After eight months,1 I have got round to setting up my website again, and laboured, over the last month, to repost the archive of old articles which I had, in a fit of optimism, converted to Hugo format. Hugo, it turns out, requires coding skills to use, despite the YouTube ‘walkthroughs’ that assure you it’s as easy as picking a new hipster flannel shirt. I could have had a standard, moody, sans-serif photography portfolio blog, with google integration and serious off-the-shelf attitude baked in, but I want something else, and so I have returned to WordPress.
I gave up my commercially hosted website because I was on an economy drive after quitting the job that was driving me to ill-health. That chicken actually came home to roost in October, when I had a mild heart attack, but that’s another story.2 Anyway, this current version is home-hosted, thanks to a wonderful piece of software called Yunohost, which I mentioned in another post.3 If you are reading this, you have accessed it on a little ThinkCentre computer that sits in my office in my home. I am very happy about this. I love having a blog, but I cannot justify paying for hosting. In this version, it is merely a side-project on a server that performs other functions, including hosting my Nextcloud instance. It is, effectively, free.
The previous few iterations of my blog have been on the domain danceswithcats.uk. However, I had over a year’s worth of email service paid for on that one, and didn’t want to transfer it to my server, so I have returned my blog to its original domain, danceswithcats.net. Given that the U.K. may not survive as a political entity to the end of my contract with Gandi, I think this is a clear-sighted move on my part.
It is likely that the next few posts will be about computers and software and, in particular, my server. It is a real triumph, limited only by my inability to properly integrate a network attached storage, so I haven’t yet been able to set up any media, apart from a Calibre server to host my ebooks, which are small files and don’t take up too much space. At the moment, the ThinkCentre has a 1TB ssd. My Nextcloud setup takes about a third of that, and this blog barely touches it, but if I were to host all my music and a music streaming server, it would need over a TB just for that, before I started looking at video. I have a NAS of 4TB in a Raspberry Pi box I put together. However, it doesn’t allow for direct attachment and Network links are symbolic links, which the server software doesn’t like. I’m sure there are ways around this, but they involve deep coding knowledge and maintenance. I need simple.
However, a 4TB ssd is not such an exotic beast now: there are unbranded ones available for £1504 and I’ve even seen a Crucial ssd available for £195.5 I’m tempted by the cheapo. I have good backup strategies, and, by the time even a delicate ssd fails, replacements will be much cheaper, if the decline in the price of 1TB discs is anything to go by.
The process of transferring the server to a new disc will require a bit of careful study. I know how to clone a disc, in theory, and have actually done it with sd memory cards, for my Raspberry Pi. On that occasion, I used a command line program called dd.6 It requires a bit of care, but I am fairly confident.
So, adventures await and I now have a blog where I can boast about them.
The other topics I want to write about are more personal. I have given up work, partly because I felt bullied by my supervisor and was constantly stressed, but mainly to be free to become a carer for my mother, who will be moving down to the Island very soon. I expected to get a part time job, and had all sorts of ambitions in that direction, but then I had the heart attack. It is entirely possible I have had my last day of employment. That deserves reflecting upon. I also want to write about my heart attack. It was a bit of a big deal. I took notes and I’d like to preserve those.
And, I still want to write about books. I had a bit of an obsession with Thomas Mann a couple of years back.789 I’m not sure what that says about me, but my writing about him is all wrapped up in my sense of doom surrounding Russia’s atrocity against Ukraine. Since then, I haven’t read a great deal of ‘literature’, but I have listened to audiobooks, some of which have been fascinating. Over the last few years, starting in early 2022,10 I have listened through most of The Witcher books, by Andrzej Sapkowski.11 Fantasy they may be, but they have a truth to them, and they strike me as superior, in every respect, to any fantasy that I have ever read. I’ve bought the ebooks and am planning to read them more closely because, masterful as Peter Kenny’s readings of them are, listening to a book is a sort of grazing. It colours one’s experience at the expense of detail.
So, if you are reading this, well done you. I am the most amateur of bloggers. I do not attempt to optimise my experience or try in any way to manipulate people into coming to this website, clicking through it, or staying once they are here. You are special. Thank you.
Computers seem to gather. This slightly incriminating image shows seven laptops, six of which belong to me, and two desktops. One of the desktops, the mini-lenovo in the top-left, is my Nextcloud server, and the other, sitting, in defiance of the term desktop, under the desk, is my main computer, an Asus gaming machine of impressive age.
Of the laptops, three are in useable working order, but one of those – the red Dell netbook, is so old that its uses are limited. I have put antiX Linux1 on it, but connecting to a modern webpage, of even the most static and undemanding design, sets its poor little processor into terminal sprint and sends its temperature up to alarming levels. I’m loathe to get rid of it, because I bought it almost new, from the Dell outlet store, in 2010, and it has served me well, but I think it may be time to offer it to the computer recycling people, who might be able to find a use for it.
The live machines are the two Thinkpads in this second picture. The one to the left (it’s the one with the yellow sticker on it in the first pic) is a slightly more modern machine than its stablemate (orange Ubuntu sticker). That is an X220, which my wife bought second hand, but could never get on with. I always thought it had the most amazing keyboard, but she broke the trackpad buttons at some point, and I took it on when she replaced it. I fitted a replacement keyboard, but it’s a cheapo Chinese rip-off that has a lot of flex. Yesterday, I popped into Just P C’s (sic) in Newport and asked whether he could fix it, and he said I could just stick it down with a double sided foam pad. I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll give it a try soon.
I hadn’t used it much since the disappointment of finding that the keyboard repair was shonky. I’d put a small SSD in it and loaded Xubuntu2 on, and liked that operating system so much that I’d done the same on the other ThinkPad, my main laptop. I was happy enough with that for some time, but wanted to try systems other than Ubuntu-based ones and, a few weeks ago, I stuck Manjaro Plasma3 on the X220, as an experiment.
And there, children, the tale begins. But first, some history.
Manjaro on the Thinkpad.
Linux & Me
Ubuntu, which was designed to be ‘Linux for the rest of us’, was the first Linux OS I managed to get running, when a Toshiba I couldn’t afford to replace got so many viruses that its Windows XP system became useless. At the time, my attitude to computers was turn-on-and-use: it seemed outrageous to me that I might have to pay, a second time, for the operating system to get my expensive property working again.
So, with many false starts and struggles, I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, made a CD of it, discovered how to boot into BIOS and managed to install my first linux OS. WiFi was a new and wonderful thing in those days, and I had to buy a wireless card, something like the one in this picture.
The first Ubuntu OS I installed was 32 bit, and it fit on a CD. I was immediately hooked, not to mention, extremely chuffed with myself. At that time, it felt like a major operation to install an operating system. This morning, I installed Kubuntu on my desktop before breakfast.
I’m pretty sure this is Ubuntu 07.04, the first version I installed. It is running Gnome 2 with the BUUF icon scheme.
Anyway, for several years I used Ubuntu, and very happy I was with it too. It made writing and editing and other work very easy, and it also made the new media, such as electronic images and digital music files, enjoyable to create, store and use. I became a bit of an experimenter, putting an open source operating system onto an ipod,((https://www.rockbox.org/)) and making my first, stumbling attempts to understand the command line.
However, in 2011, Canonical, the company who developed and maintain Ubuntu, took their netbook remix layout and pushed it on to their main distribution, calling it Unity. It was a wrench and I was somewhat miffed. It was the first time I had felt that Ubuntu was trying to limit my computing freedoms, as opposed to trying to help me realise them. As you’ll see, over the years, that has become a theme.
My gripes at the time were that it was much more difficult to personalise the Unity desktop, and I couldn’t install my favourite icons or make it look the way I like my computer to look. In frustration, I began experimenting with other distributions and found Bodhi Linux.4 I was using the Dell netbook as my main laptop by now, and Bodhi, being very lightweight, made a huge difference. It was also accessible and easy to customise, and I stuck with it for some years.
I had, however, bought a cheapish but reasonably powerful desktop computer when we moved into this house. It was, incidentally, the last new computer I bought, except for a Raspberry Pi I keep as a media server. Bodhi felt a little stretched on a large monitor, and in 2014, having read enthusiastic things about Unity, I switched back. For a few years, it was love.
Another shot from 2014. I don’t think my Ubuntu setup has ever looked lovelier.
I was using, although not yet self-hosting, a cloud computer by then, so I had discovered the pleasure of integrating files across a network and, more importantly, contacts, task-lists and calendars between devices. I had also, finally, succumbed to the smartphone pressure in either 2012 or 13. I had, I felt, entered the future. I could take a photo on my phone and it would appear on my computer when I turned it on. I could write a page of text on my laptop and the updated version would be synchronised to my desktop. It still all felt new and wondrous.
