Good, Old Fashioned, Demilitarised Fun
Good, Old Fashioned, Demilitarised Fun
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The paperback edition is out
(With thanks of course to Nael, age 6, whose original is a bona fide marvel.)
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The paperback of The Dark Between the Trees is indeed out - and it's a year this week since the hardback was originally released. A strange year: I wrote the book in 2018, or most of it, and a lot has happened since then. And the reception to it has been quite different, in a lot of ways, from what I expected. "Is it because they're arguing with a version of you from five years ago?" Not really - although it's interesting to see what does and doesn't light people up with opinions.
Actually I expected to feel further removed from the version of myself who wrote TDBTT than I in fact feel. Perhaps part of me is still sitting in a cafe in September 2018, staring out of a window with a pile of index cards on my lap, wondering how on earth I'm going to make any of this work. The readers, they're all in 2023 - or 2022, if you were quick off the mark with your reading, which I think everyone here still was. It's me that's stuck five years in the past, suspended mid-draft, wondering if I'll manage to stick the landing. Perhaps I'll catch up with the rest of you eventually.
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If this is your first time joining us, hello: you'd have to interpret the word "news" extremely loosely to describe this as a newsletter; I'm considering going with "round-robin" in the manner of things you might periodically print out on your inkjet printer from 2002 and distribute to the mums and dads of the swimming club, the Brownies, the Friends of the Allotments. Which is to say, there will be wild digressions and no strict schedule, probably occasionally some clip-art, and if someone on the committee has a grudge then you will be the first to know about it. If you want to share it with anyone else, you're more than welcome - as long as we all agree that everyone knows what they're letting themselves in for.
This one is unusually publishing-news-heavy, but now we've got that out of the way, let's return to our regularly scheduled business of character-assassinating long-dead members of the Western literary canon.
So Rudyard Kipling, then.
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Okay, so. We got here because last time, I was accusing Vladimir Nabokov of wanton insincerity. (Thank you, by the way, to both of the people who got in touch to intercede on Vladimir's behalf - it is partly because of you that I have come back around to this from another angle.) The gist of last time was that Nabokov - or at the very least, my straw-Nabokov - thought people who believe simplicity and sincerity are the highest purposes of art are unsophisticated rubes. Meanwhile, I think Nabokov was wrong and those people are right. This is because my favourite approach to art comes fundamentally from a place of observation, while Nabokov was presumably the kind of edgelord who likes to point out the Wilhelm Scream while you're watching a film with them. I never promised to be fair to him.
Which is just as well, really, because WHOOMPF! George Orwell has entered the chat, and watch out, because he's ragging on Rudyard Kipling. This came to my attention just after I sent the last email out, and it felt a bit like carrying on the conversation - so that's what I'm going to do as well.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/rudyard-kipling. (Get your popcorn out if you're going over there, by the way - if anyone knows how to have a good time slinging around the righteous fury, it's George Orwell.)
There are two things going on in here that I'm really thinking about in the light of sincerity-or-observation in art.
The first is that, while he correctly notes that Rudyard Kipling was
a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.
(I told you he went to town.) Orwell is not really a fan of Kipling's style, nor indeed his subject matter, which is fair enough quite frankly. I've sat through The Man Who Would Be King to see what all the fuss was about, and the older I get, the worse a taste it leaves in my mouth. But the point that Orwell makes is that Kipling falls into a very specific place: less abjectly dehumanising than a lot of the British in India that he wrote about, such that he did in fact want to observe and write about what he did - but at the same time, if his own politics had been any less odious, he simply would not have got access to the things he wrote about in the first place. And if he hadn't had access, he couldn't have written about them so accurately.
Can you write about something without having in some way experienced it - the emotions of it, even if not the locations? I've had this discussion before, and I genuinely don't think you can. Some people disagree with me. But I do think there's a core of observation that, while not sufficient to make art, is at least necessary for it.
Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes.
Yup yup yup, couldn't do it today, cancel the Just So Stories, what if Rudyard Kipling had Twitter. I don't know or for present purposes much care about whether being the only basically first-hand literary picture of a specific set of colonial atrocities justifies its author's enduring popularity/existence in widely accessible print (nor indeed whether it justifies the juxtaposition of the phrases "live-action remake", "King Louie", and "Christopher Walken"). What I do care about is that if Kipling's work has value - according to Orwell, and on this I agree with him - then it doesn't come from his turn of phrase, nor his prosody, nor his structure. It's not just that observation is a necessary component for art, it's that the value of the work can sometimes specifically come from the quality, or rarity, of its observation. In other words, observation is important, and art can have value on that basis.
How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that one could otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his picture of army life seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any middle-class English person is likely to know enough to fill up the gaps. ... But from the body of Kipling’s early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army – the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola’s gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like.
Kipling being sincere was despicable in a whole host of ways. But how much better would it have been if he had angled more deliberately for simplicity, if he had tried to describe things as they were, shorn of patriotic music-hall et cetera? The fact is, that's a meaningless question - if Kipling had angled for simplicity, he wouldn't have had the access to material that he needed for his work to exist in the first place. This is the best we're going to get.
