steepholm

In this BBC report a man called Nick Hancock anticipates the difficulties of spending 60 days on Rockall - to which the obvious answer would seem to be: well, don't do it.

I've never been able to sympathize much with the urge to put oneself (and one's eventual rescuers) in danger just for the sake of it, though clearly it excites admiration in many. However, I was prompted by something the reporter said on this clip to wonder about the cultural history of this kind of exploit: "In Victorian times, just visiting Rockall was said to be the epitome of heroism." That sounded a false note to me - but should it have? I can imagine a Victorian calling a visit to Rockall brave, but "heroic"? The Victorian version of that word has an overtone of nobility and service to others, to my mind, distinct from because-it's-there adventuring.

I'm far from certain about this, though. I try out a few test cases in my mind, running them through my patented "Victorian Mindset Filter":

Grace Darling and her father. They are uncontroversially heroic, showing extreme bravery and saving lives in the process. If they had merely been trying to break the night-time rowing endurance record? Not so much.

Sir John Franklin. Doomed, of course - but still fairly heroic because doomed in an attempt to find the Northwest Passage - a solid geopolitical objective that would have benefited his country had he succeeded.

The Light Brigade. Not only doomed, but doomed in a futile action; but heroic nonetheless because they acted from devotion to duty rather than reckless bravado.

Refining this a bit: Victorian heroism should not be entirely selfish; but while altruism is no doubt the ideal it is acceptable to be motivated in part by a desire for fame and glory. Indeed, desire for fame is a legitimate incentive within the classical, Germanic and Celtic heroic traditions alike. It goes clean against the Sermon on the Mount, which is no doubt why Milton calls it "the last infirmity of noble mind" - but he is praising with faint damns, there. Still, fame mustn't be the only incentive for an act otherwise pointless or contemptible. Herostratus is not admired, and no more are famous-for-being-famous celebrities (a solidly mid-Victorian word, in that sense - not a twentieth-century one as one might imagine).

It's when we get to the twentieth century though that the concept of heroism gloops out into an untrammeled glory fest - a race to get to the ends of the earth or the top of Everest for no other reason than to say that you did it first, or quickest, or with the least equipment. Are such people more likely to be called heroic now than of yore? Such feats may wear the dress of patriotism, scientific research or charity fundraising, but to what degree are these the real motivations, and what effect do they have on our conception of them as heroic or otherwise? Scott, for example, was certainly seen in his own time as a hero, and still is by many. In what exactly did the estimate of heroism consist, either now or then?

It's in the twentieth century, as far as I can see, that people become obsessed with superlatives for their own sake: the fastest, longest, highest, first, and so on. The Guinness Book of Records is published first in 1951: how did previous generations get by without it? Perhaps they didn't find that sort of thing as fascinating, or perhaps they did but wrote about them piecemeal in publications such as almanacs? Here's where I hit the buffers of ignorance - but I'd be interested to know at what point Wisden, for example (first pub. 1864) started noting records in the Guinness sense rather than merely keeping records of individual matches; or when people started thinking of the World Record for running a certain distance rather than who won a particular race. That seems to me an interesting epistemic shift. It was facilitated no doubt by technology (accurate chronometers) and organization (the creation of events such as the Olympics with the authority to declare results and have them universally accepted), but were people just waiting for that kind of opportunity, or did its arrival signal the creation of a whole new way of thinking about achievement, in absolute rather than relative terms?

I don't suppose I'm alone in finding Landseer's "The Cat's-Paw" by far the most disturbing of his paintings:



For reasons I can't now recall I was searching for it on the web this morning, and the first description I found was from a coffee table book called The Cat in Art by Stefano Zuffi: "This painting, marked by subtle cruelty... shows a monkey trying to burn the cat's paw by holding it over a brazier."

No, no, no! This totally misses what makes Landseer's painting so shocking. The monkey isn't "trying to burn the cat's paw" at all; it's trying to get the chestnuts. The cat's paw is entirely a means, not an end. Compare and contrast this sixteenth-century illustration of the same story, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder:



It's hard to read a monkey's expression, but it seems to me that there's a sadistic smile on Gheeraerts's monkey's face. It wants the chestnuts, yes, but it's also enjoying the control. That's disturbing too in its way, but it's a common-or-garden cruelty. Landseer's monkey by contrast barely knows the cat is there: if it had seen the poker first, it would probably have used that. That is the face of evil in our own times. That is the face that collapses factories in Bangladesh for the sake of a cheap Primark T-shirt. That is the face of ATOS, staring fixated at the bottom-line chestnuts and not caring how many people must be burned to get them. I don't believe for a moment that people who shop at Primark are "trying to burn the cat's paw". But the factories still collapse, and the dust spreads thinly over all of us.