Then, Canonical fumbled the ball again. They had been developing Unity so that they could achieve “convergence”: creating an operating system that would be useable on computers, phones, tablets, TVs and, for all I know, jetpacks, and the launch of the Ubuntu phone was crucial to this. Alas, it flopped, partly because Google and Apple were not likely to allow their cartel to be challenged, partly because the phone operating system was simply not ready when they released it, and partly because of Canonical’s hubris. I remember feeling quite angry about the way the phone was marketed. ‘Ubuntu insiders’, an elite clique of supporters, contributors and docile bloggers, got well publicised freebies, while the paying mugs were forced to hang on social media announcements to have a chance of buying one. At the time, I tried to get the tag #Ubuntuoutsiders going, but none of my twelve Twitter followers were interested, so it died a death.
Anyway, I did eventually get an Ubuntu phone, and it was a bit of a dog. The hardware was underpowered, and the OS lacked the very elements that would set it apart: the calendar, for instance, only had the option for local storage, or Google. For me and, I suspect, many people who use Linux, escaping Google’s creepy, coercive, bullying oversight is a major motive for the work it takes to remain an open-source software user. Assuming that everyone would have a Gmail address and would be happy to donate their personal information, creative endeavours and political interests to the monopolistic parasites of Mountain View, California, seemed a discordant clang.
In fact, Ubuntu Touch was a beautiful piece of work in many ways. A few years later, I bought my first Fairphone and loaded the system, now maintained by an heroic community of volunteers,5 onto it. It was, and remains, I should imagine, a distinctive, clever and attractive way to manage multiple functions on a small touchscreen device. It’s just too niche to be useful for everyday interaction. Its app store is tiny, and it hasn’t flown. Not all Canonical’s fault, but they didn’t do it justice.
Linux and Me: The Next Generation
At about this time, I made a mess of my commercially hosted OwnCloud setup, and became interested in self-hosting a cloud server. This is not a straightforward process, whatever the Nextcoud homepage6 may say, and, for me, it represented the start of a multi-year struggle to get to grips with topics for which my intellect is woefully underpowered.
A cloud server consists of a machine running an operating system, on which a specialised web server program manages files in a database, making them available over the internet for the users to access, while securing them from internet users other than the permitted owners. There are a number of quite specialised areas of expertise within this melange, including database management, command line proficiency and networking skills.
Quirky, like worn brakes.
When I started this process, I had none of these. Indeed, I still don’t, really. As a result of my clumsy endeavours, I do now have a little more than basic command line understanding, but I still have to do a websearch for any sort of database management, and am resigned to giving up a weekend to correcting even the most minor error message. As for networking, it remains a clouded mystery. I dogged forums, nagged my ISP and begged my domain hosts for information as I got my first experimental Nextcloud server set up, but, somehow, I managed it. For the hardware, I had used my mother-in-law’s abandoned Dell Latitude D430, a quixotic little laptop that was manufactured in 2007.7 The problem with that was that it has a hard drive like the ones used in ipods, and there wasn’t the space to upgrade it. Thus, I had the advantage of being able to use an online calendar, contacts manager and tasks manager, but I had to be very frugal with my file uploads, to avoid overwhelming it. Also, it ran an integrated chip, and that ran hot. I was never entirely sure it was safe to leave it running.
That’s better.
Eventually, though, I was able to afford a small, fanless computer, refurbished, from ebay. After that, I had to save up for a 1 TB SSD, and went through the process again. I had used Debian as the base operating system for the Dell setup, as the smaller it is, the better and, running ‘headless’, without a GUI, the specifics of the operating system are pretty unimportant, so long as it supports a software repository with the required packages for the task for which it is being used. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but is somewhat larger, even in server form, but I was persuaded to use it this time by the fact that most people on the Nextcloud forums used it.
However, even in the command-line-only, server edition, Ubuntu has, for some years now, been pushing their version of containerisation, called Snaps. Containerised apps are computer programs that have been bundled together with all their dependencies – the other programs and snippets of code that they require in order to work on a real computer. In Linux, traditionally, programs have remained focussed upon their own tasks. If a music player needs to use the sound card, for instance, it doesn’t include sound card management. Instead, when it is loaded into a repository, from which the users will download and install the music player software, its dependencies are listed. The user will get the software using a package manager: a piece of software that reads the dependencies, compares them to what is on the computer already and then adds any that are missing to the download of the software package.
Snaps make installing and maintaining a computer much easier, at least superficially. Unfortunately, they introduce their own set of problems. Unless you are a programmer, what you are given is what you get. Nextcloud, when I was trying to install it in 2019, was an example. It had the basic Nextcloud installation that would set up a database and the Nextcloud web server with one click. However, I never discovered how to link it to an SSL certificate: a fundamental security process without which a web server is so vulnerable as to be useless. In the end, I scrubbed the machine and started over again, and this time I didn’t hit the snap button, but dragged myself through the manual install process.
And, for nearly three years now, I have been able to keep my files on the little box on my desk. With very little maintenance, apart from the occasional upgrade, it has allowed me to not worry about losing data on my computers, as they are stored externally. A few years on, I became a little anxious about depending upon a self-maintained machine for all my data and bought a 10 TB external disk drive as a backup machine and that is an added level of security. I’m pretty happy.
Wires are good
I also set up a samba server, to store and share my media files and Nextcloud and email backups within the house. This was a simple enough task: at first, I used my Raspberry Pi with the external hard drive connected. It was a bit Heath Robinson, but it worked. However, the transfer rates, from the spinning disk hard drive to the computer processor via USB, were rather slow; though fine for music streaming and transfer, it was liable to stutter with decent quality video.
Pretty, but not much use at the moment.
So, I started saving for enough SSD storage to hold all my music on an integrated system and bought a case last summer. It worked well enough, but the software I was using, Open Media Vault, had a major upgrade and the Pi version hadn’t caught up. On a routine update, it stalled and I panicked and shut it off, wrecking the operating system. This is not a complete disaster, as it’s not harmed the files, which I have backed up on the external drive anyway, but I haven’t been able to be arsed to reinstall it yet. I have an idea I’d like to learn how to use Docker8 – another containerisation system, rather more developed and useful than Snaps, but that is another major learning task, and I just haven’t got started.
Back To The Desktop
My experimentation with servers satisfied my computer curiosity for several years. I did play around a bit with desktop operating systems, but I stuck to safe choices: mostly stock Ubuntu, then the wonderfully stable and accessible Zorin OS,9 then, for a while, on a whim, Lubuntu.10
The Leviathan, lurking.
Sometime in 2018, I’d been offered and had bought an old gaming machine. It’s a real beast, but wasn’t particularly useful to me. I didn’t have the desk space for another monitor and I was in the habit of using laptops most of the time, anyway. My Old desktop didn’t last all that long: I got about six years out of it, and I had a bit of a prejudice against desktops, as power-greedy, space-hungry white elephants. However, I did, eventually, find a use for the monster Asus.
I had always needed to maintain a Windows machine, for one, annoying purpose. Epub files are DRM protected and I read a lot. I still buy real books, but for my junk reading, science fiction and, as I get older, crime thrillers, I buy ebooks. To purchase a DRM protected epub, you must use a piece of software owned by the odious patent trolls Adobe: it’s called Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe don’t support Linux, just out of spite, I think, or because Microsoft pays them not to. So, I used to keep one laptop with Windows 7 installed, just to download my book purchases. As soon as I’d got them, I’d run them through Calibre and strip the DRM, and then load them on my Tolino, but to first buy them, I needed a Windows machine.
Starting up a Windows machine you don’t use very often takes a full morning. You will, inevitably, be stopped in your tracks by the infuriating Microsoft update process, which is designed, it seems, to divert you from whatever task you need a computer for. Its voice is that of the creepiest sort of teacher: moralistic and cautionary, with a vague hint of dark consequences if you don’t cater to his every perverted whim, articulated in the light, jocular bullying boss’s language of camaraderie and mutual purpose. I loathe Microsoft, not just on a practical level, but on a tonal, cultural level. It is deeply, instinctively fascistic, in a uniquely white, wealthy, passive-aggressive, American way. And that is why I have persisted, for so long, with Linux.
My father’s old laptop, vast and beautiful to look at, but with a processor just powerful enough to run a fridge if the door’s not opened too frequently, added to the pain. So, I hatched a plan to set up the gaming machine as a virtual host for Windows.
Virtualisation is a real computing marvel. It allows you to run a computer within a computer. So, on a Linux machine, you can set up another Linux machine, or a Windows machine, or even a Mac, if you don’t tell Apple’s lawyers, borrowing some of the host machine’s resources to do things you don’t want to do to the main machine. Its main use is as a way to manage complex networks: up until recently, it was the safest way to give large numbers of users access to a network while controlling their impact upon the network. It is also used to experiment with development and it is useful in education. Indeed, another reason I wanted a machine powerful enough to run as a virtual host was so I could complete a Linux Foundation course,11 which involves a lot of trying things out in the command line. In this situation, when you’re presented with the “DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON” bit of code, it’s nice to be able to press it and see what it does, without having to constantly re-install my operating system.12
And it worked! I used VirtualBox,13 bought an OEM Windows 10 licence from a cheapo online store and had Windows when I needed it, without sacrificing a machine to it. I completed my course and thought I was happy with my computer setups.
