Canadians vs Americans

It's the last blog of the year and let me pass this on. My son recently gave me a copy of Alec Guinness's A Commonplace Book, a sprightly collection of thoughts and quotations and scraps of conversation, many of them entirely new to me. I was pleased to learn that John Osborne's description of ballet was"poof's football". An entry in the book that particularly snagged my attention was something I first read, or heard of, as a child. It's an urban myth (with a maritime setting) and this is how Guinness recorded it:

This is the transcript of a radio conversation of a US naval ship with Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October, 1995. Radio conversation released by the Chief of Naval Operations 10-10-95.

Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a Collision.

Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.

Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.

Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States' Atlantic fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course 15 degrees north, that's one five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

None of this ever happened of course, but we want it to have happened, not least for the 'plucky underdog' aspect. Would it work as well if the protagonists were Russia and China? It's a story that's been in circulation for decades and the 1995 version, despite its suspiciously authentic source is simply a variant on a long-established urban (or maritime) myth. You can find out more about it here. 

I'm reminded for some reason of a film title (and it's a film I've never seen): Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River. It's a 1968 comedy starring Jerry Lewis, Terry-Thomas and Nicholas Parsons. "Jerry's on the loose in London. And Merry Olde England was never merrier!" Sounds awful - but do click on the link to see an engaging trailer which features the great Bernard (here weirdly stressed on the second syllable) Cribbins.

If you've read this or any other of my irregular blogs during 2015 -  I thank you.

"The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded"

The title of this blog is, as Star Wars fans will not need reminding, taken from the line delivered by Alec Guinness in the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi (and I'm surely not the first to notice the embedded 'wanker' in the character's name). But reverse the line and it's just as true: "The Force can have a weak influence on the strong-minded" or, to put it another way, Star Wars means nothing to me.

It's a commonplace critical observation that the movies are reactionary and unoriginal. Special effects aside they haven't advanced a millimetre in the four-decades since the first in the series was released. This will of course be seen by loyal fans as a quality rather than a flaw, and the film-maker George Lucas has said that he was influenced by the cheap and cheerful Flash Gordon series of the 1930s (the star of which, Buster Crabbe, was the only actor to play Tarzan, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers – the top three syndicated comic strip heroes of the 1930s). But there's another influence that I'd like to mull over with you.

Watching  the latest Star Wars episode with my two boys the other day (and reluctantly conceding that this wan't so much a film as a Major Motion Picture Event, then being depressed by the sight of the great Max von Sydow reduced to a cough and a spit) I was struck - and not for the first time, having noted this in the original movies nearly forty years ago -  by the portrayal of the Rebel headquarters (and you don't need me to remind you that the Rebels are fighting the Empire, that is to say the Bad Guys). I know - who does not? - that the films are set 'once upon a time in a galaxy far far away' but the whole set-up is deliberately reminiscent of American air force bases in East Anglia during the Second World War: the fighter planes diligently serviced by ground crew who are constantly, constantly welding; the water bowsers and bomb gurneys purposefully circulating; the sense of collective prepping; the ad hoc briefings to youthful pilots before their next perilous mission; the colour-coded squadron leaders in their helmets with chinstraps; the commanders with harumphing English (not American) voices at odds with their alien appearance; the easy-going camaraderie; the grace under pressure, the urgent tannoy announcements and the regular scrambling in all directions. The only thing missing is a black labrador. The Rebel command centre itself is remarkably similar to Churchill's subterranean war bunker in Whitehall, a dark and windowless place where young uniformed women move things around on maps while robots and elderly men do other stuff, intently.

I was born in 1959, which makes me a tail gunner in the baby-boom Lancaster bomber (if you see what I mean). As a schoolboy I recall reading and admiring Paul Brickhill's The Dambusters, a gripping account of Operation Chastise, which involved the delivery of Barnes Wallis's so-called 'bouncing bombs' to demolish dams in Germany's industrial Ruhr valley, flooding German infrastructure. This is the kind of book we read, the kind of film we watched. It struck me that something should be said about Star Wars' explicit indebtedness to the film of the book (which regularly shown on the telly when I was a boy). But somebody, I discover, got there first and made the point better, by editing Dambusters footage to Star Wars dialogue, or vice versa. Take a look here.

