Category: Culture

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Culture

Monkey Girl by Edward Humes

This book is about the Dover, Pennsylvania school board’s decision to put Intelligent Design into the biology curriculum and the ensuing trial that ruled it a breach of the constitutional separation of church and state.

It’s interesting enough, but not particularly special. Perhaps they were keen to get to press quickly and the book is less finished than it could be. Specifically I think it lacks a clear focus or narrative; it spends too much time going over the history of legal conflicts over teaching creationism, and makes that background rather dry. It doesn’t really get any momentum until it gets on to the trial itself in the second half of the book, which is quite well done.

In terms of the balance these kinds of books have to strike between lively reporting and melodrama, I felt too often it was telling me things were dramatic rather than communicating what must have been the real human drama of the situation.

I also didn’t feel I was in the hands of someone who really had a bone-deep understanding of the issues at stake. Humes is clearly on the side of the scientists, although I think he tries to avoid being flamboyantly partisan, and I felt that some of the of the anti-ID arguments were being reproduced in a rather uncritical and undigested form. This is a trivial example of the kind of thing that sets off my alarm bells: Humes is taking Ann Coulter apart (not difficult) and says that in a three sentence, 69 word passage, there are ‘five lies and one ludicrous error’. He says this, about the phrase ‘Liberals’ creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution…’:

It is a lie to characterize the modern science of evolution as “Darwin’s theory,” as it now encompasses genetics, DNA analysis, microbiology, embryology, artificial life experiments, and a host of other findings, methods and scientific disciplines that Darwin (and apparently Coulter) never heard of.

It’s true, of course, that biology and the understanding of evolution has moved on a lot since Darwin’s time. Coulter’s phrasing is simplistic and reductive, and may well be calculated to create a misleading impression that the idea of natural selection is outmoded or based on a personality cult. But even so, as a five word description used in brief for the theoretical underpinnings of biology, ‘Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution’ is surely not outrageous. And it certainly isn’t a ‘lie’ in the sense I understand that word.

It’s not like you have to stretch very far to find Coulter talking crap—the next sentence is a doozy—and it doesn’t do his credibilty any good to be imprecise when he attacks her.

I’m about as naturally sympathetic an audience as this book could hope to find, so if I find myself feeling it could usefully be more even-handed, there might be a problem. It’s only nuances, though.

Categories
Culture Me

New section: Music & Books

If you’re very observant, you may noticed a new link in the sidebar: Music and Books. I’ve been gradually tweaking it to my satisfaction, and you can now not only see a list of the ten most recent songs I’ve listened to and the ten most recent books I’ve read, but click through to see my profile on last.fm, reviews of the books, and a sort of bookshelf of all the books I’ve read since installing it. Since I’ve only read four books so far, the ‘bookshelf’ hasn’t really come into its own yet.

I have to admit that if I was criticising this particular design work done by someone else, I’d suggest that the navigation possibilities were a bit opaque, but it’s my party and I’ll make the links difficult to find if I want to.

None of this is currently working unless you’re using the Scallop theme. I’ll probably edit the other themes accordingly in due course. Or just turn the theme switcher off, to save myself these kind of compatibility headaches.

Categories
Culture

‘Canaletto in England’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

I almost forgot to blog about the Canaletto exhibition at DPG which I went to on Friday. As the title suggests, it focusses on Canaletto’s time in England. I knew he’d painted a few paintings of London, but I was surprised to learn that he lived here for nine years.

Not surprisingly, the show has been a big hit. He isn’t one of the top gods in my personal artistic pantheon, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Canaletto that I wouldn’t like to own. Elegant cityscapes bathed in sunlight and full of glittering water, with lots of little figures so that there’s always something to look at in the details: what’s not to like?

