What Nature Does for Britain by Tony Juniper, book review: The compelling economic argument for going green

In essence, this encapsulates the message of Tony Juniper’s campaigning book, timed for the run-up to the 2015 election: that it is only by putting a financial value on nature that politicians and businessmen will be persuaded to protect it. This is a direction many leading green activists are deeply sceptical about. We cannot devolve our responsibility to defend the rural landscape to those driven by the profit motive, they argue. Once it is seen as a network of “ecosystem services” that landowners and others can be paid to deliver, nature has effectively been privatised, its fate subject to the shifting winds of the market.

Juniper provides an excellent summary of the UK’s evolving ecological crisis: degradation of the soil and the loss of carbon-trapping peat bogs; the decimation of bees and other insect pollinators through the use of insecticides; the loss of marine habitats through destructive fishing practices; pollution of the water supply through phosphates. Agrochemical intervention is nothing new: 19th-century British entrepreneurs scoured the battlefield of Waterloo in search of skeletons to grind for bone meal and imported thousands of mummified cats plundered from Egyptian tombs to boost nutrients in the over-exploited soil.

Even if David Cameron has told his aides to “get rid of this green crap”, Juniper argues, he is out of step with the times: 4.5 million people in the UK belong to organisations supporting nature. With an election looming, can they be ignored?

Juniper finds heartening examples of businesses working with local communities to address environmental challenges because, like the Asian forestry tycoon, they are convinced it makes financial sense. Meanwhile, the market is shifting towards renewables as research shows that, in order to avoid catastrophic warming, two thirds of remaining fossil fuel resources should be left in the ground.

Where the market leads, politicians of a certain hue generally follow. But, despite the excellent work done by Juniper and his peers making the argument for the benefits that would follow, can they really be trusted to deliver a sustainable future?

Order for £9.49 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030

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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - review

This is a gripping and captivating novel that I enjoyed reading very much. The characters were believable and interesting, and I found there was a lot of symbolism and depth in the book too, which accounted for the sadness of it. The poems that Hazel recited were amusing as well.

However, despite how much I liked the book, there was one thing that bugged me as I read: the subject matter of it. To me, glamorizing illness and sensationalizing cancer is even more heartbreaking than the sadness that hangs over the book. At my school, you can hear people all day every day yelling things like, 'Have you seen The Fault in Our Stars yet? Did you cry? I cried!' and, 'I'm trying to draw a cannula but it just won't work.' And also, 'I have to find a cannula for sale so I can dress up as Hazel for Halloween.'

Why is this so distressing? you ask. What about the poor people who actually have cancer? If they saw somebody dressed up with a cannula, they would think, 'Well, they can take that off at any point – but I can't.' Also, I despise the way The Fault in Our Stars has been made into an acronym. There is even a #TFIOS. It's like saying, #cancer. It is just like news corporations sensationalizing news stories.

One day, this book will go out of fashion and so will cancer. How depressing for people with cancer. The book has been made trendy by hashtags and Twitter accounts.

Even though I disliked the subject of the book, I would recommend it to anybody who is sensible enough to realize that cancer and illness is not a fashion.

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Odd Job Man and Language! by Jonathon Green review

Jonathon Green, as per the title of his not-quite-memoir, has a very odd job indeed. He is the world's foremost slang lexicographer. He collects slang. He makes dictionaries of slang. He has spent 30 years doing more or less nothing but. "I can no longer remember when life and work were still easily distinguishable. When, to render it in as simple a way as possible, I didn't work or aim to work 24/7/365. When I didn't live in terror of the abyss of inactivity. Of 'relaxing', of the 'day off'. I find no joy in the list of popular gap-fillers – popular culture, hobbies, travel. It all, ultimately, bores."

The results of his labour are three slang dictionaries (62,00 pages, 110,000 headwords, 415,000 citations) – of which his Summa Theologica, 17 years in the making, is Green's Dictionary of Slang (2010). After its publication, he writes, "I wept". His subject is narrow in scope but deep in synonymy. "I have written the two words 'the penis' 1,351 times (from 'Aaron's rod' to 'zubrick'); 'the vagina' 1,180 ('abc' to 'zum-zum') and 'sexual intercourse', by which I mean the heterosexual variety, 1,740 ('action' to 'zot'). I allow for detail as it is necessary to be precise: sometimes it is a large penis, sometimes a small one, sometimes flaccid, sometimes erect. Sometimes a penis is just a penis."

Does this benign monomania make him happy? The impression you get reading Odd Job Man is slightly different: that, rather, it makes him less unhappy. It gives a solitary, bookish only child – sensitive to his outsiderdom as a Jew in the English public-school system – a means of retreating from the world, of controlling it, of engaging with its vulgar pleasures at a safe remove. He writes repeatedly of himself that he is a "voyeur", and of his "cowardice". To be a lexicographer, he writes, is to be a drudge (as per Dr Johnson) but also (since you define and prescribe) a "tinpot deity".

