About cultural plausibility

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.

About the White Stripes

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.

About books about books

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.

About cultural (in)coherence

I have an instinctive fondness for the notion of a culture war, but inevitably it turns out to be less fun than it sounds, being shorthand for dim bigotry. First up, the Tory MP Katie Lam, who argues that the scorched-earth repatriation policy she’s floating will leave a population that’s “culturally coherent”, whatever that might mean. Do we all need to believe in God? Support the monarchy? Declare that Del Boy falling through the bar is the funniest thing that ever happened? And if we are an incoherent people, with differing cultural assumptions and aspirations (a “nation of strangers” as another politician put it), might that not be something to do with private and/or selective education, gated communities and all the other manifestations of class and income inequality? Nah, let’s just point at the brown people, it’s easier.

She was swiftly followed by Sarah Pochin of Reform who claimed to be driven mad by the number of non-white faces in TV advertisements. Now, Pochin’s on rather steadier ground in that, yes, there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of black actors in commercials, although why this bugs her so much is perhaps the real question. Of course she doesn’t blame the black faces themselves, rather the “woke liberati” who make the decisions. Which is rather to misunderstand the dynamics of advertising; it’s not the woke liberati that actually call the shots, rather the clients trying to sell energy drinks and funeral plans and sanitary towels and if they think black faces won’t shift enough units, they won’t use black faces. It’s capitalism, Sarah. I thought your people liked that sort of thing.

PS: A few more bits and bobs, about which Lam and Pochin will be utterly indifferent: musing on the apparent death of the humanities; the new age of tech-driven stupidity; the Times tries to big up the joys of reading (and comes out from behind the paywall to do so); and Padraig Reidy on the egregious Cult of Hitchens (and he doesn’t mean Peter).

About English

The UK government has decided that migrants entering the country under skilled worker visas will now need to demonstrate the ability to speak English to a B2 level (equivalent to A-level). Now, having taught English to both native speakers and non-native learners, I actually have some personal experience upon which to base my usual scattergun pontification, but plenty of people have already come to the same conclusion anyway: this requirement would mean that any such migrant would be speaking the language at a standard that the majority of natives couldn’t hope to match. And in their comments about the change, the anti-migrant contingent just reinforce the point with all the eloquence one might expect: 

What this policy does prove is that no serious political force wants to stop immigration, merely to ensure that the migrants are at the very least plausibly middle-class. Even that ferocious boat-stopper Nigel Farage is happy to lure migrants who are prepared to pay £250,000 for the privilege. And this is the paradoxical endgame of Brexit. If you didn’t like it when a Polish plumber came round to unblock your toilet, well, congratulations. The Polish plumber’s gone back to Kraków. But he’s been replaced by an Indian doctor, a Nigerian lawyer, an Azerbaijani hedge fund manager. And now you get to unblock their toilets. Enjoy!

About (the end of?) reading

Joshua Rothman on the effect AI is having on reading:

Artificial intelligence, in itself, is unmotivated; it reads, but is not a reader; its “interests,” at any given time, depend fundamentally on the questions it’s asked. And so its usefulness as a reading tool depends on the existence of a culture of reading which it can’t embody or perpetuate.

Indeed, a culture that AI is helping to eradicate, or at least change beyond recognition, as Rothman himself predicts: 

Suppose we’re headed toward a future in which text is seen as fluid, fungible, refractable, abstractable. In this future, people will often read by asking for a text to be made shorter and more to-the-point, or to be changed into something different, like a podcast or multi-text report. It will be easy to get the gist of a piece of writing, to feel as if you know it, and so any decision to encounter the text itself will involve a positive acceptance of work... Perhaps new stylistic approaches will aim to repel automated reading, establishing zones of reading for humans only. The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo—but the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over.

Although maybe we’re already there. In class the other day I was talking to an articulate teenager who expressed more curiosity about her own country than her high school’s sanitised history curriculum was able to satisfy. But when I told her I could suggest a few books to fill in the gap, she visibly recoiled. That word. Books. Ugh.

PS: Gary Shteyngart foresaw that ugh, more than a decade ago.

PPS: Composers are doomed as well, it seems.

About ffwd

As is so often the case these days, I don’t know if this is real, or just ragebait. But I can imagine a great many people nodding along to it. 

About 1968

I was born in 1968, which really was one of those years, wasn’t it? The assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Tet offensive, the Prague Spring and its sudden end and of course the student revolts, most famously the Paris événements. Indeed, I made my entrance in the midst of the latter kerfuffle, albeit in bucolic Devon rather than at the Sorbonne. Indeed I’ve occasionally adopted the slogan above (“May 68, beginning of a prolonged struggle”) as a statement of biographical intent.

And then I discover, in Joan Didion’s The White Album (named, of course, after one of the best records released that year), a line that trumps it: 

By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

PS: Further good stuff from the Didion: discussing the mansion being built for then-California-governor Ronald Reagan, she observes:

In the entire house there are only enough bookshelves for a set of the World Book and the Book of the Month, plus maybe three Royal Doulton figurines and a back file of Connoisseur...

And, yes, we used to sneer at the likes of Reagan and Dubya for their perceived intellectual shortcomings, but they now look like Socrates and Plato compared to what came after. Talking of which, the Trump presidential library is a thing.

PPS: And a further zinger:

The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

I hadn’t read any Didion before. I think I need to catch up.