About January 2016: And then Bowie died

In 2009, I wrote a book about the decade that, in strict calendrical terms, was then stumbling to a close. I suggested, however, that the period of time I was describing really began on a blue New York morning when the first plane hit the first tower and ended seven years later only a few blocks away when the US economy imploded in a puff of, if not logic, then sudden and unexpected self-awareness. (This of course allowed me to suggest that anything that happened in the few months between my completing the book and 31 December, 2009 were essentially irrelevant). The alternative is what the historian Ferdinand Mount called decaditis, the assumption that human events pay scrupulous attention to Gregorian norms, and suddenly decide to behave differently because they find themselves in the Noughties or the 1920s or whenever.

And the same, of course applies to individual years, but every now and then something happens on or around the beginning of January that sets the tone for the next 12 months. And if we follow the conventional Dad Rock narrative that 2016 was The Year When Lots Of Famous People Especially Pop Stars Died (see here to decide whether that’s true) then it pretty much followed the rules. In retrospective we could be wilfully contrarian and say that the process began on 28 December of the previous year, when Lemmy growled his last, but let’s stick with Bowie, which means the year started on 10 January, or maybe more accurately 11 January because that’s when so many of us found out. 

I got the news at work, in the editorial department of an Asian lifestyle magazine. Idly checking out Facebook, I chanced upon an article from the Hollywood Reporter, posted in the Fantasy Death League site. Shock, denial, sadness, all the usual reactions. The problem was, that I was surrounded by 20-somethings who weren’t entirely sure who Bowie was, and certainly didn’t get why I seemed so stunned by his demise. For the rest of the day I consoled myself in the virtual world, connecting with friends of a similar vintage who knew what he meant, who had danced to his rhythms and those of his acolytes. I don’t think I did much work. Something had been reset, tweaked, knocked out of place, within me and within so many people I knew.

Because maybe 2016 really did start roughly on schedule. Lots of people died (Pierre Boulez, Alan Rickman, Terry Wogan in the same month) but I don’t think it was until April (Prince, Victoria Wood) that the whole Death Year thing was apparent. And then Brexit happened and then Trump happened and here we all are a decade later. But what we didn’t necessarily realise at the time was that Bowie’s death was a curtain-raiser not just for a miserable year but for a succession of calamities that extended well, well beyond its conventional boundaries. In some ways, it’s still 2016. As someone remarked a bit later, back when Twitter was still vaguely human: 

If I just assume that I have been having a weird dream, which started with Bowie dying, then the last 31 months or so make more sense 

Where we find ourselves now is Bowie’s world, and we just live in it.

PS: Of course, this is subjective. There are people even younger than those who were my colleagues in 2016 and their memories of that year are rather different. As this article suggests, 

Looking at Instagram, around 2016, there was no carousel posts... People were posting a picture of their avocado, and it wasn't so performative... There weren't short-form reels, so there wasn't that algorithmic kind of fatigue that people have now. 

and 

To be honest, 2016 was the year of Snapchat stories... If I go back through my Snapchat memories, it's pretty much all from 2016. Instagram was all about photos, we didn't have to worry about Reels, we didn't have to worry about updating our stories all the time. It was just a simple, chilled life. 

and only after we’ve dealt with that important stuff, in passing:

It was a particularly gloomy year for celebrity deaths, with legends including David Bowie, Prince, George Michael and Alan Rickman all passing away. And 2016 also saw some major world events - such as the UK Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's first US election win - that continue to divide people, whether they celebrated or despaired at the result. 

PPS: Or for a more conventional explanation to those baffled colleagues, not to mention the Gen Z-ers worrying about Reels, here’s Martin James, a few hours after the news broke: 

Throw a pebble into the pool of popular culture over the last 50 years and Bowie is never too many ripples from the centre. The Beatles scratched the surface, but Bowie excavated it, renovated and tore it all down again, just to start all over again.

PPPS: And my own contribution in the aftermath:

...maybe what we’re really grieving for is the fact that however often we paint on that Aladdin Sane flash, we are not and never will be Bowie.

