The latest All The Rage is devoted to biography. My own article focuses on biography and the art of the clerihew:
The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.
But what does biography have to do with sneezing? Find out in the pages of All The Rage, December 2008 edition (PDF).
This month, in honour of the London Games Festival Fringe (25 October to 2 November) the theme of All The Rage is ‘games’. In accordance with this splendid theme, I have written an article on that celebrated painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder, ‘Children’s Games’:
At first sight Bruegel’s Children’s Games might appear to represent a lost world of innocence, where children live out their days in endless play – a representation of the happy state that all must leave behind as they grow to adulthood and maturity. Yet its message is in reality quite the opposite. The games of children show us that the adult world is no more than a game itself, and that all the roles and activities which adults value are mere instances of play. Bruegel’s playful children teach their adult viewers a lesson, with their mimicry of the grown-up world: that all is folly, futility, and the chance of the game.
It’s a bumper issue, as they say, so hurry along and read the gamey October 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage.
To fit in with the September theme for All The Rage, which happens to be ‘heroes and villains’, I have written a short piece on a forgotten hero-martyr of the First World War: Captain Fryatt, master of the Great Eastern Railway steamer Brussels, shot by the Germans in July 1916. To find out more about Fryatt, the best place to start (apart from my article in All The Rage, obviously) is this National Archives page. There’s no doubt that this once celebrated figure has fallen sadly into obscurity. When the signs for Fryatt Road in Tottenham, named for the Captain, were replaced recently, no-one noticed that the council had spelt his name wrong.
Why was he shot? To the Germans the case was very simple: this was no hero, but a pirate, operating outside the rules of war. It was intolerable, they believed, for someone claiming the protection of civilian status to engage in acts of war such as attempting to sink a submarine. The court martial and firing squad were, Germany claimed, the instruments of justice. Britain, her Allies and much neutral opinion saw them as the instruments of murder. The execution of a civilian seaman who had done nothing more than acted in the justified self-defence of his ship and passengers was, they believed, an outrage, and the Allied propaganda machine sought to make all the capital it could out of Fryatt’s life and death.
If you want to know what this is all about, visit the new September 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage. Then you will be able to read the article, which will tell you.
The August 2008 edition of All The Rage has, as ever, a theme: ‘monsters’. Among the high-quality content (well, among the content, anyway) addressing that theme is my own ‘Monty’s Monsters’, an essay which looks at a figure who has been of interest to me for many years - the scholar, antiquary and writer of ghost stories M. R. James (1862-1936).
The appearances of his monsters are sudden, dramatic, and fleeting; they are glimpsed briefly and are gone, leaving a powerful after-image for the imagination to work upon. The reader, like the characters in the stories, is left not knowing quite what the thing that passed before them was, but retaining a vivid and dreadful impression of horror.
The point about James’s supernatural entities is that they often are not really ghosts at all but rather physical, fleshly and substantial monsters, demons from the margins of a medieval manuscript … find out more in the August 2008 edition (PDF) of All The Rage.
‘Dreams’ is the theme of the July 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, the world’s favourite freely-available PDF magazine. I’m in it, as usual, writing about the dark dreams of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya.
And what fills the author’s dream? Behind his figure gather the monsters of the image’s title: owls, bats, cats, nameless creatures with wings and horns. Creatures of the shadows, half-glimpsed, cluster at his back and flutter about his lowered head. Eyes glow in the dimness, beaked mouths open to utter cries that we cannot hear but the dreamer, perhaps, can. Bats that seem horned like devils circle menacingly, an oversized cat or lynx crouches on the floor, head raised and eyes staring. On the author’s right an owl raises a pen in its talons, inviting him to continue with his work, to make new images, filled with the shapes that emerge from his dreams.
Much more excellent content can of course be found in the July 2008 issue (PDF), available now from the All The Rage website.
There’s some great stuff striving to break out of the June 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, which is on the theme of ‘escape’.
We might not like meeting Jack Sheppard, still less being threatened, beaten and robbed by him, and he did little of value with his hard-won freedom. Yet the image of this slight, shabby figure quietly and dextrously prising apart every lock, breaking every chain, springing open every door that stood between him and the grubby liberty of the London street resounds across the ages, a more inspiring symbol of the uncrushable human desire for liberty than any statue, painting or political manifesto.
That’s from my piece on eighteenth-century serial escaper Jack Sheppard. Read all about him, and much more besides, in the June 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, and visit the All The Rage website for more top-notch content.
The May 2008 edition (PDF) of All The Rage is organized around the theme of ‘age and maturity’. I contribute an essay on Camille Claudel’s sculpture ‘L’age mur’ (’maturity’).
If it is Camille’s own maturity that the sculpture is asserting it seems an ambiguous celebration. Perhaps the paradox of the sculpture is that this kneeling figure is the only one of the three to be asserting independence. The man has let himself be conquered by age, who is herself a force of destiny rather than a willed individual, but the y6oung woman, even as she implores, lets him go, does not rise to restrain him. This is the maturity of the title: however painful the parting, the time is ripe for turning away from the past.
You can find the May 2008 All The Rage here (PDF), and the main All The Rage site here. There was no April 2008 edition, by the way.
Anthony Burgess (1917-93) is a writer who’s rather neglected today, but who (in addition to being very readable) always has interesting things to say. Some of the most interesting, and often prescient, are about Islam and its relationship with the West. I’ve written a new essay exploring this theme which is available at greycat.org: ‘”The old enemy”: Anthony Burgess and Islam’.
The theme for the March 2008 issue of All The Rage is ’space’. Lots of great stuff as ever; by bit is all about behavioural science, personal space, and desks.
It was Desmond Morris, a leading figure in the movement to bring animal behaviourism to bear on human society, who observed in The Naked Ape that busy executives like to urinate on their desks. Not literally (as a rule), only symbolically. When a human being puts ‘markers’ of personal significance such as photographs, ornaments or nameplates, around their environment, Morris argues, ‘it is the exact equivalent to anotherterritorial species depositing its personal scent on a landmark near its den’ by leaving traces of urine.
Hurry to the All The Rage site and open the PDF of this month’s issue. It’s very good indeed.
The February 2008 issue of All The Rage is out, and the theme this month is ‘time’. I ramble on about the relative nature of time, the thought of Henri Bergson, and the cluelessness of post-modernist historians:
No past event is intrinsically in the past. It is only a past event in relation to other events that are in the present and the future. This does not mean, as some post-modernists like to tell us, that the relationship between past and future is consequently meaningless. Time passes and change occurs: did the trendy post-modernist historian write any of his vacuous articles before he was born? No, and nor will he write a single word once he is dead.
The highlight of the issue, however, is editor Leila Johnston’s mind-opening piece on ‘time and the future of writing’:
You could, if you wanted, read the great art of the past century as a laborious delivery of 21st century individualism. Maybe it was a kind of battle to own the unknowable years ahead. Whatever lay in front would still be beyond reference, but pehaps naming it as such meant it could be deliberately uncontrolled in ways the present and past could not. Unlike the past, which was vulnerable to subjective reading and revision, the future represented a lack of context, an absence of meaning. We can view this effort to represent chaos as rather quaint - so obviously idealistic, so clearly doomed to fail.
You can find the February issue of All The Rage here (PDF): go and read the lot, and look at the pictures.
