Category: The Dish

Largely unimpressed by James Booth’s efforts “to present a warmer, kinder, more admirable Larkin” in his new book, Philip Larkin: Life, Art, and Love, Jonathan Farmer finds the poet something of a misanthrope:

His personality seems to have been, to a large extent, a kind of jerry-rigged response to his awkwardness, and it’s a measure of his extraordinary inventiveness that his manufactured persona endeared him to so many who knew him in so many ways. The poems, at their frequent best, transform those same impulses into art with even greater skill. …

Andrew Motion, whose earlier biography—both more critical of and more sympathetic toward Larkin—will thankfully remain the definitive work, has written of the “number of moments” in Larkin’s work which “manage to transcend the flow of contingent time altogether.” Those moments rarely involved other people. Famously death-obsessed, Larkin seems to have craved such freedoms, but they didn’t come easily to him, probably for the same reasons he so needed them: Life scared him, too. Too long withheld from the company of people outside his family, Larkin sharpened his wit in learning how to please others, but as with so many who invest so much in performing, he rarely found pleasure in others beyond his ability to please them. Company exhausted him, even though he grew lonely in its absence.

Peter J. Conradi, on the other hand, appreciates the complexity of Booth’s portrait:

Booth’s psychology is subtler than Motion’s and more convincing. His achievement is to paint a satisfying and believably complex picture. Larkin the nihilist also wrote: ‘ The ultimate joy is to be alive in the flesh.’ Larkin the xenophobe loved Paris and translated Verlaine. Larkin the racist wrote the wonderful lyric ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and dreamt of being a negro. The Larkin who wrote ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad’ loved his own parents.

As for Larkin the misogynist, it is mysterious how the character painted by Motion could have had any love life at all, let alone a highly complex and fulfilling one. True, Larkin himself once wrote incredulously and comically of sex as ‘like asking someone else to blow your nose for you’: he sometimes experienced a Swiftian horror at being incarnate. Yet he was also very attractive to women and for excellent reasons: he liked women and was a tolerant, patient listener and a wise soulmate. He regretted never marrying. In one mood he indeed described his life to Motion as ‘fucked up’ and ‘failed’ as a result. But this was one mood; and he had others.

And Jeremy Noel-Tod notices that, whatever his churlishness, Larkin managed to have a robust, if complicated, love life:

Outside the precious space of his writing, his complicated, indecisive love life kept him busy. Booth provides new material drawn from interviews with the various women involved, all of whom are cited in support of the view that Larkin the man has been maligned: ‘Typically, they found him “witty”, “entertaining”, “considerate” and “kind”.’ These qualities are abundantly present in the poems too. But so is unkindness, and the writing wouldn’t be as acute as it is without that unsentimental self-knowledge.

Previous Dish on Larkin here.

In a review of Joana Bourke’s The Story of Pain, Arthur Holland Michel considers how we find words for our suffering:

We “can express the thoughts of Hamlet,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1930, “but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” Even acute agony is so shifty, vague, embodied, and (at times) transcendental, it defies meaningful description. Stub your toe and it’s hard not to be hyperbolic, if not blasphemous. People say a pain “feels like getting stabbed,” even if they have never been stabbed and therefore have no idea what it actually feels like to be stabbed. …

People in Japan have “musk deer headaches,” and a hurting person in India might invoke “parched chickpeas.” The British “splitting headache!”—which was my mother’s go-to when we made a fuss—is no less peculiar. When trying to describe my shingles, I settled, in my delirium, to calling it “a jaunty hat of pain.” My uncle, who is fighting (bravely) against Lymphoma, says he feels that a cuckoo is trapped in his body, trying desperately to escape. I’m pretty sure he has never swallowed a live bird, and yet, like so many of Bourke’s sufferers, that’s as close as he can get to describing what he feels. As she points out, these descriptions, however bizarre and hyperbolic, still matter. By verbalizing how a pain feels, we are informing the way we feel it.

