Is there anybody out there?

A warm welcome back to Judeosphere and Olly's Onions - just as I was about to delete the latter from my blogroll, after four long months of silence. Olly, you've been missed. And I've just (re-) added Jeff Weintraub, culled mercilessly from the list after he went a bit quiet some months back. Also, for a long time I've been wondering whatever happened to the Labour Humanist blog - but I've just discovered, very belatedly, that there's now a fully-fledged website: well worth a visit.

The disappearance of a blog, especially an anonymous or pseudonymous one, is rather like that final, unbelievably poignant scene in Philip Pullman's 'Dark Materials' trilogy. The portal between the two parallel worlds has to be sealed, never to be re-opened, and Will and Lyra realise that there is absolutely no way they can ever contact each other again. Or it's like the scene in 2001 when the spaceship spins over into a distant galaxy, with no chance of communication with Earth being resumed.

Or am I being a little melodramatic here?

Hitch on Holm

Further to this post, here's Christopher Hitchens, in an interview with Michael Totten, expressing, as only Hitch can, his outrage at Nancy Graham Holm's article:

Hitchens: Let's do a brief thought experiment. I tell you the following: On New Year's Eve, a man in his mid-seventies is having his granddaughter over for a sleep-over, his five-year old granddaughter. He is attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding maniac with homicidal intent. Your mammalian reaction, your reaction as a primate, is one of revulsion. I'm trusting you on this. [Laughs.]

MJT: Oh, yes. You are correct.

Hitchens: Then you pick up yesterday's Guardian, one of the most liberal newspapers in the Western world, and there's a long article that says, ah, that picture, that moral picture, that instinct to protect the old and the young doesn't apply in this case. The man asked for it. He drew a cartoon that upset some people. We aren't at all entitled to use our moral instincts in the correct way.

This is a sort of cultural and moral suicide, in my opinion.

[...]

These people are saying the grandfather and granddaughter were the authors of their own attempted assassinations. These are some of the same people who say that if I don't believe in God I can't know what morality is. They've just dissolved morality completely into relativism by saying actually, occasionally, carving up grandfathers and granddaughters with an axe on New Year's Eve can be okay if it's done to protect the reputation of a seventh century Arabian man who heard voices.

(Via Andrew)

Update

More revulsion against Holm from Oliver Kamm here: 'Where do you start with this peerless featherhead?"

And yet more from Russell: 'Let the name of Nancy Graham Holm find its place in every hall of ignominy and shame, indelibly inscribed there for posterity.'

Another snow day

If Norm can do it, so can I. Some views from my window, somewhere in eastern England, this Wednesday lunchtime:

CiF beyond parody yet again

It's 'you couldn't make it up' time again. A cartoonist and his five-year-old granddaughter are terrorised by a murderous axe-wielding fanatic and the Guardian's Comment is Free runs a column with this heading:

Prejudiced Danes provoke fanaticism: Publishing Kurt Westergaard's cartoon was an aggressive act born of Denmark's reluctance to respect religious belief.

I'm speechless. Fortunately, Miranda Celeste Hale has said all that needs to be said here. Her final sentence sums it up perfectly: 'Vile. Truly, truly vile.'

The shameful CiF piece was written by one Nancy Graham Holm, who apparently is 'writing a book on feminism in the Abraham religions' (should be a slim volume) 'including the "gender jihad" among Muslim women worldwide.' Oh dear.

Incidentally, I came across Miranda's blog Exquisite With Love via Jen's list of 'awesome female atheists' at Blag Hag, to which I was pointed by B&W, whose guiding light (naturally) features prominently in it.

New Year miscellany

First, exceedingly cold day back at work (well, trawling in a desultory fashion through two weeks of unread emails and re-acquainting myself with stuff I wrote before Christmas, in a vain effort to remember what the hell I was thinking....), so less time for extended posting. To fill the temporary gap, here are a few links to others who are keeping up the good work:

Andrew on why the humanism of the original version of Miracle on 34th Street is superior to the sentimental and thinly-disguised pro-faithism of the re-make (though in our household I'm afraid Richard Attenborough is Santa Claus).

For balance: Michael Sean Winters on hopes for 2010, from the perspective of a Catholic Democrat, yearning for a revival of the Catholic social justice tradition.

And finally The New Centrist links to an important piece by Ernest Sternberg on the 'new radical ideology' of the anti-globalisation, anti-western, anti-Zionist left (though I'm still sceptical about whether this disparate movement of oppositionalists is actually for anything).

Happy New Year.

