2010

Predictable but necessary: resolutions for the new year. Two weeks ago I rejuvenated a resolution from 2009: to shower for not longer than four minutes at a time. This fell by the wayside as I lost favour with keeping time with a mobile phone that had to be within reach of the shower but far enough way for safety reasons. So I acquired one of those cute yellow duck timers you stick to the tiles with a sucker. Thing is, when the display faded last week, I reconsidered the efficiency of it all: if I'm having to reload it with eco-nasty batteries all the time to keep it going, then there was very little point in using it. £6 wasted? Let's see how the new batteries with which I replaced the ones provided by the company last. Why am I telling you all this? I've recycled one of my resolutions, that's all.

Other resolutions include joining the Co-op. How can you not believe in mutuality and the values of the Manchester-based Co-operative Society? Given their size, Co-op supermarkets have a wide range of products. The wine range especially is good for being vegetarian-friendly and abundantly Fairtrade. The wine also glugs well!

Be less neurotic. Control your mind in order to block out things that are likely to upset you, and have done so in the past. In 2009. Despite the fact that it's set up to be one of the most - possibly the most - decisive year of my life, I'm willing 2010 to be the year of easygoing life. But can I change my mindset?

Finishing novels. Starting them, even, would be a...start. This echoes a resolution a couple of years back when I resolved to buy a number of brand new novels and read them as quickly as possible, to update myself on the form and so on. Needless to say it didn't happen and that Hanif Kureishi is writing them faster than apparently I can read them. Nicola Barker's new novel comes out in the spring. Darkmans is immense and wild, and I haven't had the time to read it, either. It's not that I haven't read books; it's just that my energy for reading new novels has been low due to other commitments. Reading them should be one of my main commitments, and 2010 should see the all change.

Readers, good luck with yours and have a truly memorable new year and 2010. And don't forget you can sink the Alka-seltzer with the Vienna Philharmonic's Strauss-a-rama tomorrow morning!

Season's Greetings!

Camp as...


Cottonwool carpets.



A noir christmas.

'I progress as I digress'

Javier Marías on hating long books, including photographs in fiction, constructing 'echoes and resonances' (not repetitions) in novels like musical figures, and immortalising his father.

The BBC is cack-handed...and arrogant

Why is the BBC insisting on defending its position about the Ugandan question, despite condemnation from many quarters that its decision was an appalling display of mismanagement?

Apparently, the BBC World Service is defending itself on the basis of having 'created debate for [the] proposed Ugandan law'.

But there is no need for this debate. There should not be a debate that questions whether a nation state should or should not condemn to death or life imprisonment members of a minority group on the grounds of their status as a minority.

As some commentators have said, what would the reaction have been had the question replaced 'homosexual' with 'heterosexual'? Unthinkable? Of course!

Then why is it acceptable for straight people to discuss the state-sanctioned fate of gays and lesbians, but not the other way round? This is because homophobia remains acceptable for many people, and organisations like the BBC wrongfully and unethically support their views in relation to the homophobe's right to freedom of speech. Forget whether certain statements that result from such platforms jeopardise the safety of vulnerable people, making them question the validity of claiming rights for themselves. (This last point applies to young gays and lesbians, who are particularly vulnerable to hate speech since it is in schools that homophobic language is rife, whilst their existence as gays and lesbians is still largely unacknowledged. It's no surprise that this constant chipping away at the souls of young gays and lesbians leads to cases of suicide, self-harm, alienation and self-exclusion leading to depression and unhappy lives.)

Shame on the BBC. But are we surprised? When they talk about having thought long and hard before putting the question out there, you have to wonder what this actually entailed. It is difficult to argue with such statements because you have no evidence on which to test the meaning of 'thought long and hard'. In this light, the BBC World Service's statement is frankly evasive. By claiming you have thought long and hard about something, you are rhetorically convincing insofar as you seem to be acknowledging your critic's charge that the case of offensiveness demonstrates the complete opposite: i.e. that not much thinking actually went on. Sensible critique dictates the reality behind such bald rhetoric.

