The Icon ISSUE

PORTSMOUTH POINT PORTSMOUTH POINT why are we devoted to The icon issue

Why Are We Devoted to Icons? Endless Kerouac few minutes on You Charlie Albuery 3 Benjamin Schofield 36 Tube may seem all it What Exactly Were Icons? Paul Robeson takes to acquire iconic Benedict Lister 4 Ben Charles 39 status in the early twenty-first century. The Iconography of Christmas Icon or Psychopath? However, as Charlie ? Daniel Rollins 6 Charlotte Rowden 40 Albuery and Mr Lister point out, in this icon- ICONS themedA issue of Portsmouth Point, the need to Icon of Evil “Learning is not compulsory... Robert Bendell 8 Neither is survival.” idealize fellow human beings, to seek significance in their images, goes back many thousands Icon (noun) - One who is the object of great Josh Brown 42 Charlie Albuery Translating Dante’s Inferno of years. There is, of course, an equally deep- attention and devotion; an idol YEAR 11 Fay Davies 10 The Iconic Ending seated suspicion of placing such faith in images, Simon Lemieux 44 Anti-Icon: Caravaggio’s an iconoclastic tendency explored in articles Adoration of the Shepherds Iconoclash ranging from Caravaggio to The Clash. Tom McCarthy 15 John Sadden 46 Part of the power of an icon is its ability to hen most people hear the word “icon”, human and, therefore, He (or She --- I’m not a sexist) is the icon transcend time. 2012 marks the 50th and 35th they think of a famous actor, singer that we look up to. At first this may sound ludicrous but, really, Immortal Bird The Blessed Margaret anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe or athlete. The question that comes consider the definition of an icon: ‘One who is the object of great Laura Burden 18 David Doyle 48 and Elvis respectively, whose continuing iconic to my mind, however, is ‘Why?’ attention and devotion; an idol’. Does that not perfectly describe status is attested to by Stephanie Tindal and any deity? Hug This Hoodie Crick and Watson What is it that makes us, as humans, Mrs Bell. It is also the 260th anniversary of gravitate towards icons? It’s almost as However, becoming a god is rather challenging for a human. Andrew Hogg 20 Ben Goad 50 the birth of the prodigiously talented poet Winteresting a question as it is a depressing view into my mind. Therefore, we often gravitate towards human icons; for example, Hispanicons Why Is The Higgs Boson Thomas Chatterton, whose mysterious death Humans are naturally hierarchical beings, we seek to create in the medieval period, people often prayed to saints or to Mary, Fay Davies, Kathryn Godfray, So Important? at the age of 17 turned him not only into an order and structure wherever we go, and structure requires as they seemed more relatable than God. As a result, humans Owen Jones, Fraser Mackenzie, Chloe Sellwood 52 icon, but, as Mr Hogg argues, the prototype for leaders, people to look up to (i.e. icons). In the time of our earliest can end up being even more “iconic” than gods, perhaps because and Liliana Nogueira-Pache 24 self-destructive twentieth-century artists such as ancestors, when the world was a more savage place, every action they make iconic status seem achievable. With few exceptions, The Symbol of our Era writer Jack Kerouac and musician Jimi Hendrix revolved around merely surviving; the person at the top of the most people COULD become a footballer; the only reason The Mystery of Marilyn Andrew Jones 55 (both celebrated in this issue). hierarchy would be the one who people felt could protect them EVERYBODY isn’t a footballer is because it would involve a Stephanie Tindal 28 Fallen Icon? Events can be as iconic as people. It is 40 --- the biggest, strongest or best hunter of a tribe. When we moved lot of hard work and training that most people would not put in. The Audacity of Audrey Ruth Richmond 56 years since the Watergate break-in, which, to a state of civilization that enabled us to go beyond a state of On the other hand, no matter how hard I try, there is no way I Zoe Dukoff-Gordon 29 as Mr Lemieux notes, has lent a simple suffix just surviving, we were forced to adapt and create new methods can become a god; it just isn’t feasible in the way that being really A Tale of Two Finals iconic status for four decades. Next year will of scoring those who were to be chosen as our icons. good at kicking a ball is. Elvis: Icon or Iconoclast? Charles Farmer 58 be the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the The method you choose in the 21st century very much depends Our love of icons is born from our need for someone to look up Emma Bell 30 My Iconography of Fiction structure of DNA, as Mr Goad reminds us, while on who you are. Some people (typically sporty themselves) would to. The world can be a terrifying place sometimes; that is when When Guitar Gods Tim MacBain 62 Chloe Sellwood argues that the discovery of the consider an Olympian or a Premier League footballer to be the religious people turn to a god and that is when the rest of us turn Roamed the Earth Higgs boson this year may prove just as iconic. epitome of human success. Others, however (not to generalize, to human icons, which leads me to my point (we got there in the Virgil’s First Eclogue Mark Richardson 34 This issue of Portsmouth Point continues the but they tend to be annoyingly good at Maths), would consider end!). In a primarily secular, modern society have icons achieved Tom McCarthy 63 magazine’s eclectic tradition, as PGS pupils and scientists and intellectuals such as Albert Einstein or Stephen the level of adulation that people formerly devoted to religion? An Icon With Feet of Clay? staff explore the iconic status of nightingales Hawking to be homo-superior. The devotion some people show to a favourite athlete or pop Joanna Godfree 35 and X-boxes, Dante and the World Wide You may have noticed a pattern in the above paragraph, which star can certainly be described as cult-like, and there are easy Web, Mrs Thatcher and ‘Che’ Guevara, brings me to my theory on icons: what we look for in an icon is parallels to draw between the way we, as a society, treat religion Steve Jobs and W. Edwards Heming, Satan a faster, stronger or more intelligent version of our self, a person and sport, for example. We are fiercely divided by our belief (our Editorial Team (Magazine and Blog) and Portsmouth FC. That same eclecticism who is the pinnacle of the field we consider ourselves to be most religion or favourite team); many attend a football match weekly * Charlie Albuery * Robert Bendell * Tim Bustin * Isabelle Byrne * Jemima Carter is also the driving force of our blog, at suited to. You may consider this obvious (‘Of course we desire to with a similar level of adherence to tradition that some apply to * George Chapman * Nathaniel Charles * Neil Chhabda * Zach Choppen * Lucy Cole www.portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com, updated be like a better version of our self’), but, when you really think church services and both new football teams and religions are * Fay Davies * Billie Downer * Zoe Dukoff-Gordon * Nicholas Graham * Tom Harper * daily by pupils and staff with new reviews, about the implications of this, it begins to seem a lot less harmless. only ever founded by eccentric billionaires with extravagant Fergus Houghton-Connell * Andrew Jones * Lottie Kent * George Kimber-Sweatman commentary, creative writing, audio and video, Quick Quiz: Which icon do most people look up to? It’s not moustaches. * George Laver * Tim MacBain * George Neame * Thomas Penlington * Emma Ralph on every topic you can imagine. There is Thomas Edison or Wayne Rooney or any other person, alive The question is, do we really consider John Terry on Justin * Benjamin Schofield * Sampad Sengupta * Melissa Smith * Oliver Price * Isabel Stark something to come back for every day. or dead; it’s the notion of a god. The concept of a deity, an Bieber worthy of our devotion? This, readers, is why, despite * Louisa Stark * Hugh Summers * Katherine Tobin * Oliver Velasco * William Wallace omnipotent being, is the thing that more people look up to than understanding the psychological power of icons, I have an issue * Gregory Walton-Green * Ross Watkins * Ben Willcocks * Beatrice Wilkinson any other. with iconography. Blog Editor Daniel Rollins Editor James Burkinshaw The Editors Christians believe that we were moulded in God’s image, Magazine Designer Clara Feltham, The Graphic Design House December 2012 hence, paradoxically, God is essentially the template for being John Terry should not be a religion. That is all.

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 2 www.pgs.org.uk 3 temples for special festivals or to ask for help from a particular been miraculously created and to be able to protect cities from god for a special reason. Most worship was private and at home. enemy attack. More humble images were supposed to act as The rise of Christianity in the fourth century AD appeared to an intermediary between the worshipper and the holy person end all that. The temples were destroyed and the statues of the depicted on them. Visions and conversations with the saints Olympian gods smashed or defaced, apart from a few kept in the depicted might take place through these images and advice and private collections of the rich. Now that there was only one god reassurance might be given. what to protect everyone equally whatever their rank and wealth, there Some Christians, however, were concerned that worshippers was no place for household gods and the thousands of minor were crossing the boundary from worshipping a saint or the exactly were gods that watched over every region of the countryside. divine Christ to worshipping the icon itself. This was strictly However, the abandonment of the gods seems to have left an forbidden according to the commandments given to Moses in the emotional or spiritual void. The ancient images were tangible Old Testament. and needed to be replaced by something equally tangible. It is ‘Thou shalt make no graven images nor shalt thou worship them.’ therefore most probable – and to tell the truth there is no concrete With the rise of Islam in the seventh century AD and its evidence for this – that images of Christ, Mary his mother, or rapid spread towards Byzantium, this infatuation with icons the saints were a direct replacement for the household gods. was thrown into greater relief. In Islamic tradition no images of ICONS? In the same way, statues of the gods that were honoured by God were allowed. Could the success of Islamic forces reflect travellers at roadside shrines were replaced by Christian shrines. God’s displeasure with this Christian form of worship? Matters Mr Benedict Lister St. Christopher is, therefore, the Christian equivalent of the god came to a head in the eight century AD, when there was a mass HEAD OF MODERN Hermes, protector of travellers. A priest tells of a man who had destruction of icons throughout the Byzantine world. Those LANGUAGES AND CLASSICS commissioned a wooden icon of St. Michael the Archangel: defending the right to venerate icons were exiled and some ‘When he felt he was about to die, he took his even killed. This new movement became wife’s hand and put it upon the hand of the archangel known as ‘iconoclasm’ and its proponents Icon is a Greek word, ‘eikon’, meaning simply saying: ‘O Archangel Michael...behold, in thy hands, A cherished as ‘iconoclasts’. However, a few years later, a ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ – a portrait or depiction of I place my wife Euphemia, as a deposit, so that thou image can change of leadership and a change in popular something. By definition, therefore, an ‘icon’ mayst watch over her.’ And, after his death, Euphemia mood brought back the use of icons once cannot be abstract, a mere attractive pattern or continued offering the icon incense, keeping a lamp lit take on a again. For a century, the dispute swung one design. It has to represent something from the before it at all times, and, venerating it three times a transcendent, way and then the other with much loss of life material world in recognizable form. day, she begged the saint to help her and protect her until finally icons were fully re-established as from the devil.’ 1 living quality. part of Christian worship in the east, where The faces of these Christian images also they have remained a central part of what we seem to have been influenced by ancient models. The Egyptian now call Eastern Orthodox worship. n the Classical world, images were always important. The gods were goddess, Isis, widely worshipped throughout the Roman empire, It remains only to understand how the word ‘icon’ as it is used represented in human form in statues of wood, metal or stone. These provided a model for the Mother of Christ and those of Zeus and today relates to the Christian images. In the first place, icons statues were deeply revered in their own right. Legends of statues coming Serapis, one of the most popular gods worshipped in the East in were easily recognizable. Icons of particular saints are shown to life to issue warnings or dripping blood as a signal of impending disaster the period just before Christianity became the official religion of with particular physical features or carrying particular objects are testimony to their quasi-magical properties. To desecrate or deface a the Roman Empire, provided the models for Christ himself. which make it evident who they are. In the same way, we use the statue was a terrible crime. In its simplest form an icon, as it became known, was a religious term ‘iconic’ for an image that is readily identifiable and widely IThis may sound a little ludicrous but it should not be forgotten that, even in our image painted on a thin pieces of wood using a technique called understood. relatively godless society, a cherished image can take on a transcendent, living quality. ‘encaustic’ by which wax was heated, coloured and then applied Secondly, the icon has significant influence or symbolic value. From the poster of the pop-idol on a bedroom wall to the portrait of Her Majesty to the wooden surface. This technique had been used throughout The saints were worshipped through their images. They were on a tea-pot on the mantelpiece, the image seems to gain something of the aura of the ancient world for many centuries before Christianity, but thought to have the power to change lives. In the same way, an the person it is depicting. If the poster was torn down or the royal pot smashed to most of the wood has since decayed or rotted. The best surviving iconic image today has a central importance – it is often imitated pieces, more would be lost to the devoted fan or the staunch loyalist than the paper pre-Christian examples are from Egypt, where the dry conditions or parodied in a thousand different ways – and it is generally seen or pottery value of the item. have allowed for their preservation. Most noticeable in these to typify a particular moment in the cultural history of our species. The quasi-religious power of the image was well understood by rulers of ancient portraits are the large eyes that appear to look directly at the The philosopher Plato in the 5th Century BC said that all empires from the Egyptians onwards, none more so than the first emperor of Rome, viewer and the individuality of the portraiture. The parallels with physical impressions upon the mind are imperfect ‘icons’ or Augustus Caesar, who was a master of propaganda. As he attempted to establish his icon images are striking. images of a more perfect and permanent reality than we can authority after fifty years of civil war, images of him were distributed throughout These wooden panels were copied in other materials such as perceive. Paradoxically, two and a half thousand years later, the the empire not only on coins but by means of impressive statues set up in important metal, mosaics or enamel; they were framed and dressed in silver icon has become itself a symbolic reflection of the reality in which public places. His successors created temples in his honour and soon imperial worship coves with gems; silk veils were hung in front of them to protect we live, more permanent and more grounded than the transitory became a normal part of public life. Citizens of Rome were expected to worship the painted surface. This art form is particularly associated with moment. The icon seems to embody the wider truth of a social images of the emperors by offering incense or lighting a lamp, as a sign of their Byzantium, the Eastern capital of the Roman Empire, which phenomenon in an almost transcendent way. It only goes to show acknowledgment of imperial authority. flourished long after the fall of Rome and remained a powerful that words are slippery creatures! Apart from these grand public images, families would have tiny images of their own city right through the Middle Ages. The reason for this is simple. personal household gods (‘lares’), to which they would give offerings every day In the West, barbarian invasions brought a break in tradition and 1 From a sermon of Eustathios of Thrace, probably seventh century for the protection of their family and property. We know little about these private only a gradual assimilation of old and new cultures. In the East, ceremonies because they were largely taken for granted and therefore no-one thought there was continuity; the new celebration of Christ developed Recommended Further Reading to write about them, but they were clearly the most important religious act of most inevitably out of long-valued cultural traditions. An icon was Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire ordinary peoples’ lives. It is often forgotten that Greeks and Romans only went to more than just an image however. Some were believed to have (Penguin 2007 -- ISBN 978-0-141-03102-6) Byzantine image of the angel Gabriel

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 4 www.pgs.org.uk 5 the ICONOGRAPHY of Christmas Daniel Rollins As this is the Christmas Issue of Portsmouth Point, It would be incomplete without some mention of the icon YEAR 12 whose birthday the festival marks, Jesus Christ.

e has influenced both religious and Jesus being born into a dirty manger can also represent his secular culture since his birth over 2,000 step down from glory in heaven with his Father into the sinful, years ago. Even in our increasingly material world that he came to save, therefore showing us what secular society, many children still know he sacrificed in order to give mankind hope of salvation. This is and perform the story of his birth in one of the most beautiful parts of the story as it shows Jesus’ love school nativity plays. Little girls long for humanity in coming into a world where many people hated Hto be chosen to play Mary and boys usually want to either and eventually killed him. be God-honouring Joseph or wicked King Herod. The other children end up as innkeepers, wise men, angels, shepherds or Shepherds and Wise Men sheep. The iconography of the birth of Jesus is almost as well- No school nativity play would be complete without a crying known as the icon of his death, the Cross. So let us examine a shepherd or a wise man tripping over their robe, but why few of these icons. exactly did these two very different groups come to see Jesus? The first to come were the shepherds, who were traditionally Location, Location, Location seen as irreligious as their job kept them away from religious Luke’s gospel tells us that, while Mary was pregnant, there was activity; however, they were the first to hear about Jesus’ birth: a census requiring Mary and Joseph to go to his home town, “the angel said to them, “…I bring you good news of great joy Bethlehem, to be registered. While there, Mary gave birth to that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in her first son, whom she called Jesus (Luke 2:1-7). So why did the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” Jesus’ birth Joseph have to go to Bethlehem and why was Jesus born there? wasn’t just for the righteous, “holy” people but for the poor, Biblically, there are two main reasons, first that Joseph was a irreligious and outcast, something that many churches today descendant of the greatest King of Israel, David, who came from seem to have forgotten or ignored. Bethlehem, which made Jesus a descendant of David; therefore, The second recorded visit to see Jesus was by the wise men, he could become King of Israel under Jewish law, essential to his which may have been some months or years later. The wise role as Messiah within Jewish tradition. The other reason that men (they probably weren’t kings and there is no mention of Jesus was born in Bethlehem was to fulfil the Old Testament there being just three) could not have been more different from prophesy in Micah 5:2: the shepherds; they are rich and powerful, as evidenced by the “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, gifts that they have brought --- gold, frankincense and myrrh. who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, However, they thought that seeing a baby in a manger was from you shall come forth for me important enough to merit travelling many miles over desert. one who is to be ruler in Israel...” Jesus’ birth was also for those who, in the eyes of the world, are Therefore by saying that Jesus was born in Bethlehem the gospel powerful, wealthy or educated, but must still humble themselves writers begin to create a picture of who Jesus is: the successor before Jesus. to David, the great King for whom the Jews had been waiting. So what does the story tell us about Jesus? Away in a Manger The images in the story of the nativity, though they have One of the most iconic images of Jesus has to be the manger, the become iconic themselves, point us towards a greater icon, focal point of many carols, nativity sets and plays. The image the figure who Christians believe is the Son of God. Jesus, of Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men and the shepherds all huddling who was the promised descendant of David, the “King of the around the Christ Child in the manger is very well known, but Jews”, who humbled himself, lived in poverty and came to be why did God send “his only Son” (John 3:16) to be born in a servant for all, yet is still worthy of adoration by the rich an animal’s trough? This also has a biblical reason pointing to and powerful. As you think about what Christmas means and the nature and mission of Jesus; by being born into humble why it is celebrated this month, remember the iconic images surroundings Jesus is presented as someone who came “not to of the nativity that all point to the greatest icon --- someone be served but to serve” (Matthew 20:28), living among ordinary who turned the world upside down, showed the world how people not living in a luxurious palace where you would expect to love selflessly and, around thirty years after his birth, died Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child, XV Century to find a king. for it. Jesus.

Portsmouth Point www.pgs.org.uk 7 Although, like Darius, Alexander did not force those within his rather than just someone who makes life unpleasant for people. empire to submit to his religion, many people began to adopt This image of the Devil became popular with ordinary people, the ideas of his religion regardless. Again, the figure of Satan not just bishops. It was a tempting theory; there were few better was affected, gaining many characteristics associated with the ways of explaining away sinful behaviour than by claiming that Greek Hades --- a decider of punishment in the underworld, a cosmic power was trying to persuade one to do it. However, it yet equipped with a fundamental sense of justice; once a deal was thought unlikely that the Devil himself would take an interest is made, he will not break it. Satan also derived certain physical in every mortal; for this reason, succubi and incubi were invented features from Hades --- carrying a two-pronged fork and sitting on --- tempting demons who did their best to serve their master by a throne of judgement, while swathed in darkness. bringing mortals into sin. They gradually developed until they However, Hades was not the only product of Greek culture were Satan’s helpers in all areas, mirroring the hierarchy of God that passed on parts of himself to Satan. The greatest monster and his angels. in Greek mythology, Typhon, was most famous for the battle in However, still more dangerous than heretical Christians at this icon which he came close to defeating Zeus, king of the gods. However, time were pagans, who continued to believe in many nature gods, of ultimately, Zeus cast Typhon down to Tartarus, the lowest part of of which the most powerful was Pan, god of liberation, music, the underworld. This narrative was adapted by Jewish writers nature, and joy. However, he caused problems for the Christian (and, later, Christians) who described Satan as an angel who, movement; his followers were unwilling to convert from a cult having led a rebellion against God in Heaven, is defeated and of joyful decadence to a religion of quiet piety. For this reason, cast into Hell. Satan also gained an association with snakes and Saint Augustine-one of the most important Christian theologians, dragons from the figure of Typhon. decided to demonise Pan (so to speak). He claimed that Pan was However, the image of Hell itself as a place of fire and damnation the devil taking another form. For this reason the image of the was still to come. In Greek mythology, the Underworld could Devil has became associated with the half-goat, half-human satyr, be a place of joy as well as punishment. The association of Hell Pan, which is why the Devil is often shown with cloven hooves with fire in late Jewish and early Christian tradition came from a and horns. valley outside Jerusalem named Gehenna, used for waste disposal It was only in the eighteenth century that the more scientific (which often involved the burning of rubbish). It was also a place Enlightenment era encouraged people to consider the image EVIL Satan as a Romantic figure (painting by Gustave Dore) traditionally associated with child sacrifice (although no historical of the Devil critically. This greatly reduced his importance in evidence of this has ever been discovered). In scripture, this theology and also in folk tradition. One particularly notable story nightmarish place became identified with the image of Hell with dating from the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century is that he first recorded appearance of Satan is in the which we are so familiar today. of Dunston the blacksmith. The Devil enters the workshop of Satan is the ‘book of Job’, a section of the Bible in which In 313 AD, the Roman Emperor, Constantine, converted Dunston and demands that he makes him a new pair of shoes Robert Bendell ultimate villain. He Satan has a bet with God that he will be to Christianity, which meant that, for the first time, the most for his hooves. Dunston responds by taking his red-hot tongs and YEAR 12 has, for thousands able to force Job to turn against Him. Satan powerful man in the world was a Christian and, suddenly, the using them to grip the Devil by the nose, throwing him out of of years, been used tortures Job in many ways, but Job refuses Christian Church had serious political power. The leaders of the his workshop. This turning of the Devil into a figure of comedy to represent all to renounce God and so Satan loses the bet. church, the bishops, were competing to control those within the easily dealt with shows the extent to which his hold on the popular that is evil in the TThis representation of Satan is almost entirely different from our church who did not agree with them, and realised that the Devil imagination is reduced by this point in history. universe. However, modern image of him --- he is not a devil, or even a particularly could be a very useful figure. Accusing those who opposed the However, another interesting change in attitudes to Satan was in the process, he bad angel. At this point, it is even possible that ‘Satan’ is merely bishops of being in league with the Devil was a sure-fire way of developing in the eighteenth century. A revolution was coming. has changed beyond a title passed to whichever angel was responsible for fulfilling the making them seem not just misguided but evil. For this reason, the The overthrowing of the royal family in France, in 1789, had forced all recognition. job of accusing mortals of committing sins --- rather like an angelic Devil became presented as a tempting, insidious figure who would people to rethink the ‘divine right to rule’. What if God Himself Almost everything prosecutor. Furthermore, ‘Hell’ (or ‘Sheol’) bore little relation to whisper dark words in one’s ear to try and win a soul. 450 AD could be seen as a tyrant? Would that not make the rebellious we think of with our modern image of a fiery furnace reserved for the wicked. brought the first executions of people for being in league with the Devil a hero, like the Revolutionaries? This is most obvious in regard to ‘Satan’ Sheol was the underworld destination for all people when they Devil. This brought in the idea of the Devil as an active tempter, the reaction of the writer William Blake to John Milton’s epic has nothing to do died, whether they had been good or bad; it was not pleasant, but poem ‘Paradise Lost’. Milton had written his epic poem, in 1667, with the Bible and nor was it torturous. to ‘justify the ways of God to man’; his intention was to present everything to do The first sign of a Devil recognisable to us came from Satan as the villain of the piece. However, over 100 years later, with the history Zoroaster (a Persian priest some time before the sixth century Blake wrote that Milton was ‘of the devil’s party without knowing of Christianity. BC), who describes Ahriman, the representative of all that is evil it’, in other words that he had unintentionally created Satan as a in Zoroastrian philosophy, which divides the world very simply rebel hero against a tyrannical God. Blake himself drew Satan as a into good and evil, light and dark. This was the first recorded Romantic hero, handsome and noble in appearance in contrast to use of such a basic premise in a religion. However, it was some the goat-hooved fiend of tradition. time before this was adopted by Judaism. This process began Today, Satan remains retains all of these contradictory elements, when Darius the Great, the Persian Emperor, helped popularise in cultural tradition. He is handsome and ugly, foolish and devious, Zoroastrianism within the empire (although he allowed other powerful and rebellious, terrifying and humorous. Possibly the religious traditions to continue). As part of the Persian empire, most powerful thing about Satan is that very changeability. He can Israel felt the influence; as a result the Jewish figure of Satan become any age’s villain (or, occasionally, hero). Above all, he can began to adopt many of the features of the Zoroastrian Ahriman. be blamed for our own fears and desires. He is every irrational Powerful as the Persian Empire was, it was eventually superseded fear we have, and the best way to deal with any irrational fear is to by one of the greatest forces ever to cross the Earth: the empire of confront it. In the words of Sartre: ‘Fear? If I have gained anything Alexander the Great, who brought his Greek religion with him. Mosaic of the Greek god Pan (c. 150 CE) by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.’