And here's the real thing: the 617 Squadron website 617 Squadron website. Great stuff.

Pick of the Year

Nearly the end of the year and I'm flagging. My most-read blog in 2015, by far, is shamelessly re-cycled below. It seemed to strike a chord at the time and may do so again:

Worst. Poem. Ever.

This dashing fellow is Théophile-Jules-Henri "Theo" Marzials who was, despite his exotic monicker, a British composer, singer and poet. His French clergyman father married his English mother and Theo, born in 1850, was the youngest of five children.

At the age of twenty he started work in the British Museum as a junior assistant in the librarian's office where his path crossed those of Coventry Patmore, John Payne, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and Edmund Gosse (who may have been his lover). He was not really cut out for a library career - he reportedly once yelled "Am I not the darling of the British Museum reading room?" from the balcony of that noble institution.

He nevertheless continued working there until retiring at the ripe old age of 32, on a handsome pension of £38 a year supplemented by royalties estimated at around £1000 annually. These were derived from his successful career as a composer, noted for his settings of Christina Rossetti's verses and some popular ballads that were all the rage in the 1880s.

He moved to Devon in the early 1900s where he became addicted to chloradyne (a potent patent medicine invented in the 19th century by Dr. John Collis Browne, a doctor in the British Indian Army as a treatment for cholera, diarrhea, insomnia, neuralgia and migraines. It was made from a mixture of laudanum, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform.) He died in Colyton in February 1920.

As a poet he had his admirers - Gerard Manley Hopkins for one - and his work featured in that era-defining periodical  The Yellow Book. He is now forgotten, though not entirely, and for rather a sad reason. His poem 'A Tragedy', included in his only published collection The Gallery of Pigeons and Other Poems (1873), has strong claims to being the very worst poem ever written in the English language. I first came across it the other day in Ross and Kathryn Petras' harrowing anthology Very Bad Poetry (1997). It isn't bad in the way (say) William McGonagall's oddly memorable and sweet-natured doggerel is bad. Marzial's astonishing perpetration has no mitigating qualities.

I've typed it out in full below for you to read and savour.


A Tragedy by Theophile Marzials

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop,
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop...
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop...
And my head shrieks - "Stop"
And my heart shrieks - "Die."...
Ugh! yet I knew - I knew
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end--
My Devil - My "friend."...
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air -
I can do,
I can dare
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip, drop.)
I can dare, I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop
Dead.
Plop, flop,
Plop.

" . . . which some may find offensive."

For the last few blogs of 2015 I revisit some of the highlights or lowlights of the past twelve months. Ready?

Warning: this article contains the image of the magazine cover, which some may find offensive.

Thus the Guardian newspaper earlier this year when it published the cover of the issue of Charlie Hebdo that followed the slaughter at their Paris office. It featured (see below) a cartoon of a bearded man in a turban holding a JE SUIS CHARLIE placard. It was a representation of the prophet Mohammud and therefore (in the Guardian's view) possibly 'offensive' to those who are offended by this kind of thing. Quite why they felt obliged to publish the warning is a mystery. I've already blogged about the legibility of such images, but it's the end of the year and I'm in a reflective mood.

© Charlie Hebdo 2015

As far as I'm aware no other British newspaper was prepared to show the image of the cover, although they all reported its existence. That Guardian warning is pusillanimous, and it might just as well be applied to anything in the media likely to cause offence. Warning: this programme contains boorish, pampered, taxpayer-funded racist wankers driving flash cars and flourishing their leaden wit, which some may find offensive' might appear on screen before transmissions of 'Top Gear', for instance.

I've had it with all this pussy-footing around the possibility of giving offence to some hypothetical audience. These days one routinely sees 'WARNING: GRAPHIC FOOTAGE' on newspaper websites which are eager to show us blood, corpses, tumours or bizarre medical conditions. Such warnings have the same moral clout and ethical content as a clip joint hustler urging punters to step inside. 

