Doctor Lector I presume?

This is yet another piece which is unlikely to ever grace the Net. Did a review for Biblio of Gulliver’s travels and other writings (Edited by Clement Hawes). Swift is my favourite "Modern":

The ten-pound note of the Irish Republic features an image of Dean Swift, set against the backdrop of the Irish Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Áras an Uachtaráin in Phoenix Park, Dublin. Very few writers achieve the distinction of having their faces embossed on the national currency.

The Irish Central Bank didn’t, for instance, see fit to put Joyce, Beckett, Behan, Shaw, Synge, or Lady Gregory on its notes. (Yeats is there on the five-pound. If my memory serves me right, WBY designed the currency issued by the newly-minted Republic in the 1920s. Putting his mug-shot into circulation may have literally been his quid pro quo for performing that onerous task).

(NOTE: Actually Yeats designed the coinage for the Republic - my memory was marginally off)

Swift was perhaps accorded this unusual honour because of his historic influence on Irish coinage. In 1722, an English miner named William Wood bought a royal patent for the milling of 108,000 pounds sterling worth of Irish copper half-pennies. Swift made an almighty fuss about the debased metal of the “Wood Halfpenny” in a series of letters to the Irish people signed “Marcus Brutus Drapier”.

The pseudonymous dean of St. Patrick’s advocated that the Irish refuse to accept the new coin. His baleful influence was sufficient to render the new coins unsuccessful – these were legal tender but they did not circulate. Wood’s patent was finally revoked by the Crown along with the payment of a generous severance “pension”. The coins were sent off to the American colonies and numismatics experts now salivate over these “American Hibernians”. The irony is that Wood’s coinage was not debased. He wasn’t cheating. The pension made him rich, however, so I guess everyone was happy.

Everyone, except Swift, that is. In the 78 years of his existence, nothing and nobody ever made the dean happy, if one can dare to make such a sweeping generalisation on the basis of his writing. In all the ages of mankind, there can have been few people as angry, as bitter, and as determinedly misanthropic as the dean.

There have also been few writers who have made such an art-form out of bitterness. And, there has never been anyone who combined an imagination quite as weird and unpleasant with such a felicity for logical, verbal exposition of that imagination.

As a man of letters, Swift rocks. His combination of versatility and virtuosity is amazing. You cannot conceptualise the allegory without reference to “A Tale of a Tub” and to Gulliver. Nor can you conceive of modern science-fiction fantasy with all its colours and flavours without reference once again to Gulliver. He was an astoundingly entertaining correspondent and a very funny poet. And, any modern polemicist would swap her canines to be able to inject Swift’s effortless venom into her essays.

The other thing about Swift is accessibility. Despite the barrier of 300 years worth of changes in idiom, despite inevitable loss of context, Swift is still easier to read than most modern writers. When he wants to, as in Gulliver and Tub, he tells a rattling good yarn. His essays and certainly his poems can make you crack up in laughter through the sheer elegance of phrasing.

This edition certainly helps with the contextualisation because it adds the obligatory footnotes that for example, identify the throwaway reference to events in the early 18^th century. Another interesting section is the 18^th century perspective, which deals with Defoe’s inspiration, with William Dampier’s voyages and with the prejudices against “Papists” and the strange political anatomy of Ireland at a point of time when the Irish Parliament was bribed to vote itself out of existence.

Naturally the meat of the collection has to be the master’s own work. Apart from the complete Gulliver, it has a good representative selection of essays, letters and poems as well. The only thing that’s missing is “Tub” and that’s easily available on e-book. In addition to annotated text, the edition contains many contemporary illustrations as well.

In the end-section of criticism, there are four essays on different aspects of Swift by the editor himself, by Said, and by Carole Fabricant and Robert Mahony. While the essays are fine in themselves, they are all from the same discipline of modern literary criticism. Swift deserved a wider academic focus simply because of the breadth of subjects he wrote about and also, because of the kind of person he was. I’ll return to this subject later.

