#mr wemyss has a few words

[baptonbooks]

Cuddly Old Jeremy Corbyn: Terrorist-friendly, Jew-hating, totalitarian enemy of liberty

Let me begin with a word to our friends overseas, who have been so assiduous on social media in ‘boosting’ every pro-Corbyn screed: If it’s not your country, your opinions are perhaps interesting, but assuredly immaterial.

Now. To the matter at hand.

I am not particularly fond of Mrs May. She’s as Wet as the hoodie-and-husky-cuddling Call-Me-Dave. She’s not the Second Coming of Mrs T; she’s Francis Pym in drag.

Jeremy Corbyn, however, is a shit of the first water who ought not to be trusted with the duties of a parish councillor.

Let’s look at his friends, shall we, and the policies and tendencies which unite them.

Save in the conventional phrases of the House, nine in ten of the Parliamentary Labour Party do not consider him their Right Honourable Friend (or for that matter, right, or honourable). That is why his Shadow Cabinet would be his Cabinet if the country were ever so debased as to give that ghastly little man a majority. No one else should serve under the bugger.

This is so, because the PLP are decent human beings in the main, and are HM Loyal Opposition.

Kindly Old Uncle Jezza, however....

Who are his friends? Well, Hamas, of course, and Hezbollah. The Provos of old, whom he invited – they wearing their masks as ‘politicians’ – to take tea with him on the House terrace whilst their hands were yet imbrued with the blood and C4 of Brighton, where they had just attempted to assassinate the Prime Minister. And of course, two years after, he was agitating for the Brighton bomber Magee to escape the ‘injustice’ of being tried for his crimes. And then there were his pet causes, Botmeh and Alami, innocent lambs guilty of nothing save car-bombing the Israeli Embassy in London.

Then again, what can one expect of a man whose choice for Chancellor would be a pro-IRA Marxist who wishes to honour the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ as having brought peace in Ireland, North and South, by ‘bombs and bullets’; who regrets that the Prime Minister was not assassinated at Brighton; who, with Mr Corbyn, petitioned to have the Tamil Tigers de-listed as being a terrorist organisation; and who signed a letter two years ago – and has lied about it ever since – calling for completely disarming the police and shutting down the Security Service (known to most as MI5 and to some of us as Box 500).

But Master Jeremy has his friends, with whom he agrees on most things. Such as al-Muhajiroun, under the gentle care of Omar Bakri Muhammad and Anjem Choudary: a group supported by Khuram Butt, late – very much late – of Borough Market. They were a prominent contingent in a group he addressed in 2002, to the outrage even of the Weekly Worker. It was a rally. The  al-Muhajiroun lot were the ones shouting, to no pushback whatever by Mr Corbyn, ‘Gas Tel Aviv’.

But then, Mr Corbyn is the man who, if PM, should entrust the Home Office, and the security of the nation, to his former mistress, Diane Abbott. (They chose the GDR – East Germany – for their dirty weekends, where even the cupids were Stasi.) Ms Abbott, the thickest female MP since Red Ellen Wilkinson, who was thick as pig-shit, should make a lovely Secretary of State for Home Affairs, in charge of policing and internal security. After all, if you cannot trust a woman who has had to apologise to the House for failing to declare an interest, whose views on Ireland and The Troubles were that ‘every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed’, who wished to disband Five and Special Branch at that time, and who voted against proscribing al-Qaida, well, who can you trust to keep Britain safe?

Our Jezza trusts her, and surely his judgement is notable? After all, this is a man who stayed on as a paid broadcaster for Iran’s Press TV even after its right to broadcast was pulled by Ofcom for gleefully recording the torture of a dissident Iranian journalist; a man who was a regular Press TV pundit not only on his own programme but as a guest on his mate George Galloway’s.

But perhaps it won’t matter. After all, Jeremy says we’d face no threats at all if we simply had his friends. Hamas. Hezbollah. Assad – whom he voted against stopping – and Putin, whose Ukrainian … adventures … he winks at. Every dictator in South America. And Iran, of course, on whom he has always wished to lift sanctions. (Sanctions are for Israel.)