Some things are, to be sure, objectively offensive. Other things merely offend. The legal term about the views of 'a reasonable person' being central to any judgement when it comes to (say) pornography in the Lady Chatterly trial applies here. Anyone offended by an innocuous cartoon representing the Prophet, or come to that by a novel such as The Satanic Verses, is not by any stretch of the imagination 'a reasonable person' in the context of our liberal democracy, so their views, while not entirely without value of course, cannot be the basis on which to draft public policy. There are people - of all races and religions - offended by feminism,  freedom of speech, civil partnerships, equal rights and all the other attributes of a liberal democracy. As has been said endlessly over the past year, the selfsame freedoms that allow British subjects to worship as they please must necessarily allow other British subjects to mock those beliefs.  There is a growing intolerance of tolerance.

As it happens I am offended, deeply offended, by many of the beliefs embraced by Catholics and Jews and Protestants and Muslims and other religious practitioners. Their world views are not the same as mine but my taking offence at their convictions and practices doesn't translate into murderous revenge for some actual or imaginary slight because I'm a good person. What I hate to see is a nervous pre-emptive apology such as the one proffered by the Guardian. Journalism can afford to be principled and even courageous under threat.

On Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton died on this day, 27th December, in 2001. He was (said Clive James) 'the best prose writer of his time'. That's true, but only part of the story. Hamilton was also the best poet of his generation, an outstanding biographer, an editor of genius and mentor to a spectacular cohort of younger writers including James, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Hugo Williams, Jim Crace and many others. He was (to use a rather cobwebby phrase) 'a man of letters' - one of our best and, perhaps, one of the last.

Here's a BBC4 documentary made the year after he died - a handsome tribute, and a reminder of what our literary culture used to be in an age of respected critical arbiters, of standard-setters. If you have an hour to spare in the dog days between Christmas and the New Year you could do worse than spend it here.

On toffee, and dancing.

On Christmas Eve this year, a date that already seems remote, we listened as usual to the King's College carol service on Radio 4 and, as the short day darkened, made toffee.

This can be a fraught affair - slabs of chocolate must be carefully broken up, nuts crouched; temperatures and timings must be finely calibrated, complex blends concocted then poured and quickly spread on chill marble. It sets very quickly then another layer is added and so on, before melted chocolate is poured over the whole lot and crushed nuts and suchlike added. Soon after it all has to be carefully levered away (or 'spatulated' as we call it) from the slab and broken up into irregular fragments, then boxed. It takes about two hours in all, after which stiff recuperative drinks are called for  and it's all over for another year.

All of which prompts a question: why is at that we describe somebody's ineptness at (for instance) dancing with the phrase "he can't dance for toffee"?  I looked up the idiom and it's orig. is obsc. and I can't help wondering why toffee should be taken as a measure of incompetence. Making toffee requires confidence, organisation, split-second timing and reckless daring. 

Christmas Day with Oscar Wilde

Today, as you may have noticed, is Christmas Day, and it was on this day in 1888 that Oscar Wilde invited W. B. Yeats, then aged 23 and living alone in London. to dinner at his home in Tite Street, Chelsea. Yeats later recalled:

". . . a white drawing-room with Whistler etchings, 'let into' white panels, and a dining-room all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and, I think, a red-shadedlamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the statuette."

It wasn't entirely smooth-going. Yeats managed to annoy Wilde's young son Cyril by telling him an inept story about a giant, and felt conspicuously inelegant in the presence of his dandyish host. At one point Wilde said: "Ah, Yeats, we Irish are too poetic to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures"

After dinner Wilde read to his guest from the proofs of his Socratic dialogue The Decay of Lying. What wouldn't I give to have been there. Here is an extract from the preamble:

CYRIL: Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.

VIVIAN: I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind I After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won't do. 

You can read the rest of The Decay of Lying here.

Details of Christmas Day with the Wildes can be found in W.B. Yeats: A New Biography by A. Norman Jeffares (1988)