May22

Three Comedies, by Ben Jonson

by obooki on May 22nd, 2013
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I read Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair.

Ben Jonson’s comedies seem to me more or less a different genre to Shakespeare’s: they have very little in common. In fact, the split between them reminds me very much of the split between Old and New Comedy in Greek theatre. The New Comedy is very much a basic love story: two people, a boy and a girl, fall in love, there is some obstruction to their love, which is overcome – your typical romantic comedy; whereas the Old Comedy tends to be based on a specific comic (often absurd) idea.

But Shakespeare is perhaps closer to New Comedy than Jonson is to Old. In fact, Jonson’s plays are more like another genre familiar to us: the con (The Sting, The Spanish Prisoner etc.), people being duped by tricksters, for back then, just like today, people seemed to have an obsession with the mechanics of criminality. So Volpone is a man who pretends he is wealthy and on the point of dying, to con people into giving him money in hope of recouping a vast legacy; The Alchemist promises all nature of things to people derived from his black arts; whilst in Bartholomew Fair, perhaps everything is a con – this is the world of raw capitalism, where there are no trading standards – and if people aren’t trying to con you, then they’re trying to pick your pocket.

The criminal, in all these cases, is someone held up to be admired; we are on his side; the dupes deserve to be duped. This being a comedy, there cannot be a tragic ending; but this also being moral, the criminal cannot succeed either: – so the criminal finally fails … but he gets away.

I preferred The Alchemist to the other two: it has an amusing variety of cons, and satisfyingly builds complication onto complication.

Bartholomew Fair is, frankly, a bit of an oddity. Later than the other two, it bears no resemblance to any other Jacobean play I’ve read. It’s less of a play, in fact, more of a pageant. There’s barely a plot: a group of characters go down to Bartholomew Fair to eat a pig, and while there they have a look around at all the other curious sights the fair has to offer. (Bartholomew Fair was a sort of market, finally banned in the c19th for its notoriety and offence against public morals). It’s hard-going, to be honest; but at times quite amusing: the “vapours” competition, where each man is bound to disagree violently to whatever the previous man has said, is funny; and rather like Bottom et al’s rendition of Pyramis and Thisbe, there’s an absurd puppet theatre version of the tale of Hero and Leander. One wonders if it could ever be effectively staged again. The introduction mentions a staging in the 1960s, which in its opinion failed because it was acted as farce (that it was “acted”), when – and this is quite true I think – it needs to be acted as realism. Because this is realism as it would be known in c19th: there are no noble characters in it at all; it is the poor, using their wits as means of survival; it has an obsession with detail, with the low-life, the picaresque.

Anyway, an interesting world, the world of the Jonson comedy. I might look out some more.

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May13

The Chastening, by Paul Blustein

by obooki on May 13th, 2013
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Paul Blustein’s The Chastening has a lot to say about moral hazard, for instance this quote within a quote:

If unsuccessful hedge funds are not allowed to fail, if brokerage firms believe they will somehow be protected from the effects of far too liberal margin requirements, if banks believe help will be forthcoming should loans go sour during unsettled market conditions, how will we discipline future decisions of investors and lenders? Will such intervention make our financial system even more fragile later … Anything that weakens the effect of market discipline and that lessens the punishment the market affords speculators when they have made incorrect decisions is likely in the long run to lead to more instability.

The whole last part of the book is full of this kind of contemplation, and warnings for the future and the need to change the financial system. Unfortunately the book was written in 2001 (the quote above comes from 1998) about the series of financial collapses which happened first in south-east Asia, then in Russia, finally leading to the collapse of the firm Long-Term Capital Management and the staving-off of complete financial meltdown by various bail-outs (or so it is said, but who knows in the crazy world of global finance?), and nothing much was in fact changed.

