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I enjoyed Pat Collins’ enigmatic documentary on Gabriel Byrne, shown on RTE 1 the other night. Byrne was in meditative mode, reflecting on life, love and acting. He talked about the ‘in between, grey days’, rather than the bad times, being the ones that test your mettle. He reflected on his struggle with depression, talking about the times when he is ‘afraid inside’. Byrne doesn’t drink anymore either, his being a classic Irish relationship with the bottle, and his life experiences – including those of being a father and a divorcee – have turned him into a sympathetic character, alive to the fragility of the human condition, and while his perceptions are not necessarily original or especially different, there is an integrity to the man that makes him  worth listening to.  I found particularly interesting his observation that acting, or indeed literature or comedy, should be about trying to tell some sort of truth. This is something I discuss regularly with my students as we attempt to parse the distinctions between work that is worthy of being termed literature and work that is not.  I teach a memoir class and although none of the books chosen could be termed an ‘about’ book, eg about my attempt to climb a mountain, some of the work has greater intent or integrity than others. When we feel the truth of that intent, we determine the work is worthy of the label literature.

Love this article from the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06 on the subject of ‘honest’ work. The article is focused around Matthew B. Crawford’s  “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work”, written because Crawford has had enough of watching  the ‘soul-destroying consequences in our new work habits—endless hours spent at flexible jobs, performing abstract tasks on computer screens, and believes there must be a better way. According to the New Yorker, ‘Crawford means his book to be a philosophical manifesto for a dawning age: an ode to old-fashioned hard work, and an argument that localism can help cure our spiritual and economic woes’. Enough, therefore, of abstract activities, that give rise to destructive and incomprehensible financial products and a return, in Crawford’s case at least, to fixing motorbikes. Crawford is both a PhD and Fellowship student, and has worked at a Washington think tank. But he quit to open his own motorbike repair shop, something he says, has given him “a place in society,” as well as an “economically viable” job that won’t evaporate or get moved overseas. He believes that ‘cultural prejudices have steered many potential tradesmen into college, and then toward stultifying office jobs, which provide less satisfaction and less security than skilled manual labor, and sometimes less money’.

The book is timely, given that there is at least some small debate (not enough) now taking place about the kind of society we have created, the kind of lives we lead, as well as why so many of us feel we have to tread the soulless corridors of corporate workspaces in order to be valued and valuable. According to the New Yorker, Crawford’s solution to big business is small business; ‘he pits the work ethic and scrappy spirit of “small commercial enterprise” against the “softly despotic tendencies” of “outsized corporations.”

As the New Yorker says, Crawford wants his readers to become better, happier, more productive workers. I think we  all could agree with that.

http://www.rte.ie/arts/2009/0714/theartsshow.html

Paul Krugman: “In the long run the Irish economy will actually restore equilibrium, but as my favourite economist says, in the long run we are all dead.”

In an effort to improve our writing, I’ve been interrogating the art of using plain English with my journalism students. We first of all read Orwell’s treatise on the written word, Politics and the English Language, before considering the manner in which many of our political and literary masters mangle or obscure the language to serve their own interests.

Written in 1946, Orwell’s essay should be required reading for anyone interested in writing and communicating in the English language and is as relevant today as ever. I wince, for example, in uncomfortable recognition when he discusses how naturally writers fall into using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, aware that I have surely done so under deadline pressure – or maybe not even – to finish a theatre review or other writing work.

In the essay, Orwell is rigorous in his dissection of the meaningless words and phrases commonly used in art and literary criticism. He writes: “Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.”

Oh dear, I’m sure I have used those meaningless words in my time. And I am indebted to Orwell for reminding me as a writer to be scrupulous in seeking out clarity in my words and phrases.

Interestingly, the essay also reminds me that, as a reader, it is not necessarily my fault, or the fault of any other reader, that I often find wading through art criticism, in particular, a tedious exercise. It is, instead, the failing of the writer, who has engaged in what Orwell describes as “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug”.

Writer Fintan O’Toole more or less reiterated this point as part of a super column on artist James Coleman, recently the subject of a major exhibition across three Dublin galleries, when he noted that Coleman’s work is often funny and accessible, despite the fact that it is written about in “the obtuse argot of critical theory”, which makes it “sound difficult, utterly abstract, up itself”. I remember John Berger saying something similar in a public interview in Cork some years ago, when he told the audience that he wrote Ways of Seeing because all the other art criticism around at the time was “crap”. Indeed, the distinction between the writing style of Ways of Seeing and the language used by so many contemporary art critics is as stark today as ever.

