The TLS blog

The rereading habits of the TLS staff

By Rozalind Dineen

In this week’s TLS, Bharat Tandon reviews two books on the subject of rereading. That’s right, rereading; as if the pile of books that we would like a chance to read even once isn’t large enough. 

But rereading, as Tandon reminds us, can be one of life’s particularly rich experiences: it is where the narratives of novels and the narratives of our own lives “can converge meaningfully”.  When we reread we remember where we were the first time, who we were and how we were. We realize how we reacted differently to a text when we were younger, or sicker, or holidaying or studying. “We may try to be semioticians . . . but autobiography is always breaking in.”

An office survey is one way to pass a Friday afternoon. So, do the TLS staff reread?

Santorum and the Cicero brothers

BY PETER STOTHARD

I can barely hear the the words Super Tuesday without wishing I had been in Ohio or Georgia this week.

For any political journalist (as once I was) it is the best of times.

Today I made a tiny contribution to the coverage in the Wall Street Journal with a piece on the Commentariolum Petitionis (translated in its most recent version as How to Win Elections) a practical, cynical and eerily modern guide to winning votes that is commonly (and probably correctly) attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero's younger brother Quintus.

I thought of Robert Kennedy's help to JFK and Jeb Bush's for GWB and Roger Clinton's and Billy Carter's hindrances. 

And I wondered what help the younger Santorum brother was giving.

I asked but no one seemed to know.

Is anything fraternal happening out there?

 

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 9

BY J. C.

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series, Part IX. Charity shops once had the reputation among book hounds as a place to sniff out a genial bargain. Then along came Oxfam Books, the charity’s dedicated bibliographical arm. A dealer in Salisbury accused Oxfam of being predatory, undermining secondhand shops by opening up nearby. We heard the same complaint made by dealers on our perambulatory circuit, although one, Sebastian Sandys of LXV Books of Bethnal Green, said he would welcome Oxfam, believing it would promote the area as a bookish quarter.

Our job is not to have opinions, but to find a neglected work by an established author, for about £5, to banish Christmas giftbook blues. We do not seek cut-price collectibles; all our purchases are intended to be read. 

The largest Oxfam Books we know is in Marylebone, the smallest in Balham, with Turnham Green in between. They have in common a certain soullessness. Don’t expect tea (Walden Books), Chopin improvisations (Archive Bookstore), unworldly erudition (The Flask) or even an argument. We find it hard to think of a used bookshop in London or Edinburgh that lacks character; equally, of an Oxfam Books that possesses any. That said, we have found enough there to keep the spectre of that second Sweetheart Stout at bay, as darkness falls. There is also the humble consolation of putting food in a hungry belly.

In Oxfam, Marylebone, we picked up The Transgressor (Le Malfaiteur) by Julian Green. Born in France to American parents, Green (1900–98) wrote some fifty books. At the time of The Transgressor (1958), several had been translated into English. Yet it is fair to say that he is unread here now. The jacket quotes the TLS: “A minor masterpiece”. The name of Balzac is invoked. “No one since Alain-Fournier . . .”. What happened? One answer is that English readers fell out of love with French literature round about 1970; Green ceased being translated at the same time. Another reply might hold that his novels are too full of the musk of antique shops and Catholic churches. Sexually ambiguous figures, neither out nor in, evince too much frustration, not enough perversity. The transgressors of The Transgressor have nothing in common with the horribly attractive monsters of Les Enfants terribles, for example.

Still, we are mildly better educated than we were before. It cost £4 to be so, and we got a handsome hardback in dust jacket as a prize for turning up. Curiously, the author’s first name, usually “Julien”, is repeatedly “Julian” here. 

 

Our Christmas cards this year

BY PETER STOTHARD

About ten years ago, when austerity was a rarer word in the lexicon, the TLS printed its own Christmas cards, based on a painting that hangs in the Editor’s office.

It was not an especially festive card. But then the TLS is not famous for festivity at this time of the year, holding our sole annual party in June and preferring often to have even our office goose or turkey in March.

The painting is called The Estuary. It is mostly grey-beige river and sky. A barely sketched man in a hat stands up in a small boat. There are other empty boats. Rains seems certain. Good cheer is discouraged.

The painter was Philip Wilson Steer. And in 1939 his watery work was was a gift to Bruce Richmond (Editor of the TLS 1902-37) from T.S Eliot, Virginia Woolf and other luminaries.