Knowing the context and thinking a little about it, Swift’s iconic position in modern Ireland seems quite anomalous. He was not only a member by birth of a hated and oppressive religious minority – the protestant Anglican occupiers of catholic Ireland during the first century of the invasion. Swift was a clergyman who preached that Anglican theology to earn his bread-and-butter.

A rough analogue to the modern Irish attitude vis-a-vis Swift would be to imagine a BJP government releasing stamps to commemorate an Imam from the era of Aurangzeb.

It is true that Swift’s co-religionists disgusted him and he made no secret of that fact. The concept of a king also offended him and so, he was a republican, in an era when that was extremely politically incorrect as well.

But then, he found the Catholics of his adopted land just as disgusting as his brethren across the Irish Channel. “A Modest Proposal” for solving the problem of high Catholic birthrates by selling babies to the Protestant occupiers as fare for their Sunday lunch is amongst the most frightening essays ever written.

The cool, clinical advocacy of fattening babies by giving “ample suck” so that they can be basted, roasted and jointed to taste, reads like a verbal rendering of one of Hieronymus Bosch’s nastiest triptychs by a 18^th century ancestor of Dr Lector’s. Of course, it was satirical – it was a literal exposition of England’s metaphorical gustation of Ireland. But it could only have been articulated in such fashion by somebody who hated the English, the Irish and children, with almost equal passion.

Despite his evenhanded hatred of both races, Swift was on the side of the Irish in the Anglo-Irish disputes because he also had a passion for evenhanded justice. He hated the tightening repression he witnessed in Catholic Ireland and he found the lack of an organ of political representation very offensive. But he didn’t have to like the Irish or indeed, the human race, to demand justice for all.

By the latter stages of Gulliver’s Travels, the hatred for the human race crystallises in the sojourn in the land of the Houyhnmhnms. Swift’s alienation from his fellow beings is mirrored by Gulliver’s incapacity to readjust to human company after his return to Yahoo-infested England.

By the mid 1730s, the misanthropy had calcified into something that smells like genuine psychosis. His essays from that period are over the top – not incoherent babbling, but crisp, acid-trip lunacy; the initial premises may come from outer space but each one is smoothly and logically developed into a glittering little jewel of an essay or a poem.

In the last decade of his life, the dean suffered from what was perhaps the worst disease that could afflict such a man. He developed aphasia, an inability to understand words caused by damage to specific areas of the brain. The early stages of the condition in the 1730s may add to the feel of a great mind finally breaking loose from the restraints of the left brain and free-wheeling into spaces where normal people cannot follow.

It would have been extremely entertaining and perhaps, enlightening, if a modern clinical psychiatrist had been asked to evaluate Swift’s mental condition. He wrote enough and enough is known about his life to come up with an educated perspective. How close to the edge was he really? Would medication have stabilised him or “Prozac-ed” him out of action?

Another perspective one would have liked is that of the economic historian. Swift was wrong about Wood’s halfpennies. But he hit the nail on the head when he inveighed against laws that prevented the growth of Irish trade and against the discrimination which destroyed the catholic land-owning class. He also had scathing things to say about the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles, where he was personally burned.

The protestant-catholic sectarian perspective has been done to death over a period of centuries though Swift was one of the earliest commentators. The economic angle of the Anglo-Irish relationship has been explored in depth only from the potato famine era of the 1840s. Swift wrote with insight and sensitivity about economic conditions fully 150 years before that catastrophe.

Swift was one of the founding fathers of modernism but he wasn’t a modernist. No modern philosopher would have the stomach to produce “A Modest Proposal”. Anybody who wrote a similar “dead babies” essay set in say, Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, or Israel, etc, would set off a hullabaloo that dwarfed the Jyllands Posten ‘toons and Salman Rushdie’s verses.

Certainly 21^st century human beings are individually and collectively capable of perpetrating horrors as bad or worse. But the politically correct 21^st century mind simply isn’t capable of articulating this level of verbal viciousness anymore. What a pity!