On a related note, Alana Massey movingly relates the challenge of articulating her experience of depression:

The English language has a great deficit in words to describe the impenetrable hopelessness that mental illness visits upon those afflicted with it. I’ve spent embarrassing amounts of time seeking out words in other languages that give form and substance to this lifetime of experiences. Germans have Verzweiflung, it is the direct translation of despair but it is aslo accompanied by fear and pain. The Czech litost is the torment of suddenly seeing the extent of one’s own misery. Toska is what Nabakov said could never be fully expressed in English words and described as “a sensation of spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.” …

[E]ven in possession of a reasonably sophisticated grasp of the English language, it is exceedingly rare that I speak of the ever-present sense of dread at having to go about a day, day after day, in more than a few words. Clever metaphors and well-crafted sentences have many merits but few palliative functions. Literary history is littered with the corpses of suicidal writers whose extensive catalogs dedicated primarily to pain demonstrate that to articulate suffering is not to be relieved of it. And so instead of giving a name or a shape to it with words, I have communicated suffering with personal absences and incomplete gestures and tasks since I was very small.

Last month, the Pentagon released a new report on climate change (PDF). In his foreword to the report, Defense Secretary Hagel cautions that a warming earth “will have real impacts on our military and the way it executes its missions”:

The military could be called upon more often to support civil authorities, and provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the face of more frequent and  more intense natural disasters. Our coastal installations are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increased flooding, while droughts, wildfires, and more extreme temperatures could threaten many of our training activities. Our supply chains could be impacted, and we will need to ensure our critical equipment works under more extreme weather conditions. Weather has always affected military operations, and as the climate changes, the way we execute operations may be altered or constrained.

A WSJ op-ed responding to the report mocked Hagel’s characterization of climate change as a “threat multiplier” for the military:

The principal threats being multiplied here are hype and hysteria. Current fears about the Ebola virus notwithstanding, the last century of increasing carbon-dioxide emissions has also been the era of the conquest of infectious disease, from polio to HIV. No one has made a credible link between Ebola and climate change, though no doubt somebody will soon try.

As for terrorism, the Pentagon’s job is to defeat jihadist forces that are advancing under the flag of Islamist ideology. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did not murder his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood because the heat got to him, and Americans who might die at the hands of the Islamic State won’t care that Mr. Hagel is mobilizing against melting glaciers.

Scott Beauchamp criticizes the WSJ column for “willful misunderstanding of defense policy, faux pious indignation, and an appeal to irrationality that’s dressed up as common sense”:

Of course, Sec. Hagel isn’t sending Green Berets to the rain forest—at least not to save the trees. Most of the concerns that the Pentagon is trying to address in this report are kind of mundane issues here at home—things like management of all the land that houses military bases and training facilities. Hagel writes in the report:

We are almost done with a baseline survey to assess the vulnerability of our military’s more than 7,000 bases, instillations, and other facilities. In places like the Hampton Roads region in Virginia, with houses the largest concentration of U.S. military sites in the world, we see recurrent flooding today, and we are beginning work to address the projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet over the next 20 to 50 years.

So, this plan is not really about mobilizing against melting glaciers; it’s more like making sure our ships have viable facilities from which to launch bombs against ISIS. And the report doesn’t just focus on home, though. It casts a wider eye towards how a changing climate will affect defense missions in the future. Here’s another excerpt:

The impacts of climate change may cause instability in other countries by impairing access to food and water, damaging infrastructure, spreading disease, uprooting and displacing large numbers of people, compelling mass migration, interrupting commercial activity, or restricting electricity availability.

Critics like the Journal’s editorial board may try to miscast this roadmap as partisan posturing, but it’s fairly obvious that the opposite is the case. The Defense Department has offered up a clear-eyed plan that both acknowledges the dangers that climate change poses to our military and extrapolates the changes it should make in response, all based on the most current and reputable evidence.

