Saturday 11 February 2012

As The Sun Sets

This is the opportunity to revive The Daily Herald, complete with the Order of Industrial Heroism.

But where are today’s Chesterton and Belloc to write for a mass market paper owned by the trade unions?
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38 comments:

  1. Anonymous11 February 2012 at 21:56

    Loved the ending of your comment on Mabel Thompson's blog, "But you have to die sometime. And I will dance on your grave." So say all of us who want the orthodox Catholic voice to be heard in this country, unfiltered through a practising homosexual whose economic and foreign policy views are as far removed from the Faith as his sexual practices. I won't subscribe to the Catholic Herald while he is still a director of it, a lot of people won't. What would be the one last push necessary to get rid of him? Over to you, Mr. Lindsay.

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  2. Anonymous11 February 2012 at 22:01

    The only question is whether Neil Clark or Rod Liddle edits it, they both have to be involved somehow as do you and all the signatories to the Lanchester Declaration. Bring it on.

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  3. James11 February 2012 at 22:12

    What happened to the galleys?

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  4. David Lindsay11 February 2012 at 22:15

    They sent me the wrong ones and said it was too late to change them. The whole thing was losing too much currency in more senses than one. I am manifestly a better editor and proof-reader than whoever they were using, and Lulu is completely free, it gets you onto Amazon (eventually), the lot. I'd take an awful lot of persuading ever again to bother with the incestuous little world of literary London. End of this month, at the latest. Another one by the end of the year.

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  5. Frank11 February 2012 at 22:18

    Even Peter Hitchens could only get reviewed in his own newspaper with The Broken Compass (now The Cameron Delusion), so I doubt that you are holding out too much hope, and you are not the sort that is easily put off. Most people would just give up before they had ever started, most of our people have done. We need a Review, I know you are already working on that. And a paper sounds like a grand idea.

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  6. Old Labour Old Catholic11 February 2012 at 22:21

    You too, @21:56? There is a lot of that about. The Herald probably attributes it to tough times and new technology, but there is more to it than that. People in the know, a high proportion of Herald readers, refuse to spend their money on a publication under the overall control of the likes of that.

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  7. Anonymous11 February 2012 at 22:28

    Your "ending" has been deleted by a moderator.

    You can't even get published in the comments section of a Telegraph blog.

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  8. David Lindsay11 February 2012 at 22:31

    I can imagine no higher compliment.

    Old Labour Old Catholic, so I keep being told...

    Now, on topic, please.

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  9. Anonymous11 February 2012 at 22:50

    Lulu is free?

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  10. David Lindsay11 February 2012 at 22:51

    Oh, yes. It takes a cut from each sale to cover its own printing costs, and I assume that it makes what must be a very modest profit out of that. But that comes from the buyer. Publishing through it doesn't cost the author a penny.

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  11. Lulu author11 February 2012 at 23:06

    It's a brilliant system. Only prints when someone orders, so never out of print, never too many, never too few. Free for the authors and we even get a discount on buying copies of our own books. Assume you'll be posting those to review editors?

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  12. David Lindsay11 February 2012 at 23:12

    If I can be bothered. But I'm not in the club.

    The Mail on Sunday has to review Peter, even if nobody else does, and last time nobody else did. Heaven knows what the reaction is going to be to his next one, which is about drugs. A truly deafening silence, I expect, and I expect that he expects.

    If Neil brought something out, then he might just about get reviewed somewhere, even if it was only by the Euston Manifesto lot screaming abuse in a manner inconsistent with sanity. But I doubt that he would bet even on that.

    If I buy a few copies at the author's discount price, then I expect them to be for people who will read them. That does mean, of course, that if you do read a review, then the publication has bothered to buy the book. But what the hell? As you say, the whole thing costs me absolutely nothing unless I actually buy my own books, and even then I get them at a knocked down rate. Lulu is superb.

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  13. Anonymous11 February 2012 at 23:29

    I'm pleased to hear that you are publishing through Lulu again David. I enjoyed reading the reviews of your last book "Essays Radical and Orthodox" on their website.

