William McIlvanney joins the Olympians

Today sees my highest monthly viewing figure ever – and there’s still another full week to go before the end of the month. I’ve been rather focused on Romania and Scotland in the last month – so I’m grateful to those readers who don’t necessarily share these interests for their patience.

You can see the 7 top posts for this month (from hits) at the right-hand side – 1 about Europe; 4 about Scotland, 1 on travel – those 6 are all recent. But top billing is still this strange “backbone” one – more than 3 years old – whose title refers to an EC document about aid assistance which I was critiquing then. I have tried to suggest to readers that there are better things to read – but people just keep on punching that button. I don’t understand why!

  

Paul Mason, one of the BBC economics correspondent (all of whom do excellent blogs), ran a lovely Christmas challenge in 2010 – the 50 books which your library has to have. The challenge was apparently first made in 1930 by an American journalist who received a letter from a friend who wrote: 

"I want no more than fifty books. And none of them modern; that is, no novels that are coming off the presses these last ten years. Are there fifty intelligent books in the world? If you have time send along a list of fifty books, I promise to buy them and have them beautifully bound. I am consulting you as I would my lawyer. I have not time to develop a literary consciousness at my age. So if you were cutting your own library down to fifty books, which books would you keep?"

Mason made the challenge more difficult by preventing us from consulting our shelves or the internet – so I just managed to get my suggestions in before the discussion thread closed (It’s number 81). I then took time to reflect more and consult some booklists and then posted on this blog.

A library should be for consulting – the glories of novels, short stories, poetry, essays should be available there but also art and human knowledge. With only 50 books allowed, novels (of any sort) will have to be excluded - which means no “Buddenbrooks” (Thomas Mann) or “Candide” (Voltaire) let alone any of the powerful South Americans (Jorge Amado's "Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon", Allende’s “Eva Luna”, Marquez’s , “Love in the Time of Cholera” , Llosa ‘s “The War of the End of the World”) or Yehoshuova’s “The Liberated Bride” from Israel.

However, some books come in multi-volume collections eg Lewis Crassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song”; Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandrian Quartet”; Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy”; and Naguib Mahfouz’s “Children of the Alley” and therefore give good bangs for bucks. Perhaps they might be allowed to stay.
And remember what Nassim Taleb calls Umberto Eco's "antilibrary" concept - that read books are less valuable than unread ones - a library should be a research tool. Collections of essays, poetry and short stories also give much more reading per book (unless it’s War and Peace) - so the collected poetry of Brecht, TS Eliot, Norman McCaig and WS Graham would be the first four books; as well as the Collected Short Stories of Nabokov, William Trevor, Carol Shields, Heinrich Boell and Alice Munro; and the essays of Montaigne.

If allowed, I would also have a few collections of painters eg the Russian Itinerants. Chuck in an Etymology and a couple of overviews of intellectual endeavours of recent times such as Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and Peter Watson’s “A Terrible Beauty” - and I would then have space for 35 individual titles.

About 30 non-fiction titles then followed – interesting that less than 10 were by British writers. Now I would probably question only the inclusion of Taleb..... 

Thanks to cheating (selecting collections), I was actually left with 6 empty spots – which I never got round to filling. 

Obviously, in the light of yesterday’s post about William McIlvanny, least a couple of his titles would go in to fill those empty spots.

Draft Sceptic's Glossary

Incredibly warm for this time of the year here – 11C and a cloudless sky. 15 years or so ago the snow smothered the cars here. Strange that it is now the UK which is freezing! Is this the warming of the Gulf Stream?

Remember the little contest for the 50 books to form your library? The guy who set it has now given us his list.
I’m happy to report that you can now access the results of my last week’s musings on words at the latest paper Just Words? on my website . It is still very much at draft stage - but now able and needing to get feedback. So please read and tell me what you think.
I knew that there was an element of mere play in what I was doing with my definitions – for example suggesting that the word “capacity” so beloved of consultants could be interpreted simply as “something other people lack”! But – as many people have argued – play can liberate some powerful thoughts! And something very powerful has been driving this latest venture forward – at one stage I lost control of the process and began (very correctly) to question what I was trying to do. Was this just an exercise in superficial cynicism? Or was it a more profound exercise in scepticism?
Yesterday I suddenly remembered that I had a copy on my shelves here (as distinct from my real library at Sirnea) of A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense produced in 1994 by the genius who wrote Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorshop of reason in the west, one of the really profound critiques of soi-disant expertise.

It’s a French edition I had picked up at a second-hand sale in Brussels and is not quite in the style I am trying to create for my glossary but it did remind me of the

 “humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues (Flaubert actually issued a Dictionnaire des Idees recues in 1880) and the pretensions of power”. 

Saul contrasts this approach with that

“of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”. 

