Book Review - Donne: The Reformed Soul, by John Stubbs

John Donne is, after Shakespeare, perhaps our most familiar poet of the English Renaissance. Yet his best known insight – “that no man is an island” – comes not from his poems, nor even from his sermons, but from his private meditations.

This is perhaps how Donne would have wished it. Despite the urging of his admirers, he felt that his early poems were “Satrique thornes … growne/ where seeds of better Arts, were early sown”. These were the poems of a young man observing the world as he tried to find his place in it, and whose career, first as a government administrator, and later as a clergyman, might be damaged by their erotic and satiric tone. Yet, as this new biography suggests, this private thought was the “great thought at the heart of Donne’s life,” and one by which we can understand the man and his poems.

For young man and elderly clergyman alike finding a place in the world was difficult. Born in 1572 to a Catholic family of saintly pedigree (the corporeal relics of his ancestor, Thomas More, were macabre heirlooms), he was part of a growing middle-class which sought to distinguish its sons from unruly apprentices with a university education. Despite diligence at Oxford, the Oath of Allegiance to the Reformed Church prevented Donne from graduating. After a spell at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was both studious and a frequenter of plays, writing those “Satirique thornes” in the bargain, he fought with the glamourous but ill-fated Earl of Essex against the Spanish. Surviving these wars, he seemed to find a place as secretary to Elizabeth’s favourite lawyer.

Yet Donne was not immune to exacerbating his ambiguous social position. The scandal of his marriage to Ann More without her father’s consent cost him his job and, briefly, his liberty. For fifteen years his talents were wasted as stigma mired him and his family in shabby penury. With the “Pseudo-Martyr,” ironically a treatise on Catholics who make their lives in England more difficult that it need be, he wrote himself into the clergy and rapidly ascended to the most prominent pulpit in the land as Dean of St Paul’s where he navigated the religious controversies the past Reformation and the coming Civil War.

Stubbs strategy of ordering the precarious complexity of his subject by treating him not as an island but as part of the historical mainland allows him tell “the story,” taking us from our familiar London and bringing to life the concerns of Donne’s. Thus, as much as he evokes the solace Donne found in letter writing and letters, which “more than kisses … mingle souls,” the adventures with Essex and the machinations of the court read with the pace of a good thriller, while comedy is to be found in Donne’s apoplectic father-in-law.

The portrait that emerges from this detailed research is one from which our multitasking, Ritalin-deficient age has much to learn, and Donne is presented much as we might wish to see ourselves: tolerant, socially responsible, progressive even, hardworking, while also possessed of the meditative resources to see beyond momentary personal circumstance.

But however apt Stubbs’ approach may be to telling a life’s story, it leaves him at a disadvantage when placing the poetry in that story. As much as his reading of “Love’s Exchanges” as a subtle protest against the torture practiced by the government Donne served fits with his general portrait, a lot depends on the suggestion that “it was possibly written during his [Donne’s] time as apparatchik”. While Stubbs acknowledges the difficulties of dating Donne’s poetry, with no argument to tie specific poems to specific times, significant aspects of his portrait, however attractive, are confined to possibility.

The question is do you buy the picture knowing that it may not be entirely accurate. For me the answer is yes. After rejecting the “Satirique thornes” of his earlier days, Donne urges that we “seek ourselves in ourselves”. Significantly this urging takes place in a verse-letter, and above all Stubbs’ biography is a profound commitment to writing as a process of knowing one’s self and knowing that we are not so many islands.

