 While stocks last I’ve always understood that one of the key revolutions of the internet is to allow small but disparate voices to join together to make a louder noise than would otherwise be possible.
I like public libraries. This is a quiet like, but it is one shared by hundreds of thousands of people across the country. We will probably not be marching on Milbank anytime soon, but I’d like my quiet voice to be heard, and perhaps to join with other quiet voices elsewhere.
I spent Friday in the British Library at St Pancras, where I read some nineteenth century books about political arrangements in first-century Rome. Later, back at my computer, I received a circular email from the BL chief executive.
It was about the public sector spending review settlement, more commonly known as ‘the cuts’. After a 3% cut in 2010/11, the library has already made savings in the areas of acquisitions, preservation, and routine maintenance. The cuts now mean a further reduction in spending of 15% over four years, while the annual capital budget has been halved. This means that by 2014/15 the British Library will be funded at the lowest level since its creation in 1972.
This is Britain’s flagship library, a symbol of what we mean by civilisation. Our national library will acquire fewer books, will be less able to look after the documents it already has, and will skimp on door hinges and light-fittings and escalators that work. There will be ‘reductions in staffing numbers’.
If these cuts fail to have the desired effect on the wider economy, or if the banks need another bail-out, then the British Library is already projecting further measures such as closing the Library one or more days a week and charging for Reader Passes.
Instead of pointing out that more than 50% of the electorate voted against making these kind of drastic cuts, I think it’s worth asking George Osbourne or David Cameron when they last used a public library in earnest – borrowing a book, or slipping in to read the paper. Either answer is depressing. If so long ago that they can’t remember, then they know nothing of what the country stands to lose. If it was recently, then they know and don’t care.
I suspect, as I think we all suspect, that the answer is more likely to be the former than the latter. This is the Tory way. We could ask them when they last played tennis on a municipal court or attended a drop-in music session laid on by the local council – photo-ops for political advantage don’t count.
They think they know what they’re doing. They tell us they have no choice. And soon, when the libraries close, the people they claim to lead will be less likely to share what I learned in the library on Friday. The Romans, too, thought that with all their learning, their philosophy and poets and religions, that civilisation could never again go backwards. That’s what they said before a thousand years of the Dark Ages – we’ve come far enough, the world can’t go backwards now.
 Spot the Clinamen Over on our site in development (wait for it, wait for it), we had an interesting discussion about Scrabble and this year’s British National Champion, the fantastic Mikki Nicholson.
In principle, I like all games until my children start winning. And until recently I was a big fan of Scrabble. So much so that on my shelves I have a copy of Word Freak, by Stefan Fatsis. I have this book partly because The Times claims that ‘Stefan Fatsis is the Hunter S. Thompson of Competitive Scrabble’, but also because the book was published by Yellow Jersey Press in the days (2001) when Yellow Jersey published brilliant sports books no-one else would touch.
The story follows US sports-writer Fatsis as his Scrabble Rating rises from zero to 1697, and you’ll have to believe me that 1697 is both unimaginably good but also not quite good enough. Like being British No 3 at tennis.
I remember not quite sharing Stefan’s passion for Scrabble as far as 1697 – I was perhaps rooting for him whole-heartedly as far as about 1501, but nearly ten years later the best way of remembering what I liked about the book is to cite the sentences I marked with pencil in the margins.
‘But this – the money, the pressure, the tension, the egos, the pride, the prestige. This isn’t just about playing a board game. This is about skill and achievement and self-worth.’
‘The distances and location of the premium squares are just right. The game is a carefully choreographed pas-de-deux, a delicate balance between risk and reward.’
‘For Matt, as perhaps for James Murray, William Minor, and Joe Leonard, words are the objective reality of life.’
‘In the Book of John, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, Quid est veritas? (“What is truth?”). His answer is an anagram: “Est vir qui adest” (“It is the man who is before you”). The word anagram itself anagrams to the Latin ars magna, or great art.’
Scrabblers and cross-worders preserve the cabalistic talent for anagrams that the internet otherwise makes banal – Richard Beard as Drab Hard Rice in a millisecond at http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ However, there comes a stage in every Scrabble player’s development when language turns to maths. The game becomes a riddle of patterns, not meanings.
Maybe this happens in every field, for anyone who thinks long and hard enough, about anything. And everything. The other lesson Scrabble teaches is less exotic: don’t hold out for better letters. Make the best of what you have now.
At least I think that’s true. If not, it may explain why my children beat me – they believe in the luck of the life to come.