Consider this paragraph from the Berger book: “Let us examine an exceptional painted image of nakedness. It is a painting by Rubens of his young second wife whom he married when he himself was relatively old. We see her in the act of turning, her fur about to slip off her shoulders. Clearly she will not remain as she is for more than a second. In a superficial sense her image is as instantaneous as a photograph’s. …Her body confronts us, not as an immediate sight, but as an experience – the painter’s experience. Why?…the profound reason is a formal one. Her appearance has been literally recast by the painter’s subjectivity.”

Setting aside the fact that Berger is discussing a 17th century painting, and not a post-modern artwork, note the clarity and precision of the language. Berger’s sentences are short, focused. His words are simple, almost everyday, yet they do not seek to ‘dumb down’ the information. And he eschews the ready-made phrases and lazy metaphors that so infuriated Orwell and are so much a feature of the art criticism many of us are used to reading.

My students and I also analysed a range of political writing. In his essay, Orwell writes that “in our time, it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing”. This is also true of contemporary political writing, which has coined meaningless – and dangerous – phrases such as ‘going forward’, ‘collateral damage’ and ‘axis of evil’. What do we picture in our heads, I asked my students, when we consider the phrase ‘collateral damage’? Bits of shrapnel, they replied. Certainly not the human beings the term is supposed to be describing. This kind of language, says Orwell, is used to defend the indefensible. Other phrases, such as Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “known knowns and unknown unknowns” blur and obscure reality. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” writes Orwell in his essay.

But insincerity is the powder that fuels the words and phrases of the politicians who govern this country. Writer Joe O’Connor, in a recent radio diary for RTE Radio 1, captured the befuddlement we all feel – or at least should be feeling – as we listen to Brian Cowen tell us that people need to “internalise precisely the lightning-rod issue in the way which respects the broad parameters of the budget arithmetic”. Excuse me?

“Have you noticed,” wrote O’Connor in his diary, “that the minute we started saying going forward was the minute we started going backward with a vengeance so going forward if it means anything which I personally doubt actually seems to mean going sideways or going arseways or going pear shaped very quickly but we don’t want to admit that to the public because they’d string us up from the lampposts if we did going forward.”

Dead right. But O’Connor is merely following in the footsteps of Orwell, who wrote, more than half a century ago, that: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” What has changed since then? Not much, it appears.

So what can one possibly do, save throw one’s hands up in despair? Start small, advises Orwell. “At least one can change one’s own habits,” he writes, “and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refused – into the dustbin where it belongs.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell

An interesting – and reassuring – article from one of last year’s New Yorker magazines. It compares the work of Picasso and Cezanne and notes that Picasso did his best work in his 20s, fitting our usual ideas about genius. Cezanne, on the contrary, did his best work in his 60s. He was a late bloomer. The writer, Malcolm Gladwell , who could himself be termed something of a precocious young genius, examines the different approaches to their work taken by these two species. Prodigies, he writes, ‘start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it.’ According to the piece, Picasso said: “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’….in my opinion, to find is the thing.” Late bloomers, on the other hand, work in exactly the opposite way. The article finds that their approach is experimental, their goals imprecise and therefore their procedure tentative and incremental. They build their skills slowly, over a period of years, and rarely feel they have succeeded.

We often forget, those of us with the urge for recognition in our field, and immersed in a culture that fetishises youth and instant success, that people achieve at different times and speeds during a working life. Young geniuses abound – or appear to – but late bloomers are more difficult to spot. For every Zadie Smith, whose breakthrough novel White Teeth was completed during her final year at college, there is a William Golding, who was rejected by 21 publishers before his novel, Lord of the Flies, was accepted. But in the wake of eventual success, how often are those 21 rejections discussed?

The message is: don’t give up, even in the dark times. It is not a new one – Churchill told us to ‘never give in’, Camus imagined ‘Sisyphus happy’, while Beckett, of course, wrote that one must ‘try again, fail again, fail better’ – but it is an easy one, especially in these ephemeral, insubstantial times, to forget.

As Gladwell writes in the New Yorker, sometimes “genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”