White with Loathing

To read and find ugly a sentence such as “Personalised embodied narratives foreground the particularity of the everyday” requires no rare sensibility. No fine eye is needed, furthermore, to see that it bears the markings of a pseudo-philosophic pretence that might hide a banality at best or an absurdity at worst. One might appreciate that to write such stuff and find it worthy of expression, however, requires several years of academic instruction, in which span of time any trace of aesthetic sensibility or mental acuity is exorcised as if it were a foul and irksome ghost. Hence we should not be startled to discover that the author of this squalid phrase is suitably qualified to express it, being that she is a lecturer in the language of which it is a blight.

Anne Brewster, like many a lecturer in English, does not much concern herself with the English language or the literature of the “dead white males” whose works have helped to shape it; for like many of her ilk she is obsessed with race, and in particular with the “project of rewriting whiteness”. Quite what this might entail, I cannot tell, though it seems to involve a desire not to be white, if the following is anything to go by:

If it is patently impossible to divest ourselves of whiteness, I'd suggest, perhaps the best we (as white subjects) can hope for is persistently to interrupt our narrativisation of it.

Anne Brewster, “Writing Whiteness: the Personal Turn” Australian Humanities Review, Issue 35, June 2005.

Plainly, I have arrived on the scene late in the day; for the assumption has already been made that no decent person could possibly be white and of good conscience. Assuming then that “whiteness” is a sin, and that we are not yet able to divest ourselves of it, how are we “to interrupt our narrativisation of it”? Our author has a suggestion:

If, as [Richard] Dyer suggests, the project of refunctioning whiteness necessitates ‘making whiteness strange’ [White, (London: Routledge, 1997. p. 4)], this can be effected through making oneself strange. (Ibid.)

You may be disappointed to learn that “making oneself strange” does not involve standing in corners at parties muttering to oneself about the contents of one’s tool-shed, nor does it recommend keeping black puddings as pets. It involves rather reading “indigenous literature” in order that one may somehow become estranged from oneself towards a new identity less afflicted with “whiteness”:

I have argued elsewhere . . . that the experience of defamiliarisation produced by reading indigenous literature, for example, shifts us into a space of uncertainty because the ‘self’ to which we return is not a fixed site. Defamiliarisation reminds us of the inability of identity to remain identical to itself and of the fact that whiteness itself is a zone of indeterminacy. (Ibid.)

This wish to destroy one’s own kind reminds me somewhat of the tragic Otto Weininger, the philosopher and Viennese Jew, of whom even Hitler was reputedly an admirer; and with statements such as the following, it is not difficult to see why:

To defeat Judaism, the Jew must first understand himself and war against himself. So far, the Jew has reached no further than to make and enjoy jokes against his own peculiarities.

(Otto Weininger, Sex and Character. (London: William Heinemann, 1906.) p. 207.)

Herr Weininger committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. I do not know whether Ms Brewster views suicide as an option, in order that she might finally divest herself of whiteness. I get the feeling, however, that persons such as she would like to be around to shepherd the rest us off first. The last man out shuts the door, as it were.

Fewtril #48

The meaning of the word “potato” has hitherto remained largely unperverted, mostly because there has been little advantage in claiming “potato” to be on one’s side. If however all the schemes of politicos and partisans had depended upon the claim thereto, and all the ingenuity of philosophers had been brought to bear thereupon, so far as such actions have been taken against “truth” and “justice”, we should find a great many and diverse vegetables signified; and with some foreboding we might see the view arise that there is no such thing as a potato.

Fewtril #47

It is a curiosity of almost fathomless wonder that a pseudo-philosopher who professes the ultimate senselessness of words should be able to persuade his followers that this is the last word in sense.

Fewtril #46

An oft-used and potent defence for a downright stupid idea is the evoking of the name of the celebrated thinker who first advocated it.

Fewtril #45

Whenever the will of the people is expressed in a way that is displeasing to our political elite, it is described as a threat to democracy, even though by its very nature it is an expression thereof. A threat to individual liberties, it may be, but then what else can one expect when one has promised the beast the run of the place?

Fewtril #44

A humanist is a creature akin to a human, of whom it makes an object of superstitious worship, but for whom it has little sympathy.

Fewtril #43

If you wish to fathom the ills of modern society, a good place to start is sociology; and once you have learnt from this mistake, you can begin to look at the matter seriously; and once you have looked at the matter seriously, you can then begin to take account of what is due to sociology.

Fewtril #42

Against what is usually said, it is not the Muslim but the Christian who must adapt to the reality of the Western order, in one way at least; namely in that if he wishes the liberal intelligentsia to pay respect and even obeisance to his religion, he should hold the threat of violence over those who do not; for time and again, our self-styled guardians of thought have shown themselves to be swayed less by argument and righteousness than by violence and power; for they are the quintessence of corrupt intellect and craven character.

