It is inevitable that the most perceptive prediction about the near future I’ve seen so far this year comes in the form of a meme. It’s also appropriate that I have no idea who created it, and rather piquant that, partly because of the technological and social changes it implies, hardly anyone under the age of 45 will get the joke.
A number of celebrated authors have offered their support, if not their creative juices, to a book called Don’t Steal This Book, intended to highlight the way AI technology rips off the work of published authors with nary a by your leave. Beyond the names of the not-writers, the pages are blank, so I assume anyone who buys it will immediately ignore it, just as I did with the empty poetry book Release the Sausages, a passive-aggressive squib targeting the timidity of Keir Starmer.
That said, books that sit passively on the shelf aren’t that unusual. The same trawl that offered up Charlotte Sometimes also netted me a copy of Ben Judah’s This is London. It was published in 2016, 10 years ago, but showed no evidence of ever being opened, let alone read, during that decade. In fact, the only interruption to its boxfresh perfection was a receipt, suggesting that its previous owner had picked it up in a different charity shop in 2018. So two separate owners had bought it and then callously ignored it. And now I’m looking warily at my own shelves and wondering what I’ll discover.
PS: From the Judah book. Pawel escaped Poland in 1981 and ended up as a builder in London:
“You know what it was like then? Back in the eighties, the nineties, when I was first building, your painter, he would’ve come from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts... You’d tell him to rip off the wallpaper and throw on three thick coats of paint and he would just begin telling you about Polish minimalism. Your bricklayer... He would be a sociologist, talking Hayek when it was tea break.”
Another World Book Day passes, which means – apart from the inevitable sprawl of kids going to school dressed as characters from books their parents pretend to have read – much soul-searching about the decline of literacy. There is much fretting on Radio 4, where the few remaining readers are assumed to lurk, as they repeat December’s podcast on the crisis, in turn based on James Marriott’s Substacked Jeremiad from a few months before that (and the irony that the participants are expressing their qualms via media that is at least in part to blame for the situation is not lost on anyone).
Elsewhere, though, Auntie is gung-ho in demonstrating that books are just as much fun as TikTok, kids, and not boring at all, appending a couple of Gladiators to the 500 Words writing competition and allowing the comedian Russell Kane to explain his adoration for Evelyn Waugh (which I share, of course) by reference to 90s raves and 21st-century social media, rather than just letting the old git be funny in his own right, in his own time, in his own very un-sweet way.
This sense of inclusivity is new on the block, it seems. At the weekend I picked up a 1970s Puffin edition of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, one of those childhood classics I know only by reputation (and then mainly thanks to The Cure). And inside I find the stark, defiantly exclusive announcement: “You need an alert and imaginative mind to read and enjoy this book.” And if you aren’t blessed with one of those, I guess you should just stick to watching Gladiators.
(Tries singing said questions in Thom Yorke’s voice.)
Still recovering from the various disappointments of the Winter Olympics, above all that the American hockey player who I thought operated under the Zola-esque nom de glace “J’accuse” was in fact called Jack Hughes. Then I follow the all-conquering Norwegians back to their homeland, although I travel even further north, inside the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights.
And there I meet further disappointment. I’m well aware that the garish colours in the adverts were a photographic mirage but when I look to the skies I see the extraordinary, looping interactions of solar winds in strict monochrome. As others aah and ooh over a green one and a pink one, I start to wonder whether the whole thing is a practical joke. Is it down to me to suggest that this icon of meteorological spookiness is a naked fraud? But apparently it’s not unknown for some people to be unable to see the colours. It’s not you, Aurora Borealis, it’s me. And then, when I take a photo, it’s as pretty as, well, a picture. What I can’t capture is the black-and-white that I see. Do my eyes, not to mention technology, deceive me? Well, yes, of course they do.
And inevitably I turn to Baudrillard, who would no doubt have insisted that the image, the simulacrum (which most people see) has superseded the thing that is only seen by people who are daft enough to take a cable car up a mountain in Tromsø in sub-zero temperatures and which is only a different kind of mirage anyway. And I think back to the exertions of J’accuse and his fellow Olympians and remember that so many things (curling for example) just look better on a screen.
Found this on BlueSky (Twitter for nice people) and it made me laugh but also made me think once again that so much humour depends on getting two separate references, a bit like my favourite joke, which demands a passing knowledge of both Star Wars and French baked goods. But we’ll get back to that some other time.
The algorithms have directed me to a rather enticing box set of music created in Sheffield between the late 70s and late 80s. The track listing includes material from most of the major acts I remember from that time and place (The Human League, Heaven 17/BEF, ABC, Pulp – but no Def Leppard) as well as a few bands (Chakk, Clock DVA, Danse Society) that I probably wouldn’t be able to pick out in an identity parade but the names of which I vaguely recall from the NME or night-time Radio 1.
And there’s more. Much, much more. Names, glorious names, so glorious that I rather suspect the compilers have invented a few, just to keep us on our toes. So, here’s a conundrum. Below is a list containing the names of nine Sheffield bands from the period and one that I’ve invented. Your task is to spot the fake and there’s an imaginary bottle of Henderson’s relish for the first person to guess right.
Hobbies of Today
Repulsive Alien
The Naughtiest Girl Was A Monitor
Fish And Breadcake
Quite Unnerving
Defective Turtles
Acrobats Of Desire
Bongo Camisole Time
Peter Hope And The Jonathan S. Podmore Method
The Wacky Gardeners
Best of Yorkshire luck. And here’s one of the real bands, a few days ago.
Following on from last week’s celebration of musical meh-ness, here’s Marina O’Loughlin in the FT explaining why it’s OK for reviewers to say that a rubbish restaurant is rubbish.
The job of newspaper critics — film, TV, restaurant, whatever — is to sell newspapers, not proselytise for what they’re employed to critique. Opinions are just that, so we find voices we trust and follow accordingly. If not, if personality and preferences, tendencies and turns of phrase don’t matter, then bring on our AI overlords. There are some restaurant critics I find almost unreadable, but then I don’t have to read them, do I? But nor do I feel the need to announce their obsolescence from a standpoint that celebrates the vanilla.
