normblog

Proper Studies? (by Eve Garrard)

Here I am, in the cold and beautiful Scottish hills: very beautiful, and very very cold indeed. Not as cold as it's been up there, but still cold enough to keep me indoors more often than the landscape really deserves, so I'm making up for part of the loss by reading an anthology of poems about the landscape of Great Britain. The anthologist has made a fine selection: all the poems are interesting, and some of them are beautiful. But his introduction to the collection, full of interest though it is, leaves me a bit uneasy nonetheless. He wants to emphasize one aspect of looking at landscape: the way in which it can also teach us about ourselves. Landscape poems, he thinks, use their subject-matter to talk about other things also - in particular to talk about us, the people who look at and live in the places of Britain. He's chosen the poems in the collection as ones which, he believes, 'refresh and deepen our experience of the places around us and, through them, of ourselves'. Poets of the landscape are 'seers, who in deepening our understanding of the landscape around us, also deepen our understanding of ourselves'.

It's not exactly that I think he's wrong about this: of course understanding our landscape increases our understanding of ourselves. That's partly because understanding anything increases, at least to some extent, our self-understanding. Everything we look at, we see through the prism of our own subjectivity, so what we see isn't ever entirely separable from the fact of our seeing it; learning about the former is inevitably learning about the latter as well, and learning about the latter is learning about an aspect of ourselves. But we can choose which feature to emphasize: we can concentrate on the contribution we make to a given experience, or alternatively we can concentrate on what it's an experience of. Someone looking through a telescope can be focusing on the starry heavens above, or she can be focusing on the mechanism by which she sees them, the telescope itself. Both activities are entirely legitimate, but they're not the same activity, and they correspond to significantly different interests. An interest in landscape isn't the same as an interest in the psychology or sociology of experiencing landscape: the one looks outwards to the way the world is, the other inwards, to the way we humans are, and how we respond to the appearance of the natural world in which we find ourselves.

It goes without saying that the way we are - human nature - is an important and interesting topic. 'Know thyself' is a very fine injunction, both individually and collectively (especially since it's commonly attributed to - among many others - Socrates, against whom no disrespectful word shall be spoken in my presence). But it doesn't entail that we should seek to know only ourselves: our subjectivity is a prism, not a mirror, and through it we can see, if we're lucky, things at least as wonderful as the prism itself, and sometimes even more so. Our own contribution to whatever it is we're experiencing isn't the only thing of interest in the experience, and very often it isn't the most important aspect of it. This is particularly evident in the case of landscape, since for many people a central element of the experience is that it's of something quite other and different from us, those who are experiencing it. What we face when we look at the tall mountains or the restless sea is something deeply separate from, and necessarily indifferent to, our own immediate interests and concerns, and this gives it some of its overwhelming power. To emphasize what we can learn about ourselves from landscape (or poetry about it) is to turn away from one of its most distinctive aspects, its profound otherness. To keep insisting on the importance of the lessons which landscape poetry teaches us about our own humanity is to some extent to imprison ourselves inside our own skulls, rather than to release us into the illimitable strangeness and difference and beauty of the world outside us. (Eve Garrard)

Patrimony

Has it ever occurred to you that many of those lists of my best this and my best that (for twenty-whatever) that are produced any time between November 15 and December 26 are bound to be defective? A proportion of them must be. Why so? Because some time between the date of production and the end of the year in question your list-compiler will read a book, see a movie, hear a bit of music, or assess a handbag that would have been on the list had the list been compiled in the following January, but wasn't because it wasn't. I have a personal proof of this hypothesis right here.

I just read Philip Roth's Patrimony. Had I done so any time before December 20, I would have included it in my top 10 for 2010. I can't recommend it strongly enough. It's an account of Roth's father Herman's last years and of his death, and at the same time so much more than that: some account of Herman's life, and of Philip Roth's relationship to him, and of the process of ageing and the prospect of death (well-known Roth preoccupations), and of filial love and of the meaning of family. Whether intentionally or not it shows why universalist doctrines that don't accommodate particularist attachments must be wanting. The book is seamlessly put together, a moving testimony and a small masterpiece.

Proliferating yiddles

There may be more Jews in America than it was previously thought there were - in fact, an extra Jew for every five there used (on the accepted figures) to be. Without anything new happening, the US Jewish lobby has just been significantly strengthened. Will this be taken as further proof of the strange power of that lobby?

