About cruising

From the Instagram account (of all things) of The Face magazine (ditto), a piece that affects to investigate the phenomenon of Gen Z and younger millennials going on cruises. And among the factors they apparently appreciate is the fact that a cruise offers “a way to have everything from your day-to-day life replicated”.

So what the younglings really want from these cruises is a simulacrum of normality, but on a big boat. Damn, I’m so old, I remember when the whole point of a holiday to leave everything from your day-to-day life at home.

PS: They’ve deleted it now.

About Amazon reviews

Not having published much in recent years, I’ve got out of the habit of scouring Amazon and similar sites for what people have deigned to say about my offerings. Which is why I’ve only just noticed that, three and a half years ago, a user known only as “magic” declared that my book about the Noughties was

Fun, and easy to read

which I’m sure was meant kindly but feels like a variant on “Mostly Harmless”.

About these new-fangled mobile telephone things

I’m teaching a group in their late teens/early 20s (Brazilian, Korean, Swiss) and the increasingly preposterous textbook entreats me to throw out the following gem as a prompt to discussion:

Do you think the internet / smart phones have affected how you read?

Except that, given their age, this is a bit like asking whether their reading habits have been affected in any way by breathing.

About apostrophes (apostrophe’s?)

Over to Germany, where – in a cute inversion of the tiresome refrain, “if it weren’t for Churchill/America/Wonder Woman you’d all be speaking German” – language purists complain that allowing possessive apostrophes represents acquiescence to the cultural steamroller that is global English. The irony is of course that native English speakers are, for the most part, utterly clueless about how apostrophes work. If the Germans do deign to use them, they’ll at least learn to do it properly and then tut loudly about the mistakes when they come over here. 

About long books

Jonathan Bate’s worries about undergraduates’ declining ability to cope with long, complex books are 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.

About Warhol

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...

PS: From the same book, and in a similar vein, Jones himself gets in on the act:

...I even went through a phase of rolling up my drainpipe jeans – skinhead style – worn with pink socks and black Dr. Marten shoes, in the vain hope of trying to advertise the fact that I owned records by people who lived in New York.