Meanwhile, "The Pot of Basil" is almost two centuries old, but remains chillingly up to date. Hypocrite lecteur, -- mon semblable, -- mon frère!

With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.

For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.

I've long known that the Iron Age began at different times in different places, due to the fact that iron-making technology took time to spread. But when did it end? The Romans used iron tools as much as the Ancient Britons for example, but no one ever seems to describe first-century Rome as an iron-age culture. Why not?

If we were following the naming practice which leads from stone to copper to bronze to iron, and distinguishing societies by their cutting-edge technologies (pun intended) then perhaps we might call Rome part of the Steel Age. Their military did after all use Noric steel for weaponry (though how widespread its use was I'm not sure). But steel of one description or another was being made long centuries before that, in Moravia, in Iberia, in East Africa: were they therefore more "advanced" than Rome? Besides, steel does not seem to have been as fundamentally transformative a technology as iron had been. In many ways we might say that the Iron Age was alive and kicking at the Battle of Hastings and even beyond. But we don't.

Besides, no one does talk about the Steel Age. With the Romans, we move to a different system entirely, based not on technology but taking classical culture itself as normative. The classical age, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, even the Modern (which was at first used as a point of contrast to the Ancients - i.e. Greece and Rome) all use classical Rome rather than any technology as their ultimate point of reference. Only since the industrial revolution have we begun to name ages after technology again, and then only in certain contexts: the railway age, the computer age, the internet age, etc. These may or may not stick: it's up to future archaeologists, I suppose.

Was I going somewhere with this? If I was, I forget. Anyway, feel free to leap in.

I'm sure this must be a much-written about subject, but I'd be interested to know if anyone can recommend a particular treatment.

I've been wondering about the relationship between religion and the development of writing and early literacy. At least in the Middle East and the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, the idea of sacred writings seems to have been prominent from early times, and has at least two aspects. First, the notion that God dictates commandments, laws, scriptures - whether to Hammurabi, Moses or Mohammed - and that they assume thereafter a divine, perhaps infallible character in their written form. Second, the control of writing becomes associated with a priestly caste, using hieratic scripts, symbols and magic - something I associate particularly with Egypt, though no doubt it appears elsewhere too (in Babylon, for example?).

With both these developments, but especially the first (because magic can be performed without script) religion isn't just facilitated by writing - it's virtually identified with it: the Good Book, Holy Writ, the Law. To this day the invention of writing is the prerequisite for a vast amount of what we recognize as religious practice - from Golden Dawn ceremonials to scripture-quoting Southern Baptist preachers. I suppose it's uncontroversial to say that it must have been impressive for illiterate societies, from ancient Britain to the Aztec Empire, to find that a piece of paper could talk and carry messages - but even after the novelty has worn off (as it must have done by now) the written word appears to be valorized to what seems a slightly weird degree. I can't think of any other technology that has embedded itself so firmly into the DNA of religious experience.

Anyway - as I say, I'm just wondering whether there's a standard/classic/interesting treatment of this subject out there that my sapient friends list might be able to recommend?

Looking back through this journal I see that over the years I have spent a lot of time shoving The Great Gatsby up against other texts, to see if they were a good fit. I'm really not sure why. I mean, I like Fitzgerald's book, and I've taught it several times, but it's not one of my "big" books, or not consciously. So yesterday, when I found myself musing, "Is Kurtz the man Gatsby would have become had he been born in Mitteleuropa instead of the Midwest?" I slapped myself down severely and made myself repeat "Conrad took a steamer up the Congo" twenty times until the fit had passed.

It's not just Gatsby, though. Last summer, I read - and was blown away by - Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. One of the things I liked best was the attenuated despair of the main narrative's final pages, as the protagonist stumbles toward suicide while desperately trying to keep alive his grandiose self-image. There was a certain flavour about the account that resonated - though I wasn't sure with what. This morning it came to me what it had reminded me of: the wonderful description of Nero's death in Suetonius. (I remember where I read that, too - in a cafe near the bus station in Cambridge, during my lunch break when I was a technical writer 25 years ago. I have an excellent memory for things like that, even though I can't name more than two or three of my colleagues from that unhappy time.)

