• Hilary Mantel [2010]:  The joys of stationery.  The Guardian, 2010-03-06. On why writers need to keep loose-leaf notebooks.  An excerpt:

That said, le vrai moleskine and its mythology irritate me. Chatwin, Hemingway: has the earth ever held two greater posers? The magic has surely gone out of the little black tablet now that you can buy it everywhere, and in pastel pink, and even get it from Amazon – if they believe your address exists. The trouble with the Moleskine is that you can’t easily pick it apart. This may have its advantages for glamorous itinerants, who tend to be of careless habit and do not have my access to self-assembly beech and maple-effect storage solutions – though, as some cabinets run on castors, I don’t see what stopped them filing as they travelled. But surely the whole point of a notebook is to pull it apart, and distribute pieces among your various projects? There is a serious issue here. Perforation is vital – more vital than vodka, more essential to a novel’s success than a spellchecker and an agent.

I often sense the disappointment when trusting beginners ask me how to go about it, and I tell them it’s all about ring binders.”

• Rachel Cusk [2010]: Can creative writing ever be taught? The Guardian, 2010-01-30.  A moving discussion on teaching creative writing, and the relationship between writing  and therapy.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

At the start of last term, I asked my students a question: “How did you become the person you are?” They answered in turn, long answers of such startling candour that the ­photographer who had come in to take a couple of quick pictures for the ­university magazine ended up staying for the whole session, mesmerised. I had asked them to write down three or four words before they spoke, each word indicating a formative aspect of experience, and to tell me what the words were. They were mostly simple words, such as “father” and “school” and “Catherine”. To me they represented a regression to the first encounter with language; they represented a chance to reconfigure the link between the mellifluity of self and the concreteness of utterance. It felt as though this was a good thing for even the most accomplished writer to do. Were the students learning anything? I suppose not exactly. I’d prefer to think of it as relearning. Relearning how to write; remembering how.

One did not have to visit many bars or nightclubs in downtown Harare in the early 1980s before encountering the late Dambudzo Marechera  (1952-1987), Zimbabwean novelist and poet.    I knew him slightly, as did anyone who was willing to share a drink with him and enjoy (or endure) a stimulating late-night argument on politics or literature.   Some of his writing, for all its coarse language, is powerful and sublime (in the tradition of Burroughs and Genet), and David Caute, in a book I have just read, argues correctly that he was a great writer.    The book also captures his personality well,  even if it gives the impression that Caute thinks the work forgives the man.   It does not.  As a person, Marechera was a victim of  his addictions and perhaps also of a psychosis – mercurial, abusive,  racist, foul-mouthed, illogical, self-destructive, and paranoid:   not someone who was nice to be around for very long.     Nothing forgives such poor behaviour, not even great writing.

As always when I read David Caute, I am reminded of Graham Greene:  both are writers who grapple with the major moral questions and issues of our time, yet both write in the sloppiest of language, insincere and vague, and have the tinnest of ears.  Woolly writing might be evidence of woolly thinking or evidence of malice aforethought (perhaps attempting to hide or obfuscate something, as Orwell argued); it could also be evidence of insufficient thinking.  In any case, Greene’s and Caute’s arguments are often undone and undermined by their style.  We only get as far as page 6 of Caute’s book on Marechera, for example, before we stumble over:

Piled high at the central counter of the Book Fair are copies of his [Marechera's] new book, Mindblast, published by College Press of Harare, an orange coloured paperback with a surrealist design involving a humanized cat and a black in a space helmet.”

A black what, Dr Caute?  A black what?  I guess you mean a black person.  Just two sentences later, though,  you speak of,  “An effusive white executive of College Press . . .” So, let me get this right  – white people are important enough to have nouns to denote them, but black people not, eh?  Hmmm.

Although the effect is racist, I am sure Caute is not deliberately being racist in his use of language here, but rather just sloppy.    But the sloppy expression, here as elsewhere, leads one to doubt his sincerity and/or his ear.   Of course, someone who spent a lot of time in the company of white Rhodesians could easily forget how offensive the first usage sounds (and is); and we know from Caute’s earlier books that he spent a lot of time in the company of white Rhodesians.

