The LSE Hungary Debate 1: An impression

Preparation for this debate had been a major worry for me. I don't usually debate politics, or at least when I do it isn't against ministers of state and MEPs, even less in a situation as highly charged as this, on the very day when the EU sent the Hungarian government away to rethink - rather rapidly - its responses to the main criticisms regarding the central bank, the retirement age for judges and data protection. That was announced yesterday, and I was coming straight from Reading where having delivered the Finzi Memorial Lecture the day before, I had just done an hour long reading of poetry at lunchtime. I was falling asleep in Delaunay's in Aldwych, a stunning konditorei/restaurant where I had arranged to meet my fellow debater, the historian and journalist Victor Sebestyen, whom I had never properly met to talk to and with whom I had only had a couple of brief phone conversations ahead of the event, just so we shouldn't overlap too much.

The meeting was chaired by Abby Innes of the LSE, our opponents were Zoltán Kovács, Hungarian Minister of State for Government Communication, György Schöpflin MEP. The order of speaking, at maximum 10 minutes each, was Kovács, Sebestyen, Schöpflin, Szirtes. This was followed by questions from the packed and rather distinguished floor.

I can't give a verbatim blow-by-blow account since I don't have the other people's speeches but I am pretty sure that we won our case on a clear points decision. In any case I will try to sum up the essence of what was said, then add a copy of most of what I myself said, since the text of that is before me. Considering their positions and experience it seems to me now, in retrospect, that our opponents weren't fully prepared. In any case, I stress that this is just an impression and there will, I think, be a podcast available of the whole session so readers can check for themselves in due course. I'll link to that in the blog as and when it is ready.

Kovács had notes but mostly extemporised. He spoke a great deal of 'narrative', of how the twenty years following 1989 was dominated by a socialist, ex-communist, narrative that had brought the country to the verge of ruin; that Hungary was 'at the cross roads' so something drastic needed to be done (hence the over-350 new laws), and that half-measures were no longer enough. He stressed that Hungary was deeply misunderstood by the foreign press and, generally misrepresented, that this was, he hinted, a conspiracy by the liberal-left press. He said it was nonsense to think that there was any attempt to rein in free speech or stifle opposition in Hungary, and that, on the contrary, there was no real free speech before the current government, and that what Fidesz set out to achieve was 'a balanced, symmetrical system'. He also reminded us of Prime Minister Orbán's words that he wanted to turn Hungary into 'a normal European country'.

Sebestyén, had written notes and spoke from them. He began with Orbán and developed a history of the journey of Fidesz from the 'cool' party for under thirty-fives, citing Orbán's dictum never to trust anyone over thirty-five, through to its current position on what might or might not be defined as centre-right. He said that Hungary had been very badly governed since 1989 admitting that the last socialist government was probably the most incompetent. His case rested on unnecessary steps taken by Fidesz since assuming power. Why were such steps necessary? Why the illiberalism? Why, for example, the prosecution of a rapper called Dopeman, for his 'mocking' use of the Hungarian national anthem? Why were all foreign correspondents in the country deemed to know nothing? How was it that the methods of the Hungarian government seemed to resemble those of the pre-1989 regime? He went through the major issues addressed by the EU today and wondered why the tensions with the EU were necessary.

Schöpflin, once a professor at the LSE, was sitting next to me and had typed and copious hand-written notes and he went through some ten points, but his case was very similar to Kovács's: He accused those accusing Hungary of never giving any details; he accused the western press of deliberate distortion and misconstruction; he pointed to what he considered to be a widening gap between the western members of the EU and the eastern ones, claiming the eastern ones were sympathetic to Hungary; he claimed Hungary was 'the whipping boy' for the EU whose other members had problems just as great; and suggested that people in the west regarded Eastern Europoeans, especially Hungary, as 'hairy barbarians', a charge that would only turn the Hungarian people even more enthusiastically into the arms of Fidesz.

I think that's a reasonably fair summing up - at least it's the best I can do for now. If anyone thinks I have missed a major point (I might have) or have misread or misrepresented the thrust of the various arguments they are welcome to comment on the post and tell me.

It seems unfair that I should offer the text of my own speech, but, awaiting the podcast, at least it is available now. The next post is the text of the speech. It will be curious to see reports on the evening in the Hungarian press, that is if it does report it.

