FAMILY VALUES

My father’s ghost each night I saw

reflected on the tv screen, passing back

of actors with a meaningful look,

like a soap star.

 

‘It was Society, your uncle,

killed me.’ he said. ‘It was not!’, I said.

‘Would you make presumptions on my age,

even in death?’ he said.

It’s true, I did.

 

‘If it was that black sheep of the family

cousin Economics,

I’d expect it, or grandfather Politics,

well, without question. But Society…

he’s too scatty. He never could tell

one day from another.’ ‘Precisely!

My ordered life, plotted against!

I worked hard for that little state

of order and calm.’

 

‘We disinherited the Medical Profession

on your behalf!’ I said, ‘The doctor

was negligent.’ ‘You were wrong.’ he said,

‘Society killed me!’

 

What a family,

I thought, I would not trust one

with a teaspoon never mind

the keys of the kingdom!

And then when Conventional Romance

looked my way, well, it was

Wayward Romance, her sister

that I was after. ‘You must do your duty!’

my father said, and then he died.

So I did.

Jane Bussman’s ‘The Worst Date Ever’

Jane Bussman’s book is a wow. As a Celebrity journo she waded through the tac of rootless wealth. As a stand-up comedian she hits the nail well and firmly on the head. Her humour humanises tough and difficult subject-matter.

Her revelations of African-Western exploitation is a real antidote to our half-hearted and muddled strategies and double-think with aid programmes.

She cites the African warlords who have found it lucrative to build up their cadres of child soldiers, all with deliberate maiming and injuries – because the West pay well, in the foggy belief they are helping.

That warlord the West’s Intelligence Services couldn’t find, she found easily: he was in the next village. How did she know? She asked the villagers, then went to have a look. A white American woman. But she was talking to people as people, not victims, or the Poor.

The West pours money in – and does not really monitor how it is used. As we have seen recently with Comic Relief funding, some has gone into shares with Armaments suppliers.

Money=Aid. We pay-out, and don’t get involved: out of sight- out of mind etc etc etc

So what are the options? Making huge cuts in the aid fund to pay for infra-structures on the ground?

China went in – and built roads. They were enormous help, long-term and practical.

On the very few occasions the supposedly Communist States have got it right they have got it very right, because they dealt in realities. There is no sentimentalizing of the poor, or Third Worldism.

The West is mired in its money-culture: wealth is the cure-all. Win the Lottery and it will solve Everything. Everyone who doesn’t or isn’t, is Poor, is to be pitied, in effect, is beyond the Pale.

Get that top job, and the world is yours. Pay, pay, pay your way to happiness. The self’s needs are what the world is all about. Xmas all about Getting presents, more importantly The present. Advertising schmooze and brainless depictions of our social life superimpose and imprint over our real personalities.

Jane Bussman has lived in Africa for the last 10 years . It is, she says, a vibrant and positive place. It’s economic growth has been phenomenal. What it is NOT, she says, is all victims, poverty, war and maimed children, lands devastated by Aids. Just as Chicago is not a Mafia fiefdom, or New York pavements saturated in random-murder blood or groaning under super-wealth, London full of Lords and Ladies.

Get rid of the caricatures, stereotypes – and see the people, be the people, be who we are.

How Horrible is History?

Terry Deary brought out his Horrible Histories series of books for kids, in the 19990s.

TV took up the challenge and broadcast a school’s series of his Histories. YouTube is the place to go for those. They are great fun, and have won TV awards.  Anita Ganeri branched out into another very successful series of Horrible Geography – with the Gritty Bits Left In.

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The impetus was a need to make history interesting again for kids; and to rectify what he and associates found was deplorable teaching in his time. If I were to admit it, all I remember of school history is drawing motte and bailey castles, knights in armour, something vague about Victorian sewers, and lots of kings and occasional queens – all English of course.

It was an age of the ‘history of great men’: constitutional history of England stuff.

At the end of WW1 battle survivors were announcing History Is Dead. Critic Donald Davie pronounced that after Ezra Pound’s rewriting of classical history in his Cantos history was ended for literature.

It was all finished.

A lot of people stuck there, they did and still do not know a lot has changed in history since then: that stuff now is … history.

What they didn’t know was that Marxist history was just taking off, leading to Economic history. Most importantly Marc Bloch had just published his book The Historian’s Craft, which opened up the field.

Durkheim and Claude Levi-Strauss were waiting in the wings; Freud was opening up the private worlds of motives and back-stories. History wasn’t finished, it was just about to take off.