Pressing on, on page 43 we read:

Such rhetoric counts for little against the current surplus of maize, tobacco and beef which only the commercial farmers can guarantee.”

Well, actually, no, Dr Caute.  Tobacco and beef were in surplus at the time referred to (1984) due to commercial (ie, mainly white-owned) farms.  But maize was in surplus because the avowedly Marxist government of Robert Mugabe used the price mechanism when it came to power to encourage communal farmers  (ie, subsistence black farmers) to produce and sell surplus maize crops.   This was something so very remarkable – the country in food surplus for its staple food almost immediately after 13 years of civil war and 90 years of insurrection, and because of the fast responsiveness of peasant farmers   – that all the papers were full of it.  Surely Caute must have heard.  (See Herbst 1990 for an account.)  And even beef production was boosted by contributions from communal farmers, particularly after the Government decided not to prosecute the many illegal butcheries competing against the state-owned meat-processing monopoly, the Cold Storage Commission.  (One may wonder why a socialist government would not support its own state enterprise against privately-owned competitors until one learns that many members of the Cabinet had financial stakes in the competing butcheries.)

Is the sloppiness in Caute’s sentence then due to Orwellian sleight-of-hand – seeking to promote a case that was factually incorrect – or just  due to insufficiently-careful thought?   I suspect the latter, although it is throwaway lines like this – as it happens, lines so common in the conversation of white Rhodesians in the 1980s – that make me ponder  the sincerity of Caute’s writing.

And, finally, Caute seems eager to berate the left and liberals for their failure to call attention to Robert Mugabe’s ethnic cleansing in Matebeleland in 1982-84, the Gukurahundi campaign.  Certainly more could have been said and done, especially publicly, to oppose this.  But why is only one side of politics to blame?  Both the US and the UK had conservative administrations at the time, both of which (particularly Thatcher’s) made strong representations to Mugabe over the fate of several white Zimbabwe  Air Force officers detained and tortured in 1982.   These governments did not make nearly such strong representations over the fate of the victims of the Gukurahundi. Perhaps Mugabe was right to accuse the west of racism on this.  And Mugabe’s military campaign in Matabeleland was not launched for no reason:  As Caute must know, South Africa and its white Rhodesian friends were engaged in a campaign of terrorist violence against Zimbabwe from its inception, with terrorist bombings throughout the 1980s.   The Independence Arch he describes traveling under on the way to Harare Airport was in fact the second arch built to commemorate Independence:  the first had been blown up shortly after it was built.   And even Joshua Nkomo admitted (at a press conference following his dismissal from Cabinet in February 1982) that he had asked South Africa for assistance to stage a coup after Independence.  While Mugabe’s 5th Brigade was certainly engaged in brutal and genocidal murder and rape, the campaign was not against an imaginary enemy.

Although evil may triumph when good people do nothing, from the fact of the triumph of evil it is invalid to infer that nothing was done to oppose it by good people.  Where are the mentions in Caute’s account of the strong, high-level and repeated Catholic opposition (both clerical and lay) to Mugabe’s campaign?  Where is the mention, in the statement that Mugabe detained people using renewals of Smith’s emergency powers regulations, of the independent review panel established by ZANU(PF) stalwart Herbert Ushewokunze when Minister for Home Affairs, the Detention Review Tribunal, to consider the cases of people detained without trial?  The members of this panel included independent lawyers, some of whom were white and liberal.    Some people, even some of the people Caute seems to excoriate, were doing their best to stop or ameliorate the evil at the time.

FOOTNOTE: I speculated on Robert Mugabe’s possible CIA connections here.   If true, this may explain the reticence of Western Governments to publicly criticize him in the 1980s.

References:

David Caute [1986/2009]:  Marechera and the Colonel:  A Zimbabwean Writer and the Claims of the State. London, UK:  Totterdown Books. Revised edition, 2009.

Jeffrey Herbst [1990]: State Politics in Zimbabwe. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press. Perspectives on Southern Africa Series, Volume 45.

