The Golden Strawberry

From Comment is Free:

Experts believe Shakespeare often wrote with a hangover - and that his work suffered as a result.

In today’s G2, John Sutherland argues that while Will did have moments of brilliance, he also penned some of the clunkiest lines in English literature. “When pondering whether to be or not to be, Hamlet fantasises about ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’,” Sutherland writes. “What does Shakespeare expect us to see in our mind’s eye? Some mad idiot firing a blunderbluss into the waves from the end of Brighton pier?”

But if the Bard’s work is secretly a little lacklustre, which other iconic geniuses have produced “masterpieces” that are less than they’re cracked up to be?

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks Shakespeare is overrated. He often seems to use a hundred words, where half a dozen will do. Often what he writes is impenetrable and meaningless.

Still, it is true to say that if he was around today, Shakespeare would still be writing. He’d probably have a column for the Daily Telegraph.

Cory

An odd post to begin the resurgance, I know, but before I comment on Poverty (the Popes latest deranged ramblings and the equally barmy response from much of the Muslim world) and War (The Middle East in general), I’d like to talk about Love.

The Royal Shakespeare Company has claimed that ‘boring’ lessons are putting youngsters in England off Shakespeare for life. In the vast majority of cases, this must be the case. The very atmosphere of a school lesson (unless the teacher is particularly engaging and challenging) nearly always puts a student off the subject being taught; boring, repetitive, superficial and slap dash approaches are taken to topics (particularly Arts side ones like English and History) which require time and dialogue between teacher and pupil to be properly explained.

Ultimately the problem rests with the exam system, which entrenches a Gradgrindian ethos of ‘facts, facts and more facts’ and dilutes the pleasure of learning for learnings sake. League tables, GCSE’s and a Comprehensive education system are all partly to blame for this.

A true love of literature is something that can only be discovered for oneself; expecting a student to become a book-dweeb by thrusting him straight into the pages of the Bard or George Eloit’s ‘Middlemarch’ is a receipe for disaster. Not only will they take little from a teaching course designed to make sure they can write a 6 page essay under timed conditions in the sense of understanding the novel; they will also desert the fertile pastures of Literary life - perhaps forever. The joy of discovering Eloit, Tolstoy, George Orwell or Salman Rushdie will never be avaliable to them; and all because they felt bored and miserable in a classroom when they were 15.

My own education in English was mixed. It’s quality varied very much according to which teacher I had and their commitment and energy. I do remember, however, that studyng George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ was particularly riveting. This led me onto ‘1984′ and then his essays which, in my opinion, are some of the best ever written by an English pen. Edgar Allen Poe’s selected tales (’The Gold Bug’, ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’) were also formative.

The Reading Experience offers a good solution to this problem:

The more rational action would be to take Shakespeare–indeed, all of capital-L Literature–out of the classroom altogether. If the result of literary study is students who vow “never to come into contact with the Bard again,” what earthly good is it doing? It only further solidifies the status of literature as the tiresome pursuit of pedants (or of earnest but equally tiresome popularizers) and, in my view, does little to encourage the small cohort of students who respond positively to works of literature but would have come to reading it on their own, anyway. Take it out of the schools and literature might become an object of intrigue rather than duty, something to be discovered as part of one’s growing maturity, not stuffed into the brain because it’s “good for you.” Some of those students now convinced it’s all just too tedious might even stumble upon it as well.

It’s good to be back and blogging.

-posted by Adam

Just a snippet to whet your appetite, an interview with Francis Beckett, a biographer (apparently) who has rated all the Prime Ministers on a rating out of five. Eden and Chamberlain get 0, Thatcher and Atlee get 5, Blair gets three.

I particularly agree with what Beckett says here:

FB: This series will (hopefully) serve as a political history of the 20th century - 20 prime ministers in 20 books. In my view the best way to understand history is through biography. There are “great forces”, the Marxist idea of history, operating, but even then I find it more interesting to see those forces acting through individuals.

And I do actually believe individuals make a difference, and history would be different without them. Does anyone, for instance, think we would have been better off if Halifax had become prime minister in 1940, rather than Churchill? Or that things would not have been different if Rab Butler had won the Tory leadership rather than Harold Macmillan?