This crystallised my thinking! Which is why I gave the draft its subtletly and ambiguous title – Just words? “Just” means both “merely” and “fair”!! And the subtitle “reclaiming the language” has, for me shades of the Greenock poet WS Graham.

Three powerful forces have created verbal gymnastics which need to be exposed –
- first the need of governments to avoid admission of failure – better to imply a new condition had arisen by inventing a new phrase!
- the professional interests which surround each new definition.
- The last decade or so has seen a third force - governments have fallen even further into the hands of spin doctors and corporate interests and a powerful new verbal smokescreen has arisen to try to conceal this.

Desert Island Library

Paul Mason, one of the BBC economics correspondent (all of whom do excellent blogs), is running a lovely Christmas challenge at the moment – the 50 books which your library has to have.
The challenge was apparently first made in 1930 by an American journalist who received a letter from a friend who wrote:

"As for the library, I want no more than fifty books. And none of them modern; that is, no novels that are coming off the presses these last ten years. Are there fifty intelligent books in the world? If you have time send along a list of fifty books, I promise to buy them and have them beautifully bound. I am consulting you as I would my lawyer. I have not time to develop a literary consciousness at my age. So if you were cutting your own library down to fifty books, which books would you keep?"

He has made the challenge more difficult by preventing us from consulting our shelves or the internet – so I did my best last night but have now had the time to reflect more and consult some booklists; What follows is therefore a slightly updated version of the entry I posted on his site (number 81 I think)
A library should be for consulting – the glories of novels, short stories, poetry, essays should be available there but also art and human knowledge. With only 50 books allowed, novels (of any sort) will have to be excluded - which means no “Buddenbrooks” (Thomas Mann) or “Candide” (Voltaire) let alone any of the powerful South Americans (Jorge Amado's "Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon", Allende’s “Eva Luna”, Marquez’s , “Love in the Time of Cholera” or Llosa ‘s “The War of the End of the World”) or Yehoshuova’s “The Liberated Bride” from Israel.
However, some books come in multi-volume collections eg Lewis Crassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song”; Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandrian Quartet”; Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy”; and Naguib Mahfouz’s “Children of the Alley” and therefore give good bangs for bucks. Perhaps they might be allowed to stay.

And remember what Nassim Taleb calls Umberto Eco's "antilibrary" concept - that read books are less valuable than unread ones - a library should be a research tool. Collections of essays, poetry and short stories also give much more reading per book (unless it’s War and Peace) - so the collected poetry of Brecht, TS Eliot, Norman McCaig and WS Graham would be the first four books; as well as the Collected Short Stories of Nabokov, William Trevor, Carol Shields, Heinrich Boell and Alice Munro; and the essays of Montaigne.

If allowed, I would also have a few collections of painters eg the Russian Itinerants or Scottish colourists. Chuck in an Etymology and a couple of overviews of intellectual endeavours of recent times such as Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and Peter Watson’s “A Terrible Beauty” - and I would then have space for 35 individual titles.

My basic criteria would be (a) the light thrown on the European dilemmas of the last century and (b) the quality of the language and the book as a whole.
The books I would keep (or try to find again) are
Robert Michels; Political Parties (1911)
Reinhold Niebuhr; Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Joseph Schumpeter; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)
Arthur Koestler; The Invisible Writing (1955)
Leopold Kohr; The Breakdown of Nations (1977)
Gerald Brennan; South from Granada (1957)
JK Galbraith; The Affluent Society (1958)
Ivan Illich; Deschooling Society (1971)
Robert Greene; 48 laws of power (for the breadth of the stories from the medieval world including China)
Tony Judt; Postwar History of Europe since 1945
Richard Cobb; Paris and Elswhere
Vassily Grossman; Life and Fate
Roger Harrison; The Collected Papers (in the early days of organisational analysis)
Clive James; Cultural Amnesia (on neglected European literary figures particularly of the early 20th century – written with verbal fireworks)
JR Saul; Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of reason in the west
Amos Oz; Tale of Love and Darkness
Claude Magris; Danube
Julian Barnes; Nothing to be Frightened Of
Michael Foley; The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it impossible to be happy
Toby Jones; Utopian Dreams
Michael Pollan; The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Nassim Taleb; The Black Swan – the impact of the highly improbable
Roger Deakin; Notes from walnut tree farm
Geert Mak; In Europe – travels through the twentieth century
Donald Sassoon; A Hundred Years of Socialism – a history of the western left in the 20th century
Theodor Zeldin; The Intimate History of Humanity

Of course Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Machiavelli’s The Prince should be there – and at least one book on the Chinese contribution to the world.

This leaves 6 empty spots - about which I shall think carefully!

This time last year, I was in the mountain house (also with minimal snow) and thinking about the useful literature on public administrative reform!