Good Words and Bad.

So now I’m becoming acquainted with Lolita – whose real name is Dolores, by the way, Lo for short. I said I would reserve judgements until further down the line, and so I will, but I should note that I continue to luxuriate in Mr Nabokov’s use of English. Let me offer a couple of examples.

M Humbert is in New York City and working reluctantly in the advertising industry. His complaints include:

…how repulsed I was by the glitter of deodorized career girls…

Such economy of description grown to greatness of expression. (And how like me, I might add with apology.)

He escapes the ad industry and takes a position with an Arctic survey:

I had little notion what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand) the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographer – an insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had some psychic troubles) – maintained that the big men on our team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the arctic fox.

Such restrained cynicism towards the academic process raises a rare smile. More than that, such words I could chew and chew like a plug of favourite tobacco.

By contrast, I followed tonight’s episode of Lolita with a rare viewing of a TV programme on BBC4. It was a documentary on the Hundred Years War between England and France.

Now, it is widely recognised that one of the chief markers of maladroit writing is the impulse to add weight to a statement by using two words or phrases that are effectively, or actually, synonymous. Hence we had the narrator blessing our sensitive ears with:

… they emerged profoundly changed and very different.

What on earth has happened to the BBC? Such words remind me of that little piece of eggshell which your tongue strokes and your teeth crunch whilst eating an otherwise properly soft egg and cress sandwich.

A Pending Disappearance.

Readers of long standing should remember the venerable Lady B of the Shire – she about whom much was written, around whom several minor fantasias were constructed, and to whom and for whom a number of ditties were crafted. There was a time when she was the star witness of my life among the Hobbits. I remember saying once, and I meant it, that she was the only person within a 25 mile radius who I really wanted to talk to. It's still mostly true.

Today she told me she’s leaving, taking herself and the little princess to another Hobbit hole a few miles distant. ‘We have to move on,’ she said. Indeed.

I can’t in all truth say that I’ll miss her because I see her so rarely these days, although HT54 is likely to get fewer, if any, mentions on the blog. Nevertheless, Mill Lane is about to be demoted to the ranks of ordinariness, and the mere knowledge of her absence will remain a slightly sad issue for a while.

I wrote recently that I seem to be saying ‘and now it’s gone’ a lot lately. Well, there you are.

By Way of Contrast.

I received another cheque for a picture royalty today. Guess how much. £5.

Five freggin’ pounds!

It’s twenty years since I was an active landscape photographer. Twenty years since the Great Recession pushed me off the ladder I’d put so much effort into climbing. Back then, the very minimum fee paid for a magazine reproduction was £20, usually more. Still, £5 is better than £0. Don’t complain, Jeffrey.

I didn’t complain. I took it to the bank to pay into my account.

There was a woman in front of me and I couldn’t help overhearing her conversation with the cashier. ‘I want to talk to somebody about inheritance tax,’ she said. ‘I have two properties, you see, and I don’t want the taxman to get his hands on any of my money.’

I’ll bet she complains if the police, the fire service, the NHS, the Highways Agency, the educational system, etc, etc, are less than diligent in performing their functions. I wonder how she thinks it’s all paid for.

When she’d gone I took my cheque to the same cashier.

‘I have no property,’ I said, ‘but I do have a raindrop to put into my jam jar.’

On Both Sorts of Age Gap.

I still haven’t met Lolita. Tonight’s session was all taken up with Mr Humbert’s discourse on the nymphet phenomenon, which, frown-inducing as it might have been, was brilliantly observed and expressed. This man can write. I gather, however, that it might all be some sort of smoke screen, so deeper judgements will be reserved.

*  *  *

On a loosely related note, I watched another of the 80s TV episodes of Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes last night. The principle characters of the case were a man probably in his mid fifties, and his American wife who looked to be around thirty five. One of the YouTube commenters went straight to the heart of the mystery:

‘What’s a woman like her doing with an old fogey like him?’

The more intriguing question, however, came later:

‘Why are Holmes and Watson (or it might, more typically, have been Homes and Wotsen) always dressed like they’re going to a wedding or a funeral?’

Because the shorts hadn’t yet arrived from Bermuda?

Admitting Ignorance.

Another literary milestone was reached this week when I finished Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which I started in the summer but laid aside because I wasn’t in the mood.

So now I want to know what it’s all about. I could, of course, read the Introduction which will probably explain it to me in great detail. The problem is that the Introduction is written by the same academic who translated it, and not only do I have reservations about the quality of the translation which doesn’t flow well, I also have reservations about the role of the academic. With all due and genuine respect to certain persons I hold in high esteem and who I know to be academically inclined, I still can’t avoid the suspicion that much academic criticism and analysis is disingenuously constructed to bolster their egos and their job prospects. I might well be wrong. Feel free to excuse my ignorance on the grounds that I’m largely devoid of formal education. You might well be right.

You see, I’d love to think that The Metamorphosis is simply a random outpouring of Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination. I don’t really want to be told that it’s an allegory for the emergence of the beef burger as a staple of the western diet, or that Gregor Samsa is Jesus in disguise. Some stories need to make a point, obviously. Others can just be stories which touch a nerve in the human condition, surely. The one observation I should like to make about this one is this:

Kafka’s pronouncement of Gregor’s death is beautifully understated and all the more poignant for so being. In fact, I think The Metamorphosis is possibly the saddest story I’ve ever read.

Off to wash the dishes now, and then hopefully meet Lolita.

*  *  *

Somebody I met in the Shire yesterday told me I don’t look well. ‘That is, not as well as the last time I saw you,’ she continued with undertones of both urgency and apology. That made me feel a lot better.

Adulteration and Bits.

