Zoo in the head

Q tip

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's last word on literary style:

For — believe me, Gentlemen — so far as Handel stands above Chopin, as Velasquez above Greuze, even so far stand the great masculine objective writers above all who appeal to you by parade of personality or private sentiment.

Mention of these great masculine "objective" writers brings me to my last word: which is, "Steep yourselves in them: habitually bring all to the test of them: for while you cannot escape the fate of all style, which is to be personal, the more of catholic manhood you inherit from thsoe great loins the more you will assuredly beget.

Mmm. Steep me in those manly catholic loins.

Notes: 1) It's pronounced "Cooch". 2) Q was his nom de plume. 3) From "On Style", the last in a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University, 1913-14, and collected as On the Art of Writing (1916).

Potential T-shirt of the Day

When children appear, we justify all our weaknesses, compromises, snobberies, by saying: "It's for the children's sake."

— Anton Chekhov

Zoos: Feeling the love

 

Guy the Gorilla, photographed by Wolf Suschitzky. Almost certainly in breach of copyright.

BELOVED GIRAFFE AT ZOO ON THE MEND reads the headline on the Boston Globe website. (The subheading is only slightly less heartwarming: "Overcomes urinary obstruction, but risky surgery still possible". My invariable advice to young journalists is, Avoid urine in headlines.)

Leaving aside the details of his condition, let's think about Beau the giraffe's status: beloved. Zoo animals are quite often beloved — Knut the polar bear, Guy the gorilla, any number of pandas, and so on all the way back to Jumbo the elephant and Obaysch the hippo in Victoria's reign. What does that mean? That their names appear in the media, that children clamour to see them, or at any rate parents assume they're who the children want to see, that their photograph is taken often, and any health problem becomes a minor public drama. It is a shallow sort of love, devoid of intimacy, knowledge, real consideration. When Jumbo was sold to P. T. Barnum in 1882, the public was incensed (letters to the press, angry leading articles, a popular song) that he was being removed from his "little wife", Alice, though the pair had never even shared quarters.

Some zoo animals are regarded with benevolent indifference; they are never hated. Most entertainments have their villain: even among clowns at the circus there'll be one who is less likeable, or more dislikeable. But zoos are all about positive feeling. Nobody boos the tigers or the gibbons; at worst you'll experience a shudder at something invertebrate. The closest thing to a villain is us — or rather, not us, we're nice people, but them, those other people who are not so kind to animals: the people the signs are aimed at, who wake the animals in the nocturnal house, howl at the monkeys and chuck litter in the hippos' pool; and the people who do all that logging and poaching that endangers species. Last time I was at the Bronx Zoo, a display about the evils of tiger-poaching included a Land Rover bearing the logo "Evil Incorporated".

I've encountered similar attitudes outside zoos: the park ranger at Haggerston who, haranguing me after my dog killed a squirrel, said "I love everything in nature." (I didn't have the nerve to ask her if that included slugs, rats, and plague bacilli, but let's assume for the sake of argument that I did and she looked pretty foolish.) I'm not recommending that we hate animals; but that sort of worldview — where every species pleases, and only man is vile — is too simplistic to be healthy; it stops you knowing anything. Owning a dog has extinguished in me whatever there was of the dog-lover: I'm too aware now of dogs as individuals, some pleasant, some not.

It's not as if being beloved does animals any good. Knut, as I've mentioned before, was reportedly warped by adulation into a narcissistic psychopath with severe sexual dysfunction; he drowned in his pool, aged four, while suffering encephalitis. Jumbo suffered fits of insanity, which is why they sold him to Barnum. Loving something, or someone, is fine. It's not a substitute for thinking about them.

 

 

Travis Bickle, thou shouldst be living at this hour

On Tuesday, the Curzon Soho cinema held a speed-dating event in combination with a screening of Shame, a film - so one hears - in which sex is depicted exclusively in a context of anomie, humiliation and self-loathing. (Does sex happen in any other context? you ask. Or I ask, anyway.) Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, describes the film's idea of a date as "an uncomfortably real transcription of a supposedly romantic evening: another long, static camera shot. It starts with stilted conversation, ends with a spark, but is followed by a catastrophic tryst in which there is nothing but emotional degradation."

The reason I know about the Curzon event is that a friend of mine was invited along to it; she made her excuses - she'd already seen it - and left.