But then, a serpent began to eat at me.
The Lure of Computer Games
I realised, using the desktop, just how powerful it is, compared to the machines I’ve used up to now. That knowledge became, after a while, like a serpent, leading me towards the forbidden fruit of computing: games, weak sinner that I am.
Overall, I haven’t taken much interest in gaming, mainly because I think it is a poor substitute for books, but also because I’ve always thought the entry cost was absurd. Nevertheless, after I was made redundant in 2013, I bought a second-hand Playstation3, played five games (Bioshock,14 Journey,15 Mass Effect 1, 2 & 316), started a fifth (Bioshock __Infinite17), got bored, and gave it up as a bad job. I didn’t regret this little experiment: at the time, I needed a boost, and Journey, in particular, was a spectacular piece of art, which I was able to share with my wife and which has stayed with us as a treasured experience. All the same, gaming just didn’t really feel like being true to myself.
It’s a little like giving up smoking, though. So long as the cost of getting back into it is high, you can fight it, but if it’s made easy, it’s a problem. The gateway drug, for me, was a video extolling the virtues of Witcher 3,18 which I drifted onto on Youtube, and the audiobook of one of the short-story collections on which it is based being available on my library app.19
Witcher3 is what it is; I’m not going into it here. The books are good, though. I recommend them. What’s relevant is that the game was five years old by the time I decided I must play it, and I got it for a song on Gog,20 which is an online game store, similar to Steam,21 but with more of a commitment to open source or something. Then I tried to play it on my Virtual Windows machine and discovered that Virtual machines don’t use graphics cards.
Well, no: that’s not completely true. However, Virtualbox doesn’t support graphics cards, and the main competitor, VMWare, is commercial and the process for mounting a GPU is not available in the free version, and is really complex anyway23. In effect, though, it’s not a straightforward process, and unless your computer is very, very powerful, which the Leviathan was in its youth, but really isn’t now, it probably won’t be adequate for playing modern-ish computer games anyway. I can remember being really angry with myself when I discovered this, which might explain my bad decision making.
Remember what I said about Microsoft, above.22 If you recall, I’m not a fan. I use Windows on my work laptop, of course. I work for a Council, and the subservience to Microsoft’s imperialism is total in such environments. We use Microsoft 365, rather than a proper office package, which is unbelievably stupid and means that the Council will never be able to escape Microsoft’s clutches.23 For a Linux user, Windows is a continuous series of annoyances. It’s not because I’m not used to it: I am, like most wage slaves whose job has some clerical component, a moderately expert Windows user. It is the unnecessary complexity, the ‘guided’ processes, the ugliness, the distraction of the cluttered, intrusive, authoritarian medium. It takes creativity and introduces a slightly competitive, suburban American mundanity into every use. It interrupts to assert itself. It is needy.
All that being true, I still shamed myself. I reinstalled Windows as the base operating system on The Leviathan. This was about a year ago and, in that time, I have spent more hours than I want to admit playing, first, Myst,24 then Warcraft II25 then Witcher3.18 I reached level 20 on Witcher3. No man in his fifties should be able to say that.
I was running it, though, with only a 128 GB SSD as storage, having cannibalised the larger 1 TB SSD for my Samba server, and, as Windows boxes tend to, it got filled up with stuff, without me adding much to it. In particular, it didn’t like the attempts by GOG to update Witcher, a vast program, leaving me looking at error messages which wouldn’t go away. At some point, this lack of utility began to feel like a sign.
I bought another 1 TB SSD, fully intending to reinstall Windows. Then, having installed Manjaro on my Thinkpads, I decided to see how it would run on The Leviathan.
This is where we came in.
Back to the Beginning
The weekend before last, I put Manjaro Plasma on The Leviathan. It ran like a bullet and looked even prettier than it does on the Thinkpads, but, for a non-programmer, it has some limitations. The worst of these is that it is based upon Arch, rather than Debian: it is an entirely different branch of Linux operating system to the Ubuntu family, for which a lot of Linux software is packaged. VirtualBox, for instance, does not have an Arch package that is easily installable on Manjaro. There are instructions for making it work on the forums, but they look pretty intimidating.
So, wanting to use Plasma, I tried KDE Neon, which is an Ubuntu distribution maintained by the KDE community. Alas, a piece of software I use regularly, Manuskript, doesn’t load in Neon. Neon is built on the latest long-term-support version of Ubuntu, and that has some quirk which prevents Manuskript starting up. No one has yet managed to fix it.
Finally, this weekend, I settled on Kubuntu. This is an ‘official flavour’ of Ubuntu, meaning it is supported by Canonical. It seemed perfect, but then…
Firefox on the newest versions of Ubuntu and its ‘flavours’ is a snap. Even if you try to install it via the command line, using the apt-get command, it converts the command to a snap install. I really do not like snaps. For a browser, they can be a real nuisance, as their updates happen in the background and lead to random restarts of the application. If you’re in the middle of an online form, or a TV programme, you lose your data, unless you save manically.
And they don’t look as good. I like a rather beautiful set of icons called Buuf, originally designed by a young artist called Mattahan, way back before I was using Linux. I’ve used them from my earliest experiments with Ubuntu26 A very active, responsive and kind volunteer called Phob1an27 maintains a set of them for Plasma28 and they look pretty amazing.
Nice, or what?
Snaps, however, don’t conform to the GTK theming: they have their own icons included and that’s that.
There is, of course, a way around it. One of the real strengths of Linux is that you can change everything, if you have the skill. If you don’t, people with the skill will share their knowledge. So I have a new repository (program source) added, maintained by the Mozilla Foundation, who make Firefox, and Firefox integrates prettily into my desktop while being properly and safely updated.
For, me, with sixteen or so years’ experience of playing with Linux, that process was a bit of a challenge, taking several hours to sort out properly, but for a new user, fed up with being bossed around by Windows, the sense that Canonical are trying to limit your choices on Ubuntu would be an off-putting welcome. I have a lot to thank Canonical for: they took the community endeavour, Linux/GNU, and made it simpler to get into and to use for all the things that computing makes better or even makes possible. However, I think they do have a tendency to try to compete with Apple in making a consumer product that requires no engagement and allows not variation. They should not be despised: they have created server software that runs over 35% of the internet, second only to Debian in the field.29 And, unlike Windows and Apple, they have done that while remaining a company with a modest income, that doesn’t exploit oppressed people in their supply lines or try to trap people, schools or other public bodies into holding their data on systems from which they can’t export (Microsoft).30
It’s just that Ubuntu has begun to feel, again, that it knows better what’s good for us than we do. Its use of a strict, difficult-to-modify version of the Gnome desktop system and its push to make snaps the standard way of installing applications, has the odour of Apple, late Steve Jobs era, with just a hint of recent Microsoft preacher-knows-best tonality.31
Or, maybe the problem is with me. After all, it’s been a long time since I’ve paid Canonical for a copy of Ubuntu, although I do make payments to open-source software projects – my last donation was to Thunderbird. And, if I’m really so fed up with Ubuntu, maybe I should move to Arch,32 on which Manjaro is based, or to Debian,33 Ubuntu’s fully-open-source big sibling, or Fedora,34 the independent, community arm of RedHat.35 It’ll take some work to change from what I’m used to, but it might be fun.
However, for now, I’ve got a lovely looking desktop on which I am happy to do my writing, and I have to put up with feeling slightly left behind.
There’s a discussion of the point in this podcast. I recommend listening to the whole thing if you have time, but I’ve specifically bookmarked the pertinent passage [↩]
There’s a discussion of the point in this podcast. I recommend listening to the whole thing if you have time, but I’ve specifically bookmarked the pertinent passage [↩]
The pleasure of recalling my reading of Death In Venice is strong enough that I have ordered a copy of Buddenbrooks, and am looking forward to reading it. I was amazed by the precision of Mann’s storytelling in Death In Venice but, chiefly, I found in it a sense of what I called ‘degraded magic’ and a feeling of an epic voyage through decay to a reverse epiphany. It is the small tale of a lonely, arrogant man becoming unravelled by his vanity, but it feels like opera. What most impressed me was how this little story was able to plausibly bear the weight of that sense of grandeur.
However, seeing his work tied to Wagner, and discovering he was, in fact, a scholar of the composer, has made sense of that feeling of grandiosity in his writing. To describe Death In Venice as ‘Wagnerian’, is not to puff it up or dismiss it, even though, for me, ‘Wagnerian’ denotes a sense of camp ridiculousness, a la Bugs Bunny. See embed source for copyright
Wonderful, camp and gleeful as this is, it is most definitely what not what I find in Mann. The sense of epic greatness, applied, in Mann’s case, not to overblown legends of racial origins, but to the struggles and delusions of the bewildered subjects of a collapsing empire, creates, for me, a power greater than opera. Where opera feels like parody, even before the hubristic American cartoonists – heirs to the old empire’s powers and treasures – get hold of it, Mann’s writing feels like truth.
