Everyone needs to know where theirs is...

It appears that today is officially Towel Day.  I didn't know.  Certainly worth marking...

Bellisima

Hurrah!
Our Steve Bell alternative antimonarchy Jubilee mugs and T Shirts came today from Philosophyfootball.

Jubilee Poem of the Week

I recall sitting in a punt, with a stereo blaring out this Jubilee anthem, in 1977... so now seems the right time to broadcast it again.

God Save The Queen
The Sex Pistols

God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb

God save the queen
She ain't no human being
There is no future
In England's dreaming

Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future, no future,
No future for you

God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves

God save the queen
'Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid

When there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in your human machine
We're the future, your future

God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves

God save the queen
We mean it man
And there is no future
In England's dreaming

No future, no future,
No future for you
No future, no future,
No future for me

No future, no future,
No future for you
No future, no future
For you

Basking

A slow, gray day in Nunhead today, enlivened in a quiet, modest way by a bacon sandwich with brown sauce in Bambuni's.  The only creatures who seemed at ease with the world were four frogs basking on the edge of our garden pond.

Essay Assay

A few days back, I was sent a link to an essay by Neal Stephenson, (author of Anathem, The Baroque cycle, Cryptonomicon and other novels).  It is In the Beginning was the Command Line, and is an extended, detailed disquisition on operating systems and other stuff.  Like universes and so forth. 

And it kind of reminded me of The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond from around 1999 onwards (I think - it evolves).

Then, yesterday, while reading an entertaining book about typefaces and fonts ("Just My Type: A Book About Fonts", by Simon Garfield, 2010),  I came acros a strong recommendation for Eric Gill's "Essay on Typography" from 1931.

All of this made me want to essay some thoughts about Essays. 

It seems obvious from at least two of the examples above that the form is far from dead.  Rather, it has acquired a huge new lease of life via the Internet - but also some recent striking newspaper essays impressed me.   For exmple. a Simon Schama article for the NYT springs to mind from around six years ago, on radical American history and how it might act as a key for challenging right-wing responses to 9/11.

Essays are not just non-fiction books.  They - ideally - should be shorter, and more focused.  So neither On The Origin Of The Species nor The Principia Mathematica counts an essay.  For me, On Fairy Stories just scrapes under the wire.

And the latter also hints at another aspect of essays - they are usually colloquial, and accessible.  They may even, like On Fairy Stories, have begun as talks or lectures.  But typically not political speeches.  Repackaging the Gettysburg Address does not make it an essay.

And the really great essays may often be annoying.  They get under the skin, and you disagree with them -while at the same time being carried along by the prose.

They have influence - they live on, people remember them and cite them, continue to laugh along with them -or build scientific or other academic disciplines based upon them

So here then is a short, random selection of essays (loosely defined, some other short nonfiction is in it) that seem to me reasonably seminal, or interesting or something.  As a general note, I will admit to a gneral European rather than American bias.  For which no apologies. And for no readily discernable reason, they are arranged in date order.

Commentariolus, Copernicus, Nicholas, 1514.  This is his short outline/precis of what later became "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium." (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres).  In other words one of the most significant scientific works of the renaissance.

Of Friendship, Bacon, Francis, 1625. Bacon wrote many esays, of course, but this is one of the best.

Areopagitica, Milton, John, 1644.  On the freedon of speech - Milton's great anti-censorship polemic.

The Education of Women, Defoe, Daniel, 1719.  He's in favour, of course.

A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public, Swift, Jonathan, 1729.   OK so who hasn't read this?  Really?  Stop reading this blog now and go and read this essay at once.  It's essential.  Now read it again.  Good, isn't it?

Advice on the Choice of a Mistress, Franklin, Benjamin, 1745.  Just because it is funny...

And now it's time for Hazlitt - so much loved and eulogised by the late, great Michael Foot.  Many to choose from, but I limited the selection to three:

On Corporate Bodies, William Hazlitt, c.1821.  Marvellous splenetic rant. "Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill"

On Going a Journey, William Hazlitt, c.1821.  This is the witty, calm, poised iconoclastic Hazlitt grabbing a subject and dealing with it at length.

On The Pleasure Of Hating, William Hazlitt, c.1826.  For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about. 

The Chemical History of a Candle, Faraday, Michael, 1860.  I can't really claim this as an essay in all honesty, but what the hell..  Probably Faraday's most famous Christmas lecture series.

On The Decay of the Art Of Lying, Twain, Mark, 1882.   Lying nees to be done properly. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde, Oscar, 1891.  Paradoxical, libertarian, artistic, witty, human and annoying in equal measures.

De Profundis, Wilde, Oscar, 1897.  Really, a letter to Douglas written from Reading jail.

Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Woolf, Virginia, 1923. A beautiful, great modernist blast against Arnold Bennet and the "realist" novel.

