Book 16 - The Medieval Craft of Memory: an anthology of texts and pictures, Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds)

This from Hugh of St Victor was from one of the essays:

Child, knowledge is a treasury and your heart its strongbox. As you study all of knowledge store up for yourself good treasures, immortal treasures, incorruptible treasures, which never decay or lose the beauty of their brightness. In the treasure house of knowledge there are various sorts of wealth, and many filing places in the storehouse of your heart. in one place is put gold, in another silver, in another precious jewels. Their orderly arrangement is clarity of knowledge. Dispose and separate each single thing into its own place so you may know what has been placed here and what there. Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness, but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence and secures memory.

I have nothing to add the quotation is complete in itself.

Publication Date

2003, University of Pennsylvania Press

Link to last Book

The Memory Chalet was the application of medieval memory techniques

Book 15 pt 2 - Tony Judt, The memory Chalet

It was one of those stories that for a few days was everywhere. Young backpackers, for the dare, for the experience, for the memories, for the excitement, for the anecdote, strip off on top of a sacred mountain in Malaysia. Thoughtless of anything except the fun of being socially free whilst enjoying the hit of cold air on bare flesh, there would have seemed little danger of consequence. Instead after the picture was posted on Facebook  there was an earthquake. They were blamed for upsetting the gods with their act of disrespect and they certainly outraged the sensibilities of the locals. Like many thoughtless youngsters they paid no heed to the opinion or feelings of others. They were not malicious. It just didn’t cross their minds. It could have happened to anyone but fate singled them out and they were arrested, spent time in prison and were deported.

On a personal level I am sympathetic as I know we all do stupid things and being thoughtless does not make us morally deficient. I am sure they are good kids. But it does illustrate a wider point of cultural imperialism and how we in the economically favoured West can see the rest of the world as our playground and that we are entitled to arrive with our own values and beliefs and carry on as normal, without heed of local sensitivities.

This chimes with an anecdote in ‘The Memory Chalet’ dating from the late 70s, when as associate dean at King’s College Cambridge, Tony Judt had to a mediate between students who had cavorted naked on the college lawns and a bedder who had been offended by their immodesty. The bedder was upset not only be the nakedness but  because there were girls in the group, they had made no effort to pretend or cover up, and they had laughed at her discomfort. She thus felt humiliated.

This was a breakdown of social understanding. The students unused to the idea servants and service (the antecedent of the Cambridge system of bedders) thought of her as a paid employee and misunderstood the requirement for forbearance and respect. They thought that in an age of equality the institution was a throwback to indentured servitude. She ought to have been better paid and in return not have the right to call-out their bad behaviour. The purely commercial transaction would  release them from the obligation of consideration.

“But, as I think back, it was the bedder who showed a more subtle grasp of the core truth of human exchange. The students, unbeknownst to themselves, were parroting a reduced and impoverished capitalist vision: the ideal of monadic productive units maximising private advantage and indifferent to community or convention. Their bedder knew otherwise. Semiliterate and poorly educated she might have been, but her instincts bought her unerringly to an understanding of social intercourse, the unwritten rules that sustain it, and a priori interpersonal ethics on which it rests. She had certainly never heard of Adam Smith but the author of ‘A Theory of Moral Sentiments” would surely have applauded.”

That was well over 30 years ago and since then the hold of that economic reductionism has increased and understanding everything in terms of self interest has become so embedded it is not even noticeable. So of course you can go to a sacred mountain and take your clothes off.

Book 15 - Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet

I’m reading this on the 758 Greenline bus from Hemel Hempstead to London. This would be inconsequential except for the fact that I’m reading about the young Tony Judt riding the Greenline buses to school. He describes the difference between them and the normal red buses and how, because they served the outer areas, they were slightly more middle class, and how class differences were still quite marked in the 50s. Their routes crossed London from one side to another, with limited stops so they were like long distance coaches and so they had a little extra glamour. I can remember those buses from my childhood and how they felt, in some strange way a little more exotic than the normal double decker. Any romance is long gone and all that remains is a service, now run by Arriva, which merely retains the name. There are a few routes from outlying towns into Victoria and I’m lucky that one serves my town. I can get into London easily but don’t really think much more about it. Nevertheless it is an immediate connection with what I am reading but not the only one. I’m only a few years younger than the author and share his sense of the times, even if our life experiences are different.

This is a strange little book, written near the end of Tony Judt’s life, full of discrete memories, each 8-10 pages in length. (Feuilletons he calls them - I had to look the word up. Apparently it comes from the section in French political papers set aside for lighter articles of gossip or reviews). Physically small it feels bigger in the mind because I frequently pause and relate what I have read to what I might know.