The vigilance and self-responsibility of gays and lesbians is required more than ever before. Homophobia will not go away, especially when the BBC World Service is capable of playing (even unwittingly) into the hands of genocidal homophobes. Perhaps the LGBT community should establish an official, properly organised forum to record instances of homophobic language and direct action. The Jewish community has the Community Security Trust, set up to record as many cases of anti-Semitism as possible. In the absence of recorded evidence, it is difficult to deal effectively with what stands to threaten you. Linked to this is the increasing need to record hate crimes. As the Pink News details, official institutions like the BBC are persistent offenders with their woefully misguided decisions that play into the barbaric rhetoric of the homophobe. Given the uncertainty of our times, the World Service's Ugandan question was all the more shocking in that it looked like it had been posed by an ultra right-wing party. Did they not think about this before they clicked 'publish'?

[UPDATES]

Ben Summerskill from Stonewall reminds us of another issue that surrounds this latest controversy: that the absence of homophobic hate crimes from the national BBC news agenda makes their approach to this Ugandan debate all the more reproachable:

"Given the near invisibility of so many gay issues from BBC news and current affairs - including recent murders of gay people - it does seem odd that the BBC should invite people to contribute to their web forum asking if gay people should face execution. It is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the idea that the BBC should receive £230 million from lesbian and gay licence fee payers every year."

Peter Tatchell, as always, refers to the necessity of thinking about the broader picture that the BBC World Service's question dodges:

I think it perfectly reasonable for the BBC to host a debate about the current Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill, but not in the terms that it was framed.

The BBC would not hold online debates such as: Should Jews be exterminated? Was the Rwandan genocide justified? Should the people of Darfur be massacred? Is it right to stone women to death in Somalia?

And, echoing my own feelings, Mike Workman, father of the NUJ World Service news and current affairs chapel, makes the following pertinent point:

At times the programme seemed to give moral equivalence to the totally contradictory ideas of killing gay people and gay rights. [...] To be blunt, the producers would never have run a programme called "Should Tutsis face execution?"

The BBC is cack-handed

It's very difficult to respond with balanced language when you're confronted with a certain kind of question. When I saw this reported by the Guardian, the headline 'Should gays be killed, asks BBC site' shocked me to the core. First, I couldn't believe my eyes. Second, I felt sick. I wondered whether to click on the link to the story, thinking it would only end up depressing me. But clicked I did. I think my dominant reaction is one of sheer anger and frustration that the BBC, an organisation whose duty it is to uphold standards of civil decency, has exercised staggeringly ill-considered judgement in the attempt to frame a debate about a horribly controversial issue.

The debate is now closed. The question was modified from 'Should homosexuals face execution?' to 'Should Uganda debate gay execution?' Some of the unapologetically hateful 'answers' to the first question highlight the importance of framing a debate responsibly and effectively by wording your question carefully. Though they may have reworded the main question, some of the lead-in questions remain. They are also not beyond reproach: "Has Uganda gone too far? Should there be any level of legislation against homosexuality?" Given that we live in modern times and not the dark ages, the answers to both these questions should resoundingly, unambiguously be: 'YES, Uganda has gone too far; and NO, there should not be any level of legislation against homosexuality!' By asking these questions, you half embrace the validity of an unethical response. The questions should not be asked: any modern and open society should not countenance the idea of state-sanctioned murderous rage against a minority group. In its customary kack-handed way, the BBC has not so much framed a debate as encouraged hate speech against the very people who need the support of civilised institutions like itself.

I cannot understand how this 'debate' was published in the first place, let alone in the terms they decided were 'appropriate' for a properly functioning discussion. In my view (and as I have pointed out elsewhere), this questioning of legal protections for gays and lesbians is one step too far in the wrong direction: if you disagree with this, then you turn your back on civilised values. You also turn your back against the putative sanctity of the family unit, for in condoning a quasi-genocidal attitude towards a minority group, you undermine any future security for your family, precisely because you would be living in a society that was creeping towards some sort of low-level dictatorship. This is what is meant by the maxim of an injustice against the few being an injustice against the many. The zeal with which Uganda (and now Rwanda) are constructing so-called laws is testament not only to a quasi-genocidal impulse towards gays and lesbians, but to the inescapable corruption that is bound to affect the many in the same way as its anti-gay laws affect the few.

