Wednesday, July 30, 2014

business today

The acquisition of WhatsApp has given Facebook two major advantages, believes Brian Taylor, Digital MD at Jaywing.

"It's removed a serious competitor threat," he explained. "Where Facebook owns 'capturing our moments', WhatsApp dominates one-on-one communication, particularly in emerging markets across Asia."

(Times of India article)

Something about that word "moments" reminds me of some other piece of business language that I read recently. Oh yes, that's it. It was the mission statement in British American Tobacco's investor piece.

WORLD'S BEST AT SATISFYING CONSUMER MOMENTS IN TOBACCO AND BEYOND

(BAT: Our Vision and Strategy)

Our "moments", those things we think most private to us, are of course commoditized. But it's easy to forget that, and it's arresting to see the word used in these contexts.



Many too are the positive greenish sort of words that circulate in the business community: ecosystem, growth, reap, harvesting, crop, sustainable, environment. Their use is principally in the abstracted and self-justified world of managing business processes and profits. Company mission statements don't talk about making better flechette shells, they talk about innovation and agility in the defence sector.

As everyone knows, the word "crop" is also used of industrial chicken production. The numbers of individual birds are so huge, and their treatment so depersonalized, that they may be said to have no animal gleam in their eyes at all, but are just a sort of regular scurf of breast-meat grown in controlled allotments.

The word "harvesting" is commonly used of fossil oil.

Shell's primary business is the management of a vertically integrated oil company. The development of technical and commercial expertise in all stages of this vertical integration, from the initial search for oil (exploration) through its harvesting (production), transportation, refining and finally trading and marketing established the core competencies on which the company was founded.

(Wikipedia)

In business today you can by all means harvest what you cannot grow!

You would say that the linguistic distortion fools nobody. But that would be naive. Deceptive language does not mind being found out by a few renegades; company wording is impervious to being called ridiculous or a liar. That does not matter, because the deceptive language nevertheless influences our responses at a subliminal level, even while we imagine we are aware that you cannot truly harvest oil.

And before long, people start to forget. "Harvesting" is already becoming established as the standard academic term. Here it is in the classroom:

http://www.teachengineering.org/view_lesson.php?url=collection/cub_/lessons/cub_earth/cub_earth_lesson07.xml


Of course you could argue that what's really unsustainable isn't so much the extraction of oil as the combustion of oil. Those ice-cubes are looking very slender now.


But young people today still find Shell and BAT to be great places to work, passionate about their people and proud of what they do. Etc.











Tuesday, July 29, 2014

under the black poplar




Black Poplar (Populus nigra ssp. betulifolia)




Prickly Lettuce (Lactuca serriola forma serriola)




Lucerne or Alfalfa (Medicago sativa)



Water Mint (Mentha aquatica)



Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia)

Photos from darkest Hertfordshire, 26-27 July 2014.  



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Friday, July 25, 2014

More flora of West Swindon



An outbreak of Meadow Cranesbill  (Geranium pratense) by the cycle track near John Lewis at Home. Photo from 22/6/14.


Great Water-dock (Rumex hydrolapathum) by the remnant of canal. Photo 22/6/14.



Same day again (but now 21:45). Here's something I don't remember seeing before. In a small neglected town garden, young ash-trees absolutely devastated by some leaf-eater.

[The only image I could find that somewhat resembled this turned out to be Green Scarab Beetles (Diphucephala) devouring the leaves of an Australian Alphitonia tree - in Brisbane!]

Two more pics below:




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Toad Rush (Juncus bufonius) , a significant lawn-like colony in the shade of the pedestrian underpass that connects West Swindon District Centre ("The Link") to Shaw Ridge. Usually flooded in January. Toad Rush grows where the soil never truly dries out.

This is J. bufonius sensu strictu, according to the classification published by Cope and Stace in 1978:

http://archive.bsbi.org.uk/Wats12p113.pdf

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On the other side of the Link centre, on the edge of the shallow ponds, I found Common Club-rush (Schoenoplectus lacustris, formerly called Scirpus lacustris) with its round stems. In my opinion these ponds could do with some TLC, they are choked with slime and litter, but these plants are excellent. Until recently the books also called this Bulrush, but Stace sensibly went with everyday usage and reserves this name for the familiar Typha latifolia.



