̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Department of French

Opinion: Brexistentialism: Britain, the drop out nation in crisis, meets Jean-Paul Sartre

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:07:29 +0000

̽��ֱ��greatest philosophical one-liner of the 20th century – or anti-EU theme tune? “Hell is other people” began life as a snappy soundbite in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, a short, harsh, brilliant meditation of a play, written in the midst of World War II. It may actually have been delivered first, in rehearsal, by Sartre’s friend and antagonist Albert Camus. Huis Clos is a difficult title to translate – the norm used to be: “No Exit”, stressing some notion of inescapable interdependence. I guess, in the current fissionary climate, it could be rewritten as “Brexit”, or possibly “Brexistentialism”.

I have to ask the unpleasant question of this nation: are we being xenophobic? I am fairly sure Sartre would reply, in his confrontational way: we are not being anywhere near xenophobic enough. Yet. We are not following the Brexistentialist argument where it leads. We have to understand and assume responsibility for the consequences of our own attitudes.

Shortly after the referendum result, I received a message from a young Danish friend: “So you don’t like us any more”, she said. I replied: “We’re not prejudiced. We don’t like anyone”. I was proposing, in other words, an even-handed hostility, an all-round, egalitarian phobia of the other. But I was probably, in the Sartre view of the world, being prematurely utopian, I admit. I suspect that we are still being overly selective in our resentments and revulsion.

Existentialism is usually thought of as a form of radical individualism. There is no “society” in Sartre. Everyone is Shane or Jack Reacher or Lisbeth Salander. Your closest relationship is with your horse or folding toothbrush or computer. In Being and Nothingness, the longer essay Sartre wrote alongside Huis Clos, he makes clear that the core of the self (not that it has a core) is its nexus with other people.

How do I define myself, sitting in this West Village cafe in New York right now? Like so many philosophical answers, it is obvious and yet far-reaching in its implications. I am not this keyboard that I have under my fingers, I am not this cup of black coffee, I am not this woman in sunglasses who is sitting opposite me. I am defined, in short, by a series of negations.

Staring at the void (and seeing nothing)

Anecdotal allegory: I was once at a conference in Geneva where one of the speakers dropped out through illness. I offered to step in to fill the breach. Thank you, replied my good friend Philippe who was overseeing the conference, “Mais on ne peut pas remplir un trou par un vide”. Loosely translated: “You can’t fill a hole with a void”. Funny how certain lines stick in the mind (this was 25 years ago). But, to come to the point (not that there is a point in the entire universe), this is exactly what Sartre proposes we are doing every second of every day: I am a void which I am attempting to fill up with a series of negations. Popeye, on this basis: “I am what I am and that’s all what I am” – is clearly guilty of “bad faith” or delusion. And even he needs a tin of spinach to fully inflate.

Perhaps it was not so surprising in Occupied France in the 1940s that Sartre would conclude that, in our relations with others, we really only have two fundamental options: sadism and masochism. Or (situation normal) some combination of both. There is no third way. As true today as it was then. Which explains why, all too often in the current debates, we refer back to World War II (say, for example, Cameron being accused of “appeasement”), as if we were all retired Spitfire pilots (the “Few” have multiplied to become the many).

Groucho wasn’t much of a joiner, either. MGM/Ted Allan, CC BY

Of course the theory omits the crucial question of the collective. Sartre resorted to Marx (Karl) for the answer. But Marx (Groucho) had already defined the problem: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me for a member.” Sartre wanted to abolish clubs entirely. He dreamed of a system of evenly distributed particles floating free in the meaningless void. A beautiful concept for sure. Perhaps, ultimately, a form of nostalgia. But, rather like particles in the early universe, we have an irresistible tendency to agglomerate, to clump together. Our particular local clump, or club, can only define itself by opposition to other clubs.

̽��ֱ��great French utopian philosopher, Charles Fourier (who provided Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with the notion of the “pivotal” or significant other) analysed humans in terms of their passions – which he equated with Newtonian gravity, causing us to band together. But the “butterfly” passion also causes us to fly apart and split up.

Freedom’s just another word

We are “condemned to be free” in the sense that all our clubs are strictly provisional (except, in my own case, West Ham United). I am aligning myself with one really quite powerful club even by virtue of writing this article: it is in English, so I am implicitly asserting some measure of competence in English and association with other English speakers.

I try not to get too excited by this sense of belonging, however, because I know that English itself splits into a multiplicity of idiolects. In fact, having in the course of drifting around acquired a fairly strange accent, I no longer know where I belong, geographically or socially.

Neither does anyone else. Unless, of course, they are guilty of bad faith.

We (and I am conscious when I write the word of how fictional, how hypothetical, how mythic it is) have chosen (mythically speaking) the path of “anomie” or singularity, to be governed by no rule. “Romantic anomie” was the sociologist Emile Durkheim’s phrase, in his analysis of the causes of suicide (the first philosophical question, as Camus called it).

Whole countries can have an existential crisis, not just lonely, drifting outsiders. We can be a drop-out too. Driven by a sense of the nausea of existence itself. But equally it will not be too surprising if this drop-out mentality catches on. And “we” just ceases to exist. Maybe it already died. I already feel a certain nostalgia for Brexistentialism.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) discusses existentialism and the EU referendum.

Chris Devers

Banksy in Boston: Portrait from the F̶O̶L̶L̶O̶W̶ ̶Y̶O̶U̶R̶ ̶D̶R̶E̶A̶M̶S̶ CANCELLED piece in context on Essex St, Chinatown, Boston

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Winners announced in the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards and Public Engagement with Research Awards

jeh98 — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 09:58:54 +0000

On Monday 20 June, the Vice-Chancellor and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research presented two sets of inaugural awards; the Impact Awards run by the Research Strategy Office, and the Public Engagement with Research Awards run by the Public Engagement team in the Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has had profound effects on society – it is a formal part of the ̽��ֱ��’s mission.

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards have been established to recognise and reward those whose research has led to excellent impact beyond academia, whether on the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life.

In this, its inaugural year, there were 71 nominations across all Schools. Nominations were initially judged by School, with one overall best entry selected by external advisor Schlumberger. A prize of £1,000 was awarded to the best impact in each School, with the prize for the overall winner increased to £2,000.

̽��ֱ��winners were announced at an award ceremony on 20 June 2016, hosted by Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. These winners, although very diverse, illustrate only a small part of the wide range of impact that Cambridge's research has had.

This year’s winners were:

Dr Mari Jones (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages)

Norman French has been spoken in Jersey for over 1,000 years. Today, however, this language (Jèrriais to its speakers) is obsolescent: spoken by some 1% of the population. ̽��ֱ��research of Mari Jones has sought to preserve Jèrriais and has helped raise the profile of the language within Jersey and beyond, with impacts on local and national media, language policy and education, and cultural identity and development.

Dr Gilly Carr (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology)

̽��ֱ��Channel Islands have long had great difficulty in coming to terms with the darker side of the German occupation. ̽��ֱ��aim of Gilly Carr’s research is to increase awareness of Channel Islander victims of Nazi persecution through creation of a plural ‘heritage landscape’ and via education. ̽��ֱ��creation of this heritage is a major achievement and will be of significant impact for the Channel Islands.

Professor Steve Jackson (Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute)

Olaparib is an innovative targeted therapy for cancer developed by Steve Jackson. In 2014 Olaparib was licensed for the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. ̽��ֱ��following year, NICE made the drug available on the NHS in England for specific ovarian cancer patients. 2015 saw promising findings from a clinical trial in prostate cancer and Olaparib received Breakthrough Therapy Designation earlier this year. Olaparib is currently in clinical trials for a wide range of other cancer types.

Professor John Clarkson and Dr Nathan Crilly (Department of Engineering)

It is normal to be different. ̽��ֱ��demographics of the world are changing, with longer life expectancies and a reduced birth rate resulting in an increased proportion of older people. Yet with increasing age comes a general decline in capability, challenging the way people are able to interact with the ‘designed’ world around them. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Engineering Design Centre has worked with the Royal College of Art to address this ‘design challenge’. They developed a design toolkit and realised what was by now obvious, that inclusive design was simply better design.

Dr Nita Forouhi and Dr Fumiaki Imamura (MRC Epidemiology Unit)

Identifying modifiable risk factors is an important step in helping reduce the health burden of poor diet. Forouhi and Imamura have advanced our understanding of the health impacts of sugars, fats and foods, through both scale and depth of investigation of self-reported information and nutritional biomarkers. They have engaged at an international level with policy and guidance bodies, and have used the media to improve public understanding with the potential for a direct impact on people’s health.

In 2015, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge received a one-year £65k Catalyst Seed Fund grant from Research Councils UK to embed high quality public engagement with research and bring about culture change at an institutional level.

̽��ֱ��Public Engagement with Research Awards were set up to recognise and reward those who undertake quality engagement with research. 69 nominations were received from across all Schools.

This year’s winners were:

Dr Becky Inkster (Department of Psychiatry)

Dr Inkster’s work work explores the intersection of art and science through the prism of mental health research. Dr Inkster has successfully collaborated with ̽��ֱ��Scarabeus Theatre in a performance called Depths of My Mind and founded the website HipHopPsych, showcasing the latest psychiatry research through hip hop lyrics. Her approach has allowed her to engage with hard-to-reach teenage audiences, encouraging them to reflect on their own mental health. Beyond this work she has explored the use of social media to diagnose mental illness, and has gathered patient perspectives on ethics, privacy and data sharing in preparation for research publication.

Dr Paolo Bombelli (Department of Biochemistry)

Dr Bombelli’s research looks to utilise the photosynthetic chemistry of plants to create biophotovoltaic devices, a sustainable source of solar power. For over five years, he has been taking his research out of the lab to science festivals, schools and design fairs; tailoring his approach to a wider variety of audiences. Through his engagement, he has reached thousands of people, in multiple countries, and is currently developing an educational toolkit to further engage school students with advances in biophotovoltaic technology. Dr Bombelli’s public engagement work has also advanced his research, namely through a transition from using algae to moss in live demonstrations.

Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow (Institute of Criminology and Faculty of Law)

Dr Armstrong and Dr Ludlow have collaborated on a research project addressing the delivery of education in the prison sector. Their project, Learning Together, pioneered a new approach to prison education where the end-users, the prisoners, are directly engaged with the design, delivery and evaluation of the research intervention. Adopting this shared dialogue approach has yielded positive results in terms of prisoners’ learning outcomes and has gathered praise from prison staff and government policy makers. Through continued engagement and partnership working, Armstrong and Ludlow have managed to expand their initiative across a broad range of sites and institutional contexts.

Dr Hazel Wilkinson (Department of English)

Dr Wilkinson is investigating the history of reading and writing habits in the eighteenth century. In collaboration with Dr Will Bowers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford, she has developed an online public platform, journallists.org, which allows readers to engage with installments of periodicals, diaries, letters, and novels, on the anniversaries of the day on which they were originally published, written, or set. Her approach has allowed members of the public to actively participate in research. She has also inspired thousands of readers to engage with under-read eighteenth and nineteenth century texts, often for the very first time.

Dr Paul Coxon (Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy)

Over the last ten years Dr Coxon has endeavored to engage with audiences often overlooked by traditional public engagement channels. He has given talks in venues as varied as bingo halls, working men’s social clubs and steam fairs to showcase his passion for solar research, steering clear of the “flashes and bangs” approach often associated with Chemistry. He has also designed a Fruit Solar Cell Starter Kit, used in fifty low-income catchment schools across the UK.

Mr Ian Hosking and Mr Bill Nicholl (Department of Engineering and Faculty of Education)

Ian Hosking and Bill Nicholl are cofounders of Designing Our Tomorrow, a platform for transforming D&T education in schools. Their public engagement initiative began in 2009 and brought together research around inclusive design and creativity in education. Through production of their DOT box, Hosking and Nicholl have taken active research questions into the classroom and given students control of designing technological solutions. Engagement with teachers, students and policymakers is integral to the success of their initiative and has resulted in engineering design being included in the national curriculum and GCSE qualifications.

Researchers from across the ̽��ֱ�� have been recognised for the impact of their work on society, and engagement with research in the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards and Public Engagement with Research Awards.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow receive their award from the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Opinion: How to write a best-selling novel

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 09:33:53 +0000

So you want to write a novel? Of course you do. Everyone wants to write a novel at some stage in their lives. While you’re at it, why not make it a popular bestseller? Who wants to write an unpopular worstseller? Therefore, make it a thriller. It worked for Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth …

Every now and then I come across excellent advice for the apprentice writer. There was a fine recent article, for example, in ̽��ֱ��Big Thrill (the house magazine of International Thriller Writers) on “how to lift the saggy middle” of a story. Like baking a cake. And then there is Eden Sharp’s ̽��ֱ��Thriller Formula, her step-by-step would-be writer’s self-help manual, drawing on both classic books and movies. I felt after reading it that I really ought to be able to put theory into practice (as she does in ̽��ֱ��Breaks).

But then I thought: why not go straight to the source? Just ask a “New York Times No. 1 bestseller” writer how it’s done. So, as I have recounted here before, I knocked on Lee Child’s door in Manhattan. For the benefit of the lucky Child-virgins who have yet to read the first sentence of his first novel (“I was arrested in Eno’s Diner”), Child, born in Coventry, is the author of the globally huge Jack Reacher series, featuring an XXL ex-army MP drifter vigilante.

It is a golden rule among members of the Magic Circle that, when asked: “How did you do that?”, magicians must do no more than smile mysteriously. Child helpfully twitched aside the curtain and revealed all. Mainly because he wanted to know himself how he did it. He wasn’t quite sure. He only took up writing because he got sacked from Granada TV. Now he has completed 20 novels with another one on the way. And has a Renoir and an Andy Warhol on the wall. Windows looking out over Central Park. Grammar school boy done well.

Cigarettes and coffee

He swears by large amounts of coffee (up to 30 cups, black, per day) and cigarettes (one pack of Camels, maybe two). Supplemented by an occasional pipe (filled with marijuana). “Your main problem is going to be involuntary inhalation,” he said, as I settled down to watch him write, looking over his shoulder, perched on a psychoanalyst’s couch a couple of yards behind him.

Lee Child and Andy Martin in NYC. Jessica Lehrman, Author provided

Which was about one yard away from total insanity for both of us.

Especially given that I stuck around for about the next nine months as he wrote Make Me: from the first word (“Moving”) through to the last (“needle”), with occasional breathers. A bizarre experiment, I guess, a “howdunnit”, although Child did say he would like to do it all again, possibly on the 50th book.

Maybe I shouldn’t be giving this away for free, but, beyond all the caffeine and nicotine, I think there actually is a magic formula. For a long while I thought it could be summed up in two words: sublime confidence. “This is not the first draft”, Child said, right at the outset, striking a Reacher-like note. “It’s the only draft!”

Don’t plan, don’t map it all out in advance, be spontaneous, instinctive. Enjoy the vast emptiness of the blank page. It will fill. Child compares starting a new book to falling off a cliff. You just have to have faith that there will be a soft landing. Child calls this methodology his patented “clueless” approach.

Look Ma, I’m a writer

To be fair, not all successful writers work like this. Ian Rankin, for one (in his case I relied on conventional channels of communication rather than breaking into his house and staring at him intently for long periods) goes through three or four drafts before he is happy – and makes several pages of notes too.

Ian Rankin, creator of Inspector Rebus. Mosman Library, CC BY

And yet, with his Rebus series set in Edinburgh, Rankin has produced as many bestsellers as Child. Rebus also demonstrates that your hero does not necessarily have to be 6’5” with biceps the size of Popeye’s. And can be past retiring age too, as per the most recent Even Dogs in the Wild.

Child has a few key pointers for the would-be author: “Write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast.” And: “Ask a question you can’t answer.” Rankin also advises: “No digressions, no lengthy and flowery descriptions.” He has a style, and recurrent “tropes”, but no “system”. And Child is similarly sceptical about Elmore Leonard’s “10 rules of writing”. “‘Never use an adverb’? Never is an adverb!” And what about Leonard’s scorn for starting with the weather? “What if it really is a dark and stormy night? What am I supposed to do, lie?”

Elmore Leonard at the Peabody Awards. Peabody Awards, CC BY

Child never disses other writers. OK, almost never (there is one he wants to challenge to unarmed combat). But he is dismissive of a certain writerly attitude, a self-conscious mentality which he summarises as follows: “Hey, Ma, look – I’m writing!” And here we come close to the secret, the magic potion that if you could bottle it would be worth a fortune in book sales. Do the opposite. If you want to be a writer, the secret is: don’t be a writer. Try and forget you are writing (difficult, I know).

This is why both Child and Rankin speak with such reverence for the narrative “voice”. And why both privilege dialogue. ̽��ֱ��successful writer is a throwback to a vast, lost, oral tradition, pre-Homer. Another thing, fast-forwarding, they share in common: the default alter ego is rock star. It’s all about the vibe. Everything has to sound good when you read it aloud.

Art is theft

But if you seriously want to be a writer, think like a reader. Child explained this to me the other day in relation to his novel, Gone Tomorrow, set in New York, which is now often used to teach creative writing. “I introduce this beautiful mysterious woman. I started out thinking: I want my hero to go to bed with her. And then I thought: hold on, isn’t the reader going to be asking: ‘What if she is … bad?’” A small but crucial tweak: one letter – from bed to bad.

“So!“ you might well conclude, “isn’t this bloke like one of those con men who offer to show you how to make a fortune (for a modest outlay) and you think: ‘Well, why don’t you do it then?'” Fair comment. Which is why I am starting a novel right now about an upstart fan who tricks his way into a successful writer’s apartment and steals all his best ideas. I don’t know why, it just came to me in a flash of inspiration. Maybe that, in a word, is the core of all great art: theft.

Andy Martin in conversation with Lee Child is part of the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 14.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the "magic potion" for writing a thriller.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Opinion: ̽��ֱ��man with no plot: how I watched Lee Child write a Jack Reacher novel

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 01:00:10 +0000

Andy Martin spent much of the past year with author Lee Child as he wrote the 20th novel in his Jack Reacher series. Here he describes Child’s bold approach to writing.

Nobody really believes him when he says it. And in the end I guess it is unprovable. But I can put my hand on heart and say, having been there, and watched him at work, that Lee Child is fundamentally clueless when he starts writing. He really is. He has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. And the odd thing is he likes it that way. ̽��ֱ��question is: Why? I mean, most of us like to have some kind of idea where we are heading, roughly, a hypothesis at least to guide us, even if we are not sticking maps on the wall and suchlike. Whereas he, in contrast, embraces the feeling of just falling off a cliff into the void and relying on some kind of miraculous soft landing.

Of course he is not totally tabula rasa. Because he, and I, had a fair idea that the name Jack Reacher was going to come up somewhere in this, his 20th novel in the series.

It’s probably a defensive reflex gesture, but I sometimes like to joke that, when I had this crazy idea of writing a book about a novelist working on a story from beginning to end, I first contacted Amis/Tartt/Franzen/Houellebecq and when they were unavailable I only asked Lee Child as a desperate last resort. ̽��ֱ��reality is he was the first writer I thought of. He has always struck me as a blessed (and I don’t mean by that successful) and exemplary incarnation of what Borges called “the spirit of literature”. He is, more than anyone I can think of, a pure writer, with a degree zero style. Maybe sub-zero. He doesn’t plan. He doesn’t premeditate. He loves to be spontaneous. Which explains two things: One: that he said yes to my proposal. “I’m starting Monday”, he wrote, “so if you want to do this you’d better get over here.” And, two: that he also said: “I have no plot and no title. Nothing.”

When I got there, on September 1 of last year, to his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park, just up the street from where John Lennon once lived (and where he was shot dead by a deranged fan), all he had was sublime confidence. And a title, which he had come up with the night before: Make Me. He just liked the sound of it.

Pencilled in

It had to be September 1. It’s a ritual with him: 20 years to the day since he went out and bought the paper and a pencil with which to write his first novel, Killing Floor. (It had to be a pencil: he decided he couldn’t really afford anything better, having just been sacked from his job in television). When he sat down to write the first sentence, all he had in his head was a scene, a glimpse of a scene: a bunch of guys are burying someone, a big guy, using a backhoe (or JCB). He had no idea who they are, why they are doing this, or who the big guy is either, other than that his name is Keever.

So he wrote the following sentence: “Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.” I was looking over his shoulder, but I was about a couple of yards or so behind him, perched on a couch, so I had to peer hard at the screen. All I could make out was the “-ing”. It was enough for me. Good start I thought: participle, verb, action. I had to know more. But he didn’t know more, at this point. We discussed the first couple of pages, when they popped up out of his printer. He knew it had to be third-person. No dialogue, but he tried to capture something of the vernacular in a Flaubertian style indirect libre. And Reacher, when he gets off the train in the small town of Mother’s Rest, in the midst of “nothingness”, has no absolutely no idea what is going on.

Which was exactly how Lee Child felt. For the next few months I looked on with a degree of anxiety. Maybe he would never finish this one. ̽��ֱ��whole project looked doomed. Reacher was wandering around this small town, trying to work out mainly why it was even called Mother’s Rest. He didn’t even know that Keever was a dead man at this point. He was a fairly useless detective, because he couldn’t even figure out what the crime was, let alone solve it.

Wandering spirit

So too Lee Child. He wandered around New York, then drifted off to the West Coast, then Madrid, then Sussex, and still had no idea what the hell was going on in his book. If it was a book. Around Christmas time I spoke to him on the phone and he said: “Maybe it’ll make a good short story.” And added: “Maybe I should go back and work in television. I hear it’s improved a lot since my day.” And tossed in stray remarks like: “I guess I’m all out of gas.” He was partly winding me up of course – if he didn’t finish then neither would I. But after Phase One in his writing (what he calls “the gorgeous feeling” of the beginning) there is a Phase Two, which puts him in mind of Sisyphus and his travails. He struggles and meanders. Smokes more and drinks more black coffee, if it is possible to drink more black coffee. Puffs on the occasional joint in hope of inspiration finally striking.

Some time in January, it started to crystallise in his mind and he gave me the Big Reveal. Looking back at my notes, I see that I said to him, in a tone of mixed awe and horror: “You evil mastermind bastard.” I realised that there was a simple mistake I had been making all along. I had been mixing him up with his hero Jack Reacher. Whereas I now realised what I should have realised long before that he was also every single bad guy he had ever dreamed up. All those fiendish plots were actually his. ̽��ֱ��role of Reacher was to stop him plotting and for all I know taking over the world. Reacher keeps the author in check.

‘He stopped, so I stopped’

Then, in his phrase, it was the “marathon sprint” to the end. He got to the final page on April 10, 2015, surviving on a diet of Sugar Smacks and Alpen and toast, garnished with mucho caffeine and nicotine.

̽��ֱ��finished product: Make Me Random House

Having feared he would never get to the end, I was not sure I really wanted him to finish. Or whether I should be there to watch. It really seemed as if I was transgressing and crossing the line into some sacred place. I was bearing witness to the creative process dying. But without which the book itself could never be born. Last word: “needle”. “Moving … needle”. ̽��ֱ��whole book was there.

He stopped, so I stopped. That was the rule. I started when he started, so I had to finish when he did, or the day after anyway. No additions, no time for further reflection. It all had to be done according to the same principle he had adopted. Even before he had written the first sentence, he turned to me and said: “This is not the first draft, you know”. “Oh - what is it then?” I asked naively. “It’s the ONLY DRAFT!” he replied, with definite upper case or at least italics in his voice. He didn’t want to change anything, so neither could I.

Hence it took me several months to work out why it was that he worked in this fundamentally terrifying, angst-inducing way. Actually several explanations have occurred to me: sloth for one. He just can’t be bothered. And then there is what he says, which is that he would be “bored” if he knew what was coming next. But contained in that statement is a hint of what I think is the case and in fact is the secret of his whole writing.

Made man: Andy Martin’s meta-novel. Random House

Lee Child writes his books as if he were the reader not the writer. When he is sitting at his desk in that back room in Manhattan he is only typing. ̽��ֱ��real work takes place when he is “dreaming”, when he is being just another reader, wondering what is coming next, waiting to find out. It probably explains too why he allowed me to look over his shoulder and watch his sentences taking shape even before he knew how they would end. He feels a natural sympathy with readers because he is one.

I sometimes like to claim - with absurd grandiloquence - that my book is some kind of first in the history of mankind, sitting around watching another guy write a whole book: but in fact that would be a lie, because I had to run off from time to time so as not to curl up and die of involuntary inhalation. But the “first” that I really would like to lay claim to is this: I am the first reader of a Lee Child novel to read it slowly. I had to keep stopping because he kept stopping. Because he really had no idea what was coming next. “Why did you stop there?” I asked him one day, feeling he hadn’t really written enough for that day. “I had to stop there,” he said. “I have no idea who that guy in the Cadillac is.”

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the year he spent sitting behind author Lee Child as he wrote the latest Jack Reacher novel.

Wikimedia Commons / Mark Coggins

Lee Child at Bouchercon XLI, 2010

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Conquering a continent: how the French language circulated in Britain and medieval Europe

sjr81 — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:36:40 +0000

An important manuscript of the Lancelot-Grail, it lay forgotten and unopened for five centuries until its rediscovery in North Yorkshire and its sale in 1944. Detailing the search for the Holy Grail, it goes on public display for the first time alongside the only existing fragment of an episode from the earliest-known version of the Tristan and Isolde legend. Also on display is an early example of the kind of guide familiar to thousands of today’s holiday-makers: a French phrasebook.

A free exhibition, ̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge, looks at the enormous cultural and historic impact of the French language upon life in England, Europe, the Middle East and beyond at a time when French – like Latin before it and English today – was the global language of culture, commerce and politics.

̽��ֱ��exhibition, curated by Bill Burgwinkle and Nicola Morato, is part of a wider AHRC-funded research project looking at the question of how knowledge travelled in manuscript form through the continent and into the Eastern Mediterranean world, freely crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries at a time when France was a much smaller political entity than it is today.

Burgwinkle, Professor of Medieval French and Occitan Literature at Cambridge, said: “French may have been brought to England by the Normans in 1066 but it was already here well before then as a language of knowledge and commerce. It served as the mother tongue of every English king for almost 400 years, from William the Conqueror to Richard II, and it was still in use as a language of royalty, politics and literature until the Tudor period, when we see Henry VIII writing love letters in French to Anne Boleyn.

“Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is home to one of the world’s finest collections of medieval manuscripts of this kind. This exhibition not only gives us a chance to display the Library’s treasures, but also reminds us how the French language has enriched our cultural past and left us with a legacy that continues to be felt in 21st century Britain.

“Medieval texts like the ones we have on display became the basis of European literature. ̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition. People may not realise it, but many of the earliest and most beautiful versions of the legends of Arthur, Lancelot and the Round Table were written in French; ̽��ֱ��Moving Word is a celebration of a period sometimes unfairly written out of literary history.”

̽��ֱ��early phrasebook, a guide to French conversation for travellers, is the Manières de language (1396). Composed in Bury St Edmunds and one of four in existence, it provides a series of dialogues for those travelling in France that inform readers how to trade with merchants, haggle over prices, secure an inn for the night, stop a child crying, speak endearingly to your lover or insult them. It also has instructions for singing the ‘most gracious and amorous’ love song in the world.

Elsewhere, perhaps some of the most impressive exhibits on display are huge medieval manuscripts that acted as compendiums of knowledge. One such example is a multilingual encyclopaedia from the 1300s featuring more than fifty texts of historical, cosmographical, literary and devotional interest. A heavily decorated volume, it is unusual for its thickness, and deals with, among other subjects, the roundness of the Earth and the force of gravity – centuries before Newton defined its laws.

In contrast, the fragment of Thomas d’Angleterre’s Roman de Tristan (Tristan and Iseut) may appear small in comparison, but its size belies its importance to the Cambridge collections. Thomas’s Tristan romance is the oldest known surviving version of the tragic love story. His work formed the basis of Gottfried von Strassburg’s German Tristan romance of the 13th century, which in turn provided the chief source for Wagner’s famous opera Tristan und Isolde. ̽��ֱ��fragment on display, detailing King Marc’s discovery of his wife Iseut and nephew Tristan sleeping together in a wood, is the sole witness of this scene from Thomas’s text to survive into the present.

̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge runs from January 22 to April 17, 2014, in the Milstein Exhibition Centre, Monday–Friday 09.00–18.00, Saturday 09.00–16.30 Sunday closed. Admission free. For further information, see https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk.

Inset images: Top, detail from a multilingual compendium of knowledge (UK, first half of 14th century). Bottom, detail from the breviary of Marie de Saint-Pol, Paris 1330-1340

A 13th-century manuscript of Arthurian legend once owned by the Knights Templar is one of the star attractions of a new exhibition opening today at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition.

Bill Burgwinkle

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Image from a 14th century manuscript of the Romance of the rose, one of the best-known texts of the Middle Ages

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Death and the image: an introduction to palliative filmmaking

bjb42 — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:17:41 +0000

You don’t see her slip away, even though you are watching. A woman lies motionless in bed for 13 minutes, attended at intervals by nurses and her daughter – the artist Sophie Calle. Without these intrusions you might think you were looking at a still photograph. By the end of the film clip the woman has moved from life to death, but the point at which she dies remains invisible.

̽��ֱ��clip is part of an art installation by Calle called You Couldn’t Capture Death, which is one of the contemporary artworks explored by Professor Emma Wilson from the Department of French in her new book Love, Mortality and the Moving Image. In the book, Wilson’s research involves moving image artists who are working with the space between life and death in a variety of ways – from home movies to photographic collages.

Wilson, who is also Course Director of the ̽��ֱ��’s MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures, examines the way different artists use both moving and still images to generate works as a coping mechanism for the emotional wrench that comes with the death of loved ones – and how we use visual media to see the dead as living, helping to manage the pain of loss.

“I’m interested in artists who are using their own intimate experiences to test how far a moving image artwork can offer recall of the deceased as still responsive,” said Wilson. “Art and its creation can be used to organise experience, the editing process allowing a sense of control in the face of brute, annihilating emotions.”

“I wanted to investigate moves from family acts of mourning to more public acts – the instigation of dialogue around death through moving image displays. In the case of Calle, the installation was a space that could be entered, opening the private experience up to other views and opinions.”

Wrapping, soothing, holding

Calle’s controversial installation contained details of the last book her mother read, her last trip to the coast and the inscription she wanted on her gravestone. A sense of the active planning for death that mother and daughter went through becomes part of the artwork. In this way, aspects of these artworks could be seen as ‘palliative’, providing a framework to assist with preparation for eternal separation.

In health care terms, palliative refers to ‘end of life’ care in which treatment protocols are established and the emphasis is on well-being and dignity as an individual prepares to conclude their life. Artworks like Calle’s can be seen to feed into this ethos, regarding death as a natural process that to an extent may be planned for.

Palliative derives from the Latin word ‘palliare’, meaning ‘to cloak’. Moving image art can contribute to this ‘cloaking’ in a number of ways. Cloaking can be allied with covering, enclosing, wrapping, soothing and holding. One of the works that Wilson gives a close reading of in the book strives for this embracing of a dying loved one through moving and still images – both commemorating and ‘cloaking’ them with the camera.

In her work Jacquot de Nantes, the filmmaker Agnès Varda interposes still images of herself and her husband Jacques Demy with moving film footage she took of him during the last months of his life. They knew Demy was dying, and Varda wanted to build a collage of her husband by overlaying different forms of visual tribute.

Varda created a photographic inventory of Demy as he existed – close-ups of his hair, skin, eyes and so on – and blended it with reconstructions of Demy’s childhood and extracts from his films to create a sensory impression of the person, the idea of the palliative seen in the attention of the camera to the body and the subjectivity of the person facing death – the same type of respect and tenderness.

̽��ֱ��use of photography for direct commemoration that addresses death without flinching dates back to the 19th century, when common memorial practices included mortuary photography, the creation of daguerreotypes depicting the bodies of loved ones as if they are sleeping. For many people, the only pictorial record of their existence came when they had ceased to exist.

Hidden memory

Some argue that photography innately carries the reminder of death by ‘stilling’ a person – capturing a moment that will never be again. “There is a range of theory around this subject. ̽��ֱ��theorist Roland Barthes tells us that mortality is inherent in all photography, it creates a ‘temporal slip’ that draws attention to the emotion frozen in time,” said Wilson. “ ̽��ֱ��moving image as a medium however can present the subject as living by depicting action – so that boundaries between living and dead are, if only in illusory form, disturbed.”

Bringing the dead ‘to life’ as it were through moving images is also addressed in the book’s analysis of Alina Marazzi’s film For One More Hour With You, in which the filmmaker reconstructs a vision of her mother through home movies and family photos. Marazzi’s mother committed suicide when the filmmaker was a young child, and Wilson explores how Marazzi creates a version of her mother, and develops a relationship with a woman she barely knew through the imagery.

“Home movies have been used in acts of mourning since the earliest available cameras,” explained Wilson. “In this work, Marazzi both creates and seeks the kick of hidden memory. As this was recovered footage it gives the illusion of a fresh glance of the dead still living, allowing her to address a part of her past previously uncharted.”

“I use Marazzi’s film to examine representations of childhood memory in moving images, and how it can be a conduit for emotion, as the filmmaker is introduced through film to her mother as a child, and how this relates to memories of her mother from her own childhood.”

̽��ֱ��camera can be seen to allow access to the dead as living, or to the trauma of a loved one dying – Calle has said that having the camera in her mother’s room as she died was her way of being there in every respect that she could. But the camera can also create distance, reflecting and acknowledging the fact that death is ungraspable.

Alternative narratives

In palliative health care, thought is given to pathways and the stages that one faces. For Wilson, artists exploring this area can offer opportunities to imagine a variety of journeys through the extreme emotions involved in losing people to death.

“It’s not about finding a programmatic way of coping through art, but looking at how this kind of work can offer alternative narratives of death – by inviting people to share an example of how one person managed the loss of a loved one.”

Visually invoking and describing the dead will continue to be reinterpreted as technologies progress. Today, the images of those we’ve lost linger in the photo indexes of our smartphones and Facebook pages – testament to the power of the image, moving or otherwise, to prolong the illusion of a living presence, at the same time as it embodies the fleeting nature of all life, by trapping forever a moment never to be recaptured.

Love, Mortality and the Moving Image by Emma Wilson is available from Palgrave Macmillan.

A new book by Professor Emma Wilson from the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages looks at how death is addressed through modern artworks based in visual media.

Art and its creation can be used to organise experience, the editing process allowing a sense of control in the face of brute, annihilating emotions.

Professor Emma Wilson

Agnès Varda

Still from the film ̽��ֱ��Beaches of Agnès (2008), directed by Agnès Varda

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New York, unplugged: a day without words

lw355 — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:55:53 +0000

It was like Desert Island Discs, only without the discs, and no Bible and the works of Shakespeare either. And I was marooned on the island of Manhattan. Which made the experiment challenging or possibly insane, but I knew I had to try it anyway.

I was supposed to be doing research into the bitter philosophical duel between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (a “binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity” in Sartre’s memorable phrase). But one freezing January day I resolved to put to the test what Roland Barthes called the “degree zero” of writing. I had to set aside all books for 24 hours and relinquish entirely my tenuous hold on language. I would eschew not just books but songs, conversation, newspapers, the radio, television, any forms of communication that relied on words. I went out into the world again, on that cold, clear winter’s day, with only a hat, a scarf, and a coat: no books, no paper, no computer, no pen. It was a strange feeling, almost like walking down the middle of the street, naked, vulnerable, unarmoured, without crutches. As if I had just landed from another planet.

On any other day, how many conversations would I have had with random strangers on the subway? Today of all days they were lining up to have a chat, talking about the clothes I was wearing (“Cool jacket, man!” – on the platform at Bleecker Street), the weather, the economy, anything. There was no end to them, as if my very silence was a provocation. But I could say nothing in reply. Perhaps they even preferred it this way, as if having a one-way conversation with a dumb animal.

I wandered along the banks of the half-frozen Hudson River on the west side, then heading east into mid-town, I took the plunge into the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue, where I had an office, by way of testing my nerve. I didn’t read a single word of the billions on offer. Feeling I had resisted the ultimate temptation, I rewarded myself later with a jazz concert at the Lincoln Center, but only got as far as the door where complicated questions as to whether I would prefer the 8 or the 10 o’clock slot forced me to back off. Maybe it was better that way, there was always a risk somebody might break into song.

But in truth the siren call of words can never be silenced, only resisted. We live (as Camus said) in a “society of signs”. It was impossible to cross the street without seeing the word CROSS. Everywhere, street signs brandishing their information about parking and directions, word of bakeries, dentists, radio shacks, buns and burgers, pizzas galore, and Broadway smash-hits – flashing out, endlessly, inescapably, with or without neon. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote, there was “nothing beyond the text”, even if that now tended to suggest (in a deconstructive twist that he would surely have approved of) that everybody was fetishistically attached to their mobile phones. ̽��ֱ��next day I finally stumbled, stuttering, back into the realm of the library.

I found that experience of cognitive dissonance fruitful in addressing the rift between the symbolic and the savage in Sartre and Camus. But now, a year on, all the words that screamed out at me on my degree zero excursion seem to merge into just one – “like” – one of the most over-used words of our era, especially in New York. “He was like…” “She was like…” “I mean, like…” For some as irritating as a record stuck in a groove or a jingle you can’t get out of your head. But can we ever eradicate it?

Philosophically, it implies a degree of scepticism: everything is only approximately true, ‘like’ this or that, but never quite coinciding perfectly with the truth. But poetically speaking, there is a series of implied comparisons or similes: my love is like a red, red rose; the city lies around us (as Camus wrote) like a cloak of glittering shells; it was like Desert Island Discs. Everybody is always like something or someone, everyday discourse is shot through with alikeness, similitude, connectedness, bathed in an invisible continuum. Rub two human beings together, and comparisons fly up like sparks. Perhaps it is only fair that “to say” has now virtually been replaced by “to be like”.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that language originated in poetry. I want to bet that the first sentence uttered, probably in southern Africa, some 100,000 years or so ago, began: “Like…” Or something like that. And I fully expect my last words to be, “It’s like…” I like like.

We are addicted to language. By way of proof, Andy Martin – lecturer in the Department of French and author of books on Napoleon, Bardot and surfing – takes a vow of silence. Spending a day in New York without words, he discovers a liking for one of the most over-used expressions of the era.

It was a strange feeling, almost like walking down the middle of the street, naked, vulnerable, unarmoured, without crutches.

Dr Andy Martin

Sharon Carr

Andy in New York

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Rethinking eccentricity

bjb42 — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Since the 18th century, English culture has been associated (both by the English themselves and by continental observers) with unusual tolerance towards unconventional and peculiar individuals. Even today, eccentricity is often seen as an obligatory component of the English national character. ̽��ֱ��eccentric is typically portrayed as a harmless and amiable figure, someone who provides others with a pleasant diversion from the tedium of everyday life.

But how historically representative are these received ideas of eccentricity? This question has formed the basis of my research and the subject of my recent book, which seeks to investigate more sceptically the cultural and ideological functions of eccentricity.

My research starts from two sets of assumptions: first, that eccentricity is neither timeless nor universal; second, that it is by no means always harmless and absurd. Eccentricity is, instead, a historically relative and context-dependent term, which must be situated within the broader histories of individualism and deviance. Eccentricity often elicited violent and conflicting responses, and was associated with potentially disturbing figures such as the insane, social marginals, human ‘monsters’ and the tempestuous Romantic genius. Beliefs about eccentricity varied widely across European national traditions, and were underpinned by complex assumptions about gender and class.

I chose 19th-century Paris as the focus of the study precisely because its culture was significantly different from English culture. ̽��ֱ��modern concept of eccentricity had crystallised in 18th-century England, a culture increasingly interested in poetic and psychological originality. Pre-Revolutionary French culture, by contrast, was markedly hostile to both originality and individual difference. It asserted that elegance was timeless, upheld rigid ideals of good taste and decorum, and stressed the need for social conformism. It was precisely the initial strength of French resistance to the values of eccentricity, I suggest, which make its reception after 1830 so revealing of tensions in French cultural identity.

Ambivalent emotions

Breaking with convention aroused highly ambivalent responses in 19th-century Parisian readers, writers and spectators. Eccentricity was debated in a wide range of sources, including etiquette manuals, fashion magazines, newspapers, novels, plays, political pamphlets, and scientific and psychiatric treatises. On the one hand, the scandal of ‘standing out’ evoked the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, namely its dreams of freedom, creativity and individuality. On the other, it symbolised the deepest anxieties of this class, the threat of madness, monstrosity and sin. Eccentricity was therefore simultaneously desired and feared, incorporated into and rejected from bourgeois identity.

Why were the French so ambivalent towards eccentricity? ̽��ֱ��French Revolution in 1789 inaugurated a century of unprecedented social and political instability, generating a strong desire in the French elite to create social cohesion and order. An orderly society entailed the suppression of any challenges to social norms. At the same time, however, the influence of Romanticism led to an increasing desire for individual freedom and fulfilment, whilst the bourgeoisie had strong faith in social and intellectual progress. ̽��ֱ��latter tendencies inevitably led to many norms and traditions being called into question, and 19th-century Parisian culture was at the forefront of attempts to probe the fragile boundaries between conformism and eccentricity. Three cultural fields in which this is most evident are fashion, bohemia and science.

Followers of fashion

Eccentricity in Paris of the 1830s was linked to flamboyant new fashions and the seductions of commodity culture. ̽��ֱ��values of fashion, including novelty and bizarreness, were diametrically at odds with the traditional values of French politeness and etiquette. Eccentric styles epitomised the intoxicating dangers of modernity, and were championed by a range of unconventional figures, including male and female dandies and the aristocratic figure of the lionne or lioness. ̽��ֱ��lionne rejected the fragility and hysteria associated with respectable women, and engaged instead in energetic ‘masculine’ pursuits such as horse-riding and smoking. But increasingly, such eccentricity was linked to demi-mondaines and courtesans, who, it was feared, were corrupting the morality and health of the social elite.

Bohemian culture

After Napoleon III’s coup d’état of 1851, the social position of the writer and artist became more problematic. Eccentricity was associated with the artists, social marginals and urban poor who inhabited ‘the unknown Paris’. This murky underworld fascinated bourgeois observers as much as it horrified them. Writers and journalists documented their ambivalent responses to exhibitions of human freaks in the fairground and to the half-mad visionaries of bohemian street culture. They were uneasily aware that they too failed to conform to bourgeois norms and that some eccentrics might be unrecognised geniuses.

Scientific theory

̽��ֱ��popularisation of medical theories of national decline after 1851 led to increasing moral panic. Eccentricity was interpreted as a symptom of insanity and concealed deformity, and eccentrics were often portrayed as a dangerous social menace which psychiatrists and legislators struggled to contain. Despite this, many writers, including Gérard de Nerval, Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Vallès, championed ‘pathological’ and ‘monstrous’ forms of eccentricity. Their writing constitutes an act of symbolic resistance to a culture which defined normality, virtue and health in increasingly restrictive and unimaginative terms.

A contemporary debate

In charting the history of eccentricity, one conclusion I arrived at was that beliefs about precisely how much individuals are permitted to diverge from social norms differ considerably between cultures in response to very specific socio-historical factors. Gender appears to be central to the imagination of deviance in this period since what was deeply eccentric for women was often considered quite normal for men, and vice versa. Ultimately, the experience of ambivalence is inseparable from European modernity: eccentricity represents one compelling set of values (novelty, freedom, individuality) which clashed significantly with other, equally compelling values (stability, order, community). In many ways, this type of clash is central to debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy about the plurality of values and goods.

̽��ֱ��interdisciplinary focus of the project continues to develop, as it traces the migration of concepts and metaphors between literature, popular culture and science. Continuing to emphasise the ways in which social and psychological categories are implicitly shaped by values and norms, my research is now focusing on a cultural history of paranoia and suspicion in French modernity.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Miranda Gill (mfg24@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of French, in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.

Miranda Gill traces shifting 19th-century perceptions of eccentricity, from its association with the intoxicating lure of modernity and fashion to the murky underworld of circus freaks and half-mad visionaries.

Eccentricity is, instead, a historically relative and context-dependent term, which must be situated within the broader histories of individualism and deviance.

by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Rethinking

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