About English literature

A thoughtful review, by James Marriott in the New Statesman, of Stefan Collini’s book about the glory days of Eng Lit, ending with the author’s pessimistic moan: 

In time... it may become possible to be accepted as a cultivated person (whatever that archaic term will by then have come to represent) without having an acquaintance with any literature written before one’s own era, or perhaps with any literature at all.

and then the critic’s resigned observation that this time is already upon us. Marriott gets a bit over 2,000 words to work with, which is pretty generous these days, but would be considered a mere footnote by the sort of academics that Collini invokes, the likes of FR Leavis and IA Richards. But then Marriott gets half an hour to stretch his case out in the video. Which rather proves his point, no?

About Beyond

I am grateful to my former teacher Professor Martin Eve for drawing attention to an extraordinary document from the University of Warwick, which endeavours to ensure all communications from said institution are at once Provocative, Curious and Optimistic. 

Nah, me neither. But, as an example, we are entreated not to say something as anodyne as “Scientists make breakthrough in development of fridge-free storage for vital medications”. Now, I would have thought that was rather a good thing for a university to announce, for any number of reasons. No, instead the headline should be: “Medication proteins so stable, you can pop them in the post.” You know, like sweeties. And, at all times we should operate under the banner of Beyond; indeed, “Using ‘Beyond’ as a subject noun makes ‘Beyond’ an entity that is actively driving change.” 

So, not only childish and inane, but consciously anti-literate as well. Warwick is the 74th-best university in the world, you know. God help the rubbish ones.

About Connie Francis

Clickbait, or the principle of clickbait at least, predates the internet by a long while. I remember those hoardings at the pitch of the Evening Standard sellers, declaring “FAMOUS ACTOR DIES” and if you were tempted to buy the paper you’d discover it was someone who was in Emmerdale in 1974.

What the web has done is to refine this technique, luring you in with something more specific, but often irrelevant, reductive and often plain insulting. An obvious example was when the double-Oscar winner Maggie Smith died and all the headlines mentioned was Harry Potter and Downton Abbey – the last-named being a show so banal that even Dame Maggie herself couldn’t be arsed to watch it.

But yesterday they were outdone by The Independent, which marked the death of Connie Francis, a performer who sold over 100 millions in a turbulent, incident-packed career, with this headline:

SINGER BEHIND VIRAL TIKTOK HIT DIES AT 87

About Dover Beach

Mad-eyed, foam-flecked rumours on social media that Saturday will see a mass invasion of Dover Beach. Not one led by migrants, though. This time it’ll be stout-limbed, pink-hued defenders of the British way of life on the sands, doubtless screaming bleeding chunks of Matthew Arnold at the baffled boat people until they skedaddle back home.

...and we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

About “Harry Palmer”

The character of Harry Palmer, as played by Michael Caine in three movies in the 1960s, is rightly identified as anti-Bond, in that he is defiantly working-class, operating in a far grubbier milieu than the Etonian 007 knows, and has rather less success with women. There’s a crossover with his more famous fellow-agent in that he’s apparently something of a foodie (although the hand breaking the eggs in his first outing, The Ipcress File (1965), belongs to the character’s creator Len Deighton, who doubled as a food writer for The Observer).

The label of Harry Palmer was of course created for the movie; in Deighton’s novels he’s not even blessed with a name. (He’s also about a decade older than the film character, and comes from Burnley in Lancashire of all places.) And, re-reading The Ipcress File (1962), it becomes clear that the enigmatic spook has interests in far more than the sophisticated grub he buys in Soho delis and the vichyssoise he enjoys in the Officers’ Mess. He reads the New Statesman, and does the crossword; knows pre-Islamic mythology and Mozart symphonies and the dates of the Fourth Crusade. Bond, by comparison, is rarely seen even glancing at a book. When a supercilious colleague assumes Not-Palmer is unaware of the geography of northern Switzerland, our hero deadpans, “Forgive me if my lack of ignorance is an embarrassment to you.” He would have been bloody great on University Challenge.

About Zola (three things)

A couple of years ago I bought a cheap copy of Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre), prompted by a Cezanne exhibition at Tate Modern. (Zola and Cezanne’s friendship ended because of what the latter perceived to be his negative depiction in the novel.)  And, inevitably, it slipped under a pile of other books and I’ve only just read it.

A few thoughts from the first couple of chapters:

1. Back in the days when Dan Brown was A Thing, I was far from the only one to point and laugh at his gauche telling-not-showing schtick, displayed most notoriously in the first bloody line of The Da Vinci Code when he told you that a character was a renowned curator by introducing him as “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière” (and then killing him). Does Zola do any better? Well, of course he does. After the first sentence introduces the central character, Claude, we get:

He was an artist and liked to ramble around Paris till the small hours, but wandering about the Halles on that hot July evening he had lost all sense of time.