In Reading for the Finzi Lecture

Only the iPhone to rely on. I think the lecture went down very well generally - though who can tell? It's done at any rate, case presented. I'll try to give some idea of it later.

Today the reading at lunchtime then down to the LSE for the Hungary debate / scrap. That should be an interesting experience.

This from university accommodation. Weather has closed in after blossoming so gloriously yesterday.

FB, Twitter and the rest 3: Petals on a wet black bough

Photo of Grand Central Station from here.


First the personal stuff, then the notes.

Twitter was the medium I resisted the longest. Do I care whether Stephen Fry is standing in a doorway or sitting in a chair? Do I care for the thoughtlets of Rio Ferdinand or the e-presence of the philosopher Joey Barton? Do I desperately want to be making remarks into the crowded void? Do I want that much company on tap? Do I want to follow people or be followed? To stalk or be stalked? That might have been the question.

Two key things changed my mind. Last summer at New Writing Worlds, the Norwich international writers' conference, a young Russian poet revealed that she had compiled an entire book of 140-character poems. Was this specious or interesting? I didn't think she, personally, was specious, so the clear alternative was that she, and therefore it, was interesting. But only in a remote way.

The second was the enthusiasm of my fellow poet in China, Pascale Petit. She felt it was a great way of circulating valuable information, not just in terms of the Arab Spring or our own dear riots of looting, but in distinctly cultural terms. Perhaps so, I thought. Then, why not? And finally, OK.

*

Telegraphese

The form is genuinely interesting. Even with the recourse of abbreviation it imposes severe limits on what may be said. It is clearly not a medium for developing an argument or drawing a conclusion. Surely, then, it's just telegraphese. You could be telegraphese on FB, you could be so in an email, but you don't have to be. Here it is demanded.

But there can be subtlety even in a telegram. Peccavi, wrote General Napier in his one-word telegram of 1843, meaning, literally, I have sinned, though, wit that he was, his true meaning was I have (taken) (the Indian province of) Sind. It is an apocryphal story but exemplary in its way. It tells us something about the possibilities of translation, ambiguity and density.

Not every sentence has to be informative. Syntax is not a crude tool: it permits completion, incompletion, varieties of register, varieties of pitch and musical phrasing. It permits of density, association, enigma and echo. A little of it can go quite a long way.


Poetry and a wet black bough

There are short forms in poetry: the haiku, noted for its meditative depth; the distich, noted for its authority and firmness; the couplet, noted for its wit and crispness; and the quintain that can be quite elegiac. These are all set forms that may be explored within 140 characters. There is also Imagism and its flirting with preciousness but also its sudden sense of significance. I think of Pound's In a Station of the Metro: 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough' which is almost, but not quite, prose, though prose-as-poetry may easily follow from it.


Notation: this thing is like that thing

Poetry, conscious of itself as poetry, is one possibility then. Notation is another. The Pound poem is high-level notation, though the word 'apparition' alerts us to the fact that he wouldn't necessarily speak like that. The faces in the metro might have suggested petals on a wet black bough without quite such a clear poetic invitation. And that might be attractive, after all. We don't necessary want to be laboured into poetry, not in a Tweet. And yet we may want to feel its possibility, just as we feel it in life. We understand that life presents us with implied significances we wouldn't wish to labour but without which life would be relatively empty. The same goes for language, even in a Tweet. The language need not be relatively empty. It could just notate away, raising the stakes with a properly light touch. You just have to listen a little harder as you write.


Remark, footnote, link

This is not overtly concerned with either notation or poetry. It is merely conversation conducted in public. It can be conversation with another person on Twitter, or with a circle of the like-minded, or with a text read elsewhere. The Greeks had the dramatic form of stichomythia in which conversation is conducted through single lines of verse. In Twitter this can become a colloquy. Or a combined commentary. The abbreviation of links is vital. Other people's reading becomes, briefly, a common text. And there is not only some great reading out there but some great readers.


Jokes in a vacuum, the absurd categorised

The possibility of one-liner jokes is tempting. You can make your quip and stand well back.Or you can create or enter worlds of the absurd, worlds that comment on the apparent logic of syntax by turning their backs on it to create a pseudo-order. Somewhere between Beckett, Ionesco and the nostalgic comic strip there is a subterranean network of passages that are a delight in themselves.