I have no love of Wagner. Besides finding his music boring and unresolved 4 I had assumed he was a fascist, simply because his work only seems to make sense, after the mid-20th Century, in the light of fascism. Apparently, though, he was more an anarchist; most definitely of the left, although still a horrible, loud, unapologetic, anti-semitic bigot. As someone who thinks that fascist is as fascist does, I find the distinctions here a bit tricky to identify, but…
He was, Mann said, ‘charged with life and stormily progressive’, an innovator, with one foot already ‘on atonal terrain’, a ‘cultural Bolshevik’ (Kulturbolschewist) ‘man of the Volk who all his life fervently rejected power, money, violence and war’ and intended his festival for ‘a classless society, whatever the age made of it’. In conclusion: ‘No spirit of reaction and pious backwardness can claim him – he belongs instead to every future-directed will.’5
This is from a speech Mann gave in 1933 entitled The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner, 6 In it, he managed to dismiss the newly-ascendant Nazi party’s claims on the composer effectively enough to cause a backlash that led him to leave Germany. The Nazis were in the process of deifying Wagner and Mann, while acknowledging his admiration for Wagner and the peaks of genius in his work, had the cheek to suggest that he was a bit, well, bourgeois; a bit gauche, like displays of artificial flowers.
[Wagner’s texts]…often seem somewhat overblown and baroque, naive, with an air of grandiose and overbearing ineptitude: yet interspersed with passages of sheer genius, of a power, economy and elevated beauty that banish all doubt, though they cannot efface an awareness that these are creations which stand outside the tradition of great European literature and poetry.7
My qualifications as a literary scholar are pretty thin, and my experience thinner still, so it is rather nice to find my opinions reinforced by the work of real critics. And yet, thanks to my new reading about Mann, I can see that he was a knowing Wagner enthusiast, who loved the power of the work while seeing its weaknesses. I am further impressed by this remarkable writer.
However, I still hate Wagner. I gave a streamed Parsifal (WARNING! Youtube) five minutes this afternoon, and just couldn’t take it. What is it the fanboys hear in that ‘clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’ rubbish?
I was delighted to read that I am in good company here, too: “Not everyone was seduced: Rimbaud was indifferent; Tolstoy denounced the Ring cycle as ‘counterfeit art’; a discombobulated Ruskin left a performance of Die Meistersinger claiming the music was ‘clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’.” Stammers (2022)[↩]
Synik is a hip-hop artist from Zimbabwe, currently living in Portugal. He released this album earlier this year, and it is his first since the left his home country and made the arduous journey to Europe. In it, he discusses exile, alienation, the exploitation of migrants and the hostility they encounter.
His real name is Gerald Mugwheni, and there is an article1 about the political pressure that drives artists to leave Zimbabwe, including an appreciation of the album, in the much-mourned online paper, The Conversation.
I don’t listen to much hip-hop. A year or so back, Englistan,by RizMC2 caught my attention. I listened to it again this week, as I have just bought a pair of bone conduction earphones, and can start listening to music as I walk the dog or cycle. I had had to give that up because earphones set off tinnitus – another of the indignities of encroaching old age. Englistan is a theatrical, even cinematic experience. A Travel Guide For The Broken strikes me as a more lyrical (in the classic sense of the word) style of rap. I think you’d describe it as downbeat hip-hop: it has a rich, melodic jazz inventiveness that is immediately musically engaging.
What has kept me listening, though, is the way the raps catch you with narrative force: on ‘Underground’, Synik talks about working in the shadow economy; ‘Wega’ is a clear depiction of being in an alien environment, while your heart is focused on home. The title track is quite special. It seems to describe a response to an experience which might be the defining adventure of our times – the experience of being uprooted by economic terror and political victimisation.
We were fractured
The scattered fragments from broken homelands
Transient bodies,
Dislocated and displaced
With borderless imaginations we discarded the familiar for worlds unknown
Forced to become adept in contorting limbs to fit in confined spaces
Which constituted a further breaking
We traversed inhospitable lands in search of new homes
And the warmth of other suns
I wrote about Thomas Mann in a recent post1 and recalled that I had read Death in Venice many years ago, but remembered little about it. I searched the house, but couldn’t find a copy, so I looked on ebay. I might have had a modern copy for under £2 but this one was available for a fiver plus postage. I am enough of a book fetishist to love old Penquins and when it arrived I was rewarded with that smell that is one of the most profound yet fleeting sense experiences: the smell of an old book as it is opened for the first time in a long while.
This copy did not betray any secrets with it. Often, books of this vintage come with the scent of tobacco mixed in with the paper-and-ink must; once or twice, enticingly, I have opened a book and had a hint of Chanel No. 5, triggering images of a languid reader in a Chelsea flat. More common are the suggestions of student reading: sandalwood or patchouli, or the faintest gust of weed, along with a wine stain or two. But, no; this book just smelt of its constituent parts, and did not even carry an owner’s inscription. Its past is a closed book.
Having reread it, that blankness seems wrong, for Death in Venice, though it is written in a voice that is, initially, detached and calm, is a story of intense passion and of a slide into madness. It is very much more vivid than I remembered and what really surprised me about it was the baroque tone of degraded magic. Despite being introduced as the perfect bourgeois rationalist, whose life is an ordered triumph of will and detachment, Aschenbach voyages through a vivid world of encounters with the grotesque to meet his lonely, perverted fate. The uncanny element is introduced in the vision of the stranger outside the mortuary chapel in Munich, after which Aschenbach conceives his plan to leave his well-ordered life for a few months of restorative travel. It is developed in various encounters on his journey to Venice, through the ticket agent, the old drunken reveller on the steamer, the unlicensed gondolier and the manager of the hotel, “…a small, soft, dapper man with a black moustache and a caressing way with him…”.2 It reminded me of the sense of uprooting that launches Marlow’s journey into the interior in Heart of Darkness, although that is another book I haven’t read for decades, and may be misremembering.
The oddness that seems to clamour around Aschenbach as he travels is heightened by his character. In the early pages, he is established as a prissy old maid, both stuck up and over-sensitive, who manages his squeamishness by controlling his surroundings. Mann describes this nature and its tendency towards paranoia in beautiful terms, worth quoting at length.
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
((Ibid))
And so, as the central non-relationship of the story emerges and Aschenbach’s passion for the boy Tadzio unfolds, his perversity does not seem as strange, jarring and ugly as it should. Aschenbach has already developed a seedy quality, reflected in his experience but also in his prissiness and impatience with others. His tendency to be disgusted by and dislike people is the other side of his capacity to idealise and intellectualise this objectified stranger. I mentioned in my earlier post that…
I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, engaged, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, in a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
I hadn’t remembered – or, perhaps, as a younger reader, I didn’t pick up on – how the aesthetic moralising degrades as Aschenbach’s obsession takes him over. This story is a quite clear parable of the fragility of bourgeois restraint. Nothing Aschenbach does is truly alien to him: in true early-twentieth century fashion, Aschenbach suffers a collapse of repression.
Even before he has let his passion take hold, the sickliness of the environment is pre-signalled in his discomfort with the climate. He attempts to escape, but is relieved when his plan to leave falls through and, realizing when he next sees Tadzio that the boy is the reason he wanted to stay, he is, from this point, lost to his obsession. Before then, he still holds on to the forms of his intellectual conceits, “…assuming the patronizing air of the connoisseur to hide, as artists will, their ravishment over a masterpiece.”((Mann, p35))
The sense of the uncanny has, by now, become monstrous, and is given a form in the growing awareness of the cholera outbreak which is threatening Venice. Aschenbach attempts to find out the truth about the epidemic, but seems also to lack the will to do anything about it, as he is lied to and soothed by the hotel manager, a street performer and the barber. However, when the young English clerk in the travel bureau whispers the truth to him, Aschenbach cannot turn the knowledge to action:
…the thought of returning home, returning to reason, self-mastery, an ordered existence, to the old life of effort. Alas! the bare thought made him wince with a revulsion that was like physical nausea. ‘It must be kept quiet,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘I will not speak!’
((p75))
A dream follows; a nightmare of orgiastic pagan savagery, after which, it is clear that Aschenbach is ill. The magic has become the detached ecstasy of low-grade fever, in which internal experience entirely overwhelms the outside world. He seeks to remake himself with cosmetics, with the help of the barber, who contrives to transform him into a grotesque as alarming as the drunk on the steamer:
There he sat, the master: this was he who had found a way to reconcile art and honours; who had written The Abject, and in a style of classic purity renounced bohemianism and all its works, all sympathy with the abyss and the troubled depths of the outcast human soul…whose renown had been officially recognized and his name ennobled…There he sat. His eyelids were closed, there was only a swift, sidelong glint of the eyeballs now and again, something between a question and a leer; while the rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams.
