Savile, McAlpine, Petraeus and the truth about Leonard Cohen and me

 I wasn’t going to say something about the latest bizarre developments in... well, what I don’t even know what to call it for a start. It’s not Savilegate, because things are moving so fast that Jimmy Savile, who a few weeks ago had become some sort of conceptual synthesis of Myra Hindley, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Satan himself, has almost been forgotten; when you’re brought on as a stooge so that a not-fondly-remembered Doctor Who can say he didn’t like you much and oh, by the way, I’m going into the jungle with Nadine Dorries, then you know you’re on the margins. Well, you would know if you weren’t dead.

No, the story’s moved on, spewing out rumours and counter-rumours. Reputations of the living and dead have been left in shreds; not least that of the BBC, which was still apologising for not acting on allegations of sexual abuse when it was forced to apologise for acting on allegations of sexual abuse. Lord McAlpine is threatening legal action, even though he was never actually named by Newsnight; maybe he’s going to sue Philip Schofield’s piece of paper.

Two things, though. First, this is by no means a new story; I first became aware of the (unfounded, scurrilous, etc) allegations about McAlpine over 20 years ago. There’s been lots of grumbling about how various social media are to blame for rumour and innuendo taking hold, but in truth the likes of Twitter only amplify and accelerate the effect. The other point is that, allergic as I am to most conspiracy theories, I can’t help but wonder if somebody with an agenda (Anti-BBC? Anti-Twitter? Attempting to discredit accusations of abuse and those who make them? Any or all or more of those?) set some sort of journalistic honeytrap, an apparently solid story that was going to fall to pieces as soon as it saw the light of day, thus destroying the credibility of those involved in bringing it to public attention. Again, I’m not suggesting that MacAlpine was any part of this; he’s a MacGuffin.

But I wasn’t going to talk about that, was I? In the States, they’ve got a sex scandal that seems to be – on the face of it at least – far more straightforward. David Petraeus, the boss of the CIA, has resigned because he’s been having an extra-marital affair. Now I’m not sure whether he’s broken some particular clause in his contract, or if he’s just falling on his sword (oo-er) because he feels he’s brought shame upon his office; if the latter, it seems terribly old-fashioned, but there you go. No, the weird thing is... well, the first weird thing, as a number of people have pointed out, is that the whole messy business seems to have been prefigured in a problem page in the New York Times back in July (see the second letter). But the really weird thing is that the woman with whom he was cavorting is also his biographer. Which raises all sorts of questions about objectivity and the awkward threesome formed by subject, writer and reader. I mean, would we read Boswell’s life of Dr Johnson differently if we found out that James and Sam were an item? What of Charles Moore’s only-when-she’s-dead tome about Margaret Thatcher? Paradoxically, I suspect that even as the credibility of Paula Broadwell’s book about Petraeus falls apart, sales will rocket.

So I suppose it makes sense for me to announce, in the light of disappointing sales for my 2009 biography of Leonard Cohen, that I have enjoyed regular bouts of rudeness with the septuagenarian crooner, although he kept his fedora on at all times. Hallelujah, indeed.

PS: Ooh, and the New York Post does well on the Petraeus front:

PPS: And a rather good blog post concerning the meme that says Morrissey knew all about Savile way back when...

PPPS: And yet more; Buzzfeed kicks Petraeus when he’s down, but does it well.

Social Me, a name I call myself

Undeterred by my fleeting flirtation with Klout and passively encouraged by that digital pimp Everett the-sometime-Legend! True, I have joined some grisly entity going under the name of Social Me, which essentially casts a baleful eye over one’s Facebook posts and treats them to a bells-and-whistles version of what we used to call the Gunning Fog Index. So:

