David Hopkins Beauty in America: Zadie Smith Robin Seaton Amphetamines and bloody-mindedness: Bob Dylan Olly Chadwick Any Questions?: Hamlet
the ZAHIR
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Peter Cabrera Steeples and people: the psychological function of religious architecture
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the ZAHIR VOL. 0 ISSUE 0 | FRIDAY 21ST OCTOBER 2005
fiction
peter cabrera is currently studying for a Masters in Aesthetics with focus on religious architecture.
4 David Hopkins On Beauty: a novel | Zadie Smith 8 Caroline Trotman-Dickenson The Penelopiad | Margaret Atwood 9 David Hopkins The Possibility of an Island | Michel Houellebecq
olly chadwick is in the final year of his English
degree and feels that The Da Vinci Code has been critically underrated.
peter cobb-jones is a first-year maths
poems
student.
9 One Quartet | Mark Kelleher 20 Pym, Pin, and Pine | Peter Cobb-Jones 27 Conference of the Smurfs | Kate Smith
jasper frühs misses decent bread and beer. He is currently studying for a Masters in Modern History, focusing on the “Age of Revolutions”, 1750—1850.
music/film
hester goodsell is currently studying for a
6 Robin Seaton No Direction Home: Bob Dylan | Martin Scorsese
PGCE at Cambridge, having completed her BA in Music at York last year.
drama
david hopkins is a second-year PPE student
10 Olly Chadwick Hamlet | English Touring Theatre
and decided to read all of Zadie Smith’s novels on a whim.
history
mark kelleher volunteered in South Africa
12 Jasper Frühs Earthly Powers | Michael Burleigh
with Tentelini last summer.
ramya jaidev thinks that Descartes should have
commentary
kept his mouth shut, and is studying PPE.
15 Steeples and people: the psychological function of religious architecture | Peter Cabrera
chris reed is a second-year politics student and
can’t get enough of BBC Parliament.
language
robin seaton knows every one of Bob Dylan’s
21 Ramya Jaidev The Meaning of Tingo | Adam Jacot de Boinod
albums personally. He is a second-year history student.
kate smith is studying philosophy and politics.
biography
She caught a glimpse of George Monbiot whilst marching round Edinburgh earlier this year.
24 Kate Smith Margrave of the Marshes | John Peel and Sheila Ravenscroft
caroline trotman-dickenson is a second-year philosophy and politics student who gets upset by historically-inaccurate films.
music 26 Hester Goodsell Mozart:The Violin Concertos | Anne-Sophie Mutter, London Philharmonic
religion/philosophy 28 Chris Reed The Tibetan Book of the Dead | Graham Coleman,Thupten Jinja (eds.), Gyurme Dorje (trans.) The Zahir, 32a Temple Avenue,York YO10 3RT. © The Zahir, 2005. Editor: David Hopkins. Email: dckh500@york.ac.uk. Cover image: Interior of All Saints’ church, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, England, Andrew Dunn licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License. Other images: p. 4 licensed under the GNU General Public License, p. 7 [unattributed]. The Zahir endeavours to credit all of its images. If you have information on an unattributed image, or an issue you would like to raise, please contact the editor.
