normblog

Through a window

I discovered Kent Haruf early last year when I read his novel Plainsong. I followed up with Eventide, a sequel and just as good. Both books are set in Holt, Colorado, as is his latest, just about to be published in this country, Benediction. It's about the last months in the life of Dad Lewis, the care and love he receives from his wife Mary and daughter Lorraine, and a family sorrow over their son and brother Frank; as well as about the lives of others connected with them, neighbours, employees, friends.

In circumstances I won't describe, as I don't want to spoil what is an amusing - though also sad - episode, one of the novel's protagonists comments on the 'precious ordinary'. Whether Haruf was intending by that to echo John Updike's comment about 'giv[ing] the mundane its beautiful due', I don't know. Probably. In any case, the precious ordinary is what Benediction is about and what it marvellously captures. I shall now be going in search of the author's earlier books.

There's a feature about Kent Haruf here. (Thanks: CW.)

Wrong left-hand

George Eaton concludes his review of the Richard Seymour hatchet job on Christopher Hitchens like this:

Any left that is worthy of the name will seek to learn from such a figure [Hitchens], not impugn him. But if one seeks evidence of why Hitchens so often felt the need to deny this association, Seymour's embittered polemic provides ample proof.

I can certainly understand Hitch's later temptation to deny the association (though if my memory is right he didn't do so invariably). But it's a temptation to be resisted. It concedes the label, the traditions and the values of the left to that lot - the dead-enders of the verkrappt left. Whereas it is necessary to insist that there is another left, with better values, and that these and it are still to be fought for. This old post of mine is relevant in one way. And this Youtube clip... isn't.

Stamp of approval

Since I collected stamps on my own account maybe 60 years have elapsed. Even since I collected them with and for my daughters it's more than two decades. But I'll be wanting a full set of these six stamps.

Humbug

Geoffrey Wheatcroft makes himself the latest in the very long line of those who aren't impressed by people regretting or apologizing for wrongs they weren't personally implicated in. This time it's the regret expressed by David Cameron over the Amritsar massacre of April 1919 that is the cause of complaint. The problem for Wheatcroft lies in Cameron's 'expressing his regrets for something which had never been his own responsibility or fault, and had happened long before. But the right occasion for condemning some outrage or injustice is at the time.' Yet Cameron wasn't saying 'Hey, I was at Amritsar etc.'; he was making a statement of regret on behalf of the country of which he is prime minister; and that is a perfectly valid public act, as I am not going to argue yet once more.

It gets worse, though. Over such meaningful statements of regret or apology Wheatcroft pretends to favour meaningless ones. He writes:

With all these lamentations, what we never hear from our lachrymose politicians are genuine palinodes or recantations for their own errors and crimes. Blair effortlessly apologises for the Great Famine more than 160 years ago. He has never apologised, and never will apologise, for taking us into a needless, unlawful and horrible war only 10 years ago, and doing so on mendacious claims.

But you can't really expect Blair to apologize for actions he, Wheatcroft, thinks were wrong and Blair doesn't; unless you believe apologies are due for what others, and not the person apologizing, construe as wrongs. In general this yields worthless apologies, of the kind 'Sorry if I offended someone'. Wheatcroft's is the real humbug. He obviously knows that to expect a Blair apology is not to the point (until such time as Blair changes his mind over Iraq, should that ever happen). What Wheatcroft is doing is insisting on the one true moral universe as defined by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

Phone talk

I upgraded my iPhone during the last few days and, what with switching over from the old one to the new, and then making the necessary phone calls to my provider to figure out how to get the new one started, I went quite a lot of hours - hours! - with no proper phone other than our landline. Anyway (to get to the point of this story) once my system was back up I asked Adèle to ring me on the iPhone from our landline. We were both in the kitchen. She rang, I answered and we had a brief conversation, to make sure we were both fully audible to one another.

Well, it was a fresh experience - talking on the phone to someone who's right there in the room with you. It's even better than Skype. You're talking across the air waves but have the full person in front of you. You can both move about while you talk. It could catch on.