Perhaps that’s why he believes in unilateral nuclear disarmament for the UK, in letting his friends know the UK will never fight back, and in concentrating the only ‘cuts’ and ‘austerity’ of a Corbyn government upon HM Forces and the MoD. After all, even Putin’s land grabs are the fault only of Nato; and peace in the Middle East wants only that Israel unilaterally disarm.

For of course, not just everyone is or can be Jeremy’s friend. He has unfriends as well. Nato. Israel. The Falklands. The Royal Navy, RAF, and Army. The security services and intelligence community. The political traditions and heirs of Attlee, Ernie Bevin, Gaitskell, Foot, Kinnock, and even Benn. The PLP (172-40 at last count, when he lost the PLP’s vote of confidence in 2016: which creates an interesting constitutional wrinkle, in that, should Labour, per impossibile, win a majority in the House, its party leader could not command enough members to form a government).

And of course, as chosen enemies, he always has the Jews.

But he’s working on these things. The Lawley Lenin is smiling his inscrutable smile as the entryist tactics of his Militant youth are being trotted out – ‘Trot’ is an apt verb, here – to deselect his enemies in the PLP, at the hands of his idolaters. And as for the Jews.... Well. He commissioned a ‘report’ on the systemic Jew-hatred in the Labour party. And – in a display of the most blatant ermine-lined bribery since Maundy Gregory was flogging peerages for cash down (cheques payable to D Lloyd George, please, and leave them open, no need to cross them) – got the whitewash he wished, from La Chakrabarti. After which he equated Israel with Daesh and went back to huddling with Holocaust deniers and blood-libel spreaders.

Jeremy Corbyn’s friends shape Jeremy Corbyn’s policies and views. And by a curious coincidence, all his friends happen to be enemies or antagonists of Crown, country, and liberty. (And generally Jew-haters and terrorism-apologists into the bargain.) And, curiously, when Britain is threatened, it is always, in Mr Corbyn’s view, Britain’s fault, and the workings of karma. This may be why he has a Shadow Defence Secretary who – despite her having a Lieutenant-General for a brother-in-law – knows nothing about the Forces save that they ought not to be allowed a nuclear deterrent (not that Jeremy would allow its use even potentially as a deterrent), and a Shadow Foreign Secretary who’s only in it for her expenses.

Politics in this country having become Americanised, there shall no doubt be cries, at this point, in the veriest tones of Lady Bracknell, asking, ‘Do I impugn his patriotism?’: to which the answer is of course no.

I don’t question Mr Corbyn’s patriotism. I question his loyalty. And I’d not trust him with 20p, let alone No. 10.

[baptonbooks]

People will judge your book by its cover – and its title page and first few paras: Part Ceithir

To catch you up: Parts One, Two, Three, and Three A.

Now. Book design beyond the cover.

‘There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois type of a Times article and the slovenly print of an evening halfpenny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimaux. The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Leeds Mercury with the Western Morning News. But a Times leader is entirely distinctive, and these words could have been taken from nothing else.’

– Mr Holmes, as retailed by Dr JH Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles

I am in the hospital. It is my first experience with morphine. I am in the hospital, where everything, real and unreal (and surreal), is lived in the present continuous. I am in the hospital, and ill enough to justify it, and in more danger than I or they know (or will know), and, God help us all, I am hallucinating about page layout, typography, dingbats, and book design.

Writers. Good God.

– Mr Pyle in his heart attack memoir, Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts

We have detailed in prior posts the importance of the right typeface on your cover, and of consistency. This applies equally to What Lurks Within. Your title page may reflect your cover; but if your cover is not in something that looks good and right and apt on the page as text, you really must use a different typeface for the body of the book. (Chapter heads may, often rather elegantly, mimic or mirror or complement the typeface on the cover, by contrast: literally by contrast to the text body, and, it oughtn’t to want saying, if and only if doing so does not clash with or take away from the look and feel of the text body typeface. (Mr Wemyss notes that he does not, in his private life, patronise takeaways which have The Clash on their sound systems. Some things are simply not Tafelmusik.))