The BBC should have deliberated longer and harder before it waded into this hyper-sensitive issue. I cannot imagine what it is like to be a gay or lesbian Ugandan at the moment, with the state and electorate turning their murderous eyes towards them. The BBC has shown hardly an ounce of the support it should have extended in greater proportion to this minority, for whom persecution is alive and well and which, tragically, looks set to escalate in the coming months.

Division of rights

Lillian Ladele has lost her appeal. She was a registrar who cited her religious beliefs as a reason for not officiating at civil partnership ceremonies. This is good news for gay rights, but as far as strident religious people believe, apparently it is a sad day for democracy. What this means is that they didn't get their discriminatory way. For this is what they were arguing in court: exemptions from illegal discrimination against gays and lesbians on grounds of religious 'conscience'. These people simply cannot see the error of their ways. Take the following statements by a representative from the Christian Legal Centre:

Civil partnerships were not being discriminated against, they were able to be performed by other registrars. Lillian Ladele has been discriminated against because of her Christian convictions.

In a tolerant and civil society, we should be able to accommodate different groups.

There will be serious consequences for religious freedom, conscience, acts and speech if we can't learn to accommodate different groups.

Maybe they should practice more of what they preach.

There is another issue at stake, more to do with employment practice. Supposing a racist secretly sidled out of their duties at work on grounds of their discrimination against people of other races. There is no fundamental difference between what the Christian Legal Centre is in support of and what that racist in the workplace is secretly discriminating against. The fact is that when you're in work, and particularly when you're working in public services, you should keep whatever stinking attitudes that fester in your prejudiced mind to yourself and get on with the job you are being paid by the taxpayer to do. Lillian Ladele's right to religious belief is not negated in this case; instead, her ability to discriminate against innocent gay and lesbian taxpayers is rightly negated.

The world has not necessarily woken up from its medieval attitudes towards gay people. A germ of hatred exists in most people. In some societies, hatred is endemic: look at Uganda, Iraq, Iran. I think it is deeply sad that rather than extending (supposedly Christian) charitable attitudes towards people of other groups, the Christian Legal Centre is fighting to uphold a morality allied to centuries of oppression. Rather than seeking progress, they attach higher importance to their retrograde, medieval morality.

Thoughts on the class war

Has Gordon Brown woken the country up from its lethargy regarding the issue of class, which continues to simmer under the supposedly modern surface of meritocratic life? Possibly. His talk of the playing fields of Eton taps into suspicions most British people surely have of David Cameron and his team. Eric Pickles can brush aside all accusations against his beloved party as much as he likes by saying that quite a number of the Labour party are also privately educated - or 'posh' themselves - but at least they are in theory if not in total practice committed to social justice. The same just cannot be said of the Conservatives, however much spin they formulate in order to conceal their party's ingrained class prejudices. Pickles in fact is unaware of the shortfalls in his own tactics when he claims in this Guardian podcast that the only knowledge the posh ones from the Labour Party have of their working class electorate was gleaned in their formative years from the likes of Robert Tressell and George Orwell in their formative years. I'd say such authors were not a bad start. How would he define his 'conversion' into a Conservative from working class roots? It's valid in his case, but not the other way round. This is one of the hallmarks of current Tory strategy to undermine anything and everything Labour is doing or not doing.

Labour has instituted real infrastructural changes in communities across the country. Whilst its record on erasing the poverty divide is not perfect (perhaps it was far too ideal in the first place, in some ways the task being insurmountable), it has achieved a not insignificant level of redistribution from the wealthiest to the poorest. The least you should be thinking in this regard is the undoubted historical achievement of the National Minimum Wage. Aside from the economics of class, though, there is the constantly changing physical landscape of our cities: in the case of the North this occurred at an unbelievable rate, benefiting all strata of society. In the town in which I live, all secondary schools have been modernised in capital building projects that have merged all school buildings onto one site. In one case this has involved the complete rebuilding of the school in a different part of the town altogether. Whatever the downfalls of single site schools might be (there is always something to moan about, though, in Britain, isn't there?), Labour has made real infrastructural changes in order to reverse years of under-investment at the behest of previous Conservative governments.