Today we have a country like Greece, whose bailout dwarfs those of the countries mentioned in this book. In recent times, Greece’s 10-year bond yield has reached as high as 48.6%, meaning this would be your annual return if you invested in it. This high yield is a reflection of the theoretical risk of Greece defaulting (and therefore you losing all the money you’ve given them), but – as in the cases mentioned in this book – if the ECB, IMF etc. are going to bail out Greece no matter what, then this risk is indeed only theoretical for investors, and so they can merrily gamble on this expectation – they can get their high return without the high risk. If they couldn’t rely on this back-stop, they probably wouldn’t take the gamble at all, and Greece would be forced to default – and thus everyone would lose all their money (Blustein’s book demonstrates quite comprehensively how companies are incapable of realising a solution other than default is in everyone’s best interests and reaching an agreement around this).

Hence why, in this book, one can’t help but be amused when, to everyone’s chagrin, the IMF decides it’s fed up bankrolling a corrupt Russia just for the sake of the profits of Western investors and lets it default on its debt. And Russia was paying interest of over 100% on its bonds, so you think, no, that’s fair enough: you knew the risks; and now you’re paying for being wrong. But for some reason the investors moaned about it, and said it wasn’t fair, and if people weren’t going to play fair, they’d take their ball home with them and not play any more.

Which leaves us wondering about Greece and its eternal back-stop: a country which has no control over its monetary policy (inflation, interest rates, the value of its currency), whose debt is ever increasing as its GDP decreases, which has no hope and which one day inevitably will have to default on its debts (it has already defaulted on some of them, though perhaps not technically – but it doesn’t seem to have helped much), and leave the Euro too.

Anyway, the next book I have by Blustein is called And the Money Kept Rolling In (And Out), and it’s about Argentina in 2002. As someone who enjoys investors getting their comeuppance, it should be a right laugh (some of them are still fighting in the US courts over this to this very day); but also an instructive case for how defaulting on your debt can lead to you getting your economy back on track (see Argentinian GDP figures).

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May06

Kang and Kodos

by obooki on May 6th, 2013
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Many years ago (it was 23rd April 2007), someone masquerading as me wrote an article for The Guardian which, aside from the first paragraph – which has always seemed to me a trifle awkward (I have long since banned the use of italics, as the desperation of an incompetent stylist) – actually is not too embarrassingly written (I wonder where I got the phrase “Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousness” from?).

The point of the article was that I’ve always found newspaper reviews for books to be written from the point of view of someone with no literary discrimination whatever, and therefore useless and misleading for a boy in the process of discovering literature; that indeed my own discovery of literature has been almost entirely based on wholly ignoring newspaper reviews. One thing that perhaps I didn’t get across sufficiently was how the internet has aided this discovery: in particular how it’s led me to so many authors, famous in their countries (and often South American), whom I’d never heard of before and who, I’m prepared to hazard, have never been mentioned in newspapers in this country in my lifetime.

Amazon – I must confess – has been a great help in this. But not perhaps in the dichotomic way that newspapers like to believe.

A few of us have been reading articles recently which comment on the threat posed to newspaper reviews by the internet (which is, of course, merely a small grain of sand in the greater debate on the threat posed to newspapers by the internet), and we may have noticed this dichotomy (it has, after all, been repeated in every single newspaper article on the subject in the last five years): that there are professionally written newspapers reviews, and then there’s people’s opinions of books stuck up on Amazon: – and perhaps we’d felt a little bit aggrieved; because for all our own efforts – for all this time each of us has wasted here – there’s seemingly nothing else.

This was where I intended to put my reference to Kang and Kodos, and where I find myself piping up – as I often do – as the man who declares, “I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate” – and who for his folly is roundly laughed at by all.

As someone who’s never taken “professional” book reviews seriously, why would I turn instead to the “amateur” reviews on Amazon? As so often in the contemporary world of literary talk, I see no difference where people are trying to stake a claim for there being every difference. It is all useless to my purpose. No, where Amazon has come in useful in my discovery of literature, is that I can actually obtain these books by writers no one’s heard of – which were published probably back in the 60s and 70s, perhaps by the presses of American Universities – for surprisingly little cost.

