Bits & bobs: Nick Cave & the bad verses

Nick Cave on the literary template of the Gospel of Mark: “The Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about Him … it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and to fly… Mark just wants to get to the death. It’s done with such urgency.”

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There is also the Bad Seeds new album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! where Cave turns the man who died twice into Larry “and tells a picaresque tale of a man who might not have requested resurrection.”

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The Good Book’s bad bits – verses people would rather had been left out of the Bible. Simon Jenkins, editor of “shipoffools.com in the Times: “[The Bible] doesn’t have to be a textbook of infallible information and unbreakable laws to be God’s book. And it doesn’t have to be one big pile of lies because of its dodgy bits.”

Not another New Jerusalem

I’ve been reading Penguin Special, The Life and Times of Allen Lane, the man behind Penguin Books. As the title suggests, it is much more a cultural history than a straight biography, and my imagination has been particularly captured by “Chapter 10. The New Jerusalem”, which discusses Penguin’s role in the post-war reordering of British society that would form the political basis of the welfare “consensus” until Thatcher and her sons came along, aka Major and Blair.

What fascinated me is summed up in J.B. Priestley’s question, “What could we do to bring our economic and social system nearer to justice and security and decency?” Hardly a question far from our hearts. The book’s author, Jeremy Lewis goes on to write: “The promoters of the ‘New Jerusalem’ …were middle-class intellectuals…more concerned with spending money on housing and social services than with industrial renewal, reviving exports and rebuilding the infrastructure once the fighting was over: the country was hopelessly in debt, deprived of currency reserves and dependent on American Lend-Lease.” Lewis notes the vision was rather for “a garden-city society filled with happy, healthy children, smiling mothers, bustling workers, serene elderly souls in a golden twilight of state pensions; all living in houses furnished in Gordon Russell’s simple good taste; and, having been equally well educated in a reformed education system.”

This was a Keynesian time of improving capitalism and the birth of the welfare state. Thirty years later Thatcher, then Major and Blair dismantled that consensual hallucination such that thirty years on from that, England finds itself back in a curiously similar position. The clamourings ahead of an upcoming election are of a broken society and how to fix it, and while nobody is suggesting a return to Keynesian economics, it is clear that capitalism needs to be improved upon again. Nobody is raising the spectre of the ‘New Jerusalem’ again either. Yet it is clear walls need rebuilding. The failure of the ‘New Jerusalem’ dreamers — the secularisation of John’s vision on Patmos recorded in the biblical book of Revelation — was to ignore the “cruel real world” that culminated finally in the ‘winter of discontent’ and subsequent Thatcherite Babylonian destruction of that ideal. For a while there, “Blatcherism” seemed to have overcome the cruel real world, but that too was an idealistic dream. So here we are again.

Interestingly, when Nehemiah (of the Old Testament) rebuilt the old Jerusalem walls, the city was in a situation not dissimilar to one England faces today. Trade was insufficiently regulated, people were being forced into unsustainable mortgages to get food to live, the governors were living off expenses paid for by the people and buying up property, the countryside around the city was dying for lack of people to farm it and the treasury coffers were empty. Fairly relevant reading I would say from a book most in England write off today as culturally irrelevant. Nehemiah’s responses are pertinent as well: He doesn’t rush in with messianic ideals, but with pragmatic solutions with the long-term social and economic welfare of the people at heart. Something to reflect on as we go forward and build up “this green and pleasant land” again.

Riff on e-books & narrative

Been doing a bit of thinking about e-books of late.  With e-books, there is the tendency to see them as merely books in electronic form. But that is futile because they’re not.  Although at present they are just that – books in electronic form, their potential is far beyond that.  They are, to a degree, the Internet “reading” experience in “book” form.

This experience is one of logging on, reading something, perhaps linking from there to another page, or going back to the original page and linking from there to elsewhere.  It is also multi-media – from a news story to a youtube video to a search via an engine on the toolbar etc etc until the thread on the reader’s interest runs dry.  However, there is a crucial difference to this reading experience from the “book” reading experience, and that is narrative.

The internet reading experience is based on an internal narrative going on inside the reader’s mind that is not externally obvious to any other reader.  There is no possibility of a shared story.  For it to become a shared story, a clear narrative of sorts is required.  The links need to be signposted within the framework of a story narrative.   Thus while it is all very well to say that the potential for e-books is that the possibilities for e-books include “books with scored soundtracks and video inserts“, unless these things are added within the framework of a narrative, they can only be add-ons like  DVD extras.  I think that the great potential for e-books will be their ability to imitate the internet “reading” experience with the added bonus of narrative.