((p80))
Aschenbach’s final reverie is on the power of the passions that an artist must channel and repress in order to practice his arts. “…we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without Eros as our companion and guide.”((p80)) It is a complete reversal of the values he seems, at the opening of the story, to embody: an indulgent embrace of sensuality over learning, rejecting knowledge in favour of beauty:
For knowledge, Phaedrus, does not make him who possesses it dignified or austere. Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form. It has compassion with the abyss – it is the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment and to form. But detachment, Phaedrus, and preoccupations with form lead to intocication and desire, they may lead the noblest among us to frightful emotional excesses, which his own stern cult of the beautiful would make him the first to condemn. Yes, they lead us thither, I say, us who are poets – who by our natures are prone not to excellence but to excess. And now, Phaedrus, I will go. Remain here; and only when you can no longer see me, then do you depart also.
((p81))
He seems here, to me, to be prefiguring his death. “I will go now,” means not just that he will finish the dialogue, but that he is aware, on some level, that this is the end for him. He is held to life only by his passion for Tadzio, but within a few days, he learns that the boy’s family are finally leaving.
The close of the story is magnificent. Aschenbach’s death is the central event, but, at the point before he finally collapses, a tableau plays out on the beach between Tadzio and his friend Jaschiu; a fight that seems to represent the collapse of their holiday friendship. Tadzio, humiliated, shrugs off Jaschiu’s attempts at reconciliation and retreats to the sea. The narrative voice never leaves Aschenbach; we see the boy’s isolated sulk through the eyes of the dying man, but, for half a page, the boy becomes a character rather than a figure, and the sense of the end of childhood and the clouds of approaching adolescence are drawn in the simplest description. He might have noticed the strange old man who has been making him uncomfortable over the previous weeks, but he is just a part of the cloudy, oppressive end-of-summer sorrow into which he has been plunged. For Aschenbach, however, the boy has acknowledged him, and legitimized his lechery.
It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation.
((p83))
And then, the end, unmourned by the reader, barely noticed by the love object, but,
…before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.
In our time the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.
Thomas Mann
Today is the third day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am travelling home after having visited my mother and my sister. This morning, the front page of my mother’s right-wing newspaper was covered with pictures of terror and pain and the business section noted that BAE systems are the best performing stock in a turbulent market. Even my mother, in her increasing dementia, raised the topic of the Russians’ massacre of the innocents when I got to her flat for breakfast.
My sister was less interested, or less obviously so. We are careful about our discussion of politics, although it animates us both, and we are sympathetic to one another’s outlooks. She is preparing for another Extinction Rebellion action, and for the appeal against her conviction for protesting against the Murdoch empire’s half-century of climate crisis denial. On Thursday night she spoke at a meeting. I spent the evening at my mother’s flat, then met Charlotte – my sister – at a pub afterwards. She was with people from her meeting; good, impassioned activists who are committed to pushing for real change in the way the world is run, in the hope of mitigating the damage done to the world by human activity.
I felt ashamed in their company. I am torn by a guilty desire to affect indifference, to the war and to the climate disaster. I had my season of political hope2 and it made me very unhappy,3 and the awareness of my impotence in public matters, and the apparently illusory nature of the virtues of democratic involvement, seem to press on me whenever I break my embargo on news. I leave my phone in another room when I sleep; I try to discipline myself to avoid the news, and I seek calm and serenity.
And yet my sister’s comrades seemed to me to be – not happier than I am – but more aware of themselves and warmed by their mutual endeavour. I’ve no idea whether there is a Christian among them, but they seem to have the clear-sighted tenacity of hope that I have always envied in true believers. I didn’t get to know them closely, but they included me in their round of goodbye hugs and I felt they were giving me access to the secret of their power, as they drew their comfort from each other and, generously, shared it with me.
I found the Yeats poem while reading an LRB article4 by Seamus Perry, on Colm Tóibín’s new novel,((http://colmtoibin.com/content/magician)) about the life of Thomas Mann. I intended to read the entire issue of the magazine, taking advantage of my train journey home, but this article has brought me up short. It seems to address perfectly the disillusionment I feel towards taking responsibility for anything outside my personal orbit. I was surprised to read that Yeats was a reluctant revolutionary. He wrote, after all, perhaps the greatest poem of struggle of the twentieth century,5 a poem that might today be applied to the awful glory of Ukrainian heroism in the face of the Russian spasm of fascist imperialism: in this horror, another “terrible beauty” is born. And yet, at least at the end of his life, in Politics, the last poem of the last collection he published, he expressed a weary indifference to worldly engagement.
I ‘did’ An Irish Airman…6 at school and I learnt the first stanza of Second Coming7 when I was a taxi driver, about twenty years ago, and I have, at times, taken a non-poetry-enthusiast’s limited interest in Yeats, as both an historical figure and an artist. I respected his reputation as one of the best of the modernist writers, but he was shaded from my enthusiasm by the fact that I despised them as a group because my teachers were all so uncritically adoring of modernism. Yeats got lumped in with (well, actually, overshadowed by) Lawrence, who was drilled into us as a paragon when he seemed to me to be a hack. It is only now that I realise that most of my English teachers just weren’t that good: they may have been devoted pedagogues, but their tastes were shaped by their polytechnic educations and their 1960s and ‘70s, lefty-ish, play-for-today political outlooks. Lawrence, with his leaden, explicit prose and his interest in sex and class, was easy to teach; Yeats, an infinitely more subtle and wide-ranging writer, was a more difficult study, even if his is the more beautiful work, by a country mile.
“Yeats sometimes feared that his work would be distorted by the restrictions of Irish culture.”8 He was, throughout his life, inescapably a political and public person, serving, to his apparent regret,9 six years as an Irish senator. It seems that, as he could not escape Irish culture, neither could he escape politics, living, as he did, in the long, bitter decline of British colonialism, whose death watch has lingered for over a century now.
It must be a terrible thing to be forced to upend your life in resistance to an inescapable event. How bitter the longing for the life abandoned must be. To my modern ear, the poem seems to drift close to depicting lechery as a virtuous alternative to engagement, but my response is, no doubt, an artefact of the time, and misses some of the poem’s cultural echoes: according to the notes in my copy of the Collected Poems of Yeats10, its phrases reflect the anonymous sixteenth Century English song, Westron Wind.
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.11
Perry has this to say about how Yeats gives privately cherished passion a greater truth than worldly knowledge and engagement:
You could imagine a much more straightforward poem that pitted public discourse against, say, the intimate conversation of lovers, but Yeats does something much odder than that: he sets public language against the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze. And here, too, Yeats was entirely in tune with Mann, who was similarly fascinated by the way that catching sight of someone you don’t know can make you forget yourself – or, rather, suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought.
(( Perry (2022)))
For Mann, apparently, aesthetics (that ‘forgetfulness’), at least partially, manifested in a life of secret and vividly focussed crushes on unsuspecting men and boys. The most famous expression of this in his art is the ecstatic fixation of Aschenbach the writer upon the boy Tadzio in Death In Venice.12 It’s decades since I read it, but I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, consumed, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, by a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
Like Yeats, Mann was dragged into political activity by his times: first by the German collapse into Nazism, and then by McCarthyism in the States.((Meyers, J. (2012) ‘Thomas Mann In America’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 51, Issue 4, Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1 Accessed 6th March 2022)) Even earlier, his Nobel acceptance speech of 192913 addressed the balance between art and the political atmosphere in which it is practised. He is, however, considered an ‘apolitical’ writer.14 After he had grasped the full stupidity and dishonesty of the McCarthy putsch…
Mann vowed not to make any more political statements, which could be dangerously distorted, and wryly remarked, “the world needs peace—but I need it too.”
Unsure how to respond to the experience of reading a poem that I feel might have been written for me in my current situation, I turned away from this post and read some news articles on my phone. The Russian attack was utterly mesmerising to watch, a dreadful deluge of iron and diesel spills, unleashed by the shrill screech of Putin’s deranged sanctimony. By the time I reached home, it had become clear that something that should be impossible was happening: the Ukrainians were standing up to their invaders and the Russians appeared to be stumbling. The Ukrainians’ courage was inhuman: it must have felt like watching a tidal wave coming at you, but as a million of them fled to the borders, hundreds of thousands of them rushed to take up arms.
By the next evening, there were interviews on the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast with British-resident Ukrainians who were equipping themselves to return home to enlist. In answer to the predictable question, they all said they had no choice.
No choice. Like Mann, more suited to a life of bourgeois deception than to confronting evil, and like Yeats, who felt himself fettered into a conflict that reached back as far as the Norman invasion of his country and of which he was weary before he even began to publish. But unlike me. I, for now at least, seem to have a choice and I have chosen to be inactive.