Revolutions or riots on street corners

The handy utilitarian communications of street and hide-out politics are well known. This is much the same as the telegram, but much handier. Run. They're coming down Kensington High Street is exactly what it looks like, no more than that. Politically powerful, linguistically less interesting, it is in itself a one-note register that can nevertheless be hinted at in other contexts where it remains a simple register but gains a complex meaning


Context, context, context

Despite all the above everything one posts or reads on Twitter is against the background of normal tweeting, that is to say on the edge of evanescence and inconsequence and it's as well to remember that. Best not have vast heavy ideas that would sink as soon as launched. But who knows, perhaps life is worth one or two sinkings? And being on the edge of evanescence and inconsequence is not necessarily to be evanescent or inconsequent.

*

So I will carry on for now, and hope to learn something in the process and practice of it.

Sunday Night would have been... Ana Silvera

Ana Silvera, who we saw in Norwich last week, or the week before, who has a lovely voice, writes her own songs, plays guitar and keyboard and is very much - not at all surprisingly - on her way up. Latest work with Reverb Festival at the Round House last month, a new piece for herself and the Estonian Television Girls Choir.

*

Otherwise a day in, rewriting the Finzi for minor corrections, and rewriting, time and again the eight minute speech for the Hungary debate at the LSE on Wednesday. This entails Skyping and ringing friends who can correct errors or point out faults.

The rain has been pouring all day here. IN half an hour or so - this being Monday now - I will walk to the station and get a train to Norwich so I can pick up my Reading tickets.

It's wild out there. Leaves, branches, shaking and shuddering. The bush by the window has a fit now and then, as though it had come to the end of its tether. (It has no tether.) The sky is clearing but only to an aqueous grey-green that means every thought in its head is of more rain.

Off to London again + Marlie & Lukas x 3

And I am off to the LSE Festival in twenty minutes to discuss storytelling, poetry and translation with Marina Lewycka and Jeremy Sams.

Will report back.

FB, Twitter & the Rest 2: Booking Your Face

Adaptability to new electronic worlds is all very well, but it is nothing without a streak of hard conservatism. As writers we love neologisms, word play and the whole dazzling funfair of language as she is spoke and bespoke, but we also have a certain interest in stability. We would prefer a word at the end of a paragraph to retain much the same bundle of meanings that it had when it appeared at the beginning of it. We know about the modifications of meaning undergone by any word on its journey through text, and as writers it is our business to know that, but we do rely on the stability of the range.

So a certain resistance to all major linguistic shifts is becoming. There is a proper delay before leaping into line. I resisted Facebook before going on to resist Twitter.

It wasn't the technology as such, more a sense of caution about a social fabric that seemed to involve so much sheer chat. My interest in chat as such is limited, not absent, just limited. I wasn't desperate for trivia, however human and charming and playful it can be. Writing is, as they say, a lonely occupation, though writing-work does not feel like loneliness. I am very happy working by myself. It is only in between the bouts of concentration that a desire for chat and trivia arises. It is like looking up from the desk and spotting a trusted face nearby.

Beyond the trivial aspect lies a part-moral, part-psychological quibble. The presentation of self involved in a Facebook page, especially if one has, however limited, a 'self' presented in books on the one hand and in person on the other, seems rather pushy. Self-advertisement always feels rather desperate, even abhorrent at times. It is not seemly to flog one's wares, even at poetry readings where flogging wares becomes ever more a necessity. I don't like it. On FB - and not only on FB - the wares are you. Your persona. Your party face.

It would be naive to suppose that having a face, however diffident or modest or averse to self-advertisement is, in its effect, self-effacing. A diffident presence is still a presence. It is still the self with its masks and watchful eyes. It is no use pretending that FB is not a performance. All social intercourse is performance. Nor is it any use pretending that the readers of the FB post are not there, it is just that, for a writer, the activity of writing and thinking through the material has to be more prominent than the thought of advantage or even the warmth of friendship. Writing is writing. It is always writing first, and anything else second. Technique is the test of sincerity, said Pound, and was right. In your writing you are what you are as a writer. And what are you doing right now? Writing.

Beyond that, both writer and reader know that FB is, like all social interaction, a game with a serious side which has just as much potential as a corresponding friendship or a small party to generate real friendship. FB friends can become actual friends and in fact have done in some cases.

