Jonathan Bate’s worries about undergraduates’ declining ability to cope with long, complex books is taken up by the Daily Mail, which confidently pins the blame on social media. By which, inevitably, it means TikTok rather than inane globules of micro-celeb gossip emanating from certain tabloid... ah, right, that would be it...
PS: The Mail, obviously, has previous.
Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:
When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.
The thing is, I still believe that...
Was with a mixed (teens and 20s, Italian, Brazilian, Turkish) group of students yesterday and the sometimes awkward subject of social class was discussed, and how it manifests itself in our various homelands. And we got on to cultural capital and cultural literacy and finally pieced together the phrase that defines us: The People Who Still Read Books.
The news that Oasis may or may not be reforming fills me, as Peter Cook put it, with inertia. That said, the varying responses from those who were around in the 1990s does rather reinforce my belief that Britpop was in fact two parallel movements, one populated by people whose first musical memory was Bowie, the other by pre-pubescent Slade fans. (And as Lester Bangs said of Slade, when they were trying to crack America, “Sure they’re the new Beatles – they’re all Ringo.”)
PS: Lifted from the Threads (I joined this week) account of a vicar (you meet the strangest people):
The great thing about their songs is you'd learn the lyrics after hearing them once. That is a gift Noel Gallagher has.
But is it, though? A great thing, a gift, whatever?
PPS: There’s been acres (or however we measure it now) of coverage given over to the news, but this takedown by Simon Price is probably the best thing to appear:
...nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans.
Lists of the best of things are dead and gone, kids, but what should replace them? The Independent offers us the most overrated albums, a stance that may have made sense 20-odd years ago, when Rolling Stone touted a canon ludicrously top-heavy with white male rockers from the 60s and 70s (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, et al). Now, however, there is no such consensus, no icons against which we can be clastic. Sgt Pepper and Astral Weeks are still in place, but who ever thought Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor or A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships by The 1975 had risen to any sort of cultural prominence from which they deserved to be knocked down? Even the authors of the list lack the courage of their pitchfork-wielding convictions; the greatness of PJ Harvey's Let England Shake is acknowledged, it just isn’t necessarily as good as some of her earlier stuff.
Rather more coherent, in methodology at least, is a poll organised by the blog They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? This time there’s a defined canon against which rage (the 2022 Sight & Sound poll) but it’s not just the resulting list of 100 films in the crosshairs; it’s any of the 4,336 films that received even a single vote, and are excluded from consideration in this selection. So, in theory at least, this should be a list of overlooked, forgotten gems, the ones that established critics and filmmakers either hadn’t seen or didn’t want to admit they liked. And there are such nuggets; but it also reveals that the great and good asked to contribute to the S&S poll had managed to miss such copper-bottomed classics as Grand Hotel, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Angels With Dirty Faces, Goodbye Mr Chips, Heaven Can Wait, Dead of Night, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Brighton Rock, Jour de Fête, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, Bob le Flambeur, Spartacus, A Fistful of Dollars, The Ipcress File, Wait Until Dark, Claire’s Knee, Little Big Man, Vanishing Point, Marathon Man, The Long Good Friday, Diva, Mephisto, A Zed and Two Noughts, City on Fire, Radio Days, Midnight Run, Man Bites Dog, Reservoir Dogs, Fallen Angels, City of Lost Children, Shall We Dance?, Pi, Audition, Tears of the Black Tiger, Lagaan, Downfall, Gomorra...
Which inevitably sets up another list, another canon, against which another band of discontents can vent their fury. A process that can continue over and over again, until we get to the point when someone complains that Sgt Pepper or Citizen Kane or War and Peace or the Mona Lisa doesn’t get the critical love it deserves in these polls and we start all over again.
The current urban unrest in the UK prompted me to look back the similar (but at the same time very different) outbreaks that took place in 2011. This time round, I haven’t seen a repeat of the observation that looters were consciously avoiding bookshops but maybe that’s because there are hardly any bookshops left to ignore...
The BBC has run a story about some racist trousers. No, that’s not quite accurate. The trousers themselves are blameless but some of the marketing copy used to describe them accidentally included a racist phrase. No, wait, even that doesn’t quite cover it. The copy juxtaposed two entirely banal and innocent words that some racists have also juxtaposed because when combined they sound like a word that isn’t regarded as acceptable any more.
And already I face a dilemma. If I mention those two words (either of which in isolation is still acceptable in polite society) I’ll be implicated in the normalisation of racist discourse, albeit racist discourse of a particularly sniggering, juvenile kind. And if I don’t I’ll just be falling into the same trap as the BBC, and running a story that, for most readers, makes absolutely no sense. So I’ll take the cowardly middle path and link to a page that explains the phrase, ringfencing that link with all the necessary warnings about offence and triggers and maybe a few phone numbers in case it gets too much.
Because we are in a time of Voldemort words, when some language is seen as so dangerous and despicable that it can’t be mentioned even in situations where the language – as distinct from the thing the language describes – is the whole point of the story. In the case of the trousers, this is despite the fact that the verboten phrase was consciously invented to bypass such censorship, standing as it does for another word that’s even worse. The forces of moral purity are inevitably playing a game of ethical Whac-a-Mole, chasing down each iteration of evolving ideological impurity in turn, always a few steps behind. This despite the fact that the bad word – not the phrase used in the trousers copy, but the word that that phrase replaced – was until a few decades ago entirely unremarkable and happily deployed by the same people that it is now used to demonise. And, in some contexts, still is.
And as always with taboo language, this is only apparent if you are already aware of the bad syllables and if this is the case presumably you’ve already been subject to the harm they might present. Unless, of course you are part of some enlightened elect that can come into contact with the words and emerge unscathed. I’m reminded of the tendency of translators of Boccaccio in the 19th and early-20th centuries to leave the sauciest bit of the story in the original language, as if those bright enough to understand medieval Italian would be less corruptible than the rest of us.
The tale of Earl Butz is also relevant; he was fired as Nixon’s agriculture secretary for making a joke that was at the same time racist, scatological and entirely unfunny, but the primness of contemporary media meant that it was difficult for the casual observer to deduce what it was he’d said to provoke his ejection. (In our own time, the all-encompassing label of “inappropriate” would be applied.)
And finally, Conrad’s book that I suppose we should now call “The N-word of the Narcissus” or something similar. Except that when it was first published in the United States, it was called The Children of the Sea. Not because the language in the original title might be thought offensive to the ethnic group that it described (few in 1897 cared about that) but because white people might be dissuaded from buying a book about that ethnic group.