Charlotte told me, when she first threw herself into Extinction Rebellion, that she didn’t expect to change anything. She just wanted to be on the right side of history. I understood that, but I still believed in the virtue of political hope and was, at the time, deeply involved in the Labour party. I felt that party politics offered the best opportunity to make a change, but that all fell apart with the 2019 election. At the time I wrote:
So, I’m looking at my position…the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that…is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics…I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Instead, I crumbled when it became apparent that Starmer had lied to gain the leadership and was just another capitalist lackey, pushing the anti-Semitism lie to squeeze out any supporters of real social justice, in favour of returning the party to right-wing conformity.((https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/whet-does-starmer-stand-for/)) Rather than take my energy elsewhere, I retreated.
I have been surprised by how deeply I have fallen into nihilism, and how unable I am to rekindle hope. I have always believed that optimism is my natural state, and that pessimism is a pointless self-scourging: why anticipate sorrow? For the past two years, though, I have felt that our last hope of stopping the end of the democratic era has died, and that the drift towards authoritarian tribalism is unstoppable.
And yet, my ideals have not changed. I still believe that economic equality is a necessary first-condition of a just society. I still believe that the maltreatment of animals is at the core of the rapacious relationship of capitalism to the planet. What I have not done is find, “the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze” that Perry describes as the state in which one might, “suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought”. My fugues have been fruitless. I am as adrift as I was two and a half years ago, when my political hopes died. My courage – my optimism – has been overwhelmed by the sense that the world really is spiralling towards destruction.
Is it just a question of courage? Raymond Williams said that, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing,” but I never wanted to be radical. I don’t see my politics as radical: the belief that one life is no less valuable than the next should not be a radical assertion. It is the basis of decency, and its denial is obscene. I think, fundamentally, I’m not suited to political engagement: I’m too self-conscious and too naked; too heart-on-sleeve.
That’s an excuse, though, of course. Yeats didn’t want to be drawn into politics:
…But the strife engendered when an intensely inward mind finds itself cast into remorselessly political times was perhaps more of an epochal predicament than it sounds. The great works of Yeats…are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of ‘what’s difficult’, and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.
((Perry))
What to do? What to do?
I sought permission from Simon and Schuster to post this poem back in March. I heard nothing, and I did nag, so I’m going tp do it anyway. I own the book, and this post only makes sense if you’ve read the poem, so let’s see what happens. I expect I am beneath their notice, but if they do notice me, it will be exciting. [↩]
Walking Hazel this morning was a cure for the post-Christmas malaise.
The fog was thick even as far up the town as our house. In Whippingham, it was like a veil, and St Mildred’s looked like a fantasy castle. I was listening to The Sword of Destiny, by Andrzej Sapkowski, beautifully read by Peter Kenny. The weather suited the story telling, and I could almost picture a dragon gliding up from the Medina, the mist making swirling vortices at its wingtips.
Down in the woods, across the fields, the cobwebs were silver with mist drops. The mist settled on my beard and on Hazel’s muzzle. I wanted to go on, through the woods, down to the Folly Inn and along the path to Newport, walking all day. It was a workday though, and I had to be at Westridge by midday, to do paperwork and then teach an evening class: as prosaic a use of a day as the morning was poetic.
All the same, for an hour, I felt free, and my spirits were lifted, and work was a little less oppressive because of the beauty of the morning.
This title is available direct from the publisher, OR Books, as a print-on-demand paperback and as a DRM-free ebook. Click on the image to go to the order page. This review is of the first edition and all page references are for the paperback.
In the 2015 election, I didn’t bother to take part. In fact, I pretty much buried my head and avoided it. I did vote: of course I voted, and I voted Labour, believing that Ed Milliband was a decent man at the head of a lousy party, but I was, as I had been since at least the Iraq War, if not since Peter Mandelson demonstrated the Blairites’ real priorities1 in 2000, a reluctant voter, who felt he had no real representation within the official political system.
If you’d asked me at that time what my ideal prime ministerial candidate would have looked like, I would have said, someone who did not seek the position, who spoke clearly about the world rather than dodging round ideas, who opposed war and injustice, who was not muddied by association with the Blair years and who was prepared to aim for a move away from the apparently unstoppable drift towards a free-market economic free-for-all. Thanks to the deafening hegemony of the press, business lobbyists and cowed or corrupted politicians, that position, even under three years ago, seemed like a naive dream.
That year’s election result, an increased majority for the Tories (although on a considerably increased Labour popular vote), contrary to the expectations of the media and their opinion polls, didn’t, therefore, take me by surprise, although I had seen one Guardian cover which had shown Milliband to have been catching up with the Tories, and my hopes had been lifted somewhat. Though a Labour government, as the party was then, would not have made much of a difference to the country, it might at least have wiped the smirks off the faces of Osborne, his lackey Cameron and their odious puppet master Murdoch. In the end, though, as we all expected in our heart of hearts, Murdoch got his way as usual, and the Tories got back in, apparently stronger than before.
It would have amazed me then to discover that, a little over a month after the election, not only would I have joined the Labour Party, but that I would be on Facebook (which I had left several years before) posting enthusiastically for a Labour back bencher to become leader, attending Labour meetings and arguing with Blairites about the leadership election, and even wearing tee-shirts declaring my allegiance to the leadership candidate.
I can remember sitting in our garden, late on a summer evening, after having returned from the Isle of Wight Festival, and deciding that this man was for real, and that it was time to put my money behind him. I joined straight away: I didn’t want to just be a £3 supporter; I wanted to be a part of the movement to reintroduce socialism into British politics, and to do my bit to bring together all the angry people who had had no way of finding a voice that could reach beyond the paywall the British establishment had erected around itself. Jeremy Corbyn was saying things that had been too outré for mainstream discourse: things like, poverty is bad and not inevitable: war is a manufactured evil, not forced upon us; the news media is distorted by vested interests and hatred and we should be fighting the racist anti-immigrant propaganda; we should be funding schools properly; we should own our vital infrastructure networks; we should be reversing privatisation of the NHS, rather than collaborating with the corrupt capitalist clique who are stealing our country while lying through their teeth to us. And, most amazingly, millions of people were listening. Within two years, I was campaigning for a Labour Party that was propelled by this man to reduce the Tories to a minority government, change the political dialogue and unseat the hegemony of the elite mainstream media.
It has been an extraordinary few years: from despair to hope. This book tells the story from inside the left wing circles of the national Labour Party and, if at times it feels a little confused, and a little too busy, that is because it has a lot of material to cover.
There had been some precursors to the Corbyn movement, but, living on the Isle of Wight, working in public service and dependent upon mainstream media for my information as I was, I had largely missed them. Principally, the anti-austerity movement had been standing for all the right things for a few years, and gaining some coverage, but had been unable to inconvenience the insulated political class. The anti-war movement was similarly strong in voice but still fairly weak in influence, although the greatest parliamentary success of Ed Milliband’s leadership of Labour was probably the defeat of Cameron’s plan to bomb Syria. Despite that, Cameron went ahead and did it anyway in his next term. The anti-tax avoidance movement had caused a certain amount of change of narrative among the Tories, but no real change of direction. Online protest movements like 38 Degrees had begun to draw together people who were not active protestors but felt angry about political conditions. Looking back, I think that, for me, the biggest nudge towards thinking I should drag myself out of hopelessness had been reading The Establishment, by Owen Jones,2 which was widely read in 2015-16 (I remember the enthusiasm of the bookseller in Waterstone’s when I bought it as a moment of political fellowship). In particular, I was fascinated by what is now a reasonably familiar concept; the Overton Window, which is the constructed restriction on what is considered permitted discourse within the political realm. This idea, new to me then, perfectly explained the previously incomprehensible way in which issues that I saw as urgent and real were contained and marginalised by the political classes.
I can remember a thrill of recognition when I read, “as the late socialist politician Tony Benn would often put it, social change is a combination of two things: ‘the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope for a better world’”.3 Though I certainly didn’t lack the flame of anger at injustice, I had been lacking hope for a long time, and every event that seemed it should inspire hope would, after the first headlines, get dragged back down into the mire of politicians’ vacillations and newsreaders’ contemptuous head-shaking.
After the 2015 election, the candidates who came forward to stand as replacements for Ed Milliband did nothing to remedy that. Instead of change, we faced more greyness and surrender to neoliberalism. My despair was shared by Nunns:
The whole narrative was ‘we need to move to the right’… This was getting to the point where you go, ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to take this if this is the direction it goes in. We’ve got to at least have a go, through the debate, to pull it back.’4
The standard profile of the politician to whom we had become depressingly accustomed by now was a professional technocrat, addicted to playing a game defined as much by its restrictions as by any desire to achieve anything beyond personal advancement. In the Tories, this created the dominance of, frankly, a class of corrupt second-raters, skilled at delivering power to their corporate sponsors in return for personal advantage, staying just within the rules they had, over decades, set for themselves. Tragically, the Labour Party had followed suit.