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 8 www.pgs.org.uk 9 translating dante's inferno

translating DANTE's INFERNo Fay Davies YEAR 13

One might think of language as a system of signs understood by humans to refer to certain concepts in the mind. Its purpose is communication – rendering thoughts into spoken or written words so that they may be received by other people.

Virgil guides Dante through the Inferno (painting by Eugene Delacroix)

his is only one definition of many, but however work, but only perhaps provide us an insight into the original. 1994. The Divine Comedy has been translated into English by at A noticeable difference between the two versions is Sayers's use it may be viewed, one aspect of language is Of the variety of literary forms, poetry is perhaps the most least thirteen notable translators since 1805, and each translation of the ancient 'thee and thou', marking her work with the echoes clear: it is far from precise. No word has an difficult to translate. To the existing problems of translation, is wildly different – demonstrating the unavoidable imprecision of ancient speech. absolute, indisputable meaning, and every poetry adds the constraints of rhythm, rhyme, tone and form. In of the art. Finally, I will address the theoretical concerns at the heart of individual's interpretation is unique. his introduction to Ezra Pound, Translations, Hugh Kenner writes 'If I will also be exploring evidence of their different intentions, translation. The sacrificial notion, evident in Kenner's words, is There is more than one language in the he doesn't translate the words, the translator remains faithful to the facilitated by the introductions in which both translators state a common one: we see translations in terms of what has been Tworld: more than one system of arbitrary signs which refer to original poet's sequences of images, to his rhythms, or the effect their intended style. Ellis, for example, starts by asserting lost, what cannot be brought over to the new language. However, our perception of reality. These can be learnt and understood, produced by his rhythms and to his tone' . The very mention of that his translation is 'a colloquial version' , and that 'it tries to perhaps it may be possible to change such a perception: to see the and of course translated. But the process of translation is not some kind of choice suggests a difficulty. The translator, it seems, recapture some of the vigour and directness of Dante's original'. art in a more positive light. the same as the act of mere understanding. There is never a can choose not to translate 'the words'. He must 'remain faithful' Importantly, 'vigour' and 'directness' are abstract qualities, and Starting the analysis is an example that demonstrates the idea corresponding word in one language for every word in another, to either the images, or the rhymes, or the tone. He must sacrifice there is no absolute means of reproducing them. The kind of of sacrifice, as Kenner notes. In Canto XVIII, line 51, Dante uses and languages have different structures: grammars. The process certain elements in favour of what he thinks is most important language that incited vigour in Dante's era and in Dante's culture a pun, 'ma che ti mena a si pungenti salse?' He is inquiring as of translation inevitably becomes an act of rewriting, as translator and most representative of the original work, and this is subject to is certainly not the same as today. Sayers, the second translator, to the reasons that his companion found himself in hell, and a must read and interpret a phrase, then render the thought in individual interpretation. claims that 'the vocabulary and the sentence-rhythms of verse are fairly literal translation would be 'But what brings you into such another language. Adding another stage into the imprecise To help illustrate the subtle, elusive and sometimes ineffable not, and never can be, exactly the same as those of contemporary a biting pickle?' Salse, the word for pickle or sauce, is also the process of communication, the translator creates a new piece, difficulties that translation of poetry presents, I will be comparing prose'. Thus, although she writes that she has 'considered the name of a ravine near Bologna where they threw the bodies of and it will always be a distortion of the original. If the subject of two translations of Dante Alighieri's 'Inferno', Book One of The whole range of intelligible English speech', she is of the opinion criminals, and herein lies the pun. This line is problematic for this translation is literature, it cannot hope to replace the author's Divine Comedy: that of Dorothy Sayers, 1949, and Steve Ellis, that her diction must be altered to match the demands of verse. two reasons: historical and linguistic. The first is that modern

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 10 www.pgs.org.uk 11 readers are unlikely to know of such a ravine: regardless of the The humour lies in the fact that the narrator represents Dante parenthesis. This gives his version a greater sense of control than and 'breech', and adding grace with the alliteration. Interestingly, need for translation, the detail may not be understood. This is himself, therefore passages such as this are ironic and self- that of Sayers. Yet, he still portrays disarray with the verb 'found', Dante's version places 'trombetta' at the end of the line. This something that may be a problem with any text, as they all tend to deprecating. In her translation, Sayers increases the sense of as that he 'found' his voice wouldn't come is similar to Sayers's word, which is the key to the metaphor and the humour, fall last, presuppose a certain amount of knowledge on the reader's part. insult with her use of metaphor and words that are particularly use of 'somehow'. It implies a confusion, a lack of control over ending Canto XXI. As shown by the reasonably literal translation Yet, the older the text and the further it is from the culture and offensive. What translates fairly literally as 'it looks elsewhere' his faculties. above, English would also allow this to be the case, yet Ellis and society of the reader, the more likely it is to contain allusions that becomes 'woolgathering miles away'. 'Why does the mind wander The way Dante writes this section, the syntax is also unbroken Sayers choose to change the line. It may seem that the change has are not understood. so' is replaced with the accusation 'so dull'. Sayers's Virgil is, in but the speech comes last: occurred for no plausible reason, bringing us back to the previous The second reason that this line poses difficulties is more crucial this instance, more emphatically insulting and disrespectful than I' m'assettai in su quelle spallacce: example in which both Ellis and Sayers inexplicably change the to the nature of translation: the English translation of 'salse', Dante's. As a result, she amplifies the sense of self-deprecation si volli dir, ma la voce non venne word order. This change, too, is unexplained; but it is vital to whatever it may be, is not 'salse'. The pun no longer exists. Sayers and, arguably, the humour of the section. com' io credetti: 'Fa che tu m'abbracce.' keep in mind that the process of translation involves not only the and Ellis overcome this problem in two different ways. Sayers Ellis, however, does not supplement Dante's words with The revelation of his failure to speak is the first thing Dante constraints of language, but also the constraints of the new poem writes, as a translation of this line, 'What wormwood pickled such metaphor: notes. Arguably, it comes as less of a surprise than in Ellis's or which is in creation. It is a separate entity from the original text, a rod?' Her translation retains the pun element. She could never He says, 'Why do your wits wander Sayers's versions, as no intended speech has been recorded before and needs to cohere and work as a whole. Thus, lines may be use the same pun as Dante, but she creates one that her readers out of their normal way so much? we learn of his failure to say it. The phrase 'ma la voce non venne / written in ways that differ from the original simply because they are more likely to understand. In a way she ignores Dante's or what's your mind got hold of?' com' io credetti' ('but did not come as I thought') is parenthesised; fit in better with what has come before them. In this case, both words; she does not give a literal translation but seeks to create a Arguably, to say 'what's your mind got hold of' excuses the writing it as the less dominant clause of the sentence Dante unveils translators at least allow the line to retain some kind of comic similar device of her own. While 'pickled' may have been inspired matter as absent-mindedness or anxiety; there is nothing of the a shame over his fright. impact, whether through pure vulgarity or playful alliterative by 'salse', it occupies a completely different role in this sentence as ridicule of 'dull' or 'woolgathering'. The humour is not completely The mere position of the revelation, whether it is first, last or frivolity. it has become a verb where it was originally lost, as it is inherent in the very notion of central, subtly affects the humour that is created. It is impossible Another instance where Sayers and Ellis diverge in their level a noun. No matter, her translation does have Dante putting himself down; yet it would to judge exactly why each version is comic, and which is more of vulgarity is lines 58-60 of Canto XI. Listing the occupants of a roughly the same meaning: the narrator There is seem less explicitly comical than Sayers's comical than the others, because it depends on individual particular circle of Hell, Ellis writes: asks this occupant of Hell how he came to version. Despite her observations that interpretation. It is also difficult to know exactly why Ellis and of hypocrisy, flattery, enchantment, be there. And, as she preserves the use of a more than one humour tends not to be a result of the 'words Sayers chose the order that they did: perhaps it was to convey the counterfeiting, thieving, simonists, pun, she in turn preserves the humour and language in themselves', it appears that Sayers intends exact feeling they interpreted from Dante; perhaps it was because pimps, swindlers, crap like this. playfulness of Dante's line. the world: to accentuate the humour by these means, it best accommodated their chosen rhythm. In any case, the The last small phrase is, again, incongruous. The modern, Ellis, on the other hand, does not preserve particularly by the use of 'woolgathering'. translators have not produced a faithful representation of Dante's colloquial term is common to the English language of today but the pun, writing 'Why is your sauce here more than one Interestingly, Ellis's unembellished version lines. They have changed his structure for reasons external to at odds with more archaic religious words such as 'simonists'. so spicey?' Ellis has provided a reasonably system of is closer to the kind of subtle irony that she the direct demands of translation, something that may seem Perhaps this is Ellis's attempt at mixing the epic and the comic. literal translation of Dante's line, allowing arbitrary signs describes. unexpected when the purpose of translation is to provide as best Unsurprisingly, Sayers puts it more gently: the pun to be sacrificed and not providing Occasionally, word order alone can an insight as possible into the author's original work. Hypocrites, flatterers, dealers in sorcery, another. The relative simplicity of this line is which refer to mean that different shades of humour are Each of the examples so far demonstrate Dante's tendency to Panders and cheats, and all such filthy stuff, typical of Ellis's colloquial style. Of course, our perception produced. In Canto XVII, lines 91-93 there mix styles, particularly that of epic and comic. This mixture of With theft, and simony and barratry. it is not without its own merits: the playful is another instance of self-deprecation, this styles is no more apparent than in Dante's occasional scatological 'All such filthy stuff', if only because of its higher syllabic count, alliteration of 'sauce' and 'spicey' has, like of reality. time more subtle; as he boards the shoulders humour: his crudity. Of the two translators it is Ellis who most is decidedly less dismissive than 'crap like this'. This impression Dante's original line and Sayers's pun, a of a demon, Dante acknowledges his fear exaggerates this, and indeed his colloquial style can more aptly is reinforced by the way that the list subsequently continues, comical effect. Significantly, while one translator brings over the and futility. As Sayers translates: accommodate it. Sayers tends to soften this aspect. Her relative seeming longer, and the more complex, mixed and broken syntax pun to their version and one doesn't, both bring over the humour So I climbed to those dread shoulders obediently; hesitancy to use vulgar terms could be due to a desire to echo a contributes to a more dignified tone. The tone and the words are of the line. Perhaps this is most important: for the translators to “Only do” (I meant to say, but my voice somehow sense of the medieval, meaning that she chose to write in tune with more similar to Dante's original, although, like Ellis, he writes 'e attempt to reproduce the same feeling in the reader that they think Wouldn't come out right) “please catch hold of me.” contemporary perceptions of the era or of epic poetry. This would simile lordura', translated possibly as 'and the like filth', at the a reader of the original would have felt. Incidentally, what they In these lines, there is a revelation: that Dante was unable include use of high diction, archaisms and a sense of prudery as end. Turning 'and the like filth' into 'crap like this', Ellis takes believe a reader may have felt is most likely what they themselves to say what he intended. Sayers conveys this revelation in opposed to crudity. One instance of this crudity can be found the dismissive remark to an extreme, undermining all that went felt upon reading. Thus, subjective interpretation plays a large parentheses; the syntax is broken, stuttering, anxious. In this in the final line of Canto XXI, as the leader of a group of devils before it. part in the process of translation. translation, the character Dante makes no attempt to hide replies in an obscene fashion to the salutes of his minions. 'Ed Alliteration forms a particular problem when translating Humour is something that both translators are careful to disorder; it is immediate, honest, and not at all dignified. The elli avea del cul fatto trombetta', Dante writes, translating fairly poetry; not only does the translator have to preserve the sense preserve, but it is a complex topic. Sayers notes this, writing in confused uncertainty of 'somehow' adds to the pitiful humour; literally as 'and he made his rear into a trumpet'. Ellis takes no and tone of the line, but they are also restricted by a necessity to her introduction that '[humour], of all qualities, has been the he has no control and no answers. The phrase in parenthesis pains to be polite, writing: repeat first letters. In the 'Last Judgement' sections, Sayers shows most hopelessly obscured by his translators and critics'. Humour uses more colloquial diction than is normal in this translation; the but first, each blew a raspberry her command of such techniques as, to use her own phrase, she is problematic because it is produced by a network of words, abbreviation 'wouldn't' and the simplistic 'come out right' seem at their leader, for a salute, 'reproduces Dante's complete alliterative scheme'. One such cultural expectations and the subversion of these. Often, the curiously modern. Sayers in fact writes in her introduction that and he trumpets back with his arse. section is in Canto VI line 95 onwards: causes behind it are elusive and a result of multiple strands. Sayers she favours a modern phrase 'if the passage was humorous or While his translation may be intentionally colloquial, this last “Till the last loud angelic trumpet's sounding sums this up, describing Dante's particular humour as 'something conversational', revealing her intention to produce changes of line is incongruously vulgar. Next to the harmless and childlike For when the Enemy Power shall come arrayed more like a faintly ironic inflection in the voice than anything tone when she deems it appropriate. act of blowing a raspberry, the word 'arse' comes as somewhat of Each soul shall seek its own grave's mournful mounding, humorous in the words themselves'. An example of this 'ironic Ellis phrases these lines differently: a shock. The final line is noticeably more playfully rhythmic than Put on once more its earthly flesh and feature inflection' and the way it has been preserved by the translators I perched on those vast shoulders: what came before it, as if proudly announcing its inelegance. It is And hear the Doom eternally redounding.” is Canto XI, lines 76-78, where Dante's guide Virgil reprimands I wanted to say, 'Hold me tight,' the incongruity, then, which creates the humour of this section, Here, Virgil is telling Dante what the condition of the spirits him for the stupidity of his questions. Sayers translates it as: but found my voice wouldn't come. rather than the act or the language in isolation. Sayers, in contrast, will be after the Last Judgement, and Dante widens out from “What error has seduced thy reason, pray?” The revelation comes last, and the irony comes from writing masks the vulgarity of this last line: 'He promptly made a bugle his personal tale to take on a biblical, authoritative tone. Sayers Said he, “thou art not wont to be so dull; what he intended to say and later revealing his inability to say of his breech'. She does not make the line stand out, linking it to manages to retain the alliteration, and, while she arguably sacrifices Or are thy wits woolgathering miles away?” it. Crucially, Ellis's syntax is less cluttered, and unbroken by the rest of the section with rhyme, using the dated terms 'bugle' the meaning of certain words, their proximity to the originals

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translating DANTE's INFERNo

is sufficient. For example, 'mounding' was originally 'tomba', he uses primarily the 'language of the 90s', and it would appear more accurately translated as 'tomb' but still an adequate that he reproduces not simply the language of the current era, anti-icon: representation. 'Doom eternally redounding' is perhaps more but also the mindset. accurately translated as 'that which echoes in eternity'. Yet any Throughout the comparison, the problems of translation have sacrifice she has made is worthwhile because the epic subject is manifested themselves in the issue of the pun, in the challenge suited to the alliteration and its rhetorical poetic effect. It keeps of reproducing humour and a mix of the epic and comic, in the a pulse through this section, creating a mounting movement necessity to write a piece that is good in its own right, staying spurred on too by the rhyme. However, Ellis does not attempt faithful to one's own style as well as to the original. The last Caravaggio to reproduce Dante's alliteration except where literal translation point is perhaps the most interesting one, and, although cited as facilitates it: a 'problem', perhaps it is something that should be celebrated. Adoration of the Shepherds “till the angels sound their horns The style established by each translator may be developed and the enemy chief comes here: unconsciously, but as noted, they seem to start with some kind each will repossess his flesh and figure, of agenda. Ellis claims that he wishes to 'recapture some of the hear what booms through eternity.” vigour'; Sayers writes of her decision to use archaic forms of The Italian Renaissance has given us its familiar icon of the Tom McCarthy It is possible that his decision not to reproduce the alliterative English. So, while the task of translation is of course imprecise, it Nativity. Mary and Joseph kneel in radiant light before the scheme stemmed from the difficulty of the task, but the choice also gives freedom. It implies not just sacrifice, but also potential: Christ Child. Shepherds approach bearing gifts, a lamb, may indeed have been deliberate. The solemnly lyrical effect potential for reinvention, which Sayers and Ellis both take a dove, a basket of eggs. Above the stable, in a blaze of of the alliteration in Sayers's version, the sense of gravity and advantage of. Translations are overshadowed by the presence supernatural light, angels dance and sing. From Hugo van tension that it produces, is arguably unsuited to the poem that of the original, a kind of holy grail that we wish to access but der Goes, whose Adoration caused a sensation when it arrived Ellis writes. In his translation of this section, it appears that can only do so imperfectly. This is perhaps even more emphatic in Florence in 1485, to Ghirlandaio (1487), to Botticelli (1500), he has preferred to consume the exalted subject matter with a in the case of Dante, who has such legendary status as a writer. to Correggio (1530), we see this familiar iconography. more matter-of-fact tone. The casualness with which he writes Sayers writes of her translation 'it is not, of course, Dante; no 'comes here' contrasts with Sayers's 'shall come arrayed'; he translation could ever be Dante'. Yet, to say 'it is not Dante' is trivialises the act and makes it seem like an accident, a mere not the same as saying 'it is not good'. The purpose of translation happening. The omission of alliteration prevents too much is to make a work accessible to those who do not understand embellishment, and he achieves more understated description the language of the original, to provide a 'door to Dante', as the oreover, each of these great artists has a In the centre of each of these masterpieces there is the Infant of this momentous biblical occasion. This seems to better Literary Review writes in praise for Ellis's translation. Sayers theological intent. With van der Goes, Jesus, with Mary and Joseph devoutly kneeling. Angels attend reflect Ellis's style and the self-consciously modern nature of and Ellis demonstrate the true freedom of translation by making Mary and Joseph and eighteen other – a handful in Correggio, fourteen in Ghirlandaio, a legion in his translation. subtle changes that stem not out of necessity, but out of choice. figures, angelic and human, clad in Botticelli. Each painting underlines an article of belief and appeals Another instance where his style seems emphatically modern The vast differences in their versions are a result of the way that courtly elegance, seem to contemplate to the intellect, to reason. is 'just as I've heard of that lance that Achilles and his father interpretation is subjective and unique. So, a translation should the sadness of the future – the death of With Caravaggio’s Adoration of the Shepherds, however, the had, /harmful at first and then benign'. To say 'I've heard of not be judged solely on its ability to mimic the original. It is also MChrist. Ghirlandaio, who saw van der Goes as an inspiration, traditional joyful topic of Christ’s Nativity takes on a sombre, that lance' is noticeably hesitant; the narrator distances himself vital that a translation can stand in its own right, enjoyed by has the Infant lying in front of a Roman sarcophagus with a sorrowful air. Giovanni Bellori, a contemporary and later from the legend with the word 'that', as if he professes not to be readers for what it really is: a new creation, a testimony to the Latin motto: “...the urn that conceals me will bring forth a god” biographer wrote of him: “The old painters, brought up in the intimately acquainted with classic mythology. Ellis notes that plurality of meaning. – the resurrection of Christ. Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity has twelve tradition, were appalled... (There is) no decorum, no artistic sense. colourful angels dancing in the sky and a trinity of angels on the He painted all the figures in one and the same light and plane without roof of the stable. Another angel is leading three kings to adore, any perspective”. another leads three shepherds; at the picture plane, three angels It was painted in Messina between 1608 and 1609 for the Church Bibliography embrace three human beings, as devils disappear into crevices of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The first sign of its breaking with Dante – The Divine Comedy – 1: Inferno; Italian text with translation and comment by John D Sinclair (Oxford University Press 1961) in the earth – the theology of salvation. In Correggio’s Adoration, tradition is that, in this Church of the Angels, there are no angels, Dante – Inferno; Translated, introduced and annotated by Steve Ellis (Vintage Classics Random House 2007) sometimes called Holy Night, the light source is the Infant Christ, there is no heavenly light. Then, mother and child are not the Dante – The Divine Comedy 1: Hell; Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Books 1949) whose light irradiates his smiling mother and dazzles an attendant centre of the composition. Instead, in a wooden barn a donkey Hugh Kenner's introduction to Ezra Pound, Translations (New Directions, 1963) nurse – “lumen Christi”. and ox stand patiently in the background. Off-centre, Mary, small