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Whichever way the weathercock turns
Grasses sedges rushes and ferns.

Golden meadow a haze in the sun
Deep in the shadow where the waters run.

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Friday, July 18, 2014

literary trivia


I'm following Tom Clark's daily posts about the Gaza war on children. I don't want to, but I am.

http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/hijos-de-un-dios-menor.html
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/and-then-alien-turned-toward-zanna.html
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/i-am-bullets-oranges-and-memory-mahmoud.html
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/have-mercy-mr-obama-do-you-have-heart.html
etc

I read D.S. Marriott's Dogma last night. This is a Barque pamphlet whose contents would have subsequently ended up in one of the more recent Shearsman collections, but I do like a pamphlet.

Marriott's poems are consciously impure, they develop an image of someone who cannot be other than a thrown-together mixture of drowned ghosts and western imagery. The latter, of course, pre-eminently includes the Cambridge influence that continues to sound in these poems even though it's so obvious how different these poems are from Prynne or Milne or Brady or Sutherland.

The poems are impure not because they think it's thrilling to be impure, as per the Montevidayan swamplands (bit of reductive stereotyping there, but you'll know what I mean); these poems are impure because they can't help being impure. Because the conditions of life don't allow it. Specifically black life, according to Marriott's desolately unillusioned analysis.

Andrew Duncan has mentioned Eliot in the same sentence as Marriott, which I interpreted as an attack, but it isn't so. Duncan actually wrote a brilliant and informative piece about Dogma here:

http://jacketmagazine.com/20/dunc-r-trio.html

But anyway, Eliot did cross my mind while reading the Dogma poems.

The Barque people also sent me Monika Rinck (trans. Alistair Noon), which I don't remember ordering but am glad to have, and Streak_Willing_Artesian_Forgotten which I haven't read but which surprises me by being so beautiful to look at.  I'm talking about when you open it up and look at the poem - the beauty comes from the book as a whole product.  The jacket on its own is just functional (and a shade of green that reminds me of something put together in a classroom, which it probably was).



I am still finishing my second read-through of Scott's The Black Dwarf.  I'm also about a third of the way through Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, an extraordinary book (and obviously, there's a lot of fruitful synergy with Marriott's writings here). I'm over half-way through Fielding's Tom Jones, one of those books that strikes me as having fallen hugely in repute since the days of my youth; at present the characters are in Worcestershire, more or less. I'm just in to Act 3 of Henry VI Part II: the noble factions are seeking to eliminate Humphrey of Gloucester so they can fly at each other's throats.

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I got deeply immersed in the Maggie O'Sullivan selections of her own poetry in Out of Everywhere. Her work seems to contact me at an unsconscious level. A week or two later I found myself, without conscious intent, reading Waterfalls - the reprint that Reality Street published in 2012; it had previously appeared in etruscan books (2009) - but the half-dozen poems were written in the mid-1990s, I think.

Here's a page from "that bread should be". O'Sullivan's poems aren't really type-out-able.  Even when they don't contain things like diagonally sloping print there are always subtle visual features that can't be reproduced, but I'll do my best:

few scrapes of the shovel ————
          searching in our soils    /     the lot of long silent letters  /
                        searching     /    searching  ——

                                peeling it off the rended spine    —
    S
      E
        V
          E
            R
              E
                D

                   laid bare the narrative i SINGING

One reason why O'Sullivan's is one of the most instantly appealing of post-avant writers is that she usually work with a fairly undisguised nexus of themes. This poem isn't about the "narrative i" in isolation, but about the Irish potato famine, about the home of O'Sullivan's ancestors in Skibbereen (Co. Cork), about diaspora and dislocation, the impossibility of restoring the past, the failure of language in confronting this... Waterfalls is an openly personal book and that's true of a lot of her other writing too.

But while this perhaps accounts for the instant bond that forms when we read her, it doesn't account for the kind of deep engagement at the unconscious level that I mentioned earlier. To explain that, you'd have to study the hard-won artistry that O'Sullivan developed both alone and in collaboration with Writers Forum.