 New French Stash I know I keep promising to post up the first pages of J’suis pas plus con, or rather, I promised once and I always keep my promises.
I have, however, been distracted by two issues. Computer malfunctions, which are boring. And stash.
As an ambitious rugby player, I used to have the same hunger for stash as everyone else. ’Stash’ was the stuff that came with selection to a team. Stash is the extras, the perks, the over-and-aboves, and in those days, before the ease of printing onto synthetic materials, stash was expensive and therefore reserved most often for representative teams. It was worth having.
Typical items would be tracksuits, training tops, match shorts, maybe even a team-branded bag. It was the players’ version of been there, done that. Or if you were picked on the bench, been there, haven’t done that, but got some stash so my time wasn’t completely wasted.
Stash in sport is now out of control. There is even a company called Stash, who provide exactly the kind of accessory gear I’m talking about it (as well as this magnificent design for a rugby shirt, as enabled by modern print technology) . Every team in the land, turning their backs on natural fibres, gets personalised stuff because … well, because they can.
What happens to all this gear? It gets used for its original purpose, just out of the packet for the important match. Then it doesn’t get used because you’re dropped from the team, or move regions and don’t want to make enemies. Then it’s worn once more for validation when you’re training juniors, as a reminder of who you once were (both to them and to yourself.)
After that the stash stays in the attic for sentimental reasons until time drains it of meaning. I have a collection of fading sportswear emblazoned with the names of forgotten sponsors, usually local accountants or providers of ‘building services’.
 Those were the days Well this week I was reminded that stash also exists for writers. I’m immensely pleased with the bookmarks and the posters made for the French edition of Dry Bones by In Octavo. Stash for the writer, like stash for the rugby player, is confirmation that the core activity (the writing/playing) doesn’t come anywhere near reflecting the amount of work that goes into even the smallest triumph. Stash is tangible evidence that the effort was intended to create a world that can grow, that is growing, that can generate clothing and stationery and (why not?) cigarette lighters.
My X 20 Zippo cigarette lighter, the brainchild of Harper Collins, remains the best bit of writer’s stash I’ve ever had.
 Blow Your Own The noise, the noise. Oh, the blowing of trumpets. In the front row of the Internet orchestra are those blowing their own, but these are easily outnumbered by those modelling their brass on John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558).
Every internet rant is a blast that wants to be first, and ranting is such a natural fit to the form that the temptation ought to be resisted. Over the past month I have resisted ranting about Ryanair, automated sales calls, and two more subjects that are so rantishly scrawled on a scrap of paper I have no idea what they were. Paddles, apparently, and errors in tenant paranoia. Whatever was hurting, the pain has passed. Maybe I wanted to rant about bad handwriting. I hate that.
I prefer blogs that follow the example of the Angels. Write down five good things that happened today. Add those to the base-notes of indignation, merge them with the sound of own-blown trumpets and out comes the true sound of the Internet, the Fanfare for the Common Man.
That’s the noise the Internet makes.
 - The Real Thing
There’s an old rugby saying: if you’re good enough, you’re big enough. The actor Matt Damon would have to be very good indeed. In Clint Eastwood’s new film Invictus, Damon plays the role of 1995 Rugby World Cup winning captain Francois Pienaar. He is 5 inches shorter and 4 stones lighter – the All Blacks would snap him in half.
At 5’10” Matt Damon is also shorter than Nelson Mandela (6’1”), who in Eastwood’s film is played by Morgan Freeman (6’2”). Winning the World Cup as the shortest man in the room is the kind of exploit that Hollywood loves.
Invictus is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, which describes Nelson Mandela’s use of rugby to seduce white South Africans to his vision of the Rainbow Nation. ‘Don’t address their brains,’ he said at the time, ‘address their hearts.’ And deep in the Afrikaaner heart is a love of Rugby Union.
For a potential Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, the obscurity of rugby presents a problem. What, exactly, is this strange-looking game? The bemused film critic of the Tucson Weekly described the Invictus sports action as ‘a bunch of guys groaning a lot,’ while over at the Kansas City Star rugby ‘pretty much looks like a group mugging.’
Over here, though, everything will be different. We know what rugby is supposed to look like.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen Invictus and rugby doesn’t look like this. As with any sporting setback, it’s not fair to place all the blame on the captain. Matt Damon isn’t given much of a team. His stand-in Springboks look like college boys, though not necessarily students of acting, and their emotional range is limited even for rugby players. They sometimes cross their arms to express indignation.
