Peer Review, Amis Style

I have read for pleasure for as long as I remember, some books haunting me for years after I finish them, others drawing me in only while they last. But two authors had a particularly formative influence on me in my late teens, in very different ways. Richard Dawkins caused me to reassess my position in the world. And Martin Amis showed me that so-called literary novels could also be pretty good fun. In the couple of decades since, my tastes have changed. Amis’s early novels, which made such an impression, were written while he was much younger than I am now. They are probably best left to sixth formers and twentysomethings. And as for Dawkins, well, I was convinced early on, argumentitatively so for a while; but the need to fight those fights left me as I drifted into the happy state of live and let live that Ben Goldacre wonderfully characterises as ‘apatheism’: "I'm an apatheist. It's not that i don't believe, it's more that I find all discussion of the issue shit-boring". Dawkins, of course, is still fighting; and Amis is still writing. Indeed, superficially the two seem to have followed similar trajectories from exclusive schools through Oxbridge and early brilliance and into… well, if satirist Craig Brown’s name hadn’t appeared at the bottom of this set of (supposed) Dawkins tweets would you have known they were in Private Eye? And his second volume of memoirs was greeted in Nature thus: “Brief Candle is about as edgy as Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones cranking out the 3,578th rendition of 'Brown Sugar' — a treat for fans, but reinscribing boundaries rather than crossing them”. Amis is also an easy target for ridicule, expressing with apparent seriousness not enormously sophisticated opinions on grown-up issues, like (according to the magnificent Chris Morris) 'a senile 12-year-old'. Nearly time (he's 66) for him to consider his own advice:

“Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at thirty, they peak at fifty… at seventy, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs.”

As with so many things I got up to when I was young, then, reading Dawkins and Amis is probably best remembered fondly than attempting again now.

And yet.

I just read a Martin Amis book. True, it was not a novel, rather a book of his literary criticism and journalism (The War Against Cliche - just the kind of ‘bits and pieces’ book I enjoy). But it was good fun, and reminded me of Amis’s twin saving graces. First, he can really write. It’s partly the technical stuff - elsewhere, he writes that you should never start successive paragraphs with the same word, unless for effect, in which case do three in a row. Impossible to unread that command and I’ve obeyed it ever since. Whether or not it makes a difference stylistically, it makes you think about your writing in useful ways. More generally I just derive great pleasure from reading a sentence like:

“Excluding a few dry-outs, in hospitals and prisons, and the very occasional self-imposed prohibition, Malcolm Lowry was shitfaced for thirty-five years”

or:

“The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedies; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull… The question ‘What happens next’ has no meaning, because there is no next in Don Quixote’s world: there is only more.”

The second reason to re-try Amis is that he’s funny.

For instance, he decides to review Desmond Morris’s The Soccer Tribe by writing six pages of anecdote about the travails of being an intellectual football fan (note for younger readers: in the 1980s football fans were a trainspottery bunch, before Sky required us to profess to enjoy the lucrative game), not mentioning the book until the final sentence, whereupon:

“I have only time to add that Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill, etc., and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false.”

For instance, on Norman Mailer:

“He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses.”

For instance, the new monster in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World

“…shows promise. It is a carnotaurus, a light-heavyweight with horns… ‘Diet: Meat’, as my dinosaur encyclopaedia bluntly assures us. This is good. In the Jurassic era, as in our own, vegetarians are a drag.”

So he can write, he can amuse, and he can, of course, be cruel. (On Crichton again: “Animals — especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors — are what his is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.”) But Amis’s reviews are also, in aggregate, much nicer than I had expected. He states as much himself: as a critic,

“[y]ou hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder… Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember… ”

This surprising (and admittedly somewhat self-interested - note the ‘how long they remember’…) sensitivity to the efforts of others - no matter how substandard - is echoed in his review of a volume of John Updike’s collected journalism:

“Kind to stragglers and also-rans, to well-meaning duds and worthies, and correspondingly cautious in his praise of acknowledged stars and masters, Updike’s view of twentieth-century literature is a levelling one. Talent, like life, should be available to all.”

Think on this, then, before you set upon the next unfortunate manuscript to land in your inbox. And try always to get kinder.

Diversity and extinction of tongues and species

Some years ago, at a rather posh function in a swanky London venue, I got talking to a peer of the realm. By this point I had been drinking my endless glass of wine for some time (they have stealthy waiters at these kinds of dos), and didn’t quite catch his name, but he had been, apparently, head of a large supermarket chain. And his response to me mentioning the word ‘biodiversity’ has stuck with me. “When I took over at M&S”, he said - or was it Morrisons, or maybe Sainsbury’s? - “I noticed that we stocked loads of different kinds of tomatoes. I said that we should just stock one kind, but make sure it was a fucking good tomato. I sometimes think the same about biodiversity: focus on just a few species, but make sure they are fucking good species.”

