Showing posts with label jane austen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jane austen. Show all posts

12 Aug 2016

A Postcard from Southend-on-Sea



Southend-on-Sea, Essex, lies approximately 40 miles east of London on the north side of the Thames Estuary; a region that has produced its own virulent strain of English now spoken in many regions of this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Ingerland.  

It is home to the world's longest pleasure pier; a marvel of 19th century engineering that everyone from Princess Caroline to Arthur Daley has strolled along at some point. 

I first day-tripped to Southend with my parents in the early seventies. By then - although I didn't know it at the time - it was already in decline as a popular holiday destination. Everyone who could was jetting off to sunny Spain instead. For who wants soggy fish and chips and a mug of lukewarm tea, when you can have a big plate of paella washed down with a cheap bottle of vino

Still, I always loved my time in Southend as a child, beginning with the train ride from Romford via stations whose names had an exotic and almost magical allure - Shenfield-Billericay-Wickford-Rayleigh-Hockley-Rochford-Prittlewell - my excitement growing as I got ever closer to the coast and the thought of a fresh plate of cockles raked straight out of the mud at low tide, or an ice-cream from Rossi's.

There was no real beach to speak of and the grey sea was always out as far as I remember. But the place had a certain working-class Cockney charm (dare one say authenticity) and I had hours of fun in the amusement arcades and Peter Pan's Playground (which I preferred to the rather intimidating Kursaal full of young skinheads in their boots and braces and ageing Teddy Boys). 

What I enjoyed best of all, however, was sitting in the landscaped gardens of the Shrubbery eating a packed lunch, which always involved either a ham or cheese sandwich. There was a little stream and a waterfall, a fairy castle and a few left-over figures; remnants from its fifties heyday as Never Never Land.

Today, over forty years later, Southend is still on sea and many things have remained essentially the same; the pier, for example, still stretches a mile out to nowhere (although now you have to pay to walk along it).

But the deprivation of the town is as noticeable - and as shocking - as the tattooed obesity of the natives, or the large number of women hanging around the newly built lagoon wearing hijabs and burkinis and recreating scenes that more closely resemble Mogadishu than the lost world of Jane Austen and Donald McGill. 
      
 

23 Jun 2016

On Non-Referential Aesthetics and the Politics of Silence



Lawrence writes that, as a novelist, it's his primary task to conduct a molecular exploration of the feelings and not comment on molar politics and the great social issues of the day. Besides, other people understand these things much better than him. 

In other words, like Richard Somers, the apolitical protagonist of his novel Kangaroo, Lawrence wants to fight out something with mankind in order to make an opening into the future, but he doesn't want to become hopelessly entangled in history and great events.

Thus Lawrence comes to an understanding that - as a man of letters - his alienation from public life is something he has no choice but to actively sustain; particularly if he wishes to secure a degree of intellectual freedom and transmit in his thinking something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified within conventional political discourse.

Of course, Lawrence is not the only author to display ironic indifference (or insouciance as he calls it) to the world at large. Jane Austen is another novelist whom I admire precisely because she chose to write about the micropolitics of daily life and affairs of the heart whilst staying wonderfully silent on the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, or the massive upheaval caused by industrialization. 

Push comes to shove, I'd rather re-read Pride and Prejudice than War and Peace. And hopefully this explains why I've not written a post on the EU referendum being held in the UK today ...