But what's this got to do with class? Well, I think it's cheeky and disingenuous of some one like Eric Pickles to suggest that Labour is confused about its own relationship to class when it is Labour that has attempted to do something about the class divide by investing in schools and children's futures, such is the case with Sure Start Centres.

Labour isn't perfect, though: what good is the claim of the party's efforts at social redistribution when millions of university students are saddled with increasing debts for their degrees? For those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, in this climate, education is certainly for the privileged. I cannot answer this. On the one hand I cannot argue for social redistribution whilst on the other arguing that perhaps one should pay for one's university education. Tuition fees have been a real kick to the stomach of the poorest in society. Now, here's a genuine plaint: why did Labour do it? Why did they introduce tuition fees?! Couldn't they have found a better way of funding higher education?

I'm not in possession of all the facts. There might be schemes that the poorest in society can apply to fund university degrees. But at the end of the day, who wants tuition fees? If you ask the more affluent in society to fund the education of their children, claiming that those who can afford it should pay their way, then what results from this is a clear class divide: they are funding their children's education. I'm not sure whether such proprietorial attitudes over the poorest in society is ethically just, or even accurate: after all, poverty is structured into society on the basis of the existence of an affluent, wealthy class. For people to be affluent, some people have to be poor. The poor have to do the crap jobs in order for the ambitious to pursue their dreams. And since crap jobs are habitually insecure and low-paid, you have a class of people who are instantly cut off from the opportunities afforded to and by affluent people.

This is the core of Britain's class divide: those who have money not only enjoy privilege and the inducements of a comfortable lifestyle, they also dictate on moral grounds the expectations the poor can demand from those to whom they are economically and socially in thrall. This is why, in the Guardian's vox pop in Chelsea, two young women from the old money upper class argued that people shouldn't receive benefits: there are jobs all down the King's Road, there are jobs out there; and in any case, it was their money that people on benefits were eating up. I was astounded at such levels of social indifference and prejudice. It was tantamount to racism. You could feel the justified indignation in the Guardian reporter's voice, who shot back at them the idea that people are on benefits because they can't find work (to which the ridiculous quip about there being jobs on the King's Road responded). The class divide, in other words, is ingrained by ignorance of the realities of being out of work and being working class, but also the proprietorial attitude that comes natural to the wealthiest and privileged upper middle and upper classes. Because of course, such people do not experience the state of being out of work like working class people do. One of the privileges of being born into this class is the ease with which you drift from one source of employment to another. You are not one of the faceless millions whose parents have no connections or influence. Being out of work means enjoying some time out of work, not subsisting on meagre benefits and enduring the indignity of being cross-examined by the frequently uppity clerks in the Job Centre.

I could go on, but I have other things to do. I apologise for this ramble. It was incumbent on me to respond to some of the attitudes laid bare in the Guardian's podcast on class. Go here to listen and respond yourself.

Further to Vienna

Vienna is becoming one of this blog's obsessions. Good. Along with Berlin, it holds your fascination like no other city. But whereas Berlin is renowned for being alive in the present tense, constantly refashioning itself in spite of the tremendous difficulties it has experienced, Vienna seems to rest on its gold-encrusted laurels. I know my view is somewhat limited, perhaps even unreliable, given that I've not visited Vienna but have visited Berlin, but reading even the Rough Guide to Vienna gives you the impression that it's a city whose selective remembrance of its past is directed very much at the potential visitor of the present. We love it all the same!

Anthea Bell's translation of Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday was published at the end of November. I'd say it's a perfect present for Christmas (or holidays), and so in this spirit have presented it to myself by purchasing it earlier today! I can't wait for its arrival. Actually, I was thinking of buying it before today, on the basis of it reading Nicholas Lezard's Choice in last Saturday's Guardian Review. Here's an excerpt from Lezard's review:

For it was as an enthusiast for the pan-European cultural project that Zweig found his greatest motivation and, eventually, his greatest pain; never one to be moved by nationalism or ideology of any kind, he was a brave and outspoken pacifist in the first world war, which was bad enough for him – "the more truly European some one's way of life was in Europe, the harder he was hit by the fist shattering the continent" – but the rise of Hitler represented the absolute, nightmarish opposite of every value he believed in and held dear. This is one of the remarkable things about this book: that even though you might be familiar with the details, Zweig presents them in a way which makes you feel as though you are hearing about them for the first time. His picture of prewar Paris will have you almost in tears for a lost world; his description of Theodor Herzl's funeral will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck; and his account of the disastrously hypocritical sexual mores of turn-of-the-century Vienna (and not just Vienna; most of Europe, basically) will make your jaw drop.