Well, an interesting take I suppose, and perhaps the logical outcome of a purely utilitarian approach to nature. But not, I submit, a view that would go down well with many conservation groups. No place in this world for God’s own prototypes, the weird and the rare never considered for mass production. No place for a grass-powered bear reluctant even to reproduce, or a fish content to spend its entire life in a tiny pool.

So anyway I filed away the anecdote, to be dusted off from time to time when the occasion arises. But I got to thinking about it again just recently, after reading the excellent Lingo: A language-spotter’s guide to Europe by Gaston Dorren. Over 60 brief chapters, this book provides pen portraits of dozens of European languages, from the behemoths of English, German, and French to tiddlers like Manx, Monegasque and Sorbian. It is full of fascinating nuggets, such as the plural for the Welsh word cwm being (naturally) nghymoedd. There are also examples of useful words that English might consider - the German Gönnen, for example, “the exact opposite of ‘to envy’: to be gladdened by someone else’s fortune.” Interesting that we happily adopted Schadenfreude but not this… Other favourites include the Dutch Uitwaaien, to relax by visiting a windy, chilly, rainy place; the Sorbian Swjatok for the enjoyable hours that follow the end of the working day; the wonderful Greek Krebatomourmoúra, “similar in meaning to ‘pillow talk’ but with a greater element of discord”; and the Slovene Vrtičkar, “strictly speaking no more than a hobby gardener with an allotment, but the word also suggests that the person is more interested in spending time with other vrtičkars than in growing vegetables and flowers.”

More than these fun pieces of trivia, however, the book gives a valuable overview of the languages and people of my home continent, including useful tips - tricks to identify written languages, a primer in the cyrillic alphabet - as well as a potted history of conquest and subjugation. But it is also a study of loss: of the extinction and near extinction (and, more positively, occasional resurrection) of our continent’s linguistic diversity.

The parallels with biological diversity are striking, and of course I am not the first to make them. Indeed this lovely paper by Tatsuya Amano and colleagues  actually presents a full macroecological analysis of the world’s 6909 languages, formally assessing extinction risk based on the same criteria that the IUCN use to assess species. They show that around a quarter of all languages are threatened based on a small ‘range’ or population sizes (spoken in an area of less than 20 square kilometres, or by fewer than 1000 people), or an alarming rate of decline. Their maps showing hotspots of diversity and threats, and their analyses of drivers of change, also have a familiar look to those of us more used to examining spatial patterns in biodiversity.

Of course this seems sad, just as the loss of diversity within languages is also troubling, as we lose the ability to express uniqueness of place and of our connection with the landscape. But the thing with language is that it is so personal - especially for me, now, watching my kids go through the endlessly fascinating process of acquiring it. And so whereas I unequivocally want to prevent the extinction of species, as far as languages go - well, a little part of me agrees with the good Lord above. Diversity is great in theory, but in practice…? Basically, I want my kids to learn a fucking good language.

Happily, at this point in time, I have no conflict to resolve: English, for better or worse, is just such a language. But what if I’d got that job in north Wales a few years back? Not only might I have had to contend with the frankly unthinkable proposition of children on mine shouting for Wales in the Six Nations, what about the possibilities for mischief opened up by kids speaking a language I can’t understand? And while bilingualism has many advantages, wouldn’t it be kinder to your kids to have them fill the ‘second language’ part of their brain with something more ‘useful’? Spanish or Mandarin or something else that opens up new parts of the world to them?

No doubt this attitude arises in part from my monoglot culture, beautifully captured in the Eddie Izzard quote with which Dorren begins his book, “Two languages in one head? No one can live at that speed! Good Lord, man, you’re asking the impossible!” On the contrary, learning two, three, four languages seems perfectly possible in many parts of the world. But for those seriously threatened languages, well, keeping them alive - truly alive, not simply remembered - means that some people’s children have to learn them. And I can’t help wondering: is that really fair?