But I have to note too that Amazon (and its recent subsidiary, Goodreads) do not constitute the whole of the literary internet. There is a world outside either newspapers reviews and the webpages of Amazon, a world full of the most startling variety, a flourishing of literary opinion on a scale never before seen. It is true, like newspapers and Amazon, most of it is not to our taste: but where it differs is, that some of it is – and that some is all we need. We may been startled to come across that curious thing we’d never met before (not outside the real world of literature, at least): people whose opinions and tastes and ideas we find ourselves inclined to agree with, or at least to be not wholly and immediately contemptible. And if enough of these people congregate, a little world is formed, in which people can feel a fair degree of confidence in one another and guide one another towards the worthwhile – a world which, in its collective nature, can filter out the noise from the literary world, which is perhaps a hard if not impossible task for the individual – a world which, dare I say it, needs neither newspaper reviews nor Amazon. In my utopian vision, literary joy will in the future be passed along such tangled webs, like the fibre optics of the internet itself, pursuing in its course an endless winding trail of similar tastes and disbursing only happiness and gratification (in discrete packets) along with the occasional moment when we decide that other people’s tastes are, after all, sometimes completely unaccountable, all at the same time shielding us from the trauma of being misled about the worth of what is mediocre and absent of talent. Either that, or some corporate-dominated machine-written dystopia. Or some third thing which is neither of the other two.

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May05

The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay

by obooki on May 5th, 2013
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In a metatheatrical interlude towards the end of the play, the author discusses with one of the players his original ending, which he is being forced by audience expectation to change:

Had the play remained, as I at first intended, it would have carried a most excellent moral. ‘Twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich; and that they are punished for them.

This is the finest joke in the play – though perhaps it is not as amusing out of context – and is a useful quote to demonstrate that here we’re in the mirrored world of parody. The trouble for us moderns, however, is that the original being parodied here is the c18th vogue for Italian opera – and this may explain why an entertainment which was perhaps the single most popular artistic work of c18th England, should seem to my more modern mind curiously lacking in so many things: it has a derivative plot, uninteresting scenes and dialogue, is not satisfyingly constructed etc.

But for all its artistic failure, in my view, there is something overwhelmingly fascinating about it: and that is the world it portrays. Because Gay’s opera is an opera based on London’s criminal underworld, the world of pick-pockets and fences, loyalty and impeachment, jails and hanging – and it’s filled with many marvellous historical details. In fact, this is one instance I found – reading the Penguin Classics edition – that the notes at the bottom of the page were far more interesting than the play itself. FOr instance, here is a scene between a common thief and the jailer (you can perhaps guess which is which from their names):

Lockit: Why, boy, thou lookest as if thou wert half starved; like a shotten herring.
Filch: One had need have the constitution of a horse to go through the business. Since the favourite child-getter was disabled by a mishap, I have picked up a little money by helping the ladies to a pregnancy against their being called down to sentence. But if a man cannot get an honest livelihood any easier way, I am sure ’tis what I can’t undertake for another Session.
Lockit: Truly, if that great man should tip off, ‘twould be an irreparable loss. The vigour and the prowess of a knight-errant never saved half the ladies in distress that he hath done.

All of which is explained by the note: “as women convicted of capital crimes could not be hung if they could prove that they were pregnant, it was clearly in the interests of females awaiting trial in Newgate to become so”.

The entire play is filled with such details, jargon and forgotten law; and forms a fascinating vision of how a society – how a whole world – worked. A world which, of course, attracted other writers: – the central character of Peachum is based on a real historical figure you may have heard of from another literary source, a London underworld kingpin called Jonathan Wild. And I’m sure it’s not happenstance that Peachum – the fence, the organiser of crime – and his relation to his pickpockets is remarkably similar to Fagin and his later artful dodgers; and even, though there are more dissimilarities, that there is something of Bill Sykes in Macheath.

Worth it then, as a historical curiosity.

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Apr29

CLS: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

by obooki on April 29th, 2013
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My contemporary literary survey, if you remember, was split into books I thought I wouldnt like, and books I thought I would. So, having not liked any of the books I didnt think Id like so far (Obookis belief that you dont need to read a book to know whether its good or bad remains intact – sort of, as youll see) I thought Id try the ones I thought I would like.