However, the Venice scenes he’s most known for can feel a little production-line. The Wallace Collection has a whole roomful of Canalettos. Seeing them all together, the sense of a commodity produced for the tourist market is overwhelming. So an exhibition of English scenes not only has local interest, it also offers a different perspective on the artist. This is Warwick Castle, which normally lives at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery:

By no means my favourite picture in the exhibition, or even my favourite picture of Warwick castle, but I couldn’t find many online. I rather liked this one, but the colours look screwy to me in that version.

As a Londoner, I was naturally drawn to the London pictures, although in fact if it wasn’t a few landmark buildings (St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey especially), I wouldn’t have felt confident identifing it as London. The period (1746-55) is just at the start of modern London, and there are enough C18th buildings left in London that the scenes often look generally Londony; but the specifics are almost all different. The skyline is dominated by church spires instead of office buildings, the river is heaving with traffic, and most of the key buildings haven’t been built yet. That in itself is part of the interest, of course.

It’s rather hard to find descriptions of Canaletto that don’t sound like damning with faint praise: his paintings are elegant, decorative, likeable. To some extent this is just a reflection of a shift in taste; we’re all Romantics now, and we’re all suckers for the sublime. In 1826, Hazlitt wrote, in ‘On Depth and Superficiality’:

Elegance is a word that means something different from ease, grace, beauty, dignity; yet it is akin to all these; but it seems more particularly to imply a sparkling brilliancy of effect with finish and precision. We do not apply the term to great things; we should not call an epic poem or a head of Jupiter elegant, but we speak of an elegant copy of verses, an elegant headdress, an elegant fan, an elegant diamond brooch, or bunch of flowers. In all these cases (and others where the same epithet is used) there is something little and comparatively trifling in the objects and the interests they inspire… [long snip]

The Hercules is not elegant; the Venus is simply beautiful. The French, whose ideas of beauty or grandeur never amount to more than an elegance, have no relish for Rubens, nor will they understand this definition.

I’m not sure Canaletto would have been very sympathetic to Hazlitt’s definition either. I’m not sure I am completely, but for better or worse, our taste in places and art has been re-shaped by the Romantics. The Romantic approach has its own pitfalls, of course; insisting that art should have profundity and authenticity tends to result in a lot of fake profundity and fake authenticity. And the borderline between sublime and kitschy is wafer-thin. I really like this painting (Gordale Scar (A View of Gordale, in the Manor of East Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property of Lord Ribblesdale) by James Ward), but its wildness is so theatrical that it’s difficult to take it completely seriously:

No 500 pixel version can do it justice; the real thing is 14′ wide.

Anyway, I’ve wandered off the point slightly. I actually think, despite everything I’ve been saying, that Canaletto’s paintings are just too attractive to be easily dismissed. Here’s one (Old Walton Bridge Over The Thames) which is actually part of the Dulwich permanent collection. Unusually, it has a few clouds, and is perhaps all the better for it:

Nice, innit. For a video introduction to the exhibition, go here.

Categories
Culture Nature

More crakery from the canon

I didn’t want my post on rails and crakes to suffer from poetry bloat, so I didn’t quote it before, but John Clare isn’t the only Dead Famous English Poet who mentioned corncrakes in a poem.

This is the mowing scene from Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax by Andrew Marvell. I went through modernising the spelling and capitalisation, because frankly I can’t see any advantage to keeping it old-school, so if I’ve missed anything, my apologies:

And now to the abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable grass,
Where men like grasshoppers appear,
But grasshoppers are giants there:
They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn
Us as we walk more low then them:
And, from the precipices tall
Of the green spires, to us do call.

To see men through this meadow dive,
We wonder how they rise alive.
As, under water, none does know
Whether he fall through it or go.
But, as the mariners that sound,
And show upon their lead the ground,
They bring up flowers so to be seen,
And prove they’ve at the bottom been.

No scene that turns with engines strange
Does oftener then these meadows change,
For when the sun the grass hath vexed,
The tawny mowers enter next;
Who seem like Israelites to be,
Walking on foot through a green sea.
To them the grassy deeps divide,
And crowd a lane to either side.