If you want to do the studying then the first place to go is probably Lawrence Upton's long essay of 1998, which you can read here:

http://www.maggieosullivan.co.uk/upton.htm

Upton's writing has a readable surface, but that doesn't mean that the inner depths of his thinking are easily accessed. An essay like this needs quite a lot of commitment and you might not have the time. So for the moment I'll just define the artistry by its outcome, which is the ability to be simple, casual and profoundly searching all at the same time. As evinced, in the passage above, by the nonce-word "rended".

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The next poem is  "winter ceremony".

This is a poem that reports a narrative , though the details mayn't be clear, but musically it has a shape, with the slow fall of the opening developing into an unsettled tense middle section before a briefer return to the tranquility of the opening. Is that shape the enactment of the ceremony?

The poem is characterized by a narrow band  running down the middle of the page (two vertical lines close together). This naturally suggests waterfall. Also something seasonal, something about the necessary downtime of winter. Perhaps too, it recalls (ling YI)

Maybe it's significant that, when the poem gets more frantic this vertical band disappears.

Or, maybe verticality is the natural shape of ceremony (the ordinary and secular being represented by the horizontal).

These childhood memories are concerned with identity. The repeated MAGPIE seems to be a child's rending of her own name MAGGIE with one letter the wrong way round. Elsewhere SUIL (eye) is the first element in Súileabháin (Sullivan) which might mean the little dark-eyed one - or maybe one-eyed, or hawk-eyed. In the poem SUIL is associated with the sun. Naturally a winter ceremony tends to be solstitial.


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It's a marvellous thing that you can read nine of O'Sullivan's pamphlets in their entirety on the Eclipse site. The links are here:

http://www.maggieosullivan.co.uk/news.htm


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My previous awareness of Skibbereen was limited to the Johnny Cash song "Forty Shades of Green", a late addition to the long line of sentimental Irish standards that were composed by Americans.

I close my eyes and picture the emerald of the sea
from the fishin boats at Dingle to the shores at Dunehea
I miss the River Shannon and the folks at Skibbereen
the moorlands and the meadows and their Forty Shades of Green

Not a typical Cash song, but typifying the lack of self-imposed generic boundaries in his work, which led to Jon Langford's well-known remark about Cash being "the philosopher-prince of American country music".

[Someone had the fun idea of publishing a whole book of Cash essays by philosophers. Admittedly this does not seem quite so telling when it turns out that the publishers have also done it for the Grateful Dead and U2. I can sort of understand that U2, in their earliest phase, might be quite good material; "I will follow", for instance, blends together a number of Christian ideas with long traditions in medieval philosophy. Still I don't really think of U2 as philosophy in the way that Prefab Sprout's Swoon was.]

My carrying-around books are Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece and Tim Allen's Eight + Six. Ha ha, only joking (and forgotten the real name).    [It's Default Soul.]

Still in a Tim Allen groove, it finally crossed my mind (bit slow on the uptake) that The Carousing Duck might be some sort of paratext of his earlier volume The Cruising Duct.

Hardly any reading took place in Sweden  (light is never good in a tent) but I'm left with a complex memory of roses and sedges all mixed up with Evert Taube.

Also from Reality Street: over half-way through David Miller's anthology of prose, The Alchemist's Mind. I keep reading more of Andrea Brady's Cut from the Rushes, I must have read most of it now.

Meanwhile, on the internet, I flick through a couple of essays by Peter Larkin (get hold of  this stuff by signing up to academia.edu). One of them is about a US poet called Susan Stewart who I never heard of before, so I go and read some of her poems, which I like and envy.

Here is "The Forest" (the poem that Peter Larkin was mainly writing about):

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/forest

Now I remember that the piece I read last night in The Alchemist's Mind was by David Rattray. It was called the "Spirit of St Louis"; it was one of those show-off-your-learning descriptive pieces without any obvious direction and (can you gather) I didn't think it was such a massive deal, but I did wonder who the author was He was lots of interesting things; translator, contributing editor for Reader's Digest, experimental poet; he died in 1993. This enquiry took me to Bomb Magazine (he was a contributing editor there too), and here I found three delicious new poems by Gale Nelson from, apparently, a second tranche of his This is What Happens when Talk Ends project.