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THE ZAHIR | VOL. 0 ISSUE 0 | FRIDAY 21ST OCTOBER
FICTION
the beautyful ones are not yet born On Beauty: a novel. Zadie Smith. 446pp. Hamish Hamilton. £16.99. 0-24114-293-8 David Hopkins discovers that in her third novel Zadie Smith has turned down the volume but still has a thing for larger men. adie Smith’s new novel announces its literary creditors immediately. In the typically colloquial acknowledgements— her agent is, apparently, “a bobby dazzler”—Smith tells us “it should be obvious from the first line that this is a novel inspired by a love of E. M. Forster, to whom all my fiction is indebted, one way or the other. This time I wanted to repay the debt with hommage.” Hommage, indeed, as On Beauty is essentially a twenty-first century reworking of Forster’s magnum opus, Howards End. The epistolary opening of Forster’s book is updated to a series of chatty emails from firstborn Jerome Belsey to his father Howard, hurriedly and sometimes questionably written—“sounds crazy but it true!!!! [sic]”—and replete with emoticons. In these we come across practically all of the main cast. Howard is a white British art history professor at Wellington College, an east-coast little-Ivy, toiling away at an unpublished study of Rembrandt. Kiki Simmonds, his black American wife, is a senior nurse in the local hospital. Zora, their daughter, is studying at Wellington, and is partly modelled on Smith herself, like Irie Jones in White Teeth. Levi, the youngest of the three Belsey children, professes a phoney affinity with “the street”. Jerome is in London staying with the rightwing Trinidadian intellectual and Howard's academic archenemy Sir Monty Kipps, his enigmatic wife Carlene, and their sex-kitten daughter Victoria, known to all as
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“Vee”. In the last of these emails, Jerome, a pious and po-faced born-again (“twenty is really not that late [to still be a virgin] among young people these days, especially if they've decided to make their fellowship with Christ.”), shocks Howard by announcing his intention to marry Vee, as Helen Schlegel shocked Meg by declaring herself in love with Paul Wilcox. Like the Schlegels and Wilcoxes, the Belseys and Kippses are ideologically opposed; like in
experiencing the beautiful forces us “to give up our imaginary places at the centre” and is thus a good in and of itself; as well, it helps us better to consider social justice. Howard would believe none of this. He wants “to recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion” and challenge his students’ “beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’.” Howard prefers Kandinsky to Constable, electronica to the Eroica. These views are, if not antithetical to, certainly divergent from Smith’s own opinions—if we take her to accept Scarry’s ideas, this becomes apparent from the differing attitudes to the outside world taken by selfish Howard and charitable Monty, who is more traditional in his artistic tastes. More traditional too, is the style in which On Beauty is written. Gone is the ‘hysterical realism’ James Wood saw in White Teeth. We are treated instead to a much quieter and more subtle affair, where Smith’s enviable Smith in 2000 Howards End, the two families are gifts for imagery and poetic phrase drawn inexorably into conflict. The are allowed to take much of the cencongruencies continue: Jerome tre-stage. In a 2003 Guardian article emails too late to inform Howard Smith asserted that that he has judged the romantic situa“the conflation of the simple in tion wrongly, there is a visit to a constyle with the morally prescriptive cert that introduces the talented and in character, and the complex in beautiful local rapper Carl into the style with the amoral or anarchic in Belseys’ lives as Leonard Bast was character seems to me one of the introduced into the Schlegels’, and so most persistently fallacious beliefs on. held by English students.” This is not to say that the book is On Beauty seems at times a deliberdominated by its own model.Themes ate attempt to support this hypotheand ideas are replayed and developed sis, written plainly and very readably, inside the set structure, the literary yet never condemning Howard equivalent, perhaps, of a fugue. despite his two destructive affairs.We Elaine Scarry’s 1999 essay On Beauty are at first sympathetic towards him, and Being Just provided Smith with “a before becoming frustrated and finaltitle, a chapter heading, and a good ly unsure. Social injustice—namely, deal of inspiration”. Scarry posits that the plight of exploited Haitian work4
FICTION ers in America—is presented on the personal rather than political level. Speaking to her Haitian cleaner, “Kiki stayed in her strange moment, nervous of what this black woman thought of another black woman paying her to clean.” Levi later becomes involved with a group of Haitians who “hustle” by day and bust revolutionary rhymes by night: “‘AH-RIS-TEED, CORRUPTION AND GREED, AND SO WE ALL SEE, WE STILL AIN'T FREE!’” But whilst she may be less hysterical, Smith is more playful than ever. From the acknowledgements: “It’s Nick [Laird, her husband] who knows that ‘time is how you spend your love’, and that’s why this book is dedicated to him, as is my life.” Laird’s aphorism is later ascribed to Howard's geriatric father, who is also a bastion of fifties prejudice—“these two women—like bloody buses, both of ’em huge, hair very short, dressed like blokes of course, like they do,