With whistling scythe, and elbow strong,
These massacre the grass along:
While one, unknowing, carves the rail,
Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail.
The edge all bloody from its breast
He draws, and does his stroke detest;
Fearing the flesh untimely mowed
To him a fate as black forebode.

But bloody Thestylis, that waits
To bring the mowing camp their cates,
Greedy as kites has trussed it up,
And forthwith means on it to sup:
When on another quick she lights,
And cries, “he called us Israelites;
But now, to make his saying true,
Rails rain for quails, for manna dew.”

Unhappy birds! what does it boot
To build below the grasses’ root;
When lowness is unsafe as height,
And chance overtakes what scapeth spite?
And now your orphan parents call
Sounds your untimely funeral.
Death-trumpets creak in such a note,
And ’tis the sourdine in their throat.

I think it calls for a couple of  vocabulary notes. The ‘scene that turns with engines strange‘ is a reference to stage machinery in the theatre; ‘Thestylis’ is a poeticism for a female mower; ‘cates’ are delicacies, and ‘sourdine’ is some kind of musical instrument. The dictionary can’t decide whether it’s a miniature violin or a woodwind of some kind, but presumably it’s a reference to the distinctive sound made by the corncrake.

I think this passage is a fair illustration of what a magnificently odd poem Upon Appleton House  really is. Especially since the genre—a poem about a country estate designed to flatter its powerful owner and his family—seems so doomed to the formulaic. Perhaps he felt that the more remarkable the poem, the more effective the flattery. Or perhaps he was just enjoying himself. Or showing off.

Not all of this conspicuous ingenuity is equally successful, but sometimes it’s remarkable; the image of men bringing up flowers to prove they’ve sounded the depths of the grass is a brilliant way of making a relatively obvious comparison vivid and memorable. And the bit where Thestylis breaks out of character by commenting on something he’s just said is so unexpected. I can’t decide whether I think it’s effective as a literary device, but it’s certainly surprising in a C17th poem.

It’s good to be reminded occasionally that ingenious, peculiar, unconventional, clever-clever poetry isn’t just the preserve of Modernism.

Categories
Culture

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I’ve been meaning to read this ever since it came out because it just has the most brilliant title ever.

cover from Amazon

Is it just me, or is the cover of this edition really odd? It looks like it ought to be a novel about a stressed out career women and a handsome but bucolic farmer who are brought together by their shared love for a mischievous piglet, rather than a novel about everyone in the world being killed by genetically modified diseases.

Apparently Margaret Atwood strongly dislikes this book being referred to as ‘science fiction’. But by any obvious definition, a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world torn apart by unbridled capitalism and scientific hubris is, well, sci-fi. Reading it, it didn’t even feel particularly far out of the mainstream of SF. I think you’d have to have read very little SF to believe that any of the ideas here set it apart. Not that I’ve read much sci-fi recently.

I do have some sympathy with writers who don’t think that their choice of subject matter automatically assigns them to a genre, though. I mean, it really isn’t very helpful to refer to Jane Austen’s novels as ‘romantic fiction’. Though J.K. Rowling’s claim that the Harry Potter books are somehow not fantasy novels really does seem a bit desperate.

Anyway, it’s well-written, as you’d expect from Atwood, and I enjoyed it, though the post-apocalyptic bits more than the pre-apocalypse flashbacks. Perhaps ‘literary sci-fi’ would be a fair description.

Categories
Culture

War—hunh—Good God, y’all

We’ll soon know whether the ‘Ugly Rumours‘ version of War has made it into the UK charts. I’d be more sympathetic to the project if it wasn’t so closely linked with the all-conquering ego of greasy, self-serving media strumpet George Galloway. Anyway, here’s Edwin Starr:

EDIT: the new version went in at #21, which isn’t bad going, but not really high enough to make a big political point.

FURTHER EDIT: I decided not to clutter up the place by putting this in its own post. There’s no particular connection except it’s music on YouTube. This is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who I just learned about today via this post over at Soul Sides.