Is it valuable, exactly as it is? This is what I think some of the people who think writers can write anything they like, censorship be damned might have been thinking about, before they forgot that we live in a glorious tomorrow where observation continues to be valuable and it's okay to ask for help - and you know what, let's not even get into any of that. Yes, I think constructive answers to the question "What was it like for those real people?" are always valuable, at least a little bit, regardless of which real people you're talking about. Value from observation. Value from sincerity, even if you wouldn't want to be friends with them.
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Now, obviously, our Mister Nabokov probably did not give two figs about this. I've just gone down a bit of a rabbit-hole trying to find out if he had any opinions on Kipling himself, but I can't find anything - he was almost certainly far too sophisticated, far too busy explaining Ulysses or iambic tetrameter to someone unsuspecting at a party, etc. Once again, fair enough. Life is short; Wikipedia says he was more of a Robert Louis Stevenson kind of guy, and I respect that.
Which brings me on to point two, where George Orwell comes for me personally. Point two: a lot of poetry is bad, and some of it is very popular while also being bad. How does that work? Well! Well!
A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form – for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things – some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the world is young, lad’ is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’ sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before.
Yes, thank you George. The moral of this story is that observation isn't enough, sincerity isn't enough, simplicity isn't enough. You can't state the obvious. You have to go weird - as weird as you possibly can.
I figure Orwell and Nabokov would both agree with me here, and frankly does anyone care about Kipling's opinion at this point?
Thus, I conclude, the indispensable key component of good art is Being Weirdly Specific. It is capturing obscure feelings. Argue this point in my emails if you dare, suckers - but for now I'm keeping it.
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Okay, let's change the subject. DO YOU LIKE A WILD CONSPIRACY THEORY? Of course you do, we're friends aren't we?
Do you in particular like a COMPLETELY OFF THE WALL conspiracy that you've never heard before, and then you read one (1) article about it, and at the end you're like huh, okay, I see how you came to that after all?
Here is a Vice article from 2011 about how Arnold Schwarzenegger killed Lord Lucan. No it has nothing to do with anything else in this whole email, I just think everyone should do that kind of double-take sometimes.
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Speaking of Weird Specificity, as we were doing, I find myself on an accidental crusade at the moment to tell people to read M. John Harrison at the slightest opportunity. What's caught my attention is a combination of clarity of sight and clarity of prose that's just hitting me in places at the moment.
Here he is talking to Olivia Laing for Granta recently about the commodification of imagination.
The beginning of commodification is such an adventure. Everybody’s having a great time. Suddenly everybody wants to know about rock climbing. Or cycling or wild swimming. And everybody who is involved with those activities is suddenly elated, and everything seems to be full of possibility. And before you know it, with the magic of capital, suddenly you’re paying through the nose for what you used to get for free. Climbing, walking and swimming have been a tragedy of the commons. But more to the point, from my position, you’re also losing the activity to a standardising discourse – that for me is the worst thing, having watched it happen not just to climbing but also to imaginative fiction across the 1970s.
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Here's a stupid thing, off the back of that last, that I occasionally find myself thinking about: cosplay. We used to call it dressing up, right? Fancy dress is related, but not quite the same, but cosplay is dressing up. Commodified dressing up, I suppose. I'm being a curmugeon here, but I do think a certain proportion of people ought to be.
It's happened to knitting in the last fifteen years as well, to take something I know very well. Perhaps the only way to keep your ability to problem-solve is to make wild mistakes based on your own intuition, and then not attach judgement to cleaning them up when things go wrong. Or perhaps it's just to avoid video tutorials, I dunno.
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On a completely different note, and on the basis that sometimes I'll talk about recent cool things around here, I never promised that they had to be mine. I was very excited to see friend-of-the-Should-Have-Been-the-email Marc David Jacobs (hi pal) talking about talking about an astonishingly prolific Black film actor from the 1930s/1940s.
Just putting this here, partly because it's worth a read, and also partly in an attempt to peer-pressure him into writing more on the theme one of these days: Overlooked Black Actor May Have Been Most Prolific In Early British Cinema
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Wait, no, I'm not quite finished with that other line of thought after all. Here is a poem I liked very much when I was seventeen. I still like it, not least because I can see the beginnings of my interest in clear sight and weird specificity. There's a straight line between there and here.
Okay, I'm for sure definitely done now. Promise.
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It's the bottom of the email, time for book notices! I have a couple of bits of it this time: first of all, I'm going to be talkin' spooky on a stage on Monday 30th October, courtesy of the lovely Edinburgh Bookshop. The timing of this email is juuuust rubbish enough that the details haven't been ironed out yet, but it will definitely be on that Monday night, and you can come if you like - info when it exists (I assume imminently) will be here.
And you will be delighted to know that I have left the wildest bit til last: I'm going to be the Guest of Honour at Åcon Thirteen next year. I am deliriously excited about this: Åcon is a small, relaxed SFF convention in the Åland Islands in Finland, with a programme that treads the line between serious literary and enjoyably silly - in short, it looks carefully calibrated to be the best kind of fun. Their previous Guests of Honour are of the sort I would describe as "intimidatingly illustrious", so I'm honoured and thrilled to be invited. If anyone happens to be in southern Finland next May, and would like to get involved in "the most fun you can have in a demilitarised zone" (their words), which may involve a pub quiz and/or me gleefully gesticulating my way through a very intense discussion of time-loops in horror... that's a very specific wish, but one that might now realistically be arranged.
Life can be brilliant sometimes, can't it? Isn't this what it's all about?
Barnett over and out.