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THE ZAHIR | VOL. 0 ISSUE 0 | FRIDAY 21ST OCTOBER ugly as sin”. Should we ascribe this kind of thought to Smith’s hubby? In the TLS, Sophie Ratcliffe described Smith’s dedication of her “life” to Laird as “rather alarming”. This kind of dedication is something that Carlene, Monty’s trampled-down wife espouses: “‘I don’t ask myself what did I live for […] That is a man’s question. I ask whom did I live for.’” Smith is having us on. Playful too, is Victoria’s insistence that she be referred to as “Vee”, an allusion to the eponymous “V.” of Thomas Pynchon's first novel, a woman of vague but compellingly attractive nature who, like Victoria, reappears constantly throughout the book. Smith’s powers of pure comedy also remain undimmed, the highlight here being a set piece about a glee club’s performance of U2’s Pride (In the Name of Love). The cumulative effect of the ridiculousness that Howard perceives is captured perfectly, and finally “something about the fat guy’s handclaps pushed Howard over the brink.” (As an aside, what is this fascination with fat men? White Teeth had, amongst others, “the sudden force of a fat man pushing through swing doors”, The Autograph Man Joseph’s fat and repulsive father, Herman Klein.) However, despite all this, Smith was rightly modest about her chances of winning this year’s Booker. Contrary to earlier misquotations, she genuinely (and correctly) felt that the standard of the other shortlisted books was too high. Had she been shortlisted for On Beauty two years ago (the year of the execrable Vernon God Little) she may well have taken the prize. All of the writers and judges must be congratulated for such a raising of the bar, but especially the estimable Prof. John Sutherland, who made the excellent decision to use his casting vote to award the Booker to Ireland’s melancholy, sometimes introverted John Banville. Smith’s book, like its predecessors, suffers occasionally from 5
some poor and insufficiently brutal editing, most obviously here in the pastiche of Forster's account of Beethoven’s Fifth. The Belseys have gone to see the Mozart Requiem, and Kiki imagines “the mermaids and the apes that persist on dancing round each other” before looking in the programme notes, where she finds only “Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. That is all that happens in the Kyrie. No apes, just Latin.” The passage is as irritating as Forster’s original, and with basic errors such as this (the Kyrie is Greek, albeit Latinized) it detracts needlessly from the novel’s successes. Smith though, must not become too modest about her abilities as a whole. Quoted in the Boston Phoenix as saying that “I don’t have the physical and mental will to be a great [novelist]”, she sounds as if she might have lost the confidence that was so present in her barnstorming debut. This would be a great shame. Describing the Belsey house early on, Smith writes “They are not original, these windows, but replacements, the originals being too precious to be used as windows. Heavily insured, they are kept in a large safe in the basement. A significant portion of the value of the Belsey house resides in windows that nobody may look through or open.” Apart from being a beautiful and pregnant image, it serves as a reminder that Smith’s talents must not be allowed to be kept locked away, unseen, unopened. The hype surrounding her work has often caused this, by turning her into a celebrity rather than a writer. Awarding her English literature’s most prestigious prize so early in her career—and for this book—would have only worsened matters.Without that albatross, Smith is free to develop the many talents she already possesses. Readers everywhere should eagerly await the result.
MUSIC/FILM
THE ZAHIR | VOL. 0 ISSUE 0 | FRIDAY 21ST OCTOBER
bob dylan revisited No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Martin Scorsese. 201’. Paramount. £19.99 Martin Scorsese’s Dylan biopic is good on detail and also full of juicy new footage, writes Robin Seaton. he last week in September saw the broadcast of Martin Scorsese’s Down the Highway, one great American artist’s attempt to chronicle the most productive years of another.This documentary may not have been in depth enough for hardcore Bobcats, but in spending its nearly three-and-ahalf hours concentrating on the most productive years of Dylan’s career and on his adolescence, Scorsese achieves an admirable level of detail for a TV biography. Now released on DVD, in a few months’ time it will rightly be making its way into stockings all over the land. For any fan, the most interesting aspect was undoubtedly the use of footage shot by D.A. Pennebaker on the 1966 tour: complete live songs shot in front of a deeply divided crowd, played by a band breaking strange new ground in rock and roll.This was the world tour where Bob and the Band were booed in every city they played, becoming increasingly embattled as the tour progressed. This was the world tour where Bob was called “Judas” by a disgruntled folk fan (now a Canadian merchant banker)—an electrifying moment captured on film, and seen here for the first time.This was the world tour kept going by amphetamines and bloody mindedness. Born in 1941, Dylan had started out as just another small town boy with rock and roll dreams, but around 16, became more interested in folk songs, swapped his electric for an acoustic, and set about learning the songs of the American folk tradition. He was reading the works of enlightenment thinkers in these years too: “Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin Luther—visionar-
