My last post did something a little unusual; it actually prompted a comment. And then another. And, what’s more, the second comment was a response to the first. And suddenly it felt like the glory days of blogging, when a post was just an opening salvo to get the conversation started and then the whole process took on a life of its own. And I started feeling a bit nostalgic for those days and thought, hey, maybe I should think about doing a big retrospective anniversary thing only to realise that I was a week or so late, as my first ever post here was on November 8, 2005. And it was a bit rubbish anyway.
An article about parents who hire tutors specifically to buy social advantage for their children is mildly depressing until one of those tutors rather lets the cat out of the Birkin with the admission that “an English accent implies that you're well-read, that you're well-educated, even if you're not.” Now it seems that we’ve got beyond Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and Hirsch’s cultural literacy into a state where cultural plausibility is all that matters. And even then, we know it’s bullshit, but still go along with it. I mean, would anybody who’s actually read The Great Gatsby attend a Gatsby-themed party, let alone throw one?
I’m guessing Zadie Smith has read Gatsby, and a few other books as well. But the number of people who can say the same is falling, as she suggests in an article excoriating the British Library for its treatment of its staff:
You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.
And as the man who hasn’t read Gatsby puts the frighteners on the BBC, maybe all that we can look forward to is increasingly implausible parties.
I’m pretty sure the White Stripes were one of the last bands to tickle my fancy at the time they were getting big. (I got into the Magnetic Fields and Maher Shalal Hash Baz at around the same time, but they’d already been around for longer and never went on to enjoy/suffer the level of success as Jack and Meg did.) So I must admit to having experienced a warm, almost proprietorial glow when they were accepted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if that was tempered by the faint hope that Jack (Meg was absent) might have had the guts to tell the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to stick itself up its own self-satisfied arse.
He didn’t, obviously, but in a way he did, by namechecking a whole load of bands that influenced the Stripes but haven’t been similarly honoured. What I always found excitingly different about the White Stripes was the way they fused single-minded purism (vintage instruments, analogue recording) with a cheerful postmodernism that fused any number of apparently jarring genres.
And his list carries on that eclectic tradition, combining those whose effect on the band are obvious from space (the Troggs, Merle Haggard, Beefheart), those who remain so obscure I had to look them up to check they weren’t some sort of arch in-joke (oh, that Dexter Romweber, right) and those whose inclusion is, shall we say, just a tad surprising (Jethro sodding fluteybollocks Tull???). But the whole thing did remind me why I fell a little bit in love with them 25 years ago and why I still hold out some forlorn hope of a similar romance in the autumn of my years.
Recent reading has got a wee bit meta. First, Tim Parks in Where I’m Reading From (compiled from his articles in the New York Review of Books) about the effect that publication, or the absence thereof, has on writers, in particular those who inhabit creative writing courses:
Why do we have this uncritical reverence for the published writer? Why does the simple fact of publication suddenly make a person, hitherto almost derided, now a proper object of our admiration, a repository of special and important knowledge about the human condition?
And from Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac, this snippet about things that fall out of the books of the dead (in this case the departed being Ince’s own father):
Within two days I had collected 74 bookmarks and there will be many more to find, some leather ones with fading cathedrals embossed upon them...
...and I wonder whether, had this been submitted to one of the tutors described by Parks, she or he might have red-penned the ambiguity: is it the cathedrals that are fading, or their embossed representations? But I rather like it.