Technorati Tags: Dambudzo Marechera, David Caute, Graham Greene, Herbert Ushewokunze

Well, even with few verified facts about Shakespeare’s life, we can know some facts about the author of these texts by reading the texts themselves.  Whoever was the author must have spent a lot of time hanging about with actors, since knowledge of, and in-jokes about, acting and the theatre permeate the plays.  Also, whoever it was must have grown up in a rural district, not in a big city, since the author of the plays and the poetry knows a great deal about animals and plants, about rural life and its myths and customs, and rural pursuits.  Whoever it was also had close connections to Warwickshire, since the plays contain words specific to that area.

Also, whoever it was must have had close personal or family connections to the old religion (Catholicism), since many of the plays make detailed reference to, or indeed seem to be allegories of, the religious differences of the time (Wilson 2004, Asquith 2005). Whoever it was was close enough to the English court to write plays which discussed current political issues using historically-relevant allegories, yet not so close that these plays themselves or their performances (with just one exception) were seen as interventions in court intrigues.

Whoever it was also knew well the samizdat poetry of Robert Southwell, poet and Jesuit martyr, since some of the poetry and plays respond directly to Southwell’s poetry and prose (Wilson 2004, Klause 2008). To have responded to Southwell’s writing before 1595, as the writer of Shakespeare’s narrative poems and early plays did, required access to Southwell’s unpublished, illegal, dissident manuscripts.  Southwell and Shakespeare were cousins (Klause 2008 has a family tree).

And finally whoever it was was not a playwright or poet already known to us, since these texts differ stylistically from all other written work of the period, while exhibiting strong stylistic similarity among themselves.

There is only one candidate who fits all these criteria, and his name is William Shakespeare. Anyone seriously proposing an alternative to Shakespeare as the author of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry needs to explain how that person could have written poetry and plays with all the features described above. Every alternative theory so far advanced – Kit Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, et al. – falls at the factual hurdles created by the texts themselves.

Note: Klause [2008, p. 40] presents a genealogy which shows that Robert Southwell and William Shakespeare shared a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Robert Belknap (c. 1330-1401, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas of England, 1377-1388) – Southwell through his mother, Bridget Copley, and Shakespeare through his mother, Mary Arden.  In addition, the great-great-grandfather, Sir John Gage, of Shakespeare’s patron, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, was also grandfather to Edward Gage, husband of Margaret Shelley, Southwell’s mother’s first cousin and, like his mother, a descendant of Sir Robert Belknap.  In the extended families of Elizabethan society, all three – Shakespeare, Southwell and Wriothesley – would have been seen as, and would have known each other as, cousins.   The bonds across such extended family relationships were strong.   Having lived in contemporary societies (in Southern Africa) where extended families still play a prominent role (Bourdillon 1976), the strong loyalty and close brotherhood engendered across such apparently-distant connections is perfectly understandable to me, if not yet to all Shakespeare scholars.

References:

Clare Asquith [2005]: Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare.  UK: Public Affairs.

Michael F. Bourdillon [1976]: The Shona Peoples: An Ethnography of the Contemporary Shona, with Special Reference to their Religion. Shona Heritage Series. Gwelo, Rhodesia (now Gweru, Zimbabwe):  Mambo Press.

John Klause [2008]:  Shakespeare, the Earl and the Jesuit.  Madison, NJ, USA: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Anne R. Sweeney [2006]: Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia:  Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape 1586-1595. Manchester, UK:  Manchester University Press.

Richard Wilson [2004]: Secret Shakespeare:  Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Manchester, UK:  Manchester University Press.

Technorati Tags: William Shakespeare, Robert Southwell

Life for the teenager Computer Science was not entirely lonely, since he had several half-brothers, half-nephews, and lots of cousins, although he was the only one still living at home.   In fact, his family would have required a William Faulkner or a Patrick White to do it justice.

The oldest of Mathematics’ children was Geometry, who CS did not know well because he did not visit very often.  When he did visit, G would always bring a sketchpad and make drawings, while the others talked around him.   What the boy had heard was that G had been very successful early in his life, with a high-powered job to do with astronomy at someplace like NASA and with lots of people working for him, and with business trips to Egypt and Greece and China and places.  But then he’d had an illness or a nervous breakdown, and thought he was traveling through the fourth dimension.  CS had once overheard Maths telling someone that G had an “identity crisis“, and could not see the point of life anymore, and he  had become an alcoholic.  He didn’t speak much to the rest of the family, except for Algebra, although all of them still seemed very fond of him, perhaps because he was the oldest brother.