Another Boxing Day literary quiz

I'm repeating last year's concept for this year's quiz. You're looking for the names of 50 writers, two for each letter of the alphabet with the exception of q, x and z, for which I have provided no questions, and m and v, for which there are two pairs of writers each rather than just one. There are 25 clues, each one prompting you towards two writers linked by the fact that their last names begin with the same letter of the alphabet. Thus, for example, you might – though you don't - have the clue 'Five go to Thornfield Hall' to give you Enid Blyton and Charlotte Brontë. None of the writers featured in last year's quiz reappears in this one.

1. Got lost in a vanishing act.
2. Oh, the horror of a carve-up.
3. The rising sun darken it?
4. Felicia travels to Brooklyn.
5. Dear Mary turns up back to front and wrecked in Iceland.
6. Myra's long sobs.
7. In the city of the British Museum.
8. Not just a soldier - a lieutenant.
9. Tough rooster and sweet dove.
10. Little grey rabbit and the slave trade.
11. Took a girl like Joan of Arc.
12. Standing at second slip on a beach.
13. A home for Harry the Horse.
14. AS her sister to some brothers.
15. Bible of misery.
16. Small adapted coin.
17. The Mymble question.
18. No fault of Hitchcock's if Canadian goodness is spoilt by Norman across the border.
19. Johnno got hit in the solar plexus.
20. Obscure fox.
21. One day we will discuss serious things.
22. Sounds like you entrance a she-devil.
23. 451 lonely women.
24. Nietzsche goes to Babi Yar.
25. Hunting for some hard Brighton food?

Entries to be submitted by 2 January, with 'Boxing Day literary quiz' as the subject line of the email. The winner(s) will be drawn - as in 'out of a hat' - from all those entries deemed correct by the judges (me and WotN). Two book tokens worth £15.00 each to be won. (Answers now here.)

A yard short

I've never much taken to the use of 'critique' as a verb. But last night, watching another episode of Justified, I heard it spoken in a way that made me laugh. One member of the criminal fraternity complained to another about the latter's critiquing his yard. Whether or not the heavies of Eastern Kentucky in fact use the language of critical theorists I wouldn't know. But this does suggest there's an influence running outwards from members of the academic community into the wider society. Which may be a good thought to carry into Christmas.

The very best to normblog readers.

Private Cable?

In a Times column today, aptly summed up in its headline 'Vince's private words are not his public deeds', Philip Collins writes (£):

I don't know that Dr Cable didn't mean every word of it. Perhaps he did. In any case, his authority as Business Secretary is now totally spent. He is now a quite incredible witness to the legal process of merger and acquisition. Until he is reshuffled, he will be like one of the old Soviet leaders, dead long ago but propped up and wheeled out in public to show he's still there.
.....
The only thing getting buried this week is the distinction between the public and the private.

I don't buy that last bit. It's not as if Cable was chatting in his home to a friend; he was talking to people posing as 'voters at a constituency surgery'. That may not be like an official public statement, but it's not exactly private either.

Ideas as causes

As Yaacov (via whom) points out, this piece in the Economist on the likely causes of terrorism discusses the relative weights of economic factors (like poverty) and political factors (like a paucity of civil and political rights) in accounting for a country's 'propensity to produce terrorists', without so much as mentioning the presence or otherwise of Islamist ideology - or indeed of ideological influences of any kind.

Is there a reasonable defence of this apparent oversight? Perhaps one might take it that agent-motivation is being treated as the dependent variable, and the question then being considered is: what disposes a person to have ideas hospitable to justifying the killing of innocent people? But this won't do really. Even if the frame of mind of a potential political actor is what we want to explain and, more particularly, what sort of things influence him or her towards political murder, it's a nonsense to make abstraction from the ideas in play within the political environment. An individual's ideas are never just a function of their economic and political circumstances alone - as if they simply reasoned straight from these circumstances towards conclusions that they reach independently. People are significantly influenced by what they are hearing or reading from others; by the ideological atmosphere they breathe, to put it metaphorically. The propagation of terror as a legitimate political weapon, and the apologetics for terrorism on grounds of it's being 'understandable' for one or another reason, also play their part. It is extraordinary that this gets overlooked in relation to Islamist propaganda and agitation.

Handel at Niagara

You may remember Verdi in Israel. This is by way of a follow-up to that, and apt to the time of year.

Have you wrapped the presents?