About Murakami and resolutions

The title of this blog comes from a line in Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance Dance Dance and if you’d asked me in 2005, when I started this thing, I would probably have said that Murakami was my favourite living writer. He was certainly the only one whose books I’d automatically buy as soon as they appeared, in hardback, without reference to the reviews. I was a completist, hoovering up his hard-to-find early books, his non-fiction, the various critical works (at one point I considered a name change to Cultural Scentlessness) and then, and then... I’m not sure if I changed or he did, but I realised the hardback of Killing Commendatore had sat on my shelf unread all the way through lockdown and poor old Nobel bridesmaid Haruki-san became one of his own passive anti-heroes, dumped and left alone with his spaghetti and jazz records and cat.

But then, just before Christmas, I needed to buy a last-minute Secret Santa gift and the only useful shop in the vicinity was a branch of Waterstone’s and the gift I chose wasn’t a book and I always feel awkward if I go into a bookshop and buy only non-book things (and if you’re reading this, I suspect you’re the same) and I chanced upon a Murakami I hadn’t noticed before, his non-fiction anthology Novelist As A Vocation. So I bought it. And now I’ve read it.

Two takeaways. One is a quotation:

People who absolutely love school, and feel sad when they can’t go, probably won’t become novelists.

And the other is an anecdote from Murakami’s early writing life (and not that one about the revelation at the baseball game). When he was grappling with his first book, Hear The Wind Sing, he translated it into his decent but imperfect English, thus simplifying the style and sentence structure, and then put it back into Japanese.

Which ties nicely into my two resolutions for the coming year. First, to rationalise all the half-formed story ideas on my hard drive, and prompted by the fact that great many of my friends (here and here and here and here and here) have got their authorial arses in gear in recent months, I’m going to knuckle down and actually write another bloody book. (I mean, Julian Barnes has retired so I guess there’s a vacancy.) And because I’m frequently shamed by the hard grind that my students put in to perfect their English language skills, I need to get my own grasp of French back to some semblance of adequacy. So, let’s begin. From a novel that’s been simmering for the past few years:

La dernière chose que j’ai goûtée, c’était un pigeon.

Let’s see where that takes us. 

PS: Also from the book, the normally apolitical Murakami dips a toe into the murky waters of identity:

I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, and make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act... Basically I just go with the flow. And as long as I’m following that flow I can freely do all sorts of things that are hardly possible. This is indeed one of the main joys of writing novels.

And, possibly a touch of that cultural scentlessness:

...I get the sense that in Japan and Asian countries the “modern” that necessarily precedes the “postmodern” did not, in a precise sense, exist.

About CBS

Who remembers Andrew Keen? He was (still is, I guess) the tech entrepreneur who foresaw how widespread access to the tools of media production would lead to what he described as The Cult of the Amateur. And as he was doing this towards the end of the 2000s, it was blogging that really provoked his ire. I was a bit harsh on him at the time but finally I’m starting to think he may have had a point. As Sid Vicious pointed out, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt.”

About Sally Mann

I’ve been grumbling for some time over the tendency of BBC Radio 4 presenters and guests to assume that listeners will need every cultural reference glossed and clarified before they can take it on. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear the photographer Sally Mann on Desert Island Discs this morning, blithely dropping into the conversation Proust (also her book choice) and Nabokov, Cy Twombly and Kandinsky, all so fast that Lauren Laverne didn’t have chance to explain, before selecting eight discs that bounced between Keith Jarrett, Vivaldi and Sylvester.

And then she almost ruined things by saying “the proof is in the pudding” but I forgive her.

PS: Not that anyone really cares, though. As the writer Joel Morris observed, also this morning:

About vibey

I grow old, I grow old and language is dribbling away from my control. Case in point: this article, which describes a mid-70s Joni Mitchell album as “vibey” without explaining what that might mean. To confuse matters, it does feature contributions from the vibraphone player Victor Feldman, but I don’t think that’s what seals it. A social media callout prompted some interesting possibilities, including “more atmospheric than formally tight” which fits but could also fit supermarket muzak. And then we find that Hoxton Square is similarly vibey and it looks as if it’s a word, like “cool” and “hip”, that served a very precise purpose until the estate agents got hold of it.

