A curious apology

Nigel Biggar (theologian), in In Defence of War:

Why write yet another book on the justification of war? Why not a book on the arts of peacemaking instead? Surely peace, not war, should have first claim on our attention and reflection and creative intelligence.

I cannot deny the truth of this statement, nor the force of the questions preceding it. I cannot deny them, since I know that war is horrendous and that working to prevent its outbreak – even if in the end that should prove justified – is our first and most urgent duty. A fortiori as a Christian I cannot deny these things.

Nevertheless, I confess that I do not have it in me to write a book about peace. Maybe in due course I shall have; but I do not have it now. Now, as for most of my life, it is war that captures my imagination. I read nothing so voraciously as military history. Wherever I go, if there is a battlefield or a war cemetary, I will make a point of visiting it: Waterloo, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Gallipoli, Ypres, the Somme, Jerusalem, Gibraltar, Maleme and Souda Bay in Crete, Leningrad, Malta, El Alamein, Assisi, Rome, Normandy.

Whence the fascination? I grew up in a country haunted by the two world wars. As a child I played in my grandmother’s air-raid shelter, and I heard about the German bomber that had crash-landed in the adjacent field only twenty years before. I attended a school and a university college where the names of the war dead cascade down whole walls. A brother of my father’s father left Scotland for France one September day in 1915 and was killed three weeks later at the battle of Loos. He was twenty-one years old. My mother’s youngest brother flew out over the Burmese jungle on another September day in 1944 and never was heard of again. He was twenty-two years old. My father himself volunteered in 1943, aged thirty, and spent the next two-and-a-half years in Italy first manning an anti-aircraft gun and then, when there were no more enemy planes left to shoot at, carrying a stretcher. …

War therefore exercises my imagination in a way that peace does not. I do not claim this as a virtue. I merely state it as a fact from which I cannot escape, but which therefore defines (for now) my vocation. The arts of peacemaking certainly deserve attention, and others who are differently located and called should reflect on them. In the meantime, however, it is my task to think and write out of the place – historical, cultural, emotional, imaginative – that has, with all its many limitations, been given me. I have inherited a certain fate, and I must honour it.

So here is another book on the moral justification of war. …

There are obvious rejoinders, but the apology rings true at least in this respect: many people really do believe in the link between heritage and justification. Some people refrain from condemning the Confederate cause or the Zionist cause (or whatever) just because the heritage that has fashioned their mental furniture – and that claims them as heirs – is Southern or Jewish (or whatever). Until the link between heritage and justification is undone, anti-war argumentation is beside the point.

New Zealand “gothic”

From Kate De Goldi’s 2010 introduction to the Text Classics edition of David Ballantyne’s novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968):

New Zealand literature began in 1882 with the introduction of refrigerated shipping. This was the inimitable opening line of the New Zealand Lit course offered at Canterbury University in 1981. It was delivered by Dr Patrick Evans whose undergrad fame preceded him: his jokes were so good people actually wrote them down in lectures. Evans’ thesis, as it unfolded, was mesmerising – and deeply unsettling … something like this:

Refrigerated shipping – the vehicle for the frozen meat trade – entrenched the basis of the nascent New Zealand economy: the farming and slaughter of animals. The consequent despoliation and industrialisation of the landscape, and the transformation of the New Zealand colonist into a “systematic and calculating” butcher, described the progress of the “New Zealand Dream” from an imagined South Pacific eden (a “better Britain”) to a fallen society with, literally, blood on its collective hands. New Zealand became, not the pastoral paradise envisioned by British utopians, but a society in which industrialised violence was merely the sanctioned version of other widespread malignancies.

