Somerset Maugham said that before embarking on a new book he read Voltaire’s Candide as a way of cleansing his style. Other writers have used Hemingway or Tom Wolfe in the same way. I have often reached for Robert Hughes or Clive James when feeling jaded or pedestrian, not because I wanted to try and emulate their styles but because I wanted to inhale something of their approach to writing: serious without being pompous; a talent for muscular prose with an inbuilt-capacity to shock or surprise; unwillingness to take the great and the good at their inflated estimations of themselves; and a wonderful capacity for caricature. Who will ever forget Clive’s description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as “a condom filled with walnuts”? Or Hughes’s dismissal of Jeff Koons? (“He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.”)
So I mourn the passing of Robert Hughes, who even when he was wrong, was wrong in entertaining and thought-provoking ways. Looking for a round-up of obituaries and tributes, I went straight to the wonderful Arts & Letters Daily, which is normally terrific at doing that kind of round-up (See, for example, what they did for Gore Vidal recently). But, strangely, they seem to have missed out on Hughes.
So here is my tentative substitute.
“Hughes didn’t merely write muscular prose, he was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of art criticism.” Blake Gopnik in The Daily Beast.
“His prose was lithe, muscular and fast as a bunch of fives. He was incapable of writing the jargon of the art world, and consequently was treated by its mandarins with fear and loathing. Much he cared.” Michael McNay, the Guardian.
“His style was forthright, humorous and often irreverent. At a time when much of modern art was riddled with posturing and hyperbole, Hughes fixed his gaze unwaveringly on the work of art itself, regardless of its political or social agenda. His judgments could be merciless. Of Jeff Koons, for example, he said: ‘Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary. He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.’ The duo Gilbert and George were among the ‘image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism’.” Daily Telegraph.
“Robert Hughes: Forthright critic who transformed the public perception of modern art.” Marcus Williamson, The Independent.
“I prefer to remember him, however, … as the kind of god of criticism that he was to a generation of young writers like myself. He could turn a phrase on a dime, he could paint and write poetry, he could speak Latin, Spanish, and Italian — he was a polymath in an age of imbeciles. He was, in short an intellectual warrior, fierce in his views, frequently combative, but ever passionate about the necessity of art.” Benjamin Genocchio, ArtInfo.com.
“The eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century”. New York Times.
The increase in tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year has led to a “clear drop” in the number of English students applying for university places this autumn, an independent analysis of the impact of the coalition’s controversial reform has found.
There are 15,000 “missing” applicants who might have been expected to have sought a place on a degree course this academic year but did not, according to the Independent Commission on Fees.
Hmmm… I’m not entirely surprised by this Guardian report. I’ve noticed that teenagers of my acquaintance who have Kindles are definitely reading more. An interesting way-point on the journey to a new ecosystem.
Underlining the speed of change in the publishing industry, Amazon said that two years after introducing the Kindle, customers are now buying more ebooks than all hardcovers and paperbacks combined. According to unaudited figures released by the company on Monday, since the start of 2012, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold on its site, customers downloaded 114 ebooks. Amazon said the figures included sales of printed books which did not have Kindle editions, but excluded free ebooks.
In a surprise move in May, the company went into partnership with the UK’s largest bricks-and-mortar books retailer, Waterstones.
Much to the consternation of the publishing industry, Amazon has refused to release audited figures for its digital book sales, something it does for printed books. It told the Guardian that the company would not discuss future policy on the matter.
The company said its figures also showed that British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle, a trend it described as a renaissance of reading.
“As soon as we started selling Kindles it became our bestselling product on Amazon.co.uk so there was a very quick adoption … [And they] are buying four times more books prior to owning a Kindle,” an Amazon spokeswoman said. “Generally there seems to be … a love of a reading and a renaissance as a result of Kindle being launched.”
I’ve just finished The Places In Between, Rory Stewart’s astonishing account of his walk across the remotest part of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. For much of the time, I found myself marvelling that someone should put himself through so much pain — and into so much danger — to achieve an idealistic goal. It’s both entirely admirable and completely nuts.
But the strongest impression left by Mr Stewart’s tale is of the utter fatuity of the US/UK/Nato project in Afghanistan. His account of what life is actually like in the remote fastnesses of that wretched country is truly startling, at least to this uninformed Westerner. As another reader said to me, much of Afghanistan isn’t even a medieval society: it’s pre-medieval.