And not least, I, for one, believe things would have been fundamentally different if John Smith had lived - no Iraq, no PFI, no dome, no city academies, a proper comprehensive system of education based on what he had seen had worked in Scotland, and higher taxes, or at least hypothecated ones for education and health. And, basically, a Labour party not enslaved to Thatcher’s idea that the private sector is always best.

It’s a moot point whether you agree with the specifics of what Beckett has to say (I do as a matter of fact) but biography is the most interesting way to study history. Maybe it doesn’t help you (as much) to understand root causes, but it’s more fun reading about the lives of the medieval French kings than economic and social changes in twelfth century France, for example.

-posted by Roy

Just finished reading Dostoyevsky’s last and arguably most brilliant novel – the Karamazov Brothers. It made me think about many things (how could such a complex work not do so?) but particularly about faith. Specifically religious faith - how far the human spirit needs it as well as how far it benefits the individual. The centrepiece of the novel is book 5 - ‘Pro and Contra’ and, more precisely, the two chapters ‘Rebellion’ and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’.

These two chapters contain within them a discourse between two of the brothers, Alyosha and Ivan, about God, faith and the temporal power of the Church. Alyosha, the youngest brother, is the hero of the novel. Saintly, pious, selfless, compassionate, devoted to God and ‘the people’ (the Prosecution council at the trial later refers to him as a ‘populist’), he is Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the ideal man. Ivan, the middle brother, is an intellectual genius. Haunted by the contradictions present in the external world, he seeks to reason those same contradictions away. Alyosha refers to him constantly as a man ‘with unresolved questions inside of himself’. Ivan’s quest to resolve the worlds problems drive him to conjure up his own personal ghosts, first in the shape of the Grand Inquisitor, then later on in the form of Satan himself. Unable to reconcile his analytical concern for the suffering of humanity with the fact that, as the Grand Inquisitor and the Devil put it, man has an unquenchable desire to revel in a sea of cruelty and cynicism, Ivan is driven insane.
 In ‘Rebellion’, then, Ivan layers horror upon horror, battering Alyosha with repeated examples of humanities baseness and unsuitability for religious faith. He concludes this particular monologue with what, it seems to me, is the classic position of the materialist, of a person who would suffer with their scepticism intact rather than live blissfully with complete satisfaction, their ability to challenge evaporated. It is as follows: 

And above all, I don’t want the mother to embrace the torturer whose dogs tore her son apart! She has no right to forgive him! Let her, if she will, forgive him her own suffering, her own extreme anguish as a mother, but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her mutilated child; even if the child himself forgives, she has no right! And if that is so, if the right to forgive does not exist, then where is harmony? Is there in all the world a single being who could forgive and ahs the right to do so? I don’t want harmony; for the love of humankind, I don’t want it. I would rather that suffering were not avenged. I would prefer to keep my suffering unavenged and my abhorrence unplacated, even at the risk of being wrong. Besides, the price of harmony has been set too high, we can’t afford the entrance fee. And that’s why I hasten to return my entry ticket. If I ever want to call myself an honest man, I have to hand it back as soon as possible. And that’s exactly what I’m doing. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha; I’m just, with the utmost respect, handing Him back my ticket.’            ‘That’s rebellion,’ Alyosha said quietly, without looking up. 

Rebellion indeed. Rebellion is what Ivan pursues throughout the novel. Of course, the presence of the bastard, manipulative half brother Smerdyakov, whom Ivan infects with his ideas, means that Ivan is driven insane. Smerdyakov becomes the third projection of Ivan’s tortured personality, following the Grand Inquisitor and the Devil. What is worse, he becomes the very worst part – the section of Ivan who always seeks the upper hand in the one-to-one psychological battles waged between people of intellect. Ivan is unable to comprehend how someone as poor and pathetic as Smerdyakov could possibly challenge him. Smerdyakov exploits and manipulates Ivan’s ideas so well that he convinces Ivan that there is no guarantee of reality- how can Ivan know that reality is not a recurring nightmare in his hyperactive imagination?      

