Niccolò-and-behold

There's a partial truth in Niccolò Machiavelli's famous statement (it's from chapter 14 of Il Principe): 'Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.' He might have added: '... to your face'; for the armed man is just as much despised behind his back. Indeed, we might think, rather more so. Machiavelli's book as a positively mafiosi insistence on 'respect' as the bedrock of princely power -- chapter 19 is even called "That one should avoid being despised and hated". But the problem is: a man has a gun to gain respect; but it is not he who is respected, it is his gun. Or to put it another way, Machiavelli's words only really strike home when we have a suitably non-gun understanding of what it means for a political leader to be armed.

Duty versus pleasure

Duty has this advantage over pleasure: that whilst doing one's duty is often a pleasure in its own right, that moment when indulging in one's favourite pleasure becomes a duty is the moment the pleasure dies.

Super-Obvious Observations About Pop Music #1

I have been moved more by pop songs with mediocre lyrics than by some of the finest lyric poetry ever written. But, of course: pop songs have music. The lyrics of songs have to work less hard to move us, because they stand on the shoulders of the music. Like, durr.

Except, except: the music works its affective magic in simple, broad-stroke ways; where a perfectly judged lyric by Yeats or Keats or the Beats can achieve finer, more specific, more spine-chilly effects.  Indeed, I wonder if pop lyrics that are over complicated can undermine their own impact?  Is 'Almost Blue' a more effecting song than 'Shipbuilding', and is it so because it's simpler?

Spinkertramp Floyd

Listening to Supertramp on the cycle into work this morning. Reputation's a puzzling thing, isn't it? So: Waters-era Floyd produced an album about the miseries of school and its effects on later life (The Wall, 1979); and Supertramp produced an album about the miseries of school and its effects on later life (Crime of the Century, 1974). Floyd went on to produce an album about the cold war (The Final Cut, 1983), and Supertramp went on in their career to produce an album about the cold war (Brother Where You Bound?, 1985). The case could be made that these albums are all of a similar calibre; and both groups, in their day, were transatlantic super-hitters. Yet today the Floyd remain a huge name, and the 'Tramp are all but forgotten. Puzzling.

Atheist Theism

For the true believer, God is always a mysterious supplement, present in life but never completely known, always in essence just beyond the ability of the mind to grasp. But for a true atheist this is even more profoundly true: the atheist embraces the mysterious Otherness of God much more wholeheartedly than the believer does. To the point, indeed, of Othering God from existence itself. In this, as in other, ways the atheist is more devout than the theist.

Forget history?

Marx said it in various ways, but Santayana said it most pithily:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Reading Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin (1831), I came across this sentiment, which reads almost as the ur-text against which Santayana is rebelling. Balzac attributes it to Louis XVIII, though I can't track down the original:

Parmi ces convives, cinq avaient de l’avenir, une dizaine devait obtenir quelque gloire viagère; quant aux autres, ils pouvaient comme toutes les médiocrités se dire le fameux mensonge de Louis XVIII: Union et oubli.

'Let us come together and forget the past' ... the motto of 'toutes les médiocrités'!

Man Booker Prize, 2012: the Longlist

And bang! -- went August. The order, here, is the order in which I read the books, and has no other special significance; although it so happened the first book I read also turned out to be the best of the lot. Anyway:

Booker Longlist 2012 1: Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies

Booker Longlist 2012, 2: Michael Frayn, Skios

Booker Longlist 2012, 3: Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

Booker Longlist 2012, 4: Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Booker Longlist 2012, 5: Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

Booker Longlist 2012, 6: Sam Thompson, Communion Town: a City in Ten Chapters

Booker Longlist 2012, 7: André Brink, Philida

Booker Longlist 2012, 8: Will Self, Umbrella

Booker Longlist 2012, 9: Alison Moore, The Lighthouse

Booker Longlist 2012, 10: Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

Booker Longlist 2012, 11: Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

Booker Longlist 2012, 12: Nicola Barker, The Yips

So, briefly (gotta be somewhere ... you know how it is) some overall thoughts. Well, it seems to me a pretty weak longlist. Of this twelve, only Mantel absolutely deserves to be here; although I'd be happy enough to see Barker, Beauman and Moore go through to shortlist. Of the rest some are interesting more-or-less failures, some are pretty bad, and some are so bad (Frayn, Levy, I'm looking at you) as to make the reader slap his/her forehead in disbelief, Wallace-and-Gromit-style, with his/her meaty plasticine hand.

This is the shortlist I expect to see from yon farrago of titles: Barker; Brink; Joyce; Moore; Self; Mantel. The first, though slack, feels unlike anything else and has the proper 21st-century tang; the second is worthy and dull but the judges will think 'Brink surely deserves a nod; he's 111 years old and has subsisted too long in the shadow of Coetzee, and he's written several score novels all making the case that slavery and racism are bad'; the third is sentimental and easy to read, and the judges will put it forward to balance out the density and difficulty of some of their other choices; the fourth is actually a pretty good novel; the stodgy fifth is not a pretty good novel (not pretty at all) but it flatters the judges into thinking they're connoisseurs of complex Modernist art; the sixth will go on to win the prize.

Oh, but what might have been! Where is John Lanchester's Capital? Where's Zadie Smith's NW? Adam Thorpe's Flight? Where oh where is M John Harrison's extraordinary Empty Space? Indeed (only Beauman, and he only glancingly, escapes the severity of my Jeremiah-tone here) why is there no SFF at all on this longlist? What about Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker? Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts? M D Lachan's Lord of Slaughter? These novels are all better than at least half of the longlist, and some of them are better than all-but-one. If you see what I mean.