The circumstances of its writing make it heroic. He was reaching the end stages of a degenerative disease, ALS, which had rendered him quadriplegic. He described the progress of first losing the physical ability to write, then the voice and then being condemned to long hours of silent immobility - but with a clear mind. For someone, whose life had been built on the ability to communicate, I cannot begin to understand the frustration and despair. Yet his life up to that point had stocked his mind full and this book is the result of sifting through that store, through the sleepless nights. He ends the introductory chapter by saying he is grateful that his life had left him with such a rich seam to mine and that despite the illness he still considered himself lucky. “It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck.”

It is here I pause and wonder how I would cope with such incapacity. I find it hard to imagine how I would cope with being so trapped, so incapacitated. So here I am just a few pages into the book and in the space of a few, economical words, stumped and staring into space, trying to think how I would maintain a sense of self and what I would value. As I said earlier my progress through the book is frequently interrupted.

I am not yet beyond the introductory chapter. Take this about feelings of frustration with unproductive nights:

“ To be sure, you can say to yourself, come now: you should be proud of the fact that you have kept your sanity - where is it written that you should be productive as well? And yet I feel a certain guilt at having submitted to fate so readily. Who could do better in the circumstances? The answer, of course, is a “better me” and it is surprising how often we ask that we be better versions of our present self - in the full knowledge of just how difficult it was getting this far.”

He transferred these feelings into a character: the alm-uncle, who glowers from beneath furrowed brow and is not a happy man. A perennially dissatisfied alter-ego, who “sits there smoking a Gitanes, cradling a glass of whisky, turning the pages of a newspaper” “Damn” I thought “apart from the smoking that’s me pretty much nailed down”. I think I need to take stock.

And that is what this book is about: taking stock. What I like best about it is that it is sticky, like burrs that attach to you clothing during a country walk.


P.S.
The idea of a memory chalet follows the mnemonic technique of early ages where events could not easily be recorded on paper. He mentions the work of Frances Yeats and Jonathan Spence describing how people from medieval times would create memory palaces whereby thoughts and images were placed in different places in the envisioned rooms so that the person could close their eyes and walk through their story. Judt did not choose a palace, instead he fixed upon a particular chalet, a small pensione, in the village of Chesières, Switzerland, home to some fond childhood memories. As he explains “In order for the memory palace to work as a storehouse of infinitely reorganised and regrouped recollections, it needs to be a building of extraordinary appeal.”

I have heard of this technique before but have never tried to use it. Instinctively it feels a difficult skill to master but Judt sees it as the easiest of devices, almost too mechanical. Perhaps I need to find out more.

Link to the last book

Both CLR James and Tony Judt are famous scholars who have written semi-memoirs. James organised his around cricket, particularly West Indian cricket but a lot of it is about his own story. Judt has no great organising theme (apart from his chalet) but to my mind there is a link.

Publication date
2010

Book 14 - Beyond a Boundary pt 2

Beyond a Boundary is a work of recollection, an oldish man looking back at his obsession with cricket: integrating his own memories with things he learnt from other sources. He started it at some point in the 1950s but when it was published in 1963 he was 62, so the  descriptions of single strokes seen when he was a young boy, the cut of Arthur Jones for example, are images that had been with him for decades. I find this remarkable and can only wish my memory was so vivid and I had such clarity but the book makes clear can only happen with early and rigorous training. Cricket filled his mind and tested his body from a young age.  “I was reading cricket and looking at it so critically so early that casual experiences which would have passed unnoticed stayed with me and I worked on them as if on some historical problem” (p47).

He played the game to a high standard and although he played with some of the great players he described in the book he had the awareness to know he was not quite good enough. “ By the time I left school at the age of eighteen I was a good defensive bat and could have held my own at any English public school side. I could bowl fast-medium with a high action, swing the ball late from leg and break it with shoulder and finger action from off”(p45). “I had bowing gifts and they could have been developed but the pace, the length, the command, the stamina, the concentration, I did not have and never had. Now and then even I could bring it off for an over or two. The great gain was that it taught me how to watch.” (p47). This is the reason the book is so good. He understands what he sees on a cricket pitch, can work out the subtleties of the ebb and flow of fortune, can see the angles and know what is being attempted yet knows that the game is mostly in the mind  and as such also reveals character. In the same way that the best football managers were often not the best players, the most insightful writers on sport need not have played at the highest level.  They just need to have played enough to recognise what is going on and have an obsessive curiosity about what they are watching.