New Zealand literature, Evans argued, oscillated between work that danced around the “truth” of this national mythology, and work that confronted it in various compelling ways. Using short fiction and novels from the mid nineteenth century to the late 1960s he laid out the evidence for a “slaughterhouse” fiction …

Then, a list. I don’t know a lot of New Zealand authors, but most of those I’m aware of, down to the present day, are on Evans’s/​De Goldi’s list or should be. Even Katherine Mansfield. (Ngaio Marsh, for all her murder-writing, would barely qualify – she’s one who “dances around” the slaughterhouse theme, preferring to write about theatre-killings and such – but I presume she’d make the cut, for Died in the Wool.)

(I don’t mean the philosophers – certainly not A. N. Prior. But Jonathan Bennett isn’t so far off, thematically.)

Think of moviemakers, too. “Systematic and calculating butcher” describes Peter Jackson rather well. And Jane Campion has her moments (In the Cut; the fascinating, disturbing Top of the Lake). Think, also, of the documentarian David Farrier (Tickled; Dark Tourist; Mister Organ).

Anyway, Sydney Bridge Upside Down is a piece of work.

People are always saying how civilized New Zealanders are, how exemplarily democratic, and maybe so, but New Zealanders do appear to relish churning out stories of brutality. As do the Swedes.

Body-text fonts, pt. 56: Guardian Egyptian

Guardian readers will be familiar with the house font.

Matthew Butterick:

It’s counterintuitive, but a well-designed font can have a lot of subtle variation between letters and still look consistent on the page. The converse of this principle is that a font with too much consistency can be numbing to read. Cambria is an example of this problem. It works well on screen, but on the printed page, it’s a skull-clutcher. Guardian Egyptian … [is] similar to Cambria but [avoids] monotony.

An example of Guardian Egyptian:

This is hardly the best type specimen. The quote marks are “straight” rather than “curly,” and the dash in the second line appears to be a mere hyphen.

But I exhibit it because it’s an outstanding passage from one of my all-time favorite reviews: a pan of the great Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. It gets at what’s so elegant and so disconcerting – so craftily, poignantly removed – about Ishiguro’s prose.

(I’ve been reading Ishiguro’s books in order. Their formality is endlessly fascinating.)

The Guardian passage explains certain tendencies in my own writing.

I, too, am a kind of foreigner.

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Another insight along similar lines, due to Nancy Mitford (Don’t Tell Alfred):

You must remember, with Americans, that they are fighting to express themselves in a language they’ve never properly learnt. They need the dissertation; the kind of shorthand that we talk would be useless to them.

Recall, also, C. S. Lewis’s remark in Studies in Words:

It was better to have the older English distinction between “I haven’t got indigestion” (I am not suffering from it at the moment) and “I don’t have indigestion” (I am not a dyspeptic) than to level both, as Americans have taught most Englishmen to do, under “I don’t have.”

If you introduce many non-natives into an English-speaking country, then – naturally enough – phrasal verbs will get phased out: got will be dropped from I haven’t got.

Suppose that, over time, that country’s influence is inflated. Eventually, the blood will be siphoned out even from the Mother Country’s speech.

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See, also, David Lodge’s chapter, in The Art of Fiction, on Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day:

Stevens [the narrator] speaks, or writes, in a fussily precise, stiffly formal style – butlerspeak, in a word. Viewed objectively, the style has no literary merit whatsoever. It is completely lacking in wit, sensuousness and originality. Its effectiveness as a medium for this novel resides precisely in our growing perception of its inadequacy for what it describes.

Reading report

How I end up at night:

I don’t usually sleep with a Nutella jar. One of my sons added that prop.

I call this photo “Living High & Letting Die.”

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Our new pastor invited me out for coffee and asked what I’d been reading (besides the Bible). To his dismay, I told him I’d been making a special effort this season to get through various Gothic and horror classics.

What do you like about them, he asked.

The weather, I said.

It’s the truth!

Then I said something about “sins of the past.” That’s true, too.

Here are some items, a few of which I’ve already mentioned in this blog:

(1) Julia (Peter Straub; very Iris Murdochian)

(2) If You Could See Me Now (Straub)

(3) Ghost Story (Straub)

They’ve just been re-issued by the Library of America, although I’ve been reading them in other editions. Straub is the editor of the LOA’s two volumes of “American Fantastic Tales.”