The next oldest was either Analysis or Probability, CS wasn’t sure.  They were both a lot older than he was.  Analysis was a half-brother to CS, who visited all the time.  He was Maths’ child all right, but CS had never discovered who his other parent was.   One of the kids at school had told him that it was someone called Enlightenment, but CS did not know if this was true.   Anyway, CS did not like Analysis very much – he was very bossy, always telling the others in the family what to do and even telling strangers what to do.  No matter what the season, Analysis always wore a black suit, white shirt and a thin, black tie.  He reminded CS of the painting he’d once seen of a mid-western farmer holding a pitch-fork standing with his wife.  There was not an ounce of fat on Analysis, since he ran marathons, and he was tall and thin.   He was always prodding Algebra to do some exercise, but Algebra ignored him.  Apart from the marathons, Analysis had no hobbies and did not seem to mix with people much.  He used to meet up sometimes with his ex, Economics.  In fact, Analysis and Economics, when both of them were quite young,  had had a son, called Mathematical Economics.  Lately, though, ME had got himself mixed up with a bad crowd, through his own half-brother Finance, who was apparently now in trouble with the police.  

CS was always a little scared of Analysis, since he had a sharp tongue, and talking with him it always seemed that you had failed him in some way, and he was about to tell you.   He told anybody what he thought of their failings.   This was especially true of the twins, AppliedMath and MathPhysics, who Analysis was always berating, both to their face and behind their backs.  CS could never tell the two apart, and it was always confusing when one of them visited without the other.    They were usually friendly to him, although they were always trying to persuade CS to do little stuff for them, like running to the shop to buy some cigarettes or designing a new operating system for their latest supercomputer, which CS thought a real bore (since he’d now done it so often for them already).

His favourite half-brother was Algebra, who was the opposite in every way to Analysis.  Algebra was bald and short and pudgy, and never stopped talking.  Yadda, yadda, yadda, all day long.  He never wore a suit and tie, only ever a tee-shirt, or when he dressed up, a polo shirt.  As far as CS could tell, his only exercise was golf, which he played 2 or 3 times a week.   Algebra had a son who was only a little older than CS, called Category Theory, although he insisted you call him Cat.  Although only slightly little older, he seemed way more mature than CS; for example, he smoked dope and had a girlfriend.   In fact, one time, when Philosophy had taken CS to visit Philosophy’s French friend Existent (“Call me X, daddyo”), who worked in advertisting and listened to jazz, who should they find there in X’s basement apartment but Cat.   Like his uncle Geometry, Cat always carried a sketchpad and was always drawing.  But he talked more than Geometry, which he probably got from his father.   Cat was always friendly to CS, and was the only person in the family, apart from Philosophy, who took him seriously.   Cat was also a very good bongos player, and had even once been to West Africa to learn African drumming.   He told CS he was planning to go to India to spend a year meditating, but not to tell anyone about this yet.  Only years later did CS learn that Cat’s parents were in fact Algebra and Philosophy, although Philosophy had abandoned him, so Cat was both a half-nephew and a half-brother to CS.

Then there was CS’s other half-brother, Logic, whose parents were actually Philosophy and Theology.   Philosophy had abandoned him too, like CS and Cat, while Theology had gone to help guerrillas in South America and was now living in Saudi Arabia.  So poor Mathematics, the only one with a regular job,  had had to raise Logic too. By the time CS was born, Logic had already left home.  To CS, Logic seemed like a younger version of Analysis, thin and single-minded, although he was much friendlier than Analysis, at least to CS.  Everytime you saw Logic, he had a new word puzzle or a card trick or magic trick to show you.  He hung out a lot with Philosophy and even visited Uncle EE now and then.    Apart from Philosophy, none of the others seemed to like Logic very much, although CS got along with him fine, and Cat used to visit with him.  He would always help CS with his homework, and he had clever ways to turn the question the teacher had given you into another question which you could answer using a bit of algebra.   Sometimes, this even worked in tricking the teacher.