These are pat-a-cake Springboks led by mini-Matt Damon and they will never win the Webb-Ellis Trophy. In that sense, the casting is perfect for the formula – Nelson can lick the boys into shape. If they follow his crazy reconciling ways, then one day, perhaps at a World Cup on home soil, they will ultimately prevail.
 The Anxiety of Influence Eastwood, too, is in the business of addressing hearts and not brains. Mandela is a complicated man in a troublesome country, but as with the rugby it’s easier to keep things simple. The Mandela bio-pic soon becomes a plot-standard sports movie: he’s black, he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, but can kindly ex-con Nelson Mandela inspire a bunch of undersized students to become Rugby Champions of the World?
Maybe he can, if these actor Boks show they know their rugby. I certainly hadn’t written them off in advance, especially as in America Invictus was rated PG 13, for ‘brutal sport action’.
Which is exactly what rugby should provide, when played properly. By ‘properly’, I mean as we’re used to seeing it on TV, most of the weeks of the year. To capture the full dynamism and grace of the game, and also the brutality, TV sticks to the basics. High-spec cameras follow the action.
In Invictus, because the players aren’t a patch on the real thing, the camera does exactly the opposite. It obscures the action. Eastwood keeps cutting away, and no single sporting sequence is allowed to develop.
I can see just enough to make out that Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky is having a bad day with the boot. He can’t punt a rugby ball, and his incompetence is so striking (in a Test Match, Brian!) that I want to see immediate replays of his flawed technique.
That’s my Pavlovian TV-spectator response to unusual sports phenomena, a category that includes all the rugby in this film. I want Eddie Butler to explain why the wingers don’t sprint and the Samoans are weak in defence. Is it the altitude? Have the All Blacks been poisoned? And why has Andrew Mehrtens appeared in a World Cup final wearing an Andrew Mehrtens wig?
Instead of this sense of involvement, I gradually realise I’m watching the one activity on earth that is as far from real life as it’s possible to get: the rugby looks like amateur dramatics.
And in Invictus there’s no escape, because the ‘95 Final is shown at length, almost thirty minutes of ersatz rugby action. The fearsome Jonah Lomu is replaced by a slightly chubby student. He is occasionally jumped on by other students, but before we can assess his contact skills the camera cuts to another unrelated set-up. There are scuffed kick-offs and elementary back-moves, all performed at rehearsal pace so as not to confuse Wisconsin.
Eastwood knows something is wrong. How could entire nations be in thrall to this? He therefore decides that the fervour of rugby is best expressed by sound-effects.
 Springbok Back Line In Invictus, the major injury risk to the players is earache. Every tackle boofs like a blunt object thumped into stuffed leather, and out comes the stuffing as grunts and oomphs. This is the aural equivalent of the Batman biff and boom.
Just when the rugby can’t get any worse, the match goes slow-mo. On television, slow-motion exists to repeat the interesting bits. In feature films, it means the emotional heft is so weighty that time stands still. Or feels like it does.
As the action slows, so does the sound. Ellis Park fills with whale-song, as the groans wallow deeply from one amateur tackle to the next. The Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky, who isn’t Stransky and who has forgotten his kicking boots, is calling for the ball in slow-audio, an unintelligible last word direct from a Hollywood battlefield, possibly Iwo Jima, and I expect him at any moment to receive (tragically) a solitary bullet between the eyes.
Instead he pops over a drop goal.
Clint gives rugby the fatal Hollywood treatment. In doing so, he undermines his film about Nelson Mandela, the nature of leadership, and the new South Africa.
In the best Hollywood sports films, usually about baseball or boxing, the protagonists are allowed to be grown men. Their lives depend upon their sport. The 1995 Springboks were also men, much closer to the flawed and grizzled heroes of Eastwood’s earlier work than they are to the college-boys of Invictus. They were playing for their old life and their new life, and also for themselves.
It does the truth of the story a disservice to insist, less than fifteen years after the event, that Mandela and the Boks can be simplified to serve the narrative conventions of this film. The rugby is central to this weakness. It becomes apparent long before the end that the epiphany of Invictus depends on the Springboks winning the Cup.
South Africa win. The film ends, and as choral arrangements squeeze the last sentimental tear from any dry eye, the credits roll against a montage of still photographs from the final. The real one.
There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela, the great man himself, at Ellis Park before kick-off. He is famously wearing the No.6 Springbok jersey, in green-and-gold, and he looks tiny against the blonde Afrikaaner bulk of Pienaar, the man he called ‘captain of rugby’. Anyone genuinely inspired by Nelson Mandela, and indeed by the game of rugby itself, will know that the triumph would have been as great if South Africa had lost.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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