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and frail, lies on the earth, slumped, exhausted. The baby tugs at “She is a refugee mother, utterly alone in the dark with her defenceless child”. her face; she looks down and beyond him to stray straws glinting The black blanket does this. on the floor. A twentieth-century champion of Caravaggio says You might read somewhere that in the image of the mother of Adoration: “He succeeded in completing for the Capuchins in Messina the lying on the ground Caravaggio was reaching back to earlier exquisitely humble Manger Scene with Shepherds. ... The Madonna looks masters – for example, to Giotto in his Nativity in the Scrovegni lost, holding the tiny child before the apprehensive gaze of the shepherds, as Chapel in Padua. Giotto’s Madonna, however, is richly clad in stolid as if cast in bronze. She is lying on a litter of prickly straw, hemmed in precious ultramarine and gold and reaches eagerly across for the by animals as immobile as objects, while the merest glimmer of light seems to Infant handed to her by a nurse. A joyous image. enter in, together with the surge of a distant sea. Set down in front of us, a sort In the earlier Renaissance paintings, the light source is either of ‘peasant still life’ – napkin, loaf and carpenter’s plane in three tones, white, heavenly (as in Botticelli and Ghirlandaio) or supernatural from brown and black – is reduced to a forlorn quintessence”. (Roberto Longhi). the Infant Christ (as in van der Goes and Correggio). No such The Capuchins were and are Franciscan Friars whose faith supernatural intervention intrudes in Caravaggio’s Adoration. is that Christ was born for the poor – the bare feet of Mary, What little light there is comes from the left and the bottom left, Joseph and a shepherd attest to this. This painting exemplifies a from the earth, and its effect is surprising. Just as the diagonal faith that God became man as one of the poor, an ideal utterly of the descending heads emphasises the mother’s and the child’s different to that of van der Goes, or Ghirlandaio, or Botticelli or head, so the light travelling up along that line, picks out first the even Correggio. Mother and child exemplify humility as they basket of carpenter’s tools, saw, adze and set square: Joseph, the lie on the earth, “humus”. Some years before Caravaggio came journeyman carpenter, had not left his craft behind. In the basket, to Messina, himself a fugitive from the authorities in Rome and too, there is food, a roughly baked loaf – just that, a loaf of bread. in Malta, a Capuchin preacher, imagining in a meditation Christ The light picks out the white napkin in the basket; notice how speaking, said: “...for see in how great a need of human help I was born, the folds of napkin find a reflection in the folds of the infant’s with no shelter, no bed, no fire and no nurse to aid my mother”. swaddling clothes. “Refugee mother”, as Graham-Dixon says, The composition of the painting emphasises the artist’s purpose. but refugee father, too, refugee child. There is a simplicity about the geometry: a diagonal drawn down Caravaggio’s Adoration shatters the Renaissance icon and presents by the descending heads divides the painting into two triangles. itself to us as anti-icon. It has no theology, either, no appeal to the The superior one, all dark in brown and black, seems to press mind, but to the heart, to the emotions. There is desolate humanity down on the triangle of the figures, in red and brown and grey, a here, though, and doubt and faith: limited and unostentatious palette, the dark making the colours bright. The superior triangle finds an echo in the dark rectangle “The picture is almost unbearable”. at the bottom of the picture and, just as the light picks out the (Graham-Dixon) donkey’s nose at the top, it sets alight the glittering straws, the only riches in the composition, scattered on the floor below. An astonishing detail, so utterly alien to the Renaissance painters, isolates the mother. She is lying on a rough, black Bibliography: blanket, the colour field so densely black it reminds me of Rothko, Caravaggio Helen Langdon as does her dress, red without any tonal variations. Caravaggio’s Caravaggio Andrew Graham-Dixon latest biographer, Andrew Graham- Dixon, says of this painting: The Final Years Nicola Spinosa et al

The Adoration of the Shepherds by Caravaggio (1608-1609)

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 16 www.pgs.org.uk 17 unseen musician, who feel that they are moved or softened, yet know not whence or why.” In many ways, this is a perfect definition of the mysterious power possessed by poetry. Keats’ plaintive Ode, written in the shadow of the death of his brother Tom from tuberculosis, acknowledges that his theme of lamenting in the darkness to the nightingale’s song is not a new one but tells of his heartache with a rawness that is both deeply personal and universal. Wordsworth in “O Nightingale” and Coleridge in “The Nightingale” both recall the status the nightingale’s song has in literature but choose to break away from it. Wordsworth mentions the Nightingale’s “fiery heart” but ultimately the poem’s tone is light and he rejects the “tumultuous” love immortal suggested by the nightingale’s song for the more “homely tale” sung by a dove. In “The Nightingale” Coleridge similarly recalls the age-old reputation of the nightingale’s song having a “melancholy strain” and acknowledges that “many a poet echoes the conceit” but instead chooses to see the birdsong as an overwhelmingly positive celebration of Nature. BYRON The nightingale, then, is a longstanding symbol of strong emotion, whether of love or of loss or of both. Yet we must and BULLYING take care that this will remain the case: the destruction of the Lord Byron nightingale’s ground habitat both in England and overseas bird has jeopardised the bird’s existence. The annual journey of George Gordon, Lord Byron was, by his own the nightingale is astonishing: tracking has suggested that the admission, wonderful and terrible. Brilliant poet, Nightingale singing birds fly up to 3,000 miles between breeding in the southern beautiful, radical; also, vain, insecure, sexually part of England (nightingales are found predominantly in incontinent and cruel. These complexities resulted, in the southeast of the UK and rarely north of The Wash) and part, from his “club foot”, a malformation that made Ms Laura Burden Darkling, we listened. Nothing yet. Sticks cracked wintering in Africa. In 2009, one nightingale was tracked with it difficult to walk. He endured a childhood of painful HEAD OF ENGLISH underfoot. Some of the pupils giggled and we sshhed a geolocator from Norfolk, through France and Spain, across ‘remedies’ and a metal calliper that added to both his them. We carried on through the woodland path. One Morocco and the Sahara and finally to Guinea-Bissau on the physical and mental torment. Worse, the device and of my colleagues peered at his i-phone: “My wife has just west coast of Africa. his limp attracted insults and taunting. tweeted that I’ve gone to the woods in search of full- In “Sonnet One”, Milton juxtaposed two iconic British throated ease.” We blundered on. migrant birds, the nightingale and the cuckoo, as did Byron entered Harrow School at thirteen. Bullying Wordsworth in his narrative translation of Chaucer’s “The was endemic, an approved strategy for control. So Cuckoo and the Nightingale”. Milton preferred the “liquid hellish was his first year that he begged his mother notes” of the nightingale, which he associated with faithful love, to be allowed to return home. When she refused, he he nightingale’s song is arresting and into a nightingale, forever linked the bird with lament and to the “shallow” and “rude” cuckoo, associating that bird with took up boxing. A succession of bloody noses and distinctive; Wordsworth claimed that the tragedy but also with liberty. As a wronged woman, Philomela’s jealousy. The cuckoo, which like the nightingale has long been black eyes resolved the problem so effectively that notes “pierce and pierce.” The call ranges tongue had been cut out by her attacker Tereus but, when the seen as a herald of the English spring, is now on the RSPB’s younger boys began to seek his protection from the rapidly and at a volume that is surprising gods transformed her into a nightingale, she regained her voice “red” list and is endangered, partly because of deforestation more vicious prefects. Byron tamed the worst culprits for such a small, plain, brown bird. It is the through the power of song. Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Ovid and in the Congo, where many birds winter. The nightingale and left for Cambridge a legend. scope and seeming creativity of its song that Aristophanes (who described it in The Birds as a “liquid trill” in a is currently on the “amber” list, threatened but not yet Thas resulted in its iconic place in Western Literature. “vibrato voice”) all wrote of the nightingale’s song through their endangered. We are beginning to value our woodland more, as The teenage Byron outlawed bullying nearly thirty You will rarely see a nightingale. The 6,700 or so males still inclusion of the myth of Philomela. Latterly, English writers from a nation, but in many ways our conservation measures are too years before Dickens wrote about it in Nicholas Nickleby passing through the UK require dense thicket – what Coleridge Chaucer, Shakespeare and Sidney to T.S. Eliot and Margaret little, too late. John Keats heard his nightingale in Hampstead, and Thomas Arnold reformed Rugby School. His referred to as “tangling underwood”- to sing for a mate and to Atwood have taken inspiration from the legend. near the heath, but a nightingale has not been heard in London own experiences of being bullied as a child drove his breed. On this particular night, on a twilight trip to woodland Yet the nightingale’s iconic status does not depend solely on since the turn of the twentieth century and its numbers have insecurities and helped shape his moral philosophy, near my previous school in Northamptonshire, our group of the Philomela myth. Aristophanes was probably the earliest declined with its habitat. During the horrors of the Blitz, the creating a flawed hero whose hatred of persecution three teachers and about ten sixth formers beat our way to a author to explicitly identify the nightingale with poetry and singer Vera Lynn entertained the public with Maschwitz and would ultimately lead to his death while supporting little clearing and listened to the song that, Keats surmised, “was authors through to Hans Christian Anderson and Oscar Wilde Sherwin’s song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” but it is the Greek War of Independence, in which a small heard/In ancient days by emperor and clown” before one boy in the nineteenth century have evoked the beauty of the song. likely that the nightingale, an entirely rural bird, was never country was being bullied by the huge Ottoman read “Ode to a Nightingale” in the shadow of a white hawthorn. It is the Romantic writers, in their desire to celebrate seen in Mayfair: the song became popular because of its wish- empire. He also created some of the finest poetry since The change in mood from when we first stumbled into the wood mankind’s union with Nature, and “the viewless wings of fulfilment and because of the nightingale’s enduring symbolism Shakespeare. to one of stillness and preoccupation was remarkable. Poesy” whose identification with the small bird is perhaps the in regard to love. Whether the nightingale continues to be an Keats was right: the warbles and whistles of the nightingale strongest. Shelley, in his A Defense of Poetry argued that, “A poet inspiration to writers as we enter the digital age or whether it Mr Josh Brown have long resonated with those who listen. In Ancient Greece the is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude will eventually only be known through myth and association, BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS myth of Philomela, the raped and mutilated princess transformed with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an like a more euphonic dodo, remains to be seen. DEPARTMENT

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 18 www.pgs.org.uk 19 The prototype of hug the tortured soul for whom this hoodie life becomes unbearable. A plea on behalf of Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770)

Above: Sculpture of Thomas Chatterton in his home town of Bristol. Mr Andrew Hogg Left: The Death of Chatterton (painting by Henry Wallis, 1856). MODERN LANGUAGES The model who posed as Chatterton was Portsmouth-born poet DEPARTMENT and novelist George Meredith.

HOw many singers, actors and celebrities can you think of who died young and became more popular after death than before? Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, James Dean, perhaps?

or how many of these was a mixture of ages of ten and seventeen, showed an imaginative freedom, drugs and or drink to blame, with either encompassing Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval themes and suicide or accidental overdose the cause of inspiration from as far afield as Africa, and expressed in a death? You could consider adding Thomas direct, lyrical way quite different from that of the first half of Chatterton to the list, as possibly the first, the eighteenth century but which would become typical of the the prototype of the tortured soul, alone in first half of the nineteenth. a room, for whom life becomes unbearable. Thomas’s father, who died two months before he was born, “Thomas who?” I hear you say. Although rejected by was a retired teacher and antiquarian, with a minor talent for Fpublishers and public alike during his lifetime, his poetry was writing music and poetry and an interest in the occult and later picked up, admired and imitated by such great names old manuscripts. He was also sexton of St Mary’s Church, as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Keats, Shelley, Dante Redcliffe, Bristol. Thomas’s mother, only twenty when he was Rossetti and Oscar Wilde. Not bad for a young man who died born, despaired of her difficult child, who was often moody, at the age of seventeen. sullen and uncommunicative. Thomas’s first school considered Thomas Chatterton was born two hundred and sixty years him so dull as to be unteachable, but, at the age of six, using the ago on 20 November 1752, a year firmly fixed in the Age of ornate capital letters in an old music book, Thomas was taught Reason --- where classical allusions to Greece and Rome, to read by his elder sister. From then on, with the help of an harmony, balance and order predominated in art, architecture old Bible in mediaeval print, Thomas became a keen reader, and in poetry. The most popular poet of the time was Alexander devouring everything from heraldry to music, metaphysics and Pope, whose verse, carefully balanced, polished, harmonious astronomy, and, most importantly, the mediaeval manuscripts and allusive was concerned principally with deflating pompous kept in chests in the store room attached to the Church, which members of society. Chatterton’s verse, written between the stood next to their house.

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 20 www.pgs.org.uk 21 At the age of eight, Thomas gained a place at Colston’s School, newspapers and magazines - he was keen to become a political most English of poets except Shakespeare, Thomas Chatterton”. In a a charity school for boys destined to become apprentices, where writer and journalist. In June he earned his first payment of £3 letter written shortly before his death in1821, after holding the uniform consisted of long blue coats and yellow stockings for composing an elegy on the death of the Mayor of London, up Chatterton’s language as “the purest English”, Keats as it still does for the pupils of Christ’s Hospital today. In those and began writing a variety of short stories and sketches. Soon continues: “I always somehow associate Chatterton with Autumn”. days the boys of Colston’s also wore a tonsure, that is, their he was to receive the sum of five guineas (£5.25) for a little Keats had been reading Chatterton’s “mediaeval” poem heads were shaved like monks. opera called The Revenge, which he promptly spent on presents “Aella”; the third “Minstrel’s Song” from this poem runs thus At the age of only ten, Thomas’s first poem was published in for his mother and sister, possibly to show how well he was (in a modernised spelling): the local paper: doing. But it was all a front - there was little work to be had and very little payment. Thomas was literally starving. When Autumn black and sun-burnt do appear, Almighty framer of the skies Sometime in June 1770 Thomas moved to a cheaper room at With his gold hand gilding the falling leaf, O let our pure devotion rise the top of a house in Brook Street, where he continued to write. Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year Like incense in thy sight. He also became well acquainted with Mr Cross, the local chemist, Bearing upon his back the ripened sheaf; … Wrapt in impenetrable shade probably because he had caught “the foul disease“ - syphilis, the When the fair apple, red as evening sky The texture of our souls were made popular treatment for which was laudanum, (opium dissolved in Do bend the trees down to the fruitful ground; Till thy command gave light… alcohol) or arsenic and water. On the morning of 24 August, he When juicy pears and berries of black dye, was found dead in his room, his body contorted from the pain Do dance in air … Not a bad effort at only ten years of age. When he turned of death by arsenic poisoning, surrounded by minutely shredded JJES’ MOUSTACHE fourteen, Thomas left Colston’s to begin work at a Bristol law pieces of manuscript. He had clearly not eaten for several days. Compare this with Keats’ “Ode to Autumn”, especially the first firm as an apprentice for seven years. This was a much sought- He was just seventeen years and nine months old. draft of the first line: after position, in which he was expected to copy legal documents Following his death, controversy continued over the authorship Throughout the ages, well groomed facial hair 'While a gold cloud gilds the dying day,' for only a few hours a day; however, he was uninterested in the of the poems; to the emerging Romantic view, forgery was of no has been the mark of a true gentleman. You can Keats borrows other images, such as the personification of boring work and insulted at having to eat with the servants. importance - it was just an exercise of the imagination. Amongst always trust a man who looks after his upper lip, autumn as a reaper, “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store/ And so Thomas began to write to entertain himself, sending the first to recognise Chatterton’s qualities was William Blake, whether by keeping it stiff or hidden from view …sitting careless on a granary floor”and the image of the apple- letters to local newspapers and to the young ladies of Bristol, of just five years younger, whose work shows a similar interest in entirely behind the bristling glory of a well-kempt tree bending down to the ground: “To bend with apples the moss'd whom he was exceedingly fond. ancient British themes and simple verse forms. Walter Scott was moustache. As is well known, Smith is not only cottage-trees” . In 1768, on the opening of a new bridge in Bristol, a local also drawn to and imitated Chatterton’s use of the ballad form, the Founder’s House it is the Moustache House. In “Adonais”, Shelley’s elegy on the death of Keats, newspaper published an account of the Mayor of Bristol as well as praising his poetic achievements. Wordsworth, born Since the dawn of Mr. Elphick-Smith’s leadership, Chatterton’s name is linked to his for the last time, as: passing over the old bridge in mediaeval times, “taken from in the year of Chatterton’s death, immortalised him in these we have been proudly led by a figure adorned an old manuscript”. The owner of the manuscript, sixteen year famous lines: with facial hair that has become itself iconic within The inheritors of unfulfilled renown… old Thomas, eventually admitted that his father had taken it the school and so entwined with the identity of Chatterton rose pale; his solemn agony from the store room of the Church and that he, Thomas, had I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, the House that, were he to attempt to shave it, Had not yet faded from him… “found” it. It appeared to have been written by a monk called The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride… there would be a public outcry so furious and Thomas Rowley in the fourteenth century, but the real author We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; instantaneous that the follicles themselves would As no suicide note was found at the time of his death, it could was of course Thomas himself. But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. likely leap back from the dastardly razor to their be inferred that it was not suicide but an accidental overdose Later Thomas “found” a treasure trove of other documents, rightful place upon the upper lip. of the arsenic-based treatment for venereal disease. Chatterton all apparently written in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Coleridge wrote his first important poem while still a pupil was buried in an unmarked grave in Shoe Lane workhouse, The enthusiasm of his friends and the keenness of the at Christ’s Hospital: “Monody (mournful poem) on the Death of Benjamin Schofield a site which was later built over. Apart from a statue, which local newspapers to print more of these apparently ancient Chatterton”. He identified closely with him in background and YEAR 12 is to be found in Bristol city centre, he is also commemorated manuscripts spurred Thomas on to produce several more, all outlook and was to adapt and extend this poem over the next by a plaque in St Mary Redcliffe, belated recognition in a conveniently relating to the ancestors of people he knew, who forty-four years, as if he were accompanied his entire poetic life town which he despised, it’s true, but recognition which he were naturally delighted to receive them. As pieces of mediaeval by the dead teenager. Other poems of Coleridge’s also show would surely have appreciated. What would or could he have English in the style of Chaucer, Chatterton’s efforts were so his influence: “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of The Ancient become if he’d lived? It’s impossible to be sure but there is good as to cause controversy for the next one hundred and fifty Mariner” (first printed as “Ancyent Marinere” in Chattertonian no doubt that his work was continually improving in range years. Not a bad effort for a teenager armed with only a few mediaeval style) both have several echoes of Chatteron’s and vividness of language when he died; he was politically genuine parchments, a book of old poetry and an Anglo-Saxon “African Eclogues”. The poet whose style was most influenced aware and would undoubtedly have been excited, or perhaps dictionary. But his forgeries brought him no money and, just as by Chatterton, however, was, Keats, who openly acknowledged appalled, by the French Revolution in 1789. Would he not have importantly, no recognition. his devotion and debt to him; one of his earliest sonnets begins: become the elder statesman of English Romantic movement, In March 1770, Thomas decided that his best option was to in a way that Blake, only five years younger, never achieved? leave Bristol for London, having obtained his release from his O Chatterton! How very sad thy fate! What is clear is that he was a hero and an inspiration to the apprenticeship by threatening suicide and leaving a witty and Dear child of sorrow - son of misery! great names of Romanticism, not just because of the manner of ironic will for his employer to find. So, with five pounds collected his life and death but even more because of his poetry. I hope from family and friends in his pocket, Chatterton arrived in and goes on to celebrate his “Genius”. Later he dedicates you will come to embrace him too! London and began to look for work with one of the many his most ambitious poem, “Endymion”, to “the memory of the

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 22 www.pgs.org.uk 23 hispanicons

hispanicons

From the worlds of medicine, art, politics, literature and sport

Juan De La Vega

Kathryn Godfray Year 13

La malaria es una de las enfermedades tropicales más comunes, que mata a 665.000 personas cada año. Aunque, hoy en día, suele afectar los países de África, Suramérica M Left page: Malaria mosquito , Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. y Asia, originalmente la malaria era un gran alaria is one of the most common tropical Above: Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937 and Pablo Picasso below right problema en Europa también, lo que puede diseases, which kills 665,000 people per parecer bastante extraño. El mejor tratamiento year. Although the countries of Africa, South para curarse es la quinina, que viene de la America and Asia are the most affected by cargos que se reunirían en las oficinas del Consejo de Seguridad corteza del arból cinchona. No fue descubierta this condition, malaria was once a disease that de las Naciones Unidas, donde se encuentra instalado, no les muy recientemente ya que hacía muchos siglos posed huge problems for the population of remordiera la conciencia por el futuro que estaban planeando que los indígenas la utilizaban. Esta droga Europe, which may surprise some people. The para la primavera de 2003, entonces no puedo pensar en otro es imprescindible en los países en vías de best treatment against the disease is quinine, icono que represente mejor la brutalidad y crueldad de que desarrollo que a menudo son víctimas de esta which comes from the “chinchona tree”. It somos capaces. La España fratricida de ese tiempo, que Picasso condición grave. Sin su uso, las cifras de los is not a recent discovery; in fact, indigenous inmortalizó, es hoy sesenta y cinco años más tarde Siria, México muertos serían mucho más altas a causa de la peoples of South America have been using o Afganistán. enfermedad, y como resultado, para mí una this product for centuries. This drug is so Y los gritos desgarrados de las madres seguirán sobrecogiéndonos persona icónica en el mundo hispanohablante vital for people in developing countries, who desde ese lienzo testigo y símbolo de nuestra falta de humanidad. en el campo de la medicina es la primera persona que utilizó la are particularly acutely affected by malaria. The mortality figures Y no habrá censura que consiga ahogarlos. quinina: Juan de la Vega. would be so much higher were it not for this drug. For this reason, Hace cuatrocientos años en Perú, la condesa de Chinchón, Juan de la Vega should be lauded as a Hispanic icon for being the It still has to be covered over so that those who are going to una persona cuyo marido tenía mucho respeto y poder en el país, first person to use this drug. invade another country (Iraq this time) aren’t shamed by the se enfermó con una enfermedad desconocida. Su condición 400 years ago, in Peru, the Countess of Chinchón, whose atrocity they are about to commit. If the tapestry hanging in empeoró, y la gente de Perú se preocupaba mucho por su salud husband had great power and influence in the country, fell sick the offices of the Security Council of the United Nations (a y por si alguien pudiera encontrar una cura. Su médico, Juan with an unknown illness. Her condition worsened and everyone GUERNICA DE PICASSO reproduction of the painting that reminds us of the bombing de la Vega, intentó muchos remedios, que incluyó la práctica de worried about her state of health and whether a cure would be carried out by the Luftwaffe against the civilian population of sacar sangre, pero empezó a agotarse de ideas. Otra vez observó found. Her doctor, Juan de la Vega, tried a number of remedies, Liliana Nogueira-Pache Guernica in 1937) had to be covered up so that the VIPs meeting los síntomas – fiebre, escalofrío, frío, vómito. Estaba consciente including the drawing of blood, but he soon ran out of ideas. MODERN LANGUAGES there wouldn’t feel culpable about the future they were planning de algo utilizado por el Quechua, un tribu local para curar He observed other symptoms of the disease – fever, chills and DEPARTMENT in the spring of 2003, then I can think of no other icon that los periodos de escalofrío, la “quina quina” y cómo milagro, se vomiting. He was aware of something known as “quina quina” represents more clearly the brutality and cruelty of which we recuperó. that the Quechua people used to cure chills and, as if through a Si todavía hay que cubrirlo para que los que van a invadir otro are capable. The fratricidal conflict that was tearing Spain apart La droga tiene el nombre quinina hoy para rendir homenaje miracle, this substance cured the Countess. país, Irak esta vez, no se sientan avergonzados por la atrocidad at that time, immortalised by Picasso, is reproduced today, sixty a la condesa. Cuando la condesa de Chinchón volvió a Europa The drug is known today as quinine – malaria was later que van a cometer; si todavía, el tapiz, reproducción de la obra five years later, in Syria, Mexico or Afghanistan. con la quinina, y con las mejoras en la sanitación, la malaria fue eradicated from Europe following the introduction of quinine into que recuerda, precisamente, el bombardeo que durante la guerra And the desperate cries of mothers, represented in this symbol erradicada en Europa, gracias a Juan de la Vega, un médico que medical practice. Juan de la Vega is a Hispanic icon through his civil española, la Luftwaffe perpetró contra la población civil and testament to our inhumanity, will continue to haunt us, and no tuvo miedo de tomar riesgos para curar a su paciente. pioneering use of this wonder drug. de Guernica en 1937, tiene que taparse para que a los altos no censorship or cover-up will drown them out.