About Brigitte Bardot and Nigel Farage

Brigitte Bardot exits and the splendid Justin Lewis ponders aloud on the vexed question of whether we can/should celebrate the art while castigating the artist.

For the record, I don’t think Bardot was a terribly good actor or singer, nor did she make very many good movies, but that’s not the point. Her arrival in the 1950s signalled a new perspective on female sexuality that resonated well after she ceased to be a major draw in the cinema. She was John Lennon’s first celebrity crush and her look influenced any number of 60s dollybirds (Christie, Faithfull, Rice-Davies, et al) as well as cementing in the mainstream media the association of Frenchness with sensual misbehaviour. She was important, and that’s what qualifies her for obituaries. Her later descent into far-right wingnuttery is neither here nor there. Incidentally, I’d disagree with Justin and also stake a claim for Norman Tebbit. He wasn’t the first senior Tory politician from a humble background – Heath, Powell and Thatcher came before him – but he was the first to eschew elocution lessons and as such must be a role model for the current crop of right-wing populists.

Talking of which, the question of how colossal a shitbag the teenage Nigel Farage might have been rumbles on. I don’t know, as I wasn’t there. But I do come from a roughly similar vintage, being four years younger than him, and am an alumnus of a similar school (selective, single-sex, sporty, cadet corps, faded grandeur, a strange blend of academic rigour and macho philistinism). And racism was bloody everywhere and as the only Jew among the student body, I was on the receiving end and I’m pretty sure that the handful of non-white kids got it even worse. The low point came in 1983 when we staged a mock election and the National Front came a strong second and I wouldn’t be surprised if even that result was massaged downwards to avoid some unpleasant headlines. I remember the names and I remember the faces. I’ll be charitable and assume it was all youthful bravado and they’re now respectable, productive members of society. I’m sure I said some pretty toe-curling things myself at that age. But if I see any of those names and faces appear over the parapets, perhaps by getting involved in politics, perhaps as cheerleaders for a certain former student of Dulwich College, maybe I won’t be so discreet.

PS: More about the good art/bad artist conundrum here.

About online wrongness

The Oxford Word of the Year is “rage bait”, defined as: 

online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.

But I’m trying to be less consumed with rage these days, even if recent events feel designed to provoke it: analogue rage bait, if you like. What I do notice instead, among all the AI capybaras is stuff that appears engineered to induce a bit of mild eye-rolling, a sigh, an outburst of pedantry; that time when an exasperated parent loses patience and says, “never mind, let me do it.” It’s a variant of Cunningham’s Law, which holds that “the best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer”. Except that nobody cares about getting the right answer as long as they get those eyeballs.

The whole issue is confused by the lurking presence of AI; are these cynical attempts to engage with wrongness, or just bots swallowing up online dumbness and spitting it out again? For example, this list of the best ever Test batters, which starts OK, then descends into increasingly hearty portions of word soup. It looks like AI slop, put out there to provoke – but then we recall the Japanese Nintendo game that was peopled with bizarrely-named baseball players, all without the assistance of AI. Might Gariel Btogby not be a distant cousin to Bobson Dugnutt?

And then we see posts like this, claiming to be a video of “Jingle Bells in Indian” which is nonsensical because there’s no such language as Indian, and in any case the song being massacred is ‘Sleigh Ride’. Pedant bait? Well, not really, because someone who points out the solecism is slagged off for being a killjoy Karen. This was a post born of slack-jawed ignorance, pure and simple, and it’s bad manners to mention it. To be honest, why do we need digitally-generated stupidity when we have the real thing?

About James

From James, by Percival Everett, which is a reworking of Huckleberry Finn, which I haven’t read, so I don’t know if something similar occurs in the original book, which is rather appropriate:

...I don’t think he ever read no books, but he acted like the sort of man what reads books. You know what I mean?

And later, when the central (black) character blacks up to join a minstrel show:

What would they have done to you if they had figured out that you were exactly what you were pretending to be?