Geeks and comics

Sir, – Michael Saler’s review of recent literature on comic books (June 6) is enjoyable and enlightening but, I fear, a little over-optimistic. He senses a truce between so-called “elite and mass cultures”. I suspect that, like so much else, the conflict has merely been displaced by digital technology. Its current manifestation is evident in, for example, confrontations between supporters of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, the former a champion of mass culture, the latter a polemic against it. Moreover, if we do accept that comics have overcome “irrational intolerance”, we now have to consider whether such things as video games can or should do the same. Are we right to condescend to “geeks” who spend hours a day with such games? Is it time less well spent than time with comics, genre fiction, or popular novels? Or are people (like myself) who hesitate to accept games as equals to comics or novels, much better than those who in the middle of the last century fought to keep comics out of public libraries or even those who at its beginning fought to keep out novels?

PAUL DUGUID
School of Information, University of California, 102 South Hall, Berkeley, California 94720.

Sir, – As someone who grew up reading the comics of the 1950s, but now prefers “elite literature” (ie, I read Cormac McCarthy’s novels before I see the movies), I find Michael Saler’s suggestion that some unique tie exists between “experimental techniques” and graphic literature perplexing. What era in literary history has not featured experimental techniques in at least one genre?

Moreover, with comics today such an important genre in most East Asian literatures, it seems presumptious of Saler to conclude his review with Michael Chabon’s claim that “all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction”. In Chinese literature, through the early twentieth century, a clear bifurcation between entertainment genres (fiction and drama primarily) for the folk, and various formal classical-language verse forms for the scholar-elite, is evident.

WILLIAM H. NIENHAUSER, JR
Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.

‘Tudors’

Sir, – I enjoyed Clifford S. L. Davies’s article on the “Tudors” (June 13). Arthur Ketton was correct to praise Henry VIII, who, in the Acts of Union between England and Wales, freed the Welsh from their bondage, an argument that this Nationalist has made many times in the Welsh press. The Welsh, prior to the Act, were second class citizens in Wales, especially in the wake of the rising of Owain Glyndwr, when penal sanctions were imposed on them: they were not allowed to live in towns, trade, carry arms, marry English spouses, etc. They were given a status equivalent to the apartheid system, or the condition of the Palestinians. Though these laws were mainly ignored by the sixteenth century, it was Henry VIII who gave the Welsh equality with the English, not only in England, but also in Wales. The Acts of Union created a new political state (that of England and Wales), the start of a modern “British” identity, a point most English people are unaware of, but which is reflected in such organizations as the England and Wales Cricket Board. The downside of the Act was that use of the Welsh language was banned in local government and the law, and did not get official status until 1966, but you can’t have everything.

JOHN OWEN
6 Ludlow Street, Caerphilly.

V. S. Naipaul

Sir, – In my review of Patrick French’s excellent biography of V. S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is (May 23), I mistakenly assumed that the dedication – to “MG” – was to Margaret Gooding (see Susan Wilkinson’s letter, June 13). The book is in fact dedicated to Patrick French’s wife Meru Gokhale. Many apologies for any embarrassment which this mistake has caused.

A. N. WILSON
5 Regent’s Park Terrace, London NW1.

Craftsmanship

Sir, – D. D. Guttenplan draws attention in his review to the “shocking” number of typographical and grammatical slips in Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (May 16). The book has more errors due to copy-editorial oversight than any book I can recall (examples on pages 4, 6, 13, 29, 33, 64, 73, 84, 94, 100, 236, 253, 255, 259 and 289).

It seems ironic for so many blemishes to have slipped into a book about craftsmanship. Could these slips represent an almost intentional statement that surface perfection is not the essential feature of true craft or even that imperfections add lustre to an artefact?

Could the embarrassment of errors also embody the need just to get the work out rather than fretting over every detail? As Sennett asserts, “the writer will deliver on time, no matter that every comma is in place, the point of writing being to be read”. Similarly, “to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a prescription for failure”. Obsessive perfectionism is identified as detrimental to craftsmanship – such a criticism cannot be levelled at The Craftsman.

MATT CHAPPEL
Thornhill Primary School, Thornhill Road, London N1.

Useful idiots

Sir, – Lenin’s remark concerning the “useful idiots” to be found among Western intellectuals, mentioned in the Commentary piece by Zinovy Zinik (May 30), reminds me of an exchange in an interview with the poet Joseph Brodsky. Having raised the matter of Soviet sympathizers, the interviewer asks “What do you think motivates them? After all, many are highly intelligent”. To which Brodsky replies witheringly, “No, this is the litmus test for one’s intelligence; and, even more important, a litmus test for one’s ethics”.