The only other regular visitor to Maths’ house was a great aunt of Philosophy, called Philosophy of Math. Phil, as she liked to be called, wasn’t married, smoked cigarillos, and wore sensible shoes.   She seemed to have only other single-women her own age as friends, such as her sisters History of Math and Philosophy of Science, and her good friend Epistemology, and CS thought she had a crush on Mathematics.  She would always arrive late at night without any warning, and without any definite date for departure, and stay for a few weeks until Maths was forced to ask her to leave.   What upset Maths the most was not that she never contributed a dime to the food bill while she was visiting, or that she never helped with the washing up, but that she slept late each night and did not get up till noon.    This was just the height of idleness, in Maths’ view, wasting the best part of the day.   Phil kept a diary, which she wrote in before going to sleep every night, and Maths was sure she was writing down everyone’s conversations.  Sometimes Phil would even read excerpts from her diary over dinner, particularly if she thought she’d written something witty or clever.  This just drove Maths crazy.  “Such boring, obvious piffle!”, is what Maths would say to CS, later.  Maths never had the courage to say it directly to Phil, though, because she knew word would get back to Philosophy, and all hell would break loose.     Phil always talked a lot with Logic whenever he visited and would ignore everyone else, although lately she’d starting talking to Cat.  No one knew just how she made her living.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

So here’s my story:  Computer Science is the love-child of Pure Mathematics and Philosophy. 

The two disciplines once had a brief fling, some years ago, which led to a child they called Computer Science, who is now a young teenager.  Philosophy ran off to leave poor-old Mathematics to raise the boy as a single parent.  So, every day, Maths, whose intentions are surely honourable but whose methods lack sympathy or emotion,  forces CS  to get dressed and ready for school, to eat his greens, tidy his room, do his homework, practice his trombone, go to bed at the same time each night, to just apply some self-discipline and rigour and commitment, god-dammit, can’t you, boy?!   Philosophy, off cavorting with fresh young paramours like Political Science and Art History and Film Studies, sends some money now and again, but plays hardly any role in the boy’s daily upbringing.  However, every couple of months, Philosophy turns up unannounced in a fast, shiny red convertible to take the boy for the weekend, and when this happens, on Saturdays they usually go sailing or go to the zoo or a stock car race, and then stay up late eating pizza and drinking coke and watching computer-animated sci-fi movies on DVD, and then talking late into the night about life, the universe and everything, and sometimes the boy is even allowed to have a beer.  And on Sundays, Philosophy never gets dressed up and goes to church like Maths always does, but instead sleeps late and maybe takes him surfing, or they go for brunch, where they have tomato juice (a whole glass, as a drink, with pepper!), and then afterwards they drink real capuccinos and get ice-creams (which Maths never lets him have), and they spend the afternoon chatting to women they don’t know on the pier, or even visit a good friend of Philosophy who lives in a basement, smokes French cigarettes and listens to jazz.  Of course, the boy has a whale of a time, and talks about nothing else to Maths when he gets home, for days on end, until Maths is finally forced to tell him not to say any more about it, that’s just about enough out of you, and don’t you mention the name of that wicked Philosophy in this house again, boy, or I’ll beat you with my slide rule!

The only consolation between these rare visits from Philosophy is the old man who lives next door, Uncle Electronic Engineering, who has a fascinating workshop, with all manner of things in it, at the back of his house, hidden from view by the trees in his overgrown garden.  So, of a late afternoon or quiet day on the weekend, when Maths is engaged in playing correspondence chess with a penfriend in Canada or sorting through the dresser in an upstairs bedroom, re-arranging (yet again!) the socks by size and colour and age and brand, or double-checking the cross-indexes Maths had made of all the old back-issues of TV Guide, the boy CS sneaks out to shoot the breeze with Uncle EE.   The old man always has plenty of time for the boy, and is always friendly and encouraging, and tells the boy he should dream as much as he wants, and lets him play with stuff in the workshop to his heart’s content, and always tells him not to ever worry about the “readin, ritin, an rithmetic” stuff that Maths never stops nagging about.  There are more important things in life than problems with words such as split infinitives and crossing t’s and dotting i’s, the old man is fond of saying.  There’s life itself, which has to be lived, not written about!

CONTINUED HERE