Deliver me from Spinning Plates - Monkey: The Journey to the West

Monkey is apparently based on a Chinese legend with music from Damon Albarn and animation by Jamie Hewitt, both of Gorrillaz. Along with their work is the often astonishing acrobatics of 40 performers on stage. The first scene is called "The Birth of Monkey and his Quest for Immortality". Immortality is achieved by the third scene where, with simian glee, Monkey trashes what appears to be a celestial tea party and eats the peach of immortality. There are another six scenes, each set in such locations as an underwater crystal palace (compete with suspended singing starfish), the Volcano City and Paradise. Having achieved his Nietzschian goal, monkey is incarcerated for 500 years after which he joins a young pilgrim looking for sacred scriptures. Their search is rather unfocused and this goal is soon abandoned, or their discovery was lost by me through the daring use of blue subtitles on a black surface, so quite what the purpose of the last five scenes is other than pointlessly clever acrobatics I am not sure. Each of these follows the same template: acrobatics to set the scene, the disruptive arrival of Monkey and gang, gleeful slaughter by Monkey to initial shock but eventual participation by his companions. By scene seven my forehead was resting on the metal rail in front of me. Catatonia was beginning to set in by this point, but this deliverance was prevented by Mr Albarn's attempts at martial music which at times verged on the sub-Gilbert-&-Sullivan. Thus, by the final scene when you thought you'd seen everything, out come the spinning plates which torture at least I thought I had been spared. Jamie Hewitt's animation is the best thing about the show, especially the way it combines with the acrobatics, but this is only used to link the first three scenes. Either money ran out or he possibly felt that he had nothing to contribute without the semblance narrative.

Managing the post PhD come down

A brief note on what I did after passing my viva and an example not to follow.

After my viva I sat down to do some marking. (The fact that I was out before the pubs opened might have had something to do with this.) After that I suffered, and still do suffer, paralyzing bouts of anxiety about how I'm going to pay the rent; whether a career in data entry is preferable; wonder if I am capable of writing a novel; wonder what my supervisor meant when, after being asked if he had any advice for the aspiring academic, he said "Don't"; tried working on some publications, gave up because it was pointless, told myself not give up what I'd worked so hard for; tried to stop smoking, failed, resigned myself to cancer as preferable to daily failure and reminders of my moral weakness; squandered money on a martini to cheer myself up, hated myself for squandering money with the added factor of gin induced depression; tried to control my flatmate by instigating a domestic reign of terror whose only form of control was passive-aggression, alienated my flatmate; cried. Still haven't tried pornography and the laundry's still being done, so there's quite a way to go yet.

Of course, I don't plan travel a path lined with piles of fetid laundry, but if any one has the route map, please sling it in my direction.

Book Review - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This book had me waking my flatmate as I screamed in my sleep. Do not be put off such nocturnal trauma; this is a rewarding and vital book. The father and son at its centre are “pilgrims” and “mendicant friars” in the “cold glaucoma” of a sunless, wasted America. Scavenging the hopefully abandoned houses and stores of a more abundant age, decent shoes are their first priority after food. Two bullets, one apiece for father and son, are their material defence against the gangs of roadreapers who would rape the son and eat them both. Language itself is not immune to this destruction, “the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion”. Yet, however spare the language McCarthy uses to imagine the absence of God and words, his is of our abundant age. Through it he has created a tale whose fearful beauty offers a glimmering hope and reminds us that our civilization, any civilization, is as wafer thin as a “host” and as fleeting as words.

Spilling his seed on rocky ground – The Diviners by Rick Moody

Early on in Rick Moody’s The Diviners, action-hero-turned-movie-producer, Thaddeus Griffen, extemporizes the plot of a miniseries of the same title. From the departure of the Mongolian hoards from their drought stricken plains to the founding of Las Vegas, this quest for water is a multigenerational TV epic of love, mysteries, survival, and the quenching of a thirst which you, the putative viewer, share.

This epic tale is conceived by Griffen as he seduces and covers for his co-worker, Annabel Duffy, who has lost the script demanded by their donut-munching boss, Vanessa Meandro. Thaddeus views on the creative process in terms of pornography, and he suggests that Annabel stop working on the biopic of the wife of the Marquis de Sade and concentrate on the story that “gets you off [italics Moody’s]. The one where all the differences in the world, are obliterated in the reprise of the come shot of creation, the big grand unified come shot that made the conditions that made you and me and art and commerce and religion”.

"The Diviners" is Thaddeus’s come shot, though one suspects that he’s getting off on being drunk, on being charming, and generally on being Thaddeus Griffen. Other characters are only slightly less self-obsessed, but these too are propelled by Moody’s sustained exuberant prose which has the speed and punch of a pinball. Just be thankful this energy is contained within a book. So, as the rest of the world counts the chads in Dade County, we arrive in New York in the hands of a writer who can handle the PR girls, the recording artists, the dot-com bust, and a bipolar bike courier, all of whom want a piece of "The Diviners".

What follows in the 31 chapters, plus opening and closting titles, is a display of linguistic acrobatics as Moody jumps from style to style, bringing us new characters to the very end. Looking up from the somersaults, we see marriages break-up from the perspective of autistic children, childhood from the perspective of a group of dialectians who haven't quite left the schoolyard, and identity reconstituted as a patient emerges from her coma.