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ies, revolutionaries”. Inevitably for a teenager growing up in the late 50s, he read the works of the beatniks, identifying with Kerouac’s words in On the Road: “the only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to talk, mad to live, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Dylan saw On the Road and other works such as Ginsberg’s Howl and Corso’s Gasoline as “street ideologies that were signalling a new type of human existence”. Initially, he felt that he had to do an apprenticeship as a performer before he could begin to write songs, and most of the songs on his first album are covers and reworkings of old folk songs. Even on his second album, The Freewheeling, many tunes are lifted from traditional songs, such as Scarborough Fair. In the same vein comes Dylan’s idolisation, around this time, of Woody Guthrie. Guthrie was a singer-songwriter who had been bankrupted by the depression, and had ridden freight trains across the country throughout much of the thirties, in the company of old Okies,Arkies and his acoustic guitar. He had learnt folk songs and Appalachian mountain songs from these people, and composed his own about the people he met and the state of society as he saw it. His most famous is America’s ‘alternative anthem’, This Land isYour Land. Dylan felt that Guthrie’s style was more real, more connected to real people, than any other he knew, and consciously imitated him for the first part of his career, even posing like him in photographs. Dylan visited Guthrie in the hospice where he spent the last years of his life, playing Guthrie’s own songs back to him.There seems to have been a real sense of a baton being 6
passed, on both sides. Before recording the songs for The Freewheeling, Dylan came to Britain to further this folk apprenticeship, where he stayed with folk guitarist Martin Carthy (who has no memory of performing with Dylan, due to being too stoned), and learnt old British folk songs like Scarborough Fair, and many others. During this period Dylan had a bit part in a BBC TV play, but didn’t make too much money out of it—he and Carthy had to chop up Carthy’s piano for firewood that winter. Throughout the documentary, Scorsese is constantly cutting back to the stunning footage of the 1966 tour, maintaining a tension between Dylan Mk. 1 (folk) and Dylan Mk. 2 (rock), a tension obvious to those who could hear his musical and lyrical evolution between 1964 and 1966.While his music became louder, stronger, a ‘wild mercury sound’, his lyrics generally became more elliptical, reaching a peak of complexity and beauty with the whirling surrealistic vortices of words found on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.These were nothing like the lyrics found in the popular rock and pop songs of the time. These lyrics are roughly contemporaneous: “We all live in a yellow submarine/ yellow submarine/ yellow submarine”, and “You say you never compromise/ With the mystery tramp/ But now you realise/ He’s not selling any alibis/ As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes/ And say ‘Do you want to make a deal?” Or, to go back to 1963, compare I Want to Hold Your Hand with the understated beauty of Girl from the North Country. But how did his fans, who were used to his skilful rendering of massive social issues within the context of a three minute song, react to the dreamlike qualities and Symbolist tendencies of his post 1964 work? While Dylan had been
MUSIC/FILM absorbing the influence of Rimbaud and others, many fans remained stuck on the style of literal protest songs, songs about liberty, freedom and real events, songs that were seen as an important and vocal part of the ‘revolution’. Dylan’s ‘conversion’ to the electric guitar, and movement away from being labelled as a ‘protest singer’ were seen as a betrayal by many, which, in retrospect, seems a bit narrow minded—should an artist be dictated to by his audience? Should he play up to their expectations? Or should an artist try to push back the boundaries of his art? Establish new levels of brilliance? Or follow the same old routes without challenging anyone except those who it is seen as acceptable to challenge? Dylan had started to write songs lyrically entirely unlike those of his predecessors. However, fans coming out of gigs on the 1966 tour, whose interviews are seen here spliced into the documentary at various points, had a different perspective: “Dylan was a bastud in the second half ”. Many are confused as to what they have just seen, with “I came to see a folk musician, not a pop group”, on the one hand and “there’s not many pop groups that sound like that, mate”, on the other. There are even those who don’t know
THE ZAHIR | VOL. 0 ISSUE 0 | FRIDAY 21ST OCTOBER whether to hate or idolise Dylan, such as the girl who leans through the window of his car, asking for an autograph— “BOB:Why? GIRL: I want it.You were a bastard, playing like that. Sign it, go on. BOB: You don’t need my autograph. GIRL: Go on, sign it you bastard. BOB: If you needed my autograph, I’d give it to you. GIRL: Bastard! [Car drives on].” Reinventing rock and roll and having seen the results booed on three continents seems to have got Dylan down. “I’m gonna get me a new Bob Dylan next week and use him up, see how long he lasts,” he mutters at one point. It was not long after the tour, in December 1966, that he had the motorcycle crash, which, one way or another seems to have put a stop to this period of incredible creativity. Between 1962 and 1966, Dylan recorded over nine albums’ worth of songs, if the Basement Tapes are included. But after 1966, he did not tour for eight years, and he released albums more rarely, albums which do not, in general, stand up as well as his revolutionary works from ’65/’66.The lyrical style is different; the songs are simpler, pared down. It wasn’t until 1974 that he, briefly, returned to the peak of artistic brilliance he had known in the mid sixties.
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