The right to live in a democracy

In issue 2 of the new journal Fathom, Amnon Rubinstein identifies what he sees as a paradox at the heart of human rights discourse. The paradox is this:

While the right to live in a democracy can be tantamount to the right to life... international law does not recognise the right of an individual to live in a democracy.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does include at Article 21(1), as he himself notes, that 'Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives', but Rubinstein regards this as an empty formula compatible with voting in a Soviet-style one-party state. I'm not so sure about that: 'freely chosen representatives' can be interpreted in more than one way, but 'freely' either means freely or the relevant right is not being realized. In any case, Rubinstein argues that it is pragmatic political calculations that have led to the absence of an effective right to live in a democracy from international human rights instruments. He speaks of...

... the need to accommodate and placate victorious Soviet Communism after World War Two... [and later] the composition of the UN itself – the majority of whose members are non-democratic in some way – as well as... the fear of causing a split within the international community.

I would see something else, or at any rate something more, as having been at work, a doctrinal premise: namely, the principle of national self-determination. If there is a universal right to national self-determination, then there cannot be a universal right to live in a democracy so long as self-determination is thought to allow nations to choose their own form of government. Here one might argue that if this is to be a genuine choice then there must be democratic means of registering it; but I think the counter-argument would be that peoples can choose in other, more negative, or implicit, ways. If they tolerate, or merely live with, forms of rule which are less than democratic, then this may be viewed, practically-speaking, as a kind of choice. Put another way, democracy has to be 'taken on' by any national populace, by their campaigning for it, fighting for it, or at least receiving it willingly in circumstances - such as defeat in war - where democracy has been delivered by the armies of an external power.

I don't say that the above position is without its problems. It isn't. But I assume it to be standard as a way of reconciling national self-determination with the absence of an individual's right to live in a democracy. National self-determination presupposes ways of construing the collective national will that do not depend on genuinely democratic elections or expressions of that will through mechanisms such as the referendum.

All that said, Rubinstein has a point. The right to live in a democracy is important as a powerful protection against arbitrary and lethal state power, and belongs with other fundamental human rights. Including it in international treaties and human rights documents would give support to democrats everywhere, especially those living under dictatorship. Today, the notion that this or that people really doesn't want democratic government can be tested (where it is not just a blatant rationalization for monopolistic power) by the usual mechanisms of democratic choice. Should it prove to be the case somewhere that people vote for their own exclusion from democratic rule, then they will really have chosen not to avail themselves of the right to live in a democracy, but it will then be clear that that was their (majority) choice. There would need to be free, and possibly even assisted, emigration.

Now you see it, now you don't

In a review of Geoffrey Beattie's Our Racist Heart? An Exploration of Unconscious Prejudice in Everyday Life, Eona Bell says:

The key argument [of the book] is that, regardless of the liberal and open-minded attitudes we may consciously hold, we all have unconscious biases which can lead to prejudice in our interaction with other people.

You might think this a well-known thesis, and you'd be right to. But it is the very thesis that is forgotten or implicitly denied - often when there are Jews involved – by those who claim that what they say or write or draw can't be racist because their intentions aren't. Two thousand years of prejudice such people just know to be over and done with. Unconscious biases, themes and symbols linked with traditions of hatred and persecution, these are then, strangely, as nothing.

Storyteller?

Here's Colm Tóibín:

What's more important in fiction: story or style?

I'm against story. I remember [the painter] Howard Hodgkin really disliking being called a colourist. People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

And if he did get it from his grandmother? People like a good story anyway - they do. Including his. But, yes, you need to be able to write as well. I also enjoyed this bit:

Do you read your reviews?

Not if somebody has told me in advance that it isn't good. The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych."

Is America the greatest country in world history?