Blues for Bobby

I haven't got the copyright for this but the blokes who do haven't bothered to archive it.
I wrote it five years ago to mark the bugger's 60 B'day. Since it was his 65th recently, here we go again.
Warning - a long, frigging, self-indulgent whine follows. But then, doesn't that make it the perfect blogpost?

Here we go:

The best thing about Dylan is that you can sing along with him and feel superior. Yeah, he was a good poet, one hell of a talented musician with an instinctive grasp of complicated orchestral abstractions. But he couldn't sing for peanuts, that whiny, nasal, flat voice could barely hold a tune. That incomprehensible high-plains accent butchered his own poetry, mangled and mumbled the words and rendered his lyrics into a guessing game.

Over the years, I guess hundreds of millions have sung along anyway with Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota. In a thousand campus hostels, every idiot who ever fiddled with a guitar learnt his or her set-piece Dylan. Maybe some of them didn't want to but singing Dylan was the price they paid to keep an audience.

I stopped listening to Dylan as pure music a long time ago. He turned into background noise, something as familiar as driving a cantankerous old car with funny quirks in the gearing. I knew every trick of phrasing, I knew exactly when the harmonica would kick in just the way I knew the delicate balance of choke and starter. I knew the variations Robertson had done on it, I knew the Dead's bootleg version, I'd heard Tom Petty mugging it along with the Heartbreakers.

And Dylan has associations running back across the years. There are the stoner anthems that take me disappearing along the foggy ruins of time to when I travelled steerage to Goa, more than 20 years ago. There were the unending arguments with Cool Breeze - my black pal from Detroit who thought that Dylan did whiteman's music but he liked it.

There was the music that we played scratchily through the nights on the old gramophone as we stayed awake and waited for the hard rain to fall, for my girlfriend's dad to lose his long hard battle with cancer. There was my bitter empathy with the boy who swore that he wouldn't work on Maggie's farm no more as I totted up my week's commission on the typewriters I'd sold.

I remember driving up the Assam Trunk Road from Guwahati to Tinsukhia and blasting Buckets of Rain over and over again as the windscreen wipers went into overdrive. The lost weekend when a bunch of us got smashed in the grotty old Tiger Cinema bar and watched The Last Waltz three times post-exams. Every time the show ended we just stepped across the road to the Maidan, or down to Nizams and we drifted back again as the third and final bell rang.

Of course, it was "early" Dylan I listened to as a young adult. Sure I'd heard Dylan as a kid, but I started to relate to his poetry only in the grim gray 1980s. That was when Agnetha was wiggling her butt and most contemporary music was built around the metronomic backbeat of an invariant boring bass.

By then Dylan was well into his period of religious mania and he was writing complete crap. The first great manic association of talent clustered around him in the 1960s had broken up and dispersed. Half of his early comrades were dead, some were vegetables, still others had gone their own way. It would be a long time before he would again forge a team where the whole made better music than the parts, still longer before he would find his own feet again as a songster.

But he'd created the early oeuvre, the work that made him great. The first flowering was the great folk ballads of the early 1960s that came straight out of the Woody Guthrie tradition and transcended it. Those lyrics articulated what an entire generation felt was "wrong" with the way the world worked. He spoke for the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse.

In the mid-1960s he started the transition from acoustic road balladeer with banjo, guitar and harmonica to composing and fronting for tight ensembles that stretched the limit of everything electricity could do. The return journey to the softer influences of country and Southron blues ala Nashville Skyline took him several years as well.

There were the flirtations with drugs, the statutory brushes with the law and the string of girlfriends, wives and relationships that turned sour. It was all grist to the creative mill throughout this wondrous 15-year odyssey that transformed popular music, even those aspects that Dylan never directly touched. Blonde on Blonde with its Visions of Joanna, and Sad Eyed Lady must be about the best album of love songs ever written or maybe it just felt that way. Like A Rolling Stone - well, who could write a more viciously brilliant allegory and set it to music?

Nobody who came after Dylan would ignore him; you just couldn't ignore him despite all the obvious flaws. Dylan created the original space for a poet who could sing. Even the rank amateurs often did covers that out-sang the original. It only enhanced his reputation - you realised the depths of the imagery, felt the itches he had so precisely scratched.