…within the ranks of the Blairite MPs there was a decline in quality over time…made up of spads – special advisors – many of whom had moved effortlessly from university to MPs’ researcher to ministerial advisor to a safe seat to being in government (this applied to Brownites as well as Blairites). It was a career path that produced technocrats, people who had never needed to fight.5
As the candidates lined up to succeed Ed Milliband, this was exactly what we were offered: a line-up of identikit technocrats. Andy Burnham (‘soft left’), Yvette Cooper (Brownite) and Liz Kendall (Blairite) presented nothing of any substance to someone who wanted to be led against the corrupt orthodoxy of austerity and privatised public services.
They have probably been thinking for years about their unique ‘policy offer’; which combination of the words ‘future,’ ‘Britain,’ ‘forward,’ and ‘together’ they will adopt for their slogan; and how they will answer the question about whether they took drugs at university.6
In that environment, the hopes of left-leaning Labour members were not high. Some even thought that the Left should simply avoid the contest. Owen Jones is quoted saying as much.
My view was that, in the midst of general post-election demoralisation, a left candidate could end up being crushed. Such a result would be used by both the Labour Party establishment and the British right generally to perform the last rites of the left, dismiss us as irrelevant, and tell us to shut up forever.7
Had I been thinking about it, I would probably have felt much the same. I was not part of ‘the left’, but their views, as outlined in this book, were the very ideas I was dreaming of, and had been dreaming of for many years, thinking that they were politically impossible to believe in. I remember telling my sister that, at least, Cooper had been sound on the establishment of SureStart, but, given her bland, centrist campaign8 for the leadership, that felt like a quirky anomaly, rather than an indication of her radical, egalitarian politics. She, like Burnham, looked less like a campaigner who had sold out than a careerist who had a couple of slightly radical sales positions.
This very dreariness and the weight of rightward-peering consensus was, however, what drove the left to search for a candidate. John McDonnell and Diane Abbott both ruled themselves out, McDonnell for health reasons and because he felt he was too abrasive and Abbott because she wanted to run for London mayor. Clive Lewis declined because he felt he lacked experience; “I don’t even know where the toilets are,”9 but the desperation for a Left candidate to at least shift the debate away from surrender to capital was powerful. As McDonnell put it in a journal article,
That the candidates for the Labour leadership so far have failed to mount the slightest challenge to capital shows the abject state of near surrender of the Labour Party. No core Labour principle is safe in the rush to not only return to Blairism but even go beyond. Redistribution of wealth through taxation is denounced as ‘the politics of envy.’ Privatisation of the NHS is acceptable as long as it ‘works.’ Caps on welfare benefits and toughening the treatment of migrants are supported because they were ‘doorstep issues.’10
In this atmosphere, the idea of running to win was not really on the table. Merely fielding a candidate who could put the case for an alternative to servility to capitalist austerity was the only aim. Jeremy Corbyn was not even considered: “We suffered from a blindness to anything other than a conventionally acceptable candidate,” Jon Lansman is quoted as saying.11
The story that Corbyn tentatively proposed himself at a meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group is, according to Nunns, true. Despair had almost set in: “They discussed the alternative of backing one of the existing candidates in return for concessions”10 and he put his name forward, assuming that he would be defeated, but unwilling to see a contest without a genuine Labour voice. In fact, Byron Taylor, the national officer of the Trades Union Liaison Organisation had suggested Corbyn to Lansman already, pointing out that Corbyn was “…the nicest man in politics…he hasn’t got any enemies.”10
At this point, the Left’s highest ambition in the leadership contest was not to be wiped out. Nunns quotes one anonymous source as having said, “I don’t want the Left to fall flat on its face. The main thing is, we don’t finish fourth, or even worse than that, a distant fourth.”12 However, very quickly, a new factor became evident: people power.
The early signs were all good. Even before the campaign had any kind of central command, things were happening out in the wild. Throughout the summer what was known as the Corbyn campaign was actually an amalgam of spontaneous local activity, but in practice the official operation was often “at the reins of a runaway horse,” as Corbyn’s press spokesperson Carmel Nolan described it…[Marshajane] Thompson found an image on the internet with the #JezWeCan motif and paid her own money to have 100 t-shirts printed with the design. “We had a meeting in Newcastle where we literally advertised it 48 hours in advance and we got 250 people” says Ben Sellars. “This is in the first week of the campaign.” Meanwhile in London, an activist gathering held in a pub in Tottenham Court Road attracted 300 people wanting to campaign for Corbyn.13
Jumping On Board
This must be around the time I came in, signing up to Facebook, partly because of a happy event around The Isle of Wight Festival and partly because I was, like nearly everyone I knew, amazed and delighted to hear a politician saying what I had been thinking, and speaking in terms that reflected the real world, rather than a Photoshopped, PR-led mirage of ‘political reality’ that seemed divorced from the reality of my life and the world around me.
I’d found my dream candidate. Within days, I had joined the party, as a full member, not a £3 supporter.
The excitement of that time comes back to me now. I was far from the centre of things, on the Isle of Wight, going to my first constituency meetings, arguing for Jeremy, making new friends, voting in the constituency nomination poll, which overwhelmingly supported Corbyn. The local party here, like in many areas, was both excited and somewhat shocked by the influx of new faces, bringing an agenda that threw all the work they had done over the years up into the air. I must say here that the Island Labour Party, with a few exceptions, responded with great grace to the change. On Facebook, things looked rather different. A few very vocal figures were entrenched in their nostalgia for the Blair years and there were unpleasant and often circular arguments, which a couple of trotstkyite/leninist/whatever revolutionaries stirred with monomaniacal delight. However, the divisions were overwhelmed by the unanimity of the new voices, who leapt upon the opportunity to participate in politics that, at last, had some relevance to them.
This was the story nationally, according to Nunns. Local parties, by and large, were reinvigorated by the arrival of new members, while being, initially, somewhat sceptical about whether the surge in membership would translate to active participation. However, among the party’s MPs, the PLP, things were rather different. The best description is panic, and the most appalling example of the PLP’s failure to recognise the nature of their new support, and the change in the political landscape that it heralded, was interim leader Harriet Harman’s disastrous decision to not oppose the Tory government’s welfare reform bill.
Harman’s Horrible Blunder
The sheer barbarity of the Tories’ welfare reform bill, which Harriet Harman decided the Labour Party should not oppose, is well covered by Nunns.
It is a bill that piles the cost of the government’s austerity drive onto those in work on low pay-the very people Labour was founded to represent. But in her wisdom, Harman has decided not to oppose the bill. Labour will first table a ‘reasoned amendment,’ an obscure parliamentary mechanism for setting-out objections, and when that inevitably fails it will abstain…
John McDonnell, Nunns says,
…has been sitting on the backbenches seething at the debate he has heard…With his first sentence, he cuts through all the vacillation: “I would swim through vomit to vote against this Bill, and listening to some of the nauseating speeches tonight, I think we might have to.”
He [McDonnell] continues:
Poverty in my constituency is not a lifestyle choice; it’s imposed upon people…This Welfare Reform Bill does as all the other welfare reform bills in recent years have done and blames the poor for their own poverty and not the system…I find it appalling that we sit here – in, to be frank, relative wealth ourselves – and we’re willing to vote for increased poverty for the people back in our constituencies.14)
That line – ”blam[ing] the poor for their own poverty and not the system,” gave me another new hero. It summed up the confidence trick that the Thatcherites had inserted into British politics in my teens and that subsequent governments, Tory and Labour, had embedded and refined as a cover for the blatant thievery of an establishment that regarded itself as above question: sneering at disenfranchised, abandoned people for their victimhood. The fact that anyone was prepared to speak with such moral certainty against the corruption of the Draco Malfoy of British politics, George Osborne, and his Pansy Parkinson, Cameron, gave me a little hope. The fact that the PLP bottled its duty in such spectacular fashion by not opposing this brutal, snide bill with every weapon at its disposal secured my certainty that supporting Jeremy Corbyn was not just an opportunity, but a moral imperative.
When the division bell rings at the end of the debate, 48 Labour MPs-over a fifth of the parliamentary party-defy Harman to oppose the Bill. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall are not among them. But John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn are.10
The chapter on this inglorious moment in Labour history is particularly rich. Harman’s motivation for this career-defining blunder is discussed, and suggests that she was
”traumatised” by her previous experience as acting leader after the 2010 election, when under her watch the Tories pinned the blame for the financial crash on Labour overspending.15
According to Nunns, both Burnham and Cooper were desperate for Labour to oppose the Bill, but divided by a squabble over who should speak first in a Shadow Cabinet meeting, and therefore suggest the reasoned amendment. “But Harman was resolute that Labour would not vote against it. The Shadow Cabinet was fragmented.”16
I remember being aghast and weary. Had Burnham or Cooper resigned the Shadow Cabinet and joined the rebels, I think the leadership contest would have been a lot closer, but they drifted into the disaster, tied to their belief that a facile show of unity trumped principles and, in so doing, lost my respect.
I wasn’t the only one.