No doubt one's past reading forms a rich humus in which the experience of new books can flower all the more vigorously. Still, it's a chicken-and-egg thing, or a hermeneutically circular one. Would I have enjoyed that bit of Hogg as much, or at all, had it not been for meeting Nero first? I'm not usually attracted to tales of suicidal despair - in fact, I prefer happy endings and find them more rewarding technically, spiritually, and aesthetically. My own depression and sense of futility perhaps contributed to that part of Suetonius sticking with me. What made it an important literary experience had as much to do with my own state of mind as anything I could have said about the text, even though I was consciously appreciating things about that too, and (since I was reading it in Graves's translation) thinking about it as source text for the Claudius books. That was consciously, ratiocinatively absorbing, but it took another reading of another text a quarter of a century later to hook out what had mattered to me most, and even since then it's been the best part of a year. And perhaps it wouldn't have occurred to me now if I hadn't dreamed about Nero last night - which was entirely the fault of Beric the Briton. Well, that's the kind of brain I've had the privilege of growing from a cutting, I suppose - but by God, it's a wonder we can make ourselves understood when we talk about books at all.

Back in the day, magical children didn't exist in children's literature. Nesbit, for example, wrote about children who got involved with magical creatures or objects, but while those creatures or objects might lend them magic for a limited time, for example by granting wishes, the children themselves were sturdily ordinary. That, as far as I can see, was typical: children might encounter magic users - from Molesworth's cuckoo clock to Puck, to Cole Hawlings, to Merlin - and they might get temporary magical powers as a result (often to regret it), but they weren't themselves presented as magical.

Then something changed. In the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly post 1970, we begin to meet children who are intrinsically magical. Ged. Will Stanton. Mildred Hubble. The Chants (Christopher and Laura). Buffy. Harry Potter. Percy Jackson.

First, is this even true? It's top-of-the-head stuff, and there may be many counter-examples I've not yet thought of. I suspect things are fuzzier in humorous texts, and in ones set in secondary worlds. (I'm wondering about Dorothy, for example.) But if there is any truth to it is it significant, and if so, of what? Does it reflect changing views of children and childhood? The rise of superhero comics? Different attitudes to magic itself?

Neanderthals had larger eyes and sockets than we do, and therefore less brain-room with which to perform "higher" cognitive functions. This, it is suggested, is why they died out.

There seems to be a term missing from this argument - namely the bit that explains why higher cognitive function is a more advantageous adaptation than good vision in low-level light. The northern latitudes (with their attendant dark winters) that were said to have encouraged the latter didn't go away, so why did gloaming-vision and the ability to carry out crepuscular hunts suddenly not count for much - as compared with the ability to decorate cave walls? There may be a good explanation, but on the face of it this seems like evolutionary parochialism and a circular argument: "Anything that resembles us is more likely to have survived than anything that doesn't - since, after all, we're still here."

We pique ourselves on our intelligence, but that doesn't make it an evolutionary trump card. The most successful species - sharks, ants, horseshoe crabs, etc. - aren't known for their smarts.

I was attending my aunt's funeral yesterday, so didn't get around to writing my promised second post on problematic tactics in the Moore-Burchill row. By now I imagine most people are sick of the subject, but for my own reference if for no one else's pleasure, here it is. Last time I was writing about the uses and abuses of analogy; today, I want to look at the term "community".

One tactic that has been repeatedly used by Moore, Burchill and others, is that of treating trans people as a monolithic group. Sometimes this group is characterized as a "mob" (the English elite's favourite word for unruly underlings since Shakespeare), but sometimes it mysteriously reverses its character and becomes a shadowy, moneyed "cabal", wielding huge power within the Establishment. (And really, this isn't surprising when you look at how many trans MPs and top civil servants there are, how many CEOs, judges, newspaper editors, TV pundits... Oh, right.) Whether in "howling mob" or "sinister cabal" mode, however, the community of trans people has one remarkable characteristic. Whatever any one of its members does, all the others turn out to be responsible for, both collectively and individually.