New Directions in the New Year

New Directions has to be one of the most discerning publishing houses out there. If you're passionate about twentieth and twenty-first century literature, then I'd recommend you trawl through their website looking at past, present, and forthcoming publications, and sign up to their free e-newsletter. This month's edition links to this page, where details are given of the new books out in 2010. The list is highly impressive, not to mention exciting!

I wish I had time to read Roberto Bolaño. (I'm kind of scared by the late experimental genius, who appears to have staged the belated publication of his own works.) With the publication of Antwerp next year, we are promised another work that confronts the idea of the omniscient narrator and structural conventions head-on. Anne Carson's Nox, containing poems written in response to the death of her brother and the process of dealing with loss, looks as challenging for its design as it will undoubtedly be for Carson's invigoratingly demanding poetry. Following their recent publication of Susan Bernofsky's translation of Robert Walser's The Tanners, New Directions' next Walser edition is a co-production with New York's Christine Burgin Gallery. Another luxury production, The Microscripts demonstrates Sebald's view of Walser as the 'clairvoyant of the small' by reproducing a selection of the latter's near-illegible handwritten manuscripts. His handwriting is a fascinating enough document by itself, particularly when you consider the fact that Walser wrote them in the Waldau Sanatorium when he was hospitalised there. The interview with Susan Bernofsky on the New Directions website, notable for its insights on the translation process, places the new publication in context:

This project came about as a co-production with Christine Burgin Gallery after Burgin fell in love with Walser’s miniature manuscripts (both the sheets of paper and the handwriting that covers them are unbelievably small) and decided to put together an exhibition of them in New York, due to open in the spring of 2010. The volume Microscripts will serve as a catalogue for the exhibition—it will contain a number of high-resolution facsimiles of Walser’s beautiful manuscripts—and at the same time is a collection of stories from his late work. These stories remind me of Beethoven’s late string quartets: by the time Walser writes them, he’s become such a master storyteller that he starts playing drastically with narrative form and convention, producing truly wacky texts that are both startling in their proto-postmodernism and deeply moving in their reflection of the difficult circumstances under which they were written. Leaving aside the difficulty of the stories as texts, the handwriting they were written in was so tiny that when these manuscripts were first discovered after Walser’s death in 1956 they were thought to have been written in secret code. In fact they were written in a now-antiquated form of German handwriting shrunken down to a height of between one and two millimeters. What’s more, Walser wrote them in pencil, and his pencil was not always sharp. Two scholars in Zurich devoted 12 years to deciphering six volumes’ worth of these texts, and for one of those years (1987-88) I had the privilege of working in the next room on what would become my first book of Walser translations (Masquerade and Other Stories).

The anticipation builds for my 2010 reading list!

Monumental

Der Spiegel reports here on the renovations of Berlin's Weissensee Jewish cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe.

It might be the largest, but it isn't the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin. The cemetery on Große Hamburger Straße is the only one I've managed to visit during my trips to Berlin. It is remarkable for its location: nestled at the rear of the bustling Hackescher Hofe, the transition from the centre of life to its opposite, negated and almost silent, is eerie. Familiar nineteenth century Berlin apartment blocks look over the site, now a void marked by a single grave: the only grave restored there is that of Moses Mendelssohn's, the Enlightenment philosopher and the grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn. Große Hamburger Straße itself has a unique atmosphere. It forms part of a network of streets whose layout bears the hallmark of pre-twentieth century Berlin. Besides the Freidhof is a Jewish secondary school, protected by the police as all Jewish sites are. I think Matt Frei filmed in this school for the third edition of his wonderful series on Berlin. This must be the case, since we see him walk around the cemetery beforehand. He too pays his respects to Moses Mendelssohn, and the hundreds of individuals whose graves are non-existent, their lives unmarked but not forgotten.