• I like to talk about Literature, Social Media, and Philosophy. I am Artsy and Confident. (Really not sure about the last one.) I post statuses to Facebook most often in the morning.
• My posts are most often Humorous, Loving, Excited and Happy. (Yeah, right. And some of them seem to come under the heading “Your Day” which implies a certain diary-like banality. Gee, thanks.)
• I post about 9 statuses per month. The average person posts 12.8 statuses per month. (So I’m officially below average. Yay!) I posted the most statuses in one day on Jan 18, 2009 (which was the day after I joined Facebook) with a total of 6 statuses.
• I am Extroverted, Confident, Strong-Willed, Organised, Artsy. (In most of these, only on Facebook, I’d suggest. And the only one that sounds at all valid is “artsy” and I’m not sure what it means, especially as its antithesis is given as “Traditional”.)
• I have posted as many words as a book. (32,049 at about this time yesterday; and not including the Facebook post that will be automatically generated when I publish this blog post. How meta is that?) In fact, I have posted more words than Charlotte’s Web, which has a total of 31,938 words. (Yes, but it’s a very short book. I’ve actually written three books that are longer than that. To be fair, none of them was as successful or as good as Charlotte’s Web, although they did make me cry almost as much.)
• My most popular updates were smartarse one-liners about Kindles, Mo Farah and Rebekah Brooks. Here’s where it gets interesting, though:
• I use more words per sentence than 88% of people.
• I use more emoticons than 90% of people. :)
• I use more commas than 87% of people.
• I use fewer exclamation marks than 94% of people.
• I use more apostrophes in his writing than 86% of people.
• I use longer words than 96% of people.
• I use words with more syllables than 96% of people.
• I use fewer concrete words than 97% of people.
• I use fewer imaginative words than 99% of people.

I’m guessing/hoping that “imaginative words” is a euphemism for words that don’t really exist. And to be honest, all the stats about punctuation and so on are pretty irrelevant unless we know whether I’m using the many apostrophes and few exclamation marks properly. And it’s only particularly relevant if you’re labouring under the misapprehension that the real “you” exists within the ones and zeroes of your Facebook profile; whereas mine is on Twitter, of course. The real “real me” went out to buy some milk some time in 2008 and hasn’t been seen since. So I don’t know what any of this means. And I’m still baffled about the whole “confident” thing. Oh go on, you do it for yourselves and come back and tell me what it says and give me your best guess as to how accurate it is. Especially the stuff about commas.

Of course, no sooner had I disgorged my Zuckerbergoid self into the Social Me bucket, I remembered that there’s another method of self-analysis via one’s own writings that doesn’t focus on the banal, superficial blatherings of my pokey/likey persona. So I pasted a few recent posts from Cultural Snow into I Write Like and discovered that I write like HP Lovecraft, which is intriguing because I’ve never knowingly read more than two or three sentences of Lovecraft’s prose. And then I did the same thing with some text from my new David Foster Wallace blog – which you’re all reading, I know – and was informed that, no, actually I write like the late David Foster Wallace. Which is at one and the same time entirely to be expected and also a bit weird, as if I’ve been typing on someone’s grave. To coin a tortured simile that DFW would probably spurn; although he does at one point come up with the sentence “He went to the bathroom to use the bathroom” which is pretty bad. Hey, I can say that! I write like him! Which means I’m pretty much him.

Doesn’t it?

Stephen Leather and the sock puppet blues

There’s been something of a commotion in that murky space where writing and commerce meet on the web. The thriller writer Stephen Leather has admitted to creating various online identities with which to praise his own titles and disparage those of his writers and RJ Ellory has been caught out doing the same; meanwhile, John Locke bought 300 reviews to raise the profile of his self-published titles. This is nothing new of course; the novelist John Rechy was caught out as far back as 2004. Before these misdeeds are dismissed as a problem solely for the cut-throat market in genre fiction, let’s not forget that the (previously?) respected historian Orlando Figes was busted on much the same charges a couple of years ago; and as Christopher Howse points out, Walter Scott and Walt Whitman also transgressed, albeit not on Amazon. Much of the more recent nefarious activity has been exposed thanks to the sterling efforts of the author Jeremy Duns, and he’s among the signatories to a letter in the Telegraph deploring such activities and vowing never to transgress in a similar manner.

Now let’s put this in context, which is not to acquit Leather and Ellory and co of any apparent wrongdoing. There are too many books and far too many authors and not nearly enough readers. This has always been the case. In the last few years, technology has made it even easier for wannabe authors to get product into the public domain, but they usually have to do so without the professional advice and support of conventional publishers. At the same time, those who do have professionals behind them find that the level of back-up is being reduced; a publishers will attend to editing, printing and distribution but the burden of raising a work’s profile increasingly falls on the author. And someone who knows how to write a readable thriller or cook book or erotic blockbuster may also have the savvy for self-marketing and social media, but it doesn’t necessarily follow.