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 24 www.pgs.org.uk 25 hispanicons

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ RAFAEL NADAL

Fay Davies Owen Jones YEAR 13 YEAR 13

abriel García Márquez, escritor colombiano y ganador Gabriel Garcíá Márquez, Colombian writer and Nobel Prize afael Nadal lleva 11 años como jugador de tenis Rafael Nadal has been a professional tennis player for 11 del Premio Nobel para la Literatura, tiene muchos winner, has multiple roles. As a novelist, short-story writer, profesional (desde 2001). Nació en Mallorca el 3 de years (since 2001). He was born in Majorca, 3rd June 1986. G papeles. Es escritor, novelista, guionista y periodista: en journalist and screenwriter, he is, put simply, a storyteller. His R junio de 1986. Su mejor ránking era número 1 en el His highest ranking in professional tennis has been Number breve, un cuentista. Quizás su obra más famosa sea Cien años de most famous work is perhaps One Hundred Years of Solitude, mundo – es decir, era el mejor jugador del mundo, según su One – in other words, arguably the best player in the world soledad por la que recibió el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1982. for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Other ránking. Se puede decir que su ‘enemigo famoso’ siempre ha sido according to his ranking. You could say his ‘arch nemesis’ is Otras novelas incluyen Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada, El novels include Chronicle Of A Death Foretold, No-one Writes Roger Federer, el jugador fenomenal suizo que ha sido también el Roger Federer, another tennis player from Switzerland, who has Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba, El amor En Los Tiempos de To The Colonel, Love in the Time of Cholera and Of Love and número 1 del mundo – los dos han luchado con mucho esfuerzo also been World Number One. Both of them have fought their Cólera y Del Amor y Otros Demonios. Other Demons. Yet, García Márquez (or 'Gabo' y mucha pasión durante toda su carrera para way to the top to earn such a rewarding position. Es un escritor fantástico pero también es un as he is known throughout Latin America) is not ganar ese título increíble. Nadal’s statistics are certainly unusual and icono. Es un icono porque popularizó el estilo just a fantastic writer. He is also an icon. Las estadísticas son muy interesantes y bastante interesting of the sort. He has won every French de literatura que se llama 'el realismo mágico', He is an icon because he popularised the extrañas para Nadal. Ha ganado cada Grand Open Grand Slam title since 2005, (except y porque ha contribuido a la globalización de style called 'magical realism', and because he Slam del Open de Francia desde 2005 (con la for 2009 where he lost to Söderling in the 4th la literatura hispánica. Traducciones de sus has contributed to the globalisation of Hispanic excepción de 2009, cuando Soderling ganó el Round). As well as that, statistically if Nadal obras están disponibles a tráves del mundo en literature. Translations of his work can be found partido en la cuarta ronda). Además, en cada wins the first set, he goes on to win the match – casi todas las lenguas. Formó parte del 'boom throughout the world in almost every language. partido de Nadal, si ha ganado el primer set, that has been the result for all of those matches. latinoamericano', un movimiento de los años He was part of the 'Latin American Boom', a ha ganado el partido. También, puso fin a la Also, Federer was hoping to beat the record and sesenta y setenta cuando un grupo de novelistas movement in the 1960s and 1970s in which a intención de Federer de ganar más de cinco títulos get more than five consecutive Wimbledon titles latinoamericanos comenzó a circularse en Europa group of novelists from South America began to de Wimbledon consecutivos ya que en su sexto (the record of Björn Borg), but in Federer’s sixth y el resto del mundo. circulate in Europe and the rest of the world. final Nadal ganó en vez de Federer. Wimbledon final, Nadal beat him, preventing Es un icono porque no tiene miedo a la He is an icon because he combines his talent Nadal solamente tiene 26 años y ya ha ganado him from breaking the record. controversia. Utiliza sus habilidades literarias for writing with his strong opinions in order to 50 títulos de tenis en su carrera, además de Nadal is only 26 years old and has already para difundir sus creencias políticas. Fue criticado por su amistad share his political ideologies. Unafraid of controversy, he was ganar 583 partidos mientras que solamente ha perdido 122 won 50 tennis tournament titles, as well as having a ratio of con el líder cubano Fidel Castro, y se describió como 'subversivo' criticised for his friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, así que ha ganado el 83% de sus partidos profesionales, una 583 wins to only 122 losses (therefore winning 82.7% of his debido a sus opiniones sobre el imperialismo de los EE.UU. and has been labelled as 'subversive' for his views on US estadística impresionante. Quizás su éxito sea debido a su fuerza, professional tennis matches). Maybe his success is a result of Es un icono porque ha combatido el cáncer linfático y continuó imperialism. su velocidad, su aptitud, o puede ser el hecho que es zurdo; su his strength, his speed, his fitness, or even the fact he plays left- escribiendo mientras recibía tratamiento. En 2002, tres años He is an icon because he has beaten lymphatic cancer fighting capacidad es todavía misteriosa. Sin embargo, sabemos que sigue handed. Either way, we know he continues to blow our minds después de su remision, publicó la primera parte sus memorias, his illness whilst continuing to write. In 2002, three years into siendo un tenista fenomenal, pero¿Qué más podría demostrar en with such phenomenal tennis, but who knows what else he’ll Vivir para contarla. remission, he published the first part of his memoirs, Living to el futuro? Está por ver……….. bring to the court in the future? That remains to be seen….. Tell the Tale.

Guevara viajó por Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador, Panamá, Costa Rica, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, He deduced that these massive injustices were the result of ERNESTO ‘CHE’ GUEVARA Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela y El Salvador antes de physician and guerrilla leader born on 14th May 1928 in Rosario, imperialism and gross colonialism on the part of the United volver a Argentina. Observó las condiciones horrorosas de los trabajadores Santa Fe. A major figure of the Cuban revolution and Marxism, States. After completing his medical degree in 1953, he dedicated Fraser Mackenzie latinoamericanos y dijo que estaba “muy cerca de la pobreza, el hambre y his stylised visage has become a global symbol of rebellion and his life to what he hoped would result in “world revolution”, his YEAR 13 la enfermedad”. revolution. motive being putting an end to the exploitation of his own people. Dedujo que estas injusticias fueron el resultado del imperialismo y Guevara attended the University of Buenos Aires in 1948, Che contributed greatly to the Cuban Revolution, alongside colonialismo grave de los Estados Unidos. Después de cumplir su carrera where he studied medicine. After finishing his second year of Fidel Castro, and helped to topple the government of the rnesto “Che” Guevara fue un revolucionario marxista de de la medicina en 1953, el dedicó su vida a lo que quería resultar en “una medical school, Guevara temporarily suspended his studies in previous vicious dictator, Batista. He remains an important Argentina, médico y líder de la guerilla nacido el 14 de mayo revolución mundial”, para poner fin a la explotación de su pueblo. Este order to fulfil what he described as “his hunger to explore the figure in both Cuban and Latin-American culture and is viewed E 1928 en Rosario, Santa Fe. Fue una figura grande de la fue su motivación. world”. Guevara left Argentina and began the first of two extensive as a great liberator. revolución cubana y, por eso, la imagen de su cara se ha convertido en un “Che” contribuyó mucho a la revolución de Cuba, con Fidel Castro, motorcycle journeys across Latin-America. His experiences of For Che, the following words resonate most strongly: “to be imagen global de la rebelión y la revolución. y le ayudó a destruir el gobierno del dictador anterior, Batista. “Che” se these trips would drastically alter the way he viewed the world. a true revolutionary you have to understand the injustices in Guevara asistió a la universidad de Buenos Aires en 1948 donde ha mantenido como una figura muy importante en la cultura cubana y Guevara travelled through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, this world, feel them and live them.” With these words, Che estudió la medicina. Después de terminar su año segundo, Guevara latinoamericana ya que es considerado un “libertador” del continente. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Columbia, Venezuela and El continues to motivate and engage the youth of Latin America paró sus estudios para que pudiera cumplir lo que el describió como Según Che Guevara, “para ser un verdadero revolucionario, hay que Salvador before returning home to Argentina. He observed the in the fight against the inequalities in Latin American society. “su hambre de explorar el mundo”. Guevara dejó Argentina y empezó el entender bien las injusticias del mundo, vivirlas y sentirlas.” Con estas shocking conditions which Latin-American people were forced primer de dos viajes de motocicleta por Latinoamérica. Sus experiencias palabras, sigue motivando a los jóvenes latinoamericanos a que participen to live and work in and stated that he came close to “poverty, cambiarían su manera de ver al mundo drásticamente. en la erradicación de las desigualdades en el continente latinoamericano. hunger and disease”.

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 26 www.pgs.org.uk 27 orma Jean Mortenson is a name you may the never have heard before. It is an ordinary name; nothing exciting comes to mind when mystery you see it. But Marilyn Monroe is a name demanding attention; it has a beautiful tone AUDACITY of to it and makes you think of success, of Old the of NHollywood glamour, dozens of major movies, outrageous affairs with numerous men in power, scandalous secrets and, last of all, one of the most tragic deaths of the twentieth century. Marilyn This gorgeous actress did not start off so pretty. Her early years were harsh, brought up in foster care because her mother and Stephanie Tindal grandmother suffered with schizophrenia, growing up not knowing year 12 who her real father was. This caused her to have a troubled childhood and maybe helps explain her multiple marriages, the first when she was just 16 years old. Nowadays, the way she climbed AUDREY her way up to the top would be seen as outrageous (although it still Zoe Dukoff-Gordon happens today, behind the scenes); she had a long list of affairs with year 11 directors of small agencies and film companies and, eventually, one of these men offered her a job. To their surprise, she actually had talent; there was more to her than just good looks. There is always an assumption made about Marilyn which is that she was just a dumb blonde. Indeed, to her dismay, she was constantly cast in roles that fit this stereotype; she either played the vacuous blonde bombshell or the ‘other woman’ who seduced the udrey Hepburn started her life on May 4th husband (for example in The Seven Year Itch, which contained the 1929, in Belgium, and, like many others, iconic scene with the white dress and the subway grate). Monroe she was left fighting to deal with the cruel had not been well educated but she tried to make up for this by consequences of World War Two. She was surrounding herself with many of the great minds of the time – it sent to boarding school at the age of 5, but is rumoured that she was friends with Albert Einstein – and read was forced to leave and live in Holland philosophical works by writers such as Aristotle. inA 1939, when the war started. Once the invasion spread to But what she most longed for were roles with depth and meaning; Holland itself, she left and went to live in England. She didn’t however, no such parts were made available to her, although she see her father, Joseph, for another 25 years. Her two provided many wonderful performances over the years, including brothers, Alexander and Ian, fought in the war, which my personal favourite, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which she co- left Audrey and her mother Ella not knowing whether starred with Jane Russell and sang the famous ‘Diamonds Are A they were dead or alive until years later. Girl’s Best Friend’. As the years went by, she was worried about her During her childhood, Audrey’s mother organised mental heath and began taking all sports of pills prescribed by her ballet lessons for her, which started her passion for private doctor, which may have contributed to her death (although dance and her dreams of becoming a prima ballerina. the situation surrounding her death remains unclear to this day, However, her ambitions seemed shattered by the "My career is a complete mystery to me. further adding to her myth). ‘Hunger Winter’ imposed on Holland, which led Audrey It's been a total surprise since the first day. Maybe her early struggle as an actress, model and singer is to suffer from anaemia, asthma and malnutrition, so that I never thought I was going to be an actress; part of what we admire about her – the fact that she wasn’t born she became too weak and ill ever to dance again. However, she I never thought I was going to be in movies. perfect, that she had surgery on her nose and chin and even had to channelled her passion into other areas of the arts, becoming a learn how to smile differently so that she could be seen as perfect, model and performing in a few shows which led to her working I never thought it would all happen as iconic. In the tough, often brutal world of show business, she in small roles in films such as The Lavender Hill Mob. Her career the way it did." pursued her dreams and, for a while, managed to make them come break-through came when she was spotted in the French film Audrey Hepburn true and seem to live a 1950s fairy tale. Monte Carlo Baby, which led to a starring role in Gigi and a series Fifty years after her death, secrets still surround this woman. Was of successful Hollywood films, including Roman Holiday, for she married three times or four? Was her death an accident, suicide which she won an Oscar for Best Actress. or murder? Are the conspiracy theories true? Although the actress As her career expanded and blossomed, she married actor Mel their lives the best they can and move onto new beginnings, if was only 36 years old when she died, she left behind a great legacy Ferrer and had children; her husband managed to track down possible, despite the setbacks they face. and still inspires people as varied as Christina Aguilera, Scarlett Audrey’s father, whom she hadn’t seen for 25 years, in Ireland. What interested Audrey, in her role as Holly, was the relation Johansson and Marilyn Manson. There are currently more films In 1961, she starred in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an experience between her character and herself, in how she managed to come than ever being produced about Marilyn, including Simon Curtis’ which hit home hard for Audrey. She could identify with out of the destruction of her early life a successful and giving person My Week with Marilyn, and over the past four years she has been on the struggles of her character, Holly, to survive the poverty (she was not only a great actress but a tireless worker for charity). I the cover of Vanity Fair three times! Clearly, she still has the power in which she lives and to rise above her surprising origins, believe this is why she is an icon, not only due to her brilliant talents to fascinate us, even half a century after her death. She remains an enjoying life where she can. She meets and befriends a writer, of acting, but the way in which she managed to come out of such important cultural influence and yet we will never know the whole Paul (George Peppard), who lives down the hall from her and a disruptive start to life and become as successful as she did, while truth about her. Perhaps that is part of her iconic appeal. is suffering writer’s block. They are both left trying to enjoy never forgetting those (especially children) who suffered.

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icon or iconoclast? Mrs Emma Bell of a cripplingly shy young man who walked into 706 Union DEPUTY HEAD Avenue one rainy Saturday afternoon to pay to make a record OF ENGLISH for his mother’s birthday. In doing that, in 1954, Elvis Presley began a journey that would see him become the most famous man on the planet. Did he know that at the age of 19? Of course not. What to make of Elvis Presley, 77 years After all, there were others ahead of him who must have after his birth, 49 after his first hit, looked like they’d run the game before this kid: There was Bill 35 after his death? Should we make Haley, but he was old and rotund and had a silly spit curl. There anything of this? After all, rock and was Carl Perkins, who had a big hit with his own song, “Blue roll as musical form is surely no longer Suede Shoes”, but he was out of action for a long time after a music that is fresh, vital and relevant. a car wreck; Boyd Bennet and Lonnie Donnegan were feeling Maybe so. But its most famous ambassador their way around the charts with rock and roll and skiffle, but is, I would argue, still relevant and nothing really worked until… important in the widest cultural sense. July 5th 1954. Elvis, who has recorded some numbers with Sam Phillips, owner of Sun records, is disconsolate and aware that his first forays into music have been unsuccessful. “Go back to driving a truck, son,” one kindly musician offers. “You’ll never make it as a singer”. However, Sam puts him together with experienced musicians Bill Black on standup bass ociety has always looked up to the icon: and Scotty Moore on guitar in the hope that a jam session will calm the whether god, monarch, mystic or (in the 20th boy’s nerves. Nothing gels. Just as everyone starts to pack up Elvis bangs century) singer. One might argue that the need his guitar in frustration and starts singing Arthur Crudup’s 1946 blues for celebrity mirrors the need to find a prism hit “That’s All Right”. through which we may define ourselves. There is it. That’s the moment popular music begins. It didn’t start like that. Not with post-modern The cultural importance of Elvis was recognized almost musing.S It starts more like a Southern Gothic tale: boy born to immediately. As soon as the record, “That’s All Right”, dirt-poor parents; twin dies at birth and is buried in an unmarked grave. Father gets sent to jail for attempting to buy a pig with a forged cheque. Mother and son create an unbreakable bond, which debilitates the boy when she dies aged only 46. Family moves to a big city “because there just had to be something Above: Elvis, a star at 21 (1956) better”. Boy hears an extraordinary combination of music and Left: Elvis with his parents (c. 1937) sounds, records some songs… Let us pause there. Reason number one to still recognise the iconic status of Elvis Presley: When Elvis moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948, the South was still gripped by the ghastly tensions of segregation and poverty. Within this swelter of injustice and deprivation, Elvis listened to and absorbed the sounds of the South. To the East, Nashville; the home of country. To the northeast, bluegrass music (much mocked as ‘hillbilly’); to the South, New Orleans and jazz. Gospel and spiritual music poured out of every church and travelling show. And, all around Memphis, the boy walked, listening to the blues. It was almost fated that rock and roll should find its voice at this crossroads and find it in the shape