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  14. David Lindsay11 February 2012 at 23:39

    They had to have bought it first, so I'm not complaining.

    It was not aimed at people who could not understand it, which was the top and bottom of their complaint, and of course that was what they were really so angry about: they had spent their whole lives being told how clever they were, but had finally been confronted with the fact that, well, they are just not. The Oliver Kamm Syndrome.

    Or the Damian Thompson Syndrome. A minor sociologist who happens to edit some Fleet Street blogging site has more clout in British religious publishing than my dear friend and preface author, the most talked about English-speaking theologian this side of the grave? Not long ago, that would have been an outrage, a scandal. But these days, sod him (so to speak him), we can just publish the thing ourselves on an extremely economic model.

    His ability to stop it from being reviewed is still a bit of a problem. But he has to die sometime. I will dance on his grave. Clearly, as if I didn't already know, I won't be the only one.

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  15. Robert Cook12 February 2012 at 11:49

    "But you have to die sometime. And I will dance on your grave."

    Hmm, sounds like the follower of some death cult.

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  16. Anonymous12 February 2012 at 12:17

    You have already said over there that the "Absolutely nuts" comment will be on the blurb of a book which among other things sets the record straight on the Church and child abuse, AIDS in Africa, Pius XII and the Holocaust, and the Spanish Inquisition. Any chance of the "dance on his grave" comment, too? And of naming the think tank that would have published it, cataloguing its incompetence?

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  17. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 12:18

    The second point, only if there is room; the same goes for Thompson's home address, printed in Who's Who. The first point, depend on it. Way ahead of you.

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  18. Anonymous12 February 2012 at 12:32

    Talking of home addresses, do you still have the home address of your ex-tutee whom we all owe a little favour? There was a scandal down there a few years ago, so they must be especially sensitive to certain sorts of tip off, especially keen to be seen to do something about them. And who would ever get to practise law with that sort of thing on a file about him somewhere?

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  19. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 12:34

    Although he might yet to have been made fully aware of quite what a problem he is, I very much doubt that he would ever have been allowed to practise, anyway...

    On topic, please.

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  20. Anonymous12 February 2012 at 12:45

    The blurb for your book is going to wish death on your named ex-boss? There's only one David Lindsay.

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  21. Jersey Boy12 February 2012 at 12:47

    As you know, your laughable ex-tutee is now an occasional Murdoch hack. When he is not being disqualified from student elections for cheating or driven insane with bitterness because he could not merely order you out of this university as he had imagined, he is a paid member of a criminal organisation, a kind of mafioso. A very low, Goodfellas sort of mafioso, but still a professional criminal. He has found his level.

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  22. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 12:50

    More or less bringing us back on topic.

    Now, if you will excuse me, a most excellent luncheon is about to be served.

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  23. Anonymous12 February 2012 at 16:41

    You can't lose, can you? Every time you are not published or have to publish your own books, it is all the fault of the evil Damian Thompson and the evil Oliver Kamm. Secure in the knowledge that plenty of people hate one or both of them enough to believe you.

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  24. Dexter the Tapir12 February 2012 at 17:07

    Lindsay's real constituency when baiting Thompson are the trad Catholics who despise "Mabel" and fully concur with the view often expressed on here that "she" illegitimately occupies their rightful place in public debate.

    Lindsay's constituency when baiting Kamm are the people who are obsessed with the "neocons" who have allegedly taken over the old Christian/rural/traditionalist Tory and Republican machines and the old social conservative, Catholic-dominated Labour and Democratic machines. Taken over in what rival interest, you might ask?

    Both constituencies lap it up. They love David Lindsay. I hope he is glad.

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  25. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 17:17

    On topic, please.

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  26. Anna12 February 2012 at 17:49

    Dexter the Tapir's invective does tie in with the topic of this post. I am surprised that none of your American readers, who probably outnumber your British ones by two if not three to one, have never told you that setting up an alternative institutional establishment is relatively easy over here.