There was…a perception of moral decay in Labour’s position, a feeling captured by Diane Abbott in an outraged op-ed published the day after Harman’s interview (on the BBC’s Sunday Politics on 12th July 2015). “How did a party that once promised to end child poverty in a generation become one that will shrug and vote for measures which will force tens of thousands of children into poverty?” she asked.17
Stunningly, this is an argument that Labour won, to an extent. After Corbyn’s election as leader, Iain Duncan-Smith, the right-wing Tory welfare minister, resigned over further cuts, this time to disability payments.
“Fiscal self-imposed restraints,” said Duncan Smith while explaining his resignation on the Andrew Marr programme, “are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest.” He might just as well have directly quoted Corbyn’s campaign slogan that austerity is a political choice not an economic necessity.18
The (Over) Reaction
There was a quality of blinking disbelief to the media coverage of the leadership election. The over-ironed, open-necked shirts out of which comfortably Blairite skinny-necked ‘experts’ opined their certainty that a Corbyn victory was an impossibility were viewing the end of their cosy hegemony, and seemed to become shinier and starchier, simply denying it could be happening. Jonathan Freedland, Anne Perkins, Andrew Rawnsley, Michael White and Polly Toynbee, all of The Guardian, were notable columnists of the ‘left’ who circled their Range Rovers against the assault on the British media’s four-decade-long war against disadvantaged and marginalised people. Andrew Rawnsley lost his reason:
That Rawnsley should react with animosity rather than curiosity was perhaps understandable. Suddenly, the centre of gravity was moving away from the Labour elite to which he had unparalleled access, and from which he had mined the raw materials needed to fashion-with considerable skill-the books and journalism that had won him acclaim. Newbies were putting that all at risk.19
I gave up buying The Guardian (I had been a twice-a-week reader, on average, for thirty years) and have only bought one copy since.
A selection of the headlines from The Guardian website’s front page on 22 and 23 July gives a sense of the almost hysterical tone that took hold: “Blair urges Labour not to wrap itself in a Jeremy Corbyn comfort blanket”; “Think before you vote for Jeremy Corbyn”; Labour can come back from the brink, but it seems to lack the will to do so”; “Blair: I wouldn’t want to win on an old fashioned leftist platform.” On these two panic-stricken days alone, The Guardian website carried opinion pieces hostile to Corbyn from Anne Perkins, Suzanne Moore, Polly Toynbee, Tim Bale, Martin Kettle, Michael White, Anne Perkins (again), and Anne Perkins (yet again). There was not a single pro-Corbyn column…But The Guardian had a problem: its readers [disagreed]…78 per cent of the 2,500 people who responded [to a _Guardian_ poll] backed Corbyn…Such sentiment was often reflected on the letters page, an oasis amid the relentless negativity elsewhere. And anyone brave enough to venture ‘below the line’ into the netherworld of online comments could not mistake the strong feeling that Corbyn was being unfairly treated and his supporters patronised. Commenters showed themselves to be expert at puncturing pomposity and exposing illogic, but the most striking feature of their contributions was anger at The Guardian itself…The charge was that The Guardian was effectively trolling one particular candidate – one who had the support of many of its readers.20
The long term effect on the press of the earthquake beneath the British political elite’s inward-looking fortress of privilege is a subject for another essay, but it is worth noting that The Sun, which before 2015 dictated popular political culture to a pathological degree, seems like an irrelevance two and a half years later. Who is The Sun’s current political editor? Any guesses? I don’t think it important enough to bother looking it up.
The New Statesman was particularly egregious. I followed it on Facebook and noted, as did many other people, that it became not dissimilar to The Daily Mail in tone. Indeed, when The New Statesman’s editor did “…stake[] out his position on July 22nd, [it was] in The Daily Mail of all places”21
The section on the press is, perhaps, the bit of the book which has had the most impact upon me. Part of the establishment’s great confidence trick is that it is supremely skilled at side-lining voices that are not in accord with its own. Its greatest trick in this regard is to accuse oppositional voices of being ignorant and deranged: think of how often you hear establishment lackeys like Melanie Phillips or Andrew Rawnsley describe criticism of power as ‘conspiracy theory’. They alone have the right to express opposition, because they alone have the inside knowledge which the ordinary democratic voter does not have a right to share, except through the filter of their power. In the Labour leadership election, this closed shop collapsed in upon itself as it realised that, for the majority of people, and, in particular, the people it thought it had effectively demotivated from political participation, their voices were inaccessible, irrelevant and ridiculous. The people who chanted Jeremy Corbyn’s name at a rock concert less than two years after the leadership campaign haven’t heard of Jonathan Freedland, Polly Toynbee, Max Hastings or Andrew Marr. They had heard of Laura Kuenssberg by then, but only as a figure of ridicule on Facebook and Twitter. The edifice of inward-looking, London-property-owning hegemony only really began to notice that the world had moved beyond it during this leadership campaign.
And this was not an accident. In the leadership election, the Corbyn campaign knew that it needed to reach around the fortress of hopelessly corrupted commercial and ‘public service’ news power and it succeeded.
Research carried out by YouGov in August 2015 found that 57 percent of Corbyn supporters cited social media as “a main source of news,” compared to around 40 per cent for backers of other candidates. “Part of the reason why they were spending so much time on social media was because they didn’t trust the traditional media any more.” believes ben Sellers. One of the main functions of the Corbyn For Leader social media operation run by Sellers and Thompson was to circumvent the press, both by publicising the explosion of activity happening all around the country, and by curating the mainstream media to pick out the half-decent reports (“sometimes that was a struggle,” Sellers quips.
It was patently clear that some journalists felt threatened by the arrival of this new realm. A media narrative asserting that there is no alternative is much easier to sustain if there is no alternative media. The existence of a different point of view, forged among a network of people who would previously have been atomised, is what provoked the snobbish accusations of “virtue signalling” and “identity politics.” Being continually challenged about their bias and presuppositions brought howls of exasperation from journalists that congealed into a collective feeling of offence. It contributed to the general sense of consternation at Corbyn’s rise. Events were spinning beyond the media’s control.22
Note: Spookily, as I write this, I have received a marketing email from O/R books for the second edition of The Candidate. This new edition is expanded to include the 2017 election and the email uses social media quotes by ‘Britain’s major political pundits,’ all predicting the demolition of Labour at the polls. The same quotes are used in this publicity video.
Hubris doesn’t get much better than this.
Conclusion
As John Prescott says, the heart of the Corbyn campaign was not tactical, but issues-led: they talked about policies. The true pleasure of recalling the campaign, for me, is the excitement I felt every time an issue I cared about, that had become codified, contained and sidelined by ‘the political process’ was dragged into the spotlight and became live and real. The horrible corruption of privatisations, the mental health care disaster, the cruel and sickening purge of poor people from the economy by ‘welfare reform’, the collapse of education, the barely-coded racism of ‘immigration control’, the designed chaos of Tory prisons policy: issue after issue would turn up on social media and, instead of being buried in establishment pundits’ head-shaking, would be discussed, witnessed to by the people who were suffering from the policy and would drown out the lies that had been told about it with real, human truth.
The years between Jeremy’s first leadership election and the general election of 2017 included the doleful attempt by the right-wing capitalists within the Labour Party to challenge him with the corporate lackey Owen Smith’s pathetic leadership campaign. It only strengthened Jeremy as leader, although you wouldn’t believe it if you read the Guardian, for whom the only story was “how long will Corbyn last?” Even the stunning political earthquake of the general election, during which I campaigned with enthusiasm and blogged with fury, hasn’t blunted their hypocrisy and partiality. In that election, as during the recent local election campaign, mainstream media has been on the attack, settling upon one particular lie, that anti-Semitism is an attitude unique to the Labour Party and a characteristic of it. It has done harm, mainly through the old fascist trope of repetition and ubiquity, and I worry that the anti-Semitism lie, contrived and corrupt as it is, has done a certain amount to split the party at a time when it should be coming together.
Nevertheless, I am optimistic that we will see a revival of the enthusiasm when the current government finally collapses in on itself. The people who listened with interest when I was leafleting for Labour during the 2017 election weren’t members of the party, but they were care-workers, disabled people whose support payments had been decimated and blocked by Jobcentre Plus target campaigns, carers whose elderly dependents had little or no support from a National Health Service being deliberately run into the ground, and they felt hopeful then, as I hope they will feel when Jeremy leads us into the next election.
I really can’t afford to buy the second edition of The Candidate, much as I would like to read it. I read my copy of the first edition last summer, and going back through it to write this has revived my political fire a bit. I am still in the party, as the secretary of my local branch and, incredibly, I have been nominated to be assistant secretary of the Island CLP, which is a bit embarrassing. In March, I attended an economics conference hosted by John McDonnell, and I was awed by the depth of talent and energy that has coalesced around the Labour Party’s policy making: academics, campaigners, charity workers and, most importantly, people like me who just care enough to get involved, are all having their say, so that, come the next election, we will go in with policies even more deeply worked out and clearly thought through than those we offered the electorate, and so nearly delivered, in 2017.