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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Sir Walter Scott's novels, a brief guide




Those dusty, dull-bound, heavy books lie like pre-Cambrian bedrock on the lower shelves of pubs and hotels. Such is the fate of the former best-seller, the man who popularised tartan shortbread tins, the man who speckled the suburbs of Birmingham with houses called Loch Lomond in streets called Waverley Crescent and Lammermoor Close, where the daughters were once named Rowena, the sons Nigel. 

Scott is the most under-rated writer in the canon of British literature, second only to Dickens among our great nineteenth-century novelists, readable, fertile, vivid, profound, a master. Like every great novelist, he has huge faults. His English prose style is clumsy and slipshod; he “sows from the sack, not from the hand” and the impact of his best work, essentially poetic, is hard to represent from quotations. His output is vast and many of his novels fail. He promulgated, if he did not initiate, the curious Victorian literary convention that sexual feelings don’t really exist; his scenery and weather are often perfunctory, his heroes and heroines are for the most part as stiff as bookmarks. He was also a Tory and a Unionist, which meets with little favour here. But his massive humanity, comedy and invention are triumphs: once discovered, he is never abandoned. So here goes: 25 novels in six pages, a lifetime of reading. 




THE SCOTTISH PERIOD (1814-1820)

Although these are his earliest novels, they are not beginner’s work. When he published Waverley anonymously he was already 40, a celebrated man of letters thanks to his sensationally popular narrative poems. The novels of this period include his greatest achievements. Some of the later novels are deeply immersed in (lowland) Scottish culture too, but here it’s a continuous presence, the lifeblood of the books.

1.  Waverley (1814)

Seminal, and deeply pondered over many years, this is the first historical novel worthy of the name in world literature. Perhaps his masterpiece, although subtler achievements were to follow. Here are all his great themes: the process of change in society, adolescence, humour, ideals, compromises, reconciliation, progress and extinction. Every adventure, every western movie, every sci-fi fantasy adventure you’ve ever read is indebted to this brilliantly innovative book; not to mention Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot... A great place to start.10 out of 10. (Longer Note on Waverley.)

2.  Guy Mannering (1815)

Scott with a head of steam up, this is frankly an improvisation. Despite its many wonderful scenes and characters, it’s carelessly executed and doesn’t run very deep. The Victorians loved it, but in our severer times: 7 out of 10.

3.  The Antiquary (1816)

On the surface this is even more chaotic and heterogeneous than Guy Mannering; but this time it all works out. This is Scott’s supreme book about conversation, conviviality and human company: a little-known delight. 9 out of 10.

But his sister understood these looks of ire (rescued from drowning, and no food in the house). “Ou dear! Monkbarns, what’s the use of making a wark?”

  “I make no wark, as ye call it, woman.”

  “But what’s the use o’ looking sae glum and glunch about a pickle bains? – an ye will hae the truth, ye maun ken the minister came in, worthy man – sair distressed he was, nae doubt, about your precaurious situation, as he ca’d it, (for ye ken how weel he’s gifted wi’ words,) and here he wad bide till he could hear wi’ certainty how the matter was likely to gang wi’ ye a’. He said fine things on the duty of resignation to Providence’s will, worthy man! that did he.” (The Antiquary, Ch 9)

4.  The Black Dwarf  and  5.  Old Mortality (1816)

Old Mortality is Scott's most exciting and perhaps greatest book, one of the best-imagined stories in English. A profound meditation on violence, fanaticism and repression; pick it up at Chapter 2 (as the Calders advise) and watch how Scott’s insidiously slack-limbed narration sucks you in. 10 out of 10. (Longer Note on Old Mortality. And a Follow-up Note: The Whig's Vault.)

The Black Dwarf, a short novel published alongside Old Mortality, has some fine pages but never gets far off the ground. 5 out of 10. (Longer Note on The Black Dwarf.)

6.  Rob Roy (1818)

A brief, fiery and penetrating book lies hidden inside a baggier, more uneven one. In no book does Scott come closer to a critique of the conventional ruling class that he approved, in no book is the fact of the Highlands more challengingly posed. But we have to wade through a lot of idling and Gothic plotting in Northumberland to get to the serious heart of this, so all in all: 7.5 out of 10.  (Longer Note on Rob Roy. And a Follow-up Note: A Sentence in Rob Roy.
  
