Twelve prominent Americans give their verdict on Bush’s cultural legacy.

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Art Nouveau - 6 rue du lac, Brussells

Fonk has a photograph of a wonderful art nouveau door. I’ve reproduced it here, but there are more on his Flickr page:

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“One major difference between love and hate appears to be in the fact that large parts of the cerebral cortex – associated with judgement and reasoning – become de-activated during love, whereas only a small area is deactivated in hate.” Steve Conner at The Independent.

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“It’s dog-eat-dog time, and the big dogs have the best lobbyists.” In The Guardian, five writers, Danit Brown, Hari Kunzru, Kevin Brockmeier, Harry Shearer, and Paul Maliszewski imagine what happens after the election.

Gone are the days when Jack McClelland would publish a seminal Canadian novel like Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers even though he confessed to being baffled by it. In a 1965 letter to Cohen, McClelland wrote, “[E]ven though I can’t pretend to understand the goddamn book, I do congratulate you. It’s a wild and incredible effort.” McClelland took a chance on a book that he didn’t fully comprehend, but in which he detected the spark of greatness. Forty-three years later, Beautiful Losers remains in print.
Would Leonard Cohen fare so well today? An argument to the contrary could be made. Yet Beautiful Losers is a great book precisely because of its iconoclasm and idiosyncrasies, because of its wildness and its sheer uncontainability. Naipaul was probably wrong in suggesting that great authors don’t exist today, but they do appear to have a more difficult time gaining access to the machinery of publishing and to securing a readership once they have vaulted that hurdle. The more publishers retreat to the middle ground, the more they are consigning our culture to the wasteland of mediocrity and complacency. And it need not be said that a complacent culture is a moribund culture.

In a very competitive culture that emphasizes newness and fashion, and promotes the reading of a current blockbuster which is forgotten in a moment’s time, the backlist is a vanishing phenomenon. The volume of sales of one-year-old or older books is shrinking, while newer books capture an increasing share of the market. Most major publishers realize that this ratio has changed. The scope of the decrease is estimated to be 20 percent: the backlist which once accounted for 60 percent to 70 percent of the sales volume now represents 40 percent to 50 percent, depending on the size and age of the publisher.

Consider the most striking literary canonisation of our times. Jane Austen has always been esteemed, and FR Leavis sanctified her as one of the bearers of the “great tradition,” a sort of doctor of his secular church. But in the past 15 years she has turned into the English novelist, an inescapable part of the public consciousness, more universally present than any other writer bar Shakespeare. Some people think she owes her current prominence to popular fantasies of tight breeches and bosoms heaving beneath empire-line dresses. This does not seem likely: if that is what people want, they can get it more readily from Georgette Heyer. Another view is that she has benefited from nostalgia for a safer, quieter and more decorous world; but the idea that the world of her novels is cosy and comfortable can hardly survive the reading of them. Most of her modern popularity is the result of her actual merits, and in a broad sense the highbrows and the lower-middlebrows are admiring the same things: well-made plots, perceptive depiction of character and the acute study of social interaction. It is a genuine popular canonisation.

As night fell, burning torches were set on wooden tripods and the young men raised a song. The elders sat in a circle and the singers went round singing each man’s praise as they came before him. They had something to say for every man. Some were great farmers, some were orators who spoke for the clan. Okonkwo was the greatest wrestler and warrior alive. When they had gone round the circle they settled down in the centre, and girls came from the inner compound to dance. At first the bride was not among them. But when she finally appeared holding a cock in her right hand, a loud cheer rose from the crowd. All the other dancers made way for her. She presented the cock to the musicians and began to dance. Her brass anklets rattled as she danced and her body gleamed with cam wood in the soft yellow light. The musicians with their wood, clay and metal instruments went from song to song. And they were all gay.

Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, the son of a teacher in a missionary school. His parents, instilled in him many of the values of their traditional Ibo culture, but christened him Albert after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria.

Almost forty years ago Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart and became one of the founders of the new Nigerian literature. He would quickly become one of the finest African novelists, if not one of the finest in the world.

This ironic novel traces the life of Okonkwo, one of the greatest men in Umuofia, who, after seven years of exile, returns to his village to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived and are in the process of undermining and destroying his culture and tradition. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy.

As an Ibo writer, Achebe is interested in the effects of Western customs and values on traditional African society. In simple and dignified language he describes a complex and sympathetic portrait of a traditional Ibo village. He shows us a society that contains much of value and undermines Conrad’s vision of Africa as the heart of darkness.

Although he does not paint a vision of an ideal society, Achebe, nevertheless, introduces us to a range of timeless and empathetic characters, and displays his ability to portray them in a way that makes them instantly recognisable to us over both time and space.

This is a short novel but compulsive reading. There are, apparently, two sequels, and I shall be looking for both of them.

Fellows is a British comedian, perhaps better known to many people in his incarnation of John Shuttleworth, an aspiring singer/songwriter from Sheffield in South Yorkshire, and a bit of a nerd.

The recording for Radio Four involved Fellows sorting out his antecedents and his influences and telling exactly what books or cultural events have had a bearing on his development as a comedian. He was helped by a couple of actors who read the literary lines that have lodged in his brain.

We listened to John Hegley (who likes chicken soup spiked with Ecstasy) singing Luton Bungalow, about the house in which he grew up.

Hovis Presley, the Bolton wit and poet who died of a heart attack in 2005 when he was only forty-four, was represented by three of his short poems: Thought For Christmas (“Wait ages for a wise man, then three come at once”).

We listened to poems and extracts from the work of Keats and Laurie Lee.

Some pathos was provided by the reading of the last logs of Donald Crowhurst who, in a deeply conflicted psychological state, leapt from the deck of his trimaran and watched it drift away, during the round-the-world race in 1969.

The real surprise item was a reading from Hunger by the Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun. This is a tiny sample:

If one only had something to eat, just a little, on such a clear day! The mood of the gay morning overwhelmed me, I became unusually serene, and started to hum for pure joy and for no particular reason. In front of a butcher’s shop there was a woman with a basket on her arm, debating about some sausage for dinner; as I went past, she looked up at me. She had only a single tooth in the lower jaw. In the nervous and excitable state I was in, her face made an instant and revolting impression on me – the long yellow tooth looked like a finger sticking out of her jaw, and as she turned toward me, her eyes were full of sausage. I lost my appetite instantly, and felt nauseated.

(Knut Hamsun, Hunger)

Thanks for a continuing parade of new things to read, and especially for Charlote Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wall-Paper.

Thanks for improving my quality of life and stripping away some of the veils that forced me to look at our existence with archaic perceptions. And for challenging long established conceptions of gender, sex rolls, etc.

For improving my sense of self and fostering the certainty that the things you don’t like about life can be changed.

For encouraging me to live with an equal partner instead of the infantalized construct I was brought up to expect.

For giving my daughters the knowledge that it is possible to do anything regardless of gender and for allowing them to be treated on an equal footing in law. For granting them the right to vote. For allowing them to own their own money, house, furniture, etc.

For widening the spectrum of women’s work from teacher, housewife, nun, nurse, whore, skivvy and cook, to almost anything.

For changing the culture in which we live.

For allowing us to dream.

Is that five?