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Above: Sculpture of Thomas Chatterton in his home town of Bristol Left: The Death of Chatterton (painting by Henry Wallis, 1856) His manager, the Colonel decided a TV Christmas special But he was alone. would be just the ticket, with strict instructions that Elvis was to He didn’t even have a band to share the crazy stuff with, just a sing Christmas songs around a fire, with choirs of sweet children bunch of friends who couldn’t possibly know what it meant to and Christmas trees and baubles and sweaters with reindeer on be Elvis Presley. And so there was more medication and more them. However, producer Steve Binder was having none of that. food and more medication and more food to cope with the He recognised what others had by this time forgotten. Elvis’s relentless touring schedule and Vegas schedule and a marriage iconic image was not an anachronism; it simply needed to be dissolved and a child he barely saw… re-invigorated, re-presented. For, despite his huge earning power, Elvis did not have the Witness the start of the TV show: Elvis, collar of black jacket private economic or professional power to break free. His only just visible, stares directly into the camera and growls manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, a former fairground hustler, “If you’re lookin’ for trouble, you came to the right place…” strangled Elvis’s musical potential: taking a 50% cut, keeping Absolutely in control of the material, he sings and swaggers and him on the road for 300 days out of 356 (in order to earn grinds and howls through ‘Guitar Man’ as the camera moves the money for the Colonel to pay his gambling debts); only out to an image of dozens of ‘Elvises’ with guitars dancing accepting concert tours in the USA because ‘Parker’ was, in behind him on rostra before ending the number, on his own, fact, an illegal immigrant from Holland and would, if he left standing in front of giant red electric lettering spelling out his America, probably be refused re-entry; refusing interesting and The comeback (1968) name. ELVIS. One word. No more is needed. challenging movie roles for Elvis because the money wasn’t A supernatural force (1970) It was a triumph. He parlayed and distilled his extraordinary enough... musical influences into this show: singing ‘unplugged’ with his Did Elvis guess that this was the beginning of his end? original band; singing production numbers with go-go dancers, Probably. creating a gospel segment that recalled the revivalist fairground Roll forward to 1977. Reason number three to still recognise was played on local stations, it became a hit; soon Elvis shows of his youth, acknowledging the the iconic status of Elvis Presley: was recording, at Sun Studio, a series of invigorating and passing of the years and staring at the In June of that year, Elvis was preparing electrifying performances: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, “Milkcow Did Elvis guess, in 1956, that breaking down those barriers camera as if to say “Yeah, and did you think for what would be his last tour. Tired. Blues Boogie”, “Baby Let’s Play House”, “Trying to Get to You”, would be an incalculable legacy? I didn’t matter anymore?” Only Elvis could ‘Mystery Overweight. A recluse, trapped in his “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” and “Mystery Train”. Probably not. have the audacity to prowl around a stage Train’ reached superstar status. His voice, worn out from Mystery Train. It still sounds like a clarion call from another In 1956, Elvis was on a breakneck schedule of tours, TV in black leather, transfixing an audience with out to all years of touring in increasingly poor venues, world. A high, wailing, ethereal rock and roll epiphany that appearances and interviews that would, in the end, constrain a sleek sexual danger that had only recently was losing its purity and power. He would reached out from the sweltering South of the 1950s to all those and choke him. But how could he know that at this point? seemed so castrated by Hollywood. It was those who have minded a lot about that. Locked in a who dreamed of a different world: Scotty on his Gibson and the This point is great! There are girls and cars and money for the almost as if he knew this was his last chance dreamed of a dreadful cycle of addiction. Pills to sleep, bass beat relentlessly evoking the Memphian railroads the boy first time and a house for mom and dad, and motorcycles and to re-establish his iconic status. different pills to wake up, pills to use the bathroom, was to travel; on the train that would take us all with him… amusement parks that would open all night just for him! There He closed with a specially written number pills for his glaucoma, pills for his head… 19-year-old Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time on one of is a gold Cadillac! And there is Graceland! (The Colonel was still holding out for a world. A recently auctioned Bible belonging to these first tours and recollected: “His energy was incredible, his Graceland. His sanctuary and his prison. A gilded prince carol). Martin Luther King had died in Elvis, given to him by his aunt on his 21st instinct was just amazing. ... I just didn’t know what to make of trapped in his golden tower; for when the collective imagination Memphis in April of that year. Bobby Kennedy had died in birthday, has an inscription in the back in Elvis’s own hand: it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare creates a mass fantasy about the magnetic force of the icon, what June. There were race riots and Vietnam and unrest. Elvis, “To judge a man by his weakest link or deed is like judging the it.” Bob Dylan later recalled that, on first listening to Elvis, he happens to the person behind the icon? Elvis Presley found avowedly apolitical, decided to close with ‘If I Can Dream’, a power of the ocean by one wave”. Did he ever hear ‘My Baby and his friends felt ‘like (they) were bustin’ outta jail’. himself in the rigid grip of what ‘Elvis Presley’ was supposed to paean to brotherly love and peace. Unabashedly emotional but Left Me’ and ache to sing again with that verve and excitement? So. That reason would be enough were it not also augmented be. How could anyone rise above being the most famous man not sentimental, the song drew a powerhouse performance from Did he long to convey that mystery, that hope? by one important point. These songs were, by and large, black in the world? And what do you do when you know you can’t? Elvis who showed beyond measure of a doubt that the skinny, Yes, he probably did. songs. In recording them, in singing them live on national Roll forward to 1968. Reason number two to recognise the shy kid with a high, wailing voice had matured, grown and His finale had more than a touch of the Southern Gothic television, in getting banned for lascivious movements, Elvis iconic status of Elvis Presley: become a man. about it. This ‘elegant young roughneck’ who began life in was showing racist white America what it feared most: an Between 1956 and 1968, Elvis Presley completed his two F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong in his assertion that there are a two-roomed shack, born in the darkest moments of The interracial future. This was a world in which public toilets, years Army Service, lost his adored mother, made over 30 no second acts in American lives. There were high profile Great Depression, and, by virtue of a talent which still defies swimming pools and schools were still fiercely segregated. Elvis films of diminishing worth, made hastily assembled albums of engagements in Vegas and nationwide tours followed (not via understanding, transformed his life and became the most on National Television singing about Long Tall Sally who ‘likes varying quality, got married and had a child. His output was railroads and Cadillacs, but this time in his own jet, the Lisa famous man on the planet, died alone in a big house, aged 42. to ball’? White America froze in horror (for they guessed to what not as woeful as some critics would claim: his two-and-a-third- Marie) And yet. This was the beginning of his end. This was Zelda Fitzgerald: “Oh, the secret life of man and woman—dreaming he alluded) and condemned a white boy as ‘trash’ for singing octave-range voice had matured and he made some terrific the point when the myth took its final shape: the icon in a white how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or ‘nigger music’. Ministers denounced Elvis from pulpits. Even records during this time, but they were overshadowed by a jumpsuit, studded with rhinestones, a cape spread behind him. even ourselves…” We felt that, when we saw Elvis, we became seeing Elvis singing his beloved gospel music on the Ed Sullivan Hollywood career that no-one really cared about. He was still A supernatural force. A god. The rings and the medallions. better, dreamed further and longed for more…. And it is, in Show in front of 52 million viewers didn’t allay the suspicions famous, but in a new era of guitar groups, singer-songwriters The huge sunglasses which hid increasingly bloodshot and the end, only his voice that counts. That instantly recognisable, that he was the very embodiment of the moral breakdown of and nude musicals, Elvis was considered rather a quaint relic puffy eyes. The increasingly lurid tales of girls and cars and iconic Southern drawl transformed into music and beauty that American youth. of the 1950s. motorcycles and amusement parks that would open all night would forever, in the words of Peter Guralnick, “proclaim the just for him and Graceland and more million selling records. dawning of a new day”.

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 32 www.pgs.org.uk 33 when ‘He Was The One Who Left’: GUITAR AN ICON WITH FEET Jimi Hendrix Jimi Hendrix arrived in London in 1966 and took the music OF CLAY? scene there by storm. And in 1966 the world of music was pretty much centred on London. He entered a scene that was vibrant: ‘I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes, a lively mixture of pop, folk, blues, jazz and the avant garde, And just for that one moment I could be you... and there were so many talented players in the town that it was Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside ODS almost embarrassing how musically rich an environment it was. my shoes – You’d know what a drag it is to see you...’ g But when Hendrix joined in with others on stage, everyone Bob Dylan, Positively 4th Street, 1965 roamed present realised that everything had changed. Here was a man both men and women adored, whose fluency on the guitar was Although, at the time, my teen friends and I believed the earth awesome, who could play solos --- really, solos! --- with his teeth, that this wonderfully scorching diatribe was directed at who was tall (he had been in the US Army's 101st Airborne Joan Baez, his ex-lover, Wikipedia suggests that the song Division) and who looked like something beamed down from was intended to ridicule Greenwich Village (New York) another planet. residents who criticized Dylan for his departure from He showed a new vision of the future, one in which anyone traditional folk styles towards the electric guitar and could make an impact, make a fresh start. From his point of rock music. Many of the Greenwich Village folk crowd, view, London was extraordinary: it was full of young people who had been good friends of Dylan's, took offence and devoted to the blues, a place where he could roam freely, the assumed that the song carried personal references. Izzy colour of his skin being exotic rather than, as in the States, a Young, who ran the Village Folklore Center, had this to mark of second-class citizenry (at best). His music was exciting, say of the accusation: free, and he could develop it as he wished. He dressed in King's "At least five hundred came into my place [the Folklore Center].. Road military finery, groomed his hair into an Afro, as did the and asked if it was about me. I don't know if it was, but it was two white English musicians that formed, with him, The Jimi unfair.… Dylan comes in and takes from us, uses my resources, Hendrix Experience. then he leaves and he gets bitter. He writes a bitter song. He was Their blend of power blues took to stages across the world, the one who left." with songs such as 'All Along The Watchtower', 'Hey Joe' and I recall the song sending electric shocks through me – 'Voodoo Child'. This was the era of huge festivals, and, at the very opposite of a love song, but with a gutful of Monterey, Woodstock and, a few weeks before his death, the emotion. I loved it yet hated it. It wasn’t what I thought Isle of Wight, Hendrix became THE name. Previously ignored Dylan did. It’s hard to describe how much the pop stars in the States, his new-found fame also made him a figure who of the ‘60s meant to me then – objects of passionate could be central to the world of emergent Black Power, and he awe and romantic obsession. Dylan was just one of Mr Mark Richardson “Icon see clearly now (the rain has gone)." increasingly played with other black musicians. The group, The my heroes who, over the years to come, followed their ENGLISH DEPARTMENT So sang Johnny Nash in 1972. Well, almost. Band of Gypsies, allowed him to explore harder edged material, own twisting path through places that seemed to me while more and more musicians from beyond the narrow world puzzling, outrageous and at times heart-breaking. As we of blues wanted to play with him: funk, fusion and jazz. reached the end of the colourful ‘60s and entered the The world of music in the Sixties was also intertwined with the ‘70s, Dylan wasn’t the other-worldly popster of peace; world of drugs, and Hendrix was an enthusiastic link between Simon and Garfunkel rowed and broke up; even the the two. His death, at the age of 27, which also set the tone for Beatles broke up – how could that be? George Harrison bviously he wasn't talking about icons at come into being; they didn't represent it. If they are an icon, a series of early and untimely deaths by famous musicians, was wrote some banal songs and let the sumptuous Patti all, and I am, and it's a poor link, but there they are an icon of themselves. likely the result of his persistent drug use. Boyd go – to Eric Clapton; Davy Jones of the Monkees you go. I was thinking about this when But there is someone who I think is an icon, who represents a So, he represented the excitement, liberation and sexuality of didn’t even play an instrument! I went through a stage the brilliant idea of having an icon-themed free-spirited, modern age, who was a one-off but was also very the Flower Power age, the emergence of a new sense of black of cynicism about all these idols who had, in my teenage edition of Portsmouth Point came up, well, much part of his time. Once upon a time, guitar gods roamed the identity, new politics, strange new clothes and hair styles, pop, eyes, fallen from grace – from a pedestal that I myself not thinking about Mr Nash but about Earth. They had names such as Eric, Jeff, Jimmy, Davey. They blues and hard rock, festivals, living fast and dying young. had constructed for them. Meanwhile, they went on Owho might be worth highlighting as iconic in the music world. learnt from one another, audiences sat at their feet, and they played Iconic indeed. living their lives, going to places we might not like or As I haven't yet talked about the Beatles, and I have been re- --- oh how they played. Such was their legend that one, famously, Apart from those tracks mentioned earlier, the stand- understand; music went on doing what it does. Looking listening to Revolver (which is amazing, by the way), I thought was likened to God, much to his embarrassment. But I speak not out performance for me is with the aforementioned Band of at the survivors now (and those who died too young) I of writing about them and that record. But, to be honest, the of them but of the one who was to come after them, the one who Gypsies, in a song that acknowledges those killed in the raging am awestruck again, this time by the often inelegant but Beatles aren't iconic. For me, an icon represents something else: ruled them all, the one who bound them...OK, enough of that. I'm Vietnam War and also deaths in American universities during somehow heroic shape of their lives. Looking back, it that poster of Che Guevara, for instance, is an icon of the radical getting carried away here. But that is what it seemed like, almost, anti-war protests. 'Machine Gun' is a tour-de-force event, full of seems I was the one who left ... chic aspect of the 60s, a nod towards revolution while also filling and why perhaps a man first named Johnny, then re-christened his trademark feedback, lyrical power and sweetness. What he up a space on the wall of a student bedsit. The Beatles, though, James, before becoming Jimmy and, having found his way from could do with a guitar still baffles guitarists even today. Listen to Ms Joanna Godfree WERE an event, not an icon of an event. They made an age New York to London, finally Jimi, and, ultimately, an icon. it. It's an Experience. LIBRARIAN

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 34 www.pgs.org.uk 35 the intellectuals of New York like an exciting dream, a hint of to what was to come. During this period, he met the other men who would form the ‘beat endless generation’. It was Allen Ginsberg who once said, during the obscenity trial for “Howl”, “There is no beat generation, it’s just a bunch of guys trying to get published”. The origin of the term ‘beat generation’ lies with Kerouac himself, but it was John Clellon Holmes, who published the first beat novel Go in 1952, that propagated the term by writing an article for The New York Times titled “This is the Beat Generation”. KEROUAC As well as Holmes, Kerouac met and mixed with Benjamin Schofield such famous characters as: William Burroughs, year 12 "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century";8 the aforementioned, Above: Kerouac (centre) with Allen Ginsberg (left). wondrous, mad poet Allen Ginsberg; Right: In the navy and the infamous, barely-veiled star Before the Road of On the Road, Neal Cassady. It was from 1947 to 1949 that Kerouac “Can any praise be worthy of the Lord’s majesty? How magnificent his said he ‘decided to become a writer at age seventeen’.4 When sick bay, and then on to psychiatric wrote The Town and the City, still strength! How inscrutable his wisdom! Man is one of your creatures, Lord, he reached Columbia, Jack soon grew tired of university life. observation for over two months. influenced Wolfe’s sentimentally and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the After he broke his collarbone in a football injury, he began to Bounced around, knocked from styled prose, opening with a florid sign of his own sin, to remind him that you thwart the proud.” Book 1 – St read Thomas Wolfe, the sadly forgotten, short-lived writer of side to side, city to sea to town to city, description of the town and avid Augustine, Confessions of a Sinner. You Can’t Go Home Again; Kerouac’s reading of both Wolfe’s Kerouac must have felt disturbed – a interlinking of characters; even To know where Kerouac came from is to understand him. dense, highly descriptive prose and the work of Jack London genuinely sensitive, poetic soul that the title was reminiscent of Wolfe’s Kerouac’s life began in a small industrial Franco-Canuck town awakened wanderlust. Soon afterwards, he quit the football couldn’t stand the jack-boot of the The Web and the Rock. With the nestled on the top of America – Lowell, Massachusetts. He team because of disagreements with the coach and walked out military. His psychological profile was coming of Neal Cassady, Kerouac learned to fear God from a young age, taught by Jesuit priests of the university itself. Too many hours spent in the old bars nearly 150 pages long, the doctors found the liberation to move on to at the local Catholic school. When he had his first confession, a of New York with the young bards of New York had disrupted finding that a "neuropsychiatric his own devised style of writing: vision of God came to tell him that he had a good soul, that he his work, not to mention his avid reading of Joyce, Dostoevsky examination disclosed auditory Spontaneous Prose, inspired by would suffer in his life and die in pain and horror, but would, and Céline in preference to the writers he was supposed to be hallucinations, ideas of suicide, and Cassady’s energy, vibrancy and in the end, have salvation1. studying. While in the immortal opening lines of Road, Kerouac a rambling, grandiose, philosophical determination to do, to be, to live, He and his family were all traumatised greatly by the death of states how his life on the road began with Dean Moriarty, it manner." Diagnosed with dementia bouncing from coast to coast with no his older brother, Gerard, aged just 9, when Jack, was merely was in 1942 that his life began to lose the strict rigour of school, praecox (schizophrenia) before being space for punctuation or paragraphs 4. He would later detail this early affecting period in his “most Catechism and college. After the bombing of Pearl Harbour he transferred to the psyche ward, in his notebooks already bursting serious sad and true book”.2 He was raised under Catholic guilt signed up for a brief stint in the Merchant Marine, taking one his discharge was inevitable. This with writing. And so the book that by an eternally grieving family, after Gerard’s death, his mother trip to Greenland. This trip is most likely that which is described was a very curious period in his inspired a generation was born. turning more fervently to God and his father to the bottle, in The Sea is My Brother, posthumously published in 2011 under life, foreshadowing the restlessness leaving poor ‘Ti Jean’ (Little Jack, as his family called him) stuck the same title along with a collection of other early writings, and to come and really showing the in the middle. correspondence with Sebastian Sampas. Kerouac described this disturbed nature of his soul. We know He grew into writing early, first pretending to write articles early work as being about "man’s simple revolt from society as all this now only thanks to the disclosure of information by the in his father’s printing store as papa Kerouac worked, prolific it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2005.6 throughout adolescence, as he himself attested, writing his first However, Kerouac reportedly viewed the work as a failure, One quotation from his psychiatrists struck me: ‘his medical 1 Amburn, Ellis, Subterranean Kerouac: novel at 11 and innumerable mystery tales.3 In high school, calling it a "crock [of shit] as literature".5 history from the Bethesda Naval Hospital notes that he became The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, p. 13-14, MacMillan 1999 Jack flourished, becoming a football star, performing well After his spell on the waves, he returned to New York and, at bored easily and lacked focus. He "impulsively left school 2 Visions of Gerard (Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard, Penguin, 1991 3 enough to gain scholarships to three universities, including the request of his football coach, re-joined Columbia. As was because he had nothing further to learn"’.7 Yet when he left the The Sea is my Brother, Jack Kerouac, Penguin 2011 4 Foreword to The Town and the City, Penguin Classics 2000 fateful Columbia, as well as reading much from an early age, destined to happen, he dropped out once more and, since he military and returned to New York, he began to learn more than 5 Bates, Stephen, ‘Kerouac’s Lost Debut Novel Published’ - in particular Hemingway and Saroyan. Reaching maturity was officially out of full time education, was drafted into the College ever could have taught him. For a period, he drifted in The Guardian, London, 25/11/2011: and developing as a writer, Kerouac surrounded himself with Navy in 1943. But, feeling the pull of the library more than that and out of the merchant marine, making voyages and staying Retrieved at www.guardian.co.uk, 12/6/2012) 6 www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2011/fall/kerouac.html other young writers and correspondents, in particular one of the drill sergeant, his time under orders was short-lived. He with his gang of friends when ashore; here, Kerouac began to 7 www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2011/fall/kerouac.html young poet, Sebastian Sampas, under whose influence Kerouac served only 10 days in boot camp before he was bounced to the solidify his relationship with Allen Ginsberg, dancing amongst 8 2003 Penguin Modern Classics edition of Junky

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PAU L

After On the Road, I read all the Kerouac I could, from (my ROBESON sister’s personal favourite) The Dharma Bums to the melancholic Big Sur, dancing back through the timeline of his life to Visions Mr Ben Charles of Cody. But there is one thing that pervades all of Kerouac’s DEPUTY HEADMASTER novels: a possessive, haunting Catholic guilt; even when he is filled by Buddhist satori, modern revelation, you can tell that deep down he longs to “go back to Childhood, just eat apples "The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my and read your Catechism – sit on a curbstone, the hell with choice. I had no alternative." Paul Robeson the hot lights of Hollywood”,9 a revolutionary writer, a poetic soul, but a conservative conscience. There was conflict in that aul Robeson was an African-American personality, which eventually tore him apart. athlete, singer, actor, and advocate for the civil Nearly all of his books were semi-autobiographical; he wrote rights of people around the world. He rose them with the intention of one day compounding each individual to prominence at a time when segregation Neal Cassady, 1955 novel into one great saga, The Legend of Duluoz. It was his dream between black and white people was legal in the to settle down from the life of going out getting drunk, beaten United States and African-Americans were still up, broken, every night, to collate his marvellous work and Pvulnerable to being lynched by racist mobs, especially (but not re-insert the correct names to each book, making a consistent exclusively) in the Deep South. Meeting Jack timeline of his life. Unfortunately, he died too soon. At the age Robeson came from a poor but aspirant family. His of just forty seven, he sat down to his longest novel yet, about father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Kerouac was a prolific writer. In his brief 47 years crawling his father’s printing shop in Lowell; he had been working on it Lincoln University, and his mother came from an abolitionist through the dust, he penned at least 33 books, recorded three for years already. A glass of whiskey in his hand, his third wife Quaker family. Robeson's family knew both hardship and albums of his poetry, and filled countless notebooks with magical Stella just round the corner, he began to write. the determination to rise above it. His own life was no less and worked tirelessly for friendship and respect between the scribbling. But it was in one book that he inspired generation The illness came on quickly; feeling sick was a common challenging. In 1915, he won a four-year academic scholarship U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. In 1945, he headed an organisation after generation with the documentation of his own. occurrence, considering how much he drank; just making it to Rutgers University. Despite suffering racism and violence that challenged President Truman to support an anti-lynching The Kerouac I know first met me when I was at a very to the bathroom, he began to vomit blood. He yelled, “Stella, from teammates, he was twice named to the All-American law. In the late 1940s, when black dissent was still scarcely susceptible age: fresh-faced 14. Just reaching maturity, full of I’m bleeding.” After being convinced to go to the hospital, he Football Team. At Columbia Law School, Robeson met and tolerated in the U.S.A., Robeson openly questioned why books already read, and held firm by the (mostly imagined) continued to bleed profusely. An operation with the aim to tie married Eslanda Cordoza Goode, who was to become the first African Americans should fight in the army of a government claustrophobia that limits all teenagers. I was the typical case, the burst blood vessels failed, as the liver damage prevented the black woman to head a pathology laboratory. He took his first that tolerated racism. Because of his outspoken words, he was introduced by my older sister, who had no knowledge that blood from clotting. He died at 5:15 the next morning. job with a law firm, but left when a white secretary refused to accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee good literature is more polluting than good music; dreams of As is so often the case with our idols, it has a tragic ending. take dictation from him. (HUAC) of being a Communist. Robeson saw this as an America, climbing out of my window and stripping myself of The Legend... was never finished; now every few years the owners His career was set to follow his artistic talents in theatre and attack on the democratic rights of everyone who worked for responsibilities began, fantasies of fantastical immortal Dean of his estate try to publish some new material with a curious music to promote African and African-American history and international friendship and for equality. The accusation nearly and grinning Sal. I was enticed, trapped by this mythical vision, agenda and we see more of Kerouac’s worse writing, preceded culture in particular. Perhaps best known for his performance ended his career. Eighty of his concerts were cancelled, and, in a false reading. by endless introductions from dull academics that only serve in 1928 of the song, “Ol’ Man River” from the musical Showboat, 1949, two interracial outdoor concerts in Peekskill, New York In reality, Road couldn’t be further from the vision "generation to obscure the truth behind his words. He was the man that Robeson used his deep baritone voice to promote Black were attacked by racist mobs. Robeson responded, "I'm going after generation" fixated upon. It is a novel about the purity of inspired generation after generation, but hated every second spirituals, including my personal favourite “Deep River”, and to sing wherever the people want me to sing... and I won't be the road and its sorrow; about the true pathos behind rushing in the spotlight; teenagers would burst in on him, desperate to to benefit the labour and social movements of his time. He frightened by crosses burning in Peekskill or anywhere else." back and forth across 3,000 miles of spiritual wasteland with no meet the Sal Paradise of Road and only find a tragic 37 year old sang for peace and justice throughout the U.S.A., Europe, In 1950, the U.S. revoked Robeson's passport, leading to an stops in between – just hurry and rush and speed as if chased, trying to write in peace. the U.S.S.R. and Africa and became known as a citizen of eight-year battle to re-secure it and to travel again. During possessed by inner demons and a wish to go onwards. His death marked a change in the world; Cassady, the the world, equally comfortable with the people of Moscow, those years, Robeson studied Chinese, met with Albert immortal Dean Moriarty, had passed away only the year before. Nairobi, and Harlem. Einstein to discuss the prospects for world peace, published By the time of Kerouac’s death, Ginsberg had written his best In London, in 1930, Robeson earned international acclaim his autobiography, Here I Stand, and sang at Carnegie Hall. poetry; he continued on resolutely reading “Howl” in every for his lead role in Othello, opposite Dame Peggy Ashcroft’s In 1957, he made a transatlantic radiophone broadcast from state, as he had said he would. William Burroughs dodged Desdemona. He received 20 curtain calls on the opening night New York to show solidarity with coal miners in Wales. In death many a time, surviving 15 years as a junky, killing his own and later went on to reprise the role all over the world, never 1960, Robeson made his last concert tour to New Zealand and wife in a William Tell incident, and multitudinous other small losing his pleasure in it. For Robeson, Othello was more than Australia. In ill health, he retired from public life in 1963. He insanities; he later became Godfather to the punk movement. just a part: it was, as he once said, "killing two birds with one died on January 23, 1976, aged 77. Endless ‘beats’ emerged from the woodwork, the second stone. I'm acting and I'm talking for the negroes in the way generation ‘cool beats’, who had known Kerouac in passing, only Shakespeare can." whom he had hated, and therefore gave themselves free rein to During the 1940s, Robeson continued to perform and to References write a book about the magical man. The world turned on its speak out against racism and for peace. He was a champion Paul Robeson, Martin Duberman, 1988 axis and Kerouac slumbered under a gravestone labelled “Ti of working people and spoke at strike rallies and labour Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement, Sheila Tully Boyle Jean”, the name his family called him – not King of the Beats, festivals worldwide. As a passionate believer in international and Andrew Bunie, 2001 9 Big Sur, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Classics 2000 not Sal Paradise, just “Ti Jean”. cooperation, Robeson protested against the growing Cold War Paul Robeson Speaks, Philip S. Foner, 1982