The great frequently built their reputations on the songs Dylan wrote. Leave alone pals like Joan Baez, Robbie Robertson and Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix's big popular breakthrough came with the electrifying variation he did of Watchtower at the Isle of Wight. From Jerry Garcia to Pete Seeger, everyone's tried their hand at Dylan.

Dylan still can't sing. A disability he's insisted on publicly flaunting for more than forty of the last sixty years as he's leveraged his limitations into a trademark style.

No other great has performed so often. Dylan still does a concert every three days. Some of them in really weird places, small towns in the prairies, provincial backwaters in Central Europe - somebody once calculated that Dylan did a round trip of the world every year. In his 60th year, in just the last five months, he has played 13 shows in Japan, nine in Australia, 15 in the USA -- with Scandinavia and Western Europe on the agenda for the second half.

He started putting the music back together in the late 1980s. There were hiccups, the Budokan performance led to a dreadful double album. But slowly the talented started drifting back to the master. Mark Knofler, Neil Young, the Dead, - who else would they ever have taken second billing to?

Recent albums like World Gone Wrong and Time out of Mind are testimony enough to the fact that he has found a second wind. And looking at his contemporaries, the "Never-ending tour" as it's been billed since 1988 makes sense.

Mick Jagger performs Start Me Up for the launch of Windows95, Paul McCartney accepts a knighthood, Jim Morrison fertilises a Paris graveyard.

Dylan travels endlessly. That's where he started from, the tradition of the roadie, the Okie who chronicled the working mans blues. The travel keeps him sane. He can still tell his audience that even the president of the United States sometimes must stand naked. And so, while others sign the endorsement deals, he's out there standing on the gallows with his head in the noose, watching with those wild wolf eyes and just waiting for hell to break loose.

These old shades

Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, - bad movies *ing Vin Diesel; corny novelisations, one of them by a reasonably competent SF writer (Alan Dean Foster). The only thing worth noting is that Riddick wears “black goggles” (Amazon says this is a statistically improbable phrase) even in the depths of a dark, deep mine.

Shades are common props in many SF movies – Matrix, MIB, etc. Hollywood believes in them as “futuristical” props that nicely offset campy sets and uniforms. Odd because versions of these have been around since before H.G.Wells.

The Germans almost won the Battle of Jutland (1 June 1916) because they had Zeiss glasses that enabled them to maintain semaphore contact through shellfire (after they learnt that the Kiregsmarine radio ciphers had been broken) and to spot British ships emerging out of the setting sun.

Shades also featured in the election slogan of Jack B in “Bug Jack Barron”, which is an awesomely good organ-legging novel from the 1960s. Barron styles himself “The White Shade” to woo the black vote.

Shades are an integral part of the Southie political landscape. Bangarappa, MGR, Karunanidhi, et al, everybody uses shades. At first I thought it was just an affectation – much like Cow-belt politicians referring to themselves in the third person.

Later I realised that it was like a badge of belonging and a not-so-subtle means to establish hierarchy and seniority.

The common political thug wears his shades on the streets of Mylapore to show that he is a more evolved being than the average Tambram who wanders about with his eyes exposed. He takes his shades off in front of an MLC, who in turn, displays respect to a senior boss like MK Stalin by whipping off his shades. MGR was cremated in his shades as the mark of ultimate respect.

In contrast to MGR, Kamaraj was considered a lick-spittle of the Northies by Deccan hardliners because he was so often seen face-naked in the company of the Hindi-speakers. And in Mollywood, one sign that Rajnikant is finally taking the villain seriously is a deliberate removal of his shades before the action-hero rolls up his sleeves and goes into action.

Stalin acknowledges that the man who named him is still the DMK uberappa by going face-stripped in front of MK. And, as for Kalinger, he takes his shades off for nuthin' and nobody. When Jayalollipoppa had him arrested, the ultimate humiliation was that he was caught on candid camera with buck-naked eyes.