7.  The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818)

Scott told the publishers, before he had written a word of it, that it was going to be his best book. And after many readings I've come to feel that he was probably right. The mundane, terrible, triumphant yet ultimately sad story of Jeanie and her family has a psychological penetration that Scott never deployed so fully elsewhere. And great as that story is, there's much more to this longest and most complex of the novels. Still, it's problematic in some ways. Even back when it was published some readers wondered if the fourth volume was really needed (it really is!). It regularly switches genres in a way that admirers of other classic novels might find unsettling, is sometimes demanding (e.g. on Scottish religious history) and sometimes uneven. So to deter readers who aren't already passionate Scott fans, I'm giving it a paltry 9.5 out of 10. (Longer Note on The Heart of Midlothian. And another note: Time trouble in The Heart of Midlothian.)

8.  The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)

Rumoured to have been dictated in delirium and subsequently unremembered by its author (whose life was a catalogue of sicknesses), this is the most un-Scott-like of his masterpieces: a brilliant, bleak, secretive tragedy that operates with intense restraint. Beautifully structured, it shows (along with Old Mortality, Kenilworth etc) that Scott was the most naturally gifted designer of a novel in our tradition. (The French equivalent, in this respect, is Balzac’s Une ténébreuse affaire.)  9 out of 10.

9.  A Legend of Montrose (1819)

This is Scott’s book about war; but that scarcely does it justice. It's a book about violence of peculiar ferocity; a book about war crimes might be nearer the mark. The topic is pondered via unmitigated highland blood-feuds and, in very fertile contrast, the amoral mercenary Dugald Dalgetty.  The book is seriously under-rated. A bit thin and creaky in places, certainly, but fully deserving of 8 out of 10. (Longer Note on A Legend of Montrose.)


THE COSTUME DRAMAS (1820-1826)

It’s commonly supposed that the unprecedented success of Ivanhoe, his first book set outside Scotland, turned Scott’s head, and led him away from the true sources of his inspiration (with the anomalous exception of Redgauntlet). The reality is more complicated. Scott’s books always occupied the borderland with romance anyway, and the best books of this period (e.g. The Abbot, Kenilworth) are as good as all but the very best of his earlier novels – and arguably stranger.

10.  Ivanhoe (1820)

Anyone who wants to understand the Victorian imagination needs to start with this. England went Ivanhoe-crazy; this is the public-school boy’s book par excellence. So did America. So did Europe. And today? Well, it’s a rich and humane adventure with a few deeper chords (Rebecca, the greenwood...). But when all’s said, only half of Scott’s greatness is on view here. 6 out of 10. (Longer Note on Ivanhoe.)

11.  The Monastery  (1820)

This was considered a failure even at the time of its first publication, so is now never read. The November weather, the Tweed and the reformation period suit Scott well, and though the story doesn’t quite add up he’s in easy spirits throughout. 6 out of 10.

The river was not in flood, but it was above its ordinary level – a heavy water, as it is called in that country, through which the monk had no particular inclination to ride, if he could manage the matter better.

  “Peter, my good friend,” cried the sacristan, raising his voice; “my very excellent friend Peter, be so kind as to lower the drawbridge. Peter, I say, dost not hear? – it is thy gossip, Father Philip, who calls thee.”

  Peter heard him perfectly well, and saw him into the bargain; but, as he had considered the sacristan as peculiarly his enemy in his dispute with the convent, he went quietly to bed, after reconnoitring the monk through his loop-hole, observing to his wife that “riding the water in a moonlight night would do the sacristan no harm, and would teach him the value of a brig the neist time, on whilk a man might pass high and dry, winter and summer, flood and ebb.” (The Monastery, Ch 5)

12.  The Abbot (1820)

Characteristically, Scott’s response to his first avowed failure was to write a sequel to it.  Roland and Catherine are Scott’s most lively young couple, and the tension of the theme (Protestantism outlawing Catholism) make this a romance with an edge. 8 out of 10.

  “You talk riddles, my lord,” said Mary; “I will hope the explanation carries nothing insulting with it.”