So Ivan is driven insane by his ideas, but only as a result of the presence of a villain. His philosophy still holds a remarkable amount of resilience, however. Its torch is carried today by such person as Hitchens, who, in his book ‘Letters to a Young Contrarian’, says:  

I should not even attempt to sermonise, yet I do warn you that if you feel capable of going into ‘’internal exile’’ and living against the stream, you can expect some dark nights of- all right- the soul/ But to undertake this and then to seek external or invisible aid would surely be to miss the point. A degree of solitude and resignation is necessary to begin with. Some people can’t bear solitude, let alone the idea that the heavens are empty and that we do not even succeed in troubling their deafness with out bootless cries. To be an exile or outcast on a remote shore- many minds turn away in terror and seek any source of cosiness. I can say that, not only when it is compared to the ghastliness of Eternal Paternalism, the concept of lonliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up. 

As rousing and self affirming an encouragement of secular humanism as I have ever read. Freud said in his ‘The Future of an Illusion’ that the religious impulse is in eradicable in humanity so long as we are ‘afraid of the dark’ so to speak. Afraid of death, we constantly seek to prolong our life. At the expense of our reason and our love and solidarity with our fellow man we have come up with variations on the same cosmic blanket. Being humans, we then proceed to kill each other because of our differences. It is high time that we came to our senses and ditched the pernicious medievalist tendencies and traditions which have somehow survived to the digital age. Our rapidly advancing level of technical development means that we can no longer afford to give religious faith the leeway and tolerance it has eben afforded for so long. Weapons which can kill millions of people are becoming easier and easier to build; and if something is not done quickly to arrest the tide of fundementalism currently sweeping the globe, sooner or later one of our major cities could end up as a smoking, radioactive wasteland.

-posted by Adam

I knew you’d be excited. I was flicking through the books on Medieval England (as you do) and I saw this paragraph in one of them:

Civilisations, born of material needs, corrupt and perish. Cultures, born of spiritual needs, survive and justify mankind. Medievalism produces a strong sivilisation which is now a memory: it also produced a religious and an aesthetic conception of life which is still vital and is still regarded as one of the noblest man has ever known of can attain to.

I can almost see Adam spluttering into his coffee reading that. Sounds like an interesting read, anyroad.

-posted by Roy

According to the Observer anyway. And I have read one. 1984. Less time blogging, more time reading, methinks…

-posted by Roy

Adventures in a TV Nation, by Michael Moore and Kathleen Glynn.

When I got back from uni, on top of my boxes of papers and miscellaneous crap, there was a book; presumably one that Dad had bought from a charity shop. Although I had read, accepted and then dismissed as foolish Moore’s particular brand of politics, I thought I would give this a whirl.

It turns out that TV Nation was an award-winning TV Series. Screened on NBC and Fox in America and the BBC over here, it was supposed to be a humourous, satirical magazine show, poking fun at Moore’s main bugbears - big companies, the state of the Democrats and neo-liberals of various description.

The problem with the book, is that it’s not as funny as the TV series. Although watching a TV show where a giant 7ft chicken marches into company buildings and harrasses the bosses may be amusing, this doesn’t translate well into a book. The same goes for a haulage truck filled with Communist memorabilla and hauled around America for “Communism’s farewell tour”.

The second problem, is that TV Nation was supposed to be a humourous rather than political show. This means there is more style than substance. Now Michael Moore’s political work at the best of times is more style than substance. Which means basically what you read is 300 pages of mainly meaningless froth. For instance, TV Nation hired a former KGB spy to find out “Who is buried in (Richard) Nixon’s Grave?” There is no explanation as to why Nixon would fake his own death, or how this would occur, just a load of half-baked statements about how Nixon was well one minute and dead the next. Because no person in history’s ever died suddenly, have they?

