On dvandvas

My last blog of 2014. It's been a helter-coaster, roller-skelter of a year, as always, but this is no pretext for a retrospective. Onward!

I've noticed that many of my blogs over the past twelve months are about off-trail linguistic subjects (avoiding, I hope, the chortling whimsical tone that is associated with such backwaters.) So here we go again. Are you familiar with the term 'dvandva'?

A dvandva is a lovely word from Sanskrit meaning 'pair', and refers to a language feature also known as a 'Siamese linguistic compound'. It refers to one or more objects that could otherwise be connected in sense by the conjunction 'and' (which is omitted), where the objects refer to the parts of the agglomeration described by the compound. Stay with me.

Dvandvas are common in Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, and some Modern Indic languages such as Hindi and Urdu, but less common in English - the term rarely appears in standard English dictionaries and is not in common circulation, even along linguists.

Cue Wikipedia:

An example in Sanskrit mātāpitarau (मातापितरौ) for 'mother and father'; Chinese shānchuān and Japanese yamakaw for 'mountains and rivers'; Modern Greek "maxeropiruno" (μαχαιροπήρουνο) for 'fork and knife', "anðrojino" (ανδρόγυνο) for "married couple (lit. man-woman)"

By the Greek for 'fork and knife' is presumably nothing to do with the 'spark' (or spoon'fork which comes handy on camping holidays).

We don't have dvandvas in English, not really. Such a term as 'singer-songwriter', in the sense 'someone who is both a singer and a songwriter' is not - at least within the Sanskrit classification of compounds - a compound. 

Cue Wikipedia again: 

These are considered कर्मधारय 'karmadhāraya compounds' such as राजर्षि rājarṣi 'king-sage,' i.e. 'one who is both a king and a sage' (राजा चासावृषिश्च).

In Greek, sernicothilyko (σερνικοθήλυκο) means being male and female (although I have no idea whether this refers to hermaphroditism). It might apply to the short-lived 's/he' used for gender non-esclusion by high-minded writers. 

I suppose the portmanteau words found in Lewis Carroll (who invented the term), such as 'brillig' and 'slithy' come close, or their modern equivalents 'brunch', 'bromance' and 'Chunnel (as the Channel Tunnel was once called).

If you're still reading at this point, I thank you.

I plan to blog from time to time in January and thereafter in 2015. A happy new year to all my readers. 

On Gilbert Adair

On 29th December 1944 the author and critic Gilbert Adair was born in Kilmarnock. Today is, or would have been, his seventieth birthday. He died too young, in 2011, and is very much missed.

I once sat next to him at a screening (in the now-defunct Museum of the Moving Image) of part of Jean-Luc Godard's epic Histoire(s) du cinéma. This must have been in the early 1990s. He fizzed and tutted and fidgeted throughout, and left as soon as the credits started to roll. Any chance of an encounter and a mutually rewarding friendship died on the spot, although that was hardly his loss. 

This blog, such as it is, owes a huge debt to Adair. When Philip Larkin shyly waddled up to Cyril Connolly at the memorial service for John Betjeman he stammered: "Sir - you formed me." I might have said the same to Adair, and with the same degree of timidity, if he hadn't sloped off so quickly at the end of that NFT screening. Since first reading his books in the 1980s I've tried to think and write as clearly and responsibly as he did.

He is one of the very few contemporary writers I have in toto - all the novels and essays and film books and translations, and a thick folder of newspaper and magazine articles clipped over the years. I bought his first book when it was published in 1981 - a ground-breaking account of the Vietnam conflict as depicted in Hollywood movies. He struck me then (and still does) as our very best film critic - only the great Raymond Durgnat comes to mind as a rival. Both men knew all there was worth knowing about films, and about much more than films. Both men wrote the kind of prose that only comes naturally to supernaturally gifted writers. 

I never tire of recommending another early Adair work - Alice Through the Needle's Eye, his pitch perfect sequel to Lewis Carroll's two celebrated books, and every bit as good as either. Both pastiche and homage, it should remain permanently in print. Then came his first real novel The Holy Innocents (filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci as The Dreamers with a script by the author) - a spellbinding and flawless debut. I was hooked, and for the rest of his career would snap up each new publication as soon as it appeared. The only (relative) duds came late with his 'Evadne Mount' trilogy - whimsical pastiches of Agatha Christie. He seemed to be coasting.