JOHN SHAND
43 Norwood Road, Stretford, Manchester.

International law

Sir, – In his review (May 2), Lawrence R. Douglas simply fails to engage with my book, Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law, or my constructive critique of the architecture of international criminal law. I deal extensively with the expressive value of adversarial criminal trials when conducted in the aftermath of genocide or crimes against humanity. In fact, I conclude that expressive justifications for such trials are more compelling than either retribution or deterrence. Douglas ignores my discussion while accusing me of paying no more than “lip service” to the topic.

Douglas’s reaction to my critique demonstrates the difficulty inherent in meaningfully conversing about the application of international criminal law to recent tragedies in a diverse array of places ranging from Rwanda to Uganda to Cambodia to Timor-Leste. In order to be robust, this conversation requires us to revisit existing orthodoxies. Assuredly, these orthodoxies may be very comfortable for scholars vested in them.

Douglas’s review also suffers from disappointing factual errors. The maximum penalty contemplated by the International Criminal Court is not thirty years, as Douglas states, but life imprisonment. Moreover, he is incorrect in saying that only a “few” convicts at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda have received “lengthy sentences”. As of May 2008, out of a total of twenty-eight convicts, eleven have been sentenced to life and another five to term sentences that exceed thirty years.

MARK A. DRUMBL
School of Law, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia 24450.

Disraeli’s influence

Sir, – According to the persuasive essay by Charles C. Nickerson (Commentary, March 28), “Byron, Shelley and Miss Havisham”, it is “conceivable” that some elements of Great Expectations (1860–61), such as Miss Havisham’s lugubrious room and her control over Estella, may have derived from Dickens’s reading of Disraeli’s novel Venetia (1837). It is in fact highly probable. Unfortunately, Disraeli was too busy with politics (he stopped writing novels between 1847 and 1870), when Great Expectations appeared, to have recognized his hand in it. Nickerson points out that the two men “had numerous opportunities of meeting”; they did so on at least one occasion, on October 5, 1843, when Disraeli spoke at the Manchester Athenaeum, with Dickens in the chair. They were also inspired by the same woman (Mary Boyle, Lady Cork), who became the model for Lady Belair in Henrietta Temple (1836) and for Mrs Leo Hunter in The Pickwick Papers (1836–7). And despite Disraeli’s claim in 1857 that “I have never read anything of Dickens, except an extract in a newspaper”, the numerous references to Dickens’s novels and characters in Disraeli’s letters tell another story. Future volumes in our series (Volume VIII: 1860–64 will be published next year) may reveal further ties.

MICHEL W. PHARAND
Disraeli Project, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

Dog collars

Sir, – J. C. asks (NB, May 30) if readers know of early evidence of dog collars. Dogs wearing collars can be seen on the fresco from the Palace of Tiryns, in the Peloponnese, dated to 1300– 1200 BC, where three hounds are shown chasing a boar. As far as I know, this is the earliest. Later, Xenophon mentions collars and leads as necessary for hunting dogs, and there are several depictions of dogs wearing collars on sixth- and fifth-century Greek vases and grave reliefs. The collection of dog collars at Leeds Castle shows European examples from the sixteenth century.

DIANE TURNER
Ano Aprovatou, Andros, Greece.

Cold War summer

Sir, – I have just read Niall Ferguson’s review of Jeremi Suri’s biography of Henry Kissinger (May 30). Kissinger did indeed run the Harvard International Seminar, but it is quite wrong to describe it as “the Cold War Summer School”. I was there in 1952, and there was nothing “Cold War” about it except that, yes, we were all West Europeans. What we were there for, and what we did, was to find out what America was about: for most of us it was a first time.

Most vividly, I remember, under “summer school” auspices, staying with a black family in Atlanta, Georgia. CIA propaganda? I think not.

WAYLAND KENNET
100 Bayswater Road, London W2.

Service slang

Sir, – Re your item on Service Slang (NB, May 23), I think J. C. is wrong about the definition of “Gen”. My father, who was in the Royal Air Force during the war, told us it was short for “general information”. Otherwise, by your definition, “pukka gen” would be a tautology.

GRACE KENNY
9 Charleville Mansions, Charleville Road, London W14.