One of the great pleasure of the book is the analytical description of West Indian cricketers from a bygone era. As I read some of the names meant something: Learie Constantine and Frank Worrell. George Headley rang a bell but Wilton St Hill and George John were completely unknown. About all of them though there was personal insight. Constantine was obviously a man of virtue as well as a great cricketer and was of great help to James in building his career and so we learn of his character as well as his prowess. George Headley though is talked about purely in terms of his greatness as a batsman and what it was that set him apart:

Great batsmen are the same, they are not like you or me. An experience is automatically registered and henceforth functions as a permanent part of the organism.
Similarly with placing. For George, to make a stroke was to hit the ball (he had loud scorn for ‘the pushers’) and to hit it precisely in a certain place.. He couldn’t think of a stroke without thinking of exactly where it was going. Whenever he scored a century and runs were not urgent he practised different strokes at the same ball, so as to be sure to command the placing of the ball where there was no fiejdsman… This placing to a shifting field must also be to a substantial degree automatic. Having taken glance round and sized up what the bowler is trying to do, the great batsman puts the ball away more by reflex than conscious action (p188)

But that reflex took a lot of conscious effort. The night before a Test Headley would rarely sleep more than an hour or two. he spent the time visualising how he would play his innings and mentally rehearse his shots. A lot of modern sports psychology extols the benefits of pre-visualisation but it is not a new discovery. It is one of the pleasures of reading older books to discover that it is not a new thing.  This book shows, above everything else, how hard people have always thought about the game and who everyone James wrote about had their own profound insights.

Book 14 - C L R James, Beyond a Boundary

The weeks in this blog have stretched longer and longer until I will be lucky to do a book a month. I half expected this to happen as things get in the way. This time it was being away in Scotland, visiting distilleries and mostly reading about whisky and birds, none of that reading will feature here. Instead my follow-on book from the cricket humour of Peter Tinniswood, is something that is not only referred to as one of the best cricket books but also has a claim to be one of the best books on sport ever written. This is because it is about more than a game. It is part memoir, part portraits of cricketers who were significant personalities, part social history and the evolution of attitudes to race, and part aesthetic theory.

C L R James could write this because not only was he a social theorist, historian and essayist, with a role in the public life of the West Indies, he was also someone who had been obsessed by cricket from a young age and played the game to a very high standard. High enough to be offered a place in a Lancashire League team (and know he didn’t have the personality to bear that responsibility) But he was also marked out at an early age as an intellectual. One of the shocking revelations (shocking in the sense that it made me sit up and blink, not that it was terrible)  was that his favourite book from the age of eight was Vanity Fair and that he reread it so many times he could challenge people to read out a random passage and he would complete it. But alongside this he stored and filed clippings about cricket happening in England, devoured and organised the stats, and learnt about great figures from the past, as well as being outside playing thee game. From early ages are habits formed!

This book is so rich I am going to blog about it in two parts. in the second I will talk about some of his observations about cricket and cricketers but in this I will talk about a tiny little detail, almost an aside, that resonated with me because of the election Ed Miliband has just lost.

it was in a section where James was describing how many of his his values were actually formed on the cricket pitch and how as a black, scholarship boy in a colonial school he imbibed the attitudes of Thomas Arnold and the Nineteenth Century public school ethos.

“But as soon as we stepped on to the cricket or football field, all was changed. We were a motley crew. The children of some white officials and white business men, middle class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, some of whose parents still spoke broken English,  Indian boys, some of whose parents could speak no English at all, and some poor black boys who had one exhibitions or whose parents had has starved or toiled on plots of agricultural land and were spending their hard-earned money  on giving their their eldest son an education. Yet we rapidly learnt to obey the umpire’s decision without question, however irrational it was. We learnt to play with the team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill fortune. We did not denounce failures, but  ‘Well tried’ or Hard luck’ came easily to our lips. We were generous to  our opponents and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they did not deserve it… We did not obey every rule. But the majority of boys did. the best and most respected boys were precisely the ones who always kept them.”

The idea of playing by the rules, of not being bumptious in victory or churlish in defeat, of being honest and straightforward, seep into the bones if taught early and consistently enough. (I recognise them, they were also part of my education even if I only went to a grammar school. They are still deep within me). For James they are at his moral core.