Best of the lot, for my money, is Myths and Memories (1986), a superb collection of essays on cultural subjects inspired by, and in many ways indebted to, Roland Barthes. 'Piquant and riveting' said Anthony Burgess on the cover blurb. Adair was a vital conduit of French thinking into mainstream British culture at a time when French thinking, before the buffoonish ascendancy of Bernard Henri-Levy, counted for something. Adair was a Francophone Francophile and wrote like a dream. Here, courtesy of the BFI, is The Nautilus and the Nursery, a typically tongue-in-cheek piece applying Barthes' deconstructive approach to (of all things) the dire Carry On series.

Subsequent essay collections - The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice and Surfing the Zeitgeist - are still essential reading. While some of his subjects may have lost their lustre the prose has not. It dazzles in its wit and insight and his range is breathtaking. No other cultural commentator comes close.  

The publisher and author Charles Boyle has written beautifully about Adair in his fine blog Sonofabook.

Here's David Thomson's Guardian obituary.

And finally, in case you're interested, is a partial bibliography: 

Fiction

Alice through the Needle's Eye (1984)
Peter Pan and the Only Children (1987)
The Holy Innocents (1988)
Love and Death on Long Island (1990)
The Death of the Author (1992)
The Key of the Tower (1997)
A Closed Book (1999)
The Dreamers (2003) - a revised version of The Holy Innocents
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires (2003)
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006)
A Mysterious Affair of Style (2007)
And Then There Was No One (2009)

Non-fiction

Hollywood's Vietnam (1981)
A Night at the Pictures (with Nick Roddick) (1985)
Myths & Memories (1986)
The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice (1992)
Wonder Tales: Six French Stories of Enchantment (editor with Marina Warner) (1995)
Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema (1995)
Surfing the Zeitgeist (1997)
Movies (editor) (1999)
The Real Tadzio (2001)
.
Translations

Letters by François Truffaut (1990) (also editor)
A Void by Georges Perec (1994) — winner of the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize
Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau (2000) (introduction)


Gilbert Adair (29th December 1944 - 8th December 2011)

Favourite snatches (18)

The last snatch for the time being, and the last blog, as Salvēte! closes down temporarily. Pressure of work.

I spend (usually) 30-45 minutes each evening knocking out this blog, which I check first thing in the morning before sharing the variable results online. It never feels like a chore and is usually a pleasure. It means that each day leads to and ends in the production of a complete piece of work, no matter how inconsequential. This is no small satisfaction, for me at any rate, and is close to being a form of self-discipline. But I need the hour or so I currently spend blogging to do other stuff, for now.

NEVERTHELESS (makes elaborate caveat gesture) regular readers will know that here at Salvēte!  our sole concern is all for your delight so, as a generous valedictory snatch, here's a link to the marvellous Paris Review interview with T. S. Eliot dating from 1959. It's often unexpectedly hilarious ("I can’t make my children weep over a cat who’s gone wrong.") and always illuminating. Eliot was so wise, and so kind.

This, by the way, is the 19th snatch but appears, for technical reasons, as the 18th. There will be a 20th snatch, and more snatches, and more blogs. Keep watching the skies.

Finally - I shall continue to blog regularly  (if not frequently) for the TLS. Do follow me and the talented cohort of TLS bloggers here: http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/

Thank you for reading Salvēte! Cheerio for the time being.

Dylan Thomas, Nazis and Christmas shopping

These Are the Men is a 1943 propaganda film co-scripted by Dylan Thomas that ridicules the Nazi leadership, anticipating by sixty years the kind of YouTube prank we today take for granted. It's a ten-minute short using sequences lifted from Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph Des Willens in which Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Streicher and Hess deliver bombastic monologues in dubbed English confessing to their multiple inadequacies, their words courtesy of Thomas. It's a simple, powerful and often  hilarious debunking of Third Reich rhetoric.

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH9Tw156aCw

This clip is incomplete (but the only version I could find online). You can find the whole film on a fascinating collection of eight Thomas-scripted films (all dating from his brief but productive stint in wartime documentary) on Dylan Thomas - The War Films Anthology, issued by the Imperial War Museum.