For example: some people were rude to Suzanne Moore on Twitter. Some people apparently even made threats. As it turns out, only two of the rude people and none of the threat-makers was trans, at least according to Zoe Brain, whose statements have a deserved reputation for being well-researched. Well, never mind - for the sake of argument, let's say some trans people stepped out of line. After all, some do, sometimes. In fairness, we should also note that many other trans people remained remarkably reasonable, even conciliatory, despite Moore's tweeting about "fucking lopping bits off your body" and Burchill's bile-belch in the Observer. I linked to some of their comments in earlier posts - feel free to go and read them. The majority of trans people, of course, said nothing at all, at least in public. Sadly, trans people are used to being abused, and a good proportion live in hiding.

Nevertheless, when Moore wrote about the affair in The Guardian on 17th January, she was able to affirm that "The wrath of the transgender community has been insane." This is Moore, note, not Burchill. She's meant to be the reasonable one, and she was certainly trying to strike a reasonable, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone (her piece is called "It saddens me that supporting freedom makes me an opponent of equality"). She wasn't throwing swear words around, but look at what she's actually said here. For her "the transgender community" has reacted, as one, with an "insane" degree of anger. There is no attempt at qualification - no "some" transgender people, no acknowledgement that the majority of responses by transgender people have been anything but insane. She has, in effect, taken the voices of a couple of angry people on Twitter and attributed them to every transgender person in the country. (Given that trans people are regularly told that they have a mental illness, this was a unfortunate choice of adjective, by the way.)

Blaming whole groups of people for the perceived misdeeds of one or two, is of course - need I point it out? - the same reasoning that we normally associate with racism: "I was mugged by a Pole, so now I believe all Poles are muggers." If Moore was able to write it without blushing (or without other people blushing on her behalf), I think it has a lot to do with her use of that word "community", which is roomy and ambiguous enough to hide this reasoning, possibly from Moore herself. Quite possibly when she wrote "the transgender community" she had in mind something fairly organized and cabally, that sinister clique we spoke of before - or else its demotic counterpart, Shakespeare's "many-headed multitude" storming en masse into Fleet St to upturn laptops and lobster lunches. Neither of these hive-minded monsters actually exists, but as fictions they serve their purpose, which is to divert readers' (and perhaps Moore's) attention from the extremism of what she actually wrote.

I use the example of this phrase because its nastiness is not as explicit as Burchill's, but of course the same tactic was being used up and down Fleet St, often in less nuanced forms. Burchill's article was entirely predicated on the assumption that "My friend was insulted by some people who are trans, so I have carte blanche to abuse all trans people everywhere." Or, as one of the letters in this week's Observer put it, "nothing [Burchill] wrote was disproportionate to groundless death threats." Nor is the tactic an invention of the last week or so. Its past mistress is Julie Bindel: her MO is to write something vile about trans people, then trawl through the responses it provokes until she finds something offensive, before writing a follow-up article quoting that and only that, entitled "See what bullies trannies are!"

Given all this, should we ditch the word "community", since it offers such ample cover for abuse, and since trans people are in fact anything but monolithic in their views on gender or any other topic?

Of course, it's not so simple. "Community", to begin with, is used in a number of different ways, to imply different kinds of association. For example, I think it's obvious that the deaf community isn't a community in quite the same way that the birdwatching or environmentalist communities are. We might say that membership of some communities is an accident of birth or circumstance, while others are based on a shared set of interests, values, beliefs. From this perspective, part of the problem with Moore's (and others') use of the word is that they are writing about trans people (an accidental community, as it were) as if they were an ideological community. Not of course that it would be okay for Moore to blame all environmentalists for the sins of one or two, either - but I don't think I'd jib if she wrote "The environmentalist community is concerned about climate change". It's probably not true of every environmentalist, but as a generalization it's true enough for the newspapers.

It's not even as simple as that, though - because shared circumstances beget cultural identities. There is no reason that deaf people should have anything particularly in common beyond the fact of being deaf, yet by all accounts there is a thriving deaf culture. Their shared experiences shape a collective identity - a community, if you like. Finding oneself at a systematic disadvantage because the world is designed with another kind of person in mind is always likely to engender some kind of esprit. (Where there is no disadvantage, you tend not to get communities: there is no people-without-earlobes community, to my knowledge.) Now, it seems clear that trans people are a community in much the same sense deaf people are. They share certain experiences not fully understood by many other people; they are frequently isolated, and appreciate mutual support and advice; and they face a degree of systematic disadvantage in a world designed for people who are not trans. All these are bonding experiences, but it doesn't make them a "lobby" (to use Burchill's favourite word) any more than deaf people are a lobby.