If you read a history of Great Men now, and they do still get written, it reads as though everything happens in a vacuum, isolated, and confined to a rarefied plane.

It shows how far history has come. Social and Economic history helped shake it all up. Sociology and Anthropology took it by its neck – and fed it methodologies.

The French Annales School has produced ground-breaking work. The emphasis has shifted from the few in power to the rest who lived it out. How can you hope to know something of a period without knowing how terrain shaped transport, availability; and how combined with climate dictated behaviour, mood even?

The Annales School collected papers from a wide field of investigation to collate information and material, a collage of knowledge.  Braudel published his monumental History of France.

Herbert Butterfield published The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931. History, he said, has been rewritten to favour the Whig (Liberal) viewpoint. History writing was not neutral, he was implying, but always a political act – including his own writing.  In particular he pointed to latter depictions of the French Revolution. How the Romantics had glorified it! Even if Wordsworth and Coleridge back-tracked – who would want to relive the Reign of Terror!

So, when a historian researches for a book on a period, event, place, she/he does not present all the material. She/he selects what is needed for their narrative. This narrative itself has come into question. Everyone has their predilections.

This wide field began to fragment. Women’s History had to find itself, away from male structured research; similarly Post-Colonial History had to find itself away from the dominant cultural investigations. And also methodologies had to be found that served the subject, and not the interpretation.

Out of these conflicting interpretations where did truth lie? Could there be truth? Is the historian the truth-teller? No, obviously, he/she has their take, their selection of material: what is relevant and what peripheral?

Does the materialist dialectic exist? Or was it one of the ‘grand narratives’ of the 19century, along with Darwin’s Origin of Species, Fraser’s Golden Bough?

At least, the thinking goes, with a Marxist historian, you know where you stand.

What was it with those school history teachers? Were they caught in the limbo between historical methods?

Historiography has been for some time a major part of history tuition. With historiography you learn what goes into history writing, the particular viewpoints and emphases of a period, which historians wrote what history. Invaluable. You learn the political metanarratives of  ‘progress’ historians, and of the rewriters.

Recently (2007) John Burrow published A History of Histories, an excellent historiographer’s primer.

We now have histories of the colour blue, a scent, the footnote, a phrase (The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe by Richard Scholar), Peter Burke on The Art of Conversation.  Cultural history took off to great effect

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Then historians looked around again, and renewed their relationship with literary theory. Only this time Derrida had cut a swathe through the certainty of authorisation, and Semiotics had destabilised the text. The period became known as the historians’ ‘linguistic turn’.

Historians were late coming to this – most other disciplines had come to some appeasement with it by then, but not the historians.

Why do these things matter? It’s all about accountability, legitimacy, accuracy… we cannot in all honesty claim to truth, but we can predicate truth; and this is what we have when we do.

If an historian’s material is textual evidence, and that primary text codifies cultural concerns and previous texts, narratives… and  others have written about the text, and then you write…  how can there be an hierarchy of meaning?

New Historicism has history writing caught up in a web of relativist theories, a hall of mirrors. Over-think, looking for a day off, a way out.

BTW Terry Deary in his Groovy Greeks seems to have forgotten completely about the Minoans – Mycenean palaces in Crete indeed!

A DUBIOUS HISTORY OF ‘THE ROSE THEATRE’

She was their audacity, they balloted her

actor-manager of The Rose Theatre;

her voice the decider, the dea ex machine

with which she straddled the trap-door of argument.

Few could escape her bawling-out or charisma;

who else could change theme mid-scene

or change character though it raged against her?

 

‘We’ll give her twelve years!’ said the backers,

carte-blanching theatre, sub-clausing actors: ‘There’s

money in tragedy, bowdlerised naturally;

a rhetoric there to over-ride opponents.

Fill your programme with bluster, let none go Scot-free

and none will renege.’ Their values cashed with hers.

 

The City grew wealthy with players, new fads arose,

rented street populations for crowd scenes,

bit-parts, creating the notion of a nation

(a licensed interpretation). Her entrance mid-scene

as rousing climacteric steered timing’s on-rush

from one climax to another. Each play she chose

manipulated lives, a wielded created

of stage-emotion, subservient to a hidden plot.

 

Twelve years ticking through the turn-stiles, takings

poll-plotting her management acumen, and the faking

of adrenalin pulsing through history,

to smother sub-plotters’ murmurings.

A poised and clinching pathos of reasoning; or was it, rather,

the sheer amplitude of her persona, proving

the inconsequence of plot, theme… theatre?