So The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I started it about 5pm on Saturday and finished it before I went to sleep (which, OK – or should I say Okay – was quite late) – and its 300 pages long! – So, it was that good then? You couldnt put it down. – Well, no: I think I was partly driven on to finish it because I was thinking, if I did put it down, Id never pick it up again. But theres another reason why I read it so quickly: and thats because its really, really easy to read. And its really, really easy to read because reading it requires no thought whatsoever. Its an utterly undemanding book, written in an utterly undemanding style.

Now many critics have stated that The Road is beautifully written. Heres some quotes from the back: “a work of such terrible beauty”, “the prose is of such beauty”, “a brutal, beautiful culmination”, “the sheer, terrible beauty of the writing”, “terrifying and beautiful”, “beautiful and hypnotic and terrifyingly real”, “dazzling and beautiful” – and its not just the blurb pushing this idea; you can look through the internet at the reviews. – But I didnt really find this beauty in it at all. It is for the most part dully written, and I even think this is quite deliberate: it is written simply and primitively, since we have entered a simple and primitive world.

In fact, McCarthy uses three devices in the book, endlessly alternating between them:

a) Basic descriptions of the characters actions, such as youd find in any formulaic novel to which obviously we shouldnt be comparing such a wondrous writer as McCarthy (or for that matter his New York facsimile Don DeLillo), as in:

They rummaged through the outbuildings for anything of use. He found a wheelbarrow and pulled it out and tipped it over and turned the wheel slowly, examining the tire. The rubber was glazed and cracked but he thought it might hold air and he looked through old boxes and jumbles of tolls and found a bicycle pump and screwed the end of the hose to the valvestem of the tire and began to pump. The air leaked out around the rim but he turned the wheel and had the boy hold down the tire until it caught and he got it pumped up. He unscrewed the hose and turned the wheelbarrow over and trundled it across the floor and back. Then he pushed it outside for the rain to clean.

b) Short poetic-prose passages which are incapable of forming any coherent images in your mind, often using words youve never heard of or in ways youre not familiar with,

Slow water in the flat country. The sloughs by the roadside motionless and gray. The coastal plain rivers in leaden serpentine across the wasted farmland.

c) And thirdly, inane conversations between father and son,

I dont know.
What do you want to do?
You have to say.
We both have to say.
Do you think they’re okay?
I think if we cook them really good they’ll be all right.
Okay. Why do you think nobody has eaten them?
I think nobody found them. You cant see the house from the road.
We saw it.
You saw it.

Styles a) and c), I felt, were of such a pace that every time you got to style b) you were incapable of slowing down to appreciate the fine prose-poetry, or even to think about what it was describing, or whether it was any good. But I couldnt find any real beauty in the language (I think I have been spoiled recently, reading so much Shakespeare), perhaps because it is all so joyless – the language, I mean, not the subject-matter or the writers outlook; – its all so dead and uninspiring, as it just tediously and repetitiously trudges its way along towards the ocean.

I came away from it all feeling a bit grubby and sordid. Yes, the relationship between father and son is quite good: but you know from about page 10, with even a slight appreciation of the nature of literary fiction, that nothing much is going to happen – theyre just going to spend the novel walking down a road, slightly ill at ease with the nature of humanity. (McCarthy has clearly never read The Man-Eating Myth by W, Arens. [Perhaps I should take that back though: Arens would allow of cannibalism in a situation of starvation and no hope whatsoever for the continuance of the human race]).

I can hear SF-loons claiming this as an example of a literary author entering SF-territory and demonstrating his lack of understanding of its tradition by putting forward the nothing new (I was reminded, as they journeyed along endlessly through a collapsed society, a bit of Ringworld – though without the aliens and the floating cities. – I am Legend, too? I never got to the end of it. – The feel was quite a lot like that Gene Wolfe novel I read a few years ago. – And let’s face it, I know little about SF). And, considering say Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies (or perhaps even more, Pincher Martin), I can hear literary-loons claiming much the same.

Still, I finished it – which puts it above everything else I’ve read in this series (though not, as it happens, the other one of the CLS books I am currently reading).

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