The Daleks at Google have destroyed about the last six months of my YouTube Watch History, taking the whole thing back to a place it was at last summer. On first discovering this disaster I was mortified, but then I realised it was quite interesting to see what I was watching and listening to six months ago. Accordingly, I watched and listened to some of it again. Being transported back to the reality I was living in back then was like thumbing through an old photograph album, and I came across this little curio:

Somebody had put a comment on the official video to Faun’s Dies Kalte Nacht. It said:

‘so… this is what pure, unadulterated sex sounds like… in song form.’

It’s an opinion of sorts, I suppose, and therefore to be respected. Nevertheless, I’m curious to know what adulterated sex is.

*  *  *

The post I was going to make about how an American actress in a TV programme pronounced ‘Derbyshire’ didn’t get made. I came to my senses just in time and saw how boring it would be.

*  *  *

Those who read yesterday’s final post might be pleased to know that I made it through the night and am now sampling the Johnnie Walker. It isn’t half bad, which is more than can be said of me.

On Blogging and Posh Gs.

I just saw an advert for a correspondence course which included a section on How to Write a Blog. Can you believe that? I had trouble believing it, but that’s definitely what it said. I’ll bet my version is shorter than theirs:

1. Say what you want to say.

2. Don’t worry too much whether anybody reads it, or the voices you hear coming back from the depths of cyberspace asking ‘What on earth is this fruitcake talking about?’

3. Enjoy the experience of learning something about yourself which you didn’t know yesterday. It can be a little chastening, but it’s probably good for the soul.

That’s about it really, apart from the fact that it’s worth getting a Feedjit. It helps you learn the flags of the world, so when somebody asks ‘Where the hell is that flag from?’ you can answer smugly ‘Singapore.’ (But see below.) It also provides fascinating little snippets of information such as the fact that Hanoi is in Ha Noi.

*  *  *

Non-English persons might be interested to know that posh English persons pronounce the g in ‘Singapore’ as a sort of glottal stop, whereas the low life who come from where I do pronounce it as a g. That, according to the posh folks, makes us inferior. But then we knew that anyway, and pronouncing both g’s in ‘singing’ confirms it absolutely. The received view on ‘blogging’ is that you pronounce the first two g’s as one, and the last as in ‘Singapore.’ It isn’t as complicated as it sounds, once you realise that it’s the preceding n which separates the classes.

Before I Go...

Tomorrow I get to open my bottle of Johnnie Walker Explorer's Club Collection scotch.

You know, most nights I don't mind the idea of dying in my sleep. In fact, I mostly welcome it, since one should be so lucky. But tonight is different. Before the great conveyor belt consigns me to a diet of milk and manna, it would be nice to sample something the Pearly Gates Customs Officers don't let through. What's the point of being here otherwise?

Landscape Photography: an Honest View.

When I was fifteen I was told that I should decide what I wanted to study at university, since that would determine what subjects I took between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.

I thought long and hard about what I was really interested in, and decided that the only thing which had compelled my attention during my life to date was landscape. I’d always loved landscapes, and so the question was: how do you turn a love of landscape into a career? I could think of only one subject that fitted the bill. I said I would take geology.

It would have been a mistake, even if I’d been allowed to continue my education beyond sixteen (which I wasn’t.) I later realised that geology is the scientific study of landscape; my interest was aesthetic. And that was why I eventually became a landscape photographer and made an enjoyable living at it for six years. But then I realised something else.

Aesthetic appreciation of landscape comes from much more than just the simple physical form contained within your field of vision. It comes from the wind in your face, the smell of new-mown hay, the sound of running water and birdsong, the moving shadows of clouds on hills, and the clammy feeling of mist on your skin. But most of all it comes from the sense of being a tiny speck contained within a very big space. Landscape photography misses all that. What you get with a landscape photograph is a small, two-dimensional facsimile. You’re looking down on it, rather that it looking down on you. All the power is missing. The photograph is little better than worthless.

And so I watch YouTube clips with their slide shows – pictures of autumn leaves, and sunset skies, and waves breaking on rocks, and creamy water courtesy of slow shutter speeds.

‘Amazing pictures!’ say the commenters. Actually, they aren’t.

Discovering Nabokov.

I’ve spent the evenings over the last few winters catching up on some of the modern and not-so-modern literary classics that I missed while I was still dreaming about Rupert Bear and Tiger Lily. (What a splendid couple they made – no agendas, you see. No tensions. I was always suspicious of relationships with agendas, and it seemed to me that life carried enough tensions in the here and now without adding to its often ponderous weight by reading about somebody else’s fictional ones.)

But then I spent nine years writing my own fiction, and over those nine years I developed my own style and learned a lot about how to put words together in a way that makes them worth reading. It didn’t make me a good writer, but it gave me a much better understanding of those who were. It’s what makes me feel modestly qualified to be critical – both positively and negatively – of other people’s efforts, and to feel reasonably free to differentiate between the good, the populist but passable, and the never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width stuff like The Duh Vinci Code.

This evening I started reading Nabokov’s Lolita. So far I’ve only read about Lolita’s predecessor-by-twenty-four-years, Annabelle, but it has me well engaged. The narrative is complex yet direct, the observations keen yet perfunctory in expression, the style lyrical yet terse. The words are simple, but the meanings have to be thought about. (And that ultimate preposition was deliberate.) It reminds me a little of somebody idly throwing best caviar to feral pigeons while musing on the odd sight of a smooth column topped by a Corinthian capital. Alternatively, imagine a basketball player sitting on the edge of the court eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper. He lobs the ball casually over his shoulder and it lands dead centre in the basket.

I’ll bet you couldn’t do that again. I’ll bet he could.

I think of literature as having three characteristics – form, style and content. Form is of no concern to me, being mostly the plaything of the academic. Style and content matter to me, and in this case they’re not only both superb, they also match one another perfectly. I’ll let you know if I change my mind.