I admire a handful of Dylan Thomas poems (most of them from Deaths and Entrances) and I like some of his prose (especially Adventures in the Skin Trade, his uncompleted novel). His letters are marvellous (and proof that he could be, much of the time, a real shit). So are some of his BBC radio broadcasts, the ones collected in Quite Early One Morning. I don't go a bundle on Under Milk Wood and on the whole, long after an adolescent infatuation with the whole Thomas myth, I now think he's a schoolboy's idea of a poet, and too much of his stuff is densely compacted, shallow and meaningless. A very few lines aside it doesn't make its way straight to the heart to the mind. It stays on the page.

But here's a thing. Yesterday at the annual Small Publishers' Fair (a marvellous annual event in Holborn's Conway Hall), I picked up Finding Your Way to Dylan Thomas, a 'micro-book' published by Jeremy Dixon under his engaging imprint Hazard Press ('written, designed, and made by hand in Wales'). The subtitle is 'A photographic trail through Laugharne, West Wales.' The images depict all the local 'heritage' signage directing visitors to sites connected with the poet, a witty idea suggesting the commodification of the life and work (and especially the life). Hazard Press's micro-books are ingeniously crafted from a  single sheet of A4 paper and are an unalloyed delight. They are all ridiculously cheap and I'd like to buy the lot. At two quid a pop you may feel the same way, so why not shop early for Christmas:  www.hazardpress.co.uk.

Beyond satire

Two screen grabs from cameras in the House of Commons in which our political representatives debate (upper) welfare reforms for sick and disabled voters and (lower) their own entitlement to a (well-earned) pay rise.  It's enough to make you puke until you puke air.        

Ian McEwan on trial

My latest TLS blog is about Ian McEwan's recent novel The Children Act. 

I've admired McEwan since the early days and hate to see him off form, but over the past few years each book he writes seems better than the next. In his latest the two main subjects are the evangelical millennial Christian sect known as Jehovah's Witnesses and the workings of the British legal system. He gets them both very wrong. You can read about the former in my TLS blog. As for the latter . . .

A barrister friend with literary inclinations kindly offered to read the The Children Act and, with her keen legal brain, common sense and critical acumen, came up with an amusing list of errors before abandoning the book halfway through. Here are just a few of them (and with my grateful thanks to her):

1. McEwan refers to witnesses taking 'the stand'‎, but that's what they do in America. In England they go into the witness box. When a barrister says 'my expert's in the box' it means their expert witness is giving evidence, and most likely being cross-examined. (This reminds me of how annoying it used to be to see American movies ostensibly set in Britain but filmed on a Hollywood backlot featuring cars - with white-walled tyres.)

2. He refers to senior judges as, for example, Lord Hoffman and Lord Hailsham. But on page 15 we have the late Senior Law Lord, Baron Bingham of Cornhill, referred to as ‘Tom Bingham’. Now this may not strike you as a momentous error, but bear with me.

How to address judges is a bit of minefield (although rich material for a novelist with a satirical bent. McEwan, alas, is not a satirist).

In court you call them 'My Lord', 'Your Lordship', (or 'My Lord Lord Hoffman' if you're facing more than one of them); or 'My Lady', 'My Ladyship', 'Your Honour' – depending on which court your are in. If you know judges socially you tend to use their Christian names. (‘Hello Lenny how are you?’). If you're a barrister and don’t know them you are expected to call them simply ‘Judge’. (‘Hello Judge how are you?’). If you introduce them to someone who’s not a barrister you're expected to use their title. (‘Robert can I introduce my friend Ian McEwan? Ian this is Sir Robert Akenhead.’). When talking about them socially you use both names. (‘I saw Lenny Hoffman at the opera last night’ - but when referring to his judgments you would say ‘Lord Hoffman says  …’). So when McEwan drops Bingham’s title the reader won’t know he was the most senior judge in the land.  Now this may not matter in the great scheme of things but it's the kind of things that novelists (and their editors) are supposed to get right. Otherwise readers may begin to suspect that it's all made up.

3. He refers to the 'Courts of Justice' (p. 19) but to be pedantic (and the law is nothing if not pedantic) there is no such place. He presumably means the Royal Courts of Justice building on the Strand. Barristers refer to it as ‘over the road’ as in ‘I’m doing a trial over the road’. People who work there call it the RCJ.