On Being the Right Size, Haldane, J.B.S, 1928.  A beautiful short piece and the origin of the notion  that a horse splashes.

A Hanging, Orwell, George, 1931.  Classic reportage and feeling. 

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin, Walter, 1936.  Still fresh and relevant, despite the fact that we are several generations of technology on.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien, J.R.R., 1936.  It could be argued that this was the first piece of writing that really began to understand and sympathise with Beowulf.
 
If Hazlitt has to be limited to just three essays then the same must apply to Orwell. But it is hard, very hard.

Wells, Hitler and the World State, Orwell, George, 1941.  Timely, precise, astonishing.

Decline of the English Murder, Orwell, George, 1946.  Famous and rightly so.

On Fairy Stories, Tolkien, J.R.R., 1947.  Could be said to have been the piece that kicked off a whole industry of thinking and thought about fantasy and the fantastic.

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Feynman, Richard P., 1959.  The founding text, I think, of nanotechnology.

Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida, Jacques, 1966.  The real secret joy of this piece is just how impenetrable it is!

The Death of the Author, Barthes, Roland, 1967.  Arguifying against the establishment ways of seeing art and culture - and winning...

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Sokal, Alan D., 1994.  And finally, the only possible, and wholly necessary, corrective to the Derrida and his brethren.

Wear Word

It was nice to see the River Wear - one of the Three Rivers from earlier in this blog - appearing in Orlando's cryptic crossword on the 15th May.

All about Browning

In recognition of Browning’s recent Bicentenary, as keen observers of TANH will have spotted, I posted a few of his poems. And I’m a bit of a Browning fan, so I wanted to show him off a little, to choose poems that would explain my enthusiasm.

This was really quite hard. Rather, I guess, like choosing the tracks to be your Desert Island Discs. What to include, and what to leave out, and why?

First off, I’d already plastered a few Browning’s over TANH as part of the Poem of the Week strand. In particular:-

• The brilliant, witty and unnerving study of strange psychology Porphyria’s Lover.
• The complex, argumentative Bishop Blougram's Apology
• The cod-medieval Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came - to shich I later added a short note.

And I also mentioned him in passing, in an essay on Tennyson, in 2009 and also discussed a radio programme about My Last Duchess.

So what to choose for the centenary?  Well, one of the great pleasures of Browning is his range, and the first thing I noticed was that I hadn't posted any of the love lyrics or shorter poems previously.  So I began with one of my favourite lyrics, Love Among the Ruins, with its unusual patterning of rhythm.
 
And by far the most famous of theshort poems is Home Thoughts from Abroad of course, with it's opening of "Oh, to be in England/Now that April's there" - so that seemed to be a cert.
 
Then, given that I was thinking about his most famous poetry, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" had to be there with its wonderful:

Rats!

They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

After which why Garden Fancies II: Sindandus Schafnaburgensis? Partly, I will admit, a desire for some suitably 'crabbed' Browning but also because I love:

How did he like it when the live creatures
Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right of trover?
---When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife's closet?

After which a more direct short poem again seemed in order - so I chose the "the quick sharp scratch/And blue spurt of a lighted match from "Meeting at Night"

By now I'd covered a lot of ground, but still hadn't touched upon one of Browning's great topics, the great painter and scupltors of renaissance Italy.  Hence Andrea del Sarto - called by some "the faultless painter" - which many critics have thought Browning's greatest poem.  I can see it is great, but to be honest it isn't even my favourite Browning poem about renaissance Italian painters! (*)

So in keeping with the plan of keeping things diverse, it was back to the short love lyric and Summum Bonum. 

Perhaps the most anthologised of Browning's poems (after the Pied Piper, of course) is My Last Duchess - and one of my great pleasures.  So I couldn't leave that out.

(")  And I had to have my favourite poem about a renaissance Italian painter, Fra Lippo Lippi.  Browning keeps close to Vasari.  The latter tells us 

Cosimo therefore, when he was working for him in his house, caused him to be shut in, so that he could not go out and waste his time; but he, cutting up the sheets of the bed with a pair of scissors, made a rope and let himself down by the window...

Which in Browning's poem becomes:

— three slim shapes,

And a face that looked up . . . zooks, sir, flesh and blood,
That's all I'm made of! Into shreds it went,
Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,
All the bed-furniture — a dozen knots,
There was a ladder! Down I let myself,
Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,
And after them. I came up with the fun

Less well-known, but also interesting, is House - with some echoes of Keats and Tennyson, in very different ways.

Eventually everything comes to an end of course, but I had to leave so much out! 

Pictor Ignotus;
An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician;
Mr Sludge, the Medium;
How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix (honest!);
Rabbi Ben Ezra (Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be/The last of life/For which the first was made)
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister;
By the Fireside;
The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church;
A Toccata of Galuppi's;
Caliban Upon Setebos;
Tray;
The Laboratory
 
Anyway, go read.  It's an order.