We may as well say at once that the version of your work prepared and formatted for e-readers has its own constraints, purely technical and technological ones; and these ought to be followed. (A quite useful guide, really, taking it all in all, may be found here.) But this is not within our remit here.

We are discussing the physical book.

It is as well to choose a font, a typeface, with which you are satisfied to be associated for what is mysteriously called ‘the long haul’ (a Naval expression, I presume...). Once you have made any sort of name for yourself, and all the more if you are committing a series, these subliminal continuities matter immensely.

The typeface ought also to be one apposite to the genre, and capable of its requirements (writers of non-fiction engaged in popularising the sciences, for example, may have cause to include formulæ, and their typeface wants to give them that option; writers of thrillers set Overseas, who are up to their oxters in villains with Slavic or Latin American or Daesh-ly Arabic names, shall want diacritics to hand). The typeface really is better off in having ligatures: certainly the common digraphs such as ‘æ’ and ‘œ’, but also, if possible, ‘ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ���’ if anything historical crops up, and ‘st’. These add dignity: that ‘leaded bourgeois type’ air. (Historians particularly can make us of that subliminal effect.)

But all of this bows to legibility; with dignity very nearly joint first. Persons fancying themselves poets have an appallingly marked tendency to believe their books ought to be printed (full stop … but I go on) in markedly appalling ‘pretty-pretty’ typefaces which render their vapid effusions illegible as well as, in any case, unreadable. Real poets do not: the only Fancy Fonts you find in poets of the stature of Eliot, Auden, Larkin, and Betjeman, are Greek.

Similarly, nothing has ever been – nor shall ever be  – taken seriously in certain fonts. If you publish in Comic Sans, you’re a fool. If, frankly, you publish in a sans-serif typeface at all, you’re a twat.

Accordingly, you are advised most urgently to choose a serif typeface of uncompromised legibility – even at smaller weights or points – and with some dignity to it. It wants to be overtly unobtrusive and subliminally suasive. Plain, stodgy Times New Roman and its derivatives work perfectly well, and are your best choice for the e-book version in any case. Subliminally, typefaces have a semiotic function (so much so that even Dan Sodding Brown, the William Topaz McGonagall of the railway station trade paperback, seems slightly less unreadable and unbelievable, and marginally more literate, than he should otherwise do or in fact is: and he’s a bugger who thinks semiotics are something called ‘symbology’. The world had been spared much trash had he and that ghastly cow who wrote the Twilight balls been forced to publish only in Impact or Westminster or Brush Script ... or Curlz MT).

We, by the way, have come to adopt and hew to one of the Garamond typefaces. All the same, you cannot go very far wrong with most serif fonts, even unto Caslons, Bells, Fells, or even Didones.

If you are considering your ‘badge or marque’ typeface, you ought also to consider it in context, on the page; and to remember that the paper of the page may be white, or cream. As you presumably have some sort of graphics programme for your covers, take a sample text and try it on a white background and on a cream, in various sizes of your possible typefaces.

Some of you shall have published online in the past, and accustomed yourself to the Web’s conventions (and bad habits). Eschew these. Three centred asterisks on a screen are one thing, to indicate a shift or break or some damned thing within a chapter; on the physical page, something like this is far superior:

A dingbat such as ❦ is better still.

As for such considerations as indents, paragraphing, the position of chapter heads or titles, and All That … we can tell you only, rather uselessly, to go by feel. That feel, however, wants to be informed by a fairly wide reading in and familiarity with your genre and sub-genre: if there are certain conventions common to it, it is for you to know them, and to be able either to follow them or to know when and why and how far to break them deliberately. The measure of this as of all things is the probably effect on the potential reader and purchaser: writing may be an art; selling it is a business. And – as you are presumably a reader yourself – you ought to have some idea of what other readers respond to or don’t, both consciously and otherwise, with all allowances made for connotations and overtones and subliminal effects.

That ought to get you started thinking, at least. If we think of anything further, we’ll revisit the topic.