The editorialisation and alteration of sincerely held religious beliefs

The pope by Ralph Steadman

We're told that the religious have sincerely held religious beliefs, unalterable convictions and an indivisible conscience. 

Salman Rushdie - Avoid politeness, Ctd

Salman Rushdie by Ralph Steadman

In a conversation with Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie said that respect proper means that you can take someone seriously and still disagree with them:

"One of the most mealy mouthed pieces of language that has developed to justify this kind of behaviour is a kind of reinvention of the meaning of the word "respect". It seemed to me when I was growing up that respect meant that you took people seriously. It didn’t mean that you never disagreed with them. To respect someone is to say we’ll take on what you have to say and if I don’t agree with it I will offer a counter argument. The idea that it would be disrespectful to someone in any way disagree from this system of belief is a new idea, is a new meaning of the term "respect" and it seems to me to have nothing to do with respect. And what it actually means is I am too afraid to do it. So what you have is cowardice masquerading as respect. And that’s become more and more common. It’s very clear in the case of the [Danish] cartoons."

Christopher Hitchens on the Falklands War

A cartoon by Ralph Steadman of Margaret Thatcher being haunted by the ARA General Belgrano

The cartoon is by Ralph Steadman of Margaret Thatcher being haunted by the ARA General Belgrano, an Argentine cruiser leaving the British Declared Exclusion Zone that was ordered to be sunk under her instructions.

In all the polarisation around Thatcher and controvery about the Falklands War, Christopher Hitchens brings some clarity. He held that line that he could not agree more with Thatcher and her position on the Falklands War. Hitchens shared his position on the Falklands War in a conversation with Salman Rushdie, where he said:

Ralph Steadman and Quentin Blake on the term cartoonist

If there's one thing I struggle with it's what to call the Live Drawing aspect of my work. The name for me is a little clumsy. As are the terms cartoonist and caricaturist. As Ralph Steadman said:

"In some ways ‘cartoonist’ is a derogatory term. People have said it to me dozens of times – you’re just a cartoonist. But I’m rather keen on the Wittgenstein bit about the only thing of value being what you cannot say. That’s the thing about drawing: when you try to say something in pictures, it gains a dimension that language can’t match. I like that.”

And I wouldn't even use the term illustrator. As Quentin Blake said:

"There's a snobbery about illustration." 

Ralph Steadman said that he's an artist, not an illustrator, but prefers cartoonist to illustrator:

"I always wanted to be an artist, period: I hate the word illustrator - it just sounds so limp - I prefer cartoonist. Goya was a cartoonist, Daumier was a cartoonist, even Picasso used the cartoon form to express himself. But cartooning has got a really bad name now hasn’t it? People think it’s just something for filling up a column in a newspaper [adopts condescending voice] ‘Oh, it’s only a cartoon, here’s a fiver…’ I’m not trying to be artsy-fartsy but I don’t like the division that one thing is fine art and another thing isn’t."

And:

"Cartooning meant more to me than just funny pictures. I needed to apply it as a weapon almost."

And finally Ralph Steadman said:

"I try to use cartoon as an artist. I hate artistic snobbery. It’s bullshit. You should have no truck with it whatsoever. Have no truck with it."

The Orwell Method

George Orwell by Ralph Steadman, with full selection here

[UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens explains how Orwell was "arguing all of the time with his own prejudices and his own fears and his own bigotries and his own shortcomings."

 

UPDATE II: Also read my blog post from September 2013 on opposition as the ointment to groupthink.]

 

Paul Muldoon explained:

"Be deeply suspicious, first of all, of your own prejudices before you begin to approach the prejudices of others."

V.S. Pritchett echoed this:

"George Orwell... was more likely in politics to chasten his own side than the enemy."  

Christopher Hitchens too:

"The unpleasant facts that George Orwell chose to face were usually the ones that put his own position, or his own preference to the test."

Christopher Hitchens on Orwell and feeling inferior against otherwriters

Christopher Hitchens by Ralph Steadman

Christopher Hitchens said about George Orwell: 

"The point was made better by Lionel Trilling. The remarkable thing about Orwell and the encouraging thing was he is not a genius. He lived to only 46 years. He never went to university. He never had a steady job. He usually didn’t have a steady publisher. He will never be forgotten because he managed to disprove imperialism, Stalinism and fascism in one lifetime and made some imperishable raids on its territory that no-one is ever going to forget. All the time ill. All the time poor."

He then said:

"[George Orwell] shows how much difference a person of really average integrity and intelligence and education can make if they have a little courage and a little intellectual honesty. The shortcomings of the individual you can see in him too. But he basically won his own battle against his own prejudices. This is an example for all time. You don’t get the sense for example when you’re reading Proust or Nebokhov or George Eliot that you shouldn’t be in the writing business. All the people in history who said alas there was nothing I could do are lying or at least discrediting themselves. They could have. They just chose not to."

Philip Larkin in and on Belfast

Philip Larkin by Ralph Steadman

Philip Larkin was appointed sub-librarian at Queen's University Belfast in June 1950, starting in September of that year. He spent five years in Belfast. Leaving in 1955 Larkin for the University of Hull. He said of the context surrounding his move to Belfast in an interview with the Paris Review:

"After finishing my first books, say by 1945, I thought I had come to an end. I couldn’t write another novel, I published nothing. My personal life was rather harassing. Then in 1950 I went to Belfast, and things reawoke somehow. I wrote some poems, and thought, These aren’t bad, and had that little pamphlet XX Poems printed privately. I felt for the first time I was speaking for myself. Thoughts, feelings, language cohered and jumped. They have to do that. Of course they are always lying around in you, but they have to get together."

He also said to the Paris Review:

"The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the University there."

In his 1950 letter to Monica Jones, Larkin described the city and its people 8 weeks after his arrival there:

"A wide and cobble-streeted town, lined with frowning buildings in the late Victorian manner & some indifferent shops. I’m already fed up with anything called Ulster, Northern, Victoria, etc., also with the Irish male face (craggy, drink-flushed, with greasy black curls and a too-tight collar & the Irish female face (plump, bad-teethed, pinkly powdered, with a diamante lizard on the lapel)."

Elaine Sturtevant - Art is theft, Ctd

In an obituary on Elaine Sturtevant, Hans Ulrich Obrist wrote:

"[Elaine Sturtevant] made her controversial artistic debut in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery, New York, when she repeated Andy Warhol's Flowers, a series of silk-screen prints that he had shown a couple of weeks before. Today it is par for the course for images to be sampled, re-used and edited, but in the early 60s, acts of appropriation were yet to become a staple of the art world."

On the occasion of her 2012 retrospective, Sturtevant: Image Over Image, at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Elaine Sturtevant said:

"What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that's the way to go."

According to Alexis Petridis, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman fell out after Steadman's first wife accused Scarfe of plagiarism.

Oliver Jeffers on art as theft here.

Ralph Steadman - "I envy the ones starting out now"

Like Christopher Hitchens, Ralph Steadman said that he envies the young person starting out. He said:

"I envy the ones starting out now, with all that in front of them to do something interesting. And whatever they do is theirs, not mine."

Original in full here (27m30s). Christopher Hitchens on being envious of the young person starting out, here. Shane Smith of Vice also said that the present is the best time to be alive and in journalism.

Nick Laird - "All writing is political"

Sketch of George Orwell by Ralph Steadman

George Orwell said:

"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

He also said:

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

Northern Irish writer Nick Laird said:

"I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort—this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn’t that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?"