And this is where things start to get a bit grey. Ian Hocking has mused with his customary sagacity about the dilemmas encountered by self-published writers. I’ve always had a bit of corporate heft behind my own modest efforts, but I’ve still had to do quite a bit of donkey work. I haven’t taken to bestowing five stars upon my own books, but I have made efforts to raise my own profile on Amazon and elsewhere. If I send free copies to friends, on the understanding that they’ll write an online review at some point, is that a bad thing? When posting such reviews, should they make clear that they know me? (Some do; some don’t.) Am I entitled to get annoyed with the ones who don’t keep up their end of the bargain. Or do I just assume that they’ve posted negative reviews under a pseudonym and haven’t told me? What about the Amazon Vine system, or LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers, by which free copies are sent out to people who request them? Is that more or less needy than sending a review copy to The Guardian or the New York Times? What about the mutual back-scratching that Private Eye always identifies with its round-up of the books of the year. Is that better or worse than what RJ Ellory has done. Are there rules? Conventions? Should there be a law?

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the writers who signed the Telegraph letter, but I’d hazard a guess that Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Joanne Harris don’t feel compelled to check into Amazon every 20 minutes to check incremental shifts in their sales ranks, or whether “A reader from Norwich” has given their latest opus three or four stars. And again, I don’t condone what the likes of Stephen Leather have done. But I’ll admit to a twinge of sympathy for someone who pushes the ethical envelope a little too far in an effort to rescue his or her life’s work from oblivion.

Of course, the problem isn’t confined to authors and similar fey ponces. Review sites for restaurants and hotels become all but useless when they’re taken over by PR hacks. And despite all the  complaints about Wikipedia being a platform for know-nothings, I get far more annoyed when a page has clearly been tidied up by someone rather too close to the subject. I’ve said before that Andrew Keen got things wrong in his silly book, but as social media becomes ever more important, I start to see that the reality is the exact reverse of what he describes. Pretty soon, it’ll be just another Cult of the Professional. And they’re the ones who really should know better.

PS: Alison Flood in The Guardian covers much the same ground, but some of the comments are interesting. Not sure if the pro-Leather one is sock-puppetry or sarcastic or sincere or what.

PPS: More on the historical perspective.

In defence of stylish exclusion

There were verbalcuffs at the Edinburgh Book Festival last weekend, with Irvine Welsh grabbing the biggest, splashiest headlines as he accused the Booker Prize of squeezing out British regional and vernacular voices in favour of the posh and the exotic. His wingman was another Scottish author, Alan Bissett, who argued that “protectionism for local cultures is sometimes necessary” but then appeared to contradict himself:

I worry how style can exclude. You think about the people who are not convinced by literature and find it for a small elite… Style risks becoming fetishised and it becomes stylish people talking to one another.

Well, yes, but if you’re reading from outside a particular regional tradition, such as the urban Scots of Bissett and Welsh and James Kelman, does that style not have the potential to exclude as well?  Especially if it’s protected; what are we talking about, Celtic quotas in the Booker shortlist? And how much effort should an author put into reaching out to the excluded and the unconvinced? If style – fetishised or not, whether it derives from Hampstead or Hampden Park – is such a barrier, maybe we should all write in the manner of government websites, with clarity and ease of comprehension the only criterion that matters a damn. Which would of course not only disqualify from consideration the kinds of book that tend to win the Booker Prize but also those that offer a gateway into what Bissett would describe as “local cultures”. I’m guessing that Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave is the sort of book that Bissett and Welsh would hold up in opposition to the consciously stylish Hampstead tendency, but I found it pretty bloody exclusive when I first read it at the age of 12 or so; I didn’t talk that way, didn’t know anyone who worked down t’pit, didn’t feel any particular desire to train a bird of prey. For the first few pages I wasn’t really sure what was going on. But I persevered and became utterly absorbed in Billy Casper’s world and remember sobbing myself to sleep after I’d finished. And if I hadn’t believed there might be something for me there, I might not have pushed on with Joyce or Nabokov or BS Johnson. I’m not saying that writing must be challenging to be good, but for every reader welcomed in by a writer who goes out of his way not to exclude, there will be another who just gets bored by the blandness of it all. Inclusiveness also excludes.

