Philip Hoare + EISF = Fabulous!

Last Friday, Philip Hoare appeared at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, giving a talk called “The State of the Whale.” The author of many wonderful and fascinating books, Hoare has most recently found fame with his latest book “Leviathan”, which deservedly won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction last year.

Reminiscent of another great writer, the late W.G. Sebald, Hoare’s “Leviathan” is wonderful for its fusion of fact, history and literature with the personal, resulting in a quite extraordinary book. Leaving the bookshop after buying it, I promptly buried my head in it — slowly wandering home reading it, and almost in tears before I was thirty pages in. Upon realising that I had reached the half-way ‘tipping’ point brought genuine distress that it would soon be over, but even then I couldn’t stop myself from reading on, devouring the second half of the book in a single day.

Having looked forward to “The State of the Whale” for weeks, I am happy to report that Hoare’s talk was excellent. As someone who has read “Leviathan”, I was delighted to finally hear from the man who wrote it; to see pictures of his studies and to hear more about his personal experiences with whales. We were told about different types of whale and their behaviour, shown shown real teeth and baleen and treated to images from Hoare’s own whale-watching. The highly personal way that Hoare spoke about his own obsession with whales and about his travels around the world to watch and learn about them was utterly engaging, and I sat enraptured.

Hoare’s talk was wonderful in conveying the scale of these wonderful, elusive mammals and revelling in their mysterious nature — for such large creatures, they are seen only in glimpses at the ocean’s surface and as yet have not been monitored or filmed at depth. The talk was tragic too, in revealing the devastation inflicted on these huge, intelligent beasts by mankind’s long history of whaling. With many species hunted to the point of extinction by the twentieth century, the anti-whaling movement and anti-whaling legislation have done much to aid the recovery of certain species. For others, like the North Atlantic Right Whale, it may already too late. As whalers targeted large males as prized catches, they removed the strongest individuals from the gene pool. The species may never recover.

In a world awoken to the importance of conservation and caring for our fragile environment and ecosystems, we need the voices of passionate individuals to ring out and remind us of the intrinsic power and beauty of the natural world. In an age when our lives are dominated by the artificial and constructed realities of electronic media and life in modern cities, we must not forget our sense of wonder at the natural world — the world that gives life and sustains us all.

An eye-opening, informative, fascinating and entertaining talk, “The State of the Whale” reminded me of the wonderful abundance of life on our planet; life that is beautiful, brutal, mysterious, and perpetually struggling for survival. Evolved to the point that we have, it is our duty to protect and support these other forms of life. With the possibility of a return to whaling coming as early as next year, is it not time to think about the intrinsic value of the natural world around us, instead of its value as a commodity to be captured, traded, and capitalised on?

After the talk I kicked myself for not bringing my copy of “Leviathan” with me to be signed, and my mum obligingly stepped in a bought me a new copy. I spoke to Philip briefly, and told him that I find his writing magnificent. Now that my new copy of “Leviathan” has taken its place on the mantlepiece, it’s time for my unsigned copy to go on a journey of it’s own: being passed first to my mum and then from friend to friend, most highly recommended. I urge you to read it.

Edinburgh International Science Festival – Oh JOY!

Today has been a happy day for my inner geek.

On picking up and flicking through this year’s programme for the EISF, I involuntarily let out a squeal of delight. This also caused me to confess my latest, and most wrong-indeed man crush to two complete strangers, who were interviewing me for a job. (And yes, I do imagine that my chances of getting said job were much diminished, if not destroyed outright, by my outburst.)

The object of my latest mental dalliance is Brian Cox, presenter of BBC 2′s ‘Wonders of the Solar System’. Man of science, physicist extraordinaire, and all round wonderful creature, he somehow makes talking about things that I will never be able to understand the most engrossing thing ever. Planets and physics, I’m talking about you. Sigh.

Yes, you have my full and undivided attention...

Anyway. What was I talking about?

Oh yes. The wonderful news is that this fine man of science is going to be in Edinburgh for some events during the Science Festival that include a screening of ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ at the Filmhouse on the 12th April at 8:30pm followed by a Q&A (gasp!), and a talk at Edinburgh University’s Informatics Forum, ‘Why does E=mc2?’ on the 11th April at 8:00pm. I will be most certainly be going to both. Yippedy yip yip, and indeed, hooray!

Now, imagine my delight then when, already quivering and almost frantic with joy, I turned the page to discover that Philip Hoare will be giving a talk called ‘The State of the Whale’ on the 9th April at 8:00pm (Informatics Forum, again). He’s the writer of two of my favourite books — ‘Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant’ and ‘Leviathan’ — and an absolutely astonishingly gifted writer at that: stylistically sublime and bursting with erudition, with a surprisingly emotional quality that I find irresistable. I cried in the street reading ‘Leviathan’ — and it was only the first chapter proper, how shaming! He is, quite simply, one of the greatest writers around.

In Awe of the Awesome

Lawd! Walking through Leith Links at this point, festival programme clutched in hand, I was ready to lie down among the crocuses and joyfully expire… what looked like three rabid dogs running wild off the leash only just prevented me from doing so.

6 Music: There Are No Words

I don’t ask for much, but I will today.