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 38 www.pgs.org.uk 39 change. He offers the patients a kind of therapy that they had smoke when they want. McMurphy would be seen as an ideal probably never experienced before: empowerment. He instructs role model to them as he is of the same gender and he appears one patient to drive the boat, saying ‘You’re not a goddamn to be more in control of his actions. loony now, you’re a fisherman’. At first this does seem like Token economy is another Learning Approach idea that is another selfish act, as he retires to the cabin with Candy, yet employed in the film, a way of rewarding desirable behaviour is there more to this scene than meets the eye? By empowering and punishing undesirable behaviour by giving or taking away icon or the patients, he has got them to question their sense of identity. treats. In the film, the nurses reward good behaviour by giving He describes them all as doctors, singling out Cheswick as a the patients a cigarette; to punish bad behaviour they refuse to ‘famous doctor’, which leads to the latter cleaning his glasses, give the patients a cigarette. However, following McMurphy’s the first time he has completed this action for the duration of arrival, Cheswick suffers an extreme outburst, in which he calls the film. Although McMurphy’s statement is a means to an Nurse Ratchet out on the reward system. He shouts ‘What PSYcHOPATH end (their getting the boat) he, perhaps unknowingly, helps gives you the right to keep our cigarettes piled up on your desk ? Cheswick in a way no one else has done, giving him a sense and only give them out when you feel like it… I ain’t no little A PSYCHOPATH IS DEFINED AS BEING 'A PERSON WITH of identity and pride. This leads to a dilemma: is McMurphy kid, you can’t reward me with cigarettes like cookies’. Before, Charlotte Rowden AN ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER, MANIFESTED as callous and unemotional as one might think? I would argue Cheswick’s character could be described as timid, especially year 13 IN AGGRESSIVE, PERVERTED, CRIMINAL, OR AMORAL that he, in fact, is. I believe McMurphy is smart, but his lack towards Nurse Ratchet, but as a result of McMurphy’s lead, BEHAVIOUR WITHOUT EMPATHY OR REMORSE'. of remorse towards his actions, particularly towards the fifteen- the token economy system has backfired, as Cheswick begins year-old girl, overshadows this and I think that he is as selfish to feel that a grown man such as himself should not be treated and psychopathic as first meets the eye. like an infant. The Social Approach is key in understanding some scenes Freud’s psychodynamic theories could also be applied, in the film. Group membership could be used to explain the particularly during McMurphy’s first treatment session, during apparent divide between the patients and the nurses. The which he is seen to chain smoke and chew gum. Freud would patients could see themselves as belonging argue that these manifestations are a clear to one group, the in-group, and the nurses indication that McMurphy is fixated on belonging to another group, the out- The patients the oral stage of development, spanning group. This sense of divide is likely to from birth to the age of two years old; he mean the patients will see themselves as see McMurphy would note that the child will experience being similar to McMurphy and so follow as a role model, problems later in life if they are neglected his lead as he is a natural, charismatic imitating his (insufficiently fed) or over-protected leader. By seeing McMurphy as an (over fed) during this time. McMurphy’s authority figure, the patients may defer behaviour. personality traits, sarcasm and verbal responsibility to him for their actions, as hostility, for example, might indicate that described in Milgram’s Agency Theory. Milgram would argue he was neglected during this stage. His aggression and sexual that the patients are making the agentic shift and beginning to drive (libido) would indicate that the id part of his personality is act as ‘agents’ of McMurphy and are therefore not thinking more in control. His previous convictions (five arrests for assault Jack Nicholson as McMurphy for themselves, blindly following McMurphy although they and statutory rape (after having sex with a fifteen year old)) probably know and understand that this could lead to trouble. also support this. If his personality were correctly balanced, the This can also be seen in the group therapy session in which superego (morality) and the ego (reality) would prevent the id McMurphy riles the patients up, not fully understanding from taking control in these situations. His lack of remorse also what the consequences of his actions will be, leading to a fight indicates that the id is more in control as he is fulfilling his between the patients and the nurses over the cigarettes. During selfish desires and does not care about the consequences, thus here is no question that Randle “Mac” the fishing boat scene, he empowers each the argument, Cheswick is seen to completely ignore Nurse indicating that he is a psychopathic character. McMurphy, the protagonist of Milos of the patients, leading them to idolise him. Ratchet’s order for him to sit down, but, when McMurphy In conclusion, multiple approaches from psychology can Forman’s film, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s This scene, in particular, is key in outlining tells him to sit, he sits immediately, highlighting the change in be used to analyse McMurphy’s apparent personality traits. Nest (based on Ken Kesey’s novel), fits the psychological themes. authority. This scene climaxes to the point where one patient is However, what is more difficult to determine is whether second part of this definition. However, In this scene, McMurphy takes the dragged off, whilst McMurphy breaks a window to try to get McMurphy can be deemed iconic. True, for the patients of the the underlying question behind the film patients out to sea. Milgram would describe Cheswick some cigarettes to calm the situation. mental ward, his overt rebellion against Nurse Ratchet may is whether McMurphy does have some his actions as putting a ‘foot in the door’; Some theories of the Learning Approach are also tackled be perceived as iconic, but I find it impossible to ignore his sort of antisocial personality disorder McMurphy feels the need to up the ante in the film. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory could be used to lack of remorse for what he has done. I believe he remains a or if he is indeed just evil. He pleads each time. At first, this seems like an extreme explain the change in behaviours of the patients. According to psychopath rather than an icon. insanity in order to escape labour duties psychopathic act, as he is clearly exploiting this theory, the patients would see McMurphy as a role model, in prison but is there more to it? Some and endangering others for his own thus imitating his behaviour. This is seen particularly when they would argue that McMurphy attains amusement, but, as this scene unfolds, the begin to challenge the nurses over certain issues, such as being T the status of icon; for example, during audience’s perception of McMurphy might locked out of their rooms during the day and not allowed to portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 40 www.pgs.org.uk 41 LEARNING is not compulsory... neither is SURVIVAL

Mr Josh Brown In A series of Deming went on to advise some of the most successful BUSINESS STUDIES programmes still companies. His approach challenged senior management. He AND ECONOMICS shown on cable TV turned down powerful companies if the top echelons were not entitled "from the prepared to accept advice or participate with lower level staff. deming library", an Despite heavy demand on his time, he worked on his own from elderly strategist an office in an unpretentious suburban home. guides american The measure of his ideas can be seen in his success at Ford, middle managers the first US Company to seek his help. Deming’s guidance through training turned around a company in difficulty overshadowing arch- designed to make rival General Motors. them efficiently Ironically, Deming pioneered a holistic, human-centred and creative. This is approach to work and production that played down numerical w Edwards deming concepts of success and eschewed short-term profit gains. (1900-1993), pioneer and “Total Quality Management”, as this became known, favours leading personality workforce participation, a culture rather than a set of procedures of the "quality and what the Japanese call “Kaizen”, continuous human-led revolution" in improvement rather than dramatic management-designed business. programmes. “A manager of people” he wrote, “needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, (and is) the responsibility of management.” Faith in numerical appraisal and league tables, which runs statistician, Deming was enlisted by through education, health and policing, would have alarmed the Japanese government to design the Deming, for whom statistical processes were a tool not dogma. post-war census. This led to requests to Amongst his famous “14 Key Points” are: “Cease dependence on help companies like Sony devise means inspection to achieve quality”; “Drive out fear, so everyone may work to measure and improve efficiency. He effectively”; “Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals and taught business leaders statistical process substitute with leadership”; and “Remove barriers that rob people of pride controlA methods, leading to unprecedented economic growth. in their work, including the annual rating or merit system.” They remain Manufacturers achieved unheard-of levels of quality and challenging and revolutionary ideas. productivity which, combined with lowered costs, created Watching the TV series, it is clear that the elderly Deming international demand for their products. (he continued to work into his 90s) was frail and unwell; his A modest, generous man, Deming refused royalties for cancer needed morphine to enable him to continue. When his this work, leading the Japanese government to establish the assistants urged him stop, he explained, “The purpose of life is prestigious Deming Prize in his honour. He was devout, a to make the world a better place!” He died in his sleep, aged 93. family man, wrote poetry, studied music, composed and played Shortly before, his nurse sought his advice; “Life is precious” he several instruments told her “never be afraid to say I love you”. W Edwards Deming

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 42 www.pgs.org.uk 43 THE ICONIC

spirit, during the 2012 Paralympics we had “Bladegate”, when Oscar Pistorius questioned the size of the running blade of fellow- amputee sprinter Alan Oliveira on live television when the former unexpectedly caught up and narrowly overtook him before the finishing line at the Men's 200 metres T44 final. Finally, perhaps the greatest accolade of any cultural or linguistic export from the USA is when it comes to be accepted in the Middle East and Arab world. That happened back in 2006 when Algerian football fans were up in arms about not being able to watch the World Cup unless they subscribed to Mr Simon Lemieux The Americans have done many things to President Nixon resigns, as a result of the Watergate scandal ART - a Saudi company which bought up the rights to World HEAD OF HISTORY the English language, few of them positive. Cup footage for the region and thereby put the coverage outside and politics Different spellings (usually shorter, so the reach of most ordinary Algerians. It became known (you’ve ةحيضف باوبأ ىلع رئازجلا ,easier for them to remember correctly?), comments quickly seized on by the media. He then had to go guessed it) as ART-gate or, in Arabic !"تياغ-يترآ" slang words like “ace” and “loser” and on to describe himself as a ‘penitent sinner’, not something that different words where no replacement was Nixon ever entirely got round to doing. Still, at least that had So where does that leave us? One political scandal and cover- needed – what’s wrong with a nappy rather something of political substance, unlike “Biscuitgate”, the 2009 up 40 years ago left as its legacy one of the most widely used than a diaper? media controversy over Gordon Brown's reluctance to declare and recognisable suffixes in the media today (almost inevitably, his "favourite biscuit" when answering questions on Mumsnet. we have even had “Gategate” in the last few weeks, following 24 hours later, he owned up to having a preference for chocolate (former) Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell’s altercation with a police ones. A rather vague response, I thought, and, surely, as a officer at the Downing Street security gate). Anything dodgy, ut, still, there are exceptions, those rare United States, in 2000. More recently, American politicians have Scottish MP he should have answered “shortbread”. underhand or unfair is thus re-packaged with its very own “— linguistic gifts where US English has made a given us “Weinergate”, when Congressman Anthony Weiner But use of the term is not just restricted to politicians. The gate” whether or not it is uncovered by serious and sustained welcome positive contribution to our mother was accused of sending lewd photographs via Twitter, his own Royal Family have also had the suffix associated with them. investigative journalism. The final thing to consider is a parlour tongue. The rest of this piece is about just such name possessing a euphemistic quality that made “Weinergate” Back in the cold, dark days of the Charles (Prince of Wales) game: what would we call it in the unlikely event that scandal an example. a doubly appropriate term. and Diana marital problems, there was “Squidgygate” (or hit PGS? My musings are below, if you can think of something We have to go back 40 years, to the US But the –gate suffix has not just stayed on the other side of “Dianagate”), which referred to the telephone conversations better (but not slanderous or grossly offensive) why not put it BPresidential election of 1972. In June that year, 5 men broke into the pond. British politics has also experienced its own examples. between Diana and a close friend, James Gilbey, and to the on the Portsmouth Point blog? the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Washington DC, There was “Betsygate”, back in 2004, to do with allegations controversy surrounding how those conversations were an office complex known as Watergate. The rest, as they say, is that former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith had recorded. During the calls, Gilbey affectionately called Diana Cambridgegate – too vague and general, more East Anglia History. As a result of the ensuing scandal, in part uncovered by put his wife Betsy on his payroll, without her actually doing by the names "Squidgy" and "Squidge". Not so much political than Portsmouth. the investigative journalism of two Washington Post reporters, Bob any work. It has also extended beyond direct political scandal cover-up and scandal, more just celeb tittle-tattle. HighStreetgate – sounds like, well, a real gate Woodward and Carl Bernstein, President Nixon was forced to to more general notations of unpopular policies, witness for The suffix has however travelled far beyond the English Highgate – too much like a North London cemetery resign in disgrace as the USA endured its worst political scandal example “Pastygate” in March/April 2012 focused around the speaking world, as the 2012 “Porngate” scandal in India proves; Priorygate – a bit too personal for decades. The whole episode revealed a murky world of wire- planned taxation of hot snacks, such as pasties, by the Coalition three members of the Karnataka Legislative Assembly in India Burkinshawgate or Lemieuxgate – too personal (and also too tapping, cover-ups and blatant lying by those who should have Government, where ministers were said to be out of touch with had to resign from their offices after accusations that they cumbersome) known better but clearly thought they could get away with it. the eating habits of ordinary people, and of course, harming the watched pornography during government proceedings. The Portmuthiangate – too cumbersome What has this got to do with language, though? profit margins of the baking industry exemplified by Greggs! world of sport has been affected, too, my personal favourite Smithgate – sounds like a cross between two London wholesale In short, an obvious, but perhaps under-recognised, outcome, The suffix has also been applied to unwise words muttered in being “Toiletgate”, which concerned the allegations made by food markets was the frequent use of the “–gate” suffix to all kinds of scandals, private and that are distinctly ‘off-message’. Who remembers the Bulgarian chess player Veselin Topalov, during The World Lattergate – trips off the tongue but a bit too obscure not just political ones. So what follows is my selection of some “Bigotgate”, sometimes known as “Biddygate”, of fleeting Chess Championship 2006, that his Russian opponent, Vladimir of the best. notoriety during the 2010 General Election campaign? Then- Kramnik, was visiting the toilet suspiciously frequently during Best not to tempt fate, then, and just enjoy the ‘gates’ that political Particularly appropriate, given the fact that Nixon’s successor Prime Minister Gordon Brown privately described a 65-year-old, games. The allegations were never proven, and were widely scandal has left to us, that have lovingly been manipulated as US President, Gerald Ford, gave Nixon a full pardon in 1976, lifelong Labour voter in Rochdale, Gillian Duffy, as a bigoted viewed within the international chess playing community as an and re-worded by journalists ever since. But, if you do have is “Pardongate”, the controversy surrounding Bill Clinton's woman when she had politely raised the issue of immigration. act of gamesmanship on the part of Topalov to distract Kramnik suggestions, you know where to post them and thus perhaps pardons of 140 people on his last day in office as President of the Unfortunately for GB, the microphone was switched on and his at a time when he was ahead in the match. In the true Olympic pre-empt the headline writers of tomorrow.

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 44 www.pgs.org.uk 45

Mr John Sadden "Right now... ha ha ha ha ha... I am an antichrist, ARCHIVIST I am an anarchist...” Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK, 1976

“I don't want to know about what the rich are doing, I don't want to go to where the rich are going, They think they're so clever, they think they're so right, But the truth is only known by gutter snipes” The Clash, Garageband, 1977

healthily virulent contempt for racism and for politicians (of all parties), big business and corporations. Their lyrics spoke of tower-block, rat-trap living, dead-end jobs, being stone-broke and utterly insignificant. “We’re hoping to change quite a lot”, said 22-year-old bass guitarist Paul Simonon, who grew up in Brixton. “We’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist and we’re pro-creative”, explained Strummer. If this explanation Left page: The Clash perform at the Rock Against Racism Rally, Hackney, 1978. did little to explain, Strummer’s musical and lyrical creativity Above (centre): Thatcher was the first British politician to fully recognise the power of personal

clash spoke angrily and bitterly for itself. image in gaining votes. She had her teeth capped, her voice trained and developed The Rock Against Racism campaign had been prompted by Eric a reputation for very visibly visiting disaster victims. Clapton’s comments at a gig in Birmingham when he professed Above (right): The Clash: Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. his support for the racist Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s policy of the repatriation of ethnic minorities. It was also a reaction to the rising popularity of the white supremacist National Front (precursors of the current British National Party The lyrics refer to swinging truncheons, the Spanish Republican and English Defence League). The Clash were effective leaders poet Lorca, the dangers of untrammelled capitalism, William of the fight-back and an estimated 100,000 people came to see Blake, globalisation, fascism, nuclear apocalypse, revolution, the bands and show solidarity in the fight against racism. To rebellion and resistance. The musical influences include reggae, declare oneself as anti-racist in the 1970s was an invitation to ska, rock and roll, blues-rock and rockabilly. ridicule and worse. After London Calling it went downhill, with a few notable 17 December 1978. Saw the Clash perform at the Locarno, Arundel highlights along the way, like “Know Your Rights”, “Should I Street, Portsmouth. Stay or Should I Go”, “Straight to Hell” and “This is England”. The Clash covered a Junior Murvin reggae song, “Police The last, released in 1985, described “Thatcher’s decrepit and and Thieves”, which commented on police brutality. The true unwelcoming Britain (where) icy winds blow and violence is nature of the law had been brought home to us when we joined dished out on the street”. The miners had been defeated with a mass picket at a sweatshop in Brixton where immigrant the same violence tested outside that Brixton sweatshop, and women workers were paid a pittance for working round the the working class had lost their voice with the crushing of the e had first heard of the guitarist and lead vocalist, was the only punk in clock. They had tried to form a union to improve their pay and unions, aided by the media and one or two incompetent and Clash in 1976 from the first wave who called his stuff “protest songs”. conditions but the sweatshop owner sacked them all. Their case unpleasant union leaders. a friend who had Sunday, 30th April 1978. Went up to London for the was taken up by the trade union movement, and workers from The Clash expired in 1986 and Thatcher’s government betrayed his working Rock against Racism march and free gig in Hackney. all over the country came to support them. Thousands of white, continued its divisive and destructive policies, arguably sowing class, gutter-snipe The Anti-Nazi League put on a coach, and the Clash largely male, workers supporting black female workers stood the seeds of today’s recession by replacing real industry with roots and gone to uni performed the band’s first ever open-air gig. out as a beacon of hope in the racist, sexist seventies. So the service industries and a deregulated City, privatising industries Win London. We forgave him his treachery and The punk philosophy of the Clash was police extinguished it with brutality. We knew Dixon of Dock that belonged to us all (policies that “New Labour” embraced he brought back news of this exciting new punk summed up in a 1976 edition of Sniffin’ Glue, Green was a cosy fantasy, but this violence on peaceful pickets, with equal zeal in the 1990s). Thatcher spurned one-nation band in the summer holiday. a kitchen-table-top-produced rag that cost 25 largely executed by the paramilitary Special Patrol Group, was conservatism, supported anti-gay legislation, sucked up to Rupert The following year, the band’s debut album pence in the days when the only font in existence genuinely shocking. The nature and exercise of power was Murdoch, called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist”, supported some was released and it was confirmed that the was Times New Roman, pummelled from a tired explained succinctly in “White Riot”, written after Strummer of the worst offenders against human rights on the planet and Clash were something special. There could manual typewriter-ribbon revived with punk and Simenon were caught up in a race riot at the Notting Hill generally behaved in a way that was less than endearing. be more to punk than volume, two chords, spit. The interview was entitled “The Very Angry Carnival. Joe Strummer died in 2001 (may he rant in peace). The repetition, dressing up in dustbin liners, safety Clash”, and the conflict suggested by the new “All the power is in the hands, Of people rich enough to buy it”. dystopian anthem, “London’s Calling”, was co-opted to sell Jaguar pins and being obnoxious. The Clash shunned band’s name was a large part of its philosophy. 4 May 1979. Thatcher is elected Prime Minister following her Cars, promote British Airways, and featured in the last James the professed nihilism and anarchy of other The inspiration was a hatred of popular culture “swamping” comments about Asian and black immigration. Many National Bond film. Johnny Rotten sells Countrylife butter, rants like your bands like the Pistols. They were intelligent and of the 1970s (in particular, disco), a rejection of Front supporters switched their support to the Conservatives. mad old uncle on Question Time and remains “an antichrist”, albeit politically aware. Joe Strummer, lyricist, rhythm consumerism, a desire for “authenticity” and a 14 December 1979. The Clash release the double album London Calling in a parodic and cuddly way. And I am… an archivist. I CONO