    Traditionalists and paleocons have been doing it for 40 years, you have very close connections to the one that they have created. Marginalized Democrats of the stripe of your buddy Mark Stricherz are beginning to do the same, as probably nobody in Europe knows better than you.

    But you know that "paleo-Labour" might set an obscure online review, put out a few small circulation books, even scrape together a tiny think tank or publishing house after 10 years or more, but never have a hope of the big time comparable to American traditionalists' ISI, Philadelphia Society, Modern Age, National Humanities Institute, Chesterton Review, G.K. Chesterton Institute, Russell Kirk Center, Touchstone, Howard Center, Chronicles, The American Conservative, the American Cause and all of the rest of them.

    Hey, that's the old country for you. As you yourself might put, you are either in the club or you are out of it. You can't do what you can do here and set up your own.

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  27. Old Dunelm Yank12 February 2012 at 18:12

    Anna is right and you know it. This suggestion has pleased your Facebook friends and your Twitter followers, but no one, including you, expects the revival of the Daily Herald and the OIH to happen. If you wanted to do something like that in the US, you could just do it. Even sources of funding can be made available for most anything.

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  28. New Dunelm Yank12 February 2012 at 18:53

    You could write it out by hand on toilet tissue and distribute it door to door for free, you are still a glittering ornament of Durham at large and Collingwood especially, the intellectual and other guiding light of what are now generations of undergraduates.

    It has not gone unnoticed that you have bothered to take up a staff library card and use it, and having no departmental affiliation have bothered to credit your college when publishing. We Durham Brideshead types love that sort of thing, as nobody knows better than you.

    Swatting Palatinate aside like an annoying bluebottle only confirms that status, as does publishing what happens to interest you instead of what some departmental, or central government, goon with a clipboard and a sheet of tick boxes might want. Very old school. And why else would we New World types be at Durham, if not for the very old school?

    The last book's breadth and depth were dazzling, an organized campaign on the Lulu site by people who should never have been let into a university only serving to heighten its brilliance. We look forward to more of the same, yet not, at the end of the month. Durham would not quite be Durham without you, and Collingwood would not remotely be Collingwood. You are the sort of scholar some of us have crossed an ocean to meet. It is a privilege, Mr. Lindsay. A privilege.

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  29. Ex-tutee12 February 2012 at 19:24

    Yes, it is generations now. Your present lot have never met me. But I hope that they never forget meeting you, any more than I ever will. I have no doubt they never will. No one ever could.

    The last book was phenomenal. Radical Orthodoxy. The most amazing study of the relationships between Hebraism and Hellenism, theology and philosophy (including Eastern philosophy), faith and reason, religion and science. All comers taken on and beaten in the debate over Vatican II. How Catholicism completes and transcends the several forms of Protestantism. Southwell, Crashaw, Jacobean melodrama, Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton (including a lot of Dickens and a bit of Chaucer), Greene and Waugh. Church and State. Edward Norman. Anglo-Catholicism. Opus Dei, including a stunning reappraisal of the Spanish Civil War. After reading all that, I'd be a Catholic. If there were a god.

    Next, we are promised Old Labour patriotism and social conservatism. Bracingly revisionist accounts of Blair, Thatcher and Churchill. A complete reassessment of the importance of Jacobitism. A rallying cry across party lines against nuclear weapons and Post Office privatisation. A complete alternative programme across a breathtaking range of policy areas. A totally new take on the Irish Question. The same on Islam, Judaism and the Middle East. The same again on Anglo-American relations. Rounded off with taking no prisoners in defence of the Catholic church against its critics.

    Both in your work of this kind and in your life-changing influence on students, you are the reason why Durham has colleges as well as departments, maybe the last person still doing only that within the university.

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  30. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 19:30

    You are both too, too kind.

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  31. Anonymous12 February 2012 at 19:48

    They are more than that. You will not like this and probably will not put it up, but they have both answered the question posed in this post. The one man Chesterbelloc of our own time is David Lindsay.

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  32. Lizzie12 February 2012 at 21:07

    It is not as if you are the sort that needs an editor, or a literary agent, or anything like that. You are David Lindsay. Whatever you write will be brilliant, and bound to annoy the hell out of all the right people.