  “You shall judge, madam,” answered Lindesay. “With this good sword was Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, girded on the memorable day when he acquired the name of Bell-the-Cat, for dragging from the presence of your great-grandfather, the third James of the race, a crew of minions, flatterers, and favourites, whom he hanged over the bridge of Lauder, as a warning to such reptiles how they approach a Scottish throne. With this same weapon, the same inflexible champion of Scottish honour and nobility slew at one blow Spens of Kilspindie, a courtier of your grandfather, James the Fourth, who had dared to speak lightly of him in the royal presence. They fought near the brook of Fala; and Bell-the-Cat, with this blade, sheared through the thigh of his opponent, and lopped the limb as easily as a shepherd’s boy slices a twig from a sapling.” (The Abbot, Ch 21)

13.  Kenilworth (1821)

Perhaps his most under-rated book, this tragedy of ostentation and gorgeous surfaces is a not unworthy companion to The Bride of Lammermoor, the extended description of the revels at Kenilworth unmatched in moral and dramatic intensity. Scott’s sixteenth-century England is utterly unlike what we expect, a nightmare of fortune-hunters and trapdoors that unfolds with a dreadful logic and expires like a thunderclap on the last page. 8 out of 10.

14.  The Pirate (1822)

Scott had loved visiting the Shetlands, but he couldn’t raise a good novel out of it. The things that had moved him were untranslateable into any fiction even he could imagine. Dreary, tame and unconvincing. 3 out of 10.

15.  The Fortunes of Nigel (1822)

Like all the other books he set in the seventeenth century, Scott’s London novel suffers from the inevitable comparison with his own Old Mortality, and in a different way with the Jacobean city comedies from which he plundered so much material. Nigel is colourful but inadequately felt, and dead from the waist down. 4 out of 10. 

16.  Peveril of the Peak (1822)

Much derided, this long book is good for about half its length before finally coming apart at the seams. The prelude is excellent, and Peveril’s journey across England beautifully poised, but Scott abandons his most arresting characters and the ending turns into a wearisome game of chess. 4 out of 10.

17.  Quentin Durward (1823)

If the marks were for literary historical significance, then Durward would come near the top; it opened the floodgates to historical romance in Europe. It's architectural, expansive, finely conceived and often penetrating. You also have to put up with some of Scott's most slovenly prose. 6 out of 10. (Longer Note on Quentin Durward. And a Follow-up Note: Quentin Durward again.)

18.  St Ronan’s Well (1824)

Strange book. Often seems remarkably un-Scott-like: What's with that scene with the tableaux from Shakespeare? Set nearly, but not quite, in the present day (some "twenty years" ago, a similar time-gap to The Antiquary). Compared to Durward or The Talisman, the author's sharp intelligence seems to have sprung to life; it's comparable even to Redgauntlet in that respect. But I keep getting the feeling that I ought to enjoy it much more than I do. Scott as satirist, his lack of  sympathy for most of the characters, is maybe part of the problem. And then there's the very damaging suppression of the most shocking element in the plot, insisted on by James Ballantyne. So all in all, 5 out of 10. (Longer Note on St Ronan's Well.)

19.  Redgauntlet (1824)

For many, his greatest book. Beneath its casual surface is a profoundly poetic meditation on romance itself, intuitive, mature and brilliantly imagined. Its innovative structure incorporates, along with much else, that supreme short story, “Wandering Willie’s Tale”. The closing chapters in Cumberland, alas, fall a bit short. 9 out of 10.

20.  The Betrothed  and 21.  The Talisman (1825)

The first of the “Tales of the Crusaders” is indisputably minor, a book that can be read (like The Pirate) only for the pleasure of hearing its author’s voice. 3 out of 10. The second is intermittently lively, and Scott's excursion into Palestine is an intriguing record of western conceptions of Islam. 5 out of 10. (Longer Note on The Talisman.

RUIN AND DECLINE (1826-1832)

In 1826, the fragile financial system of the printing and publishing trade collapsed. Scott, who was a secret partner in his own printing house, was brought down with it. Rather than plead bankruptcy, he offered to pay his creditors off with the proceeds of future writing. It was a decision that saved his honour and his home, at the cost of literally writing himself to death. (Apart from the novels, these last years produced such daunting monuments as his gigantic Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, now never seen or read: also, his private Journal, a grievous and brilliant book.)

22.  Woodstock (1826)

This intricately rotating microcosm in the unsettled backwash of the English civil war was half-completed when financial ruin, bereavement and illness dropped on its author in quick succession. But in the finished novel it doesn’t show; Scott was a stoic at noon and midnight; the full but sombre palette is there from the start. 6 out of 10. (Longer Note on Woodstock.)