Green doesn't tell you all that much about his life ("some confessions" is right). After he got stuck into slang, the suggestion perhaps is, there's not that much to tell. He owns many books and lives between London and Paris. He has children. He can afford to do his job thanks to a large and unexpected legacy, and was dunned out of another one in a bruising encounter with the law. His hero is Lenny Bruce. He kicked around as an underground journalist in the 1960s (he edited Oz while Richard Neville was in the dock), wrote a porn book, tried heroin ("Yum-my!"), compiled a number of hack books of quotations and had a lightbulb moment reading Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Partridge defined "nafka" right – it means "whore" – but didn't know it was Yiddish. It made Green think: I can do this. And he was off.

But what is it, exactly, that Green is doing? Slang is a pretty fugitive category. The word itself (first print appearance: 1756) is of unknown etymology and remains resistant to definition. Slang isn't a language (it doesn't have a grammar) but a set of vocabulary items, and it lives in a territory adjoining and overlapping but not coterminous with (among other things) colloquialism, dialect, euphemism, abbreviation, professional jargon and various forms of figurative speech. For his purposes, "slang" is anything Green says is slang.

There's no doubt we've had slang as long as we've had registers of language. But slang as we know it begins, in his account, with late-medieval thieves' cant – collected in the titillating pamphlets of "rogue literature" and "beggar books" then percolating into the general population. Slang, to Green, is "counter-language". It is distinctively of the city. It is the lexicon of outsiders and rebels, constantly on the move, patricidal and mocking, and yet plugged into the most basic human activities: fucking, fighting, shitting, stealing stuff and getting fucked up. Slang has no word for love. And it's very male (Green touches on this here and there but one longs for him to develop it): "in this most manmade of languages women are always objects, never subjects".

But that isn't Green's main concern. He's not a sociolinguist or, as he freely admits, a linguist of any sort. He is an amateur (in the best sense: he does it for love) – not an entomologist but a butterfly collector. Not quite even that, perhaps. Slang is basically oral, and Green doesn't do fieldwork. What he's looking for is written or literary evidence (and that would include everything from Chaucer to The A-Team, which yielded 155 citations). It is quixotic: the traces of slang in the written language are the shadows those butterflies cast on the wall. Hard to net!

Green is a good enough sport to be upfront about how heavily each glossary of slang over the years perforce leans on its predecessors. In Language! he even quotes a party-pooping don who puts doubt at the very root of the discipline: "there is little evidence that real vagrants spoke thieves' cant, a notion fostered by rogue literature". Green says that her theory – that thieves' cant was simply made up, like Dothraki or brown windsor soup – is "as unprovable as the contrary thesis that she is at pains to decry". The absence of evidence, in other words, is not evidence of absence. Still.

Green has a faintly chippy relationship with the OED, to which he is a consultant but also (in his smaller field) a rival. He publishes first, and then, "distrusting the abilities even of one whom they claim to respect, the legions of Little Clarendon Street have reresearched my efforts and displayed them online as if their own". One-upping their first citations is a point of pride. When he finds an instance of the word "fuckadoodle" somewhere predating the OED's, one imagines him doing a little air-punch in his lonely room.

But Green and the legions of Little Clarendon Street are in roughly the same game. He has some starchier things to say about Urban Dictionary, which looks likely to shoot his fox. It's not actually a dictionary, as he rightly points out: it's more like a sort of linguistic wiki with its guts on the floor. And yet – while it forsakes the lexicographer's authority (any fool can add an entry and authority is a matter of accruing thumbs-ups) – it has the advantage of contemporaneity and, however messily corralled, the potential evidence of a massive body of current slang users.

Language! is a very interesting survey of the history of slang and the history of its collectors, taking in everything from the early literature of criminality to the Broadway backchat of Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, from Soho's Polari to the black slangs emerging from slavery in the American south. What it declines to address, perhaps tellingly, is internet "leetspeak".

One of the book's virtues is that, by taking a step back from the lexis, Green is able to tease out family resemblances in the metaphors that lead us from the act to the slang word: the way that sex is often cast as violence, and so on. Language! bursts with linguistic interest and fun historical nuggets. Did you know that Swift may have been the first to use "blue" to mean obscene? Or that Smollett (though elsewhere Green says Cleland) minted the phrase "birthday suit"?

A fair amount of content is repeated between the two books, but there's a noticeable difference in the prose. That might be down to the author finding it more difficult to write about himself than about his subject (again and again, Odd Job Man skitters away into Green's safe zone). But the books also have different publishers.