About a Blog

In his early collection of miscellaneous writing Paperweight, Stephen Fry includes a column from The Listener called Absolutely Nothing At All, about… writing a column. He prefaces it in the book with the excuse, “Journalist friends tell me that columnists are allowed to write one column of this nature once in their lives.” On the assumption that bloggers get the same allowance, here we go…

*

I’ve had this post largely worked out in my head for several weeks. It’s been sitting there with half a dozen others, gestating, waiting for me to have the time to sit down and type it out. But if you’ve been monitoring activity on this site over the last few months, you will have surmised that such moments, those quiet half hours to polish off something as relatively trivial as a blog post, are getting harder and harder to find. Only this morning I had to batten down the hatches against the brewing panic of several looming deadlines at work; whilst kids and garden, the occasional foray into the world of leisure activities, and obtaining sufficient sleep all take precedence at home. Of course, I’m not alone in feeling these external pressures, and yet other academics manage to blog with alarming frequency. Which has got me thinking a bit about the why of my blogging, but even more so about the how, and I thought I’d share some conclusions.

Even four years and more into this blogging experiment, ideas are not (yet) the limiting factor I thought they would inevitably become. Certainly I have enough to maintain a much more respectable posting frequency. They hit me from all sides - from reading or conducting new research (perhaps less often than I initially assumed); more often the process of being a working scientist, a person, and a dad. A while back I published a 'placeholder' post (so perhaps I’ve already used up my allowance? Come to think of it, I’m sure I’ve written about blogging before too… Oh well.) with a list of things I planned to write about. Several of those are still to be finished, and many others have formed since.

So ideas come, and fortunately, because the net of my memory has always been pretty fine-meshed, they tend to remain in its cod-end and are usually still there when I finally get around to hauling them on deck for closer examination. As the net ages, though, holes are more frequent, and I decided I need to back up to external memory. For tiddlers, little scraps of ideas, I set up a ‘blog ideas’ project in Things, a task management app from Cultured Code that I use for my general to-dos. Things syncs nicely between devices: I stick a one line memo into my ‘blog ideas’ project on my phone, and there it is on my desktop when I eventually sit down to write.

Then we come to writing itself, and the search for a nice word processing package, the modern version of the search for the perfect stationary, or the perfect desk position, in the writer’s list of procrastination activities. I have settled, for the blog anyway, on Scrivener from Literature & Latte. Scrivener is actually designed for writing big and complex projects, and lends itself very well to scientific papers (allowing nice split views of notes, manuscript sections, figures and analyses). But I’ve used it much less for that than I thought I would. Instead, just as in Things I have a ‘blog ideas’ project with a load of component documents filed under ‘ideas’ (where this is now), which Scrivener lets me view in various ways - I particularly like the corkboard. Then there’s a second set of documents under ‘final versions’ (to where this will move in due course). It works nicely for me, and is a logical way to transfer my ideas from Things to somewhere I can write them up.

Ah, writing them up. That’s where the process slows right down. The trivial explanation for that is I’m busy, and blogging is low priority - it’s important to me, but not as important as other facets of my life and career, and it seldom reaches the levels of urgency that demand immediate action. But, as mentioned above, plenty of academic bloggers, all of them as busy as me, manage to find that hour or two a week to sustain their output. So, whilst busy-ness and other priorities are important, for the main cause of slow output we have to confront the ‘why’ of my blog.

When I started to blog, it was an outlet for the frustrated writer in me; frustrated by having to conform to the norms of formal scientific discourse in most of my writing. I wanted to write differently, and I wanted to write well. Moreover, I wanted to use the blog to experiment, to learn to write better. I still try to keep to these original objectives. I want to write with precision: to use the correct word if I can (something that used to come more easily; now I find myself frequently fishing around at the bottom of that net, feeling the perfect term slip through my fingers…). I want to match tenses and styles, to write with clarity, to eliminate errors; in short, to avoid cliche. And just to throw this in, so it may haunt you too - Martin Amis wrote somewhere that you should never begin two consecutive paragraphs with the same word (three in a row is acceptable, if intentional). I cannot not notice that now, in my own writing and that of others.

Writing, then, is something I take reasonably seriously, something I work at. After writing a post, I put on my editor’s hat, and edit. I try to cut the fluff - ironically this post looks like ending up longer than the 800 or so words I usually aim for. I proof read and try to spot errors and imprecisions (doubtless some will remain in this piece; they always do…) One of the most used apps on my phone is a dictionary - I use a cheap one, Advanced English Dictionary from jDictionary, which has its quirks but is pretty comprehensive. I look up every word whose definition I doubt - and sometimes those I’m sure of, just in case.

I try, then, to publish reasonably polished posts. I’m much less interested in churning out ideas as soon as they occur to me - I use Twitter for that. (Though I do the proofing and dictionary thing there too. Yes, I know…) - although I often read posts of that nature, and find them interesting and useful. And don’t get me wrong, many academic bloggers seem able to write high quality posts with a frequency that I find humbling. I can only suppose they need rather less sleep than I do.

Well, that’s me. As I said at the outset, the ideas keep coming, and every so often one will get processed. In the meantime, thank you for your patience.