About LibGen

Every time someone reveals a massive cache of copyrighted material that’s being used as raw material for AI training, without any thought of compensation to the authors, I join in with the performative outrage, while at the same time being slightly miffed that nothing from my oeuvre was thought worthy of ripping off. I suppose it’s like having a phone or a bike that’s just too old and/or crap to nick. But now I look through LibGen, the vast database of samizdat that Meta has used for its own murky ends, and three whole works of mine are there. At last I can meld my righteous indignation with the warm glow of smugness.

About literary fiction

Back in the olden days I started a blog about The Da Vinci Code, attempting to deconstruct exactly what Dan Brown was doing right/wrong, attracting millions of readers while at the same time breaking pretty much every rule of half-decent writing (including those followed by other writers of popular, non-literary fiction). I gave up, of course, but I was never dissuaded from my initial premise that the book is badly written. What might have shifted is whether, in a post-literate era, that matters any more.

And now, after all these years, in The Spectator of all places, one Sean Thomas reads the last rites to what may once have been identified as good books, the ones that dominated the cultural agenda in the 80s and 90s. Except, he’s quite glad to see the genre go, even though he (like me) was a bit of an Amis fanboy back in the day. And what was it turned his head around? Why, The Da Vinci Code, of course, because it privileged plot over navel-gazing. But what about the writing, the thing that made critics’ teeth hurt just from thinking about it? Thomas describes that as “all quite workmanlike”.

It’s not though, is it? It’s crap. Go back to my blog for myriad examples. I can only infer that Mr Thomas has had some unfortunate run-ins with workmen.

PS: Just before posting, I Googled Sean Thomas and discovered that he’s the son of DM Thomas, whose novel The White Hotel was pipped to the Booker Prize by Midnight’s Children. From which I won’t draw any conclusions. I’ll just leave it there.

About old films

Interesting/depressing article by Benjamin Svetkey in the Hollywood Reporter highlighting the fact that there are barely any films on Netflix that are more than 50 years old. As he points out, any number of budding cinéastes and auteurs honed their own aesthetics via the serendipity of late-night TV, a set of happy accidents that may be unavailable to the next generation. I had similar experiences, discovering Wilder, Hitchcock, Buñuel, Astaire/Rogers and 1930s Universal horror thanks to the eccentric generosity of BBC2 (and the absence of much useful competition). Svetkey laments:

Obviously, it’s decided that making and streaming its own content, rather than paying licensing fees for older films, is a more profitable business model. And that’s OK for Netflix. Nobody appointed the streamer guardian of the cinematic temple... But it’s worth noting what’s being lost in the process, as streaming and its cold algorithmic imperatives continue to take over the culture and turn us all into cinematic illiterates.

To be fair, other streaming services such as Amazon Prime offer a rather better selection of films that have the sheer bloody cheek to be old, or black-and-white, or even foreign. But it doesn’t make it that easy to find them, unless you know what you’re looking for, which rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?

PS: And now I realise that when I was watching all those glorious old movies for the first time, most of them were still under 50.

About Vonnegut and Herron

I’m back to my bad old habit of thinking I’m re-reading a book and then realising, often to my shame, that it’s actually my first time (did I just see the film?) and this time it’s Slaughterhouse-Five. And I see something on the first few pages that I’m sure I would have noticed it first time round, although when first time round happened (although, do please keep up, there wasn’t really a first time round) I wouldn’t have spotted the apparent prefiguring of Twitter and the like, because Twitter and the like didn’t exist. Anyway, the quote:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Also, prompted of course by the Gary Oldman-fronted TV series, I have been dipping a cautious toe in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses universe and in the first volume we encounters a downgraded spook reduced to tracking “the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere” and then

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

and my mind goes back to the late Noughties, to what we felt at the time was The Golden Age Of Blogging, or maybe even of Meta-Blogging since much of what we typed about was the nature of blogging itself. What was it? What distinguished it from journalism, of old media? If a representative of old media launched a blog and it all went horribly wrong, were we supposed to point and laugh, or explain nicely how to do it better (hoping there might be a real live job at the end of it)? 

And then it all stopped. 

So it goes.

PS: And further into the Vonnegut, I find this:

The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragère of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice and Schnapps.

And I wonder whether I should really have called this blog “A Fourragère of Snot” or “Snot and Blutwurst” or “Blutwurst and Tobacco Juice” and, for the time being at least, it’s got a subhead again. And yes, I did have to look up what “fourragère” means. And so will you.

About Gregg Jevin

Today is the 13th anniversary of the comedian Michael Legge creating and killing the enigma that wasn’t Gregg Jevin in a single tweet and as such a piquant reminder of when Twitter was good. And, yes, I only know this because Facebook reminded me. 

About fascination and muzzling

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.

—Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Government, 1940

About writing and reading

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.

About bookshops and GBS

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. 

About Chris Jefferies

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.”

About the Louvre

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?

About Orlando

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.

About Tony Slattery

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.

About lynx

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. 

About Listen

At the urging of expat@large, one of the faithful from the days when Blogging Was A Thing, I have been reading Michel Faber’s Listen: On Music, Sound and Us and immediately feel a wee bit seen.

Being exceptional is not a badge of honour, it’s just a divergence from the general standard. Intellectuals (or bookish types or deep thinkers or cultured souls or whatever label you choose) are a minority like any other. They find validation in their specialness while missing out on easy communion with the larger herd. They console each other, reassure each other that they’re not weird or poncy even though, statistically speaking, they are.