The tradition of a morning paper

Far be it from me to complain about life in Cambridge; far be it, far be it, at a very great distance, from me. Love the new house and happy to be in this ancient university city. BUT... I have one small reservation. In Manchester, the darkness up north which London people treat as though you'd fallen off the edge of the world, we had every morning (WotN and me) a newspaper to adorn and ease our introduction to the day. I'm talking about a newspaper made out of paper. I would sit there over my cereal and turn the pages to ascertain how things were in the world, and what, if anything, there might be to blog about. It was civilized; it was nice.

With our new Cambridge postcode, however, we now have no such friendly resource. We early discovered that there was no newsagent near enough the house to be willing to deliver one. Never mind; but a five minute walk away, if that, there was a garage catering to this need. So one of us would nip out each morning - problem solved. And then the garage closed down its newspaper-vending operation. I am reduced to reading the morning papers at breakfast on my laptop. Readers, I do not have to explain to you that I am in no way averse to reading online. I do it all the time. But at breakfast! To have that cold steely thing instead of the paper paper. It isn't right. On this matter I am a traditionalist - which it was easier to be in that great northern conurbation than it is in this old seat of learning.

In related jews, sorry, news, you can inform yourself of the need for e-readers that adhere to Jewish law. (Thanks: L.)

'Understandable': three usages

There are two primary ways of using the word 'understandable'. One of them is morally neutral and the other isn't. In the first, we simply say of some phenomenon that we are able to understand it. Thus, I might give out that 'Although some things are beyond our grasp in principle, and others mysterious to us for the time being, much of the world and how it works is perfectly understandable.' I would mean no more than that it can be explained - empirically, scientifically, in logical terms or however. Again: 'That she became ill is understandable' - for she'd been attacked by a strength-sapping virus. Or: 'That she helped so many people is understandable' - for she is known to be both very compassionate and full of energy. Notice from these two examples that this usage of understandable implies no moral judgement. We can speak of both bad things and good things (illnesses, acts of compassion) as understandable.

In a second usage, however, 'understandable' is used as a way of mitigating or excusing an action that might otherwise be thought wrong. So: 'He behaved very rudely to his hosts, but it was understandable in the circumstances; he was under intense provocation and could not have been expected to show restraint'. Here, it is not only that his rudeness can be explained; it is also that we are urged to judge him less harshly than we otherwise might. Again: 'He failed to keep his promise, but it's understandable that he forgot; he had a lot else on his mind through no fault of his own'.

Observe that on the first of these two meanings of 'understandable', everything in the whole wide world that can be explained may be said to be understandable, while on the second there would be no point in saying of a lot them that they are understandable since no issue of mitigation or excuse could arise. A kettle's boiling is understandable in the first sense; but you wouldn't bother to say that its boiling was morally understandable given that once switched on the kettle had no choice, no other possibility; nobody would be feeling the kettle had a case to answer.

OK, so which meaning of 'understandable' is at work in this paragraph from Henning Mankell on the recent attempted act of terrorism in Sweden?

This is the first suicide bomber in Scandinavia and I am surprised that so many are – surprised. It reminds me of when the passenger jets crashed into the towers in New York. I never understood the surprise that followed. Wasn't this exactly what we had expected? A situation where the extreme, the desperate and the furious attacked the western world that for so long had humiliated Muslim countries. An attack that would be understandable [my emphasis - NG] but nevertheless wrong and worthy of condemnation.

It looks, on the face of it, like Mankell must be using 'understandable' in the first of the above two ways, because he's explicit that such attacks by 'the desperate and the furious' are wrong, worthy of condemnation. But one can't help feeling that by his insistence on this very desperation and fury he might be bringing in an element of the second usage, the mitigating one. He doesn't, for example, say that animosity towards Muslims is 'understandable' - and it's a good thing that he doesn't. But if he's using the word in our first way, it is just as understandable as acts of terrorism: it, like them, has a context, preceding causes, and all the rest of it. So why not it, Islamophobia, as well as them, terrorist attacks and attempts - both understandable on the meaning 'susceptible to explanation'?

Well, I don't know what's in the mind of Henning Mankel, so I'll leave it at that so far as he is concerned. But since this kind of ambiguity occurs as often as it does now, let me suggest that there may be a third usage of the word 'understandable': in which its user lays claim to meaning one above while hoping to get some benefit from meaning two. Whatever Mankel may be doing, that has become a common linguistic practice of our time.