“Bats live in a world of acoustic warfare,” writes Ed Yong. He describes a study that investigated a type of bat call with an “antagonistic bent”:

It’s called the sinFM. The bats rapidly raise and lower the pitch of their call more than a dozen times over, in bursts or “syllables” that last just a tenth of a second. The bats only ever did this [under observation] when one of their peers was using its feeding buzz, and was about to snag an insect. And when these hunting bats heard the sinFM, they usually flubbed their strikes, missing their targets between 77 and 85 percent of the time.

Yong goes on to describe an experiment that tested whether “the bats use their sinFM calls to actively jam the sonar of their competitors”:

[The researchers] attached a thin line to a street light, and dangled a moth from it. Whenever a bat approached this bait, they played a recording of a sinFM call from a nearby speaker. Normally, bats capture the dangling moths around 70 percent of the time, and neither a loud tone nor burst of noise put them off. But a sinFM call slashed their success rate to below 20 percent. Even though the moths were hanging in place, the bats couldn’t hit them.

And critically, the sinFM only worked if it overlapped with the bats’ feeding buzz. If the team played it just before an attack, it had no effect. Clearly, this call isn’t an off-putting shout. It really does seem to be a way for bats to jam each other. It isn’t meant to overwhelm a target’s senses like, say, a bright light shone into another person’s eyes. It’s more subtle than that. I imagine it to be more like saddling an opponent with a set of goggles that makes their world fuzzier.

If [researchers Aaron] Corcoran and [William] Conner are right, they’ve discovered the first example of a non-human animal that competes with a rival by disrupting its senses.

Nathan Heller savages Steven Pinker’s writing guide The Sense of Style, arguing that its arguments against prescriptivism “justify bad habits that certain people would rather not be bothered to unlearn”:

Some skimmings from the final part of Pinker’s book ran in the Guardian last month, under the provocative headline “10 ‘Grammar Rules’ It’s OK To Break (Sometimes).” It is a brazen document. Armed with examples from pop culture and from the literary canon, Pinker tries to shoot down some basic principles of English grammar (such as the distinction between “who” and “whom”), some looser stylistic preferences (such as the recommendation against splitting infinitives), and some wholly permissible things widely rumored to be wrong (such as beginning sentences with “but” or “and”). …

Too often, Pinker makes choices about usage on aesthetic grounds. He says that his new rules are graceful, but the standards of grace seem to be mainly his own. It’s for grammatical consistency, not beauty or gentilesse, for example, that correct English has us say “It was he” instead of “It was him.” Pinker calls this offense “a schoolteacher rule” that is “a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with semantics.” He’s done crucial research on language acquisition, and he offers an admirable account of syntax in his book, but it is unclear what he’s talking about here. As he knows, the nominative and accusative cases are the reason that we don’t say gibberish like “Her gave it to he and then sat by we here!” No idea is more basic to English syntax and grammar. In the phrase “It was he,” “it” and “he” are the same thing: they’re both the subject, and thus nominative. This is not “Latin.” (Our modern cases had their roots in tribal Germanic.)

Robert Lane Greene objects to that line of criticism:

Logic and consistency are, of course, good things. But both words mean different things to different people, and sometimes the goals conflict. For Mr Heller, it is “logical” that “was” should be like a grammatical equals sign. So if the subject of the sentence It was he is nominative, so should the pronoun in the predicate be: it = he. But case systems don’t care about invisible equals signs. In French, this construction is forbidden: the French say c’est moi, not c’est je, using a special set of pronouns (usually called “emphatic”) rather than the nominative ones. Nobody accuses the language of Pascal and Descartes of being any less logical than English.

In Danish, it is det er mig (“it is me”), using the accusative pronoun, not det er jeg (”it is I”). And yet no one says the language of Kierkegaard is a confusing mess. And it just so happens that the ancestors of the Danes and the French conquered England, contributing to the language’s mixed nature. It is me didn’t show up in writing until the 15th century, and so may not come directly from those languages. But contact between speakers of different languages did give English a habit of accepting different ways of saying things, such as both the king’s son (typically Germanic) and the son of the king (typically French). In any case, variety is not the same thing as the “complexity, ambiguity and doubt” Mr Heller fears.

Previous Dish on The Sense of Style here and here.