“One afternoon in 1956, being at that time deep in this book, I sat in a hall in Manchester, listening to Mr. Aneurin Bevan. Mr Bevan had been under much criticism for not playing with the team and had answered his critics. He devoted them  and bought his audience to a pitch of high receptivity and continuous laughter by turning inside out and timing holes in such concepts as ‘playing with the team’, ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’, ‘playing with a straight bat’ and the rest of them. I to had had my fun with them on the public platform often enough but by 1956 I was involved in a more respectful re-examination and I believe I was the solitary person among the those many hundreds who was not going the whole way with Mr Bevan. perhaps there was one other.  When Mr Bevan had enough of it he tossed the ball lightly to his fellow speaker, Mr Michael Foot. ‘Michael is an old public schoolboy and knows more about these things than I.’ Mr Foot smiled, but if I’m not mistaken the smile was cryptic.
I smiled too but not whole heartedly. In the midst of the fireworks Mr Bevan had dropped a single sentence that had tolled like a bell. ‘I did not join the Labour Party, I was bought up in it.’ And I had been brought up in the public school code."

It was the reference to Michael Foot that caught me.I remembered the early 1980s and him doing his best to hold the Labour party together - a party riven by deep personal and ideological differences. He was the only person respected enough by both wings to have any chance of doing such a thing but he could not win and in the end was badly defeated in the 83 election. He was of course traduced and maligned in the press at the time.  But all I could see was an honourable man trying to do his best for the team, in other words trying to uphold his public school code (that code by the way doesn’t stop you being marxist, anarchist, libertarian, high tory, liberal, christian fundamentalist, or anything else. It is just a code about how you conduct yourself with your beliefs). Politics is known as being a dirty trade with a relativistic relationship to the truth but there there are still many good people trying to do the right thing. Michael Foot always struck me as being one of those, as does Ed Miliband. They both lost, of course, so I don’t know what that says about the use of the old code of values. Perhaps that times ohave changed (or more likely) they were always more honoured in the breach.

Miliband didn’t go to a public school though. His opponent David Cameron did and either standards have slipped and the ethos is no longer taught or Cameron is more Flashman than Tom Brown.  There was a small but indicative example of him 'not playing the game' in the use of the Liam Byrne note . When labour lost the 2010 election Liam Byrne as the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury left a jokey note for his successor ‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam’. it was a little private joke within a Westminster tradition (in 1964 Reginald Maudling left a similar note ’Good luck, old cock ... Sorry to leave it in such a mess’). Making it public trampled on tthe convention and was bad form. Definitely not ‘playing the game’, yet David Cameron waived the piece of paper around on the campaign trail, piously proclaiming that it was no joke.

To me it not only felt like the breaking of a confidence (it was definitely meant to be a private communication) but it was also used dishonest because it was repeatedly misquoted.  ‘I’m afraid there is no money left.’ was the phrase used in speeches. That ‘left’ might seem like a small, unimportant, detail but it actually changes the meaning. It it implies that there was a pot that has all been spent (i.e. implying profligacy), instead of there being no money because of the state of the economy after a banking collapse.

You can say this is a small incident that means nothing in itself. Politics is a form of warfare where anything is acceptable if it helps you win. But to me it’s the small details that reveal character.

This is one of the times of ‘Beyond a Boundary’ where James will, for example, dwell lovingly on a single stroke. More of that though when I talk about the cricket.



First published
1963

Link with last book
Cricket

Book 13 - Peter Tinniswood, Tales From A Long Room

Bill Bryson is an amusing writer who occasionally makes you laugh but I don’t think of him as primarily a humorist. Instead he is someone who can make droll observations. So for this weeks book I turned to someone I consider a great comic stylist, someone who could mix absurdity, exaggeration, puns, particularly on names, with beautiful descriptive phrases. Just as much a stylist as Wodehouse - and you can’t raise the bar much higher than that. Unlike Wodehouse, most of his output was for television or radio; scripts rather than novels but he did write some books. Although they all seem to be out of print at the moment they are quite widely available second hand.

Tales from a Long Room was first published in 1981 and most of the jokes and references are based on the golden eras of pre and post war cricket, mixed with cultural and entertainment figures. I am not sure it matters much if you know who the people were as their names are used as absurdist colour rather than being comments on the real person. The tone can be gauged from the introduction

I was born in winter
I love summer
My friend the Brigadier was born in Arlott St Johns.
He loves fine wine, Vimto, quails in season, barrage balloons, blotting paper, E.W. Swanton and his sister Gloria.
He recounted these tales to me during the course of a long convivial summer spent in his favourite corner of a long room ‘somewhere in England’.