(Il s'était oublié à rôder dans les Halles, par cette nuit brûlante de juillet, en artiste flâneur, amoureux du Paris nocturne...)

So you get the information, but there’s a reason, a context for your getting the information. Even if it relies on the stereotype of the artist wandering around the city at night, up to no good. Which may, in Claude’s case, be accurate...

2. Claude meets a distressed young woman and lets her stay the night in his studio. She is nervous about the situation, and he is annoyed by her nervousness, the fact that she thinks he might want to take advantage of her, but then:

In the hothouse heat of the sunlit room, the girl had thrown back the sheet and, exhausted after a night without sleep, was now slumbering peacefully, bathed in sunlight, and so lost to consciousness that not a sign of a tremor disturbed her naked innocence. During her sleepless tossing the shoulder-straps of her chemise had come unfastened and the one on her left shoulder had slipped off completely, leaving her bosom bare. Her flesh was faintly golden and silk-like in its texture, her firm little breasts, tipped with palest rose-colour, thrust upwards with all the freshness of spring. Her sleepy head lay back upon the pillow, her right arm folded under it, thus displaying her bosom in a line of trusting, delicious abandon, clothed only in the dark mantle of her loose black hair.

Good heavens, that’s pretty racy stuff for the 1880s. But what does Claude do? He begins to draw her still-sleeping form, and carries on after she wakes, gruffly overriding her objections. All sorts of modern concerns about consent and agency and surreptitious image-making come into play. But he doesn’t touch her little breasts, only draws them, so that’s OK (or at least Claude himself thinks that’s OK, but Zola stays out of it).

3. Claude and his chums are at the vanguard of something that may turn out to be Impressionism, but with the names changed, and he wants to present a sense of authenticity, as distinct from “the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure École des Beaux-Arts stuff”. But, in his mind at least, the logical end of this is the triumph of the mundane, familiar image that Warhol might have envisaged:

The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution!

And later, he comes close to precognition of Duchamp:

...a naked woman’s body with neither head nor shoulders, a mutilated trunk, a vague, corpselike shape, the dead flesh of the beauty of his dreams.

Tell you what, it’s better than Dan Brown, isn’t it?

About Kant

I keep returning to the matter of Radio 4, pretty much the last remnant of Reithian values, and how in its desperation to remain relevant to Gens Y and Z, its presenters apparently feel the need to explain cultural references that their parents and grandparents would have taken in their stride.

And then this happens. In the lexicography-cum-comedy show Unspeakable, the comedian Russell Kane explains how he and his wife, when in the presence of their children, use the name “Immanuel” to describe someone who might in adult company attract a rather more robust epithet. What’s interesting is that the audience gets the gag with the barest of clues; all Kane tells us is that Immanuel is a philosopher who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and the ribald chortles begin. I’m not suggesting that everybody who rocks up to a BBC comedy recording is totally conversant with what Kant has to say about metaphysics (I’m certainly not) but they have enough basic, possibly superficial understanding – what ED Hirsch would call cultural literacy – to ensure they laugh in the right place.

I wonder what it would take for producers and controllers to understand that listeners at home can cope with the same sort of thing.

PS: Vaguely related: investigating the war on so-called performative reading; and when AI destroys one’s ability to flirt, let alone write a college essay.

PPS: From the vaults: when I defended Paul Morley from the Philistines.

PPPS: An argument that men don’t read books any more; and an article on beach reads (Kinsella beats Tolstoy) that seems to take that contention for granted.

About Kneecap

From what I’ve heard of Kneecap’s music, I don’t particularly care for it and wouldn’t want to go to one of their gigs. And their political stances on Ireland and Palestine carry the scent of the obnoxious self-confidence and certainty of the student activist, when both issues demand nuance.

That said, they have played the recent spate of controversies like Karajan drove the Berlin Philharmonic and frankly who can blame them? Consciously or not, they are following the tradition of the Sex Pistols (swearing at Bill Grundy) and John Lennon (bigger than Jesus) and whatever the rights or wrongs or realities of the situation, the politicians and journalists demanding they be banned will ultimately be seen as the fuddy-duddy bad guys. When so much contemporary music seems to consist of bland platitudes and whiny solecism, at least they’re saying something about something that matters. I’m glad they exist. 

PS: And, in case there’s any doubt, calls for Rod Stewart to be banned from Glastonbury should also be ignored, despite his support for the preposterous Farage and his acolytes. Basically, censorship in all but the most extreme cases is usually a bad thing and inevitably causes more harm to the censor than the censored. The fact that Stewart hasn’t made a decent record since about 1974 is probably more significant...