paulkincaid

I think it was Gertrude Stein who said, sometime in the 1930s, that the USA was the oldest nation on earth, because it had created the twentieth century and now everyone else was following in their wake. When I first came across this, my immediate thought was of war. The American Civil War had established a pattern that the great European wars of the twentieth century would follow, almost to the letter: trench warfare, industrialised slaughter, monstrous prison camps (read up about Andersonville), bringing warfare to the civilian population. Indeed it is the copycat nature of these wars that sometimes makes me think of the so-called World Wars as European Civil Wars (the extent to which the rest of the world was drawn into the conflict was, in part, because of the imperial reach of the European powers, and in part because of the coincidence that a war in the Far East was happening at the same time).
If you look at it this way. Then all the world learned from the example of the Civil War was how to wage war more terribly than it had been waged to that point.
And now, when I am starting to think that we are witnessing the first manoeuvrings in the second (or third, depending on how you count the Revolution?) American Civil War, I wonder what the current warmongers have learned from their European predecessors. And I do not feel optimistic.
Let’s face it, Trump and his cohorts seem to have taken Hannah Arendt’s warning about the rise of totalitarianism as a how-to guide. Which makes me think they are incapable of seeing “lessons from history” as the warning most of us think of, but are rather taking it as a pattern to follow. Meanwhile the rest of the world watches what is happening and thinks to itself: I know where this is going, I know how this works out. And their inevitable reaction is: leave me out of this, I don’t want any part of it, I’m not going to touch this with a bargepole. So do not look anywhere outside America for intervention, on either side. They will play it safe until it is well past the point when it is safe to do so, so any intervention is going to be tentative, half-hearted, and not followed through.
I watch what Trump is doing, I listen to what he is saying, and I wonder: has any peace party ever actually prevented war? Has calling out lies ever actually changed the minds of the deceived? Has democracy ever peacefully seized power when the anti-democrats control the reins of state? Help me out here: I can’t think of encouraging examples.
I suspect we can only look forward to more deaths, more cruelty, more damage. Maybe I am just being pessimistic, but when Stein called the USA the oldest nation on earth, did she in fact imply it is now in its dotage?

It's that time of year, isn't it. Ah well, this is my annual round-up of what I have read. Makeof it what you will. https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2025/12/31/another-year-and/

Just discovered that my 2012 essay for Foundation, "Far Too Strange: the Early Fiction of Iain Banks", a prelude to my book on Banks, has been translated into French as "Bien trop etranges: les premieres fictions de Iain Banks". And if you read French it is available in a free online journal, ReSFuturae. https://journals.openedition.org/resf/14925

With a hat-tip to Ian Mond, this is a book unlike anything you have read before, and a book you really have to read. It casts a very distinctive light on the county where I live. https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2025/12/27/terra-incognita/

A fascinating look at the whole Spycatcher saga, from the abject failures of the British Intelligence services to the arrogance and lies of the Thatcher government. There is so much worth reading here. https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2025/12/22/plots-and-paranoia/

A novel I had distinct difficulty getting into, yet which, by the end, was one of the most powerful and emotionally draining novels I have read for along time. https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2025/11/29/comet-tales/

And my review of an excellent book about the ever-intriguing Russell Hoban is now out in the wild: https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/11/07/fruitful-confusion/

Yesterday morning, Mort decided that I needed to wake up at 4am. This was rather earlier than I had planned. The advantage was that I was able to catch an earlier train than anticipated; the disadvantage was that I spent my one day at World Fantasy Con struggling to keep my eyes open and feeling as if I had been pummelled with a sledgehammer. Though I suppose the latter wasn't helped by the dreadfully uncomfortable seats on the Thameslink train from Blackfriars to Brighton. The hotel, which was once the Metropole and is now apparently a Hilton, is not exactly as I remembered it. The owners seem to be working on the principle that guests don't really need anywhere to relax, so where I remember a large lounge and a separate if not quite so spacious bar, now there is simply a lounge bar that might just about be adequate so long as the hotel is never more than half full. When I turned up at the bar just after 10am it was nearly empty, but it didn't take long for it to start filling up and by mid-afternoon there were people milling about looking forlornly for any available seat. Anyway, I got myself a pot of tea, put a post on Facebook, and settled down to see what might happen. It wasn't long before John Clute showed up with Gary Wolfe, Dale Weatherwax Hanes, and Julie Phillips (whom I had never met before). We managed to commandeer one of the larger tables even though these were all marked "Reserved", and I found myself staying there for the next several hours. People drifted away, and new people joined the group (hi Kev McVeigh and Dev Agarwal), others said hi as they passed the table (hat tip to Geoff Ryman), and still others I failed to attract the attention of (next time, Jonathan Strahan?). At some point the hotel decided that our table was reserved from 4pm, and then announced that they had to have it by 3pm, (presumably for the arduous task of wiping it down), so Kev and Dev and I wandered off to a pub, The Cricketers, which is one of several that seems to have declared itself the oldest pub in Brighton. There we were joined by Leigh Kennedy and Simon Priest, and a convivial time was had until I decided I was too knackered to continue and went off to catch my train. I managed (just) to stay awake until I got home, fed the cats, and collapsed onto the bed. And Mort decided to wake me up at 4am again this morning.

A curious benefit from yesterday's Amazon internet outage. I have Alexa throughout the house. I got it when Maureen was ill at home and it allowed us to keep in contact wherever I was in the house. Now I use it to control a few lights and so forth. Now usually when I tell Alexa to turn such-and-such a light on, the light goes on and Alexa says Okay. But a few weeks ago the Alexa device in my bedroom started behaving oddly. I would say turn the light on, and the light would go on, but Alexa would say: Hmm, the device is not responding; or Hmm, I cannot connect to the internet. Always that "Hmm", and always denying that it could do what it had in fact just done. But since the outage, it has just gone back to saying Okay. Such a relief.

A wonderful day yesterday. Met up with John Clute and Judith Clute at Tate Britain to go around first the Edward Burra exhibition then, reached by a staircase illuminated by a glorious Chris Ofili mural commemorating Grenfell Tower (I pointed out that I once worked with Chris Ofili's brother), the Lee Miller exhibition. Wow, that was one eye-opening day. I have known about Burra for a long time, but I've only ever seen one or two of his pictures reproduced in books, and they never quite worked for me. But seeing the actual watercolours en masse was an entirely different thing. The longer you look into them, the more they mean. I was struck how the early pictures were crammed with often cartoonish figures, but as the exhibition went on the later pictures were emptied out so that there are in the final room a number of empty landscapes. And yet, for all that radical change in content, there was an extraordinary continuity in style and approach throughout the fifty-odd years covered by this exhibition. There is a late, post-war painting of a bunch of thugs beating up a scarecrow, yet their postures echo figures in a pre-war painting of dancers in New York. I'm not sure I really like his paintings, but I was awestruck by them. And as the Burra exhibition is coming to a close, so the Miller is just starting (although a slightly fuller version was shown last year at the Imperial War Museum, which I missed). And again, it was dazzling. I was struck again and again by the composition of her photographs, always slightly at an odd or unexpected angle but always telling a story that was more than what was in the frame. It was no surprise to see her collaborations with Man Ray, sometimes as model, sometimes as photographer, because the approach to making a picture is so similar. (At one point a picture of Miller taken by Man Ray is positioned next to one by Cecil Beaton, and it shows you so clearly why one is a genius and one is a hack.)