It is our office heirloom.

It also made a fine Christmas card — and I have been using it ever since.

Each December our office suprema, Maureen Allen, says that it looks down-at-heel to send the same card year after year. And each year some distinguished recipients, at her irresistible insistence, have enjoyed angels and holly instead. I hope they have appreciated her thought.

But In 2012 she need lecture me no longer. Sad to say, the tide has almost run out on the Estuary. The grey box file, marked ‘Peter’s Christmas Cards (unused)’ has merely three Stygian images left.

No more are going to be made. There will be no second impression. Austerity comes naturally to us here.

Inside my Christmas card box (unused) are five pictures of a snowman on the lawn of Trinity College, Oxford, six views of Texan oil rigs (see above), twenty thin Virgins from Katonah, NY, a few Thesea from the Benaki Museum and an Ashmolean Klimt.

Ah yes, and hidden in a large envelope a quantity of Thames bridges, riparian subjects from further up river than where Steer once stood.

If anyone who expects a card from the Editor of the TLS gets anything other than these. Maureen will have been especially persuasive on their behalf.

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 6

BY J. C.

 

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series, part VI. The “Back to Basics” tour. That rough crucifix we fashioned out of old Penguins bought from the Archive Bookstore must be working. The vampiric virus of Christmas “humour” books with titles of the Do Ants Have Arseholes variety appears to be shrinking in its coffin. There are fewer than ever this year.

Venice Biennale 1: a little light Russian video sex

Next week the world's biggest art party will be open to the public. For holidaying visitors to Venice it will be their first chance to see what  thousands of museum curators, critics and gallery owners are glorying in right now, modest metal tables from Scotland, hardly-moving movies from Holland, massive Japanese breasts, Korean views of condensation and glow-in-the-dark mushrooms (from the USA, I think), everything that makes up the Venice Biennale.

This is my first time here. Even for a veteran of political conventions, literary fairs and other press-fests, the mass of bombast and bullshit in search of beauty takes some serious personal adjustment. Over the next week I may come to make some sense of it.

For the moment, the three-day 'private-view' is almost over.  All the highest-rolling Biennalistas are moving on - to their business home in Basel where they hope to buy and sell to each other rather than to whoop it up at each other's expense. Next week, for the professionals, it will be back to the doom-laden trade of finding the big customers of 2009.  For this Biennale amateur there is merely the task in the next few days of trying to understand something of all this.

So far, I seem to be at loose among free-flowing Bellini-drinkers and feverishly fierce competitors for who gets the most desirable free canvas bag. FYI to next week's visitors: if you find the one that says 'it's so easy to fuck up but I'm too fucking old now to care' you have got the one that most people want.  I have already failed that test for myself, ending up with only a much lesser collection to carry my books through the rest of the summer,  totemic-energy-dragons, lobsters and designer-carrots.

 But there is a lot of other free stuff to be had, some of it exhibits themselves, like a million holiday postcards from different places around the world, all stamped VENEZIA - elephant packs from Venice, ice flows from Venice, Westminsters from Venice. One of the themes this year is that everywhere in the world is more or less the same place.

The private-viewers very much like the free stuff.  Throughout the official and unofficial sites that dot the city there are free iced coffees (from the Illy company that sees its product as essential to fine art), free art books each one of a weight that could kill a man, not to mention again the city's peach-and-prosecco cocktails upon which any art lover can become an instant connoisseur. Of course, if you want to drink a free Bellini on Roman Abramovic's yacht, you may be unlucky. That is an invite of even greater rarity than a 'too fucking old to care bag'. But anyone less fussy is fine.

I have just been to a splendid Russian event. In a brick warehouse in the Arsenale there were tall women in gladiator shoes and killer stilettoes taking canapes and peach drinks from black-suited waiters while watching a giant circular screen on which actors, with only a mildly more malevolent gaze, were doing much the same. It was wonderful, the 'world premiere' of a video installation with the title - unusually comforting for a classicist at the Biennale - of Trimalchio's Feast.

This was nothing too excessive, quite a gentle introduction to the big event. Neither in the audience nor on screen was there anything hard-core, nothing even like the sort of exoticism that excited Petronius, the original Roman author of the Feast in the age of Nero: I neither saw, nor was offered, any hot dinner dish from which live birds flew. There were only eery scenes of seaside decadence, understated sadism with golf clubs and a narrative of what might happen if a tsunami hit the the wrong rich holiday makers at the wrong time.