23.  The Fair Maid of Perth (1828)

The best novel of his last period, this warm and wintry adventure, full of incident and humour, shows that Scott had lost none of his inner wisdom and imagination, if only circumstances would allow him to deploy them. 7 out of 10.

24.  Anne of Geierstein (1829)

More interesting than I expected. The book concerns the later history of Charles the Bold, previously seen in Quentin Durward. The initially arresting narrative doesn't manage to retain its hold on us, but the book is rich in detail (it feels long) and it never declines below the level of an impressively sombre history.  4.5 out of 10.

25.  Count Robert of Paris  and 26.  Castle Dangerous (1832)

I've led you astray -- I still haven’t read these two. Universally described, by those few who have ventured in, as the worst novels he wrote. Count Robert is set in eleventh-century Byzantium, Castle Dangerous in medieval Scotland.  (Some of Count Robert was quietly rewritten by Lockhart after Scott refused to modify the story as the publisher wanted; Scott was never told.) Presumably 1 or 2 out of 10.

27.  The Siege of Malta

Desperately ill, Scott went on a recuperative trip to the Mediterranean, collapsing during his return and dying in his own bed. While abroad, he wrote this book and also a novella called Bizarro. Lockhart decided they were not publishable and when they eventually appeared (in 2008) you could see why. No amount of tidying up broken sentences can disguise the calamitous decay of the author’s mind. These spasms of compulsive writing are fascinating from a medical point of view. The imaginative faculty is the first thing to go, and the second half of The Siege of Malta is a bare-bones re-telling of history with no fictional characters at all.



My other Scott-related posts:

Scott's translation of Goethe's Goetz of Berlichingen.
Scott's Life of Dryden:
The Lady of the Lake:
William Laidlaw:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-poems-of-william-laidlaw.html
Ann Radcliffe (A Sicilian Romance):
Scott and American violence:
J.C. Trewin's Selected Prose of Sir Walter Scott:



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Scott has probably lost his popular audience forever, but I don't want to give the impression that reading him needs to be a solitary experience. It's true that I've found the Wikipedia entries for his novels to be mostly pretty poor, containing little other than contentious plot-summaries. (I haven't checked them out recently and some may have improved.) But Scott is certainly not neglected by scholars. His presence looms too large over the cultural history of Scotland, Britain, Europe and America. There's masses of enthusiastic and thought-provoking academic work out there. I'd urge you e.g. to sign up for a free account on JStor and get access to hundreds of Scott articles.

Here's a few other things that I've happened across:

The Walter Scott Digital Archive (Edinburgh University Library) gathers lots of useful information and links. (Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have been kept up to date since about 2011.)
Don't miss the Image Database, with its wealth of visual materials and realia from the Corson Collection.

J. G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott is available on Gutenberg. Indispensable, even though Lockhart evidently "managed" his father-in-law's reputation. [The first chapter is Scott's own fragment of an autobiography, written in 1808.] This link is to the the first volume (of ten):

If you or your library card has access to Oxford resources, you can see David Hewitt's very comprehensive entry on Scott in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, revised 2008): 

The Maclise Portrait-Gallery is now partially available on Wikisource (2021). A remarkable book, containing Daniel Maclise's 1830s drawings, with an entertaining prose commentary added in 1883 by William Bates. The link below is to the chapter on Scott; many of his friends and contemporaries are also here.

Noctes Ambrosianae (1822-1835), mostly by John Wilson (=Christopher North), is a highly readable series of table-talk colloquies, mostly on matters Scottish and literary, first published in Blackwoods magazine. (One of the other regular drinking companions is James Hogg.) There are some searchable but almost unreadable texts out there, and some unsearchable but readable texts in image format. The following link takes you to volume 1 of Ferrier's edition:




Sir Walter Scott Finding the Manuscript of Waverley in an Attic, 1890 painting by Charles Martin Hardie












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Flowers of Roslagen - July 2014




Above: a distant Ek (Quercus robur, Pedunculate Oak) framed by aspen, birch and pine.

