Harbingers of Hatred

Thanks to Stonewall, major progress has been made in this country on the equality front. But as Ben Summerskill explains in the latest newsletter to Stonewall members, there are some who would like to perpetuate the old hatred guard. Enter Lord Tebbit:

Sadly peers also voted, by 178 to 164, to retain an amendment that will mean some people of extreme views attempt to avoid prosecution by citing a religious defence. The amendment had been moved by Lord Waddington and was supported by the Opposition Chief Whip, the Shadow Leader of the House, Lord Tebbit and many of the architects of Section 28, including Baroness Knight and Baroness Fookes. There were also distressing, and completely gratuitous, references to sodomy and young people during the debate. We will push the government before the offence is finally introduced to minimize the impact of this exclusion. However, the tone and unpleasantness of the debates in recent weeks have been a very stark reminder of how many veteran opponents of equality there still are in both Houses of Parliament.

Can't they see how hateful and wrong their attitudes are? Yes, wrong. I don't think it's a matter of opinion whether every individual in society deserves respect and equality.

Riveted by gems

The man is 83. This is what went through our minds as my friend and I visited London last week for one of Pierre Boulez's performance with the LSO.

The man is 83. I saw every concert Boulez gave in London whilst I was at university between 1997 and 2000. I've returned to London twice since the day I graduated to see him conduct. Naturally, then, I am very excited to see him on stage. But as the years tick on, I am mindful of the fact that one day he might have to relinquish his very, very busy conducting schedule. Thankfully, on the evidence of last Wednesday's concert, this does not seem to be in the offing. He breezed through the concert much like it was an impromptu performance, the LSO likewise. He ran up and down the stairs in between pieces during the generous and, at the end, rapturous applause. The man is incredible. And this is before you consider his astonishing achievements as a conductor and composer, both of which were in astonishing evidence last Wednesday.

Anticipating events like this can make the occasion itself seem strangely dream-like, as if the images you've entertained in your imagination do not quite materialise. This is how I felt on Wednesday as I stared at the orchestra and Boulez, in peculiar disbelief. It's only now that I'm able to process this abundantly rich experience, which amounts to reflecting on almost each minute of the performance. Boulez's mathematically-precise and implacable sense of line assists in such situations; every note has its own logic and place within the architectural whole, and Boulez the conductor never fails to make both these things clear in his reading of the scores. But what I found remarkable was the softness and fluidity of the conductor's control and the orchestra's playing. How effortless does the LSO make the highest level of playing seem! I will remember the flute and trumpet solos in Stravinsky's The Song of the Nightingale; the appropriately snarling but never crassly-intoned trombones in Shoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces; the joyously chaotic image of the string section dividing into more than forty parts in Boulez's own Notations; the bite of the percussion everywhere.

I agree with Boulezian's review of the concert, in particular his observation about Boulez's programming. You could argue that his concentration on twentieth-century masterworks of the most progressive kind makes Boulez's repertoire as a conductor limited. (It's only in recent years that he has surprised the music community by journeying tentatively into realms unfamiliar to him, Bruckner being the most notable example, and over the past year, Janacek - a real surprise!) Though he concentrates very specifically on such figures as Bartok, Stravinsky, Debussy, Shoenberg, Webern, and Berg, last week's concert at the Barbican juxtaposed works in such a way as to reveal the relationships between composers. It's as if something of the creative unconscious is illuminated in ways that each composer might not have fathomed. I'm thinking here of how strikingly similar are certain elements of Shoenberg's and Stravinsky's writing, and how Boulez himself has absorbed their vocabularies in his own Notations. And this despite the dissimilarities between each composer's overall style. Beyond technical matters, though, there was an hallucinatory atmosphere at the centre of each piece that made me think the concert was programmed with this in mind. Each piece had an intensely-focused still centre, and I was riveted; lost, even. Amazing.

My ultimate wish is that LSO Live decide to release a recording of Boulez's Notations with the composer himself conducting. Recent years have demonstrated that it is one of their prize projects together.

The original of The Original of Laura

Can't think how this one eluded me, but there's good news on the Nabokov front: the son, Dmitri, has decided not to destroy his father's manuscript, The Original of Laura. No matter what, it will be the literary event of any year of any decade, even if your moral compass on the Vladimir's-last-wishes front favoured the oblivion option.

Not exactly static

As if there wasn't already too much to read, then another magazine pops up out of the (virtual) blue. Static is the online vehicle for the high-powered activities and research facilities of the London Consortium, which aims to encourage intellectual dialogue between the disciplines. It's on its sixth issue, and the forthcoming one is based around the theme of catastrophe, a theme close to my heart, if it can be termed this way. The deadline for that issue has gone, so we will have to eagerly await its publication.