Northern lights

Writing in one of those end-of-decade review things (not reproduced on the paper's website), an anonymous Guardian author puts forward this intriguing thesis:

As the decade advanced, one prerequisite for a noughties mega-seller became clear. A journey to the north, realm of occult knowledge and dark forces, links the Harry Potter sequence (King's Cross to Hogwarts) to The Da Vinci Code (Paris to Scotland). Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander/Mikael Blomkvist trilogy similarly begins with the pair travelling northward from Stockholm in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and as a series offers a bracing voyage into Nordic torment that has attracted bookings from around the world.

The article goes on to adduce Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels, in which teenage heroine Bella relocates from Arizona to Washington state, as a further example of the trend.

But there's one significant instance which, surprisingly, the reviewer overlooks. Philip Pullman's massively popular Dark Materials trilogy begins in a parallel-universe Oxford, briefly visits London, then transports its young heroine, Lyra, northwards, to Svalbard and an alternative Nordic world. For me, that northerly relocation was a massive disappointment. I was completely absorbed by Pullman's detailed recreation of a parallel Oxford, which appealingly combined the familiar and the strange, and I was tantalised (despite the author's tendentious anti-Catholicism) by the glimpse he offered of a London where the Reformation had never happened. I wanted more of this dense, intriguing, human world, but instead found myself as a reader whisked off to an unappealing landscape of flying witches and speaking polar bears.

When it comes to the fantasy genre, one's appreciation of a book seems to depend a great deal on matters of personal taste: on whether you find the imaginary world created by the author appealing or jarring. Famously, Tolkien couldn't get on with C.S.Lewis' Narnia series, despite their close friendship and shared love of all things mythological. It wasn't that he disliked the stories, but Lewis' fantasy world - fauns, redemptive lions and so on - just wasn't to his taste. Of course, many readers have found the same with Tolkien's Middle Earth. I'm not one of them, though my tolerance is rather strained when it comes to the pseudo-Saxon warrior world in the later volumes.

In my youth, I used to consume fantasy novels by the bucketload. In recent years, not so much. Pullman and Potter are recent exceptions. And Alasdair Gray's Lanark, I suppose, would be another, very different, example. But, as I noted in the previous post, I'm a nit-picky and demanding reader, and at the first sign of anything too jarring or outlandish in the mythical landscape - talking polar bears being a prime example - a fantasy novel, mega-seller or not, is liable to find itself returned unceremoniously to the shelves.

Misreadings

So there I am, happily reading one of the books I was given for Christmas - William McCarthy's biography of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (see previous post) - when I come across something that stops me in my tracks and makes me feel I can hardly go on. What great offence has the author committed to induce this reaction? Why, he has used the word 'Commons' (as in 'House of') without the definite article. And he has done it more than once. Writing about the failed attempt to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts in 1790, McCarthy describes Edmund Burke giving a speech 'in Commons' and on the very next page he mentions Barbauld composing an address to the members 'of Commons'.

I had a similar experience recently with the biography of another eighteenth-century political figure: John Keane's life of Tom Paine, in which the author insists on writing about Paine's childhood in 'Norfolk County', as if he grew up in Virginia, rather than East Anglia. Elsewhere, he describes Paine journeying into 'county Kent'.

How could authors who have obviously done extensive research into their subjects and clearly spent a great deal of time in England working on their books, make such basic mistakes? In both cases, you can see how it has happened: a familiar American usage has been transposed to an unfamiliar British setting, with jarring results (in McCarthy's case, he has clearly used as his template the way Americans talk about Congress, minus the definite article - 'in Congress', 'members of Congress'). But that doesn't explain why it happened: why these esteemed authors didn't realise they were in error, and why their editors didn't see fit to correct them. (This isn't meant as an anti-American tirade, by the way: I'm sure British authors make similar mistakes when writing about US topics.)

And why does it matter so much to me as a reader, to the point where I feel reluctant to go on with books that I was finding completely absorbing until that moment? It's probably because I think of reading as a relationship of trust. When I start a new book, I'm looking to see whether I can have confidence in the author: if it's a work of non-fiction, confidence that they know their stuff, and if a novel, that they're not going to surprise me with an unbelievable plot twist or unconvincing character. Once that sense of confidence has been confirmed (I find this usually happens in the first two or three pages), I can let go and enjoy the book, trusting myself to the author's care, rather as a traveller has to put their complete trust in a ship's captain or airline pilot before relaxing and enjoying the journey.

Coming across the kind of basic mistake that I noted above can be enough to shake that trust and make me lose all my confidence in the author - and in the book. If the writer can get wrong something that is so fundamental, then who's to say there aren't other errors lying in wait for me? Should I start distrusting the author's more important claims about their subject? Writing is a kind of magic trick, in which the reader is lulled into suspending their knowledge that these words have been created by a human mind, and for a time believes that they have somehow emerged from the ether and are an emanation of objective truth. Finding a mistake, however trivial, destroys that illusion and reminds us, annoyingly, of the author's fallibility.

Or is it just that I'm neurotic and obsessive?