firstly, there's Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film at the University of Portsmouth, 14-16 July 2008, where I'll be presenting on urban myth and Edwardian crime fiction, in particular Marie Belloc-Lowndes' novel The Lodger. Although we tend to associate urban legends with twentieth century popular culture (and in particular fifties Americana onwards, I would guess), there's a persuasive case that such stories were all over nineteenth century popular culture, and certainly by the time Belloc Lowndes took a hearsay story about Jack the Ripper and turned it into fiction in 1912. It's probably a little on the late side, but you can book your front row seats here.
Secondly, and in the same week, a rare hometown gig; Artistry and Industry: Representations of Creative Labour in Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Exeter, 18-20 July 2008. This one is a development of the research area I unveiled at Birkbeck back in October, magic and conjuring in Victorian fiction. Like that paper, there'll be some Dickens in there, but this one is more generally about Victorian conjuring's internal struggle with its aesthetic status (is it an art? 'Yes,' says David Devant and other successful fin de siecle magicians; 'um maybe' says the public; 'Hell no' say the arbiters of high culture, but they obviously say it more politely). Expect side discussions of spiritualism and perhaps a bonus bad Derren Brown impersonation.
Thirdly, and finally for now, off to Leicester for Victorian Bodies: Touch, Bodies, and Emotions, 1-3 September 2008. Although last on the list at present, this one is part of my primary research project, being a cultural history of London Underground (those of you who have been paying attention to a psychotic degree will remember I mentioned this about fifteen months ago). Here, I'll be looking at how the establishment of the Underground in the 1860s gave popular culture a new space for fear, unease, and general terror, in particular in John Oxenham's 1897 crime serial A Mystery of the Underground, a story apparently so terrifying that readers refused to travel by underground. Or so Peter Haining argues, although I'm finding actual evidence for this rather scant (itself an interesting point; why are we so keen to accept narratives of terror about the underground?). Tour T-shirts to follow, featuring rockin' John Watson; yours for thirty pounds each.
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