Such are the surprises that burst onto your screens when leafing (correct verb?) through the webosphere. Readers keen to pore through the contents of Static might also be as eager to virtually thumb through the information on - or indeed physically attend one of the activities hosted by - The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, whose international director is none other than the hyperventilatory Slavoj Zizek. It's quite an august and forward-thinking institution, heading up talks, lectures, and research seminars delivered by such figures as Etienne Balibar (whose masterclass on democracy in the post-68 world is sold out).

I should've said that the article that interested me the most in Static's archive was Claire Colebrook's essay on happiness, which argues that '[Martha] Nussbaum's affirmation of literature and narrative as crucial to the function of a sympathetic, flourishing and ethical life is typical of western philosophy's normative definition of happiness [...]'. I would agree with the link between literature, narrative, and the ethical life, but I expect that Colebrook has much more to say that might contest this point.

China's arms trade ship

China seems to be putting the cherries on the rancid cake of its human rights record. This report struck me as being plain sick, demonstrating that China definitely has no regard for human rights. Is this what happens when a country's in the first full bloom of its capitalist history?

Granta 101

Granta's 101st issue is out now. It is beautiful! The magazine has been redesigned, the website likewise, with more hi-tech features such as videos, blogs (forthcoming), and generally more up-to-date design features. I know, I know, I know: it's all about what's inside. But presentation counts, and Granta has done a very fine job on their elegant rebranding. (I also know that word 'rebranding' doesn't quite fit with Granta's ethos, either.) Go and have a look. Subscriptions are very generous indeed. More than worth it.

Life, well-worn

Whither the state-of-the-nation novel? This is the question asked by Philip Henscher in the April edition of Prospect. It is a matter close to his heart: his new novel contributes to the genre he's assessing. The article starts off well, describing the many traits that define state-of-the-nation novels, tracing the trajectory of the form from the nineteenth-century (possibly Middlemarch) to the present day (Hanif Kureishi's Something To Tell You gets a battering). But Henscher's article loses course after the mid-way point, careering off into pedantic realms by pointing the reader's attention towards the ungrammatical writing in the examples he's discussing. I don't think this is particularly critical or helpful, and to be honest, there was an implication that throbbed beneath Henscher's pedantry: it's as if he was saying, 'you'll find none of this shoddy writing in my novel, which is out right now'.

But this is merely another example of an irritating trend in contemporary criticism. More to the point, though, is Henscher's pejorative reading of the way in which such standards of writing have been allowed to shape the form itself. In other words, he attacks Helen Walsh for her clichés and Hanif Kureishi for the misjudged diction in his dialogue, his habit of conflating incongruous historical details in the character's recollections, which thereby renders his representations implausible (the list goes on with Kureishi). Henscher is right to suggest (at the very end of his article) that popular music is used as a shortcut to authenticity, adding that not all people's view of the recent past is shaped in just this way. (I share with him the shaping influence of Mahler on one's formative years.) Though I agree with him there, I found myself tugged by his thoughts on the bearing of popular culture on contemporary life in general and state-of-the-nation novels in particular. There is something in the relationship between the cultural dominant of popular music and the novel that Henscher cannot reconcile himself with. I think his argument has to do with particularity; that the novel must strive to articulate universal themes (which historical forms like state-of-the-nation novels must do) through the particular. Hence Henscher's disdain for the genre's unreflective predilection for popular music as a shortcut to novelistic authenticity. It is just too popular, too communal, and therefore against interiority, the individual, and so on. The question is whether representations of contemporary life in the novel could exist without reference to a cultural dominant, such as popular music. Arguably, dwelling on one aspect of life devalues the texture of novelistic representation, so the question seems to be why Henscher's bugbears are so persistently represented in recent novels. The state-of-the-nation novel, with its panoramic view, must place questions about cultural dominants at the core of its enterprise.

The other issue which irritated me in Henscher's article was the unanalytical view of narration. Dragging his article down is his respect for good grammar, which he thinks should be spoken more by the characters in the ungrammatical books he discusses. Here's his ungenerous view of Helen Walsh's book, out now:

The urgency and declared weight of the subjects in these books has, in some cases, allowed the authors to overlook what ought to be paramount—the obligation to write well. Walsh is filled with cliché: "A stunned silence had descended"; "Though he was weary to the marrow of his bones…"

The comeback for this is the question about the status of the narrator. Who is the narrator? In narratology circles, the question might rather be who is the focaliser of this passage? Judging from the social milieu of Walsh's novel, is it likely or not whether such clichés are authentic expressions of the mind and subjectivity of this particular narrator or focaliser?

Henscher seems to think that clichés have no place in the novel. But have any of us has gone through our everyday lives without coming into earshot with, or actively articulating, clichés? Writing the demotic voice out of a form such as the state-of-the-nation novel would be like unpeopling the world, stripping away (I dare say, in such a clichéd manner) the everyday reality of contemporary life. Like life itself, as Martin Amis might say, clichés are well-worn. They speak volumes.