(1)–(3) aren’t bad, but I wouldn’t have canonized them.

(4) The Greater Trumps (Charles Williams; introduced by William Lindsay Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley I might read, too)

(5) All Hallows’ Eve (Williams)

(6) Ortranto (Horace Walpole; ridiculous)

(7) The Haunted Looking Glass (compiled and illustrated by Edward Gorey)

(8) A Gothic Treasure Trove (Reader’s Digest Condensed Books)

(9) The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins; my fifth or sixth – and, thus far, most successful – attempt)

(10) Fludd (Hilary Mantel; there is a “Mrs. Fludd” in Straub’s Julia)

(11) Beyond Black (Mantel)

(12) Stories by Ray Bradbury, Elizabeth Gaskell, and M. R. James

“Every flat-earth person needs a globe”

We recently acquired a globe, courtesy of the abuelos (tireless Goodwill shoppers).

Samuel: “Every flat-earth person needs a globe.”

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There are very few living writers whose every new book I look out for. One is Michael Lewis. I have added his name to my St. Joe County Public Library “author alerts” list.

The library did not alert me that Lewis had just published Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, his third book showcasing the invaluable contributions of unheralded civil servants (its predecessors are The Fifth Risk and Who Is Government?; other books – The Big Short, The Premonition, and Going Infinite – touch on related issues).

All ten hard copies of Blockers are checked out.

Well, I thought, I can at least find out the body-text font.

I could not. Only e-versions are previewable online, and they use other fonts.

On Faustian impulse, I turned to A.I. Would this demon supply the desired knowledge?

No.

Too Small; Didn’t Enlarge:

AI Overview:

The exact body text typeface for the hardcover edition of Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis (published by W. W. Norton & Company) is not publicly specified or documented in available records.

While W. W. Norton books typically include a colophon page at the very back of the hardcover detailing the typeface and composition history, this specific typographical information hasn’t been indexed online.

Uh, huh.

Might someone have uploaded some pages’ images to eBay? I checked. The closest specimen I could find was of the UK edition (Allen Lane). This edition appears to have been set in Dante.

This copy is being sold as “signed”:

Were I the buyer, I’d ask for a little more John Hancock for my buck (quid, whatever).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy October 12. Some names for this day:

Día de la Raza, i.e. Race Day (Latin America, superannuated)

Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural, i.e. Respect for Cultural Diversity Day (Argentina)

Día del Encuentro de Dos Mundos, i.e. Two Worlds’ Meeting Day (Chile)

Día de la Nación Pluricultural, i.e. Multicultural Nation’s Day (Mexico)

Día de la Descolonización, i.e. Decolonization Day (Bolivia)

Día de la Resistencia Indígena, i.e. Indians’ Resistance Day (Venezuela)

Día de la Resistencia Indígena, Negra y Popular, i.e. Indians’, Blacks’, and Proles’ Resistance Day (Nicaragua)

Día de los Pueblos Originarios y del Diálogo Intercultural, i.e. First Peoples’ and Intercultural Dialog Day (Peru)

Día de la Interculturalidad y la Plurinacionalidad, i.e. D.E.I. Bandwagon Day (Ecuador)

Fiesta Nacional de España, i.e. Spain Nation Fest; and Día de la Hispanidad, i.e. Spanishness Day (Spain)

Discovery Day (Bahamas)

Columbus Day (USA)

Thanksgiving Day (Canada)

Etc.

I lean toward either “Race Day,” “Discovery Day,” “Two Worlds’ Meeting Day,” or “Columbus Day.” (Columbus was a flawed man, but some flaws are worth remembering.) “Thanksgiving” is a nice sentiment, but giving thanks on this day is unseemly.

Kudos to Spain for bravado.