These pictures were taken in or near Harö in Roslagen. (Coastal edge of Uppland, more or less the northern part of the Stockholm archipelago). Harö means "Hare Island". It isn't quite an island now, but it probably was until recently; the land rises fast along this coast. Nevertheless, the sea is always nearby, and Roslagen's mild climate allows many plants of south/central Sweden to flourish further north than elsewhere. The spectacle of oak and ash trees - and roses! - growing among the usual pines and spruces is extraordinary to a Norrlander's eyes.



Norrland was one pole of comparison/contrast for me. The other was the UK. As often, I noticed how different the "British" species are  in Sweden.

The oaks here are comparatively slim and elegant, that is if you can imagine Quercus robur being elegant! This slimness aligns them to the surrounding pines and birches, as you can see in the photo above , a sort of convergent habit that must reflect Sweden's brief but consistent growing seasons.

The roses likewise grow upright, without the support of hedgerows (which don't exist here), and look rather precarious on their ridiculously slender stems.

I reflect that even the familiar species of our own homelands are not fully known to us if homeland is the only place we've seen them. What do they know of oak trees, who only England know?





"Roslagens Ros": Wild rose among spruce trees. I venture with trepidation into the genus Rosa, but I'm pretty sure this is Nyponros (Rosa caesia ssp. glauca, Glaucous Dog-rose). Common in south-central Sweden, and further north along the coast.

[The name "Roslagen" , however, does not have anything to do with roses. "Ros-" perhaps originally meant "the people who row". It probably lies behind the Finnish name for Sweden ("Ruotsi") and - less certainly - the name "Russia". The theory about the latter is that it derives from the "Rus", rulers of 10th Century Kiev, who in turn are thought to have originated as a bunch of Swedish emigrants (i.e. Vikings) from these very shores.]



A typically spectacular show of Blodnäva (Geranium sanguineum, Bloody Cranesbill) alongside Natt Och Dag (Melampyrum nemorosum), a showy cow-wheat that does not occur in the UK, or in most of Norrland, but is extremely common here. The Swedish name, which means "Night and Day", needs no explanation!

(Wood Cranesbill - the celebrated "Midsommarblomster" - is the predominant large cranesbill throughout Sweden. There's plenty of it here too. Meadow Cranesbill is a relatively scarce plant, only found in the south.)


A seedling of Lönn (Acer platanoides, Norway Maple), a native tree here.





En (Juniperus communis, Juniper) growing as a small tree at Holmen.




Spenört (Laserpitium latifolium), a species that does not occur in the UK.

The large many-rayed umbels were highly appreciated by the flower-arrangers amongst us. Spenört was the most prominent umbellifer in these parts, along with Ground-elder, which grew in great quantities. The Swedish population of Spenört - mainly in the east, where it's associated with deciduous woodland - is rather isolated from the plant's heartland; L. latifolium is essentially a central European plant that occurs from W. Russia right across to N. Spain. According to Wikipedia it is a submontane plant that rarely grows at altitiudes below 400m. But here in Roslagen it's growing at sea-level.

It has no popular English name, but is sometimes called Broad-leaved Sermountain or Broad-leaved Laserwort (both names distinguish it from L. siler, an alpine species of south-central Europe).



Spenört 2. Another view, but too nice to leave out. What looks like a lake is actually an inlet of the sea.


Spenört 3. Umbels.


Spenört 4. I know it's blurred, but this was the only photo I took that showed the impressive inflated petioles, somewhat resembling Angelica but pure green in colour, as are the rounded, hairless stems.

I'm not sure of the name's origin but I know "Spene" means "teat".  Spenört, Angelica and Lovage were formerly fed to cattle to increase their appetite (and hence milk production).


Kirskål (Aegopodium podagraria, Ground-elder). From a distance the flat tops distinguished it from Spenört. Ground-elder is of course a pernicious garden weed, and in the UK is believed to be always introduced, but in Sweden it also occurs as a native, and that was the impression I got here.



Bulbils of Tandrot (Cardamine bulbifera, Coralroot Bittercress). The plant flowers, briefly, in the spring.


Backlök (Allium oleraceum, Field Garlic). Here at its prettiest, when the flowers are still in bud but the bulbils are rosy-pink.

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"On a flowering island in Roslagen's bay..."

http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/evert-taube-calle-schewens-vals.html

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