I suppose there are worse date movies: inordinately long films, films about the Shoah (Claud Lanzmann's Shoah itself, all nine-and-a-half hours of it, may be the greatest bad-date movie), and films involving sexual violence or perversion (Irréversible, Cronenberg's Dead Ringers). It's interesting to note that Hollywood has already come up with some suggestions: in Annie Hall Woody Allen tries to drag Diane Keaton to Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity; and there's the best bad date-movie scene of all. It leaves me feeling I need to scrub myself down with Milton:

 

Big swinging dicks of the avant-garde

Shaun Whiteside pointed me in the direction of this, after I had enthused about a radio programme on Frederic Rzewski. (The programme was an episode of Music by My Friends on Resonance FM.) The music is very good - echoes of Charles Ives and Bruce Hornby - but I was disturbed to see that it had been uploaded by someone called John11inch. The phallocentrism of the world of classical music is well known, but I didn't realize anybody took it quite that far. Apart from Pierre "Lick My" Boulez, obviously.

Sing Sing sing

 Can't have done much for prison as a deterrent.

Potential T-shirt of the Day

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs" - G. K. Chesterton

Resolution

Dr Johnson in The Idler, October 21, 1758: 

It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit: but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world; we do not so often endeavour or wish to impose on others as on ourselves; we resolve to do right, we hope to keep our resolutions, we declare them to confirm our own hope, and fix our own inconstancy by calling witnesses of our actions; but at last habit prevails, and those whom we invited to our triumph laugh at our defeat.

He said a number of things about resolutions, none encouraging, all woefully true to my own experience. Nor do I believe that calendars have magical powers, that because we've suddenly started giving a new name to the days we are living in, something has changed. But still the feeling is hard to shake, that New Year is a time to make resolutions. And so here I am, resolving to be a good little blogger this year, to try daily to say something or other, to create a bigger, brasher, brighter zoo in the head (oh dear: I think I'm bored with that name). Stay tuned!

The photo, of a sign at Wroclaw Zoo, is taken from Ilona Karwinska's Polish Cold War Neon.

I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving: having, from the earliest time almost that I can remember, been forming plans of a better life. I have done nothing. The need of doing, therefore, is pressing, since the time of doing is short. O GOD, grant me to resolve aright, and to keep my resolutions, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.

(One of Dr Johnson's prayers.)

 

What I did in the holidays

Being a complete list of all the secondhand books I bought during my summer holiday in Norfolk, with my "reasons" for buying them:

The Pattern of English by G. H. Vallins Pelican 1957
“The developments in the construction of the English prose sentence from the earliest times to the present day.” I’m unsure now why I thought this was worth buying, except to make up the numbers on a five-for-a-pound deal at a village fête.

Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place by Malcolm Lowry Penguin 1969
The cover has an attractive woodcut by George Tute; I like inscriptions: this one has the owner’s name, N. Ingpen, and the enigmatic note “(W.T.C. October 1970)”.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine, ed. with introduction by Isaac Kramnick Penguin American Library 1982
Nice cover: the Bennington Flag of 1776. You can’t have too many copies of Common Sense, and I only have two.

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Panther 1979
I’m writing about Hughes for the LRB, and needed a reading copy. This is an ugly commercial paperback; the main feature of interest is the jacket copy, which consists mainly of endorsements from Hugh Walpole, Cyril Connolly and Arnold Bennett - who, in 1979, gave a fig for their opinions?

Mario and the Magician and Other Stories  by Thomas Mann Penguin Modern Classics 1975
Cover badly creased but I wanted the opening story, “A Man and His Dog”, because I’m working with Tim Dee on a series for BBC Radio 4 about dogs in literature and life, to be broadcast late next year.

The Friendly Dog: An Anthology ed. J. Parson Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1912
See above

Imperial lather

The Guardian publishes an extract from Richard Gott's new book, in which he works himself into a lather over the British Empire. It's somewhat overwritten, but that's not the same as overstated; the thrust of the piece is irresistible: that, however much we allow ourselves to be flattered by talk of good intentions or absence of mind or by comparisons with the Belgian Congo, an empire is necessarily violent and oppressive. (The best short version of this argument I know is Sven Lindqvist's 'Exterminate all the brutes'.)

A striking sentence towards the end, though:

The rebellions and resistance of the subject peoples of empire were so extensive that we may eventually come to consider that Britain's imperial experience bears comparison with the exploits of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun rather than with those of Alexander the Great.

Why let Alexander off the hook? In the New York Review of Books, Mary Beard questions the greatness:

In a now fragmentary passage of his treatise On the State, [Cicero] seems to have quoted an anecdote that would turn up again, almost five hundred years later, in the pages of Saint Augustine. The story was that a petty pirate had been captured and brought before Alexander. What drove him, Alexander asked, to terrorize the seas with his pirate ship? “The same thing as drives you to terrorize the whole world,” the man sharply replied. There were plenty of acts of terror he could have cited: the total massacres of the male population after the sieges at Tyre and Gaza; the mass killing of the local population in the Punjab; the razing of the royal palace at Persepolis, after (so it was said) one of Alexander’s inebriated dinner parties.

It seems to have slipped Gott's mind momentarily that empires rely on propaganda, projecting an image of relatively benign power, as much as on brutality.