Meandro buys the Thadster’s story and, come the six page pitch to the networks, barely interrupted by paragraphs let alone the exec at the other end of the phone line, proclaims “The Diviners” to be “the perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience”. There is something here for the hundreds of millions who just didn’t know how thirsty they were until those Mongol hoards tore into their living rooms, something for every group that feels disenfranchised by the media elites of the Northeast and the West Coast. This is, as Meandro puts it “a millennialist vision … a reconstituted Jesus strolling down Fifth Avenue, laying waste to readers of the New York Times”.

And herein lies the problem with Moody’s book. His book is about thirst for meaning and the vacuity of the televisual metaphor. Yet, having established that these are deliberately vacuous in order that they can be filled with anyone and everyone’s content (think terrorist soap-opera, think Lost) and so achieve the widest possible audience, he is stuck with it as his own deliberately bloated yet curiously flat metaphor.

Of course there are ironies in the divinational metaphor. In her list of parched wanderers of the deserts of meaning, Meandro omits those media elites of east and west, who see every possible spin-off and marketing scam to hustle the thirsty brethren of the American interior, but feel the thirst to be slaked themselves yet lack the struggle for survival of the metaphorical diviners and religious meaning of their religiously minded market. These media elites are the real subject of Moody’s book, but Moody refuses to explore them, and beyond abstract meaning, he cannot say what thirst possesses his Gawker-reading media bunnies. Instead, Moody borrows a technique more cinematic than televisual to offer up the cliché of his disparate and desperate characters engaged in the same activity. This is done so well you can almost here the elegiac soundtrack, and if you didn’t get the concept of redemption through shared interest, we’re talking Thanksgiving.

The interest in question is, of course, watching television, in this case the hit series The Werewolves of Fairfield County, in which the wealthy and leisured of Connecticut have mutated and breakout into lupine madness every full moon. In the midst of uncaring corpocracy they are forced to develop a moral code lest they be discovered in which the stronger look after the weak, the older look after the younger. In terms of meaning the werewolves have it all, a struggle to survive but also a dynamic sense of belonging. No pampered neurotics thirsty for a way of understanding the pain of their existence here.

Yet having felt a thirst and divined the quencher, Moody refuses to see what happens to the characters who he clearly loves and has made considerable effort to make us love after they slaked their thirst. Do they find God? Do they join the SLBC? Do they become werewolves? We never find out and they are abandoned so that we can breathlessly meet more new characters.

On the one hand, Moody is gesturing to serious issues: the divisions of the United States, the vacuity of our modern lives, and the thought that we might want something more than cars, bars, and moviestars. Yet, on the other, Moody's book is more about his exuberance and showcasing his undoubted stylistic ingenuity as are hastened towards Moody's come-shot of creation. The thing is if there is a come-shot, then it's only been a hand job.

Announcing the Vladimir Nabokov Reading Project

Le tout Manchester is reading celebrated Russo-American writer, Vladimir Nabokov. Le tout being, well, my neighbour, Ben, and John at the Cornerhouse (both Pale Fire), and Dr Biswell (Pnin). As a service to readers, The Manual is embarking on the Vladimir Nabokov Reading Project. Full attention will ensure that reader will be able to hold their own in literary conversations across the North West. This service is vitally needed as due to shortages of Pale Fire at Waterstone's, Mancunians were left without the supply of linguistic wonders which, delicate things that they are, is as vital to their lives as premium gin and cheap red wine.

First up is Pnin. The rest will follow, but The Real Life of Sebastian Knight will have to wait till I get my copy back from Luke. If you want to know more about Vladimir Nabokov or buy the books, you know were Wikipedia and Amazon are to be found. Better resources may follow as the project continues.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

With Pnin we are introduced to Russian émigré, Timofey Pnin. Tenuously untenured at a New England college, he muddles through 1950s America with a variety of English all of his own. Mocked and loved on campus in equal measure, he has an acute sense of the ridiculous of the world and of himself. For Pnin sorrow is "the only thing in the world people really possess" and his planned courses will show that "the history of man is the history of pain". Alongside these bleak courseplans, we are treated two parties, a former wife convinced of her own glamour, the visit of her insular, wunderkind son, and Pnin's wonderful driving. As with much of Nabokov, there are dopelgangers aplenty causing Pnin (and us) to ask which is the genuine article. Anyone who knows himself to be fallible and slightly absurd will love Pnin, and will be grateful to Nabokov for making this invention a reality.