It does have it’s moments. The most interesting parts of the book was talking about the TV company’s censorship of the programme. Though even this got tiresome, as Moore appeared to keep banging on about how everyone was against him. In terms of episodes, my personal favourite concerned Newt Gingrich, a Republican Senator who was against US Government Spending. His district only happened to rake in $4billion of government funds every year. He did not seem to want to return all this “evil” government money, despite TV Nation’s best efforts to get it back…

The main problem is, as with all Moore’s other works, what he doesn’t tell you is as important as what he does. As someone says in the comments section to TV Nation’s entry in the Internet Movie Databse:

I remember this show coming to a city near my home town for TV Nation Day. Moore had lobbied to get a certain day declared TV Nation Day in the US to show how easy it is to buy congressmen. The bill WAS introduced, but not voted on in time. The small city of Fishkill, NY decided to declare that day TV Nation Day on their own and to celebrate the city and show held a parade down it’s small main street followed by a celebration at a small mall with a showing of Roger & Me. I was at the parade and can vouch that the footage shown that night on TV was NOT indicative of the parade or the city of Fishkill at the time. The city HAD fallen on hard times with the bad economy, mostly IBM closing a local plant in a city that relied on IBM. However, it was NOT as bad as the show would have viewers believe. Michael Moore’s contention was that the economy was horrible. So to back it up, they used creative camera angles to give the impression that Main Street was almost totally vacant. It was not. But by shooting several different angles of the same vacant stores, TV Nation made it look like almost every building was vacant. After seeing this first hand, I never took this show, or anything Michael Moore did seriously ever again. Who knows what other lies he has told.

VERDICT - perhaps a good nostalgia binge for those who watched the series. It doesn’t do very much for me though. Only occasionally does it spring into life.

RATING - 3 Golden Strawberrys (out of 5) ***.

-posted by Roy

Hopefully there will be a few more reviews added of Books, films and the like. Possibly CDs, but this could cause contention, as it seems we don’t “get” each other’s music!

….is all I can say to this:

If I want to blog something, but cannot think of a suitable subject, all I have to do is to go onto RESPECT’s website. There is usually always something on there to rile me and get me typing away.

This isn’t so much annoying as just faintly amusing. John Rees has got a new book out. Imperialism and Resistance is, apparently:

A unique critique of the new economic and military imperialism of the United States and its allies in the 21st century.

Unique, perhaps, but in what way? And imperialism, tish and pish I say. I may have more to say after I have finished reading “Colossos”. 

Inspired by the anti-globalization and anti-war movements, in which the author himself has played a crucial role,

And doing a fine job in halting the spread of global economies throughout the world…. 

this is also an accessible introduction to the huge changes in global politics since the dominance of the American Empire with the end of the Cold War.

Is it really. What a shame I won’t bother buying it then. Especially seeing as Bookmarks are selling it for £11.99!Perhaps if they could have made use of the opportunities to cut costs that globalisation has given them, they could have shifted it for half the price. Still, so it goes.

I am also amused by the identity of those who have already given the book a glowing praise. Of the four people listed, three (Tony Benn, Alex Callinicos and George Galloway) are fellow comrades of Rees’, with the Stop The War coalition. Not that this is mentioned in the blurb. Callinicos isn’t even mentioned as the (former, I think) editor of “Socialist Worker”, but as a Professor of something or other. Funny how lefty books seem to use the same “capitalist” technique to sell books they themselves abhor.

As I say before, I have nothing to say about imperialism yet, but I will post about it in a few days or so…

-posted by Roy.

For those of us with an irrational hatred of Noel Edmonds (oh come on - he is annoying), this was fairly amusing.

An orthopaedic consultant has found that Edmonds is suffering from repetitive strain injury in his right elbow from lifting the telephone too often on his new television game show, Deal or No Deal.

 And there’s this:

Edmonds, 57, said: “The phone is pretty heavy.

Yes, of course it is. Poor guy.

If this weren’t bad enough, I saw this whilst browsing bookshops in Huddersfield yesterday. Who in their right mind would buy such a book?

-posted by Roy

I did have a bit of a go at Niall Ferguson in this blog earlier, but I didn’t call his views “disgusting and dangerous”. This is what Johann Hari does in the latest Newsnight review, which can be viewed here from Monday.

The panel was reviewing Ferguson’s War of the World. With the exception of Michael Gove, the panel did not give it a positive review, saying it was scrappily put together. I will pass judgement until I have actually seen it, if I get the chance.

There is an accompanying book with the series, which is out in June according to Ferguson’s website. Also on the website is a quotation from the Sunday Telegraph, describing the book as:

big, bold and brilliantly belligerent

But then, of course the ST would praise Ferguson. He’s only a columnist for the bloody thing!

-posted by Roy