Sometimes though it does help to have, at least, a passing knowledge of the people being referred to:

There is a regrettable tendency these days for what I call ‘public nosey parkering.
Fed by the unceasing efforts of journalists, broadcasters and similar scum, the British public have developed an insatiable appetite for tittle-tattle of the most trivial nature concerning people, who for one reason or another, happen to be in the ‘limelight’
What possible interest can it be to know that E. W. Swanton wears maroon corduroy underpants and has in his study a complete collection of the records of Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas?
Is the world a better place for knowing that despite all the evidence to the contrary Mr Robin Marlar is a thoroughly nice man?
Are we uplifted in soul and spirit by the knowledge, that despite his constant protestations, Mr Ned Sherrin did indeed once play rugby league football for Rochdale Hornets? - the match in which Miss Caryl Brahms was sent for an early bath for butting an opponent.

To anybody who has heard the plummy, pompous tones of E. W. Swanton dispensing his lofty judgement of the days play, the idea of a secret passion for one of the Merseybeat groups is wonderfully nonsensical. As is the thought of the wit, bon viveur, impresario and lover of musicals, Ned Sherrin, playing rugby league. Perhaps as knowledge of these people fades the humour dates. But I hope not. I hope people will still appreciate the glory of prose such as this:

Why on earth did I ever marry her?
Certainly there was a physical attraction. That I cannot deny
I remember to this day the surge of emotion that coursed through my veins when I first caught sight of her.
The rose garden of dear old Castle Arlott slumbering with honey-laden bees.
The summer breeze lisping through the timid tracery of the delicate Frindall tree.
The Benaud bush aflame in scarlet bloom. The phlox Lakerensis flowering hazily, lazily, benignly blue.
And into my sight she glided; a tall, slim, sylph like figure dressed in purest white.
My heart missed a beat.
Sap rose in my loins.
Dear God, she was the spitting image of Herbert Sutcliffe.

Link to Last Book
Humour

Date first published 
1981

P.S.
Apologies for the photo but the cover of my copy has faded somewhat, over time.

Book 12 - Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods

The last book was a memoir of personal recovery and how a hike along the Pacific Crest Trail enabled a young girl reconnect with who she had once been and find the strength to grow into who she wanted to become. This book couldn’t be more different in tone and intent, even if it is about a similarly long through-hike of the East Coast equivalent: the Appalachian Trail. Bill Bryson started his adventure from the place Cheryl Strayed wanted to arrive. He was already a successful author, and settled in his life. As far as we know he had no great demons to face down in the wild, no need for a long physical challenge in order to find his centre. One of the walks was a slightly desperate throw of the dice, the other more of a whim, probably with a book in mind. You might not find much personal redemption in Bryson but there is more humour and information about his surroundings.

I honestly do not know what I can write here that will add anything to what is already known about Bill Bryson and his books. He is an institution. An author used a a reference point in the quotes on the cover of other books; someone who defines his own category. He writes about places or things with humour and although he seems to place himself in the centre of the story, deep down it is not really about him. The narrative might be about his actions and reactions but he doesn’t go deep in his own psyche. He is more interested in what he sees (which is as it should be). I find it confusing when he is described as a humorist; yes he can be funny but he also does his research and is informative. It’s a neat trick: as a reader you learn stuff whilst being amused. It’s what keeps you going and what sets him apart. He has great skill in presenting information, which in other hands could be dry, and make it come alive. Take for example this about trees:

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem, and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves. These diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do this is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in the forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs that phloem, xylem, and cambium perform

I will never look at trees in the same way again.

But Bryson can also be a bit spiky. His contempt for the National Park Service, which maintains the trail, is a recurring theme.

Here in the Smokies, not far from where Katz and I now trod, the Park Service in 1957 decided to ‘reclaim’ Abrams Creek, a tributary of the Little Tennessee River, for rainbow trout. To that end, biologists dumped extravagant quantities of a poison called rotenone into 15 miles of creek. Within hours, tens of thousands of dead fish were floating on the surface like autumn leaves - what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist. Among the 31 species of Abrams Creek fish that were wiped out was one called smoky madam, which scientists had never seen before. Thus the Park Service biologists managed the wonderfully unusual accomplishment of discovering and eradicating a new species of fish in the same instant.

The payoff at the end might be wonderfully ironic but it is the “what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist” that is really cutting (especially with the substitution of naturalist for biologist).

I came away from this book with an increased appreciation of the skill with which Bryson puts his books together and the craftsmanship of his writing. It makes an interesting comparison with Wild, in the one I was deeply impressed by the story, in the other by the way the story was told.

Date of first publication
1997

Link to last book

This is pretty obvious. The Appalachian Trail is the east coast equivalent of the Pacific Crest Trail so the two books make an interesting comparison, especially as both the walks must have happened at roughly the same time. Although Wild was published only a couple of years ago and A Walk in the Woods dates from 1997, Strayed started her walk in 1995.