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 46 www.pgs.org.uk 47 Mr David Doyle restore both economic and political stability as well as national which had as its goal the crippling of all British governments HEAD OF LATTER pride and respect to Great Britain. and capitalism itself. Left unchecked and unchallenged, Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, they would have cemented the idea of Britain being “the sick and became an MP in 1959, having spent many years fighting man of Europe”, as we were being called by our neighbours. the for the opportunity to stand as a Conservative candidate. Successive governments had been weak in challenging their Despite many rejections on account of her gender, she never power and, as was subsequently seen with the Blair and Brown gave up; forced to stand in a safe Labour seat, Dartford, she governments, recent Labour administrations have done their even managed to reduce the Labour majority sharply. Her utmost to restore the unions’ power. MT brought in legislation tenacity (which was a sign of what she would later bring to her to outlaw secondary picketing (in which anyone could walk out Premiership) finally paid off when she became Conservative MP on strike for a cause that had nothing to do with them), enforce for Finchley, which she represented for 33 years. MT served in secret ballots, remove state aid given to both unions and their Blessed Ted Heath’s government as the ‘token’ woman, in the position representatives and give back the right of self-determination to MARGARET of Minister for Education, in which role she showed her loyalty businesses and to their workers. to what was right and to her party: a policy to remove free The greatest opposition to these attempts was the Miners’ school milk to school children aged seven to eleven saw her Strike of 1984-85. I remember very clearly the elation and One of my earliest memories of childhood is sitting at our labelled in the tabloids as “Thatcher, milk snatcher”. However, relief of the vast majority in Manchester on hearing the news home in Stockport, on the outskirts of Manchester, in the it was a government policy, forced through by the Treasury, for that the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, had been defeated. He dark! This, sadly, was not some recreation of the dismal, which she alone bore the wrath of the country. As she herself had tried to use the hard-working miners for his own political distant Victorian era; rather, socialist Britain in the 1970s. stated in government papers released in 2001, purposes and lost. However, he had been she thought that the complete withdrawal incompetent enough to take on a government of free milk for school children of all ages She whose popularity was at a height after the would be too drastic a step and would arouse Falklands conflict, during one of the mildest more widespread public antagonism than the Believed in winters on record with stockpiles of coal at saving justified. Britain and in a 10-year peak. However, Heath’s ineptitude as PM and making it a Naturally, every great leader has her a second general election loss in October detractors, MT more than most. I am often 1974 led, ultimately, to his downfall and MT better place. confronted with inaccurate statements about lackouts were a regular dangerous for the country and embarrassing decided she could not allow the country to her time in office or about what she achieved. feature of the failed for its international reputation. The Labour continue on a downward spiral. Despite One great misconception is that the poor policies of the Labour Government of 1974- 1979 had proven one of reactions ranging from irritation to downright contempt from became poorer and the idea of there being such a thing as government (shored the most crisis-prone in British history, leading some of the more traditional Tory MPs of the day (echoing her “society” died. Utter nonsense! MT gave the majority of the up by the Lib-Lab pact) the country to a state of virtual bankruptcy in 1976 experiences when first seeking to stand as an MP), she won country a way out of the national poverty of the 1970s; she which had taken our when a collapse in the value of the currency the leadership election and, in February 1975, Britain had its renewed this country’s pride in itself and the respect nations Bcountry to the point of despair in on the foreign exchanges forced the first female leader of a mainstream political party. Many were around the world had for us. How many of the European a few short years. Prime Minister government to negotiate credit from surprised how comprehensive her victory was and any thought countries would have gone to war for one of its dependencies, James Callaghan had proved that the International Monetary Fund. of her being a stop-gap leader soon dissolved. as Britain did for The Falklands? the unions were in charge of the Before the days of 24/7 cable news, She was elected Prime Minister in 1979. She began cautiously, No leader is perfect but the reason that I have enormous country as firmly as they had been the internet and twitter, the daily not wanting to alienate those still loyal to Heath1 and knowing respect for Margaret Thatcher is that she believed in Britain in 1974 when former Prime Minister newspapers and twice-daily television there were still many in and outside of the party who did not and in making it a better place. Unlike subsequent PMs, she Ted Heath had asked the famous news were our only information believe she had the capability of making a difference. Over the was not in office for herself (or her spouse), for fame or fortune; question, “Who governs Britain?” source, showing us images of next eleven years, she cut the government deficit and repaid she was a true servant of the nation. when seeking a dissolution of rubbish piling high in the streets and debt; she sharply cut income tax for all tax payers and reduced She summed up her achievements in a speech during the Parliament for a general election bodies not being buried, all due to public spending as a share of national income; job creation Nicholas Ridley Memorial Lecture in 1996: which he lost comprehensively. the strikes. Labour, as the famous increased overall and more than one million small firms were It was a strategy. It was not a set of policies cobbled together from As the 70s drew to a close, Maurice Saatchi billboard campaign set up in the UK. By the end of her three great terms in office, minute to minute, begged, borrowed, or stolen from other people. It was the 3-day week was crippling the for the Conservatives stated, was not sixteen of the twenty-five most profitable companies in Europe successful because it was based on clear, firmly-held principles which were economy and the stranglehold of working. were British. themselves on a right understanding of politics, economics and, above all, unionism and the inability of the Then came 4th May, 1979, and the Her greatest victory, of course, had to be against the human nature. (Margaret Thatcher – The Collected Speeches. Ed government to act proved both victory of the woman who was to take on trade unions, which had become corrupt, out-dated and self- R Harris. Harper Collins 1997) the worst of the unions and socialism and serving organisations, dominated by a left-wing leadership If only we could say that about anyone since.

1Heath loyalists included Norman St John Stevas, who Margaret Thatcher coined the nickname "The Blessed Margaret".

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 48 www.pgs.org.uk 49 Bruce CRICK and SPRINGSTEEN

If you have heard the songs ‘Born to Run’ or ‘Thunder Road’ you will have some idea of why Born to Run will always be the album I treasure the MOST. I bought the LP WAT SON because I had seen a clip of Bruce performing another song, ‘Rosalita’, on The Old Grey Whistle Test. His performance was a revelation, so full of energy and life. I had to listen one sleepy summer afternoon, to this guy’s music and see him in concert. My first was at Mr Ben Goad as I was working late at school, Wembley on the ‘Born in the USA’ tour in 1985, which HEAD OF SCIENCE I was disturbed en route to the blew me away. He had the audience in the palm of his photocopier by an amiable gentleman hand. Over the years, I have needed to see more shows carrying a roll of paper. each tour and do what I can to get as near the front as possible, sometimes queuing for over 30 hours. Why go to several shows in one tour? Because each show is different. There will be elements that are that same but each show will have a different set list, partly made up on the spot by Bruce depending on how the crowd are responding. All the musicians in the band have to know the back catalogue must admit to being rather wary; he iconic image in 1953, had no idea at the time of the really well as Bruce might call for something they haven’t seemed a little vague and I wasn’t in the significance of what he had captured. He had been sent played for years. mood for having to be “polite but firm”. to the scientists’ room at the Cavendish Laboratory The core members of the E street Band have been playing With a warm smile, he asked me whether in Cambridge by a friend who fancied himself as a with Bruce since the Born to Run album. Over recent years, I’d like to accept a copy of his poster, as he journalist. He had a hunch that Time magazine might two members have died, most recently Clarence Clemons, would very much like to donate it to the pay him for an article. Time never published and the each honoured on the next tour by stories told and songs Ischool. With a little difficulty, we unrolled it to reveal negative was returned with half a guinea as payment. sung. Bruce comes from a difficult background and doesn’t the image you see here, with Francis Crick striking a The photograph all but disappeared until Watson’s forget it; he keeps a connection with his audience, writing pose next to a decidedly jimcranky structure made The Double Helix was published in 1968. Since then, songs about their lives. He encourages stalls for community out of clamps, bosses and bits of wire. Despite being the casual pose, next to a contraption that seems to groups at concerts in the States and, in this country, made a poor physicist, I recognised the image immediately have been cobbled together from the contents of a donations to the striking miners and other causes. As he as the famous double helix model of DNA that won chemistry laboratory, has encapsulated the serendipity put it himself, "There's a part of the singer going way back Crick and James Watson a Nobel Prize less than of scientific discovery. in American history that is of course the canary in the coal ten years after the image was taken. The discovery In 1970, the original print was used to help mine. When it gets dark, you're supposed to be singing. It's signalled a steep change in our understanding of reconstruct the original model. In 1990, an attempt dark right now... I believe that salvation is not an individual molecular biology and the revolution in genetics that was made to recreate the image with an older Crick thing, but a collective one, and that each of us is responsible followed is still underway. and Watson posing next to a newer model (see above). for all others." His songs tell of the heroism of ordinary I thanked the kind benefactor, still a little unsure This attempt to recreate the original only cements people who get up each day and get on with life even about why he was dishing out old posters, when he its iconic value. It will never be captured again and though it is hard. Each time an album comes out, it seems remarked with a wry smile “I found it difficult to certainly never by Mr Barrington-Brown, who, I’m to be speaking to a different part of my life. He’s helped me persuade them to stop fooling around, but I’m glad sad to say, died earlier this year. This piece has been through some hard times and long may he continue to do so. that I did. I’m still living off the royalties”. written in his memory and in memory of all those Antony Barrington-Brown, who I met in Oxford who just happened to be in the right place at the right Mrs. Anne Stephenson on that sleepy afternoon and who had taken that time, with a camera. Biology Department

Anthony Barrington-Brown’s iconic image of James Watson (left) and Francis Crick

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 50 www.pgs.org.uk 51 IS THE HIGGS BOson why SO IMPORTANT Chloe Sellwood YEAR 13 When the announcement was made on the evening of the 4th of July 2012 that the Higgs boson ‘probably exists’, the science world went into frenzy; the elusive "God particle" had become the most sought-after particle in modern Caption here science. But what does this mean for the rest of us?

Peter Higgs

hose physicists or mathematicians among the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, whether you are when Ancient Egyptians received electric shocks from fish, changing or showering on this particular occasion (honestly, the you may have some vague understanding personally interested in scientific experiments or not. leading to the understanding we have now thanks to various science of synthetic fibres and water heating systems is more of the particle itself (which I will attempt to I’m sure you would first like to know how my explanation is scientists such as Talus, Volt and Faraday. But there would be of the same). So, breakfast time: the milk with your cereal is delve briefly into later). You may well feel the going to be any different from those you have already heard, for nothing for the electricity to light if it weren’t for an idea from pasteurised thanks to Louis Pasteur, the kitchen you’re eating excitement felt by such scientists as Professor example, ‘The Higgs completes the standard model’ ‘It resolves Humphrey Davy in 1802, followed by years of research and in is full of microwaves, hobs and fridges based on scientific Anthony Thomas of Adelaide’s University: the mystery of the origin of mass’, which may mean nothing numerous inputs from scientists leading to a lamp consisting knowledge of heat and preservation. Now you choose to watch T‘Now that it has been found, there is not only a palpable sense whatsoever to you. Well, of course, I will have to go into these of carbon rods patented by Henry Woodward and Mathew a bit of light TV; that’s liquid crystal displays right there…. you of relief but a great deal of excitement as we begin to pore over scientific benefits because, no matter what other advantages Evans in 1874, followed later by Thomas Edison’s research get the idea. Life is full of innovative products commercialised the details of the various experimental results to see what hints can be put forward, first and foremost its significance lies in into developing a practical incandescent bulb, patented in 1879. after years of scientific discovery. they may have for completely new physics which goes beyond its enhancement of scientific knowledge. As C.H. Llewellyn And that’s not even the end of it, seeing as you now probably the Standard Model’. Smith, former Director-General of CERN notes, ‘When have the latest high-tech energy-saving lights to turn on in the However, although we appreciate it may be a momentous justifying particle physics, it is tempting to invoke spin-offs, morning as a result of further scientific research. Next, you may discovery for particle physics, the rest of us can’t seem to such as the World Wide Web, which was invented at CERN, tune in for a bit of Chris Moyles in the morning, thanks to your muster up quite that level of excitement; some find it hard but, in my opinion, they provide a secondary argument and the shiny new radio, and now I’m sure you're dying to know where even to begin to care in the slightest. In fact, the top-trending contribution to knowledge should be put first. In my experience, that came from too! Well, you’re in luck: the first predictions of article on Yahoo on the day of the Higgs boson announcement the general public generally finds the cultural argument at least radio waves came from mathematical work in 1867 by James (amusingly or depressingly, depending on your perspective) as convincing as spin-offs, if not more so.’ I’m going to try to Clerk Maxwell, who proposed equations describing light and concerned the adolescent pop-star Justin Bieber storming out of convince everyone (non-scientists as well as scientists) that radio waves as waves of electromagnetism, but obviously your an interview rather than the most important physics discovery we, as funders, are equal customers and benefactors of this radio device didn’t suddenly exist after that. In 1887, Heinrich of the century. Clearly, a large number of people appear to be research. Scientific knowledge translates to the advancement Hertz generated radio waves in his lab; later, after several in the category of those who don’t seem to be affected by the of mankind throughout history, whether directly or indirectly; more scientists’ contributions, an Italian sent and received his discovery, prompting the inevitable question whether, during a although practical advantages are not necessarily the goal of the first radio signal in 1895 and, by 1899, that signal stretched time of global recession, it is morally irresponsible to spend vast experiment, without these experiments taking place we would the length of the Channel; however, it was not until 1915 that amounts of money (something in the vicinity of £2.6 billion) on be living in back in the Dark Ages. true broadcasting began and speech was transmitted across the a purely theoretical experiment which is not designed to tackle Do you really appreciate the impact scientific knowledge has continent from New York City to San Francisco and across the any significant social problem or health concern. Nevertheless, on your everyday life? Let’s go through an average day: you Atlantic Ocean from naval radio station NAA at Arlington, I’m here to convince those of you that feel this way otherwise, get up and turn on the light above your bed, which requires Virginia, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. OK, now let’s pretend and to argue that, in fact, you will be affected in some way by electricity; documented knowledge dates back to 2750 BCE, you’re having a very lazy day and you decide not to bother CERN’s reconstructed particle collision

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 52 www.pgs.org.uk 53 the IS THE HIGGS BOson why SO IMPORTANT

So, how is this all relevant to the discovery of the Higgs boson? I mass, much as swimmers moving through a pool get wet. understand that particle physics seems a little more obscure, but, Therefore, this particle is a small part of a step-by-step discovery symbol like all these other sciences, it has been a sequence of discovery cycle slowly but surely confirming the Standard Model, which of our era and innovation. However, in the case of particle physics it is explains why scientists are so incredibly excited. sometimes harder to see the direct link between the discoveries That is not all. The existence of the Higgs also helps to and their real-life application. A good example would be the explain how two of the fundamental forces of the universe - the In the modern era, our icons seem to emerge from a narrowing area of human discovery of the electron, which has led to technologies such as electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged activity. One obvious example is sport, with an array of accomplished electron beam welding, the electron microscope and radiation particles and the weak force that's responsible for radioactive figures described as “iconic”, including Bradley Wiggins, Jessica Ennis and David therapy; lasers and electron guns used in TV and computer decay - can be unified. Like all others, these forces are associated Beckham. However, will they still be icons in ten years, or fifty, displays would not exist without the knowledge of the particle’s with a particle. The particle tied to electromagnetism is the or a hundred? Who deserve to be the lasting icons of our era? existence. It would not have been possible to exploit such laws photon; however, we don’t need to know that --- what we do of physics had they remained undiscovered; if we stop funding need to know is that the particles associated with the weak force scientific research, we will lose the practical benefits that we are called the W and Z bosons, which are massive. The Higgs Andrew Jones receive from it. mechanism is thought to be responsible for this; when these year 13 If you asked a physicist how the world works, you are particles are introduced to the Higgs field, they acquire mass unlikely to get the scary complicated answer you may expect: and (in simple terms) this helps confirm our understanding that firstly, these particle physicists, like you, don’t really know yet; the electromagnetic and the weak force can be unified into the secondly, they want the explanation to be as simple as humanly electroweak force. ‘Supersymmetry’ is another theory affected he contemporary figure that I believe most people spending 65% more time online than three years ago. possible. The perfect description would not consist of multiple, by the discovery of the Higgs, speculating that every known worthy of iconic status has, until recently, In China, there are 513,000,000 users (although only a third of long-winded theories but one unified simple model that would particle has a "superpartner" particle with slightly different been overlooked but has also shied away them use it regularly). Extensive as Berners-Lee's achievements ultimately explain how everything in the universe works: characteristics; all we need to know is that if the Higgs Boson from such a position himself. Despite his have been to date, the influence of his invention will only grow from the Big Bang and black holes to how humans are built. is found at a low mass range, it would make this theory more personal modesty, the work of Sir Tim further as technology becomes available to a wider spectrum of Unfortunately, much as this sounds like a nice idea, we have not viable, which is positive in scientific terms. Berners-Lee has transformed the modern humanity. yet got to the unified theory; the latest theory is the Standard Although a scientist would argue the spin-offs from particle world in ways which we will only slowly come to appreciate. In fact, it is difficult not to be concerned, as well as amazed, T by the world's increasing reliance on Berners-Lee’s invention. Model, which still seems very far from simple, but I am going physics experiments are purely a bonus and should not be Tim Berners-Lee’s early enthusiasm for tinkering with to try to summarise it for the purpose of explaining the Higgs considered an important reason for the research, I have a feeling model trains, as he grew up in south-west London, proved an The global financial system, which is becoming ever-more boson. The Standard Model attempts to describe all the basic these spin-offs may help get you on-side: excellent grounding for studying Physics at Oxford University, internationalised, relies increasingly heavily on the internet, particles in the universe and how they interact, which allows Accelerators: semiconductor industry; sterilisation – food, graduating with First-Class Honours. It was while working at which offers great opportunities but also terrible risks in the us to build up how atoms, molecules, crystals and cells work medical, sewage; radiation processing; non-destructive testing; CERN as a contract software engineer in 1989, that Berners- event of a system malfunction or even collapse. Our social lives, (therefore, when chemists argue chemistry is more important cancer therapy; incineration of nuclear waste; power generation Lee proposed the concept of a global hypertext project which also, are becoming ever more entwined with the internet, which than physics you can challenge them, in a way that makes you (energy amplifier); source of synchrotron radiation (biology, later became known as the World Wide Web. The project was is affecting the ways in which we interact with one another and sound intelligent, with your knowledge of the Standard Model condensed matter physics...); source of neutrons (biology, partially inspired by a previous project, Enquire, which he had could lead us in directions, as a species and culture, that none of and how it underpins all of chemistry and chemical reactions so condensed matter physics...) worked on (but had not published). The principal aim of the us can anticipate. Is it healthy to be so reliant upon one thing, you really wouldn’t have one without the other). Particle detectors: crystal detectors; medical imaging; security; non- Web venture was to offer intellectuals a way of correlating ideas whatever its power? The Standard Model was created through a cycle of destructive testing; research; multiwire proportional chambers; from around the globe. After writing the first server (httpd), Berners-Lee’s achievement is the pre-eminent symbol of our prediction, experiment and discovery, and all of the particles container inspection; research; semi-conductor detectors; many followed by the first client (WorldWideWeb) he made it available era, in the same way that the telephone and the car symbolised that the Standard Model originally predicted have since been applications at the development stage; to the world in 1991. earlier periods of the twentieth century. However, have the discovered with the exception (until now, we believe) of the Informatics: World Wide Web; simulation programmes; fault Since then, Berners-Lee has devoted himself to working for internet and the World Wide Web become too integral a part of Higgs boson. Although scientists are not necessarily known diagnosis; control systems; stimulation of parallel computing the internet’s improvement, founding the World Wide Web the modern world? for being modest, they do know that the Standard Model is Superconductivity: particle physics; multifilamentary wires/cables; Consortium in order to do this. Most recently, he became a incomplete and that there is still a long way to go. But a big step nuclear magnetic resonance imaging; many others (cryogenics, director for the World Wide Web Foundation in 2008, which was made when Peter Higgs predicted the new boson particle vacuum, electrical engineering, geodesy...) aims to research the ways in which the Web could help further back in the 60s. I bet you’re wondering what took them so long, In other words, one result of developing techniques and humanity. From the outset, he insisted that the Web should be but back then there was nothing that created enough energy to equipment to confirm the existence of these particles is the free for everyone to use which certainly is a mark of his personal produce the Higgs boson, so the Large Hadron Collider was invention of new technology that will benefit society in multiple generosity in contrast to others who have tried to benefit built for exactly this purpose (and there’s something extra that and often unexpected ways, to give the World Wide Web as just financially from the project. This work led him to be knighted in we can benefit from, the building of new technologies resulting one extraordinary example. 2004 and to receive a host of international awards. from scientific discoveries, which I will talk about later). What To conclude, the study of particle physics is leading us to a better The honour he was accorded at the London Olympics most people have heard about with regard to the Higgs particle understanding of the world, and, over a long period, this has been 2012 Opening Ceremony illustrates the anomalousness of his is that it has something to do with the origin of mass; this is responsible for bringing us the advancements and products that achievement. Berners-Lee has come to define an entire period exactly right. The Higgs boson is associated with a field (the we take for granted today. The extended timeframes often make of human history through one invention alone. In Britain, it is Higgs field) that supposedly pervades the universe. It is thought the links complex and difficult to appreciate; however, I hope that estimated that the average individual spends 22 hours on the that, as other particles travel though this field, they acquire I have persuaded you that they do exist. internet every month, the trend accelerating all the time, with Tim Berners-Lee’s message to the world (2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony)

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 54 www.pgs.org.uk 55 Dr Ruth Richmond HEAD OF PHILOSOPHY and RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Steve Jobs died in California in October criticised and targeted if they attempted to strike a work/life 2011, at the comparatively young age of balance, such as spending time with their partners and children, 56, with many accolades to his name: and were told that their ‘lack of dedication and concentration’ endangered the future innovations of the companies. Workers were often sacked on the spot, humiliated in front of their colleagues by cutting words expressed in a fit of uncontrolled reator of desktop publishing with the use anger. Those who had the stomach to stay in the company were of a mouse-driven graphical user interface; often made to stay in meetings which ran past midnight and then executive producer of Toy Story (1995), were called to reconvene the meeting before 7am the next day. which his company Pixar created, and Lengthy faxes were sent out to workers between 4am and 6am; ultimately the ‘visionary’ and ‘innovative’ Jobs expected them to be read before the 7am meeting. iPhone and iPod, not to mention the range of Furthermore, in 2012, Chinese factory workers were told they CApple Macintosh computers. Not only was Jobs an innovator in must put together the iPhone 5 in no less than 30 seconds in order computing and digital animation, but he was a spiritual man too. to meet the demand of customers by a certain deadline; in return In 1974, Jobs undertook a pilgrimage to India to meet an Eastern they were paid just £230 wages per month. For each worker, Mystic spiritual leader, which began his obsession with a strict that means assembling 1,000 iPhones a day during a 14 hour vegan diet, such was his commitment to seeking enlightenment. shift in which talking to your colleagues while visiting the toilet is Jobs wished to improve the world in a spiritual and material banned in case it interferes with your ‘iPhone concentration’! This sense. He wanted people to create what they wanted to become, is simply the exploitation of workers desperate for permanent “follow their heart and intuition” and not be trapped by dogma. and regular employment without access to a trade union. The He also famously said, at the tender age of 17, “If you live each impressive result was the sale of 5 million iPhones worldwide day as if it was your last”, then you would make the changes (in during the first weekend after release; a money-maker’s dream his case technological) today in order to make life better for you at £599 per device! and everyone. The Apple Mac and the iPhone were to be the This brutal focus on profit at the expense of humanity calls culmination of Job’s obsession with change and innovation. into question the nature of Steve Jobs’ avowed spirituality, which Is he, therefore, an icon for our modern age? Someone for has been cited by supporters as another reason for his status as young people to look up to as they aspire to achieve what appears a modern icon. As a self-proclaimed Zen Buddhist, Jobs said to be the impossible? I have to admit that Jobs does inspire me he was disturbed at the destruction of the natural world and and others, at the very least, to achieve our best. Jobs did not the eating of animals. But hang on a minute! Anyone with a give up in his quest to create a ‘perfect’ Mac and an iPhone and I cursory knowledge of Buddhism knows that, in order to seek admire this attention to detail which we can all bring to our place spiritual enlightenment, one seeks to practise non-attachment to of work. However, ultimately, I have come to believe that Steve money and to live out a commitment to act ethically towards all Jobs ought not to be considered an icon. I will explain why. humanity. One of the Noble Eightfold Paths (a list of 8 ethical Others have always paid a price for Jobs’ success. In the early guidelines), ‘Right Livelihood’, would probably prohibit a multi- 1970s, when he was in his late teens, he had plans, along with billionaire from making his money from creating luxury products his computer geek friend Andy Wozniak, to create a new style that cost more than its rivals and involve the exploitation of of computer with fewer chips. It was computer genius Wozniak powerless workers. Just a thought! who probably created the circuit board for the Atari video game Since Jobs’ death in October 2011, Apple has only got richer! in 1974 as Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board Samsung has been ordered to pay Apple $1.1 billion for using design. With only 50 chips, it was an innovative and ground- some its design in the award-winning Samsung Galaxy range breaking design. When Apple was formed in 1976 by Wozniak of smartphones. Apple is now considering going after HTC and Jobs, however, Wozniak was seen to be side-lined by Jobs and Motorola in court for possible patent issues. Apple knows and took very little money in relation to the huge profits being it dominates the market and wishes to crush its rivals in any made. There have been suggestions that Jobs instrumented the way it can. Jobs lives on in the Apple executives who want to resignation of Wozniak in 1976 in order that Apple be under his dominate the market with over-priced products that users ‘just sole financial and directional control. have to have!’, while bullying other companies in the courtroom Jobs’ bullying tactics of his employees at both Apple and Pixar who dare to challenge them and ruthlessly exploiting those who are legendary. Workers were told they were “worthless” in front have no choice but to work for them. of their colleagues and staff turnover was huge. Workers were Jobs an icon? Think again!