*

But what kind of literature is FB? In terms of subject and interest it is as wide as the world of books and letters, as wide as the world of any human contact. In its means and manners it is more informal, generally briefer and snappier than the letter. It is not an essay but a series of remarks that can be honed to a delightful or at least honourable precision. It can address politics and make jokes. It can share music, films, and other interests.

FB can be a political and cultural lever. I have posted a great many links to news from Hungary on FB and have got into conversation with people about it. I have started clerihew- and limerick-chases. I have experimented with poems that are built on the use of square brackets. More recently I have twinned FB with Twitter and cross posted.

I doubt whether FB has, or is likely to have, a literature in the classic sense but I can imagine material produced or introduced there entering the literary bloodstream at some level. It is, after all, performative language that is aware of itself as some kind of shape. Having a quick mind - which has its disadvantages as well as advantages - I have enjoyed composing verse almost instantaneously. The verse had to have the same standards as poetry. In some respects FB has been a poetic scratching-post and may yet generate a new line in my writing.

It might. Publishing on FB is not the same as publishing in a regular journal. There is a a kind of dry-run sense to it, a built in obsolescence. I actually think of it as a place where genuine poems may be hung out to dry, as on a washing line.

What kind of literature is it then? Interim literature, is my best guess. One with its own forms and manners to be learned and explored, as any other kind of interim literature.

*

I know we are all making Mark Zuckerberg even richer. I know what is tacky about FB. I know what is glib. I know what is opportunistic. I think I know at any rate. I am a sceptical being not a cynical one. I know there are real eyes reading the words.

Next time Twitter.

FB, Twitter and the rest: a manner of speaking 1

From one perspective it's rather horrifying how the world plugs into one enormous website and talks till it is blue in the face. It isn't the meditative retreat often recommended for the spiritual, a term that might apply to artists - and to poets in particular - and it surprises me how readily I have adapted to it. Being sixty-three I expected to find this way of communicating somewhat inimical and it may be that at some stage I will feel I have to withdraw from it.

The way I justify it to myself is by regarding all such things as literary forms. It took me a little while to think - and more pertinently, to feel - my way around emails. A form is partly its manners, its way of behaving. I wouldn't have liked paper letters headed, Hi George, for instance. I don't suppose I'd like it now. On the other hand it would be quaint to have one signed, Your obedient servant (I have had a few of these but in clearly ironic spirit), or even Yours faithfully these days. Letters have evolved like everything else: nevertheless we understand their manner of formality, and when we come across love letters or letters of high drama it is their very breach of manners that moves us.

Two thoughts follow from this. First, that all communication works by conformity to, or deviance from, expectation. Once there is no expectation there can be no deviance, so reading becomes cruder. That is the absolute case though in practice people simply tend to alter their ways of close reading. All language is coded. We are continually learning new codes, new distinctions.

The second thought is that manners establish workable social relationships. So Hi George in a letter seems to be claiming a more intimate, brasher form of relationship than I feel willing to grant. It is like someone speaking within three inches of your face without invitation, and Auden had a way of dealing with such intrusions, writing:

Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.

I have to add that I myself rarely have the inclination to spit and am not quite so jealous of my private pagus or demesne as Auden was. But I understand. Oh yes, I understand all right.

*

Then come emails with their hybrid sense of formal approach on the one hand and dashed-off remark on the other. An email is not quite a letter, but not exactly a postcard either. Time plays an important role in this: there is an implicit propriety about a message that passes through appreciable time and space. Time is part of the pagus / demesne. Email has the potential to make time almost vanish, so one might be simply the equivalent of a nod to a tap on the shoulder. OK, we reply. Fine. See you there. Telegraphese, you might say. But email manners range well beyond the manners of telegraphs. In terms of direct speech it's possible that if English were one of those languages with distinctions between various forms of you, it's possible we might be on tutoyer terms with most of the universe most of the time.

So instantaneity changes language. Possibly because I am an immigrant from another language (with four versions of you as it happens) and have had to adapt so many times over the years that I have grown to enjoy the act of adaptation in itself, I have never been completely sure of my pagus or demesne and find the constant shifting into and out of focus quite exciting and pleasurable. (I think of a device like rhyme in much the same way: adaptation is essential to the thrill as well as to the process of discovery.)

[to be contd 1/3