I don't propose to try answering the question (assuming it's a valid one), since to do so in a serious way would take time and be complicated. I'll content myself with saying that I think the US today is a pretty damn good country, and I think there are large numbers of non-Americans throughout the world who also think that; and I'd expect it, as one of the world's long-standing liberal democracies, to rank highly against non-democracies both past and present in any ranking exercise undertaken by people who knew what they were doing and were historically knowledgeable and reasonably impartial. What I'm interested in, however, is a post by Glenn Greenwald in which he waxes indignant about the proposition that America is the greatest country in world history, picked up by him from a tweet of Charles Cooke's saying that it is. You can find Cooke's reply to Greenwald here, but it doesn't really take up the point that is of interest to me: namely, one of the means by which Greenwald attempts to discredit the belief in American superiority. He argues from probabilities. Thus:

[T]here are 179 countries on the planet. The probability that you will happen to be born into The Objectively Greatest One, to the extent there is such a thing, is less than 1%.

And:

[I]f you extend the claim to the Greatest Country that Has Ever Existed in All of Human History, then the probability is minute...

These observations Greenwald offers by way of impugning 'the thought process behind this formulation' (that is, the claim for America's historical superiority); and it's not the only reference he makes to the thought processes of those who support the claim.

Greenwald should have given more careful attention to his own critical thought processes before launching this little beauty on the world.

Probability calculations are made relative to what one knows, or thinks one knows, and what one doesn't. And the claim that America is the greatest country isn't generally made as a proposition of pure chance within the relevant statistical field. Imagine, for an analogy, someone saying that Donald Bradman was the greatest Test batsman of all time. It would not be apt to reply: 'Gosh, given the very large number of Test batsmen there have been, what are the chances of just Bradman having been the greatest ever?' The claim is based on some knowledge about Bradman's batting relative to that of other Test batsmen. It is not a stab in the dark.

OK, the analogy is imperfect because there are some fairly definitive indices of what constitutes outstanding batsmanship in cricket. What constitutes a great country is more open to argument. So let's consider the following analogy instead. If I say that Jane Austen (or Charles Dickens) is the greatest English novelist, I'm not just making a wild bet, at odds of several thousands to one, on her (or his) being so. It's a judgement based on having read the work of the writer in question and also read some reasonable quantity of the output of other English novelists, plus a certain amount of critical opinion etc, and arrived at the ranking in that way. Of course, the judgement might be disputed, or even wrong; there might be an English novelist I haven't read who I would find, if I did, to be superior.

But this issue isn't about someone's failure to consider the odds of just any old country, X, in a field of n countries, being the best ever. A person who truly believes that America is the greatest believes it on the basis of knowledge which they have, or think they have, about that country's qualities relative to the comparable and contrasting qualities of other countries.

Writer's choice 374: Sheila Quigley

Sheila Quigley is a crime writer from the North East. She was born in 1947 and started work at the age of fifteen as a presser in Hepworths, a tailoring factory. She published her first novel in 2004. Sheila's books include Run for Home, The Road to Hell and Thorn in my Side. Below she remembers some favourite books.

Sheila Quigley on reading she has enjoyed and been frightened by

I was seven years old before I could understand the squiggles on a sheet of paper, way behind everyone in my class. Then one day, like a finger from above, the teacher pointed at me and told me to read out loud. I can still remember the horror I felt. That night I went home, picked up the local newspaper and pointed a word out to my mother. I learned five words that first night by staring at them and repeating them over and over, the next night I learned another five, and by the end of a fortnight I was top of the class for reading. I've never stopped since.

My first love was the Enid Blyton books, the Famous Five and the Secret Seven. By the age of eleven I was into fantasy. The problem was they were in the adult section of the library, so I used to borrow them under my jumper. Every one was returned, and on reflection I think the librarian must have known what I was up to. This was a small village where everyone knew everyone and everything, so who did I think I was fooling?

When I was sixteen I read Dracula in one sitting. I remember screaming at the doorway to upstairs at one o'clock in the morning for my dad to come and get me.

Then, somewhere in my twenties I found Stephen King and he has been my number one ever since. The man is a genius - his story-telling abilities are nothing short of fantastic. I have loved all his books but my favourite is The Stand.

There have been many books with this story line since, some of them really good, but nothing compares with Mr King. His people - and that's what they are - are all individuals. You feel everything they feel; when they are frightened you are terrified. To me he is the best.

Some time during my thirties I read the one where the clown is looking up from the water-grate. This time I was standing at the bottom of the stairs at one o'clock in the morning shouting for my husband to come and get me.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]