Polly-Mathematical Misdemeanors

“Who do you believe?”, asks Polly Toynbee of The Guardian, echoing the question asked by a Mori Report to be published tomorrow. Hoping that we’ll believe her, she claims that,

[People] believe what they read more than what they see. . . . Only 3% of reported crime involves sex and violence, yet it accounts for 45% of crime in the press, so how can mere statistics win?

(Polly Toynbee, “It is New Labour, as much as the public, that lacks trust”, The Guardian, 22nd November 2005.)

In view of the first point, that people “believe what they read more than what they see”, one may indeed see some truth in this, though it must be added that it is no less true of the journalists and the literary types of North London; and moreover that such types are often more prone than others to the debilitating luxury of not believing what they do not see in their leafy suburbs or what they do not read in their hopeful political periodicals.

As for the second point, that violent crime is over-reported in the press when compared with other crimes, little could be more fatuous; for if the press were to give a statistically fair representation of crime in England and Wales, we should cease to hear about bombs on trains since we should be swamped by reports of teenagers stealing sweets.

Dealing with the matter of public trust in politicians and journalists, Ms Toynbee castigates both for their abuses, and singles out the staff of the Daily Mail as exemplary in its misuse of statistics, calling it “not stupid . . . just wicked”. But what of Ms Toynbee’s claim that, “Only 3% of reported crime involves sex and violence, yet it accounts for 45% of crime in the press”? She gives no source for her statistics (this itself is a misuse), and so we are left wondering if she made them up.

According to the Home Office Statistical Bulletin of July 2005, “Violent crime represented 22 per cent of all BSC [British Crime Survey] and 21 per cent of police recorded crimes in 2004/05” (Sian Nicholas, David Povey, Alison Walker, and Chris Kershaw “Crime in England and Wales, 2004/2005”. p. 15.), of which 5 per cent is accounted for by sexual offences (p. 77). The sexual offence statistics are subsumed as a subset of the violent crime statistics.

Precisely what Ms Toynbee means by her statistical category of “sex and violence” is unclear, however. If she means sexual offences alone (that is, sexual offences as a subset of violent offences), then these account for just over 1 per cent of police recorded crimes. (She cannot have analysed the statistics of sexual crimes from the British Crime Survey, for they are excluded therefrom.) If she has made an error, however, and means “sex or violence”, that is to say, all violent crimes including sexual offences in the category of violence, then the figures are as above (22% or 21%).

Whence then has Ms Toynbee derived her figures? Are they from the soon-to-be published Mori Report? She does not say. Has she made them up or merely muddled them? What is certain is that with Polly Toynbee as the sole arbiter, mere statistics cannot win. Nevertheless, the question remains whether this state of affairs is owing to stupidity or wickedness.

A Profound Sickness

Most mornings I like to peruse the pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which, like many a German newspaper, is refreshingly tedious, being that it is comparatively free of the entertainingly idiotic opinions that infect all British newspapers. This morning, however, I was startled from my near-slumber, not by some indelicate pronouncement or brainless theorem, but rather by the following sober report by Alexander Kissler:

Ein gesunder Mann sucht einen Arzt, der ihm das Rückenmark durchtrennt, . . . [um] ‘[seine] innere Identität als Mensch mit einer Querschnittlähmung zu realisieren und somit psychische Heilung zu erlangen.’

(A healthy man seeks a doctor who will cut through his spinal cord . . . [in order] ‘to realise [his] inner identity as a human with paraplegia and thus to achieve mental healing.’)

(Alexander Kissler, “Mein Haus, mein Auto, meine Schwerstbehinderung”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22nd November 2005.)

The age-old maternal threat of “I’ll give you something to complain about in a minute” presumably held no sway over this man.

Sophistical Machinations: No.8 (Earnest Triviality)

With this trick the attempt is to have something accepted as important, which, without special pleading, pomposity, and earnest mugging, would be thought trivial.

Usually one descends upon a matter thitherto neglected in proportion to its triviality and proclaims its importance in inverse proportion thereto; so much so that often in the perennial search for originality by those insufficiently intelligent to make something both original and worthwhile, “the less it signifies, the more it qualifies” [1].

Being that the pitch of one’s proclamations of importance should increase in proportion to the smallness of the matter, the peak performance should be an hysterical screech of qualifying gibberish and a high whine of protestation; for undoubtedly one’s exultation of triviality will bring its detractors, in which case, sneering critics may be painted as part of a conservative-reactionary clique who would have important work marginalised in order to preserve the status quo.

It would do us all well to remember that nothing is so trivial that it cannot be taken seriously by an academic under pressure to publish.

[1] The phrase is not mine, and I cannot remember where I read it. I beg the pardon of its author.