Stewart walked from village to village, on one of the most treacherous paths in the world. In some villages he was treated generously; in others the famed Muslim hospitality was, to say the least, grudging. Some people clearly contemplated killing him, for for various inscrutable reasons, didn’t. Most of the people he met were poor and illiterate, and obsessed with religion. But even in some of the poorest areas, there were serious discrepancies in wealth and status between villagers, most of whose lives were truly nasty, brutish and short. Women were effectively invisible (Stewart saw only a handful of them during the entire duration of his trip), marriage between first or second cousins seemed to be the norm, and some villagers had never even set foot in the next village along the path. Just about the only piece of modern technology that anyone had experienced was a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Despite the remoteness of their locations, many of the people Stewart encountered had also been involved in a bewildering range of armed conflicts over the last few decades. In Dahan-e-Rezak, for example, he stayed in the house of the headman, one Seyyad Agha, who had been a military commander for twenty-four years:
“First, he had fought the Russians, with a group funded by Pakistani Intelligence, then, “because they weren’t killing enough people”, he had fought for a group partially funded by the British. Then the Russians withdrew and he fought the pro-Russian Najib government and the rival Northern Alliance groups. When the Taliban took over the province, five years ago, he decided, he said, to ‘retire from fighting’. This probably meant that he had been the Taliban commander in the area, but he would have denied it if I had asked.”
But Seyyad had a radio and as Stewart settled for sleep in the crowded guest house,
“someone put the BBC Dari service on the radio. Bill Gates was making a speech on American policy towards technology monopolies, which was being translated into Dari. The men listened intently. I wondered what these illiterate men without electricity thought of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows”.
Towards the end of the book, Stewart quotes a passage from the UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan, the goal of which is “the creation of a centralized, broad-based, multi-ethnic government committed to democracy, human rights and the rule of law”.
The UN folks are — like the Development personnel from the various Western governments involved in Afghanistan — talented, hard-working, well-meaning people with university degrees in subjects like international law, economics and development. They come from middle-class backgrounds, work on high-minded policy proposals on ‘democratization’, ‘capacity building, ‘gender’, ‘skills training’ and ‘sustainable development’. The trouble is, says Stewart, that they know
“next to nothing about the villages where 90 per cent of the population of Afghanistan lived. They come from post-modern, secularised, globalized states with liberal traditions of law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights and fibre-optic cable networks, to talk about transparent, clean and accountable processes, tolerance and civil society and to speak of a people ‘who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government’.”
Oh yeah? Ponder this:
“There were five if us in the guest room and for two hours we sat in silence. It was an overcast afternoon. Seyyed Umar sat by the large window, clicking his rosary. He shifted his head to look down at the black ridge, the mud below the river and the tracks in the snow. Occasionally he sighed or cleared his throat. Outside, a door creaked, a horse whinnied. Half an hour later, two ragged men came up the hill with donkeys and the children of the village threw snowballs at them. The men who were exhausted and at the end of their day’s journey smiled.
Seyyed Umar and the others could not work in the fields because of the snow; they had lived here together since they were children; nothing had happened recently that was worth talking about and they were illiterate so that they could not read. They waited in silence throughout the long afternoon for the call to prayer, dinner, and bed.”
Given the reality — the utter hopelessness of any attempt to turn this vast, pre-medieval country into even the crudest approximation of a coherent state by throwing money and armed force at it — the windy cant our politicians spout whenever they visit British troops in Afghanistan is truly nauseating. They are even preparing to do a deal with the Taliban, the elimination of whom was the ostensible justification for the US/UK intervention in the country. To date, 422 young British men and women have paid with their lives for the hypocrisy of our political elite. And many more will die before this farce is finally brought to an end.
Postscript: Rory Stewart is now a member of that aforementioned political elite — as MP for Penrith and the Border. Despite this, he’s still talking sense about Afghanistan. Trouble is: nobody in government is listening.
, Rory Stewart’s astonishing account of his walk across the remotest part of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. For much of the time, I found myself marvelling that someone should put himself through so much pain — and into so much danger — to achieve an idealistic goal. It’s both entirely admirable and completely nuts.