Language! is, for the most part, limpidly written. Reading Odd Job Man is like paddling through mud.The autobiographical sections zip between first and third person, present tense and past narration, and are prone to tedious periphrasis when they spell things out at all. "Motherfucker" is "the Oedipal polysyllable". Tom Wolfe shows up, but – unnamed – is identifiable only by his white suit. A "well-known figure" is glimpsed off his face on booze, and the clue that his son-in-law would eventually "rule our waves" leads you to identify him as Tony Booth; but why not say so?

Yet Odd Job Man is also the more unusual and the more moving of the two books. Here is somebody whose life's work is not complete, and can never be complete: Green is a man swimming against an ever stronger tide. But it's a life's work that has – with the publication of his dictionary – passed its climacteric. And thanks to the internet, like a vocational concordance-maker in the age of digital search, Green is living through his own obsolescence: "It appears that I have spent my life becoming good at the wrong thing."

Incoherent though his achievement may be, however, it is also magnificent: a cathedral of bin lids built on foundations of quicksand. What's to be done? What he undoubtedly will do, until he drops dead at his desk: keep buggering on.

• To order Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue (Atlantic, £25) by Jonathon Green for £18.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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Bret Easton Ellis shows 50 shades of green?

We have a new Twitter-fueled uproar today. Why is bad-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis claiming TV actor Matt Bomer is "too gay" to play a straight role in a movie of Fifty Shades of Grey?

There is no movie, or at least not yet. It's not yet even a glimmer in Hollywood's addled brain, let alone cast, but fans of the hot-hot-hot novels of sadomasochistic sex are busy casting the major characters anyway, especially on Twitter. Bomer, the hot-hot-hot star of USA Network's White Collar who also had a role in this year's Magic Mike, is being mentioned to play the novels' soft-porn protagonist Christian Grey.

No way, tweeted Ellis, 48, the author and screenwriter of American Psycho and other books, who may or may not be gay himself but surely is the brattiest of the literary Brat Pack. He has nothing against gays or Bomer, Ellis says, but Christian Grey has to be into women or the story won't work. Which is what he said in a Twitter rant this week.

"He's NOT right for Christian G," he tweeted Wednesday. "Okay I'll say it. Matt Bomer isn't right for Christian Grey because he is openly gay...He's not CG. Never...I am NOT discriminating Matt Bomer because of his sexuality. Fifty Shades of Grey demands an actor that is genuinely into women. Get it?!?"

Cue the ensuing flow of push-back and atta boy tweets.

And, mind you, the fact that Ellis didn't get the job to adapt the story for the big screen has nothing to do with what E!Online called "Fifty Shades of Bitter." On that point, Ellis tweeted earlier, "It's a very major disappointment to announce that I've somehow been taken off the list of possible screenwriters for Fifty Shades of Grey..."

Bomer, 32, who recently came out, plays a sexy straight guy in his TV show and so far has managed to be persuasive despite going home every night to his male partner and their children. Ellis, in another tweet, said he thinks Bomer comes off as "totally gay" in White Collar.

By the way, Ellis himself has long been coy in multiple interviews over the years about defining his own sexuality. For artistic reasons, he has said, he doesn't want to say because "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read (his books) in a different way. If they knew I was gay, Psycho would be read as a different book."

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John Green on why books beat any iPad app

Author John Green, one half of the Vlogbrothers (along with his brother Hank) talked to USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer about this summer's choice for their Nerdfighter Book Club —Ray Bradbury's classic novel, Fahrenheit 451— and about the role of books in a digital age.

Q: When & why did you first readFahrenheit 451?

A: I read it in ninth grade. I remember liking it more than most of the books I read for English class that year, but that's not saying much. I was one of those students who was predisposed to disliking a book simply because it had been assigned to me. These days, I'm a much bigger fan of English classes and critical reading, and one of the reasons we started the book club in the first place was to make the argument that it's pleasurable to read great literature, and to read with care and thoughtfulness, which is why we like doing this over the summer, when there's no school.

Q: Why choose it for the Nerdfighters Book Club?

A: I think it will be really interesting to discuss the themes of the novel — particularly thinking about the ways context and sustained intellectual engagement adds meaning to human life — in a place (the Internet) that is not exactly known for sustained intellectual engagement. Social networks are often home to precisely the kinds of factoids and half-truths that Bradbury worries about in Fahrrenheit 451. Nerdfighters are trying to build spaces online that can foster the kind of thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor that isn't always easy to find online. (Certainly, it is easier to find cute pictures of cats, for instance.) As we often say in the Nerdfighter community, "The truth resists simplicity," and I think Fahrenheit 451 is a great example of a novel that proves more complex and nuanced the closer you read.

Q: Your experiences with schools' summer reading assignments?

John and Hank Green's new Nerdfighter Book Club pick is the late Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451.'

A: I loved my summer reading in high school — in fact, many of my favorite books were assigned to me as summer reading. (The Virgin Suicides and Song of Solomon come to mind.) I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time — and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

Q: What do you think about using videos and the Internet on behalf of reading and books?