4. More white wall tyres.  UK judges are not 'elected' as McEwan claims on p. 45, but either 'elevated' or 'appointed'.

5. Still on acceptable forms of address: a judge would not refer to a fellow judge as 'Mr Justice Sherwood‎ Runcie' (p. 49) simply call him 'Sherwood'.

6. Barristers are instructed by solicitors, who refer to them, with predictable accuracy, as 'instructing solicitors'‎. The reference to an 'instructing solicitor' in the context of advising a client is therefore wrong. (p. 49)

7. McEwan also seems to think that Judges sitting in the Family Division are 'robed' (i.e. wear wigs and gowns in court like Rumple) although this has not been the case since 2008.

I could go on, but rest my case. Does any of this matter? I submit that it does (catchy, this). I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that a novel of the kind written by Mr McE -

His Honour Judge Mental (interrupting): Mr Collard. I hesitate to correct such a distinguished advocate  as yourself but feel that in the circumstances I have to make it clear to the members of the jury that a novel of the kind at the centre of this unhappy case was not so much 'written' as 'perpetrated'.

Bunty Collard Q.C. : I am most grateful my Lord. (continues)  . . . that a novel of the kind perpetrated by the accused makes a claim on our time and attention and even admiration based, at least in part, on its accuracy and authenticity and must therefore be judged, at least in part, by those very standards.  If I may make a humorous observation, m'lud?

His Honour Judge Mental: By all means, but keep it clean, keep it clean

Bunty Collard Q.C.: It is not so much a case of 'the biter bit' as (mnk, mnk) 'the writer writ'.

(Gales of laughter fill the courtroom. Judge Mental wipes tears from his eyes. The jury dissolve. McEwan, in the dock, looks crestfallen.)

His Honour Judge Mental: Oh very good! AHAHAHAHAHAH. "Writer writ' indeed. Mr. Collard you excel yourself my dear.

Bunty Collard Q.C. : Your Lordship is too kind. Now if I may I should like to summon my next witness. Call Margaret Attwood.

Usher: Call Margaret Attwood!

More distant usher: Call Margaret Atwood!

Even more distant usher: Call Margaret Atwood!

(A woman enters the witness box or, as the luckless defendant would say, 'takes the stand')

Bunty Collard Q.C: You are Margaret Attwood?

Woman: I am not. I am Lionel Shriver.

Sensation in Court!

Avast!

I like pirates. Who doesn't? 

One of the contributors to the current edition of the Times Literary Supplement is an academic named Grace Moore, and I can't resist typing out her Contributor's Note:

Grace Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence of the History of Emotions. She is the editor of Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century: Swashbucklers and Swindlers, 2011, and is working on a study of bush fires in nineteenth-century Australian settler literature.

I like the sound of all of this, so I looked up the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence of the History of Emotions - surely never abbreviated as the ARCCEHE - and I'm sorry to have to report that they have a Vision, and a Mission Statement, and all the associated management balls attached to what otherwise seems to be an admirable organisation. 

With a plaguey nip o'grog and a brisk yo-ho-ho I peer yet closer through me one good eye . . .

Their aim, they say, is: "to provide leadership in humanities research worldwide into how societies thought, felt and functioned in Europe, 1100 - 1800, and how this long history continues to impact on present day Australia."

Apart from the barbarous verbal use of 'impact' this all seems above board and ship-shape (me hearties) and, if you can stomach the disappointingly unpiratical language in which much of their stuff is couched, you can find out more here. Ms Moore is I am sure a high-minded academic, but I expect in her dreams she swings from the rigging, a cutlass between her teeth, roaring profanities. I hope she is not seen by her humourless peers as an unreliable swashbuckling gadabout who would be better employed studying (say) the penal colonies or the Great Barrier Reef. 

I always flinch at the phrase 'Centre of Excellence', that sibilant indicator of gormless management values, sent up years ago (when it first came into vogue) by the comedians Fry and Laurie at the expense of the sinister and preposterous education minister, Rhodes Boyson (1925 - 2012): Watch it here. Boyson's no-nonsense mutton-chopp'd Lancashire schoolmaster act is neatly skewered. His posthumous reputation is in free-fall, as a quick skim of the internet will confirm.