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  33. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 21:30

    Well, I can guarantee the second bit, anyway.

    Those sorts of things are on the way out. After a two year wait with attendant loss of currency in more senses than one, I'd take an awful lot of persuading to bother with them again when I can publish myself for free (private publication used to be ludicrously expensive, but not anymore), and I am an old-fashioned soul who still insists on a print edition. For now, anyway. Who knows to what else I might succumb?

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  34. Anonymous12 February 2012 at 23:27

    Anna and Old Dunelm Yank are onto something, I’m afraid. If “conservative” intellectuals are allowed to exist at all in Britain, then the term is used to mean full throttle advocates of neoliberal economic policy and neoconservative foreign policy, Jacobins and Marxists though they really are.

    It certainly does not mean traditionalist Christian critics of capitalism and military adventurism, looking back to the lingering doubts about Hanoverian imperialism and its economic order in communities detached or semidetached from the Established Church, and therefore locating their position within the wider European Christian critiques of both the “liberal” and the “capitalism” in “liberal capitalism”.

    That sort of thing still plays on the Continent, and will do so increasingly under the current circumstances. But very few people there, associating the left with Marxism or at least Jacobinism as they do, would understand the perfectly logical transition from your starting position to the pre-Blair, potentially post-Blair Labour movement with its non-Marxist roots and anti-Marxist achievements.

    Up to a point, it also plays in America, in the traditionalist and paleoconservative parallel intellectual Establishment. But very few, if any, of them would understand how it translated into support for the Welfare State, trade union rights and so on. And none of them would understand that the whole position stands as a radically orthodox theological critique of the very foundations of the American Republic.

    You are seeking to make a case that can only be made in and from Britain. But no one in Britain is going to listen. The book will be amazing, like the last one. But, like the last one, no one much at all will allow themselves to be amazed by it. Their loss, our loss, but above all your loss. I hope I’m wrong. But I’m sure I’m not.

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  35. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 23:35

    And, leaving aside the question of whether or not I myself purport to be an intellectual, I am sure that you are wrong.

    There was a pre-Murdoch Sun, and even Auberon Waugh wrote for it. Before that, the Daily Herald was at one time edited by George Lansbury, while both Chesterton and Belloc were known to write for it.

    It awarded the Order of Industrial Heroism, the medal of which was designed by Eric Gill of the Distributist League and of the Westminster Cathedral Stations of the Cross. That medal featured Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child. That at a time when the awarding newspaper was the official organ of the TUC, recalling all those Biblical scenes and characters on many a trade union banner.

    So the idea of a mass market voice of economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative patriotism is an historically sound one, both in itself and because it would also compel the Mirror to go back to its own better days in order to compete.

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  36. Alan12 February 2012 at 23:52

    You are too good for Durham. If you had ever been to Oxford or Cambridge, you would know that that was not meant as an insult, only as an observation. You should have headed south for your postgrad work, you were and are as good as anyone here and better than an awful lot of them.

    By all accounts, the sort of spoilt, thick little rich boys with whom you have had to contend, as they tried to remove you merely because they thought that they could, are beneath the dignity of man of your intellect, erudition, insight and articulacy. JCRs and that sort of carry on do not run things down here, student newspapers do not matter, the grown-ups are in charge and everyone knows it implicitly.

    Get out of Durham. Your luminous originality is out of place at a university ever faithful to a founding lecture which began, "Whatever is true is not new, and whatever is new is not true." Backwaters and rich kids' playgrounds are not your scene. You are so much better than that, but you do not even know it.

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  37. David Lindsay12 February 2012 at 23:54

    I wouldn't be anywhere else on earth, and there are people here who would never let me leave.

    On topic, please.

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  38. Anonymous13 February 2012 at 00:14

    Kamm was at Oxford, so Alan is talking rubbish. There could not be a more perfect example of a spoilt, thick little rich boy who thinks he owns the world. Apart from Blair, obviously. Blair was also at Oxford, Alan.

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