Fewtril #41

If you wish to gain a true account of how moral principles might preserve integrity in politics, then there is no better person to ask than a politician. He won’t tell you the truth of course, but at least you’ll hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Ein Anschnauzer

“In diesen Tagen erinnert Europa manchmal an eine alternde Tante, die ihre zittrigen Hände um ihre letzten Juwelen legt, während ein Räuber gerade bei den Nachbarn einbricht. Europa – dein Familienname ist Feigheit.”

(“In these days, Europe is sometimes evocative of an aging aunt, who lays her palsied hands around her last jewels, while a burglar is breaking into her neighbour’s house. Europe – your surname is gutlessness.”)

Mathias Döpfner, “Europa – dein Name ist Feigheit”, Die Welt, 20th November 2004. (H/T: The Last Ditch.)

Bad News

Any television-viewer who can comfortably out-think an aubergine, without having to rely on pen and paper, must wonder at the state of the ITN Evening News. One must wonder at how a news-broadcaster, ostensibly finding its audience amongst a species bearing the honorific title sapiens, could pitch so low that even dogs might howl in derision.

Though I have become inured to its absurd sensationalism and idiotic simplifications, I am still exercised by its egregious abuse of the English language. Last night, for instance, it reported that Anthony Walker had been “bludgeoned to death with an axe”, which monstrosity might lead some to fear whether it is also possible to be axed to death with a bludgeon.

Fewtril #40

When one is stuck for a solution or an intelligent thought thereupon, and one would like to pretend otherwise; or when one is presented with a sensible solution from which one is ideologically averse, and one would like to have it obscured; then the phrase “We need more dialogue and debate” comes in very useful.

Poppycock-Poetry

The complexity of the modern world presents us with questions and doubts that would hardly have occurred in the minds of our forebears. For instance, when we come across an eccentrically punctuated and ungrammatical rant, arbitrarily broken into a mess of lines singularly lacking in sense or aesthetic qualities, we have to decide whether it is the by-product of a disturbed and disordered mind largely unacquainted with the language in which it presumes to bother us, or it is a poem.

In many cases, our task is made easy because we have the author’s testimony that it is the latter, and being that we would do anything for an easy life, we tend to take the author’s word for it.

The acquiescence to this view, that an artefact is what the artificer tells us, is a simple proposed solution to a complex problem of definition, and it has advantages for the barbarian who wishes to make his way in this world: firstly, in that it is a simplification; secondly, in that it serves to display a thoroughly modern and sophisticated tolerance for things about which he couldn’t care less, for which boon he need expend no veritable generosity of mind; and thirdly, in that it applies to his own works.

If, then, we are to take to be a sufficient definition of poetry that it be a piece of writing, arbitrarily broken into awkward lines, singularly unconcerned with metre, grammar, beauty or sense, for which we have the author’s testimony that it is indeed poetry, then we have the potential to become truly a land of poets; for all we need do is persuade the vast numbers of semi-literate savages, for which this country does not want, to bestow the name of poetry upon any rubbishy scribbling of theirs. They could all produce trash of this calibre, for example:

Summer thoughts of icicles imprint

voices on the fibers of young skin.

License to use syllables is painted

topaz maybe maybe yarn perhaps gold.

She rinsed her mail in salt water

protectively left leaves to dry.

Night defined by memory elapses

into solo heat that self erases.

He moved where nobody would recognize

his penmanship and started signing checks.

Weeds in the new yard grew fresh and tall.

He, loving extension of his beard.

(Sheila E. Murphy, “Loving Extension Of” Lynx, XI:2, June, 1996.)

It would be wrong of me to describe this as having no intrinsic qualities. After all, it made me laugh, and I must give due credit for the provocation to the author’s work, as well as to my own merry soul. But we have only the context and the author’s word with which to decide that it ought to be described as a poem, rather than as an embarrassing case of logorrhoea.

It often appears that the only barrier to becoming a modern poet is an aesthetic sense of decency and rhythm; and even our very own Nobel laureate Harold Pinter has overcome this barrier to produce work that “proceeds to its own law and discipline” (Quoted by Martin Esslin, Pinter: The Playwright (London: Methuen, 1970) at HaroldPinter.org):

And after noon the well-dressed creatures come

To sniff among the dead

And have their lunch

And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck

The swollen avocados from the dust

And stir the minestrone with stray bones

And after lunch

They loll and lounge about

Decanting claret in convenient skulls

(Harold Pinter, “After Lunch”, online at HaroldPinter.org.)

Should not such pap fill the heart of every talentless troglodyte with the stench of hope? For if this is poetry – and by our modern definition it is – then every man, woman and misbegotten child has the righteous claim to be a poet. But then, I suspect that that is the point.