And in any case, is there really such a thing as style-free writing? I’ve seen the prose of Magnus Mills described as such, but the apparent blank artlessness he offers is surely a style in itself. Or is it just a euphemism for mainstream fiction, where function takes precedence over form? In a recent piece about the film-maker Christopher Nolan, David Bordwell confronts those who take issue with his sometimes clunky story-telling style:

Can you be a good writer without writing particularly well? I think so. James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other significant novelists had many virtues, but elegant prose was not among them. In popular fiction we treasure flawless wordsmiths like PG Wodehouse and Rex Stout and Patricia Highsmith, but we tolerate bland or clumsy style if a gripping plot and vivid characters keep us turning the pages. From Burroughs and Doyle to Stieg Larsson and Michael Crichton, we forgive a lot.

I’m guessing that in the last sentence he means Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle rather than William S and Roddy, but you never know, do you?

On a vaguely similar note, the annual to-me-to-you about whether exams have been dumbed down up or sideways prompted me to take a look at some recent GCSE papers. One English exam from last year had a practical criticism component, comparing two poems about social outsiders. No problem there, except that the examiners were helpful enough to define three apparently difficult words therein; namely “chide”, “gibber” and “dissuade”. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on the first two; but if candidates can’t work out unaided that “dissuade” is pretty much the opposite of “persuade”, I don’t think their grasp of English – as distinct from their ability to regurgitate what the teacher has told them is going to come up in the exam – is all that great. Sorry, is that too exclusive? Too stylish, maybe?

And while I’ve got you, I’ll just reiterate my response to Rachel Cooke’s description of Ian McEwan as “the nearest thing to EL James that literary fiction has right now”. Eh?

Hitchens, Orwell, Lenin and the virtual slop-pail of fame

In his introduction to a 2010 edition of Animal Farm (also included in the almost-posthumous collection Arguably), Christopher Hitchens makes this observation on Orwell’s cast of characters and their equivalents in the Russian revolution:

There is, however, one very salient omission. There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig... Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face).

Well I noticed when I first read it, probably around the age of 14 or 15, at the same time I was covering the revolution in my O-level history class. And I’m sure I pointed it out at the time, although I wouldn’t be surprised if none of my peers paid any attention. And I’d be astonished if thousands of people over the years hadn’t read the book and stroked their chins and thought, “Hang on...” Of course, that’s not what Hitchens means. He means that nobody within his golden circle pointed it out, nobody with whom he was at Oxford, nobody who wrote for the New Statesman in the 70s or Vanity Fair in the 00s, nobody with whom he drank and smoke and roistered and even doistered. If I’d had a blog (OK, its analogue equivalent) back in the early 80s I might have raised the matter then, but I suspect even if I had it wouldn’t have come to his attention. Some writers, it would appear, are more equal than others.

Incidentally, if you key “animal farm” into google.co.uk the first site that comes up is an adventure park in Somerset, where you get to meet Peppa Pig. Maybe she’s Lenin.

Helene Hegemann and the sincerest form of self-flattery

The controversial German author Helene Hegemann is interviewed in The Observer and (inevitably) on the agenda are the accusations of plagiarism that surrounded her novel Axolotl Roadkill. Apparently she lifted a total of 14 sentences from a blogger called Airen, but the act is pretty explicitly flagged up because the lines in question are specifically about the whole ill-defined area of theft and appropriation and cultural sampling:

Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man… I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination… because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It’s not where I take things from – it’s where I take them to.

And then, just in case we haven’t got the joke, the English translator interpolates the exchange:

“So you didn’t make it up?”
“No, it’s from some blogger.”

