The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
Dipping into John Walsh’s memoir about the literary scene of the 1980s and two fragments of the introduction leap out. The first is a quote from The Mikado, which rather reinforces my journalistic instinct that when the precise language used is not the most important issue, some stylistic burnishing is acceptable, so long as the meaning survives. (See my previous rant about semantic bleaching and the hack’s duty to prevent it.)
Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
And then, as teenaged Walsh determines to avail himself of the books deemed to be classics (Austen, Dickens, Forster, etc) he has a moment of self-doubt, something that hangs over any consideration of the canon:
A certain specific worry nagged at me: what if I didn’t enjoy the books that the world had admired for centuries? What if I didn’t have the taste (or intelligence) to appreciate them?
To which of course we could offer Hirsch’s notion of cultural literacy and to suggest that in many ways, it’s enough to know, however approximately, what they’re about; or failing that, simply that they exist.
News from Clitheroe in Lancashire, where another bookshop closes and the owner complains not only of punitive rents and the more general decline of the high street but also our old friend dumbing-down. I’m not sure of Paul Hamer’s logic here, as he appears to blame the insidious intellectual hollowing-out of Western society on the prevalence of vape shops and nail bars, but I can certainly offer some sort of anecdotal evidence. I’ve been a London commuter on and off for over 30 years and when I first did it, I reckon at least half my fellow travellers would be reading something, even if it was a tabloid or lad mag. Now I’m very often the only person with any kind of print matter to hand and, yes, maybe some of the phone-gazers are getting to grips with a new translation of Dostoevsky or Derrida but when I do sneak a glance at their screens, they’re really not, are they?
And then to David Hare, who bewails the current tendency of the National Theatre to prioritise star vehicles with West End/Broadway potential over its old repertory policy. And for some reason, George Bernard Shaw gets in on the act:
Do the English people want a national theatre? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them. But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.
Except that I’m not so sure they’re proud of them any more. Or even know they exist.
Interesting article by Patrick McGuinness in the LRB, flashing back to the case of his former teacher Chris Jefferies, who was spuriously accused of murder and dragged through the tabloid mire, apparently because he had strange hair, didn’t own a TV, didn’t like sport and, most reprehensible of all, appeared to have been an excellent English teacher. “Did they really think showing a Jean-Luc Godard film or reading Browning indicated murderous potential?” asks McGuinness. Well, yes, of course they bloody did. As always, these staunch defenders of Western culture run away screaming when presented with anyone who knows or cares about Western culture at any level deeper than a commemorative tea-towel from the V&A.
McGuinness also recalls the activities that Jefferies ran for boys who didn’t want to join the school Cadet Force:
It was like a version of the Foreign Legion for misfits: the asthmatics and the diabetics, the boys with the hearing aids and the boys on crutches, the epileptic, the attention-challenged, the marginal, the sad and the emotionally combustible. We loved it.
PS: Now I’m reminded of the 1997 election and the deeply weird Tory candidate Dr Adrian Rogers, who declared that his opponent Ben Bradshaw “is a homosexual, works for the BBC, rides a bicycle, speaks German: he’s everything about our country that is wrong.”
On Radio 4 this evening, a newsreader helpfully glossed an item about the redesign of the Louvre with the information that the Louvre is a museum in Paris that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Now, I get that the BBC is desperate to broaden its reach to the younglings and as a result we might need to broaden our assumptions about canons of knowledge and what is or isn’t known, but if someone doesn’t know what or where the Louvre is, why might they care that President Macron is chucking some money about it. And why does this passion for inclusivity only apply to Radio 4? Does Radio 1 explain every few minutes who Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter might be? No, because the people who listen to Radio 1 are expected to know.
Why are expectations so low at R4?
I grabbed a random book for the work commute and it turned out to be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I’m pretty sure last read in the dying days of the Thatcher regime (yes, even before the film came out). Except that I must have skipped the preface that time, because surely I’d have remembered, in among the nods to pretty much everybody who was Bloomsbury or Bloomsbury-adjacent in 1928, the following salute to failure, which feels like Alan Bennett channelling Jane Austen, or maybe vice versa:
Miss M.K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain.
Sad to hear that Tony Slattery has died, and it inevitably prompts a slew of posts, many incorporating clips from the TV show where most of us first encountered him, Whose Line Is It Anyway? This one, for example, which gives us a chance not only to mourn a mercurial talent, but also to gaze back at a time when a major channel would put out a show with the working assumption that a critical mass of the audience would know who William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess might be.
I was mildly startled, during the coverage of the lynx being released in Scotland, to hear more than one broadcaster explain, often with an annoying mini-chuckle, that they meant a kind of big cat, not a brand of deodorant. But surely there’s a large constituency, especially among listeners to what’s now known as legacy media, who don’t have day-to-day contact with stinky, surly 14-year-olds, but do have a bit of an idea about the different species of wild cat. And as a result, for a decent number of listeners, the rather desperate attempt at clarification would surely have made things more confusing.
