My Day Job

I recently had a long meeting with my Literary Agent, who also manages my PR and acts as proxy in a number of prolonged legal disputes I seem to have got entangled in, and we agreed that with the Harry Potter phenomenon finished this was a good time to step into the breach and introduce a new generation of children to the wonder of the written word. Because of the recent success of The Dangerous Book for Boys we agreed it should be an old fashioned yarn of derring-do etc. in the mold of Conan Doyle and John Buchan, and luckily for you people it will be serialised for free upon this very blog. Gather the children around then, as I give you the first instalment of:

Sir Arthur and the Mystery of the Cordwainer's Toe
"Silence is the condemned man's only prerogative" said Lord Entwistle, pushing the decanter across the table toward me, "but perhaps you'd care to tell us what became of the Brigadier, and the aeronautical device of the Philadelphia Jesuits?"
"With pleasure" I said, selecting a cigar from a proffered box, "It all began last January, on a bitterly cold afternoon. Like any sensible fellow I was seated before a roaring fire with a monograph of Chaldean adverbs, the last of my uncle Nungent's '66 Taylor's, and a large sixpenny whore. I was disturbed from my comfortable reveries by a hoarse salutation, and from the thick London peasouper which swirled round the far end of my study stepped a curious figure. His bearing and demeanour were undoubtedly that of a naval man, but he was dressed in the clothes of an off duty magician, or the proprietor of a second rate dog training school. He sported a large ginger moustache, of the sort which might be worn by an army chaplain recently defrocked for unnatural sexual practices,and on his cheek were tattooed a number of cryptic symbols.
'Sir Arthur' he cried, 'I come to you under the orders of the foreign office. I am told that you are a daring fellow, who would gladly put his unique talents to the defense of the empire overseas'.
'Why' I replied, 'I am a man of no particular talents. I am considered, I admit, the finest blow pipe marksman in Europe, , and a world expert in Persian dietary habits, and I'm anyone's match at Hungarian kick-boxing, but other than that my interests are somewhat obscure. However I will gladly put my few poor abilities at the disposal of my country.'
'How would you feel' he asked 'about undertaking an exceedingly dangerous mission to Constantinople?'
'Dash it' I cried, 'it sounds just the caper I've been looking for! Pull up a whore and tell me all about it.'
The visitor sat down and produced a Mussulman water pipe. For a period he was silent as he carefully filled and lit it. Eventually he looked up, his head wreathed in fragrant smoke.
'What do you know' he asked 'of the nation of Russia?'
'As I recall it was a small province of the Rhine Palatinate, which briefly attained the status of an autonomous Lutheran republic during the Thirty Years war, before being claimed as a crown possession of the Austro-Hungarian empire'
'So we have long believed. However it now appears that this was a misapprehension caused, through circumstances too Byzantine to enter into, by the idiosyncrasies of an eighteenth century archivist in the department of records, by the name of Paisley. Russia is in fact a huge and powerful nation, ruled by the Romanov dynasty and profession the Orthodox faith, situated to the far east of Europe. Its climate is extreme and its main export is timber. Its embassy is situated on the Strand, between the Royal Anthropological Society and the Pickwick Hotel.'
'Good God!' I cried. 'I always thought that building was some kind of dry goods emporium.'
'That' said my visitor darkly 'is closer to the truth than you realise.'"
"Confound it!" ejaculated Lord Entwistle passionately, "This web of intrigue is so deep and mysterious it seems that it might go on forever."
"Yes" I replied, allowing, I must admit, a wry smile to play on my lips, "it seems that it might."

Saturn Devouring His Pension Plan

One of Dogtooth's recent posts raised the topic of art and value. He suggests that a copy of Sunflowers should be valued according to its similarity to the original. Not so. I can receive all the artistic value of Hamlet from a paperback copy (let's assume there has been no textual jiggery-pokery) but that does not mean that the manuscript for Hamlet would not be worth far more money. When I buy, for example, one of Goya's black paintings (see above), I am not only paying for the artistic value but also for a unique artifact. Of course as an impoverished sea creature I might think that rarity value a ridiculous extravagance, but I bet I'd change my mind if fifty million came rolling through the door.

The Treason of Metaphors

What I want to say concerns an article (predominantly the second half, or last seven paragraphs) by Brendan O'Neill, SpikedOnline's illustrious editor. The article is a slightly flat and uninspiring variation on an original theme: the erosion of civil liberties. It's quite good stuff, if a little jaded; but notice O'Neill's rhetoric getting the better of him towards the end:

...a bill of rights that was based on a fear of out-of-control politicians and a suspicion of the celebrity-obsessed public would run the risk of turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, making it a museum piece that can be admired by lawyers and professional civil libertarians but which remains beyond the reach of the smoking, drinking, junk food-eating man in the street.

I don't see this. How would a written catalogue of civil rights have less application to the 'man on the street' than lawyers and academics? How would its application be more complicated than the Law, which has no trouble treating its subjects impartially? O'Neill has fallen victim to the felicitous metaphor. He has happened upon an analogy so fruitful that he cannot bear to part with it. The focus of his piece (a written bill of rights) is now dictated by the logic of the metaphor (an artefact on a high shelf behind thick-plated glass in a museum). Never mind that these two things are not analogous: rhetorical logic is irresistible, even to the orator.

The Treason of Images

Dogtooth is not usually known to equivocate, but in the case of Robert Thwaites I find myself once again navigating a tight passage between liberty and practicality. The value of authenticity has never diminished - much to the consternation of Roland Barthes, who would argue, probably quite sensibly, that a flawless forgery of van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' should fetch the price of the original. Or alternatively - as our economics would have it - the price of the original should fall to the aggregate of the collected fakes. In essence, Thwaites's crime was only to take advantage of the absurdly inflated value of original works of fine art. His forgeries received high praise from everyone up to and including his sentencing judge, not to mention that the paintings were of such a quality to dupe the art experts who purchased them. Honesty in one's dealing should of course be encouraged, and serious fraud exposed and punished. But as a country that hands out serious prison terms to forgers, we should reflect soberly on the how selling high-quality paintings under the name of a past-master (these were not copies of originals, but original works in the style of John Fitzgerald, a 19th century dreamscape artist) came to be a criminal offence.

Giblets to stuff the turkey of inactivity

According to Madeleine Bunting, who frequently leaps fully-clothed into freezing lakes, "we need that attentiveness to nature to understand our humanity, and of how we fit, as just one species, into a vast reach of time and space."
People really should think before they commit this sort of thing to paper.

In Memoriam

I was going to impose Ingmar Bergman's face over the knight, but I'm looking for a job and I don't really have time. To be quite honest the biggest shock about Bergman's death for me was the fact that he was still alive. Ho hum.

Tangentially, one of the most mysterious disappearances that I have ever experienced was a rented copy of Wild Strawberries which removed itself from a video player and disappeared altogether when I left the room for fifteen minutes for a cup of tea and a chicken tikka pasty.