The audience seemed to like it alot, not just because of the piles of free badges declaring 'Unconditional Love', nor even because the alternative video show was of an interrogator repeatedly banging a young woman's head into a barrel of water. Trimalchio's Feast, with its Gatsby echoes, glossy sex and flying saucers, seems to me an excellent way to have started my Biennale.

The video makers are offering their own free bags here too. A New Zealander who thought (wrongly, I suspect) that this one was the true 'best bag', leant heavily over a table of drinks to see if he could get his prize, bringing upon himself only a hard stare from one of the women in black behind the bar.

'Could I buy one?', he then asked desperately, uttering words more alien here than almost any he could  have chosen.

'Sorry, I don't know', she replied not very sweetly.

'I'm just the artist'.

Exit stout visitor, without gift but still fit to fight another day. 

(More blogging from Venice will follow here later, perhaps something more serious, certainly with pictures when a little technical difficulty of the not very high-end-art kind has been overcome.)

A note from Mick Imlah

There have been many fine tributes to our poetry editor, Mick Imlah, who died last week.

I thought I might say something more here. But saying something about so perfectionist a poet and editor has made me freeze - as though I were trespassing on one of his areas of special interest, Tennyson, cricket or Walter Scott, and he were still looking over my shoulder with a hard pencil in his hand.

So this will be no new obsequy.

The only thing I have for a blog is a note already written, sometime in the early 1980s, and  inserted in one of my three copies (yes, Imlah in unexplained triplicate) of his first book, The Zoologist's Bath and other adventures.

I was a features editor on The Times in those days and the note consists of a set of points which I must have thought I'd ask him about, perhaps for an interview, perhaps because I wanted him to judge some competition, maybe  for some other reason long ago lost.

It reads:

1) no poems which look like rubble

2) eat cheese to stir up dreams

3) the glamour of not travelling

4) in alleys and toilets in places like Norwood

I never did get to ask him about rubble, cheese and the facilities of south east London. I'm not sure we ever did meet until I joined him at the TLS.

Twenty five years ago he did leave a message at the side of my desk, in large clear letters written on the side of a corrugated cardboard box.

All it said was that he'd passed by and I'd missed him.

He had, I did and I do.

A pencil box of bees

In the current edition of The American Scholar my friend, Steven Isenberg, recalls lunches in his enthusiastic youth with Auden, Larkin, Forster and Empson.

It is a rose-tinted piece of recollected pleasure - one which raises more issues than first appear, not least about whether how young admirers could or would have such meetings today.

These were not interviews, promotional opportunities, book-tour signings - just lunches.

Some readers may already know which of the four great men told Isenberg a joke about keeping bees in a pencil box.

Those that don't - and those that do too - can read the memoir for themselves right here.

Sir David Cannadine: master of the Honours list

Congratulations to the great historian and TLS contributor, David Cannadine, on his knighthood in the New Year Honours list.

But it must be a long time since that title - or any title - went to a recipient with so much knowledge of the system's murkier past.

Sir David is a man of many 'special subjects'.

Lloyd George's  abuse of the honours system to finance his politics is famously one of them.

How British aristocrats first gained their coronets is another one.

Sir David has written extensively on the subtle symbolism of the monarchy - and how politicians and palace use one another in good times and bad.

And one of his main contributions to recent public debate has been his insistence that Prime Ministers - whether planning ID cards or Iraqi invasions - should pay a more knowing heed to the lessons of the past.

When the subject is 'cash for honours' or catstrophes in the Middle East, Sir David has a pointed way with precedent.

Gordon Brown has long been an admirer.

It is always good to see due recognition for scholarship - especially a TLS writer's scholarship.

But in this submission for a knighthood, our Prime Minister may be showing a little bit more than mere admiration for a fine scholar and man.

Harold Pinter: exit a master

On one of the stranger nights of this very strange year, Harold Pinter waved a sort of farewell to the London theatre.

He was at the Duke of York's on October 7 - for the triumphant London revival of No Man's Land.

When the show was over, the audience stood first for the cast - and then, looking up at the box beside the dress circle, stayed on their feet for as long as they saw the frail playwright peering down.

Many that night sensed that they would not again see the greatest master of the stage to have shared their lives.

Harold Pinter had a very public cancer.

He wrote about it, talked about it, made it a metaphor - and yesterday, three months later, he died of it.