Hegemann defends herself further, pointing out that Airen half-inched the disputed lines from the film director Jim Jarmusch, who took them from Jean-Luc Godard and a sign in a gallery. (Do bloggers operate under a laxer moral code than published authors have to endure, one wonders? And if so, is it OK to lift from them even if they’ve lifted, or is that a bit like receiving stolen goods?) Ultimately, though, she questions the very basis on which such finger-pointing is founded: “But I’ve said it again and it’s still my best defence: there’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity.” And she certainly has said it many times already, and was saying it over a year ago when I first wrote about her. Which does prompt the question of whether it’s permissible to plagiarise oneself, in which case any number of writers (Paul Auster, Nicholson Baker, Haruki Murakami all come to mind, and I’m sure you’ve got a few candidates of your own) should be thrown into the mix alongside Hegemann. In any case, new editions of Axolotl Roadkill will come with detailed footnotes attributing all the borrowed material, even if that flies in the face of her own contention that everything’s borrowed anyway.

There have, of course, been footnotes in works of fiction before, but they tend to occupy the same fictional universe as the main text (eg Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or The Third Policeman); a real-world reader won’t be able to toddle off to the library and check the references. Even when a writer appears at first glance to be playing fair (I’m looking at you, Mr Eliot), the notes usually provoke further puzzlement on top of the questions they sought to answer. I can see why Hegemann and her publishers feel the need to clarify matters; ultimately though, they should ask if the footnotes are just to keep the lawyers off their backs, or whether they actually make for a better book.

In defence of pretension

So I was reading Richard King’s How Soon Is Now, about the people behind the rise and fall of (ugh) indie music in the UK and I was thinking there really wasn’t anything else to say (Tony Wilson was on the telly, Geoff Travis had an afro ho ho, Spiral Scratch, yada etc) when we get to Daniel Miller aka The Normal and founder of the Mute label. And then this:

The tracks ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ were two corrosive and minimal songs that sounded as though they had been intimidated out of a synthesiser.

“Intimidated”. Yes. Oh, yes, that’s good. Oh no, hang on, perhaps it’s pretentious. Actually, that may not be such a bad thing, according to Pat Long’s The History of the NME, another recent book that covers much the same ground as King’s, from a slightly different perspective. In it, Ian Penman stands his ground:

The cliché that grew up at the time around me and Paul [Morley] was that we were pretentious, which I’m not ashamed of... Pretentious is just another word for aspiring to something, for trying something out.

Phew.

Marginalia: the blue-ink brigade

When I acquired a Kindle, I wondered whether I might never buy a book again. But then I remembered that when I bought my first CD player, some time back in the early 90s, I didn’t stop buying vinyl. OK, so if a new album came out, I’d probably buy the small expensive version in the case that cracked, rather than the larger, slightly less expensive version in the sleeve that bent at the corner and split along the edge. But I’d still be mooching around dank second-hand shops and windy car-boot sales for Northern Soul singles and kitsch MOR LPs and limited-edition translucent 10-inch discs by cod-psychedelic wastrels from Ashton-under-Lyme.

So it’s not terribly surprising that last weekend found me taking away very nearly an armful of variously damaged paperbacks, including Toby Litt’s Finding Myself. One of the quirks of this 2003 novel is that the text consists of documents supposedly retrieved from the laptop of a fictitious author, Victoria About, with blue, handwritten amendments, corrections and suggestions from her editor all over the hard copy. For those used to pages of neatly justified, spaced and kerned black-on-white type, it might be a tad distressing.

But I vaguely remembered hearing about this gimmick when the book originally came out, so I didn’t embarrass myself by asking for a clean copy or demanding a discount. In fact, I went to the opposite extreme: when I found squiggly add-ons in the next book I picked up –  Retro: The Culture of Revival, by Elizabeth Guffey – my instinctive reaction was that this was all part of the author’s intentions as well. The following is underlined in angry biro:

The literary historian Jean Starobinski has suggested that it was only with the advent of bacteriology and pathological anatomy in the late nineteenth century that nostalgia disappeared from medical journals, becoming the province of poets and philosophers rather than doctors.

Now, Dr Guffey didn’t provide the underlining on that bit. But I bet she wish she had done.

(The image is the title page of a biography Jorge Luis Borges, with contributions by its owner, the late David Foster Wallace.)

PS: A different angle on the paper vs digital debate: Julia Jones on the fire that destroyed 40 years’ worth of her partner’s work.