Okay, I think that's more or less where I've got to in my cogitations on the question. I still think "community" is a dangerous word that can be abused far too easily; but I hesitate to discard it because there really is a kind of trans community - just not the type that Moore and Burchill write about.

When I was at primary school, I suppose in about 1970, we used to sing a song about school dinners. It went like this:

Say what you will,
School dinners make you ill,
And Davy Crockett died of shepherd's pie.
Our school din-dins come from pig bins
Out of town.

I used to walk home for dinner in those days (this was long before I became gentrified and started calling it lunch), so my interest in the subject was merely theoretical, but I sang along with the rest in a spirit of camaraderie.

It's interesting, if only to me, to piece together the various bits of this song. Its tune was the opening theme from the TV show Out of Town, presented by Jack Hargreaves. The theme's lyrics were:

Say what you will,
The countryside is still
The only place where I could settle down
Troubles there are so much rarer
Out of town.

Clearly the school rhyme is a parody of this, so we might expect that the school dinner song postdates 1963, when Out of Town was first broadcast. But there are features that irksomely suggest an earlier date. Davy Crockett is a quintessentially mid-'50s icon, is he not - thanks to the US film and TV series? In 1970 I had a vague idea who he was, but he was by no means a name to conjure with in my childhood. I knew the phrase "king of the wild frontier", for example, but had no notion what it referred to. (In fact I still don't. Is it the western frontier, or the frontier with Mexico?)

Pig bins were more mysterious still. They were obviously meant to be unpleasant, but what were they? This bothered me vaguely even in 1970, I now recall, but it took me more than forty years to find out. In fact, this post was prompted by my accidentally learning about pig bins just the other day, from a TV programme on the history of waste management. According to the programme, pig bins were a wartime feature - metal bins put on the street for the collection of scraps to be fed to pigs, in a thrifty effort at recycling. You can see a picture here.

At this point the song looks like a chimera. It references WWII pig bins, but also a 1960s TV programme, along with a figure whose cultural zenith was about 1955. What generation of children could possibly have invented it? Did it evolve over time in some way? Having read the Opies, one might find that plausible.

But the mystery dilutes when you learn that the Out of Town theme was actually written for the film Charley Moon (1956), where it was sung by Max Bygraves. So the parody may be earlier. Not only that, but if you look at the first comment on the article about pig bins linked above, you will read that they survived the war and lasted into the 1960s (though not in my town, obviously). Given all that, my best guess is that the song I sang was probably composed circa 1956, riding the wave of Crockett enthusiasm and taking advantage of Max Bygrave's song in Charley Moon, while alluding to the noisome pig bins still dotting the streets of Albion.

I wish now that I could go back to my 1970 self and share the news.

"And now, Profile. This week we look at the new Chinese leader-in-waiting."

Thus the Radio 4 continuity announcer, while I'm getting my tea yesterday. Half-listening, for a moment I think she has told me that the new Chinese leader's name is In Wei Ting. I laugh involuntarily, then choke it back. Did my id just make a racist joke? Or was I merely laughing at my own stupidity (a source of constant amusement)?

Chinese jokes seem to be weirdly acceptable, or at any rate widespread, on the TV comedy scene at the moment. You can see people like Dara Ó Briain and Chris Addison doing Chinese impressions that are almost childishly racist on national television - and then excusing it with a beguiling guilty laugh.

I don't really understand who gets to decides which kinds of racism "count". Is there an official line on such things? I can't remember the last time I heard an Irish joke being broadcast, or even a gentile-told Jewish joke. Jokes about Americans and the French are rife, though - and Germans too seem to be fair game. Broadly speaking the rule seems to be that, the more powerful you are, the more you are allowed to be mocked for your appearance, accent, or national character. From that point of view, the popularity of Chinese jokes is a very backhanded compliment - especially as they always come with a kind of cringe. One expects Ó Briain to say something about "overlords" in a Kent Brockman voice.

On the other hand, I also hear jokes about, for example, Greece - and although they're usually related directly to their current financial woes, it's hard to stop that leaking into a general image of the Greeks as a race being lazy, corrupt, etc.