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.

About cultural snobbery

An interesting piece by Rachel Aroesti arguing that the prevalence of algorithm-driven drivel might necessitate the resurgence of cultural snobbery, allowing people to suggest that what you like is shit, actually (and as such a rejection of the hideous “don’t yuck my yum” mantra I discussed a few weeks back): 

These days, “let people enjoy things” is the prevailing attitude towards all cultural consumption... With any negativity now considered psychic violence (sometimes countered by threats of actual violence from fans), enthusiasm took over as the default mode. Ironically, considering the Gallaghers’ track record of insulting their peers, it’s a mindset that has benefited the Oasis reunion no end: don’t call them derivative, dull or lyrically inane like people did in the 1990s; just focus on the rare and precious sight of British people having fun. 

PS: Looks as if Aroesti’s a lone voice though (or at best a lonely one, as I think she might have a point). Ho hum. The best lack all conviction... Although in the midst of all that, I think someone called me a Leavisite.

PPS: Also plucked from the carnage, Brian Klaas suggests that we shouldn’t slag off Dan Brown because that might discourage people from reading anything whatsoever. But even Klaas acknowledges that “Brown’s prose is clunky, his characters so thin that they occasionally resemble crepes with speech bubbles.” So might we be permitted to hold such opinions in places where the fans won’t see them? If I point and laugh at Oasis fans in a forest while all the Oasis fans are in a stadium 50 miles away...

About men and women

I recently discovered this decade-old list of the greatest British novels, which is more interesting than most of its type for a couple of reasons. First, the critics who voted in the poll are all outside the UK, which may or may not explain some notable omissions (Elizabeth Gaskell, Martin Amis, John le Carre, Beryl Bainbridge, for example). But even more significant, of the top 10 books, six are by female authors, and Jane Austen – who would almost certainly have been at or near the top of a poll of UK critics – doesn’t figure among them, with Pride and Prejudice in 11th place. 

Yet that top 10, and indeed much of the list, adheres very much to the Eng Lit canon. No reactionary curmudgeon is going to grumble that George Eliot or Virginia Woolf or the Brontës were only crowbarred in there to appease the feminists. Even today it would be entirely plausible to concoct a Top 10 of painting or classical music and have it populated solely by the dreaded Dead White Men. An appearance by Artemisia Gentileschi or Lili Boulanger would provoke accusations of tokenism, of DEI. But Charlotte Brontë? Well of course she’s earned a place alongside Dickens. The canon says so. And the obvious question is, why is the literary canon, in English at least, so open to gender equality, when the other arts resist it? And we could also ask whether the resources and publicity chucked at, say, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, might more profitably be offered to female painters or composers.

And then I find this pair of lists, which shows the films that have the biggest disparity when it comes to votes cast by male and female users of IMDb. Now, some of these are what you might expect. Women favour Frozen, The Notebook and (here we go again) Pride and Prejudice. Men lean to Raging Bull and Platoon. But that’s not all. All the female-favoured films are in English and in colour; the vast majority were made after 2000. The male films are at once considerably more diverse in terms of where and when they come from, and at the same time include far more (Seven Samurai, M, Paths of Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, etc) that would show up on any self-respecting film studies syllabus. Do men have better taste? Or are women simply more honest about what they like? 

PS: Belatedly, the six British authors namechecked by Donald Trump at his recent state visit. Now obviously he didn’t choose those writers (Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Lewis, Kipling) and I’d be astonished if he’d read a book by any of them, or indeed by anyone, ever. But was the fact that they’re all male a clumsy oversight by his scriptwriters, or a conscious assertion of his tiresome machismo?