If you’re in possession of a pair of working ears and a brain that loves good music: get on-line, switch on your TV or tune your DAB radio and look for 6 Music. Once you’ve found it, please stay there for one day.

And if you like it – never, ever, stop listening.

In Awe of the Awesome, or: Who I want to be when I grow up

What's written on his t-shirt? Damn right!

Philip Hoare: not only a man of discerning taste — he’s written books about Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward (the second best thing to come out of Teddington, after myself) — but a man remarkable for two reasons:

1. After a rather misguided decision to write my Advanced Higher English personal study on “Moby Dick” (which resulted in the creation of a parallel text within my copy of the book through the green inked marginalia that detailed the complete mental collapse I suffered in trying to read the bloody thing), only this particular man could make me voluntarily pick up and read another book about a whale. (Incidentally, it’s called ‘Leviathan’ and is wonderful. Please read it).

2. He wrote a rather magnificent book called ‘Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant’, which is the best biography I have ever read, if not one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve ever come across. Having recently acquired my own copy, it sits in pride of place on my mantlepiece. ‘Serious Pleasures’ is a wonderful book about an equally wonderful, though curious, man who flitted from party to party in the 1920s as one of the brightest of the Bright Young People, had a turbulent love affair with Siegfried Sassoon (whom I also adore), liked to sprinkle gold dust in his hair and spent his life time talking about a novel, Lascar, that he never finished; only to become a virtual recluse and spend — purportedly — the final years of his life in bed. Written in an exuberant and eloquent style, Hoare brings Tennant wonderfully to life, and at least once a week I find myself sitting down with a cup of tea to delve into the delights of the book at random.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Late, Great… and Underrated?

I’ve recently found one of my more secret literary obsessions forced out, blinking, into the light after many years of quiet, untrumpeted adoration. At the end of last year, faced with the sudden realisation that the coming summer would mark five years since I finished my degree, I acknowledged the inevitable rot that had set into my brain and set about to search for a remedy. I found it in an open course at Edinburgh University on Victorian Gothic, whose subtitle  ”Fantasies, Dreams and Nightmares in 19th Century Fiction” sent me all a quiver. Led by a most charming and wonderful tutor, David Melville Wingrove — who won me over within the first hour with the statement “Camille Paglia is who I want to be when I grow up” — our second week’s focus was to be Hawthorne’s 1851 novel “The House of the Seven Gables.” I, of course, was delighted.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is a writer I have held to be wonderful ever since I came across his short story “Young Goodman Brown” in the heady Spring of 2003, to which I date the numerous literary epiphanies that awoke the passion for literature that has gripped me intensely ever since and left me perpetually preoccupied with the notion of applying for a PhD. In the story, Salem born Hawthorne (himself descended from a judge at the infamous witch trials of 1692) returns to his town’s dark history for a romp of a story in which a paranoid man of the community is unable to shake off the possibility that his virtuous-seeming neighbours might indulge in certain dark past-times, including midnight meetings in the woods and dancing naked around devilish alters under the cover of night. Having witnessed such a meeting in the forest – why was he walking there at all, we wonder? – Goodman Brown awakens the next day to find himself alone, and his life is forever haunted by what he thinks he saw. With the witches meeting looming in his brain somewhere between reality and dream, and with no way to prove it as either, poor Goodman Brown is undone, and lives a haunted life under the shadow of what he might have seen that night.

The genius of Hawthorne’s writing in this particular story comes from this pull of reality and dream and the fact that the author does not give us, the readers, a definitive answer as to what Goodman Brown may – or may not – have witnessed that night. Read with this inherent ambiguity, the story becomes a satire of the hysteria and paranoia that proved so catastrophic in Salem, as we see a fearful Puritan mind undone by its own ideologies. Though shaking off events as having been a dream, Goodman Brown never recovers, and the final paragraph is  a tour-de-force of writerly eloquence and wit that raises the hairs on my arms and a laugh from my throat each time that I read it:

“Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”

I will stand up for my love of Hawthorne — and have done, publicly on occasion (mortifying, but absolutely necessary) — but I wonder that so many find his work over-long, gloomy and out-dated. (For that matter, if I could find the person who wrote on Amazon.co.uk of the Oxford Classics volume “Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories” that the “book is full of short stories, some are good but most a [sic] quite boring and you wish you could get back the time you had wasted reading them”, I would rather like to smack them with said book and then deliver a variation of my Hawthorne sermon as set forth above). And as for his work being over-long, I don’t see that many people complaining about Dickens who, by modern standards, could really have done with a rather aggressive editor.

But each to his own. For me, Hawthorne is a writer who can combine spooky spine-tingling plots with quite exquisitely lyrical description, who can wring both humour and pathos from the human heart. To anyone who has never read Hawthorne, I would suggest you to give his stories a go. For anyone who has read Hawthorne and not liked his writing, I would say that we are all entitled to our own opinions. To anyone who, like me, adores the man, I would say “Great! Now I don’t feel quite so alone. Would you like to talk about why we like him so much at great length over many cups of tea?”.

And now I stand to proclaim what I’ve so long thought and felt, but all too little said: Hawthorne isn’t just some old sop in a frock coat with a silly moustache (see below if you doubt me) but of the greats of American fiction, and I adore him.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Genius