A: I don't think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books. We've seen that for years — whether it's thousands of people (mostly teenagers) choosing to read The Great Gatsby together over summer vacation, or projects like Infinite Summer, in which thousands of people read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest together over the summer of 2010.

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles — books, in short, that are as much like Angry Birds as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea. (It's also, it seems to me, Ray Bradbury's nightmare.)

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can. And that's what we're trying to do with the Nerdfighter Book Club.

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33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE: A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holiday to Green Day

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May 13, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Dorian Lynskey
Ecco
ISBN 978-0061670152
660 pages
$19.99

Reviewed by Dave Shiflett

Protest music isn't what it used to be. "Steal From Walmart" and even the hundreds of anti-war songs that blossomed in the blood of the war in Iraq don't approach the societal resonance of "We Shall Overcome" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," as British music critic Dorian Lynskey confirms and mourns in "33 Revolutions Per Minute."

"I began this book intending to write a history of a still vital form of music," Lynskey writes. "I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy." As eulogies go, however, this is a lively and sprawling one, beginning with a chapter on "Strange Fruit," written in 1939, and ending with largely ignored attacks on George W. Bush's military policy.

"Strange Fruit," a darkly powerful meditation on lynching, was anything but ignored. It put its singer, 23-year-old Billie Holiday, on the map and remains vibrant today. While protest songs up to that point were "propaganda," Lynskey writes, this one "proved they could be art."

"Strange Fruit" is far more vocally demanding than most protest songs, including Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," written in a New York flophouse in 1940 and borrowing part of its melody from the Carter family's "Little Darling Pal of Mine." In a similar sharing spirit, "We Shall Overcome" commandeered an 18th-century melody and boasts four lyricists, including Pete Seeger, whose rendition found an instant fan in Martin Luther King Jr. "There's something about that song that haunts you," King said, though it did have its critics. "I don't believe we're going to overcome (by) singing," Malcolm X told a Harlem rally in 1964. "If you're going to get yourself a .45 and start singing 'We Shall Overcome,' I'm with you."

Lynskey writes passionately and often admiringly but doesn't stint on the criticism, giving ample praise to Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" but adding that fellow folkie Tom Paxton dismissed "Blowing in the Wind" as "a grocery list song where one line has absolutely no relevance to the next line." Lynskey also reminds us that Dylan was a master of sometimes clunky contrariness: A few weeks after John F. Kennedy's assassination, he claimed a strange kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald: "I saw some of myself in him," he told a New York audience, which rewarded him with a bouquet of catcalls.

Singalong fans will appreciate Lynskey's inclusion of Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag," perhaps most famous for the Fish Cheer that preceded it at Woodstock and helped launch the F-bomb's glorious ascendancy. In this case, the criticism comes from McDonald himself. "What's almost unfathomable is the smallness of it," he says. "It was just another song." Yet we still remember that rag, unlike the hundreds (if not thousands) of songs inspired by the Iraq war. The absence of a military draft might explain the difference. In an earlier era, singing anti-war songs might be considered an act of self-preservation; today, our volunteer services drain such warbling of its urgency and audience.

The book ranges far beyond the '60s and includes songs celebrating gay and black pride, protesting apartheid and hunger, and denouncing various meanies, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There are also amusing nonmusical asides, including a fond remembrance of punkster Jello Biafra's 1979 run for mayor of San Francisco, in which he took a respectable 4 percent of the vote, though that placed him behind Diane Feinstein and Sister Boom-Boom. Biafra later said that punk was "a close-minded, self-centered social club" and "a meaningless fad."

The theme of smugness and encroaching irrelevance weaves through the book, with Lynskey reminding us early on that many protest songs are short on chord changes and long on sanctimony, with fans to match. He characterizes the attitude as "We understand. We are not like them. We are all on the same side."

He gives a terrific example of another problem: the profundity-aspiring musician, in this case country singer Steve Earle, who insisted that American-born Taliban member John Walker Lindh was something of a post-adolescent everyman: "I became acutely aware that what happened to him could have happened to my son, and your son, and anybody's son," weirdly suggesting a widespread youthful desire to join an ultrareligious warrior group that doesn't allow you to drink beer or listen to popular music and stones you to death for unsanctioned sex.

Thankfully, we get a more sober observation from the voice of reason himself, Keith Richards: "You don't shoulder any responsibility when you pick up a guitar or sing a song, because it's not a position of responsibility."

Is protest music dead? The better question, Lynskey writes, is "Is anybody listening?" Not to protest music, it seems, which interrupts the pursuit of unencumbered entertainment. "It is not just that people have lost faith in any performer to help bring about change," he concludes. "They resent anyone who attempts to do so."

Perhaps the only way to bring protest music back home is to reinstitute the draft.

Dave Shiflett is a writer and musician in Midlothian, Va.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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