More blogs on Pnin

Read about Jim Story's encounter with a real life Pnin.

Manchester. Not original. Not modern.

Ahead of the opening of the Manchester International Festival in nine days time, it is perhaps worth dwelling for a moment on the words of Nick Johnson, the head of Marketing Manchester, as he promoted the Festival in New York earlier this year. Of his strapline, "Manchester. Original. Modern," he was reported by the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead as saying, "What it's encouraging everyone in the city to do is to ask the question: Is what I'm doing original and modern?" As yet no-one has been struck down in St Ann Square on exiting Starbucks by the existential crisis this demand would inspire, but there is the nagging question of the consequences of failure to participate in the urban flashmob army. Banishment to Bury? Accompanying Johnson in New York was city council leader, Sir Richard Leese, who of the strapline interjected with the wonderfully heartfelt, if worryingly vacuous comment, "It's not a slogan - it's a brand signifier".

Marketing terminology aside, the slogan is an odd choice. As much as Manchester might claim originality and modernity as the cradle of the industrial revolution, it has in recent decades understood itself in its representations and stories. The ecstasy of this is that as a city Manchester knows that it is caught in its stories. We know that Manchester is not Coronation Street, Shameless or Cold Feet even if we nod ironically to these stories on an almost daily basis. That Mancunians inhabit stories was precisely the point of Twenty-Four Hour Party People. " Print the legend," says Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson quoting John Huston, while telling us that the legend is not the reality. These stories, our desire to inhabit them, the way they help us understand our lives suggest that Manchester, far from being original or modern, may in fact be a mythical place. In understanding this, Manchester rejects the idea of originality and authenticity, a defining practice not of modernity but of postmodernity.

The Manchester International Festival is itself part of this myth. Billed as "The world's first international festival of original, new work," it is designed to position Manchester as a centre of creativity of international standing. But even a cursory glance at the programme suggests we pause to question the originality of the work. First up on the Festival website is Industrial Revolution, a clubnight whose very name gestures to that moment of "original modernity" in the eighteenth century and take of Factory Records in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth. The principle behind the work of the event's performers, who include DJ Shadow, the Unabombers, Fat Boy Slim, is of course quotation. The launch event, Monkey: Journey to the West, is, we learn in the detail, "based on an ancient Chinese legend," while we might ask where would Victoria Borisova-Ollas, composer of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, be without the novel of the same title by Salman Rushdie?

In this morass of quotation and allusion, we might ask in what sense is the word "original" being used. The question is not pedantic. To bill a festival of creative work featuring artists who clearly reject notions of originality as original to an audience who do the same is to risk ridicule, insult your audience, or demonstrate a philistine approach to the creative process. That is to say, artists and writers have through the ages suffered those existential crises on exiting Starbucks as they are poleaxed by their own lack or originality and mediocrity. For Horace it was the art of poetry to make the ordinary seem original, with the result that he is reputed to have also written that, "He who knows a thousand works of art knows a thousand and frauds." More recently, T.S. Eliot put it more baldly: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." In this sense the history of art is the history of theft.

Which brings us back to the claim of Manchester's later day Medici's that their Festival is "The world's first international festival of original, new work," a claim which shows a marked indifference to, for example, the Venice Biennale, now in its 57th year, or the work of the Edinburgh Festivals. It is, of course these, which Leese, Johnson and other city fathers wish the Manchester International Festival to rival. They are to be applauded for their aspiration, but it is neither an original nor modern aspiration; Edinburgh and Venice got there before them. As Coogan/Wilson points out Manchester is like Renaissance Florence, and in the intention to put an artist on every corner, Leese has created a festival of thieves and frauds which will only add to the myth that is Manchester. And for that, their "brand signifier" might be the greatest work of art of the festival.

Other takes on the MIF - [added 19 June 2007]

Yankunian at the Manchizzle tells about Not the Manchester International Festival and being MIFed on Portland Street by the New Yorker article.

Diehard Manchester media bunnies at 1 Scott Place produce this surprising result at Comment is Free: