Mad dogs and Irishmen
A certain excess of Marxist verbiage in recent posts can maybe be explained by the fact that I’ve been reading Leonard Schapiro’s The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It has to be said, much as I like reading about crazy Leninist shenanigans, it’s not a very good book. Schapiro seems to be something of a neo-con avant la lettre; he has the curious combination of a classical liberal self-confidence (despair at the wilful inability of Russian socialists to realise that bourgeois democracy is the best of all possible political systems) and mildly fascist respect for Lenin’s naked power (despair at the supposed idealism of the Mensheviks and essairs). More subtly, he also exhibits the idealism of the supposed realist, describing the ideological debates of the Social Democrats before 1917 entirely in terms of Lenin’s short-term strategies, as if ideology was merely a matter of the whims of particularly devious individuals. Anyway, here is Schapiro condemned by the crazy Maoists of the PLP, and by his own words at the New York Review of Books.
Another bad book on an interesting topic is the Larousse Encyclopedia of Music (not a patch on their Gastronomique, which I used to wile away lunchtimes reading at school). I hadn’t quite figured out what was wrong with it until I read this article by Tom Paulin on Hazlitt (of course, I read the article in a bad impression of Paulin’s Ulster accent; you needn’t, but I find it impossible to do otherwise). The Larousse is exactly what Hazlitt’s style isn’t; I guess the best word to describe it would be ‘effete’. Consider this sentence, picked almost at random: “Though a lesser figure than Weckmann, Jan Adam Reinken (1623-1722), of Dutch descent, is assured of his place in the history of the German organ school if only because of the admiration for him shown by the young Bach, and admiration warmly reciprocated.� The article on Hazlitt is excellent, anyway, and opened up for me a few ways of thinking about my own, often execrable, prose.
(These two books are currently sharing the sidebar on this page with Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Empire. Never fear, I’ll have something to say about that too, shortly).
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