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 56 www.pgs.org.uk 57 a tale of TWO FINALS

a tale of two finals This is the tale of how one club Charlie Farmer reached two FA Cup finals in very old portmuthian different circumstances.

Top left page; Promotional poster, 1939. Left: Portsmouth FC, FA Cup winners, 2008. Left below: Portsmouth’s Cup Final team, 1939. Below: The Cup Final, 1939.

any great cities all over the world associate themselves with their local football clubs. In the UK it is difficult to go out for the day without seeing at least one Chelsea or Manchester United shirt; however, in Portsmouth, Myou are still more likely to see a Pompey shirt. Everyone in the city has heard of Portsmouth Football Club and its recent financial downfall. Perhaps fewer people know of the club’s rich history. There have been many iconic moments since the club was established in 1898 at Number 12 Portsmouth High Street. Two of these moments were the FA Cup finals of 1939 and 2008.

Portsmouth Heroes Redknapp. Because of these new players, the club went When Portsmouth first won the competition in 1939, it was from a relegation struggle in 2006 to pushing for fifth place still known as the Association Cup. All of the players in the and a spot in the Europa League. Football had changed team were British but Herbert (Bert) Barlow was the only since 1939; Portsmouth players were now on thousands of Portsmouth-born player on the cup-winning side. He was also pounds a week, whereas seventy years before the players the first player to score for Pompey in the 1939 final. The team had received prize money of around £40 each. While the was built by Jack Tinn, who had previously taken the club to average salary of a footballer in the early 1900s was just two cup finals but had ultimately been unsuccessful in both £1, today the average weekly earnings of Premier League (with Portsmouth losing 2-1 to Manchester City in 1934 and player are £21,000. 2-0 to Bolton Wonderers in 1929). In just thirteen years, he would take the club to three cup finals; however, despite the The Opposition team’s numerous cup runs it was struggling to stay in the top In 1939, Portsmouth faced Wolverhampton Wanderers, Division of English football and it looked as if the team would who were considered a very strong side. Not only had face relegation to Division 2. they come above Portsmouth in the league for the previous In 2008, Portsmouth’s FA Cup Final squad had only five three years, but they had also been runners up to Arsenal. British players out of a team of 16; the squad was made up Portsmouth, on the other hand, had finished nineteenth, of players from all over the world, with many only brought only a couple of spots from relegation. Like Portsmouth, into the team a couple of years previously by manager Harry Wolves had a completely British team; they had already

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 58 www.pgs.org.uk 59 a tale of TWO FINALS

won the cup twice before, in 1893 (before Portsmouth had even shaky. Unlike Wolves, Pompey were calm; they were reported been founded) and 1908. Therefore, they were no strangers to to have been singing songs and telling jokes in the changing success. Unlike Wolves, Portsmouth had never before won a room. In 1939, the teams walked out of the tunnel to a record major trophy. crowd of roughly 99,000. In 2008, Portsmouth’s opponents were Division Two side Cardiff Portsmouth would play in a 2:3:5 formation with two City, half of whose team was British. Dave Jones had been Cardiff defenders, three midfielder, a left and right winger to cross in manager for three years and had previously managed Portsmouth’s balls to the inside left and rights and the centre forwards --- local rivals Southampton Football club. Like Portsmouth, Cardiff basically a W formation. Pompey looked like a strong team and had only won the cup once, back in 1927. Portsmouth-born Bert Barlow scored in the top corner of the goal in the 29th The Road to Wembley minute, with Portsmouth continuing to Every football supporter dreams of watching their club in the press Wolves until, in the 43rd minute, FA Cup Final and so there was a huge demand for tickets; just before half time, John Anderson however, in 1939, there was no easy way of distributing them. volleyed the ball past the Wolves keeper. Fifty Fans had been waiting outside the ticket booth since 10:30 After half time, Portsmouth’s dominance Above (left): Kanu scores, 2008. the previous night in order to secure their seat for the final. of the game continued and, despite the Above: Portsmouth celebrates, 2008. In the morning, the queue had extended from Frogmore Road Wolves goalkeeper getting a hand to the Left: Portsmouth FC: Association Cup winners, 1939. to Goldsmith Avenue, growing to an estimated 5,000 people. ball, Cliff Parker bundled it to the back Eventually, the queue broke up as people became impatient; the of the net to make it 3-0 to Pompey. At of Portsmouth to see them. The tournament prize money was crowd surged into Frogmore Road to demand their tickets, which this point it seemed like it was over for £1 million, a substantial amount more than the prize money in meant the police had to come to restore order. Unfortunately for Wolves, but they managed to get one 1939. Though pleased that they had won the FA Cup, some the fans, the club stopped distributing tickets as a result. On the back as Dicky Dorsett scored after the of the players were disappointed with the way the season had day of the Final, many fans travelled to and across London to ball was crossed to him. However, it was ended as they had hoped to reach fifth place and a spot in the see the game on public transport, including trains and trams; indeed all over by the 71st minute, when Europa League but had, instead, only reached eighth. Although very few people owned cars in the 1930s. Portsmouth’s Cliff Parker scored for the the club still qualified for Europe by winning the FA Cup, they In 2008, the tickets were distributed more fairly and efficiently, second and last time. had still aimed to finish higher in the league. They believed that tickets being allocated primarily to season ticket holders and Although Portsmouth were the their success in the FA Cup had prevented them from meeting then to people who had been to games the previous October. favourites in 2008, they had recently their league objective. Then the tickets went on general sale and were also distributed struggled to score goals in the league. Later that year, the financial troubles began and, despite to those who’d been lucky enough to win competitions using the Therefore, instead of using his normal claiming he would not, Harry Redknapp left the cup-winning tickets as prizes. Many fans travelled to the recently renovated formation, manager Harry Redknapp side to join London-based club Tottenham Hotspur. He was Wembley stadium by Luckett’s coach, by car or by train. decided to experiment with 4 defenders later awarded the key to the city and a bell in the Guildhall was and one central defender starting further named after him for his success in the FA Cup. Most of the team Lucky Charms and Superstitions up the field, 4 midfielders and one would have gone by the end of 2008. Both Harry Redknapp (Portsmouth manager in 2008) and Jack upfront. The fans were nervous about this strategy. However, Despite going into administration, Portsmouth reached the FA Tinn (Portsmouth manager 1939) had certain lucky charms Redknapp’s idea was that the two outside midfielders would The Aftermath Cup Final again in 2010, but this time lost to Chelsea. when it came to games of such importance. push up and help the one attacker. The crowd came to just After both victories the fans celebrated and welcomed the team In 114 years, the fans and staff of Portsmouth Football Club Harry Redknapp had worn the same shirt, tie, pants and jacket under 90,000, which was full capacity at the new Wembley back to Portsmouth in large crowds. In 1939, fans lined the have experienced many iconic moments and, while the club, when he had a 20-match unbeaten role with AFC Bournemouth. stadium; whereas in the 1930s fans could watch the game city’s streets and waited until after 11pm for a bus carrying the in recent years, has suffered financial difficulties which have He wore this in the cup final against Cardiff. Before every game standing on terraces, now it was compulsory for everyone to players and the FA Cup. The cup was presented to the fans by crippled it into two relegations and resulted in the loss of many in each round of the FA cup in 1939, Pompey player Fred Worrall be seated, which took up more space, reducing crowd capacity. the players and manager, during which ceremony Bert Barlow staff, it remains a local treasure and should be admired for all attached spats (which are a type of shoe accessory) to Jack Early in the game, Cardiff had only the Portsmouth dropped the trophy (it took £70 to mend the damage). The that it has achieved. Tinn’s shoes. He won each game during which he was wearing goalkeeper, David James, to beat to score the first goal but James players were each given £42 as prize money. The cup was often spats. It was not just the managers who had superstitions; after (who would later play for England) stopped their efforts. Later presented before subsequent football matches. Portsmouth to beating West Bromwich Albion in the FA cup semi final in 2008 on in the game, Portsmouth forward Nwankwo Kanu received this day hold the record for keeping the cup because the Second Sources The Pompey Book by Graham Smith in all blue, Portsmouth decided to play in all blue for the final the ball and beat the Cardiff goalkeeper, but missed an open World War broke out the same year that the club won it. For Portsmouth Football Club: The Official Centenary Pictorial History by and used the same changing rooms and the same stand for the goal from a tight angle, hitting the side netting of the goal. Kanu the next six years, the FA Cup competition and the other Peter Jeffs, Colin Farmery and Richard Owen Portsmouth fans. eventually fumbled the first goal over the line in the 37th minute leagues were suspended. Portsmouth’s team managed to avoid Portsmouth Miscellany by Roger Holmes after the Cardiff keeper stopped a shot but, unable to hold on, relegation and a decade later they won the league title twice in Pompey: The History of Portsmouth Football Club by Mike Neasom, Mick Copper and Doug Robinson The Final dropped the ball. Cardiff almost equalised but the goal was a row. The club would stay in the top tier of British football for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_FA_Cup_Final In 1939, there were signs of who would be the better side before disallowed after a handball in the area from one of their players. another 20 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008 the game had even begun. Portsmouth first discovered how Portsmouth had a few more chances but they were unsuccessful. In 2008, fans rejoiced, just as they had in 1939; the team again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_fc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElEPGMNtjgc nervous the Wolves team were about the game when they found Nonetheless, one goal was all they needed to triumph; they won presented the trophy to the city on an open-top bus, greeted http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktz2pruwjdQ that the writing on an autograph book signed by the players was the cup after 90 minutes plus extra time. by an estimated 200,000 fans who came out onto the streets Information from Portsmouth Central Library Newspaper Archives

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 60 www.pgs.org.uk 61 my Iconography of War? Admittedly, until last night’s Wookieepedia session, me, but, in a way, that demonstrates my point most potently; despite my spending between the hours 8 and 9 pm on Wookieepedia for VIRGIL’S six months of life there is still knowledge I haven’t discovered. For FICTION a full run-down of the Seven Forms of Lightsabre Combat, and FIRST ECLOGUE Jedi/Sith who were Masters of each respective form, come and see Introduction and Translation me at your earliest convenience. by Tom McCarthy If there was ever a protracted releasing of a series that frustrated Tim MacBain It is a commonly held belief that the Eclogues are set in a kind of Arcadia, where the shepherd is an iconic and baffled its fans, it was that of The Inheritance Cycle. The first year 13 figure for a life of ease, of love and of music. A reading of the First Eclogue shows this to be doubtful at book was released in 2002, the fourth in 2011 (one does begin to best. It deals with two shepherds whose farms have been confiscated. One of the shepherds, Tityrus, has wonder what Christopher Paolini was doing during most of those had his farm restored to him after an appeal to an unnamed youth, in Rome. The other, Meliboeus, has no JRR Tolkien, George Lucas, nine years; however, I haven’t brought it up to discuss that). The such luck. His farm is to be given to an ex-soldier, an “impius miles”, a godless thug. He is for exile now. Christopher Paolini, Bungie, Bioware/EA. concept it brings to my pantheon of fiction what I call ‘responsible Virgil grew up in the waste land of the dying Roman republic. The situation in this Eclogue corresponds Five names, five universes, five lots magic’. This is, in my opinion, what sets The Inheritance Cycle apart to that historical reality. After the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, the victors, Octavian and Mark Antony, of exquisite hours spent reading, from Harry Potter – your ability with magic is limited not just decreed that farm land in Northern Italy should be confiscated and given to ex-soldiers. Cremona and watching, playing, researching, copying. by your knowledge and (by extension) your vocabulary, but also Mantua (where Virgil was born to a farming family) were included in these clearances. by your physical stamina. Using magic uses energy, which does It is possible that the family farm was among these. Certainly the youth who gave Tityrus his freedom and somewhat limit what you can do. Personally, I find this a more restored his farm is Octavian who, soon after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, became the first Roman interesting concept, and that is why I love The Inheritance Cycle. Emperor as Caesar Augustus. Is Tityrus a self-portrait? am, of course, talking about five of my favourite My inclusion of Halo is, to some extent, misleading. There are pieces of fiction. I have tried to put them in five Halo games for Xbox; I have played one of them. Does that recognisable order, and brownie points to anyone qualify me to talk about them? Aside from the fact that the one who has managed to work out what the last two I’ve played is widely attributed to have been the best of them, M: Here you are, Tityrus, lying at your ease T: My freedom! Freedom called me overdue, T: Fleet-footed stags will feed in the upper air Under the shade of this wide beech; are; you have to (a) know me particularly well or not really. What I do find fascinating and (when taken in small Long after the clippings of my beard grew grey. And seas roll back to leave the fish on shore --- Here you are, playing country tunes Yet that call did come after lazy years, with And sooner will Parthians prowl through other lands (b) have a VERY good knowledge/memory of the doses) exhilarating, is the use of a single character to influence the On slender pipes. As for me, I’m forced Galatea gone, when to one more loved, And drink the Arar or Germans drink the Tigris --- Xbox gaming circuit (a comment, I’m sure, that has just lost me entire storyline. This is not strictly true of two of the titles, but the I To leave my home and the ploughed fields To Amaryllis, I pledged my heart. Before the memory of my patron’s gracious face what was left of my audience). overall idea of one man against the bad guys is an iconic image I love. Exile for me, Tityrus. For you, True, with Galatea I was content Fades from my heart. Alright, I’ll get on with it. I was implying, in order, Lord of with a timeless appeal. Cool under the shade, you teach the trees To stay in thrall and live from day to day. the Rings, Star Wars, The Inheritance Cycle, Halo, Mass Effect. Again, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 are all games. However, To echo back your songs to Amaryllis. Lambs would be picked from my flock for sacrifice M: But we are for exile now; some to thirst brownie points if you recognise all of those names. ‘Why?’ I they are the best games you will ever encounter, and it’s not the And rich cheeses brought to the thankless town, Among the Africans, others to Scythia, to walk hear you ask. Well, the very foundation of my love of fiction is combat simulation that earns it that title. For me, it is the pulling T: Ah, Meliboeus, it was not a man but a god Yet I sauntered home, empty-handed. By Oxus’ banks, to trudge on chalky soil, demonstrated in each of these titles. Let me explain. together of all the concepts I have detailed above. The extended Who made this leisure mine. I shall raise Or sup with Britons at the world’s last edge. Lord of the Rings is a perfect way of showing the beautiful universe is large and diverse; there are at least 15 different types of An altar for him, an altar that I will stain M: I used to wonder why Amaryllis called, And shall I never see a place to call my own? With the blood of a new-born lamb development of characters and some totally AWESOME set alien, and the Milky Way galaxy is your playground. This being Weeping, to the gods; why she left ripe apples A simple cottage with turf piled high? Survey From my own flock. He gave his word and, see, On the trees: her Tityrus had gone far away! With pride my small kingdom’s modest crop? pieces (that is a film quote – a prize for anyone who gets it!) science fiction, magic isn’t really ‘magic’; it’s called ‘biotics’. Set My cattle graze at ease while I play The very pines, old friend, the very springs, No! Some godless thug will grab my fertile land --- pieces are aided by graphics to die for. You play as one character, With regard to the characters, one has the obvious development What tunes I please on this wild reed. The vines themselves were sighing for you. A barbarian these fields. We are sunk in misery of Frodo, Sam, Gollum (who, interestingly, seems to turn a full who is rather melodramatically seen as ‘the Only Thing Between Since Roman fought with Roman in Roman war. circle). But then we have that of the friendship between Legolas the Universe and Destruction’ (Note the Use of Capitals There), M: I am not jealous but amazed. Each farm T: What else could I have done? Where else What we have sown men like that will reap. and Gimli, Gandalf’s death and rebirth, Denethor’s revival who is developed not just combatively but personally across the Nearby is in turmoil. Look at me, sick too, But Rome could I have gained my freedom, For them I’ll graft my pears and plant my vines? of his senses, and the oh-so-soppy but oh-so-lovely blossoming entire trilogy. A friend lent me the second almost two years ago, Unfit for any road; yet I can drive my goats on, on. Gain divine protection? In Rome I met that youth No! Walk on, my herd of goats, my quondam pride! of the seemingly doomed love of Aragorn and Arwen. This telling me “This game will take over your life.” And it did. I was See, Tityrus, this one I can scarcely drag along? For whom twelve days a year my altar smokes; Never again, stretched in some cool, green shade, development lets you know the characters on an almost personal afraid to finish it. Just now among those thick hazels she bore From him I won a kind reply to my request: Shall I spy you nimbly leap from rocky crags level. Set pieces, for me, can often make or break a story, be it a If you’re still reading, you’re probably a member of my Two fine kid goats, my hope for the herd. Yet “Feed your cattle as before, my lad Where brambles grow. No songs I’ll sing again She cast them aside on this flinty track film, book or game. To qualify, by set piece I mean an event that family. If you’re not, we are eternally grateful (another quote) Let loose your bulls.” Nor lead my flock to feed on sweetest clover And grow quite fat on strong willow shoots. has the potential to stick in the memory, the potential to become for sticking with a rather rambling article on a subject that really I was blind not to see disaster looming M: You lucky man! This farm will then be yours doesn’t interest a lot of people. Thank you. I do feel I should so famous it could very nearly be a metonym for the entire story When, warned by heaven, lightning struck Again, land wide enough, though rocks and bog T: Yet you could be my guest for this last night, (I hope you’re proud of me Mr Elphick-Smith!) For example, who end with a proper message, and it just so happens I have one The stout oaks. But tell me, old friend, With sedge and mud encroach your pastures. Could sleep at peace on these green leaves. We’d share doesn’t know the line “You…Shall . . . Not…PAAAAASSSS!!!” that I feel rather strongly about. The kind of fiction I have been Who is this god of yours? No strange feed will ever test your breeding ewes; Ripe apples, sweet chestnuts, richest cheeses, from Gandalf’s tragi-heroic last stand in the Mines of Moria? discussing is often not seen as ‘meaningful’, and is derided by No canker taint them from a neighbour’s flock. As evening smoke is rising from our neighbour’s farm These, when done well, always inspire a sense of awe. many. No matter how well written it is or how expertly intricate T: I was a fool, Meliboeus. I used to think Lucky, lucky man! You’ll find cooling shades And from the distant mountains taller shadows fall. If you speak to any one of my close friends, they will all tell you its structure, it is sniffed at, seen as “not literary”, and all because Great Rome was just like this, our market-town; By well-known waters, by sweet and sacred springs. how long I can talk about Star Wars for. Yes, EVEN after the crippling one can’t find a million and one poxy meanings behind just one Our town where you and I would drive for sale This thick hedge here, along that neighbour’s bourn, disappointments that were the second and third films; not even phrase. I challenge all of you (still reading) to ignore this snobbery Our weanling lambs. I was a fool measuring Whose willow-blossom feeds the Hyblan bees, Great by little things, thinking a pup a dog Yoda and Count Dooku’s lightsabre duel could resurrect number – the two kinds of fiction are incomparable. Revel in each one, Will often soothe you suasively to sleep. Full-grown or a kid its mother-goat. I know A vine-dresser at the foot of that high rock two --- an appropriately euphemistic name if ever there was one, enjoy reading/watching/playing whatever you want. I get more Now great Rome soars high over other cities Will sing his songs to the gentle breezes. incidentally. Back on topic, the main pull of Star Wars is the Star enjoyment watching The Lord of the Rings than reading the entirety As the cypress soars over low, twisting osiers. You will be charmed by your own cooing pigeons, Wars extended universe. To many unfortunate souls, this whole of Dickens’ work and personally I can glean more meaning from By turtle-doves calling softly from lofty elms. idea is alien; for example, who has heard of the Yuuzhan Vong it. It’s all a matter of preference; find yours and stick to it. M: What great reason drove you there?

portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com Portsmouth Point 62 www.pgs.org.uk 63 Emma O'Leary, studying A Level Art in Year 13, is currently exploring the contrasting guises of David Bowie through a range of media.

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